WASHINGTON - The Bush administration urged Latin American nations on Friday to stop asking for individual trade talks with Washington and work instead toward a hemispheric free-trade region -- even as questions arose on Capitol Hill about the administration's commitment to the sweeping accord.
Assistant Treasury Secretary Randal K. Quarles said at a research center in Washington, D.C., that the administration was not wavering in seeking a Free Trade Area of the Americas by the target date of 2005. He called it a difficult but achievable goal.
Quarles' emphatic remarks contrasted with recent comments by other administration officials that revealed uncertainty in the outlook for the pact, which would unite 34 countries in the world's largest common market.
Doubts as to whether a proposed hemispheric free-trade area was possible led Colombia's president to appeal to President Bush last week to open bilateral free-trade talks with his nation.
Quarles urged individual countries to desist -- for now -- from requests to open such talks with Washington, saying they should focus on a hemispheric accord if they want to boost commerce with the United States.
''In the medium term, the best way to do that is to have all oars pulling on the same boat, which is the FTAA boat, and getting that accomplished by 2005,'' Quarles said.
He acknowledged, though, that major challenges remain before the complex trade talks can be completed in the short time left to the deadline. For one, Brazil, which co-chairs the negotiations with the United States, is lukewarm about the deal.
Last week, the five-month-old government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suggested that the sagging Mercosur trade pact that links Brazil in a common market with Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay should be reinvigorated.
But Quarles said on Friday that Washington had ``no reason to be fearful of a strengthened Mercosur.''
And the administration, he said, is determined to complete FTAA talks in the next two years.
''It really would be counterproductive to start talking about various ways in which we might not proceed on that schedule,'' he said at a roundtable at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
``It's important that the countries of the region stay focused on the FTAA, because there are a lot of political obstacles to it.''
Other officials, however, have left open the possibility that, should the FTAA bog down, Washington might seek less-sweeping trade accords, such as one that it began negotiating in January with five Central American countries.
At a hearing May 1, Roger Noriega, the White House nominee for assistant secretary of state to the hemisphere, told a Senate panel that the administration may soon have a choice.
''The issues that we will have to decide . . . in the coming months [are] whether it is better to continue to pursue this hemispheric approach or go at it in a subregional way: finish with Central America and look at other potential partners,'' Noriega told senators.
Some free-trade advocates on Capitol Hill openly wonder if the White House is putting enough horsepower in its push for a regional free-trade accord.
''We shouldn't underestimate the challenges inherent in forging a free-trade agreement that includes 34 nations and covers nearly 800 million people producing more than $11 trillion in goods and services,'' Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement Thursday.
Grassley called a hearing for Tuesday to probe whether ``the U.S. government is ready, willing and able to meet the challenge of guiding the agreement to a successful conclusion.''
Congress' investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, delivered a 59-page report Thursday to Congress warning that the administration ''should intensify preparations'' if it expects to achieve success in the trade talks.
The report suggested that the U.S. Trade Representative's office might be understaffed and underfinanced even for handling an FTAA trade ministerial meeting set for Miami in November.
Also roiling free-trade prospects is a delay by the White House in signing a free-trade accord with Chile. The accord was completed late last year. The Bush administration is unhappy with Chile, which opposed the war in Iraq.
On Thursday, Frank Vargo, a representative of the National Association of Manufacturers, told a House panel that the United States was ''losing $20 million of exports a week in Chile'' while the trade agreement goes unsigned.
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