Cancun Report: As Empire Builder, the U.S. Feels the Heat

By Tom Hayden, AlterNet. Posted September 9, 2003.

CANCUN, Sept. 8. -- "The Real Cancun" is a pretty trashy film, with hard-partying American college kids being awakened by mariachi musicians against the vista of a Hilton hotel designed like the nearby Mayan ruins. In one scene, its hero, Alan, tells his drinking partner, "People like what they can't have. So, if you want a girl to really like you, just blow her off."

I cannot recall if George Bush ever got loaded in Cancun, but he seems to be following Alan's advice. Having blown off the United Nations over Iraq, he now hopes that the Security Council will be charmed by his request for money and troops. And the world-class cad that he is, Bush is also freezing the status of the poor in the global economy.

Bush has been spending more in Iraq than on the United Nations' global anti-poverty initiatives. If $60 billion this year is a conservative estimate for Iraq, that's twice what it would take to retire the debt of the developing nations, and three times the cost of eliminating extreme hunger, meeting the AIDS crisis, or stopping soil erosion.

In comparison, the U.S. contribution to the UN global anti-poverty program is 0.13 percent of our gross economic product, about one-tenth the percentage spent during the Kennedy Administration in 1962. In the meantime, child labor (10 to 14 year olds) is 14 percent of the Brazilian workforce, 13 percent in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, 12 percent in Nicaragua, and 11 percent in Bolivia.

While waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Administration has managed to lose most of Europe and Latin America. Bush (and Monsanto's) battle to impose genetically-altered crops on Europe has lost American agri-business $1 billion during the past five years. And $190 billion in U.S. farm subsidies has inflamed discontent from Brazil to Mexico.

Meanwhile, the neo-conservative dream of a permanent American empire is turning out to be short-lived. In the longer view, of course, America (and the West) are rooted in a history of colonialism, crusades and the slave trade spanning five centuries. The settling of America was an extension of empire, then of manifest destiny, then of global dominance in the past fifty years. But the recent advocacy of an American empire began just more than a decade ago, with the fall of the Soviet Union. Then came the WTO and talk of a New World Order. Today that imperial thinking is being seriously challenged once again.

Just as U.S. military unilateralism has failed at the UN, U.S. economic unilateralism is being resisted in the WTO. Like Alan in the movie, Bush is not likely to get the girl. Instead, the sole superpower is looking lonely in Cancun, besieged by forces within and without.

U.S. trade negotiators are working overtime to produce "momentum" from the Cancun talks, but with little success.

Cancun itself, a lavish symbol of distorted development and narco- trafficking, has elected a Green Party mayor to begin regulating the flow of foreign investment. Nevertheless, the U.S. wants to "liberalize" the tourism sector, while the European Union hopes to eliminate the need to obtain permits for hotels, restaurants and tourist operations. Cancun's water supply was privatized by an Enron subsidiary in the mid-Nineties. The water, according to environmental specialists, is dirtier than before but costs consumers four times as much. There is also a push to open rich genetic diversity and forests surrounding Cancun to corporate prospectors under privatization provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS).

In hopes of salvaging a victory in Cancun, the U.S. recently ended its opposition to a plan for poor countries to obtain generic medicines to treat HIV and a handful of other life-threatening diseases. But that deal, in response to global grassroots pressure, is far from nailed down, and will be overshadowed by other conflicts this week.

The flashpoint at this summit is the disintegration of rural economies after a decade of NAFTA and rising U.S. subsidies. Earlier this year, a Los Angeles Times article titled, "Free Trade Proves Devastating for Mexican Farmers," described angry protestors who rode on horseback through the elegant doors of the nation's capital, while farmers carrying firebombs and machetes abducted government officials to prevent the seizure of their land for a $2.3 billion international airport northeast of Mexico City. After unprecedented absenteeism in Mexico's July 6 elections, Vicente Fox, the hero of Nineties neo-liberalism, has conceded his government's failure to heed a "widespread social call for deeper and more dynamic change."

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