Duel for FTAA secretariat

AT FIRST we thought it was a one-horse race, but Trinidad and Tobago’s bid to have the Free Trade Area of the Americas secretariat located at Port-of-Spain is proving to be quite a competitive affair. Going by the progress reports of issued by Industry Minister Ken Valley, it seemed that TT had established an unassailable lead in the “secretariat stakes,” but it now seems that Miami is making a determined bit to nip us at the winning pole. We should have expected that the United States would not allow us to have an easy run for such a valuable prize.

Last Friday, Mr Valley disclosed that his efforts at soliciting support for TT’s bid, launched in Ecuador last October,  had succeeded to the point where the country needed only two more votes to secure the FTAA headquarters site. So far, we have secured the votes of Caricom’s 14 states together with Venezuela and Costa Rica, which means we are two short of the 18 needed (out of 34 hemispheric nations) to take the secretariat.
Those two vital votes, however, may prove to be elusive having regard to the high-powered campaign now being waged by the city of Miami which is apparently not sparing any expense to ensure its success in this enterprise. There has been some talk, in fact, that Caricom states are being solicited with deals and promises of financial support in an attempt to have them switch their support from Port-of-Spain to Miami.

But this has been flatly denied by Jorge Arrizurieta, the man appointed by Governor Jeb Bush to head the pro-Miami effort. “Nobody is doing this” Arrizurieta insisted to Newsday when we confronted him with the report during an interview last Monday at the Hilton. The Cuban American, however, had come to Trinidad in an attempt to persuade Minister Valley to abandon his bid for Port-of-Spain and to throw in his lot with Miami. Asked about the result of his effort, Arrizurieta smiled and said, “We could not convince him. We did not expect to.” But the fact that he has come to the region and to TT to carry out his mission is an indication of how determined is the effort to win the secretariat site for Miami. In fact, Arrizurieta’s assignment has turned him into a hemispheric trotter who has, since he began on June 1, visited 14 nations including Paraguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Nicaragua, Brazil, Barbados, Columbia and Dominican Republic. He is due to call on St Kitts Nevis next month.

The siting duel between the two cities is made all the more interesting by the fact that the basic claim being made by both Florida and TT happens to be the same: that, because of their strategic situation, they are each considered to be the “gateway to the Americas.” Backing up this country-to-country campaign, a statement from Florida FTAA states, “It is a very logical and natural choice for Miami to be the site of the FTAA headquarters” adding that the Florida city represents “a microcosm of the Latin American and Caribbean region already.” It is clear that our country cannot afford to match the roving campaign being conducted by Arrizurieta for Miami, but if TT is able to keep the votes already committed to it, then the country may well succeed in obtaining the winning two at the 15th meeting of the FTAA Trade Negotiations Committee now in progress at the Hilton. In this connection, Minister Valley observes, “This is going to be a make or break conference for us.”  The opposition is formidable, but our money is still on TT to win the valuable “secretariat stakes.”