Morning Star | February 6, 2002
TENS of thousands of anti-globalisation campaigners marched through Porto Alegre, Brazil, yesterday to protest against plans for a pan-American free trade pact.
The protest closed this year's World Social Forum, which coincided with the World Economic Forum in New York where corporate and political leaders met. The Brazil event had begun with a massive peace march and hosted a demonstration of solidarity with crisis-hit Argentina.
The proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would basically extend a free trade pact all the way to Argentina.
Mexican Network for Action Against Free Trade spokesman Alejandro Villamar said that, if anyone should know about the dangers of free trade, it is Mexicans, who have been part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada since 1993.
"FTAA is a superclone of NAFTA and we don't want our Latin American brothers to suffer the same as the Mexican people," he said.
The Mexican economy is expected to have contracted in 2001 due to US imports and the global economic downturn.
Mr Villamar also said that previous growth had not filtered down to ordinary people and there is more poverty now than there was before the trade act.
The US Institute for Food and Development Policy spokesman Peter Rosset, who was on the march, agreed with Mr Villamar.
He said that up to 60 per cent of small and medium business in Mexico had gone bankrupt as a result of NAFTA.
"What this shows is a delinking between economic growth and people's living standards," he said.
Uruguayan group Social Watch spokesman Roberto Bissio attacked Western powers for not playing by their own rules when enforcing free-trade diktats.
"They talk of liberalisation when it is we that have to liberalise and they that are protected," he said.
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