Action for Community and Ecology in the Regions of Central America GREEN PAPER 3: Freedoms That Are Abolished

Table of Contents Introduction 1) Trade and Investment: a little history 2) What is in the FTAA Agreement? Biotechnology and the FTAA Protecting Intellectual Property Free Flowing Capital What about Free Flow of People? Militarization and Globalization in the Americas Free Trade and Economic Developmen 3) Making the FTAA a Reality Corporate Globalization in the Americas Dry Canal Megaprojects and the FTAA Dry Canal Megaprojects and the FTAA 4) The FTAA and the Future of the Hemisphere Protecting Corporate Profits FTAA Attacks the Forests 5) Is THIS What Democracy Looks Like? The FTAA's Threat to Democracy North American First Nations: Going Corporate? Free Trade and the Proliferation of Sweatshops 6)THIS is What Democracy Looks Like Free Trade and the Proliferation of Sweatshops 7) What You Can Do Sources Acronym List download this document (488k). ACERCA

Corporate Globalization in the Americas Courtesy of the IMF, World Bank and IADB by Bob Naiman Center for Economic and Policy Research The FTAA process is not happening in a vacuum. Many of the policies which would be locked in by an FTAA agreement are already in place in many Latin American countries. These policies have been put in place by a history of foreign interventions which empowered elites friendly to the interests of multinational corporations. If Salvador Allende were still President of Chile, if a Sandanista government led Nicaragua, if Jacabo Arbenz were President of Guatemala, if an FMLN government led El Salvador, if Maurice Bishop were President of Grenada, it is not likely that these governments would be championing a hemispheric "free trade agreement" along the lines of NAFTA. Moreover, if the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) had not promoted and imposed "structural adjustment" policies in Latin America for the last twenty years, many of the policies of export-orientation, privatization, and openness to multinational corporations which would be codified by the FTAA, would not be in place. Although pro-corporate policies are in place in many countries, there is tremendous opposition to them, and the signing of an FTAA would reduce the space for that opposition. For example, an uprising in Bolivia has been able, at least for the moment, to reverse the effects of a World Bank-sponsored privatization of a water utility to the Bechtel corporation. Under an FTAA, Bechtel could sue the Bolivian government to recover profits "lost" as a result of not being able to charge impoverished people more money for water.