Tell Congress: No NAFTA Expansion to Peru & Colombia

November 21, 2009 Subject: I’m writing to you urge you to publicly oppose the U.S-Peru and U.S.-Colombia NAFTA expansions. I’ve heard that instead of looking for ways to fix these terrible agreements, President Bush wants to barely tweak the labor provisions, but leave the major problems with the agreements untouched. Please write to me ASAP to tell me you will oppose the Peru and Colombia NAFTA expansions whenever they are brought up for a vote; or, if not, what your position is and why. The U.S.-Peru and U.S.-Colombia deals are just flawed NAFTA/CAFTA expansion agreements that will only exacerbate the outsourcing of U.S. jobs and the exploding U.S. trade deficit. I have several specific concerns with these agreements, and I urge you to oppose them for these reasons: * The Peru and Colombia NAFTA expansions are bad for our economy. We are on the verge of being a net food importer, our trade deficit is out of control, and good jobs are continuing to flee our borders. PFTA and CFTA will do nothing to solve these problems - instead, they will make them worse. * The Peru and Colombia NAFTA expansions have no enforceable labor rights protections, even though Peru’s president suggested including them in the deal himself and over 2000 labor union activists have been murdered in Colombia in the last decade. The deals also have no enforceable environmental protections, even though the special privileges the deals would grant foreign investors threaten one of the most biodiverse and environmentally sensitive areas in the world - the upper Amazon basin. * The Peru and Colombia NAFTA expansions will fuel the drug war. Decades of U.S. efforts to get poor Peruvian and Colombian farmers to grow food crops instead of coca could be completely undone. The Peru and Colombia NAFTA expansions will undermine years (and billions of our tax dollars worth) of our drug-eradication efforts by forcing the same NAFTA-style farm and food rules onto Peruvian and Colombian farmers that resulted in 1.3 million Mexican campesinos losing their livelihoods. * The Peru and Colombia NAFTA expansions contain the same dangerous port services provisions as the Oman Free Trade Agreement – limiting Congressional authority to forbid foreign control of U.S. ports. To make matters worse, Dubai Ports World literally owns the rights to operate Peruvian ports, so if they wanted to buy U.S. port operations, under the Peru NAFTA expansion we would have no recourse to stop them. For all these reasons, I ask you to oppose the U.S.-Peru and U.S.-Colombia free trade agreements. We simply cannot afford any more bad trade deals. Please write me now to share your position. Sincerely, We will add your signature from the information you provide.		First Name* Last Name* Email* Street* Street 2 Street 3 City* State/Province* Select a state Alabama Alaska American Samoa Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware D.C. Florida Georgia Guam Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Northern Mariana Islands Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virgin Islands Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Armed Forces (the) Americas Armed Forces Europe Armed Forces Pacific Alberta British Columbia Manitoba Newfoundland New Brunswick Nova Scotia Northwest Territories Nunavut Ontario Prince Edward Island Quebec Saskatchewan Yukon Territory Other Zip/Postal Code*