ISDS Case Map
NAFTA | USMCA
With the Republicans and the Obama administration attempting to rush headlong into a new trade agreements with Korea, and possibly also with Panama and Colombia, it is incumbent on Americans to apply a bit of empiricism. How have our past trade agreements worked out? Above all, how's the grand-daddy of them all, NAFTA, doing?
People in Chihuahua who were picked up under guidelines of the Merida Initiative on three-year-old warrants were charged not with drugs but with organizing anti-NAFTA protests!
The award in agribusiness giant Cargill's NAFTA investor-state attack on Mexico's jobs program was published last week.
While the NAFTA framework remains intact, a recent announcement by Canada and the US to work towards a trade and security perimeter agreement without Mexico, has some questioning the future of the whole trilateral process.
This week, people across the United States and Canada will demonstrate at Mexican consulates and embassies in protest of violations of the right to organize in Mexico. Of particular concern to protesters will be the bitter strikes and repression of unions representing miners and electrical workers, and the escalating practice of government and corporate entities forcibly installing company unions known there as “protection unions.”
Experts expect Obama and Harper to announce a “new” border partnership to ease the flow of goods and people across the border by harmonizing security, immigration and refugee, surveillance and possibly defense policy across the continent. There's nothing new about this plan. It's the regurgitation of the defunct Bush-led Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) without the Mexican “amigo.”
"The government [of Mexico] didn't so much pull the plug on corn. The government pulled the plug on family farmers who grow corn because the big guys who grew corn got massive subsidies and protection from imports," said Jonathan Fox, an expert on rural Mexico at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The United States claimed victory against Canada Friday in a trade dispute over Ottawa's alleged subsidies for lumber exports to the United States.
Over $326 million in compensation has already been paid out by governments to mainly US corporations in the 66 NAFTA cases filed to date.
As in Colombia, evidence suggests paramilitaries act as enforcers for foreign corporations. Since NAFTA took effect, US and Canadian mining companies have acquired more than a million hectares of land in Chiapas, displacing thousands of peasants.
