Thread: CAFTA foes in market for allies

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CAFTA foes in market for allies

By James Janega
Tribune staff reporter
Published June 20, 2005

Evelyn Madrid angrily smacked her pen onto the table as a bishop from Guatemala described a gold mining operation near Mexico's southern border.

Villagers there cannot use the water once the mine is used up, Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini said Sunday on Chicago's West Side. They cannot make enough money to send their children to school. They cannot get their government to listen to their complaints.

Ramazzini warned that more such abuses would follow if the U.S. Congress passes the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which would remove trade barriers between the U.S. and Central American nations.

As the White House and business groups lobbied Congress to pass CAFTA--an extension of the North American agreement that involves Canada, the United States and Mexico--opponents such as Ramazzini have hit the road urging defeat of the agreement.

On Sunday, he and El Salvadoran legislator Salvador Arias made appeals at a Mexican parish in Pilsen and then to Guatemalan groups at the Mexican Fine Arts Center.

Both were trying to focus the anger of Illinois' estimated 80,000 Guatemalans and Chicago's more than 1 million Mexicans, many of whom nurse an intense dislike for NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Foes of CAFTA passed out bright yellow handbills criticizing the pact outside St. Pius Catholic Church on South Ashland Avenue, where a mass was said. The flier asked parishioners to call on U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama of Illinois to oppose the measure.

Ramazzini and Arias said their disapproval of CAFTA is based on observations of conditions near impoverished San Marcos, Guatemala, and in the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador.

Arias and several other Central American politicians have lobbied the U.S. Congress to reject the pact. Opposing them was the White House and large trade organizations. "We are fighting against a very great enemy," Arias said. "CAFTA is going to destroy the rural regions, the indigenous population, the peasantry."

Supporters hope CAFTA will breathe new life into Central America's textile and assembly plants to compete with China's growing global influence.

Farmers argue that it will drive them from their land into overcrowded cities, while union leaders and environmentalists say the agreement does nothing to protect workers and the region's jungles.

The pact's fate hangs on U.S. approval. Although legislatures in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have voted in favor of it, assemblies in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua are waiting to see what the U.S. does.

Last week, passage drew closer. On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee approved CAFTA, followed by the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday.

"The last chance is in the hands of Congress," Ramazzini said. "If this visit can get people to persuade their people in Congress, to at least give them pause before supporting this ... this is my hope, huh? And this is my expectation."

Activists and lawmakers have sensed a brief moment in which grass-roots efforts can have a global impact. Chicago, with its enormous immigrant population and sizeable congressional delegation, was a natural target.

At the St. Pius mass, Ramazzini spoke to Mexican immigrants about the ills of NAFTA and the threats of CAFTA.

Then came a news conference, attended by more community organizers than reporters.

Afterward, what was supposed to be a community meeting took on the overtones of a political planning session. As Ramazzini and Arias spoke, 21 community leaders outlined the bishop's arguments.

Those in attendance included Maricela Garcia of the Coalition of Guatemalan Immigrants, Gary Cozette of the Chicago Religious Leadership Network, Carlos Gomez of the Foundation for Human Rights in Guatemala, and Madrid, of Centro Romero on North Clark Street.

"We're part of the immigrant community who still remembers the struggles we faced, and still face," Garcia said.

"If [members of Congress] they don't hear enough from people, they won't know," said Madrid, who left Guatemala in 1991, near the end of that country's civil war. She recalled a place where even silence could become a lie. "We didn't connect the things we saw."

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jjanega@tribune.com

That article Rocker JP!

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