quote:

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Alberto Arroyo: What is so new about the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America)? I see three fundamental issues:

First: To strengthen military and security structures in order to confront the resistance of the peoples is precisely its reaction to the triumph of the movement (success in Latin American countries to oppose bi-lateral Free Trade Agreements with the evil US empire - N.Beltov) that is jeopardizing its plans.

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The plan is "confronting the social movements as if they were criminals."

Secondly:

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Arroyo: The novelty of the new SPP scheme is that these actors come out of the blue, take the foreground and the relationship is inverted: the corporate groups directly talking amongst themselves, in the presence of the governments that will then attempt to translate their agreements into policies, rule changes, changes of laws, etc. It was not enough for them now to privatize the public corporations; they are privatizing policy per se.

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thirdly:

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... the third new aspect of this structure is perhaps, remembering a saying of our classic grandparents, that phrase of Engels where he was explaining that when the people are ready to take power through the mechanisms of formal democracy, like the zero on a thermometer or the 100, the rules of the game change: water will either freeze or boil, and even though we are speaking about bourgeois democracies, they will be first ones to break the rules.

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Here we call that "moving the goalposts".

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They are saying that this is not an international treaty therefore it doesn't have to get approved by the congresses. But, as it does touch on issues that disrupt the legal framework in our countries, they will present in bit by bit; they will decide on a modification to legislation in a minute, and another one in the next minute; executive decrees to be implemented, changes in operative regulations, rules for standard functioning, but never the whole package.

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I.E., policy by stealth or death by a thousand cuts. We know all about that; we've seen lots of it from neoliberal Liberal and Conservative, and even some NDP, governments in Canada.

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I shall close with a story so that we can realize the degree of sophistication, with regards to security, that these agreements and operative mechanisms of integration of security apparatuses have reached.

A short while ago, a plane took off from Toronto with tourists headed for a vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. While the plane was on the runway, the passenger list was examined again more carefully, and they discovered that there was someone there from Bush's list of terrorists.

As soon as the plane entered American air space -- when you fly out of Toronto, American air space begins after you pass the Great Lakes and, in a jet, this takes a few minutes -- two F-16s showed up flying alongside. They led the plane out of American air space and escorted it to Mexican territory where they forced it to land in the military section of the airport; then, they arrested this man and sent his family back.

You can imagine the impression those 200 poor tourists on the plane had, seeing the two armed F-16s flying alongside and rerouting the plane.

Later, it turned out that he was not the terrorist that they thought, and they said to him: "Sorry, you can carry on with your vacation now, and make sure you call your family to come and join you."

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I don't recall the Canadian media covering this story at all. Ah, the glories of being in the orbit of US imperialism. And neoliberals, Conservatives and other misanthropes want us to snuggle up ever close to these monsters.

The above comments are from ALBERTO ARROYO (Mexico, Red mexicana de Acción contra el Libre Comercio -- Mexican Action Network against Free Trade).

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" I recommend my readers to pay attention to the complexities of human activity. It’s the only way to see much further."

Fidel Castro Ruz

On the SPP

[ 18 May 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]