Mr. President, I rise to speak in this Chamber about a story unfolding right now in Costa Rica. This country of 4 million people is having a national referendum on October 7--next week--on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the…
Mr. President, I rise to speak in this Chamber about a story unfolding right now in Costa Rica.
This country of 4 million people is having a national referendum on October 7--next week--on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the trade deal this Congress passed by a narrow margin a couple of years ago.
CAFTA stipulates that the last signatory country must approve the deal no later than 2 years after the first signatory country implements the agreement.
So over the past 2 years, the United States, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic enacted the NAFTA expansion.
The Costa Rican people have resisted it.
My colleagues have seen news reports this weekend about a massive rally of fair traders--people who want trade but under different rules--against CAFTA in Costa Rica. Some 150,000 citizens in a country of 4 million people spoke out expressing their opposition to the agreement--150,000 people--and most thought that a conservative estimate.
The pro-CAFTA government gave up efforts to pass CAFTA in the legislature after continued protest against it, including a 2-day general strike last October.
Their is strong opposition to a NAFTA-style agreement. In fact, the issue of whether to approve CAFTA has stirred up such political upheaval that the Government chose to go to a public
referendum instead of going to the legislature. Legislators not unlike our peers in Congress did not want to face voters in their home district if they voted for the pact.
The agreement must be implemented as domestic law--meaning Costa Rica has to enact new laws in order for the trade agreement to take effect. That bothers hundreds of thousands of Costa Ricans because they have in place today strong laws on health, on the environment, on education, on privatization, on generic drugs, on all the kinds of issues that have helped to build the middle class in Costa Rica.
Costa Rica is a progressive country. More than a third of its land is protected in national parks. More than 90 percent of its electricity comes from renewals. Costa Rica's high literacy rates are well known, and it has a strong health care system. Its life expectancy is not too different than our own in this country.
Costa Rica's citizens have also seen what NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement--did to Mexico's middle class, and what especially it has done to Mexican farmers, small peasant family farmers.
These factors have created strong resistance to entering into an agreement that can handcuff policymakers from setting progrowth, prodevelopment policies in their own country.
As this Chamber knows, NAFTA/CAFTA-style deals are about a whole lot more than just tariffs and quotas. These agreements are top-down pacts that lock in new rules on investment, on food safety, on services, and on procurement.
This month, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development issued a report warning developing countries to be wary of bilateral and regional free-trade deals as they are currently written. They warned them against signing these agreements.
The U.N. report cited NAFTA as an example of a trade agreement that may have short-term benefits but does long-term harm. You hear a lot of talk from the Bush administration that free trade is necessary to address poverty. You hear that the ``people,'' as they say, of these mostly poor countries want trade deals like NAFTA.
But what we are seeing in Costa Rica right now is what we are seeing around the globe when it comes to trade deals that purely and simply give too much power to multinational corporations. What we are seeing is a loud and clear demand for change.
We see it in the WTO negotiations, which continue to falter as developing countries resist WTO expansion. We see it in Ohio--in Lorain and Mansfield, in Youngstown and Lima, in Dayton and Chillicothe--where hard-working men and women who have made America the strongest Nation in the world are betrayed by Washington's trade policy.
Presidents from both parties have entered into trade agreements, agreements such as NAFTA, promising they would create millions of new jobs and enrich communities. Instead, too many of these agreements, too often, have cost millions of jobs and devastated communities.
Two years ago, when I served in the House, we created a bipartisan coalition against the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Religious organizations, labor unions, environmentalists, small businesses, human rights advocates, and small manufacturing companies were part of this bipartisan opposition.
The opposition that was evident in Washington and, more importantly, in congressional districts around the country caused the Bush administration to make deals and promises and--in the words of one sympathetic lawmaker to the Bush administration--helped us so that we ``twist[ed] arms until they break into a thousand pieces.''
The Bush administration got what it wanted when it pushed NAFTA through. But we won the debate. Today in Costa Rica, we are seeing similar scare tactics taken by the pro-CAFTA administration.
A memo was leaked to the Costa Rican press, and it has caused an uproar for good reason. In this memo, the Costa Rican Vice President and a Member of Congress outlined a plan to President Arias that uses fear, threats to local officials, and attacks on CAFTA opposition as tactics to win the referendum.
The Second Vice President, one of the memo's authors, had to resign from his government office while officials investigate whether any laws had been broken.
The memo states clearly:
The mayor that does not win his canton--
Which is their political jurisdiction--
The mayor that does not win his canton (precinct) will not
get a penny from the government in the next three years.
It is pretty simple. The memo says the government then needs to ``stimulate fear'' among Costa Ricans. It even lists the kinds of fear that are effective: Stimulate fear. Create fear of the loss of jobs if CAFTA is not approved. Stimulate a fear of violence and civil strife. Stimulate a fear of Chavez and Castro if Costa Rica does not approve