Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador: CAFTA Fact Sheet
By Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is a proposed commercial pact between the United States and five countries in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica. The name sounds familiar because it is modeled after the now-infamous North American Free Trade Agreement – NAFTA – which has devastated working people in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
CAFTA, like NAFTA before it, is part of a bigger project to spread free trade, corporate power, and US political and economic domination throughout the Americas. That project has a name: The Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, a hemisphere-wide trade deal that is being forced upon the region with renewed vigor by the Bush Administration. FTAA, in turn, is part of a greater US-led strategy known as Neoliberalism or Corporate Globalization.