Even before receiving the congressional rubber stamp, Washington has begun using its new trade club in Central America, as an article in this issue points out.

Imperialism warps the economies of the semicolonial world. Oppressed nations in the world capitalist market remain largely restricted to producing and exporting agricultural products and raw materials, as well as in recent decades serving as “export platforms” for light manufactures or other industrial goods often made in imperialist-owned factories. Even with regard to these goods, semicolonial countries get slapped down any time they try to “intrude” on markets sought by the titans of agriculture and industry in North America, Europe, or Japan.

Meanwhile, big business in the United States and other imperialist countries exports heavy industrial goods, technology, machine tools, and agricultural produce—and large amounts of capital as well. Today the capital exported to semicolonial countries in particular takes the form not only of buying up agricultural land, factories, retail and wholesale businesses, insurance companies, banks, and mineral rights. It also takes the form of loans that entangle these countries in a vortex of debt slavery to imperialist banks and governments, often through the intermediary of “international” financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The currencies of a growing number of countries in Latin America have been tied even more directly to the dollar. Both Ecuador and El Salvador have actually adopted the U.S. dollar as the national currency, joining Panama, which has been shackled to the greenback since the end of World War II. The results of such policies can be seen most graphically in Argentina—imperialism’s “free market” show case in the Third World in the 1990s—which suffered a financial collapse in 2001 after years of tying its currency to the dollar.

In Mexico, U.S. finance capital has used the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to pressure the government to open up the banking system to direct imperialist penetration and growing domination. With government barriers to foreign ownership of Mexican banks lifted, nearly 80 percent of commercial bank assets in Mexico are today owned by banks in the United States, western Europe, Canada, or Japan—including all five of the country’s largest banks. This is up from 1 percent a decade ago when the “peso crisis” erupted.

Under both the Bush and Clinton administrations, Washington has been pushing the FTAA (NAFTA metastasized) on the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In response, Cuban president Fidel Castro has proposed to working-class parties, popular organizations, and trade unions throughout the region that they demand a nationwide vote in every country of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean on ratification of these imperialist-instigated agreements. Let the people vote on the FTAA (or CAFTA)! We support that demand. We do so, as we simultaneously explain to revolutionists in Cuba and elsewhere in the Americas that in the United States the campaign against the FTAA waged by trade union officials and assorted liberal and radical groupings has a completely different content—a chauvinist, pro-imperialist one—because it is centered on protecting “American jobs” and misleading workers to believe they have common interests with employers “hurt by imports,” whether from Central America or China.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. Congress debates Central America trade pact  
 
 
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