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March 30, 2007 Movement to Defeat CAFTA in Costa Rica Urgently Requests Your Support On February 26, tens of thousands of unionists, students, farm workers, environmentalists, feminists, indigenous people and other activists held demonstrations in Costa Rica opposing CAFTA-DR, a free trade agreement which has been approved by every other country in Central America and the Dominican Republic. Despite this outpouring of protest and opposition from the majority of Costa Ricans, President Oscar Arias and the pro-CAFTA majority in Congress are moving ahead with plans to approve the treaty using fast track legislation. A national showdown is looming in April. Anti-free trade activists in Costa Rica are asking for help to stop this railroad. Please write to the Costa Rican government officials listed at the end of this email and express your support for the movement opposing CAFTA. Or take a resolution similar to the one adopted by the Martin Luther King County Labor Council in Washington State to your union or community group (a copy is attached). Both national labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, should give all-out support to this effort to scuttle CAFTA. Background to the current impasse The National Coordinating Committee against FTA, a coalition of unions and movement organizations, called the February demonstrations and plans to call more when the first of several bills is introduced which will set the stage for the actual vote on CAFTA. Labor and radical organizations are calling for a general strike at the introduction of the very first piece of enabling legislation. Many also oppose the bid to hold a national referendum on the agreement, calling the electoral arena an unequal battlefield favoring the proponents of free trade who are heavily financed by the U.S. and corporate interests. The Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadoras y Trabajadores (PRT) put their view succinctly in a recent statement: "It is in the streets, by means of a general strike, that the free trade agreement must be defeated. It is clear that the government is counting on the servile majority in parliament to impose the destruction of our social conquests and sovereignty." The PRT is a Trotskyist organization composed largely of hospital workers and other public employees. What will be lost if CAFTA passes Costa Rica has no standing army and has devoted a large portion of the national income to a public healthcare system (covering 82% of the population), publicly funded education (illiteracy is only 7.4%), and a strong national social service system. For this reason, poverty in Costa Rica has remained constant at around 20% while it has exploded in the rest of Latin America. The country's nationalized electrical and telephone industry has some of the lowest rates on the continent. All this is now under attack as the conquistadors of free trade try to force the Costa Rican people to accept CAFTA and the privatization of all nationalized industry and natural resources including its rich biodiversity. Corrupt "negotiations" set the stage for this showdown The Costa Rican team that negotiated the final round of CAFTA talks with the U.S. came from the Ministry of Foreign Commerce. It later came to light that several of these negotiators had been on the payroll of an agency whose funds came from the U.S. Agency for International Development. As writer Eva Carazo Vargas put it in a recent article: "[Costa Rica] deposited a strategic negotiation in the hands of a staff paid for by the other side." These negotiations were done in secret and even congressional representatives were barred from receiving any information about them. Only after U.S. and Costa Rican negotiators had signed off on an agreement did people find out what had been given away. Write to Costa Rican President Oscar Arias today! Tell him Costa Rica is not for sale and that workers everywhere stand with the small farmers and working class of Costa Rica who will be hurt by this agreement. Address letters and emails to: Doctor Óscar Arias Sánchez Presidente de la Republica de Costa Rica Casa Presidencial San José, Costa Rica Email: ofpresidencia@casapres.go.cr cc: Sadie Bravo Pérez, Secretaria General Partido Acción Ciudadana Email: sbravo@asamblea.go.cr Francisco Antonio Pacheco Fernández, Presidente Partido Liberación Nacional Email: lrosales@asamblea.go.cr Sandra Quesada Hidalgo Partido Liberación Nacional Email: squesada@asamblea.go.cr Albino Vargas Barrantes, Secretary General, National Association of Public and Private Employees (ANEP) Email: info@anep.or.cr Luis Salas Sarkis, Secretary General, Central General de Trabajadores (CGT) Email: Luissalassarkis@hotmail.com National Coordination of the Struggle against the FTA Email: redcnlcontratlc@racsa.co.cr Please send copies of letters and resolutions of support to fspnatl@igc.org . * * * * * * Resolution Expressing Solidarity with Costa Rican Labor Movement for its Efforts to Stop Ratification of CAFTA Whereas: Ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement is currently pending before the Congress of Costa Rica, whose citizens, led by the labor movement, have engaged in a determined fight to stop its approval; and Whereas: The impact of CAFTA on the Dominican Republic and the other Central American countries that have already approved the treaty has been devastating for small farmers and low-paid workers in the textile and other labor intensive industries; and Whereas: Corporate backers of CAFTA seek to use it as a vehicle to privatize the large, highly unionized public sector in Costa Rica that includes state ownership of insurance, telecommunications, electricity distribution, petroleum distribution, water, sewage, and railroad transportation. First to go would be subsidized phone and electrical service for the poor. In addition, CAFTA would likely lead to the dismantling of universal health care in Costa Rica and prohibit the government from purchasing low cost generic drugs; and. Whereas: The U.S. government and businesses have spent millions of dollars in Costa Rica to elect pro-CAFTA politicians while threatening to punish the entire country if its Congress fails to adopt free trade legislation, and soon; and Whereas: The government of Costa Rica has responded to militant protests and general strikes organized by CAFTA opponents with increased police and political repression, including frame-ups of labor leaders like Orlando Barrantes, General Secretary of the banana workers union. Barrantes was recently sentenced to two years in jail and three years probation for his leadership role in the fight for workers rights, land for landless farmers, quality healthcare for the poor, and the defeat of CAFTA; and Whereas: Widespread popular opposition, expressed in a successful General Strike in October 2006, has led to an impasse over approval of CAFTA and implementing legislation by the Costa Rican Congress; Whereas: The U.S. labor movement has been outspoken in its opposition to one free trade agreements after another that put the interests of multi-national corporate profiteers over the interests of workers, the environment and the public welfare, including NAFTA, FTAA, Korean FTA, CAFTA and others; and Whereas: This summer, the U.S. Congress will be reviewing free trade agreements with Peru, Colombia and Panama which share the same fundamental pro-corporate, anti-labor, anti-environmental provisions that make them harmful to the lives of workers, indigenous peoples, small farmers, and the poor in those countries. Therefore be it resolved: That the Martin Luther King Jr County Labor Council applauds the Costa Rican labor movement for its militant leadership in building a strong, united movement against CAFTA; and Be it further resolved: That the Martin Luther King Jr County Labor Council calls on the government of Costa Rica to abandon all attempts to ratify CAFTA and to drop charges against anti-CAFTA activist Orlando Barrantes and others punished for exercising their rights to freedom of speech and association; and Be it finally resolved: That the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council forward a copy of this resolution to the Washington State Labor Council and the AFL-CIO for their adoption and urge their continued opposition to neo-liberal free trade agreements, including calling for the repeal of NAFTA and CAFTA by the U.S. Congress. Approved by vote of the Executive Board of the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council on March 7, 2007. __________________________________________________________________ Freedom Socialist Party U.S. Section 4710 University Way NE, #100 Seattle, WA 98105 USA Australian Section PO Box 2066 Brunswick, VIC 3055 Australia __________________________________________________________________ To subscribe to the Freedom Socialist newspaper, or see the booklist at Red Letter Press, or to find out more about the Freedom Socialist Party, go to , or reply to this message. We would love to hear from you! |
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