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What You Need to Know
Peru NAFTA Expansion
Peru-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (PUFTA))
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) required the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to adopt numerous policies giving corporations new rights that many feared would be used to export jobs, jack up drug prices, attack environmental laws and food safety and squeeze farmers and consumers alike. Twelve years later we are living the damage caused by the NAFTA model: wages stagnating as prices rise, 3 million lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, and a $717 billion trade deficit that threatens global economic stability. Mexico is also losing factory jobs as corporations trade in Mexico’s $5/day wages for China’s $1/day wages. Some 1.3 million Mexican campesinos have lost their livelihoods, hunger rates have jumped, and desperate migration has increased.
The Bush administration wants to expand this failed NAFTA model to the entire hemisphere in a 34-nation Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). But much of South America, reviewing NAFTA’s damage, has said “no.” To pressure nations like Brazil, a target of U.S. oil, pharmaceutical, logging and other corporate giants, the Bush administration has pushed for deals with smaller nations. The administration threatens to cut off these nations’ existing tariff-free access to the U.S. market to pressure their governments into agreeing to trade deals opposed by their own populations.
After the Bush administration and their corporate allies publicly pledged to twist congressional arms “into a thousand pieces,” and offered billions in pork barrel projects and corporate campaign cash, one such deal – the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) – passed the U.S. Congress by one vote in July 2005. Now, the Bush administration is trying to push the same model into South America. Peru and Colombia recently submitted to “take-it-or-leave-it” deals that empower Big Pharma to cut off access to affordable medicines while requiring the privatization of basic services in those countries. The deals also will increase imports of subsidized U.S. agribusiness crops, running millions of impoverished South American farmers off of their land. And, like NAFTA and CAFTA, the deals fail to provide even the most basic enforceable labor or environmental standards.
Because these deals are based on NAFTA, people in Peru and Colombia know the damage they will suffer, and have held major protests. In the United States, Congress is nervous about more bad trade deals, but the Bush administration says it will ram the Peru FTA through in 2006. But because the political pain of the CAFTA battle lingers, if we speak up loudly now, we can send the Peru FTA back to the drawing board.
Tell Congress that expanding NAFTA to Peru is a bad idea
Call the U.S. Capitol Today (202) 224-3121. Ask to be connected
to your House representative. Then call again for each senator.