The U.S. hosted preliminary talks in Washington, D.C. recently to open discussion and begin planning for a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Representatives from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua traveled to the U.S. for the official start of negotiations. The United States hopes to have discussions finished by the end of the year, which will help advance its ultimate goal of a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas by 2005. The projected “winners” of this type of deal are investors and importers who take advantage of the cheap labor and relaxed labor laws in many Central American nations. If the results of the 1993 NAFTA agreement in Mexico are any indication, those who stand to lose the most from such an arrangement are small farmers who cannot compete in “free markets” with large corporations, due to the huge agricultural subsidies handed out by the U.S. government.
