Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

ALINE FRAMBES-BUXEDA
in Mexico; the southern states of United States cannot compete with low
Mexican salaries. They met again, also with the Caribbean presidents, in
June of 1994.
A frantic interest in free trade with North America has caused both
the creation and changes of integration models. Venezuela and Colombia
have established the “Grupo de los Tres” (Group of Three) with Mexico,
turning their backs, in a sense, on the Andean Pact (originated in 1969).
Peru, in turn, has almost abandoned the Andean Pact in favor of bilateral
free trade negotiations with Japan and United States; Bolivia is on it’s way
towards doing the same, with the objective of becoming closer to Mercosur.
Some analysts consider that with NAFTA the United States will at
least lose 150,000 direct jobs; NAFTA as well shall increase unemployment
in many Mexican national agriculture and traditional industrial sectors. 57
In a similar way, one can foresee that NAFTA could be devastating to
Puerto Rico and other Caribbean countries. As one becomes familiar with
the 2,000 written pages of the NAFTA agreement (5 volumes), multiple
details reveal forthcoming difficulties for certain economic sectors and
geographic regions. The Caribbean shall not be favored, due to lack of
productivity.
An astonishing part of the plan is that United States, Mexico and
Canada are interested that NAFTA should turn into a giant worldwide
integration project. Hence, in 1992 the United States ambassador to Canada,
Peter Teeley, stated the following:
Without a doubt we expect that NAFTA will grow in its membership. We
want to create a huge scheme of free trade agreements with the liberal
democracies of Latin America, which are all looking towards us, and also
with the democracies of Eastern Europe who wish a special relationship
with United States; we are interested as well in the nations of the Pacific
who wish to guarantee their future with the United States. 58
The replay and repetition every decade, and also in the 90s, of a similar
and worn out but re-modeled neo-liberalism, has transformed former
integration models in contradictory ways. Some have been neutralized, and
lay stagnant, new models have also been created. However, the renovated
neo-liberal economic model has also weakened important structures of the
world economy, or “global” economy as it is now denominated. Neo-liberalism
has, as well, reproduced a vast number of informal and marginal
economic activities: drugs, informal production, marginal street and house
vendors, and organized crime of various types. This “remodeled global
57
Ibid, p. 16.
58
Free translation from Spanish by the author from: Op. Cit., Víctor Baccheta,
p. 18.
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