CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela, the loudest critic of U.S. free-trade plans for the hemisphere, said Friday Washington would not be able to complete the trade pact by Jan. 1, 2005, because it would be "defeated from the inside."
Speaking before trade talks in Mexico next week, Venezuelan negotiator Victor Alvarez said President Hugo Chavez's government was opposed to the Free Trade Area of the Americas proposal in its current form.
"The game is blocked.... The conviction is there won't be any FTAA by 2005," Alvarez told a news conference in Caracas.
Despite threats by left-winger Chavez to pull out of the negotiations, Alvarez said oil-rich Venezuela would stay in the talks to try to force radical changes in the U.S. plan to create a free-trade area from Alaska to Patagonia.
"We might as well go for the fight. The FTAA is going to be defeated from the inside," he said.
At every summit for three years, Chavez has condemned the Americas free-trade plan as an "imperial" scheme by Washington to extend U.S. commercial power over Latin America.
He has called the FTAA "the road to hell," dismissed the negotiations as a waste of time and predicted that poor regional economies would be placed at the mercy of voracious U.S. corporations "like throwing a pig to an alligator."
Alvarez will join negotiators from around the continent for FTAA talks in the Mexican city of Puebla starting Monday.
He said Venezuela would press for concessions from Washington in areas like reducing farm subsidies, respecting intellectual property rights and allowing sovereign states the freedom to apply their own domestic purchasing policies.
"Venezuela will do everything possible to radically modify the philosophy behind the (U.S.) proposal," Alvarez added.
SPOILING ROLE
Although Chavez has so far played the noisiest role against the FTAA, the left-leaning presidents of Brazil and Argentina, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Nestor Kirchner, have also criticized U.S. President Bush's free-trade crusade.
Alvarez said English-speaking Caribbean nations also backed Venezuela's position.
The talks in Puebla will be the first high-level meeting to work on the FTAA since top trade officials from the 34 participating countries got together in Miami in November.
Countries agreed there on a two-tiered approach for finishing the FTAA that many U.S. business groups fear will allow big economies like Brazil to avoid making significant new commitments in priority areas like investment, government procurement, services and intellectual property rights.
"The abysmal disparities between the 34 nations is the reason why you cannot agree a common set of rules for each and every one of them," Alvarez said.
Venezuela is seeking financial compensation mechanisms that would cushion the impact of FTAA entry on weak Latin American economies.
Chavez, who often echoes Cuba's communist President Fidel Castro in his criticism of U.S. free-market capitalism, has proposed a regional trade plan instead of the FTAA called the "Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas".
This envisages Latin America's economies first increasing trade with each other so they can grow stronger before trying to compete with the mighty U.S. economy.
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