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The Struggle Against the FTAA Continues
Roberto Regalado Álvarez
Its inability to impose the original design of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), made obvious at the meeting of ministers of Economy and Finance held recently in Miami, constitutes a failure for the United States government. It was hoping to impose that accord as a whole and all at once. However, this is a partial failure, starting from which a new stage of struggle begins directed not only at stopping but also at reversing the denationalization process underway in Latin America and the Caribbean. In order to accurately evaluate the meaning of this reverse for imperialist policy, it is essential to understand the role the FTAA plays as part of its general policy toward the region.
The FTAA is the fundamental economic pillar of the restructuring of U.S. imperialism's system of continental domination. Through the FTAA it aims to turn Latin America and the Caribbean into an exclusive, stable and safe terrain for it monopolistic expansion. The other components of this restructuring are: the establishment of "representative democracy" as "the only legitimate form of government" on the continent, with which it affirms that the Cuban Revolution is "illegitimate," as would be as well any other popular process that breaks with capitalism; and the use of Plan Colombia and the Andean Initiative as pretexts in order to increase the presence of U.S. armed forces in the region, and their control over Latin American and Caribbean military institutions. Within this new arrangement, imperialism would directly exercise quotas of economic and political power that it previously managed with the local bourgeoisies and armed forces as intermediaries. This means the reduction of the margin of sovereignty, self-determination and independence available to these subordinated elites.
Since the sixth decade of the twentieth century, the centers of imperialist power have needed to restructure the system of international relations. With the post war economic growth exhausted and the markets of the "First World" saturated, the transnational monopolies saw themselves compelled to assume direct control of the principal natural resources, industries, services and markets of Asia, Africa and Latin America that until then they had considered to be easily accessible or secondary and which, as a consequence, remained as the property of the national bourgeoisies and states of these regions. This expansion obliged them to impose universal economic, political, legal and ideological models destined to create uniform conditions for the reproduction of capital all over the planet.
Latin America and the Caribbean make up one of the areas of the world where the renewed monopolistic penetration most manifests itself. It is for this reason U.S. imperialism, which always considered the region as its "backyard," is making use of its status as the dominant big power in the unipolar world in order realize right to its final consequences what was stated in the Monroe Doctrine: "America for the (north) Americans." That is the purpose of the restructuring of what is called the Inter-American System.
After the end of the demand for primary products, which favoured various South American countries until the early postwar years between 1955 and 1960, the U.S. carried out a first neo-liberal experiment that tended to diversify exports at the expense of internal consumption. Neo-liberalism had been conceived of during the Second World War by the Austro-British philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek as a doctrine legitimizing the extreme social inequality expected to afflict the European continent due to that conflagration. Unlike classical liberalism, which opposed all state economic intervention, the new doctrine argued for breaking that barrier so long as it were to support the accumulation of wealth, but never to aid the human groups affected by this. However, neo-liberalism was not applied on the scene for which it had been originally designed. As a function of the Cold War, imperialism opted to implant the so-called Welfare State in Western Europe, the democratic and redistributive image of which was appropriate for the aim of "containing communism." So it was that South America served as the first "guinea pig" for the neo-liberal doctrine, but that attempt was abandoned due to the destabilizing effect of its social costs.
The South American experience of the 1950s showed neo-liberalism could not be implemented just as an economic policy. Rather, it would be necessary to impose it as a totalitarian creed, directing the economy, politics and society. As a precondition, it would be necessary to destroy the popular and left movement that was capable of leading resistance against it, de-articulate the social-class structure and political alliances established during developmentalism and transform the state, previously dedicated to the protection and growth of the internal market, into the principal agent of transnationalization and denationalization.
The triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the subsequent wave of popular struggles in Latin America obliged imperialism to dedicate itself for three decades to the creation of premises to enable it to restructure the continental system of domination established after the end of the Second World War and confirmed by the Inter-American Mutual Assistance Treaty (IMAT), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Defense Council (IDC), and the Inter-American Development Bank (BID). This was the function of the military dictatorships and authoritarian governments established in the period from the coup d'etat against President João Goulart in Brazil (1964), and the reestablishment of liberal democratic institutionality in Chile (1990).
The military dictatorships imposed on Latin America during the sixties, seventies and eighties were of a "new type," different from the caudillo dictatorships that had plagued Latin America ever since independence from Spain and Portugal, and also from those set up by U.S. imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean during the first decades of the twentieth century. This new type of military dictatorship had an institutional character and was conceived in order to exercise armed might as the only means capable of defeating popular resistance and opening the path to neo-liberal restructuring. It is no accident that the second and definitive attempt to implant neo-liberalism in the region began in Chile (1976) and Argentina (1977), even before the electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1980) unleashed the worldwide surge of this doctrine. Nor is it accidental that, totally ignoring its bloody cost, the Chilean "miracle" would be presented as the model to emulate. Not all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean were governed by military dictatorships, but today it seems unnecessary to establish that they set the standards for transnationalization and denationalization of the sub-continent.
The restructuring of the continental system of domination was initiated at the beginning of the 1990s, the time when the disappearance of the Soviet Union left the field clear for the implantation of the so-called New World Order. The repercussions of the new world situation in Latin America were the invasion of Panama, the extinction of the revolutionary flame in Central America, and the hardening of the blockade and isolation policy against Cuba. The dictatorships had played their role and the Brady Plan transformed renegotiation of the external debt into a mechanism of domination, and neo-liberal restructuring advanced across the continent.
Of the three components of the restructuring of the Inter-American System, the FTAA is the one that has incited the greatest popular opposition, followed by Plan Colombia and the Andean Initiative. The initial outline of the FTAA constituted one the central points of the Initiative for the Americas announced by President George H. Bush in 1990. By means of the myth of "free access" to the U.S. market, Bush was repairing the damage caused to U.S. relations with the governments of the rest of the continent by the belligerence of the Reagan administration and this was added to the restructuring of the Inter-American System.
The defeat of Bush in the 1991 presidential election and the protectionist reaction unleashed in the United States by the advance of the negotiations that led to the entry of Mexico into NAFTA on January 1, 1994, postponed the presentation of the FTAA project. It was at the Summit of the Americas held in Miami in December 1994, that President William Clinton invited the other presidents of the region to begin the negotiation of that accord.
Immersed in the climate of imperial omnipotence generated by the disintegration of the European socialist bloc and the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union itself, those who designed the FTAA conceived it as a "package" whose fundamental elements would have to be accepted at the same time and as an indivisible whole by the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean. That package would serve as the final touch to the process of opening, deregulation and submission to transnational mechanisms of domination underway since the beginning of the eighties. Its signing was to be the imposition of a "straightjacket" that would sink the peoples of the subcontinent into total and definitive defenselessness.
The underestimation of the capacity for reconstitution and struggle of the popular and left movement of Latin America and the Caribbean explains the triumphalist arrogance with which U.S. imperialism conceived the imposition of the FTAA. In December 1994, the region had just begun to emerge from the three bloodiest decades of its history and the disappearance of the USSR was being brandished as proof that there was no alternative to neo-liberal capitalism. The official discourse explained the socio-economic crisis as a consequence of the failure of developmentalism and spread the fairy tale of the "trickle down effect." In spite of all that, the Cardenist current in Mexico, the Workers' Party of Brazil and the Broad Front of Uruguay had achieved unprecedented electoral results. In 1992, 71 per cent of Uruguayans had voted "NO" in the referendum on the Public Enterprises Law, blocking the privatizations planned by the government of Julio María Sanguinetti. As a result of popular protests, presidents Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil and Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela had been deposed, and the Zapatista rebellion had broken out in Chiapas at the moment Mexico "joined" the "First World" through the door of NAFTA. Nevertheless, one could still not speak of a continental movement against neo-liberalism.
Over the almost nine years that have passed since the holding of the Miami Summit, the situation of Latin America and the Caribbean changed rapidly. In 1995 the Mexican financial crisis revealed the consequences of "free trade" with the United States. As a result of the "tequila effect," the Cavalo Plan in Argentina, one of the paradigms of the monetarist doctrine in vogue, went to pieces. In 1998, the crisis of the Asian stock markets created the conditions for a speculative attack against Brazil threatening the financial stability not only of Latin America and the Caribbean, but also of the United States itself.
The financial crises of the 1990s played a decisive role in a wakening of the consciousness of the peoples. The rulers of the region reacted to them by reinforcing the very policies that had provoked them. That fanaticism left no room for doubt: neo-liberalism was not a developmental model requiring an initial period of "sacrifice." Rather, it was a model for the systematic concentration and export of wealth, in which each cycle of sell-out to foreign capital and national impoverishment leads to another greater one.
Starting from the Mexican crisis, a quantitative and qualitative leap in the popular struggle in Latin America and the Caribbean made itself evident. Already in 1995, the opposition to the government of Rafael Caldera in Venezuela was perceived as the first sign of the decomposition of bourgeois democratic institutionality on the sub-continent. In 1996, the movements of struggle against neo-liberalism and transnationalization intensified, the highest expression of which were the battles for land tenure in Brazil. In 1997, the indigenous protest in Ecuador gave notice of the part the aboriginal peoples would play in the social struggle, and this was confirmed in Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Guatemala. The Latin American and Caribbean popular movement realized multiple and transcendent events starting from that year. It is sufficient to note the fall of presidents Abdalá Bucaram and Jamil Mahuad in Ecuador, of Fernando de la Rúa (and of his first improvised substitutes) in Argentina and of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivia, together with the election of the left governments headed by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and the election of the progressive government of Néstor Kirchner in Argentina. It was these three governments that put obstacles in the way of approval of the original FTAA project.
Designed as a negotiation/imposition process of hidden content, outside public scrutiny and, in many cases, beyond the control and decision making power of the national legislatures, imperialism was confident the restructuring of its continental system of domination could not be slowed down, much less defeated, by the peoples. Nevertheless, reality has revealed the vicious circle of imperialist policy: greater domination leads to greater crisis and greater crisis, to greater popular struggle. This sequence of action and reaction makes it possible to calculate the significance of the defeat the original FTAA project has suffered. However, this defeat is not total or definitive.
The history of inter-American relations from the Pan-American Conference in Washington (1888-1889) to the present demonstrates that U.S. imperialism never rests in its drive to take complete possession of the rest of the continent and it always tries to find the way to overcome the obstacles that arise on that path. This is precisely what is happening starting from the meeting of the ministers of Economy and Finances in Miami itself, the agreements of which have the aim of fragmenting, isolating, weakening and defeating the opposition to the FTAA. Even if that project had been completely rejected in Miami, the task of reversing the sell-out of patrimony, sovereignty and independence made by the region's governments during recent decades would still remain.
The struggle continues.
May/2004
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