'Free' Trade, Force and Fear

Militarism in the Free Trade Area of the Americas

Prepared by the Canadian Peace Alliance

April 2001

• The security perimeter surrounding the official Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiation site shows us how military and police forces protect 'national interests.' 'Fortress Quebec' shields trade negotiators from all manner of public protest and democratic dissent.
• Militarism is entrenched throughout the Americas. From the moment of colonial contact, through slavery, the many overt and covert wars and use of force to suppress internal dissent to the structural violence of racism, extreme poverty and land dispossession, the entire region has been forged through violence. This pattern continues today, as we see in the build-up of military force called Plan Colombia.
• Every recent major trade agreement, from the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) through NAFTA to the WTO, has contained a 'national security' exemption. We can expect the FTAA to be no different.
• Under the security exemption, governments can use our tax dollars to subsidize the arms industry to their heart\rquote s content, with no questions asked, something they can do in no other industry. Inevitably, this will fuel the international weapons trade.
• Most of these arms will be used to suppress internal dissent - including legitimate demands by civil society for a political voice. The agreement designed to regulate trade in the Americas is unlikely to contain any restriction on the export or import of the tools of repression.
• An arms build-up may provoke a violent response, thus becoming a self-fulfiling prophesy.

Hemispheric integration should promote peace and economic and social justice. If the national security exemption of the FTA and N AFTA is repeated in the FTAA, then subsidies to military industry will rise and the arms trade will flourish. Militarism and violence will inevitably increase in the Americas.