The first problem is that very few people know about this next step of “deep integration.” In March 2005, Presidents George Bush, Vicente Fox and Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas launched the Security and Prosperity Partnership with a splash. Although it had few visible results, the Waco meeting of the “Three Amigos” set into motion an underground process that spawned its own working groups, rules, recommendations, and agreements — all below the radar of the legislatures and the public in the three nations. These rules and trinational programs have profound effect on the environment, the daily lives of citizens, and the future of all three countries.
The SPP not only further greases the wheels of corporate cooperation and potentially increases U.S. access to Mexican oil. Its security component represents a new and ominous form of integration, all in the name of counter-terrorism.
The SPP’s Real Objectives
From its origins in Waco, the SPP has developed through several formal meetings, including a March 31, 2006 meeting of heads of state in Cancun and a ministerial meeting in Canada in February 2007. Canadian civil society watchdogs also outed a secret meeting of high-level government, military and business people in Banff in September of 2006.
The official U.S. web page describes the SPP as “a White House-led initiative among the United States and the two nations it borders – Canada and Mexico – to increase security and to enhance prosperity among the three countries through greater cooperation.”
“White House-led” is a key element. When the heads of state met in Waco and in subsequent meetings to follow up on NAFTA, both Canada and Mexico had some very serious concerns. Canada was embroiled in trade conflicts with the United States (soft lumber, beef) that it wanted to see resolved through NAFTA mechanisms. Mexico’s right-wing government, meanwhile, has found increasingly untenable the stark contradiction between open borders for merchandise and the criminalization of immigrants. On the one hand, it had a commitment to greater integration under the free trade model; on the other it was under tremendous political pressure to defend Mexicans migrating to the United States. None of these issues made it into the SPP. U.S. security concerns, and corporate demands for fewer obstacles to border-hopping production and sales, hijacked the trinational agenda.
Instead, the SPP has three fundamental objectives. The Bush administration wants to create more advantageous conditions for transnational corporations and remove remaining barriers to the flow of capital and crossborder production within the framework of NAFTA. It wants to secure access to natural resources in the other two countries, especially oil. And it wants to create a regional security plan based on “pushing its borders out” into a security perimeter that includes Mexico and Canada.
On the liberalization side, the SPP has focused on simplifying procedures for doing business and creating more unified norms and standards. The SPP seeks to make it easier for U.S. companies to ship production offshore, eliminate specific Canadian and Mexican labor and environmental standards in the interest of “harmonization”, and assure that harsher security measures don’t interfere with crossborder business.
For Mexico, the harmonization process -- like NAFTA before it -- does not take into account its less-developed status or the pressing social
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