-What is Free Trade?
Free Trade, in short, allows companies to do whatever they please for cheap. It allows companies to influence laws in different countries, steal resources, and steal labor from workers. In case after case, free trade has worsened the situations and lives of working people but benefit the high-ups in the business world. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed in 1993 and has destroyed million of Mexican farmers lives. NAFTA is also to blame for well over 750,000 U.S. jobs moving overseas, mosly Midwest union jobs that became Mexican sweatshops. Several free trade agreements are in discussion right now, including the Free Trade Area of the Americas which would expand NAFTA throughout Central and South America and the Carribean. The FTAA would also expand the power companies had under NAFTA and allow them to do things such as sue governments for "violating their rights to profit". In other words, it's PCP for capitalism.

-What's up with AFTA?
In Miami 2003, we protested the FTAA negotations and the police beat the living shit out of people... but the meetings pretty much fell apart. Several efforts since then to pass the FTAA also failed because some poor countries are standing up a little bit. Just as the brutality of the Miami police had finished and the FTAA negotiations there finished, the same politicians and "trade-ministers" secretly passed CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement). It has yet to be ratified by Congress but it obviously will be. What they are trying to do is build the FTAA in small chunks. NAFTA, now CAFTA. The newest "chunk" is called AFTA, the Andean Free Trade Agreement. This is between the U.S., Colombia, Preu, Ecuador, and most likely Bolivia.

-Resistance!
Why the fuss? Well, the next round of AFTA meetings are in Washington D.C. on March 14th! The location has not been announced yet but will be spread asap. When the FTAA meetings we're held in Quebec City in 2001, there we're over 80,000 protesters! In Miami, there we're 10,000. When the World Trade Organization (which seeks world-wide free trade) met in Seattle they we're physically shut down by 50,000 people. When the WTO met in Cancun, over 10,000 rose up and the negotiations fell apart! Poor countries walked out, some feeling powerful because of the protests. All over the Western Hemisphere, regular people have taken serious action against FTAA and CAFTA, as they see the truth behind it. It will drive wages down, destroy forests, pollute waterways and land, destroy cultures, and further a 400+ year cycle of oppression, colonialization, and war.