CAFTA fight shows can stop FTAA.(THE LAST WORD)

In the wee hours of July 28, pro-CAFTA forces squeaked out a razor-thin victory in the House by a vote of 217 to 215--overcoming their final hurdle. The administration had signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement in May of 2004, but refused to allow Congress to vote on the agreement for more than a year, until sufficient support could be lined up. The fact that the administration dared not submit the agreement to Congress sooner, and then had to engage in an embarrassingly transparent display of arm-twisting and vote-buying to get it passed, is powerful testimony to what the informed opposition against CAFTA had accomplished. (See page 21.)

We had high hopes of defeating CAFTA. But we are not discouraged, since the CAFTA battle has helped us enormously to build opposition to a more dangerous threat--the Free Trade Area of the Americas--and to make it more difficult for the global architects who want to impose an EU-style supranational government on the Americas to move forward with the FTAA.

On January 16, 2002, President Bush declared "we're determined to complete [the FTAA] negotiations by January of 2005." Those negotiations are still not completed. Moreover, the FTAA agreement was to have been approved by Congress and put into effect this year. That timetable appears to have been shoved back at least a year.

The momentum in the battle to stop the FTAA may be swinging our way. As the Atlanta Journal Constitution noted, "Free trade supporters cheered the Central American trade pact's passage ... but said the narrow victory may provide little momentum for reaching their larger goal: a trade zone spanning the Western Hemisphere."

So-called tree trade pacts are no longer a theory to many Americans, as was the case when Congress approved NAFTA in 1993. Almost a million Americans have lost jobs as a result of NAFTA alone. Moreover, the trend toward open borders is becoming increasingly visible. Indeed, the CAFTA battle has bought us valuable time to more fully inform and activate Americans who already recognize these alarming trends.

It was a welcome surprise that CAFTA proponents had to work so hard to assemble their majority. Since much of the opposition to CAFTA was based on partisan politics and narrow economic concerns, we were pleased that the pro-CAFTA forces had so much difficulty.

Many who mistakenly view CAFTA as a "minor trade agreement" were undoubtedly puzzled by the amount of persistence, determination, and back-room dealing the administration and the GOP congressional leadership applied to get CAFTA passed. The sheer volume of political ...