Word: brazile
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Brazilian president Henrique Cardoso wasn't standing anywhere near Bush at that moment. Brazil, to put it simply, is the head of the skeptics. Mercosur, the South American trading bloc, isn't as thorough a free-trade area as NAFTA, and is beset with internal squabbles. But they have their pride. When Brazil hears Bush talk about three competing world trade zones, it wonders whether South America wouldn't be better off as a fourth leg - doing, as it is now, a nice little business with Europe as well as North America - rather than living in the NAFTA shadow...
...Bush rightly sells NAFTA as an example of how free trade can help the little partner along with the big - "Canada has benefited, Mexico has benefited, the U.S. has benefited" - but to Brazil, they all look pretty big up north, and Washington in particular doesn't seem to want to give as good as it gets. The last of the significant U.S. tariffs under NAFTA, known euphemistically as "anti-dumping laws," have deeply entrenched support in Congress, and Brazil has cause to wonder whether Latin American-produced commodities like sugar will ever find as hospitable a welcome...
...sphere of influence and a counterbalance to North American geopolitical clout. With a combined trade volume of $18 billion a year, Mercosur has become the world's third largest market - a distant third - after the European Union and NAFTA. It is also a potent symbol of Brazil's ambition to be a leader of South American unity. Last year the Cardoso government broke new ground at a South American summit, where it argued for the accelerated integration of the continent. "Mercosur is our destiny, while the FTAA is an option," Cardoso likes to say. Part of that balance-of-power...
...Brazil's concerns about domination by the NAFTA superpower sound familiar in Canada and Mexico, which went through similar anxieties before creating their own free-trade ties with the U.S. Canadian trade minister Pierre Pettigrew, for one, says Canada's experience shows that Brazil's fears are unfounded. When NAFTA was signed, he recalls, "furniture production in Tennessee was 15 times larger than what our traditional furniture makers could build, but our furniture makers have done very well in the U.S. market because they have found niches." In the end, he argues, "Brazil will have to open its closed economy...
...Maybe. But when? Much of the tension and unease of the north-south divisions in the hemisphere have been funneled into convoluted maneuvers over the timing of the FTAA launch. (The deadline date is itself the result of a compromise: Brazil originally wanted it set for 2010.) The latest efforts by the NAFTA forces involved suggestions to push forward the 2005 deadline for the FTAA's launching to 2003. The Brazilians have cold-shouldered the idea. Foreign Minister Lafer says a two-year speed-up would swamp domestic industries with a flood of low-priced goods before his country...