The Story Behind NAFTA The true story behind NAFTA is one of "byzantine mercantile gangsterism" "NAFTA was an investment agreement designed to protect American corporations in Mexico, lock in the low wage rate, and raise cash for a beleaguered political oligarchy." The cast of characters mounting the campaign to 'sell NAFTA' is carnivalesque, including NAFTA czar William Daley, who is now national campaign chair for Vice President Al Gore. "THE SELLING OF "FREE TRADE" -- NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy" by John R. MacArthur -- Hill and Wang; 388 pages; $25 REVIEWED BY John Phillip Santos San Francisco Chronicle "Book Review," July 2, 2000 Late in the evening of Jan. 1, 1994, I drove on a mountain road into San Cristobal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. The street lamps flickered in the valley below like beacons from a distant galaxy. As I rolled with the headlights off into that picturesque town from the era of the Conquest, the cobblestone streets were empty. It felt eerie. After all, it was New Year's Day. But it also happened to be the auspicious inaugural day of the much-vaunted North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in observance of which a previously unknown rebel Maya army, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), had seized the Palacio Municipal in San Cristobal and declared war on the Mexican state. These days, barely more than five years since that night, the Zapatistas are still in the jungles of Chiapas, occasionally kicking up dust with the Mexican army, but when was the last time you heard NAFTA mentioned in public? How could such a one-time noisy panacea that would usher in an idyllic age of borderless trade across las Americas fall so quickly out of view? In "The Selling of 'Free Trade': NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy," journalist and Harper's publisher John MacArthur offers an unequivocal answer: "NAFTA was an extension of American dominance over a much weaker country," in other words, a dirty business -- once done, best forgotten. The book is an illuminating, periodically astounding serial account of how NAFTA was forged, then spun, out of opportunistic backroom alliances between the Bush and Clinton administrations, joined by congressional Republicans and Democrats alike -- all of them in close consultation with a star chamber of businessmen and their phalanxes of lobbyists. According to the author, except for an apocryphal tale of a late night reverie in which Mexican President Carlos Salinas allegedly had the first free-trade epiphany, Mexicans played a secondary, junior-partner role in creating NAFTA. MacArthur writes in a clear, spare voice, which helps the reader sort through the byzantine mercantile gangsterism he details as the true story behind NAFTA. As MacArthur steadily builds his case, it seems likely the book will earn its extreme subtitle, "the Subversion of American Democracy." "NAFTA was an investment agreement," MacArthur writes, "designed to protect American corporations in Mexico, lock in the low wage rate, and raise cash for a beleaguered political oligarchy." The cast of characters mounting the campaign to "sell NAFTA" is carnivalesque, including NAFTA czar William Daley, who afterward became commerce secretary and is now national campaign chair for Vice President Al Gore. Imagine President Reagan, sounding like another Bolivar, speaking in Tampa in 1983 of "a united hemisphere, united not by the arbitrary bonds of state, but by the voluntary bonds of free ideals." Or Congressman Bill Richardson, House Majority whip, leading the charge for passage of NAFTA, working himself into a lather as he tries to rally the Democratic votes needed to pass the agreement. Lee Iacocca has a show-stealing walk-on as the diva-oracle of political television spots, brought in for a star performance on behalf of treaty passage. Lone wolf socialist Congressman Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in protest against NAFTA, introduces a bill to equalize American legislators' salaries with those of their Mexican peers. And in a bravura last-minute flourish, President Clinton, in a cell phone call, snags a vote from Oklahoma Congressman Bill Brewster by offering to go duck hunting with him. In one of the book's climactic moments, during an interview with MacArthur, Richardson, now the embattled secretary of energy, born in Mexico City to an American banker father and a Mexican mother, reveals why his passions on NAFTA were so strong. "Richardson turned misty-eyed as he recounted one of his father's last requests. 'My father once said to me -- I think I was away at school (in the United States), and I came home and he said to me -- `Always help Mexico -- I'm going to die,' and, 'always help Mexico.' " But in another interview, with Michael Wessel, chief adviser to Richard Gephardt on NAFTA, MacArthur hears another story: "The fact of the matter is they won NAFTA because of money, because of gifts, because of special interests, goodies, and everything else. They did not necessarily win the debate." The debate, in case you missed it, was about the impact of NAFTA on American and Mexican workers, along with periodic worrying about the potentially negative environmental consequences of expanding the maquiladora system of low-cost, often polluting border factories. MacArthur dismisses the resulting labor and environmental concessions as "empty rhetoric." The book's attempt to ground an understanding of the NAFTA phenomenon in the bookend stories of workers in a closing staple factory in Queens and workers in its replacement plant in Nogales, Mexico, is well-intentioned but slightly off-key, and oddly measured. MacArthur captures the staple-manufacturing process in close-ups but demurs, at first, from visiting a worker's home in the poor colonias outside Nogales. Focusing on the critical years between 1991, which saw the authorization of fast-track negotiation, and 1993, when NAFTA was finally passed, "The Selling of `Free Trade" is at its best when it gives us a glimpse into the cynical court intrigues and media campaigns that won the day for the treaty. MacArthur's advocacy journalism also probes the underlying values and motivations of the main actors, who managed to avoid the limelight during their dealmaking. The press is portrayed as largely boosterist, with the author only faintly commending the Wall Street Journal on its later criticism of NAFTA for failing to create jobs in the United States and improve the plight of Mexican workers. Given the importance MacArthur assigns to the media for NAFTA's passage, it would have been helpful to hear more about how broadcast and cable news covered the story. Organized labor is shown as slow to respond since the early '80s to the mounting challenges of globalization. And MacArthur makes an interesting historical point, tracing the intellectual origins of the contemporary political, technocratic elite that shaped NAFTA back to the Kennedy era, when JFK first spoke about "sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of 'passionate movements' which have stirred this country so often in the past." Recent WTO protesters in Seattle and Washington might have a quarrel with that idea. Telling NAFTA's sordid story so well, John R. MacArthur's book highlights the critical need for ongoing reporting of the still unfolding political, economic and cultural consequences of free trade with Mexico, on both sides of the border. [John Phillip Santos' memoir, "Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation," was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award.]
