Guadalajara: Obama Backpedals on Change

While not mentioned by name, the pro-corporate spirit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership still guided disappointing pronouncements from the North American Leaders Summit earlier this month. Be informed! Follow the "read more" link to statements from civil society groups, video, and official summit documents.

by Ben Beachy, Witness for Peace, and Manuel Pérez Rocha, Institute for Policy Studies

During the fifth North American Leaders Summit in Guadalajara, President Obama chose to backpedal on his stated commitment to change. Obama promised during his campaign (February 2008) that his meetings with the leaders of Mexico and Canada, “unlike similar summits under President Bush,” would be “transparent” and would involve “citizens, labor, the private sector and non-governmental organizations in setting the agenda and making progress.” By contrast, not only did the definition of this summit’s agenda not include civil society, the agenda was not even made public beforehand.

The summit’s outcome consistently reflected such disregard for civil society concerns. Mainstream media reported on Obama’s statements that the long-awaited overhaul of the broken U.S. migration system would be further delayed. Less reported was Obama’s suspension of the long-awaited overhaul of a treaty that has forced much migration: NAFTA. Obama’s refusal to even mention NAFTA during the summit is a major disappointment to people in the three countries who expected him to fulfill his campaign commitments to amend this and other free trade agreements. Retracting, two days before the summit Obama said that “given the weakened state of the U.S., Mexican and Canadian economies, this is not the time to reopen the NAFTA treaty for negotiations.” He missed the point: the very economic and financial deregulation policies contained in NAFTA have contributed to the present crisis, particularly in Mexico, whose economy is contracting worse than any other Latin American country. The economic crisis does not overshadow, but accentuates the need to renegotiate NAFTA.

Swine flu, another summit agenda item, also highlights the urgency of NAFTA renegotiation. While the three leaders gave collective pats-on-the-back for the handling of the swine flu outbreak, no mention was made of the epidemic’s causes. Evidence uncovered to date suggests a potential source of the flu: massive U.S.-owned hog raising operations in Mexico. Upon the implementation of NAFTA, the hog companies moved from the U.S. to Mexico so as to evade environmental and public health laws, permitting the large-scale disposal of untreated hog feces. Failing to address the trade model that facilitated this race to the bottom does not bode well for preventing future pandemics.

While saying little on trade, Obama said much on human rights. In a summit press conference, Obama backed Mexican President Calderon’s assertion that the Mexican government has a “strong commitment to protect the human rights of everybody…and anyone who says the contrary certainly would have to prove this -- any case, just one case, where the proper authority has not acted in a correct way.” Obama expressed “great confidence” that in Calderon’s ongoing antinarcotics assault, “human rights will be observed.” It is disappointing that Obama has ignored dozens of Mexican, U.S. and international human rights organizations that have repeatedly denounced the sixfold increase in human rights complaints since Calderon took office. Observing such an alarming upswing in violations amidst ongoing impunity, these organizations have asked the U.S. to withhold Merida Initiative funds destined to strengthen the Mexican military. Obama continued to turn a deaf ear to such concerns at the summit by reaffirming Merida Initiative support for Mexico’s failing “war on drugs.”

The summit did grant one partial victory: the outward failure of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a failure made evident by the fact that the Presidents did not publicly mention the SPP name during the summit. Yet, SPP logic still persists in the trilateral relations. The Presidents’ joint summit declaration calls for “modern borders to facilitate trade and the smooth operation of supply chains, while protecting our security,” “protection of intellectual property rights,” and a commitment to continue “reducing unnecessary regulatory differences.” As in the SPP, the Presidents try to ameliorate the deregulation agenda with rhetoric like “[we will] ensure that the benefits of our economic relationship are widely shared and sustainable” and “we will seek to promote respect for labor rights and protection of the environment.” And how, we ask, if NAFTA is untouchable?

Given that the mainstream U.S. press decided to pay little attention to the Guadalajara summit, please see the following documentation to become better informed. The information is grouped as: a) input from civil society and legislators prior to the summit; b) official statements; and c) post-summit analysis and declarations.

In solidarity,

Ben Beachy and Manuel Pérez Rocha


Links to documentation on Guadalajara Summit

A) INPUTS FROM CIVIL SOCIETY AND LEGISLATORS PRIOR TO THE SUMMIT

• Legislators’ Task Force on Renegotiating NAFTA Seek New Fair Trade Model for North America
• Tri-National Union Declaration on the Occasion of the NAFTA Leaders Summit
• An Open Letter To Prime Minister Stephen Harper (from Canadian organizations)
• Letter from more than 100 Mexican organizations to North American leaders (in Spanish), delivered to the US Embassy in Mexico
• Letter to Obama re NAFTA and Guadalajara Meeting from North American networks

B) OFFICIAL STATEMENTS

• “Obama says this is not the time to reopen NAFTA”
• Joint Statement by North American Leaders
• North America Leaders’ Summit: Energy Deliverables
• North American Leaders’ Declaration on H1N1
• Transcript to Leaders’ Press Conference in Guadalajara

C) Civil Society organizations, parallel Summit and declarations

• Guadalajara March Against the SPP and NAFTA Part 1 10 minutos
• Guadalajara March Against the SPP and NAFTA Part 2 6:68 minutos
• “Altermundistas: la cumbre de líderes ignoró la agenda del pueblo”
• “Same old false solutions and short-sighted North American vision from Guadalajara summit, 
say Canadian civil society organizations”
• “Canada, United States and Mexico Leaders Declaration on Climate Change and Clean Energy falls short on needed changes”
• Interview with Amy Goodman in Democracy Now: “Obama reverses campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA”

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Obama: Renegotiate NAFTA as You Promised

Pressure from individuals, civil groups, and Congress must be brought to bear so that Obama makes good on a campaign promise to renegotiate NAFTA--and the upcoming SPP summit would be a good time to put that process into motion.

by Manuel Pérez-Rocha and Stuart Trew; edited by Emily Schwartz Greco. Posted at Foreign Policy in Focus, July 27

Starting my first year in office, I will convene annual meetings with Mr. Calderón and the prime minister of Canada. Unlike similar summits under President Bush, these will be conducted with a level of transparency that represents the close ties among our three countries. We will seek the active and open involvement of citizens, labor, the private sector and non-governmental organizations in setting the agenda and making progress.

- Barack Obama, in a February 20, 2008
Dallas Morning News op-ed

Though Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper have done everything to maintain the status quo on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), President Barack Obama has promised to "push the restart button" on several trade deals. While it's debatable how much his administration actually differs from its predecessor in these areas, trade activists remain hopeful that Obama will stick to his promises to renegotiate NAFTA and reconsider its expansion through the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).

Those promises include the above comment, which Obama made when he was still vying to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

Obama wrote those words shortly before the fourth annual SPP summit took place in New Orleans. By that time, the annual gathering of North American government officials and private-sector executives had become a lightning rod for criticism across the political spectrum and across borders. Indeed, the summits have been closed-door venues for pursuing a private sector-led agenda of deregulation and militarization, an agenda that calls for lowering environmental and consumer safety standards and curbing civil liberties, under the guise of making North America more "secure and prosperous."

Once Obama took office we became hopeful, despite the unwillingness of our countries' own leaders, Calderón and Harper, to widen the North American dialogue. However, more than six months into this administration, with the next North American leaders' summit coming up on August 9 and 10 in Guadalajara, trade activists like us are more in the dark than ever about what the United States would like to accomplish during the next phase of these trinational talks.

Will opening up the summits to greater civil society participation become just another forgotten campaign pledge? Will the Obama administration continue to ignore calls from concerned citizens in Canada, Mexico, and the United States to renegotiate a free trade agreement that increasingly serves only the slimmest of elite interests and needs a complete overhaul?

Security for Whom?
The Guadalajara meeting will be the fifth such gathering since the current three North American leaders' predecessors — former presidents Vicente Fox and George W. Bush and former Canadian prime minister Paul Martin — committed, in Waco, Texas in 2005 to deepen the NAFTA relationship and expand it into areas not covered by that agreement. The three leaders, nicknamed the "three amigos," called this new trilateral arrangement the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). It included different attempts to merge policies in the three countries on a number of areas: border security and anti-terrorism measures, energy sector integration, environmental protection, emergency preparedness, safety standards and more.

While regional cooperation in many of these areas is desirable, it became clear early on in the SPP process that the ultimate policy objectives were less so, at least for the public interest.

The SPP has meant the escalation of U.S.-led militarization in Mexico via the Mérida Initiative and other mechanisms that haven't stopped Mexico's growing human rights violations or the unstoppable violence in a failed "war on drugs." In Canada, new Homeland Security-RCMP policing operations (such as the Shiprider project on the Great Lakes and shared Pacific waters) blur traditional state borders, allowing armed U.S. Homeland Security officers to operate on Canadian soil.

Prosperity for Whom?
The SPP's economic agenda has included efforts to "harmonize" how and what all three governments regulate with the stated aim of "reducing the cost of doing business across borders."

Effectively, this business-driven demand has meant deregulation in areas as important as food safety — moving to industry self-regulation — and environmental protection, including increased pesticide residue limits on hundreds of fruits and vegetables.

Other corporate demands have resulted in plans to cut the "transaction costs of exports" — like NAFTA's rules of origin — by $100 billion, according to the leaders' latest joint statement (although a report from governments of how much has actually been cut is pending). Rules of origin can guarantee the inclusion of local and national content in goods traded across borders, and their elimination affects small producers who could use them, with the help of development agencies, to provide input in trinational trade. In practice, eliminating these rules means renegotiating NAFTA in closed-door ministerial meetings.

The SPP's "energy integration" provisions have meant churning out five times more dirty oil from Canada's tar sands and pressure on Mexico to privatize its state-owned oil and gas industry, which does nothing to help the North American region to transition away from fossil fuels, while further tying Canadian and Mexican resources to insatiable U.S. energy needs, and deepening U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources.

And finally, whose partnership are we talking about here? Our leaders have pursued these goals without any public oversight. Legislators haven't been consulted, and working groups often were dominated by big business. The North American Competitiveness Council, comprised of 30 of the continent's largest corporations, has been the SPP's only advisory body and the only group invited to the annual summits like the one coming up in Guadalajara. Business groups are currently waiting in the wings, ready to "offer strategic advice and support to the leaders," in the words of the Canadian and U.S. Chambers of Commerce, "either through the NACC or its successor mechanism."

Failed Model
The abject failure of NAFTA and its SPP offshoot to bring "security and prosperity" to North America is clear with the economic, environmental, and social crises now affecting this region and much of the world. Unemployment is high, global warming is escalating, and the need to transition away from carbon-intensive energy sources is irrefutable. Multiple food and consumer product safety scandals, notably the recent swine flu epidemic that has been linked to poorly regulated meat processing plants that have spread throughout Mexico since NAFTA came into effect, have called the bluff of business lobbies seeking further deregulation. So has the financial crisis — which resulted from unregulated trade in novel financial products totally detached from the real economy.

Mexico in particular is sinking into an unprecedented social and economic crisis. The drug war, perpetrated by Calderón with U.S. military help, has only exacerbated the nation's plague of violence. Since 2006, an estimated 12,000 people have died because of this war — the body count in 2009 so far is 3,363. There are also reports of a six-fold increase in human rights abuses also since 2006.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has just announced that while most of the world is seeing signs of recovery, the contraction of the Mexican economy this year will be double what was predicted just three months ago: a 7.3% rate. The fact that Mexico has become so vulnerable makes it crucial to critically analyze why NAFTA has not helped the country, even when trade and investment has increased.

New Model
The "free-market" ideology at the heart of NAFTA and its expansion to the realms of security through the SPP must be replaced with a people-focused model of sustainable economic growth that puts human rights, environmental protection, and job creation ahead of profits. These were Obama's promises as a candidate, when his refreshing new ideas tore through the language of "security" and "prosperity" to reveal the divisive policies these euphemisms hide.

Will the U.S. president turn back on his promise by simply reviving, even if it's under a new name, the failed Security and Prosperity Partnership dialogue? Or will he heed, for example, the advice of over 100 U.S. members of congress and civil society networks who want to revisit NAFTA, to strengthen environmental and labor standards and promote just investment rules and fair trade among other changes?

Maybe Obama hasn't made his mind up yet. In that case, we offer a simple piece of advice: In Guadalajara, make it clear that you will reverse the corporate coup d'etat that took over North American relations; announce that you're closing down the SPP and push the reset button. Agree with Calderón and Harper to start renegotiating NAFTA. Give us hope that another North America is possible.

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