DYNAMITE DEAL : Environmental, Labor Groups Make Their Voices Heard

MEXICO CITY — The North American free trade agreement, which could be signed as early as today, may not specifically address environmental and labor concerns, but the U.S. Congress has clearly signaled its intent to include such issues in any agreement it approves.

A congressional vote is also expected today on a resolution that calls for the pact to protect jobs and the environment. It is in many ways a tribute to the tenacity of environmental and labor groups that have battled to place their issues on the negotiating agenda.

When talks began last year for an agreement to allow the free flow of goods throughout North America, trade officials said only commercial issues would be considered.

Now, everyone from resolution co-sponsors Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) to Canadian Commerce Minister Michael Wilson is talking about the environment in connection with free trade.

The mere fact of the discussions is a triumph for the coalition of more than 50 U.S., Mexican and Canadian environmental and labor groups that have been pushing the subject to the forefront.

“While they were seen as irrelevant, unsophisticated actors, they have succeeded in placing issues of interest to them squarely on the table,” said Cathryn Thorup, director of UC San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies. “Even though they are not part of the (negotiating) team, they are part of the discussion.”

The environmental and labor coalitions succeeded in broadening the discussion because they would not let the issues be ignored, she said.

A coalition of environmental and labor groups dogged the trail of top officials from the United States, Mexico and Canada each of the seven times they have met to advance negotiations of the proposed North American free trade agreement.

While negotiators sealed off complete floors or even an entire hotel to keep their talks secret, the coalition organized public seminars and frequent press conferences to get their message out to media and other observers bored with hanging around in lobbies for tidbits of information.

Those “shadow meetings” are only the most obvious of the tactics that environmental and labor groups have used to force their issues onto the free trade agenda.

Before today’s House vote, members of Congress received fake deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge with the warning: “If you believe President Bush’s promises on trade, jobs and the environment, there’s a bridge he’d like to sell you.”

In the past, free trade agreement opponents have distributed drain plungers--alluding to the Washington meeting site at the Watergate Hotel and the 1972 Watergate scandal--and messages attached to stalks of broccoli, the President’s least favorite vegetable and a top U.S. import from Mexico.

“We’ve been trying to keep a sense of humor about this,” said Laurie Wallach, a staff attorney for Public Citizen, an environmental and consumer group that is part of the Fair Trade Campaign, the umbrella group coordinating U.S. participation in the coalition.

Such efforts have succeeded in moving the focus of the public debate on free trade from commerce to the environment and jobs.

“The resolution includes many of the points we have been trying to make,” said Bertha Lujan, a member of the coordinating council for the Mexican groups in the coalition. “This is a result of the work that has been done, above all by the U.S. coalition members.”

Still, even those most closely connected to the environmental and labor effort worry that the agreement coming out of the closed-door talks will be strictly a corporate accord.

“The three governments decided that this is the kind of agreement they wanted: strictly commercial,” said Mexican political scientist Jorge Castaneda, a vocal critic of the talks. “It is a Reagan-Bush accord that reflects the thinking of a very narrow strata in one of the (participating) countries.”

The implication of such an agreement, said Steve Hellinger, a member of the Development Group for Alternative Policies that is part of the labor and environment coalition, is that “the benefits of an agreement will not be spread evenly among people in each country.”

Indeed, members of the governments’ business advisory committees have said that they in large measure negotiated the sections of the agreement related to their industries.

In contrast, the only members of organized labor included in the talks are Mexicans whose unions are closely aligned to the government and have promised to support the agreement. Environmental officials, but not activists, also have advised the negotiators.

Because business people and government officials in the three countries already knew each other and have similar interests, confining the talks to those groups as originally planned would have been simpler, said Thorup. But that is no longer possible, she added.

“The discussions about fast track (U.S. congressional authorization to negotiate the agreement) galvanized grass roots groups,” she said. “That ensures recognition that the agreement has impacts on other areas.”

In the long run, the coalitions formed by groups opposed to the free trade agreement may have even broader effects, she said.

“It will be impossible for government policy-makers to manage the U.S.-Mexico relationship on a government-to-government basis,” she said. “Now, citizen groups are interested.”