Washington's Voz - Letter to Friends: No to CAFTA

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Letter to Friends: No to CAFTA

Francisco Acosta, PhD
07/15/2005

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As most of you know, I am a US-Salvadoran Citizen and co-founder of the Oscar Romero University in El Salvador . I send appeals to my friends and colleagues only in urgent circumstances. This time, I am writing to you because on July 18th, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, known as CAFTA, is scheduled to come up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If CAFTA passes, it will have enormous negative socioeconomic consequences, primarily for low-income people and workers in both the U.S. and in Central America . However, this is not only a trade issue. It will also have wide-reaching implications for health care, the environment, cultural encroachment, and curtailment of labor and human rights.

CAFTA is the continuation of a set of previous initiatives that have increased the wealth of a few while destroying the quality of life and livelihood of the majority. As an example, just a few years ago, in my home country of El Salvador , the Social Security System was privatized and transferred to the control of five management companies.

All but one of those companies has since declared bankruptcy, and as a result, thousand of low-income seniors have lost their social security income. Social Security privatization was one of several privatization initiatives that have gone into effect in recent years in my country.

Today, Salvadoran citizens are even worse off than before privatization; more than half of the population currently lives under the poverty line and about 25 % live in extreme poverty, earning less than a dollar a day. If CAFTA passes, this situation can only worsen. For example, the great majority of Salvadorans survive by producing corn and beans for their own consumption on small parcels of land. Under CAFTA, genetically modified corn from farms in Iowa will compete at prices many times cheaper than the cost of producing home-grown corn, effectively destroying the Central American corn-based culture and economy.

Meanwhile, an estimated 5% of the wealthiest Central Americans will become the winners of this game called Globalization by benefiting from the import-export incentives of CAFTA.

In my recent testimony against CAFTA before the US House of Representatives, I said that many people like me in Central America and in the Dominican Republic are in favor of increasing trade, but not the kind of trade that will deteriorate the socioeconomic conditions of almost 40 million Central Americans. In fact, one almost certain result of CAFTA will be an increase in the level of undocumented immigration to the United States from those countries as people flee from increasingly unlivable conditions. This phenomenon will, in turn, contribute to increasing tensions on the southern border of the United States .

A week ago, the Senate passed CAFTA by a small margin (54-45), and now the final vote is coming up in the House of Representatives this week. A very close vote is expected. A single vote can make the difference, and your representative may be the deciding factor. Please call your Representative's District office today and ask him or her to vote NO on CAFTA.