Basically, (globalization) won't stop until foreigners finally start to think like Americans, act like Americans and - most of all - shop like Americans.
~~A top U.S. WTO official

Activists will gather in Quebec City, Canada on April 11, 2001 to protest the upcoming Summit of the Americas (SOA) meeting. The purpose of the SOA, which will be held April 18-22, is to hammer out the first full text of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a proposed agreement that would turn the entire Western Hemisphere (except Cuba) into the largest international trading bloc in history.

The FTAA, if approved, will essentially be an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into 34 countries in the Americas and the Caribbean, affecting the lives of over 755 million people. This constitutes the most ambitious attempt by transnational corporations to "globalize" the world, as the FTAA will absorb half of the globe into a homogeneous market where corporations can challenge any law, policy or procedure that isn't to their liking.

Over the past few years, negotiators have been holding secret meetings to build the framework of the FTAA. At the SOA, they will present a document that looks a lot like NAFTA, with a few dozen countries added in. In addition, the FTAA will integrate some of the most stringent and far reaching policies of the WTO. So not only will it extend NAFTA, a complete failure, it will also make NAFTA more severe.

If you haven't heard of the FTAA, that's because you weren't supposed to. The corporate media realizes that the anti-globalist movement poses a threat to their domination, as interest in the movement might inspire some viewers to seek out more "alternative" media outlets. Anti-globalization coverage is bad business, so the media is all too happy to declare the movement "dead." The FTAA, however, is something we should all know about, as it will alter the lives of everyone in the Western Hemisphere.

For starters (and this is a very small list), it will wipe out long standing laws (if they limit corporate profits), open public services to unfair competition from corporate empires, murder millions of people with AIDS who cannot afford expensive patented drugs, force GM crops on independent farmers, expand the sweatshop industry, and threaten public health, worker safety, culture, and the environment. Negotiators have scheduled the FTAA to be implemented by 2005, though some (like George W. Bush) are pushing for 2003.

The FTAA was originally proposed at the first Summit of the Americas meeting in Miami, Florida back in 1994. For several years it existed only as conjecture, until the second SOA in 1998 at Santiago, Chile. Here, representatives from 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere laid the groundwork for a more aggressive approach, creating the Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC, not to be confused with the other TNC: "transnational corporations", although, as you will see, there is very little difference between the two).

The TNC set up a system whereby trade ministers from each member country would form nine specialized negotiating groups. These negotiating groups each address a different issue facing the FTAA: services, investment, government procurement, market access, agriculture, intellectual property rights, subsidies, competition policy, and dispute settlement (later, I will explain what all this means). The policies that each group decides upon will be combined into a full text, which will be written at next week's meeting.

Now, there are countless reasons why the FTAA is being pushed so enthusiastically. In recent years, we've seen the WTO force its brutal and unfair policies on countries around the world, forming the largest governing body in human history. The WTO is essentially a puppet for the wealthiest multinational corporations: those policies they exalt as "insuring freedom in the marketplace" are really just insuring the continued dominance of the marketplace by the corporate empires.

However, that dominance was threatened in 1999, at the famous Battle of Seattle. The Seattle protests shut down the WTO's Millennium Round meeting, and stopped the proposed Multilateral Agreement of Investment (MAI) dead in its tracks. This agreement, the MAI, would have given corporations the right to override laws in foreign governments if those laws interfered with corporate profit-making. This means that large corporations would have officially become more powerful than governments. The FTAA will include guidelines that mirror the MAI, so it would act as a convenient bypass to the "Seattle Distraction." By providing a "backdoor" for the MAI, the FTAA would be an important factor in the corporate drive toward global domination.

Negotiators for the FTAA are being hurried along because the U.S. is growing uneasy about its corporate supremacy in Latin America. Recently the European Union has been asserting its influence in the region, particularly in the banking, telecommunications and automotive industries. The EU is currently in negotiations with Brazil, Chile and Mexico on a set of free trade agreements that would give the EU another advantage in the competitive race for lucrative Latin American markets. Should the FTAA pass, it would once again give the U.S. the upper hand in Latin America, thereby insuring America's continued domination in that region.

Over the past year and a half, negotiating groups have been conducting secret meetings to establish their positions on the various issues facing the FTAA. The U.S. Congress doesn't even realize this has been going on (possibly being "urged" to keep their noses out of it), and has yet to lay down an agenda for the U.S. However, one group has been absolutely vital in advising these committees: you guessed it, transnational corporations. Under the Trade Advisory Committee system, over 500 corporate representatives have been given security clearance and access to all FTAA documents, not to mention the drafters of those documents.

Negotiating the FTAA texts appears to be the exclusive right of wealthy business owners, as the "little people"- non-governmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots coalitions, and civil groups- have been completely shut out of the meetings, and will be barricaded from even setting foot in Quebec City. To represent those concerned with issues beyond corporate money making, the TNC set up a Committee of Government Representatives on Civil Society, which is supposed to help structure the FTAA so it doesn't contradict health, safety, and environmental concerns, among others. However, this committee is a mere prop designed to appease the civil minded, as it has no real mechanism for influencing the FTAA texts whatsoever.

Very little is known about the actual documents being drafted by the FTAA negotiators, as meetings have been held in secret and no texts have been released. What little we do know comes from the United States Trade Representatives Office (USTR), who has outlined the mandates of each negotiating group. Let's take a look at what each of these mandates says about what we should expect from the FTAA.

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