Citizens' organizations from Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and
the United States denounced the secrecy of talks on the
U.S.-Andean Free Trade Agreement, which will next be held
from 14-18 June in Atlanta.

This will be the second round of talks on the proposed
Andean FTA. The first round was held last month in
Cartagena, Colombia. Future negotiating sessions are
scheduled over the next few months in Peru, the United
States and Ecuador, with an eye to reaching an agreement by
February 2005.

Local Atlanta groups are planning a peaceful mobilization
at noon on Monday, 14 June at the Downtown Hilton, the site
of the official talks. Kelli Potts, an Atlanta peace and
economic-justice activist with the Peace, Not War committee
of North Decatur Presbyterian Church, said, "We want to
know what is going on behind those closed doors at the
Hilton. We are very concerned that they will simply
duplicate agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA that put
corporate profits ahead of people's lives here and in Latin
America."

Like talks for the recently completed U.S. Central America
Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), there is little transparency
in these negotiations. While officials in the Andean
region have announced that there could be some public
access to reading rooms to review the text, those doing so
would be banned from revealing that information to the
public, thus severely limiting an informed public debate on
the prospective agreement.

Enrique Daza, a spokesperson for the Colombian Action
Network on Free Trade and the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (RECALCA) stated, "The lack of transparency and
the government's decision to maintain secrecy in the
negotiations only reveals the magnitude of the outrage they
plan to commit in the FTA. We demand that they publish the
contents of the U.S. draft text and the Colombian
negotiating team's text."

"People are right to be worried," said Karen Hansen-Kuhn of
The Development GAP, a Washington, DC-based organization
and the Coordinator of the Alliance for Responsible Trade
(ART). "All indications are that this agreement will
contain the same wrong-headed policies on investment,
labor, environment and other issues that have forced the
Bush Administration to hold off on a vote on CAFTA until
after the elections."

Javier Diez Conseco, a Peruvian Member of Parliament, also
expressed concerns about the potential outcome of the
talks. "We have months of arduous negotiations ahead of us
with the United States, a superpower whose interests often
don't coincide with – and often contradict – our own, and
which could use its influence and power to achieve an
agreement in its favor."

Provisions in the Andean FTA would serve to dramatically
liberalize trade in goods and services between the United
States and Andean countries and likely provide strong
protections for foreign investment and intellectual-
property rights (patents) while containing only weak
provisions to support labor rights and the environment.
Information on U.S. negotiating positions published in the
Colombian newspaper, El Tiempo, on 2 June, for example,
indicates that the United States will seek through the
agreement to patent plants, animals and surgical
procedures. Such provisions would go far beyond anything
negotiated in other trade pacts.

Bolivia is currently participating in the talks as an
observer, although it may officially enter into
negotiations at some later date. Pablo Solon, a leader of
the Bolivian Movement against Free Trade, said, "We are
opposed to the Andean-U.S. FTA because it being negotiated
behind people's backs, ignoring the fact that the popular
uprising in Bolivia that forced President Sanchez de Lozada
out of office demanded a substantial change in economic
policy, including actions to recover our country's natural
gas and hydrocarbons, which were being taken over by
transnational corporations. We oppose the FTA with the
United States because we do not want to be stripped of our
cultural identity, because we are against making water,
health, education and biodiversity mere commodities, and
because we believe that the rights of people and other
living beings are more important than free trade."