MIAMI _ At the hemispheric trade ministers' summit a year ago in Quito, Ecuador, many participants in the closing ceremony missed the final Brazilian comments since no one thought to add a Portuguese translator.
At a similar meeting last week in Miami, not only did journalists and others hook up to the translation, they were hanging on the Brazilians' every word.
Portuguese has moved to the forefront of speech at the hemispheric trade talks just as Brazil's role in global and regional trade diplomacy has ascended. Now, Brazil has pushed the United States into a key concession: scaling back the scope of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
``Brazil won with _ yes _ good trade politics, not necessarily good trade strategy,'' said Eduardo Gamarra, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University.
``The United States in some measure lost and has a second-best strategy ... with countries that are basically in serious economic straits,'' Gamarra said, referring to Washington's announcement during the Miami meeting that it was seeking bilateral trade agreements with the Dominican Republic, Panama and the four Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
While business groups and others are heaving a sigh of relief that the Miami meeting ended on a positive note, on Friday, the House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas warned that a ``baseline unambitious'' final trade agreement would not be satisfactory on Capitol Hill.
The Quito meeting on Nov. 1, 2002, already gave hints of the problems facing the FTAA even though Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had only won his election and not taken office. During his campaign, the Brazilian leader called the proposed FTAA ``an annexation,'' although he later pledged support for the FTAA during a Washington visit.
By keeping tight reins on government spending, the leftist Brazilian president has managed to please Wall Street. But Main Street Brazil does not favor the U.S.-led FTAA proposal.
Yet the struggle over the trade agenda is not just a standoff between Brazil and the United States.
Growing social movements in Latin America, with opposition to economic policies favored by Washington and the International Monetary Fund, have forced governments from power in countries from Argentina to Ecuador to Bolivia. And in a number of countries where the United States is set to negotiate bilateral treaties, presidential elections are approaching, creating political uncertainty for future ratification of the accords.
So a year ago, the Quito meeting adjourned several hours early because trade ministers could not agree on substantive issues, particularly Latin American demands for more access to U.S. agricultural markets as a way to alleviate the region's poverty.
There was no public acknowledgement of the deadlock in regional trade talks until after the failed meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancun, Mexico, in September, when trade observers started to focus on the FTAA. Cancun was the first sign of Brazil's more activist stand on trade _ it led the Group of 21 that confronted the trade agenda set out by the European Union and the United States.
A year later in Miami, Brazil solidified that central role. Brazilian press briefings were crowded with journalists. Trade ministers wrapped up the talks a day early on Thursday, celebrating what the Argentine government hailed as a new ``formula'' that allowed the countries to ``put behind us the deadlock we have been in throughout this year.''
The formula was Brazil's design. The two-tier process proposes some common obligations for all prospective 34 members and another level where deeper commitments would be voluntary.
Trade negotiators acknowledge that the most contentious issues were not resolved in Miami, creating a successful meeting but leaving the success of the FTAA still in doubt. The final accord failed to flesh out the guidelines needed to successfully wrap up the FTAA trade negotiations in the short time remaining before the January 2005 deadline.
``If you leave there (Miami) without any sense of what's going to be inside the agreement _ the measures and products covered _ then you are not leaving there with an agreement because that's where the horse trading is,'' said Peter Morici, a professor in the University of Maryland business school.
Morici, who helped negotiate the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement, said the heart of trade accords is establishing what is on the table, such things as Florida's citrus industry, American beef production, Brazil's automobile manufacturers. Another part of the agreement is to try to set up a level playing field: outlining rules to forbid hidden subsidies, making sure such things as new product safety testing is not established to thwart imports.
Morici called the accord coming out of Miami unworkable since it was more difficult to balance domestic interests in a partial accord that cover less than all the sectors.
According to the Declaration of Miami, the Trade Negotiations Committee, comprising the deputy trade ministers, must make the difficult decisions to develop the ``common and balanced set of rights and obligations applicable to all countries'' in each of the nine negotiating topics and set up procedures for negotiations.
These instructions must be drawn up by the next Trade Negotiations Committee meeting that is expected to be held in Mexico in February. There are another two TNC meetings scheduled for 2004, along with a trade ministers' summit in July or August in Brazil and finally a Sept. 30 deadline for turning in a schedule for tariff reduction.
Faced with these uncertainties, the future of the FTAA was still awaiting translation, according to a statement from Jennifer Greeson, spokeswoman for Intel Corp.
``The momentum achieved by the Bush administration is driving us in the right direction,'' Greeson said. ``The devil will be in the details.''
As Brazil prepares to hold the next ministerial, part of that translation lies in its hands.
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