Talks on free-trade zone draw protests in Miami

By Seattle Times news services

	SPENCER PLATT / GETTY IMAGES Miami police arrest a protester yesterday outside a summit to discuss the formation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
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The Miami protests took place near a fenced-off area around the InterContinental Hotel where representatives of 34 countries discussed the future of trade in a region of almost 800 million people as part of a planned Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

At least 36 demonstrators were arrested on charges including aggravated assault, unlawful assembly, resisting arrest, trespassing and burglary. Police said two officers suffered minor injuries. At least three demonstrators were treated at a hospital for minor injuries.

Lance Stelzer, a Miami lawyer, said police overreacted to the protests because of rioting outside the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle and at other free-trade meetings worldwide.

"When you have that kind of police presence dressed up in storm-trooper garb and a mentality of 'Let's close off the entire city because we had rowdies in another city,' it has a tendency to incite problems that might not otherwise exist," Stelzer said.

The clashes took place before and after a march by 8,000 to 10,000 union members.

Protesters say the FTAA will put more power into the hands of global corporations, but some worry about job losses. Other groups are concerned about the impact on the environment.

Chairing the talks, the United States and Brazil appeared to have papered over their disagreements on how comprehensive the pact should be. A draft declaration by trade officials would require all countries to agree on a common set of commitments in each of nine negotiating areas, while allowing a second set of talks for some countries to negotiate more ambitious obligations.

The draft shows that the vision for the FTAA has undergone a substantial alteration since its conception nine years ago. The original plan would have essentially extended the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) all the way south to Tierra del Fuego, but the declaration envisions a watered-down accord in which member countries can pick and choose how far they want to go in making their economies appealing to multinational companies.

Talks to establish the FTAA were launched in 1994 at a summit here hosted by President Clinton during the height of enthusiasm about the rewards countries could reap by opening their markets and adopting U.S.-style rules of global capitalism.

Congress had just approved NAFTA, linking the U.S. economy with Canada and Mexico, and Washington proposed a similar pact for the rest of the countries in the hemisphere, except Cuba, to be completed by early 2005.

But sluggish growth, combined with a number of severe financial crises, set back the free-market cause in the region and brought left-wing governments to power, notably in Brazil, whose economy dominates South America. Brazil has led the opposition to a NAFTA model for the FTAA, arguing that the deal should focus narrowly on increasing trade among member nations rather than on intellectual property rights and investment codes.

Anxious to avert a repetition of the breakdown two months ago of negotiations at a World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, Mexico, when Brazil led a bloc of developing nations confronting Washington over the terms of a global trade accord, top U.S. and Brazilian officials crafted a compromise declaration that fudges how broad and deep the FTAA will be. In effect, that means countries like Costa Rica and El Salvador could accept a full-blown, NAFTA-style set of commitments, while Brazil could stick with its stated intention to make only limited changes in its laws.

The result is almost as great a source of gratification to the anti-free-trade activists as the debacle in Cancún. "All they agreed to is to avoid making Miami the FTAA's Waterloo," said an e-mail from Lori Wallach, executive director of Global Trade Watch, a group affiliated with Ralph Nader. "The U.S. has been forced here in Miami to choose between no FTAA and FTAA-lite."

Compiled from The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.

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