¿Nuevas ropas para el emperador? El TLCCA–EU y lo que nos espera

Abstract

What led the world’s most powerful country to earnestly seek free trade arrangements across impoverished Central America? Why is this regionalized dynamic shaking the multilateral trading architecture? How does it bear on such domestic developments as democratization and such external imperatives as security, both of which are also US goals but in short Central American supply? A case study of CAFTA suggests the evolving US trade policy approach of competitive liberalization is reconstructing the existing multilateral panoply through one–sided reciprocal and discriminatory bilateral and regional free trade agreements, rather than the symmetrically–determined reciprocity and non–discrimination adopted by GATT/WTO.