Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

ALINE FRAMBES-BUXEDA
of the principal goals of the project of integration beginning with Brazil,
Argentina and Uruguay in 1986. Before this, already in 1984, a collective
enterprise was created (LATIN-EQUIP), by three banks of Argentina,
Brazil and Mexico to foment the substitution of capital and technology
through regional production. 38 Mexico should look into these alternatives
as the most adequate for the development of advanced capitalism in its
country; and in this way not waste all of its efforts with the North American
Free Trade Association.
The populist models and neoliberal models of economic development
are now defunct as third world alternatives. We cannot continue to
repeat, decade after decade, variants of these same schemes. Free Trade
development after 1994 has been a repetition of a similar attempt in the
1950s. Factors needed are substitution of actors, active States in terms
of investments, industrialization of agriculture, economic support and
alternative models of capitalist development, we must necessarily leave
the dysfunctional cycle that still persists in the processes of socioeconomic
organization in our countries.
Without these social changes, a process of integration that produces
improved quality of life and development for Latin America and the Caribbean
is impossible. We think, as a perspective, that the change of actors
will come because the present economic crisis and the stagnation of the
development perspectives in our region affect too large a number of our
populace. Understandably, the possibilities of these changes are dependent,
on how changes in the “Global System” shall affect our countries.
The social and ethnic riots that occurred in May of 1992 in Los Angeles,
USA, may be a sign of alterations to come in the “central” industrialized
countries now still in control of “global” development.
9. WHAT IS SUBORDINATE INTEGRATION
With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) we shall
be witnesses perhaps of the first real model of “Subordinate Integration”.
Up to now, all integration models have been formed between countries with
more or less similar levels of economic development; this is not the case
in NAFTA. The asymmetry between the U.S., Canada and the Mexican
economies is still enormous. For example the average hourly wage for 1990
in the clothing industry in Toronto Canada was $8.17 and 47¢ in Mexico. 39
On the other hand, NAFTA has constrained the Mexican government in
many ways. Both Mexico and Canada no longer are able to provide the
38
Ibid., p. 4-5.
39
Cambell, Bruce, “Beggar thy Neighbor,” NACLA Report on The Americas,
Vol. XXIV, Number 6, New York, May, 1991, p. 29.
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