A Brazilian bourgeois view: FTAA = Monroe vs. Bolívar

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[ from Nestor ]

[My translation, hopefully reasonable]

e most interesting thing with what follows is that it was not written
by a Marxist. It was written by an official of the Brazilian Ministry
for Foreign Affairs, and was published in the _Jornal do Brasil_, a
mainstream newspaper...

Miracles operated by imperialist pressure?

------- Forwarded message follows -------
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From:                   Sergio da Costa Velho <monleone@xxxxxxx>
Date sent:              Tue, 24 Apr 2001 15:39:48 -0300
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Subject:                [listageografia] ALCA: Monroe X Bolivar; Globalizacao X 
Latinidade; Acordo do Clima

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9. FTAA: Monroe's dream is Bolívar's Nightmare, an article by Samuel
Pinheiro Guimaraes, ambassador and former Director of the Institute
for the Research of International Relations at Itamaraty (the name of
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brazil). Published in "Jornal do
Brasil", April 20th:

Negotiations for FTAA involve much more than the constitution of a
traditional area of free trade. Its effects might be much deeper than
simply enlarging the scope of trade of goods and services.

Thus, those estimations that are being proposed on how much would
Brazilian exports grow, and what sectors and firms would benefit with
the ellimination of customs restrictions (either tariff or para-tariff
restrictions) in USA and in the Americas simply skim the surface of
this strategic initiative of USA, the Hyperpower, and leave its main
consequences in the shadows.

The main consequency of FTAA will be a radical limitation, and even an
ellimination by international treaty where the greatest power in the
world will take part, of the sovereign capacity of the Brazilian state
to articulate, stimulate, or promote economic development by means of
commercial, industrial, agricultural or employment policies. By
"economic development" we mean the accumulation of capital, the
diversification and integration of the productive stock, the increase
of productivity and employment of manpower, a gradual reduction of
disparities -regional disparities included- and of external
vulnerability.

The consequence of this process of negotiated reduction of sovereignty
will be, as it is logic, a reduction in the ability of Brazil to
promote and defend its interests of any kind, those political and
strategical included, in the dynamics of the multipolar world that is
emerging with the process of formation of the European state, the
economic and political emergence of China (which is to be, in the
future, the largest GDP of the globe), and, in a second plane, of
Japan, Russia and India. This multipolar world will be, as everything
is showing, a violent one, an arbitrary one, and a world where wealth,
power and knowledge will be concentrated.

Its vast territory, large population, abundant natural resources,
level of industrial development, technological capacities, unity of
language, absence of acute religious or ethnic conflicts, offer Brazil
conditions better than enough -even when compared to the countries
above- to share in that process in an autonomous way, provided Brazil
does not allow itself to be absorbed by the spheres of influence that
are taking shape, under the calm ideologies of pan- americanism,
"free" trade and integration.

The basic aim of FTAA is to generate a set of rules that, by limiting
the ability to establish and execute an economic policy, integrates
the Brazilian economy in an assimetric and subordinate way to the
American economic territory (and to its political system).

It is my point of view that, in the strategic conception of USA, the
relationship of FTAA with the remaining micro, mini, small or medium
states in the Americas is very remote.

After FTAA, Brazil will not be able to exert policies to attract and
enforce foreign investment with the intention of enlarging productive
capacities, or of stimulation and integration of productive linkages,
or of effective promotion and transference of technology, or of
strengthening of national capital.

Multinational megacompanies will be able to obtain, in the spirit of
the counterfeited (esdruxulo)proyect of Multilateral Investment
Agreement, more power than the power of national States.  After FTAA,
Brazil will not be able any more to exert effective commercial,
industrial and technological policies, aimed at the creation of new
dynamic comparative advantages by stimulating the creation of
companies, because it will not have any possibility to protect those
companies from the overwhelming competition of the megacompanies that
already exist in those sectors, because it will not have any more a
tariff or a para-tariff, particularly and most probably in those
sectors of most advanced technology.

After FTAA, Brazil will not be able any more to resort to the
purchasing power of the State in order to strengthen national
companies, in order to develop new technologies, in order to increase
the scale of production or to have companies that can struggle for
markets abroad, anywhere in the world, because they will not be
related to the system of market division practised by the
multinationals.

After FTAA, Brazil will become still more defenceless in front of the
now increased power of the owners of technology, and will not have any
more the investments that it needs to fight against the abusive
consequences of the anti-social use of patents, as it was outrageously
demonstrated in the anti-social case of pharmaceutical patents.

For any practical means, after FTAA there will not be Brazil any more,
if by that we are thinking of the possibility and the vision of
constructing a more democratic and fair, more prosperous and less
unequal society, in agreement with the national and cultural traits
that Brazilians have been painfully building along centuries, against
open colonial oppression at first and, now, against the sophisticated
neo-colonial control



Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx