Today, Colombia and the US are busy negotiating in near-secret to hammer out a free trade agreement. Many in Colombia oppose an agreement and as support for rejecting the pact, they hold NAFTA as prima facie evidence. Those opposing the accord are not without solid argument. As I recall, in defense of NAFTA President Clinton declared that free trade would lift all boats and, it was said, with the unfettered marketplace at the center of a nation, democracy and economic wellbeing inevitably deepened. However, NAFTA has proved an economic and political disaster for Mexico.

Today more than half the Mexican population live in poverty; small and medium farmers and ranchers cannot compete with cheaper agricultural and meat products imported (dumped?) from the United States. Subsidies that once supported Mexican agriculture were erased although in the U. S. agribusiness kept their subsidies. Indeed, before NAFTA Mexico was food independent, but today the nation cannot feed itself and relies on imports of corn, beans, rice, meats and a host of other products to the benefit to huge combines in the US . Meanwhile, Mexican agriculture has been reorganized to specialize in export crops such as strawberries and mangoes to the US. The social consequences have been disastrous: 600 people leave the countryside daily and migrate to cities where jobs are few. For many, the solution to their problems is labor in the United States. Since the '90s hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico, refugees of an economic disaster, have fled to the US.

            That lesson seems to have been lost on the Bush administration as it seeks to finalize a free trade agreement with Colombia that incorporates many provisions included in NAFTA. The proposed FTA will reorganize the Colombian economy, particularly the production of foodstuffs. As in the case of NAFTA, trade barriers to U.S. agricultural products will be lowered drastically while at the same time opening Colombia to foreign investors. In fact, by way of free trade the Colombian government agrees to move the country from the production of foodstuffs towards and an emphasis on the production of tropical luxury items to feed the US. For Colombians, their food supply will come from the US.

            Reorganizing agriculture will have a great impact upon the rural population. Unable to compete with imported goods from the U.S., rural producers will either migrate or remain to try to eke out a living as best as they can. If they choose to remain, they become a supply of potential recruits for the narco-traffickers.

If unable or unwilling to move into poppy production, the peasantry will vacate their lands and villages and migrate to cities to form vast urban slums populated by the poor, diseased, unemployed and discontented. Emptying villages overwhelm urban centers, where employment opportunities are few and work offered by the narco Mafiosi becomes attractive.

Migration abroad becomes an alternative, not a few will choose the United States as illegal immigrants. Immigrant smuggling will become a growing business. Moreover, protections traditionally protective of the national interests and the people are subjected to modification, based not entirely on the nation's needs but those of the more powerful signatory. Protections afforded to workers will be damaged through imposing 'flexible labor standards' that make workers attractive to foreign concerns. The door is opened to free market environmentalism which requires the weakening if not elimination of environmental laws as Colombian natural resources are privatized and doled to foreign investors.

Across Latin America organized popular discontent stimulated by the consequences wrought by free trade is growing. Indeed the U.S. is associated with the bitter fruit of NAFTA encapsulated in rising anti-Americanism from the southern border to the Argentine pampas. For the peoples of Colombia and the U.S., a free trade pact is clearly against their interests and Congress should not ratify it.

Gilbert G. Gonzalez is a Professor at University of California - Irvine