ISDS Case Map
FTAA
Free Trade Area of the Americas
Surprise! Last week's completion of U.S. free trade talks with Colombia - and the likely signing of similar deals with Ecuador and Panama in coming weeks - may mean that U.S. plans to create a hemisphere-wide free-trade area may not be dead after all.
The new political climate is favourable to projects for regional integration other than the US-led free trade area of the Americas, the most radical being the mutually helpful Bolivarian Alternative.
Caribbean leaders are reconsidering the region's strategic alliances, including a possible free trade agreement with Venezuela as an alternative to the stalled Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations.
Bolivian President Evo Morales used his inaugural address Sunday to renew his pledge to nationalize the country's vast natural gas reserves, but said he's open to the idea of a large US-sponsored trade zone he harshly criticized last year during his campaign.
President Alejandro Toledo endorsed Miami as the headquarters for a proposed free trade secretariat as Florida Gov. Jeb Bush completed a two-day trade visit to Ecuador and Peru.
Venezuela today gained entry into the South American trade group Mercosur, a move pursued by President Hugo Chavez to help strengthen regional agreements and thwart a US-sponsored accord for the hemisphere.
When the Bush cabinet announced intentions to revive the moribund Free Trade Area of the Americas at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, the countries of the Southern Common Market closed ranks to prevent it. What followed was a diplomatic melee that reflects not so much divisions within Latin America, as a growing resistance to the current free trade model throughout the developing world.
Most of the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean want a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), even in a less ambitious form, as opposed to a handful of nations - albeit an economically powerful minority - that reject the idea.
In the aftermath of the U.S. failure in Argentina, the Bush administration continues to work for bilateral or sub-regional free trade agreements throughout the Americas.
Indigenous movements are indeed a threat to the free-trade policies Bush is hawking, with ever fewer buyers, across Latin America. Their power comes not from terror but a terror-resistant strain of hope, so sturdy it can take root in the midst of Colombia's seemingly hopeless civil war.
