[NYTr] US Pockets Costa Rica, Barely ; Public Citizen on Razor-Thin CAFTA Victory

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com

US Pockets Costa Rica, Barely

San Jose, Oct 8 (Prensa Latina) After the minimum advantage obtained by
Costa Rican supporters of the free trade agreement with the US, those
opposing the deal have announced they will keep rejecting it by other
means. 

Deputy Oscar Lopez, from the "Accesibilidad sin Exclusiones" party told
Prensa Latina he is determined to stop the so called agreement's
implementation. 

Lopez referred to a group of legal, environmental, and
copyright-related changes the country must make before the deal fully
enters into force. It would mean changing the regulations that
guarantee the existence of state monopolies in the provision of public
services and opening doors to competitiveness. 

In the Sunday referendum on the free trade agreement, the YES had a 2.8
percent advantage over the NO, with 51.60 percent against 48.80
percent, after 86 percent of votes were counted. The leaders of the
Patriotic Movement for NO said "they will recount votes one by one and
in front of the entire Costa Rican people."

 hr/dig/amg/mf

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Public Citizen - Oct 8, 2007
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2527

Close Tally on CAFTA by Costa Rica in First-Ever Public Vote on a NAFTA


Expansion Shows That Bush Administration’s Continual Push for These
Deals Hurts U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America

Even After U.S. Threats Aimed at Stimulating Public Fear of Reprisal
and Big-Dollar Campaign Pushing ‘Sí’ Vote, Result Is Marked by
Razor-Thin Margin

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The depth of public opposition to North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-style pacts was demonstrated Sunday by
Costa Rica’s massive “no” vote to CAFTA despite a intensive campaign
led by the country’s president, months of deceptive radio and
television advertising in favor of the pact, and a threatening
statement issued Saturday by the White House, Public Citizen said today.

The strong vote against CAFTA likely will fuel growing opposition to
another Bush proposal now before Congress to expand NAFTA to Peru. The
Peru Free Trade Agreement (FTA) contains the same foreign investor
privileges, service sector privatization, agriculture and other
provisions that fueled Costa Rican public opposition.

“That nearly half the public in Latin America’s richest free-market
democracy opposed CAFTA despite the intensive campaign in favor of it
should end the repeated claims that pushing more NAFTA-style free trade
deals is critical to U.S. foreign policy interests in the region or
helps the U.S. image,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s
Global Trade Watch division. “This vote also debunks the claim that
these pacts are motivated out of U.S. altruism to help poor people in
trade partner countries, given that many of the people in question just
announced that they themselves don’t want this kind of trade policy.
This policy, supported by the elite, will help foreign investors seize
control of their natural resources, undermine access to essential
services, displace peasant farmers and jack up medicines prices.”

Preliminary results showed that those opposing CAFTA garnered just over
48 percent of the vote and those for it garnered under 52 percent. The
anti-CAFTA vote received the majority in most rural regions, where
fears about campesino displacement drove opposition to the pact. The
pro-CAFTA vote won narrow majorities in most urban, populous regions,
where Bush administration’s threats made Thursday and Saturday were
widely covered by the media despite a legally mandated black-out on
advocacy for or against CAFTA in the press. As of Monday morning, the
“no” campaign had not conceded and was awaiting a partial recount on
Tuesday and an investigation into polling station irregularities.

Citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and the
Dominican Republic had no opportunity to voice their own views of
CAFTA. Despite massive, long-running public demonstrations against
CAFTA in those countries – which resulted in protestors being killed by
the police in Guatemala and a legislature fleeing its own building to
hold the vote in a downtown hotel in Honduras – legislatures in those
countries ultimately ratified and implemented CAFTA by mid-2006.

In Costa Rica, the CAFTA debate coincided with that nation’s
presidential election. With fair trade presidential candidate Ottón
Solís running against CAFTA-supporter and Nobel-Prize winner Oscar
Árias on a campaign focusing on the widely unpopular NAFTA expansion,
CAFTA never came to a vote in Costa Rica. Early in 2007, after Árias
narrowly won, Costa Rica’s legislature passed a measure establishing a
national referendum on whether Costa Rica should enter CAFTA.

That Sunday’s referendum resulted in narrow passage is not surprising
given considerable intervention by the Bush administration and a
massive, well-funded campaign for the pact led by Costa Rica’s
president and pushed heavily by the corporate sector and much of Costa
Rica’s media. The Bush administration repeatedly threatened to remove
Costa Rica’s existing Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) trade
preferences if the public rejected CAFTA, even though the program was
made permanent in 1990 and only an act of Congress could terminate it.
(A tiny percentage of Costa Rica’s U.S. exports enjoys duty-free
benefits under a CBI add-on program that was approved in 2000. The
tremendously popular program, which covers nearly two dozen countries
and cannot be removed for rejection of an FTA, is set for renewal next
year.) 

“Right now, we see the same duplicity with the proposed NAFTA expansion
to Peru, where proponents claim that implementing the Peru agreement is
critical to building a positive U.S. image in the region,” Wallach
said. “Yet if these agreements are good foreign policy, why did the
Bush administration also threaten to remove existing Andean trade
preferences to force the deal over the opposition of the Peruvian
public as well as its religious, indigenous and labor leaders?”

The U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, Mark Langdale, was slammed with a
rare formal denunciation before Costa Rica’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal
in August after he waged a lengthy campaign to influence the vote on
CAFTA. As part of that, Langdale employed misleading threats and
suggested there would be economic reprisals if CAFTA were rejected. In
response, Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) who serves on the House Foreign
Affairs Committee’s Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, wrote a letter to
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in late September demanding the
cessation of Langdale’s interventions. “Even the perception of such
interference harms the U.S. image in a region already suspicious of our
intentions,” Sánchez wrote. “If we are to be seen as respecting
democracy, sovereignty, and economic development, we must not interfere
in any way with the historic popular referendum on CAFTA in Costa Rica,
the region’s oldest and strongest democracy.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in
late September sent a letter to Costa Rica’s ambassador to the United
States correcting Langdale’s false threats that Costa Rica would lose
its CBI trade preferences if the public rejected CAFTA. “Participation
in CBI is not conditioned on a country’s decision to approve or reject
a free trade agreement with the United States, and we do not support
such a linkage,” Pelosi and Reid wrote. Despite this, Bush’s U.S. Trade
Representative renewed the threats on Thursday, and the White House
issued a statement repeating the threats on Saturday – just hours
before the vote.

“Only two years after CAFTA squeezed through Congress on a one-vote
margin, the narrowest margin ever for a trade deal, nearly half of
Costa Rica’s public took a strong stand, in the face of campaign
trickery and lies, against the damaging agreement,” said Todd Tucker,
research director for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division and
author of the CAFTA Damage Report. “No more countries should be
subjected to the damaging policies imposed by overreaching ‘trade’
agreements.”

For more about CAFTA and pending NAFTA expansions to Peru and other
countries, visit www.TradeWatch.org.