Rummy's Magic Wand Strikes Again…

Members of Congress, beware: a vote against CAFTA is a vote for Osama. Or so Donald Rumsfeld might have you believe, if you read his recent op-ed in the Miami Herald in which he ominously warns, “The coming vote on CAFTA is a national security vote. Let there be no doubt.”

But how is it that CAFTA--a free trade agreement negotiated in secrecy and tailored primarily to the needs of multinational manufacturers, agribusiness, and pharmaceutical companies--will help combat “the violent extremism that is threatening civilized societies”?

Since I’m having a hard time following Rummy’s line of reasoning here (it’s been known to happen on occasion), maybe I should ask the widow of a man named Jose Sanchez Gomez--an indigenous representative of the Campesino Unity Committee who was shot and killed by Guatemalan army forces while attending one of the many peaceful protests against CAFTA in the highlands of Huehuetenango last March.

Or perhaps I should ask Marta Maria Caballero, a young woman who faces another version of “violent extremism” from her managers every morning when she arrives to work at a Nicaraguan auto parts factory. In the wake of her recent efforts to organize an independent trade union after enduring years of unsafe working conditions and sexual harassment, Caballero must now confront an escalated barrage of vicious threats and intimidation.

But I somehow doubt either of these women will agree with Rumsfeld's declaration that Central America is currently reveling in a so-called “magic moment” of freedom and human rights. The only hocus pocus they're likely to confirm flies straight from Rummy's pen-cum-magic-wand, which he's long utilized to transform chaotic realities into convenient opportunities for promoting U.S. military and corporate interests abroad.

When he visited Guatemala on March 24 to announce the controversial restoration of U.S. military aid to that country, for example, Rumsfeld cited a supposed sea change in the human rights climate, despite the fact that Guatemala was then under a state of “national emergency” following the violent crackdown against thousands of CAFTA protesters throughout the country. Several days before the shootings that killed Jose Sanchez Gomez and a man named Juan Lopez in Huehuetenango, President Oscar Berger deployed 500 soldiers wielding truncheons to Guatemala City with the intent to halt nearly 1,000 union members, farmers, students, and indigenous people who were demanding a national referendum on the contentious trade issue.

I guess Rummy holds the same attitude towards basic international human rights principles as he did towards WMDs: “The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.”

Now, if I were less easily excitable, I wouldn't waste my time slamming a man who's so irretrievably lost in the la-la land of free trade idolatry. Instead, I'd be slamming those Democrats who actually purport to value things like the freedom to unionize or engage in collective bargaining, but who nevertheless tipped their hats to CAFTA in the narrow Senate vote on June 30th. Thanks to the key support of 10 Democrats who speciously claim CAFTA will combat the Chinese trade juggernaut (a pipedream that NAFTA already dismantled), the deal won a 55-45 Senate victory and will likely make its way to the House this week.

Fortunately, not many U.S. Representatives appear to be swallowing Rumsfeld's half-baked claims about CAFTA and national security, even as the fear of looking soft on terror abounds on the Hill. Most politicians who read the fine print recognize that CAFTA will foster mounting labor unrest in the hemisphere rather than peace and stability, since it wipes out existing--if minimal--measures linking U.S. market access to labor rights standards, while toothlessly recommending that CAFTA parties “strive to ensure” compliance with U.N. and ILO conventions on workers' rights.

Let's hope that a logic of healthy skepticism continues to prevail over the abracadabra rhetoric of Rumsfeld and Co. in the week ahead, so that enough members of the House reject CAFTA for what the labor movement has called it: a two-way street to job loss and rights erosion in the Americas.