Regional Integration: By the People, For the People

A slew of regional integration efforts coming out of Latin America and the Caribbean, billed as alternatives—or at least counters—to U.S. and EU colonial and trade dominance, are turning out to be not much of either. These integration projects are mired in conflicts that reflect disparate interests, competing neoliberal policies, old disputes and the heavy hand of corporations.

Take the case of Mercosur, for example. After more than a decade, the alliance still faces an uncertain future, unable to decide on trade rules among the member countries and “associated states” or agree on non-economic issues such as a regional parliament. A long-simmering dispute over appliance imports between Argentine multinational Techint and Brazilian manufacturers clouded Mercosur’s July 2004 summit. Indeed, Mercosur has tended to do more to serve the interests of Brazilian and Argentine transnationals than any broader vision, particularly one with a social agenda that includes strong worker protections.

Paraguayan human rights activist Orlando Castillo, in describing the failure of Mercosur, points to an uneven process dominated by governments and businessmen. “Mercosur, as it is today, serves no one,” says Castillo, “for what it seeks is to consolidate Brazil as the only superpower in the region, and that has happened with Lula, and it’s going to go on happening.” Similarly, plans for a South American Community of Nations (SACN), which would include the four Mercosur countries, the five Andean countries, Chile, Guyana and Suriname, have so far not advanced much except for well-meaning declarations.

But above all, examining whether Latin America’s integration offers a real alternative requires looking no further than the way foreign policy positions are shaped by large multinationals, with severe repercussions for workers. Brazil joined the fierce World Trade Organization (WTO) arbitration on bananas somewhat belatedly after intense pressure from Fresh Del Monte—which has been paying for the country’s legal advice at the WTO’s Center for Legal Affairs in Geneva—and from an aggressive lobby of national and multinational fruit exporters who would be affected by the EU’s high tariffs. (Recall that the banana trade war was initiated in 1996 when the Clinton Administration challenged the EU’s preferential policy to African, Caribbean and Pacific countries at the WTO; then-CEO of Chiquita Brands International, Carl Lindner, contributed $500,000 to the Democratic Party two days after the U.S. filed the complaint. In 1998, he gave the Republican Party $350,000 just before GOP leaders pushed legislation to punish the EU for not complying.) For the Caribbean’s Windward islands, bananas provide over half of all export earnings, and the loss of preferential trade with the EU would lead to high levels of unemployment, mass poverty and instability.

For banana workers across the region beset by violent reprisals against unionization efforts, the new regional groupings have offered little more than what already prevails in bodies like the WTO—protections for corporations and intellectual property, little to none for workers. Dana Frank, whose new book Bananeras follows the organizing of women in Latin American banana unions, says that free-trade bodies like the WTO have been largely irrelevant to their day-to-day struggles. Banana unions such as the Coalition of Honduran Banana and Agroindustrial Unions (COSIBAH), and solidarity groups, who do not see themselves pitted against Caribbean producers or workers, have long advocated a trade policy based on a differentiated tariff, which would be tied to each country’s social indicators. But the chances of any kind of social clause with
enforcement power within the existing international trade regime remains slim.
The problem is that the premises of regional integration remain within the “free trade” framework, which not only accentuates existing inequalities, but also generates its own social and spatial differences. Instead, gains that have been made—like the positive turnaround at Chiquita, which, working with Central American banana unions and a trans-Atlantic alliance of European and U.S. groups, is now 90% unionized on its own plantations, though it also relies on nonunion independent suppliers—are due to the actions of unions and solidarity networks, primarily through direct corporate-union negotiations. In the final analysis, it isn’t government elites negotiating free trade, but strong independent unions and solidarity networks that remain the best route to any real alternative integration process.