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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2007 - January 2008Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch WeerthPeru national protestsAnother "national day of struggle" against the neoliberal economic policies of President Alan Garcia of Peru was held Nov. 9. Large demonstrations were held in at least six major cities throughout the country, organized by agricultural workers, teachers, miners, and construction workers. The protests are a continuation of the movement that has been growing most of this year. In July some four million campesinos went on strike (in a country of 27 million people). They were joined by well organized teachers and construction workers, not only in the coastal capital, Lima, but throughout the Andean highlands and the Amazon lowlands. Living conditions throughout Peru have been deteriorating for the poor since the imposition of neoliberal restructuring under Fujimori in the 1990s. A major demand of the July uprising was the cancellation or renegotiation of the latest free trade agreement the U.S. is foisting on Latin America's poor. In May 2006 when he was campaigning for president Garcia said, "we are going to renegotiate the agreement [signed in the last month of the Toledo government] in defense of the campesinos." Not only has he failed to do that, he has furthered the disastrous reforms Fujimori introduced. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, for their part, have turned their backs on the Peruvian people by helping the Republicans to pass the agreement on Nov. 8. Nancy Pelosi claims it is wise for Democrats to now support free trade agreements like this one because they were able to get labor and environment protections, but the amendments she refers to are no better than other unenforceable ones that were included in NAFTA and CAFTA. Tom Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said he was "encouraged" by assurances that the labor protections in the agreement "cannot be read to require compliance." Since January this year corporations such as Wal-Mart, Citigroup, and Occidental Petroleum have lobbied for the agreement while they poured millions into the Democrats' campaign coffers. Tariffs on 80% of U.S. consumer products, and two-thirds of farm exports, will be removed immediately, leading to the same disastrous effects as with NAFTA, where heavily subsidized U.S. farm products are being allowed to flood the Mexican market. In some important respects the agreement (officially called the U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement) is worse than NAFTA and CAFTA. It gives foreign investors more rights than they've enjoyed under those agreements. Citigroup, for example, successfully pushed for the inclusion of language that gives them the right to sue Peru if the country's pension system is re-nationalized (it was privatized in 1993 under Fujimori on the Chilean model) It will also help further the destruction of the Amazon, because it encourages investment in oil and gas exploration and prohibits nationalization of these industries. According to Amazon Watch, from 2004 to 2007 the proportion of the Peruvian Amazon (which accounts for about 11% of the total Amazon rainforest and is twice the size of California) that has been zoned into oil and gas concessions rose from 15% to about 65%. AW calls the Peruvian Amazon "one of the last fronts in the fight against climate change." |
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