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Yesterday Sunday, he arrived at Washington DC a Mexican delegation made up of social activists and members of social and civil organizations to, in trinational alliances, present to Congress and public opinion what is required from the next review of the T-MEC. Welcome a vision beyond the reductionist, productivist, one-dimensional view, typical of neoliberalism and sadly latent in the positioning of the Mexican government, which insists that “the treaty (T-MEC) helps the three economies” (https://tinyurl.com/5aennd4c).
Beyond the mania to export “our” goods and strengthen “our productive chains” (says Ebrard), the visit of the Mexican delegation to Washington, Tania del Moral, coordinator of the tour for the Global Exchange organization, tells me, “is part of the historical fight against trade policies that have worsened forced migration, increased wealth inequality, facilitated corporate extractivism and violated the human rights and territories of indigenous peoples.”
For decades, CSOs from the three countries have worked to overcome the dogma of maintaining “value chains” (who gets the value in the end?, would be the question), of defending “our exports” (concentrated by transnational companies), and of attracting foreign investment without performance requirements (which are prohibited in FTAs). It is more urgent than ever to understand and address the threat posed by the large interests of transnational capital since the entry of NAFTA in 1994. Now with the T-MEC, which although it has a different name and some modifications, still represents a threat to our national sovereignty and the self-determination of the people.
The consultations with productive sectors about the supposed export opportunities that the T-MEC represents are partial, since it is not only a free trade agreement for goods and services, but also a wide variety of agreements that undermine the regulatory capacity of the State in favor of the interests of large extractive, agro-industrial, financial, automobile, and industrial corporations. big-tech and other manufactures and services.
It should not go unnoticed, as it seems to me to happen, that a group of CEOs of powerful American companies, including General Motors, United Airlines, JP Morgan Chase, Apple, FedEx and Walmart, are asking Trump to completely restore the investor-state dispute settlement system (ISDS) as it existed in Chapter 11 of NAFTA. It must be remembered that with the T-MEC, the ISDS – which allows companies to sue States directly in supranational courts, such as the World Bank’s ICSID – has been eliminated between the United States and Canada, and limited between Mexico and the United States, to companies with government contracts in the hydrocarbon sector.
The CEOs’ call to restore the neocolonial “security” system for their investments comes within the framework of the letter from the Business Roundtable – which is an organization of more than 200 of the largest corporations in the United States – to the government trade representative (USTR), which includes the complaint that “Mexico has adopted a series of measures in recent years, especially in strategic sectors such as energy, telecommunications and aviation, which benefit its state or national companies.” The USTR, the letter continues, “should insist that Mexico end discrimination against US companies in favor of its state or national companies” (own translation). The list of demands to open the country more to their interests is extensive (see https://tinyurl.com/2nysvk6x).
It is unacceptable for Mexico that the CEOs of the aforementioned companies meddle against Mexico’s recent judicial reforms. They argue that they will “cool the investment climate in Mexico and make disputes between investors and the government subject to political considerations rather than ‘the rule of law’.” The Business Roundtable complains that “in the last five years, Mexico has taken several worrying measures that have negatively affected US investments in the country, such as the expropriation of a quarry owned by a US company (translated, its own).” This is precisely the mining company Legacy Vulcan LLC, owner of Calica, the polluting mine in the vicinity of Playa del Carmen (see The Day 11/25/03).
Let’s be alert! I have no doubt that the intentions of the United States will be to go far beyond maintaining the status quoand not to undo the USMCA as Trump threatens, but to intensify and deepen it to satisfy the rapacity and mendacity of the US plutocracy in collusion with the narrow Mexican business elite willing, under the remnants of Salinas neoliberalism, to sell all possible assets and hand over the country’s natural resources to the highest bidder.
Welcome to Washington the Mexican delegation of fighters for human rights and the Mexican people, whom the 4T must accompany and receive back to the country as a sign of its attachment to fair trade with democracy! People in defense of corn, members of the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice and other human rights defenders come from Quintana Roo to Chihuahua. They bring with them the Joint Declaration of the National Meeting. Advocacy Assembly against the T-MEC (https://tinyurl.com/3utkart2).
I highlight, from among the assembly tables (which include labor rights, agriculture, human security and peace), a proposal from the environmental table, as it corresponds to this article: promoting “the complete elimination of the investor-State dispute resolution mechanism, as the United States and Canada have already done with each other in the same T-MEC.” Not one step back, enough of ceding privileges to foreign investment.
*Institute for Policy Studies (www.ips-dc.org)
