Whos driving the CAFTA process?
Ricardo Navarro: It is driven by corporations, and they are using governments to make it work. In El Salvador, for example, there are a lot of maquilas — those are enterprises that contribute only labor in order to produce, say, a clothing product for export. They are very interested in this agreement in order to support their industry, and the government is their voice. When they go to intergovernmental meetings, the government always takes private enterprise. Why don’t they take labor unions? Why don’t they take academics? Why don’t they take other representatives from civil society? One especially unfortunate thing is that the agreement is designed to expand the reach of the market, so that a lot of services that are now being provided to people in the region by the public sector are going to be obtained through private enterprise. That is going to generate a lot of problems in our countries. MM: So in the Central American countries, domestic industry is pushing the agenda? Navarro
