Clinton's First Year: Trade Above All No sooner had Colombia's president, C6sar Gaviria, been propelled to the secre- tary generalship of the Organiza- tion of American States (OAS) by what the Council on Hemispheric Affairs has called "Washington's graceless back-room bullying and salon cajolery," than he announced that hemispheric free trade would become the organization's primary goal. "We want the different trade agreements...to converge into one single process," he said. "We want to create a single, larger free-trade zone." If there was some mystery as to why Washington exerted such inordinate pressure on regional countries to support Gaviria-the president of a country whose human-rights credentials are deeply suspect-over Costa Rican foreign minister Bernd Niehaus, Gaviria's post-election remarks may hold the key. The Clinton Administration may be indecisive about all other aspects of inter-American policy, but when it comes to letting the market-and those who have mar- ket power-take control of hemi- spheric economies, it has shown the ability to be expeditious. The Administration has three stated goals for the Americas: free trade, free elections, and the ame- lioration of poverty. These can probably be taken at face value, as long as we remember that free trade is primus inter pares; the other two are only relevant as long as they support the first. U.S. policy toward Mexico, for example, where free trade and free elections have not yet shown themselves to be perfect- ly compatible, clearly demonstrates the primacy of trade. In the wake of Mexico's current political uncer- tainty, Clinton has publicly sup- ported President Carlos Salinas' pronouncements that both political stability and the implementation of free-market economic policy must precede the democratization of the country. The simultaneous-though uneven-promotion of trade and electoral democracy comes togeth- er in a policy National Security Advisor Anthony Lake has called "enlargement." Lake has called for the replacement of the old policy of the "containment" of Communism with a policy of "enlargement...of the world's free community of mar- ket democracies," all of whom can take advantage of that "immense entrepreneurial opportunity" that's out there, almost within their grasp. The idea is to make the Americas into one vast land of opportunity where, in the famous words of Al Capone, "all you have to do is reach out and take it." f course, some people are more primed to reach out than others. One of the lat- est groups to take advantage of the policy of enlargement is the inter- national community of mining companies which-following the U.S.-encouraged enactment of free- market legislation in a growing number of the region's countries-- has entered the Andes en masse, looking for copper, silver and gold. "Discarding decades of prickly nationalism," reports James Brooke in the New York Times, "Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru have rewritten their mining codes to encourage foreign investment. The new codes establish clear tax rules, easy repatriation of profits, protec- tion against nationalization and low tariffs on machinery." Apparently the United States itself is less accommodating to these transna- tional companies-many of which are U.S.-based. "North American and Australian companies," writes Brooke, "complain of increasing 'barbed wire' at home: environ- mental hearings and native-Indian land ownership disputes that either block new projects outright or stretch out approval time for years on end." Free trade, in other words, is a way to allow U.S.-based transna- tional companies to do business in countries desperate for their invest- ment dollars, before unions, envi- ronmentalists, and land-rights claimants catch up with them. Environmental degradation, the sell-off of the national wealth, and the development of an economic model driven by cheap-labor export platforms for transnationals are all at issue here in the "enlargement" of U.S.-based capital. U.S. support for these ventures stems, of course, from an interest in a certain kind of hemispheric pros- perity. "Exports," says Richard Feinberg, director of Inter-Ameri- can Affairs at the National Security Council, "have become a major engine of our economic growth, and Latin America is one of our most dynamic markets. U.S. exports to Latin America have more than doubled in seven years to nearly $80 billion in 1993." The World Bank has estimated that about 40% of global trade is intra- firm trade among the 350 largest transnationals, so that the "hemi- spheric prosperity" necessary to sustain that trade need not be all that deep. Moreover, the magnet for investment is precisely the low costs of production made possible by the desperate straits most of the population finds itself in. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the promotion of free trade seems often to work at cross-purposes with the Administration's other professed goals for the Americas: democracy and the alleviation of poverty.
