[A-List] Fidel Castro scrutinizes "regional integration"

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE UNANIMOUS OPINION

At the 6th Hemispheric Meeting in Havana, when the discussion turned 
to the subject of production of biofuels from foodstuffs, which are 
constantly getting more expensive, the huge majority voiced their 
opposition with indignation. But it was undeniable that some 
individuals with prestige, authority and good faith had been won over 
by the idea that the planet's biomass would suffice for both things 
in a relatively short time, mindless of the urgency to produce the 
foods, which are already scarce enough, that would be used as raw 
material for ethanol and agridiesel.

On the other hand, when the debate on the Free Trade Agreements with 
the United States began, several dozen people took part and all of 
them unanimously condemned both the bilateral and multilateral forms 
of such agreements with the imperialist power.

Taking into account the need for space, I shall return to the method 
of summarizing in order to present three eloquent speeches made by 
Latin American personalities who expressed extremely interesting 
concepts with great clarity and distinctiveness.  As in all the 
summaries in previous reflections, the authors' exact manner of 
presentation is respected.

ALBERTO ARROYO (Mexico, Red mexicana de Acción contra el Libre 
Comercio- Mexican Action Network against Free Trade).

I would like to share with you the new plans of the empire and 
attempt to alert the rest of the continent about something new which 
is on the upswing or that is coming forward as a new strategy for a 
new phase of the United States' offensive.  NAFTA or the FTA of North 
America was merely the first step of something that it wants for the 
entire continent.

The new attempt does not seem to take into account the defeat in the 
implementation of the FTAA, which even in it's Plan "B" recognizes 
that it cannot implement what it calls the comprehensive FTAA 
simultaneously in all the countries of the continent; it will try 
proceeding, piece by piece, negotiating bilateral Free Trade Agreements.

It succeeded in signing with Central America, but Costa Rica has not 
ratified it.  In the case of the Andean nations, it has not even 
succeeded in sitting down at the bargaining table with all the 
countries, but only with two of them; and with these two it has not 
been able to conclude negotiations.

What is so new about the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership of 
North America)?  I see three fundamental issues:

First: To strengthen military and security structures in order to 
confront the resistance of the peoples is precisely its reaction to 
the triumph of the movement that is jeopardizing its plans.

It is not a question of simply stationing military bases in danger 
zones or in areas with a high level of strategic natural resources, 
but trying to establish a close coordination, with plans concerted 
with the countries, in order to improve the security structures which 
are a way of confronting the social movements as if they were criminals.

This is the first novel aspect.

The second element, which also seems new to me: the principal actors 
in this entire neoliberal scheme were always directly the 
transnationals.  The governments, particularly the United States 
government, were the spokesmen, the ones who formally carried out the 
negotiations, but really the interests that they were defending were 
directly those of the corporations.  They were the great actors 
hidden behind the FTA and the FTAA project.

The novelty of the new SPP scheme is that these actors come out of 
the blue, take the foreground and the relationship is inverted: the 
corporate groups directly talking amongst themselves, in the presence 
of the governments that will then attempt to translate their 
agreements into policies, rule changes, changes of laws, etc.  It was 
not enough for them now to privatize the public corporations; they 
are privatizing policy per se.  The businessmen had never directly 
defined economic policy.

The SPP starts in a meeting, let's say it's called, "A meeting for 
the prosperity of North America"; they were tri-national meetings of 
businessmen.

Among the operative agreements being taken up by the SPP, one is the 
creation of tri-national committees by sectors, --what they call 
"captains of industry"-- so that these define a strategic development 
plan of the sector in the North American region.  In other words, 
Ford is multiplied or divided into three parts: that is, the Ford 
Corporation in the United States, the subsidiary of Ford in Mexico 
and the subsidiary of Ford in Canada decide the strategy for the auto 
industry sector in North America.  It's the Ford Motor Company 
speaking to a mirror, with its own employees, with the directors of 
auto companies in Canada and in Mexico, to agree on a strategic plan 
that they will present to their governments which will translate and 
implement them into concrete economic policies.

There is a scheme to incorporate the security element; second point, 
to directly privatize the negotiations; and the third new aspect of 
this structure is perhaps, remembering a saying of our classic 
grandparents, that phrase of Engels where he was explaining that when 
the people are ready to take power through the mechanisms of formal 
democracy, like the zero on a thermometer or the 100, the rules of 
the game change: water will either freeze or boil, and even though we 
are speaking about bourgeois democracies, they will be first ones to 
break the rules.

The Free Trade Agreements have to go through congresses, and the fact 
is that it is getting more difficult to have them ratified by 
congresses, including the Congress of the empire, the United States
Congress.

They are saying that this is not an international treaty therefore it 
doesn't have to get approved by the congresses. But, as it does touch 
on issues that disrupt the legal framework in our countries, they 
will present in bit by bit; they will decide on a modification to 
legislation in a minute, and another one in the next minute; 
executive decrees to be implemented, changes in operative 
regulations, rules for standard functioning, but never the whole package.

  Even though they were negotiated behind our backs and behind the 
backs of all peoples in general, sooner or later the Free Trade 
Agreements will be translated into a written text that will go to the 
congresses and then we will know what it was that they agreed 
to.  They would like us never to know what was agreed to, they will 
only let us see fragments of the strategy, because it is never going 
to get translated into a complete text.

I shall close with a story so that we can realize the degree of 
sophistication, with regards to security, that these agreements and 
operative mechanisms of integration of security apparatuses have reached.

A short while ago, a plane took off from Toronto with tourists headed 
for a vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  While the plane was on 
the runway, the passenger list was examined again more carefully, and 
they discovered that there was someone there from Bush's list of terrorists.

As soon as the plane entered American air space -when you fly out of 
Toronto, American air space begins after you pass the Great Lakes 
and, in a jet, this takes a few minutes- two F-16s showed up flying 
alongside.  They led the plane out of American air space and escorted 
it to Mexican territory where they forced it to land in the military 
section of the airport; then, they arrested this man and sent his family
back.

You can imagine the impression those 200 poor tourists on the plane 
had, seeing the two armed F-16s flying alongside and rerouting the plane.
Later, it turned out that he was not the terrorist that they thought, 
and they said to him: "Sorry, you can carry on with your vacation 
now, and make sure you call your family to come and join you."

JORGE CORONADO (Costa Rica, Continental Social Alliance)

The struggle against free trade in the region has various 
features.  One of the most devastating projects that have been 
proposed for the infrastructure, for the appropriation of our 
biodiversity, is the Puebla-Panama Plan, a strategy that not only 
appropriates our resources, but comes out of a military strategy of 
the empire covering the territory from the south of Mexico right up 
to Colombia, passing through Central America.

In the struggle against hydroelectric dams which uproot and take by 
force the indigenous and peasant lands there have been cases where, 
using military repression, they have uprooted various native and 
peasant communities in the region.

We have the component of the struggle against the mining 
industry.  Canadian, European and American transnationals have been 
pursuing this appropriation strategy.

We have been confronting the privatization of public services: 
electrical energy, water, telecommunications; the struggle in the 
peasant sector to defend seeds, against the patenting of living 
beings and against the loss of sovereignty to the transgenics.

We have been struggling against labor flexibility, one of the focuses 
oriented to the sector and, obviously, against the entire picture of 
dismantlement of our small scale peasant production.

Also, the struggle against the subject of intellectual property, 
which removes the use of generic medicines from our security, these 
being the main distribution focus which our social security 
institutes have in the region .

A central factor in this struggle against free trade has been against 
the Free Trade Agreements and, particularly, against the Free Trade 
Agreements with the United States, passed in Guatemala, Honduras, El 
Salvador and Nicaragua, through blood, sweat and tears.  And this is 
not just a rhetorical expression.

In Guatemala, comrades in the struggle have been murdered while they 
have gone head to head against the treaty approvals.  This struggle 
has allowed us to ensure a coordinating and mobilizing force for the 
greatest unity of the people's movement in the region.

In the case of the Honduran Parliament, the deputies walked out, 
breaking the minimum framework of institutional legality.

We have stated that, within the heart of the people's movement, this 
has not signified defeat.  We have lost a battle, but it has allowed 
us to take a qualitative leap forward in terms of organization, unity 
and experience in the struggle against free trade.

The Popular Social Movement and the people of Costa Rica, which have 
prevented Costa Rica's approval of the FTA up until the present, 
forging unity with various academic, political and even business 
sectors to create a great national front of diverse and heterogeneous 
struggle, till now have succeeded in stopping the Costa Rican 
government, the right-wing neoliberals, and so they have not been 
able to approve the FTA.  Today the possibility of a referendum in 
Costa Rica to decide the fate of the FTA is being proposed.

We are on the threshold of a fundamental stage in Costa Rica in terms 
of being able to prevent the advance of the neoliberal agenda; a 
defeat of this treaty would symbolically mean that we keep on adding 
up victories, like detaining and bringing FTA to a standstill.

Today we need solidarity in the popular movement, and we request it 
of the social and popular organizations which come to Costa Rica as 
international observers.  The right-wing is preparing to encourage, 
if possible, a fraud that will guarantee it a win in the fight that 
is already lost, and having international observers from the popular 
movement will be an important contribution to active militant 
solidarity with our struggle.

Today, after a year, the FTA has not brought any more jobs, any more 
investments, or better conditions for the trade balance to any 
country in Central America.  Today, in the entire region, we proclaim 
the slogan of agrarian reform, sovereignty and food security, as a 
central focus for our eminently agricultural nations.

Today, not just the United States but also Europe would like to 
appropriate one of the richest areas in biodiversity and natural 
resources.  Today, more than ever, the coordinating focus of our 
different movements in the Central American region is to confront 
free trade in its multiple manifestations; hopefully this meeting 
will help give us coordinating elements, focuses for struggle and 
joint action that will allow us in this entire hemisphere to advance 
as one popular force.

We shall not rest in our efforts of organization and struggle until 
we reach the goal of a new world.

JAIME ESTAY (Chile, coordinator of REDEM - network of world economy 
studies - and, now professor at the University of Puebla in Mexico.

This crisis, in short, has to do with a manifest non-compliance with 
the promises that accompanied a group of reforms that began to be 
applied in Latin America in the 1980's.

Under the banner of free trade, we were told that we were going to 
achieve growth of our economies, that we were going to achieve 
diminished levels of inequality in our countries, along with 
diminished distances between our countries and the advanced world 
and, in brief, that we were going to achieve a move towards 
development in leaps and bounds.  In some countries there was even 
talk about making those leaps and bounds into the First World.

In the matter of new integration or this open regionalism which took 
off more than 15 years ago, what was proposed was Latin American 
integration, or what we call Integration of Latin America, at the 
service of an opening-up process.  A whole debate was set up about 
how we had to integrate in order to open up, an integration that 
would not be the old-style protectionist integration, but an 
integration that would bring us better conditions to include 
ourselves in this global economy, in these markets which, supposedly, 
since they operated in a free manner, would produce the best possible 
results for our countries.

This relationship between integration and opening-up, that idea whose 
supreme objective of integration had to be the opening up of our 
countries, took place in effect; our countries effectively opened up 
and effectively and unfortunately the central theme of Latin American 
integration consisted in putting it at the service of this opening up.

Some officials were talking about what was called "the pragmatic 
phase of integration".  We move forward as we are able; that more or 
less became the slogan.  If what we need is to trade more, let us 
concentrate on trading more; if what we want is to sign a bunch of 
little agreements among countries, bilateral agreements or agreements 
between three or four countries, let us go in that direction, and at 
some point we shall be able to call this Latin American Integration.

The balance is clearly negative.  I think that there is recognition, 
greater on various levels now, that what we have been calling the 
Integration of Latin America is not integration, it is trade; and it 
is not Latin American but a tangle of signed agreements between 
different countries of the region, none of which has lead to a 
process possessing an effectively Latin American character.  The 
opening-up, at whose service it is supposed that integration must be 
placed, has not produced any of the results that were announced in 
terms of economic growth, lessening of inequalities and achieving the 
sorely desired development that they said was supposed to be coming to us.

What we should point out is that we are witnessing an extreme 
deterioration of a style of integration that very clearly knew why, 
how and for whom integration was taking place.

In short, what I am talking about is an integration which was 
conceived on the foundations of neoliberalism, which has failed, both 
in terms of its own objectives and in terms of the objectives that we 
all have a right to demand and to expect in a genuine integration process.

The new Latin American integration was firmly supported by the 
policies and proposals coming from Washington.  To a great extent, 
those American proposals have become something that will end up 
devouring its own offspring.  Just the act of signing Free Trade 
Agreements has brought both the Andean community and the Central 
American Common Market to a crisis point.

An important part of the current crisis in Latin American integration 
has to do with the advance of the United States hemispheric project, 
not via the FTAA which managed to be stopped, but via the signing of 
different free trade treaties.

We can see the appearance of alternatives more clearly in the current 
panorama of integration.  In many ways, ALBA (the Bolivarian 
Alternative for the Americas) is based on principles that are 
radically different from those belonging to that integration process 
which is in crisis.

There are many functions left to define and many boundaries to be 
traced:  the meaning of such concepts as "free trade", "national 
development", "market freedom", "food security and sovereignty", 
etc.  What we are able to state is that we are witnessing, on the 
hemispheric and Latin American scene, a growing insurgency regarding 
the predominance of neoliberalism.

This is where the opinions expressed by these three personalities 
end, summing up the opinions of many of the participants in the 
debate about Free Trade Treaties.  These are very solid points of 
view derived from a bitter reality and they have enriched my ideas.

I recommend my readers to pay attention to the complexities of human 
activity.  It's the only way to see much further.

Space has run out.  Today I should not add one more single word.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 16, 2007.

(6:12 p.m.)