GEORGETOWN - The United States is fragmenting Latin America and the Caribbean by negotiating bilateral free trade agreements with five Central American countries and the Dominican Republic even as negotiations continue for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Cuban Ambassador Jose M. Inglan said here Friday.
"In my opinion, they are trying to get everyone separately because as a community, you have a position," he told EFE in a brief interview.
Reiterating that Cuba did not support the FTAA as a solution for economic problems of developing countries, Inglan said Cuba supported the 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and other efforts intended "to give unity to small countries."
Cuba, which has not had diplomatic relations with the United States for more than four decades and remains suspended from the Organization of American States (OAS), was not invited to join the FTAA.
Havana has just finished hosting the 2nd Hemispheric Encounter in opposition to the FTAA, where delegates denounced the proposed pact as neo-colonialist.
Though no CARICOM member nation has held talks with the U.S. for a bilateral trade deal, a spokesman for the CARICOM Secretariat believed that Washington was hoping to seal such bilateral accords if the hemisphere did not meet the 2005 deadline for establishing the FTAA.
"My view is that they (U.S. officials) are hedging their bet if the FTAA does not come on stream by 2005 so they would still have these bilateral agreements to turn to," said Leonard Robertson, spokesman for CARICOM Secretary General Edwin Carrington.
Experts say a U.S.-Central America free trade accord will provide guaranteed long-term access to the U.S. market for Central America's exports of agricultural and manufactured goods, such as textiles and garments. In 2000, Central America sent 43 percent of its exports to the United States.
TradeWatch, an electronic newsletter of the Barbados-based trade promotion agency Caribbean Export, has quoted CARICOM's chief negotiator, Richard Bernal, as criticizing U.S. efforts to enter into bilateral trade pacts.
Bernal said those negotiations "diverted energy" from the goals of the FTAA process, noting that "while in some cases these agreements can push ahead the negotiations, they might in some areas hold back the process."
Bernal recommended that FTAA countries drop items from the agenda that were new or too complex, in order to reach agreement on a core of market access commitments.
"It may be more important to scale down our ambition and to get a good agreement built around market access, agriculture, services, investment at the core and lower our horizons on some of the more difficult or newer issues," he said.
Ambassador Bernal noted that failure to do so could see countries extending the 2005 deadline for implementing the FTAA agreement.
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