Loggers
by Jorge Vargas
Peru and the United States of America have been in the process of attempting to complete - or rather, the Peruvians have been trying to complete while the United States have been stalling - a free trade agreement that will allow Peru's exports to flourish more so than they already are while also allowing the United States to expand into a market in which it can sell as many cultural products as it would desire. This process has lasted for several years now, and, as of yet, it has still not come to fruitition.
A recent stumbling block - hardly publicized in a US media machine that has become increasingly obsessed with an election that is well over a year away as well as with a situation in Iraq that has not changed for the past three years - is Peru's timber laws. The current Peruvian laws state that companies can log in allotted lands so long as they cut down only 5% of the land allotted to them. Unfortunately for the Peruvian judicial system and for the environment, these laws are usually circumvented because Peru's inspectors are easily corrupted and are often paid off, and also due to the fact that the big companies exploiting this natural resources are relatively amoral when it comes to these sorts of issues.
The United States, which we all know is obsessed with environmental protection - after all, the US is not at all the world's biggest polluter per capita and in gross terms, and the US has not cut down more forests than all of Latin America combined since independence was reached, and the US obviously supports all international treaties on environmental protection - has now taken up a crusade in defense of logging limits in Peru, since Peru, just recently industrialized and with a population of less than 30 million, is one of the big polluters on Earth. The United States is now considering the renovation of logging laws, harsher punishments against violators, stronger inspection units, and, reminiscent of US interventions of the past, the desire to include as a clause into the Free Trade Agreement that US inspectors could be allowed to operate in Peru.
The United States wants Peru to accept, as a condition of a Free Trade Agreement, a clause in which US officials could freely enter Peru, allowing them to play a role in Peru's judicial system while supplanting and perhaps even outranking Peruvian officials. Somehow, Peru is supposed to gladly accept this benevolent condition from the United States because we, the poor, backward, little Latin Americans, are obviously incapable of protecting our own forests, or perhaps we are so primitive that we do not recognize the importance of our forests, whereas the almighty US government obviously knows the proper solutions.
Or perhaps the United States is more interested in the part of the clause that Peruvian timber may not be allowed into US borders - despite the Free Trade Agreement - because if the US does not think that Peru is complying with the lofty standards of the hegemony, meaning that if these interloping US inspectors find any fault with the Peruvian system - and they will because, like the Americans, Peruvians are human (remember?) and we, Peruvians, will likely make mistakes despite our best efforts - the US can block Peruvian timber from entering the US, whereas Peru would have no such guarantees to protect against US mistakes. Thus, Peru will have to accept a potential US trade protection within the Free Trade Agreement.
Let's make sure that the answer to this entire proposal is entirely clear: The United States has absolutely no right - legal or moral - to demand these assurances from Peru, a nation that is unfortunately found in such a condition due to a set of historical, geopolitical, and developmental reasons, but also a nation that has never intentionally attempted to disregard international conventions on environmental protections. Furthermore, the United States is once again showing its hand as a egotistical, disgustingly self-interested, hypocritical, and abusive power, because the United States honestly does not care at all about Peru's logging practices. The United States does care, however, about US loggers because US loggers vote and, in some states, those votes are politically powerful, and protecting the interests of these few families is obviously so important that a pivotal industry in Peru that could easily provide thousands upon thousands of jobs in a nation that desperately needs those jobs is going to have to suffer if Peru accepts those conditions.
Peru has long since known the fact that the United States is egotistical, disgustingly self-interested, hypocritical, and abusive, just as Peru has long since known that the United States has no moral and legal authority to impose conditions on Peru on either moral or legal grounds. This is not a surprise to anyone on the southern side of the Equator.
What Peru's government needs to do is take a stand against this recent intrusion into Peru's national politics. The message must be clear, unquestionable, and strong: No. What the Peruvian government needs to do is recognize that, yes, free trade is important, but the United States is not the only country in the world and, in terms of trade, not necessarily the most significant. Peru must threaten to reject the FTA, if the United States continues to impose unreasonable conditions, and then Peru must enter into negotiations with two other political entities that are desperately looking to expand trade relations in Latin America: the European Union and China. If Peru seems ready to turn toward these two entities, the United States will lessen its demands.
We need to get the complex out of our minds that Peru has everything to gain and that the United States is doing us a favor. The United States, like Peru, works out of self-interest (the difference between the two is that one is honorable whereas the other is not) and the United States did not agree to attempting to create a Free Trade Agreement out of a great love for Peru - half of the US population probably does not even know that Peru is in South America and most Americans seem to think that Peru is a mysterious land defined only of Macchu Picchu and llamas, where people may or may not speak Spanish - but rather because the US needs to expand its markets and because, by binding countries like Peru into these abusive agreements, the US will protect its more vulnerable industries for some time to come.
Peru is obviously not a great power (no illusions of grandeur here), but Peru represents one of the things that makes economies excel: a market. We, Peruvians, may not have a lot of economic and political muscle, but one would be hard-pressed to make the argument that Peruvians are a stupid and simple-minded people. Peru needs to use the cleverness that has long-since defined its national character for something more than short-sighted politics, internal corruption, and womanizing; we must now be clever, but this time for the good of the Republic.
But before any of that, let it be clear: The United States has no authority whatsoever in an issue that is Peruvian. Anyone believing otherwise will soon find out the consequences of such a gross miscalculation.
