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Home > Press Room > 2007 > Press Release
Press Release
Members of Congress, Latino
Civil Rights and Immigrant Groups Say NAFTA-Style Trade Pacts
Fail Latinos in the U.S. and Abroad .
Latino Organizations United in Opposition to
NAFTA-expansions to Peru, Panama and Colombia;
Call on Congress to Chart a New Course on Trade.
June 26, 2007
Contact:
Alexandra Acosta (201)-390-7129
Lizette Olmos (202)-365-4553
Holly Shulman (202)-674-8757
Washington, DC — As the fight
over immigration heats up in Washington, U.S.
Congress must oppose proposed NAFTA expansion
agreements with Peru, Panama and Colombia that
are expected to increase pressure on millions of
small farmers in those countries to attempt
desperate migration to the United States, said
Latino civil rights leaders and members of the
Congressional Hispanic Caucus in a press
conference today.
Major Latino organizations
including the League of United Latin American
Citizens (LULAC), the National Alliance of Latin
American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) and
the Dolores Huerta Foundation today sent a
letter to the U.S. Congress reiterating their
opposition to the proposed trade agreements
after the recent release of freshly
re-negotiated texts of the agreements failed to
address the key concerns of the Latino community
in the United States and abroad.
“It is unbelievable that in
the middle of a contentious debate on
immigration, Congress is being asked to pass
trade agreements that are certain to increase
the pressure on impoverished small farmers in
Latin America to attempt to come to the United
States,” said Brent Wilkes, the Executive
Director of the League of United Latin American
Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest and
largest Latino civil rights membership
organization. “We wrote repeatedly to the U.S.
Congress requesting that the agricultural
provisions in the agreement be fixed, and we are
disappointed that the new text released this
week for the FTAs doesn’t fix them.”
The agricultural rules
included in the Peru, Colombian and Panama
agreements mirror closely the agricultural rules
from NAFTA that resulted in over 1.3 million
lost jobs in Mexico’s rural sector. Undocumented
migration from Mexico to the United States has
more than doubled since NAFTA was enacted in no
small part due to failed trade policies. In the
case of the Peru, Colombia and Panama
agreements, these same agricultural provisions
will foreseeably result in the displacement of
large numbers of peasant farmers — increasing
hunger, social unrest, and desperate migration
at a minimum; and according to a report of the
Colombian Ministry of Agriculture, will lead to
an increase in drug cultivation and violence.
“We are calling on members of
Congress today to realize that in order to fix
the immigration problem of the United States, we
need to look at the root cause. If we don’t fix
the failed NAFTA model of free trade, we’ll be
fighting over immigration again and again,” said
Gabriela Lemus, Executive Director of the Labor
Council for Latin American Advancement.
Please see the attached letter
for more information or visit www.tradewatch.org.
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