Varieties Of Imperial Decline - Asparagus Imports Leave Bronx Cold
by toni solo
In the first few days of December the United States marked emphatically another stage in its progressive imperial
decline by frenetically and unexpectedly closing a bi-lateral "free trade" deal with Peru. Just a couple of weeks
beforehand, Peru had joined Ecuador and Colombia in withdrawing from negotiations on a broad Andean regional trade
treaty. Then, abruptly, early in December, Peru's negotiators were ordered to Washington. Outstanding differences were
resolved and the negotiations declared successfully closed. Peru sold out its sovereignty to the United States for the
sake of marginal benefits like increased asparagus exports. It was not so much a US victory as an unmistakeable sign of
the Bush regime's failure to sustain credible leadership in the Americas.
The significance of the trade deal with Peru for the United States is overwhelmingly political. On December 4th, the
party of President Hugo Chavez won over 60% of seats in the Venezuelan National Assembly. The US supported opposition
withdrew from the elections so as to avoid an obvious rout. Then, at the end of the Cuba-CARICOM summit in which 15
Caribbean countries participated together with Cuba, the final declaration at Bridgetown in Barbados called on the
United States to honour its international obligations and hand over super-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles to the
Venezuelan authorities to face charges for the murder of over 70 people in a terrorist attack over Barbados in 1976. The
Bridgetown summit final declaration also called on the United States to end its illegal economic blockade of Cuba [1]
Shortly afterwards, in Uruguay's capital Montevideo, the Mercosur summit of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay
welcomed Venezuela as a full member. Venezuela's President Chavez said "Venezuela's entry has more to do with politics
than econmics".[2] Despite that remark from the Venezuelan president, among the projects agreed at the summit was a US$10bn gas pipeline
to connect Venezuela with its Mercosur partners.
Likewise, in late November, Venezuela and Colombia agreed to build a two-way 215km pipeline between the Paraguana
Refinery in north-western Venezuela and Punta Ballenas, on Colombia's La Guajira peninsula. The US$230m deal is seen as
the first stage of a multi-faceted energy transportation project that will eventually serve all the Andean nations as
far as Chile and also energy customers in Asia.[3] Venezuela is also negotiating a US$600m refinery improvement program with the Uruguayan ANCAP oil company, among other
significant joint projects. In all of these deals, the United States is nowhere.
Peru trades in its sovereignty - the national context
US efforts to bully Latin America into a Free Trade Area of the Americas were decisively snubbed by the Mercosur
countries at the recent Mar de Plata summit of the Americas. Subsequent US success in railroading vulnerable countries
like Peru into bilateral trade deals are a poor consolation prize - and one that is unlikely to endure undamaged. Peru's
President Toledo has less than 10% support according to opinion polls this year. His Council of Ministers president
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski who travelled to Washington to oversee the forced closure of the deal actually has US citizenship.
Kuczynski overruled Peru's chief trade negotiator Alfredo Ferrero who wanted a joint deal including Colombia and
Ecuador.[4]
Toledo could hardly care less. He is not standing for re-election when the next presidential vote takes place in April
2006. Prior to Toledo's and Kuczynski's vicarious trade seppuku on behalf of Peru's people, the negotiations had stalled
on US insistence that Peru throw open its agriculture and other vulnerable sectors to competition with US competitors.
As usual in these deals, the most damaging concessions come in the investment clauses. US corporations will be able to
claim as unlawful restraints on investment almost any national legislation that prevents them getting what they want.
Disputes will end up being handled in supra-national tribunals in the United States.
Peru's legislature can wave national autonomy goodbye. That is what "free trade" and globalization mean. Peruvian trade
negotiators seem naively to have hoped that previous Andean preferential trade deals with the US would be a base from
which to negotiate better trade arrangements. As other observers have put it, far from being a baseline, those earlier
deals were always regarded by the US as a ceiling.[5] For the extortionist US negotiators, the deal from the start was, "give us everything, now we've got you hooked, or
lose what little you have" That threat is supplemented by the looming presence of international financial institutions
like the IMF and the World Bank and the suave rustle of debilitating debt agreements that have to be paid under threat
of losing access to further credit.
This systematic gangsterism is deliberately designed to be anti-democratic and repressive, striking deals with
oligarchical elites that intentionally target the most vulnerable, the impoverished majority. As in Mexico's case,
Peru's agriculture and food sovereignty will be decisively weakened by the trade deal with the US. Medicines were also a
key target for US negotiators, as in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Mining, agri-business, energy
and pharmaceutical multinational corporations will be the main beneficiaries. As these deals progress, the US
negotiators will point to precedents like CAFTA and the deal with Peru to try and force countries like Bolivia, Colombia
and Ecuador to cave in and accept the same hopelessly, disadvantageous terms under threat of losing earlier preferential
treatment.
The regional perspective
The deal with Peru is a hollow victory for the Bush regime for two main reasons. Firstly, it is a clear measure of US
decline. Did the US government care much in 1990 whether or not it had a trade deal with any country south of the Rio
Grande? Now it spares no effort to secure them. Secondly, the deals are likely to prove of temporary benefit as
political developments steadily turn national public sentiment decisively against US influence. In Ecuador, three
presidents have been forced from office by popular unrest in recent years for favouring US and other foreign interests.
In Bolivia, two presidents have been forced to leave office for the same reason. By contrast, defence of national
interests has been a defining policy in sustaining the popularity of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Even Colombia's
pro-US President Alvaro Uribe is having to proceed carefully in his country's trade negotiations with the US government.
In contrast to Toledo, Uribe is seeking re-election next year.
For the majority of people in the affected countries, including Peru once the treaty is ratified, the effects of these
trade deals are markedly negative. They invariably provoke sharper extremes of poverty and inequality, widespread
disruption of rural communities, increased environmental degradation, greater employment insecurity and dramatically
increased capital flight. President Toledo has predicted, absurdly, 6 million more jobs as a result of the trade deal.
But the miserable results are in from Mexico after over a decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and
it's plain that Toledo's prediction is idiotic. No wonder Toledo's party was wiped out in Peru's municipal elections
last year.
Toledo sneaked his trade team off to Washington and closed the deal behind the backs of Peru's nearly 30 million people.
Even when ratified the Peruvian trade deal with the US may well face attempts at revision from Peru's new government
after next year's May elections. Colombia's is the next likely government to sign away its people's sovereignty. After
that, predatory US trade representatives may well run out of ready prey. Political crises threaten in both Ecuador and
Bolivia to an extent that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of any trade deals signed by those countries in the near
future. If progressive indigenous leader Evo Morales wins the Bolivian presidential elections scheduled for December
18th, the US will most likely have to cross Bolivia off its list of intended "free trade" victims.
The US is now engaged in a desperate holding operation to sustain its dwindling authority and prestige in Latin America.
Its drive for a Free Trade Area of the Americas has failed. When the World Trade Organization summit in Hong Kong folds
without agreement this month as is most likely, the US will have to review its options. There is little more mileage in
trying to strike futile trade deals with oligarchical governments in countries whose peoples may well repudiate them
subsequently.
On the other hand, the rich countries' global effort to bully and cajole weaker countries into a "free trade" strait
jacket via the WTO also looks incapable of achieving legitimate acceptance. As international trade negotiations tread
water, the US will certainly be working hard to undermine alternative models of sovereign integration such as Mercosur
and Venezuela's more ambitious Alternativa Bolivariana para las Americas (ALBA). Efforts at fracturing national states
by promoting separatism in resource rich areas like Bolivia's Santa Cruz and in Venezuela's Zulia may well increase.
ALBA dawns in the US
Despite US government hostility, ALBA - the acronym means dawn in Spanish - made it a new day in the Bronx and parts of
Boston lately when the CITGO subsidiary of Venezuela's PDVSA State oil company began distributing cut price fuel oil for
people on low incomes. Commentators from Forbes to Bloomberg to the Washington Post have tried to tag CITGO's solidarity
initiative as merely a political ploy by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. "The populist South American president would relish
being able to show that Venezuela, far less wealthy than the United States, had come to the rescue of low-income people
here, analysts said." [6] A useful specimen there of how the US information media mix unattributed sources with fact to create mind-numbing
quasi-news propaganda.
In fact CITGO is responding to a request circulated this year by a group of nine US senators to the major oil companies
to help provide relief for vulnerable people with their heating bills through the winter. A total of around 70,000
families in Boston and New York's Bronx - more than a quarter of a million people - are expected to benefit from price
reductions of around 40% in the current market price. US commentators seem completely unable to acknowledge that far
from being a propaganda coup, the CITGO heating oil initiative is just one more example of a people-first economic model
that shows up deals like that between Peru and the United States as the exercises in corporate gangsterism they really
are. In the third quarter of 2005 five oil corporations - Exxon, BP-Amoco, Chevron, Shell and Total - earned US$33.4bn.
They still refused to match little CITGO's gesture.
Venezuela's cheap heating oil program in the US embodies a practical alternative to imperialist capitalism the corporate
media simply refuse to acknowledge. On Jamaica's "Breakfast Club" radio show last month, Fiona Mackie, a Latin America
specialist for the Economist Intelligence Unit gave a succinct summary of the way Venezuela's policies are
systematically misrepresented by international media. Mackie alleged that neighbouring countries would be unable to copy
Venezuela's policies because they lacked both sufficient natural resources and the political will.
The ridiculous assertion about the region's natural resources was surely a slip, perhaps understandable in an
unrehearsed radio interview. And it is certainly true the local oligarchies who run those countries are terrified of the
participatory democracy practised by Chavez. But a lack of political will for change is manifestly not true of those
countries' peoples, especially in Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador.
Economic integration putting people first
Corporate media commentators like Mackie also like to contrast Venezuela with Brazil. They argue that Chavez is taking
irresponsible advantage of windfall oil profits to buy political support with his government's social programs. While in
contrast Brazil is displaying maturity by following "sensible" financial and economic management. These advocates of
global corporate capitalism argue, of all things, that Chavez's health, education and income support programs are not
sustainable. The same commentators generally ignore Brazil's uncontrolled soya production, which is wrecking the medium
and long term sustainability of Brazil's agricultural economy.
It makes no sense to deny the intimate relationship between solid social investment and long term economic well-being. A
recent report from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimated the number of people living in
poverty at over 213 million, over 40% of the continent's peoples. [7] Presumably this is a "sensible" outcome of twenty five years of aggressive "free market" proselytism overseen by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. On the other hand one might perhaps remark sardonically that poverty is
certainly sustainable.
Venezuela is the country in the region doing most to counteract the mendacious nonsense of capitalist apologetics
delivering the basic health and education services that are the fundamental pre-requisites enabling impoverished
families to attain a decent life. If there is anything in which Brazil is being sensible it is in its still half-hearted
attempts to imitate Venezuela's efforts to reduce inequality. Despite disappointing overall economic growth, Brazil this
year reported three million fewer people living in extreme poverty compared to 2004, thanks largely to its "beca
familia" income support program. [8] Similar programs in Venezuela seem to be achieving significant reductions in poverty and inequality there too.
With its Andean trade strategy in disarray and the determination of the Mercosur coutnries to work out their own style
of trade integration, US government influence and credibility in the region is diminishing year by year. At the
political level, these economic realities have a startling multiplier effect. The failure of traditional oligarchical
politics and corporate capitalist economics in Latin America is obvious. More and more people want their countries'
resources to benefit their people instead of foreign corporations. The recent vote in Venezuela was the first in a
series of elections through the continent focusing around that and related issues. Next week it will be Bolivia's turn.
Most of Latin America will have presidential elections through 2006. It will be a decisive, win-some-lose-some year in
which the decline of US influence in Latin America is likely to become irreversible.
************** FOOTNOTES
1. "Reclama Cumbre CARICOM extradicion de Posada a Venezuela" Agencia Cubana de Noticias 8/12/2005 "Condena al bloqueo y
el terrorismo cumbre caribena" Agencia Cubana de Noticias 8/12/2005
2. Entrevista, Radio Nacional de Venezuela 11/12/05
venezuelacolombia_051125111413 and the Power and Interest News Report November 29th 2005
4. "PPK y TLC" Raul Wiener Argenpress 10/12/2005
5. "Alerta: Uribe tras los pasos de Toledo" RECALCA Argenpress 10/12/2005
6, "Chavez Pushes Petro-Diplomacy", Justin Blum, Washington Post 22nd November 2005
7. La mitad de la poblacion de America Latina es pobre, Enrique Gutierrez, La Jornada, Rebelion 27-11-2005
8. "Brasil: En busca de banderas no perdidas", Mario Osava, IPS, Argenpress 09-12-2005