Beyond NAFTA: A Forum

At the Quebec Summit of the Americas, President Bush said he wants a free-trade pact for all the Western Hemisphere modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement. But NAFTA is a deeply flawed guide to economic integration, and especially disappointing for those in Mexico worried about the growing development gap not just between their country and the United States but also within Mexico [see Jerry W. Sanders, "Two Mexicos and Fox's Quandary," February 26]. Even before he took office, Mexican President Vicente Fox offered a bold program to help close this gap, but many of his more promising ideas--for regional development funds and increased infrastructure investment--have since fallen off the US-Mexico agenda. Indeed, what emerged from the Fox-Bush February meeting was a potentially new corporate bargain: opening up Mexico to US oil companies in return for regularizing Mexican migrant labor in the United States.

To stimulate thinking on an alternative agenda, The Nation invited Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to offer his ideas, and we solicited responses from Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, and Angelo Falcón, senior policy executive at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, a national civil rights organization.
      --The Editors

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

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