FTAA: Monroe's dream is Bolívar's Nightmare

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This was written by an official of the Brazilian Ministry for Foreign
Affairs, and was published in the _Jornal do Brasil_, a mainstream
newspaper...

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 elimination 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
Superpower, and leave its main consequences in the shadows.

The main consequence of FTAA will be a radical limitation, and even an
elimination 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 asymmetric 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) project 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 practiced by the multinationals.

After FTAA, Brazil will become still more defenseless 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