President Bush was alarmed by the failure of the Fifth Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in September 2003 in Cancun, where thousands of people protested against the new proposed rules on agriculture in world trade.  As well as representatives of the so-called “First World” there were indigenous women from Chiapas present… In fact, more than 20 “Third World” governments, now poorly called “developing countries” (the tendency is the reverse), met in Cancun to ally themselves against the United States and European governments for their lack of willingness to meet the needs of those countries in increasing stages of poverty.  While richest countries increase their subsidies, they obligate the rest of the world to eliminate them.  Nonetheless, it is still difficult for ordinary citizens to understand how the commercial negotiations affect everything we eat and all our lives.

Because the United States government wasn’t content with the results of the last WTO meeting, it called a meeting of the ministers of the American continent last November in Miami with the goal of accelerating negotiations within the continent.  Although it’s clearly going to be difficult, the aim is to sign the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) this summer, so that it will take effect in January 2005.  Thousands of protesters met on the street in the midst of strong police repression.  This will be a constant in the following years: agreements made behind society’s back, without consultation, imposing presidential decrees and repressing social mobilization, criminalizing it and introducing the rhetoric of “terrorism” to end any dissidence.

There in Miami, there were women present from all over the world.  These women have been the foundation on which capital is built.  On their backs are the hours of their labor and that of their children, poorly paid in sweatshops or agricultural fields for the enrichment of major corporations; it is they who maintain the land and the family while the men emigrate to the United States in search of work, if they even make it there and then return home to their families.  They are the majority on our planet and in any individual society, and it is they who establish the accumulation of wealth that we have today.

In this decisive year for the signing of the FTAA for the administration of the U.S., the women made this declaration that we reproduce below.  It contains their analysis, political position, and strategic lines of action for women this year.

DECLARATION OF THE WOMEN’S COMITTEE OF THE CONTINENTAL SOCIAL ALLIANCE (CSA) BEFORE THE MINISTERIAL MEETING OF THE FREE TRADE Area OF THE AMERICAS (FTAA) IN MIAMI

We, the members of the women’s committee of the Continental Social Alliance (CSA), present in Miami for the Ministerial Meeting on the FTAA, declare our disagreement with the direction of the negotiations process expressed in the signed declaration.

Ever since the Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995, women worldwide have an important agenda on the topics that governments should take up as a priority in order to advance a society more just and equitable, as much for our communities as for women ourselves.  This agenda includes economic, social, cultural and political themes, including: gender equity, the right to a life without violence, serious combat against the occupational and salary segregation of women, the right of free association of workers in defense of their labor rights, access to food, education, health, housing, and sufficient services without discrimination for reasons of sex, age, or ethnicity.

The fulfillment of this agenda has been restrained by political proposals and impositions through trade treaties, the neoliberal model, and patriarchal force.  This model imposes and reproduces inequitable relations between nations, and in their interior between women and men.

The experiences, investigations, and analysis of the real impacts that free trade agreements have had in our countries, such as NAFTA, have shown us that those agreements, far from solving the acute problems that our countries suffer, tend to increase them.

The FTAA extends authoritarianism and militarization because it is constructed in a framework of dominion and imposition aggravated by the context of global and patriarchal conflict in our countries.  It impedes the construction of a true democracy in which gender equity would be possible.  Moreover, it violates constitutions, pacts, treaties and agreements regarding human rights, including those that are gender-specific.  World economic governance should not support itself on this base of exclusion.

Women say no to the FTAA because:

1.  Initiatives such as the FTAA leave our countries without judicial recourse, as they attempt to install themselves as a Supreme Law, attaining constitutional rank and placing themselves in the middle of national, state, and municipal laws.  Countries like Mexico have experienced how the arrangements, for example in capital investments, have been used by massive transnational corporations over the sovereign right of countries to decide when to accept or reject foreign investments while taking into account their duty to care for the environment.

2. The chapters that refer to agriculture in the trade treaties – and in the draft of the FTAA – grant commercial advantages to agricultural and livestock products of the United States, those which already inundate national markets with highly subsidized products.  These rules submit our rural economies to an unfair competition that provokes the failure of agricultural production.  The FTAA makes an effort against not just one production sector, but rather it will destroy a fundamental reproductive form of life for peasant families, which promotes environmental benefits and offers cultural continuity.  Once they have become subject to the logic of the trade agreements, women are subject to even greater workloads, the need to look for informal employment, often necessitating separation from their children, their families, and their communities.

3. Migration has become the only alternative for thousands of people – both women and men – from rural areas and from the city due to the lack of work opportunities, many of which are lost due to the commercial trade agreements.  Currently, the number of young women migrants has increased, due to the great needs of their families just to survive.  The migration bosses, who impose the actual conditions, couldn’t make them less advantageous for women if they tried: when they migrate, they have to abandon their families and their children, generally taken care of by the oldest child or an elderly relative; if the entire family migrates, the women are subjected to a strong disequilibrium in education, health, food, housing; when the men leave to look for work in other places within and outside of their country of origin, the women are alone, without resources, and charged with taking care of the family.  The example of Mexico is pathetic; even as it is held up as an example of the greatness of free trade agreements, millions of Mexicans work and live in the United States under precarious social and legal positions.  The Bush government is not willing to negotiate a migration agreement because it is more convenient to keep the workers illegal and force them to accept lower salaries.  The impacts of NAFTA and the national policies in accord with it have put in place those changes that send Mexicans to other countries.  These are the results of the promises of development that NAFTA offered and today the FTAA is offering to the rest of the Americas: unemployment, expulsion and persecution of thousands and millions of women and men.

4. The intellectual property rights established in the agreements have permitted the powerful chemical and pharmaceutical companies to appropriate the riches of the flora and fauna of many countries in the Americas.  The indigenous communities that inhabit and have conserved the majority of the zones in great biodiversity are now in the line of fire for mining, logging, pharmaceutical, water, and energy companies, among others.  All these resources would be converted into markets through the processes of privatization and industrialization controlled by major investors.

5. Public services such as water, education, health, will cease to be means to improve social welfare and development instruments and will become markets offered to the highest bidder if the FTAA and other trade agreements are implemented.  The costs of social reproduction will be transferred to the families, and within families, to women.  The trade agreements not only fail to promote a more equitable distribution of the responsibility of social reproduction amongst genders and within society, but also worsen the conditions of women to promote health, education, water, and other services.

6. The maquiladora (factory, sweatshop) model that promotes the neoliberal system for poor countries has proven to be extremely exploitative of women, who are subject to low wages, long work days, unhealthy conditions, sexual harassment, and violations of human and labor rights.  The maquiladora industry enjoys great fiscal prerogatives without its growth necessarily meaning development in the areas where the maquiladoras are located.  It does not contribute to growth in other sectors of the economy where the maquiladoras are located and it imposes precarious labor and environmental conditions with the continuous threat of relocation to another region.  The maquiladora model is not one that countries seeking development should aspire to, nor is it an adequate offer of entry into the labor market for women.

7.  The commercial accords and the FTAA operate based on the logic of transforming all human activity into a market to make money to the profit of transnational corporations and others who accumulate wealth.  For this reason we are seeing new forms of exploitation of women, simply because in these cases their bodies are now considered disposable.

8.  Bilateral trade agreements and the FTAA undermine the State’s presence in society, limiting its role and attributions and, in this process, consolidating the presence and concentrating the national decision-making to huge transnational consortiums that come from great world powers (in the case of our continent, from the United States).

9. We, the women of the Continental Social Alliance, are not opposed to the processes of economic integration if they respect human dignity and are inclusive and not asymmetrical.  We are, however, opposed to the FTAA and current bilateral trade agreements that violate human rights and permit the rise of new forms of oppression and dominion over women and our communities.

We, the women of the Continental Social Alliance (CSA):

We affirm that the FTAA is based on something different than “free trade;” it is neither free nor is it just trade, but an instrument utilized for the benefit of the powerful minority.

We denounce the abuse of power by transnational corporations and governments, as well as its consequence of social exclusion, which deteriorates relations between nations, social sectors, and between men and women.  As women, we are impacted differently by the free trade agreements, which place us in disadvantageous situations in work, in our families, and in our communities.

Therefore, we demand:

1. The promotion of dialogue and negotiation, creating new relations between nations with conditions of equity such that men and women may participate in equal conditions.

2. The prioritization and privilege for food security through promotion of sustainable food production that don’t just value, redeem, and make visible the role of women in production and reproduction, but also empowers them.  Women should have the right to use, usufruct and ownership of land, access to water, rational use of forests and other natural resources equally with men.  The new forms of economic integration should work to the aid and promotion of rural economic alternatives, solidarity, and networks of fair trade.

3. Respect for the human rights (economic, social, political, and cultural) of migrants that guarantees the freedom of movement of people, in the same manner as the freedom of movement of capital and markets.  Those in charge of migration should realize the different needs of men and women, and the effects on children.  The contribution to the economies in which migrants work should not be at the cost of personal, familial, or community development.  Likewise, we insist on the elimination of all forms of violence against women and children.

4.  The regulation of foreign investments that would guarantee care for the environment and labor rights.  The maquiladoras can only be regulated internally, so Latin American countries should demand the establishment of fair wages and work environments so that competitive advantages are not sustained by the exploitation of nature and people.

5.  The State should guarantee the public services for health, food, education, water and maintain control of such strategic resources as petroleum and electric energy.  Women should be integrated into decision-making mechanisms for the use and distribution of these resources, particularly water.

We want the governments to know that we are following the negotiations and their impacts on our lives, as well as watching the secret pressure the United States is placing on them, which is unacceptable because it attempts to crush our countries’ autonomy.

We summon our governments to seek alliances and create a united force that works for the benefit of our communities.

We demand our official negotiators to change the rules of the game, rejecting the United States’ abuse of power and we call on them to reconstruct an equitable and dignified integration.

We, the women of the CSA, promise to promote an alternative model of American integration.

We make our Political Declaration and Political Strategies approved in the International Forum “The Rights of Women in the Free Trade Agreements,” which took place in Cancun, Mexico on September 8^th and 9^th, 2003.

Another America, equitable and in solidarity, is possible

Women’s Committee of the CSA

The text ends here.

The women continue to mobilize.  The State Assembly of the Independent Women’s Movement will take place from February 6^th to 8^th, 2004 in Chiapas.  In later months, they will be in El Salvador (see www.sitiocompa.org).  Just as we cannot imagine history without the presence of women, we cannot imagine our future without them.

Note: If you wish to be placed on a list to receive this English version of the Bulletin, or the Spanish, or both, please direct a request to: ciepac@laneta.apc.org and indicate whether you wish to receive the bulletin in plain text or as a Word 7 for Windows 95 attachment.

Note: If you use this information, cite the source and our email address. We are grateful to the persons and institutions who have given us their comments on these Bulletins. CIEPAC, A.C. is a non-government and non-profit organization, and your support is necessary for us to be able to continue offering you this news and analysis service. If you would like to contribute, in any amount, we would infinitely appreciate your remittance to the bank account in the name of:

CIEPAC, A.C.
Bank: Banamex
Account number: 7049672 Sucursal 386
San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México.
You will also need to use an ABA number:
BNMXMXMM

Thank you! CIEPAC

Telephone:
in México: 01 967 674 5168
from outside Mexico:: +52 967 674 5168