Last year on election day, I sat at a polling place in Brunswick with a petition opposed to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, an extension of NAFTA. Nearly every voter signed the petition. Clearly, Brunswick citizens have seen the results of corporate free trade and they want no part of it.

NAFTA has meant 10 years of lost jobs, environmental devastation, family farm closures and corporate attacks on public interest laws. The world's biggest corporations want NAFTA expanded to the entire Western Hemisphere through the FTAA. But the FTAA negotiations are stuck in gridlock. As a result, the U.S. government has adopted a "little by little" approach called CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement. CAFTA is an expansion of NAFTA involving the United States, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

When President Bush announced plans for a free trade agreement with Central American countries in January 2002, he said its purpose was to "reinforce their progress toward economic, political and social reform. But CAFTA is NAFTA with a "C." We've seen 10 years of results from NAFTA. It hasn't been good. So we can get an idea of the "economic, political and social reforms" that are likely to occur under CAFTA.

How has NAFTA affected Mexico? Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and their ilk, with their enormous farm machinery and huge government subsidies, flooded Mexico with low-cost U.S. products, while Mexican farmers, with small plots, no subsidies, and low-tech implements could not compete. To stay afloat, Mexican farmers have increased their use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers in order to raise yields. These inputs, along with intensified tillage and increased use of water have led to soil degradation and erosion. Farmers who have added grazing animals to diversify their incomes have caused overgrazing and clearing of forests, all with negative environmental impacts.

If the Mexican people have fared so poorly under NAFTA, how can a country like Nicara-gua, with an economy less than 1/200th the size of Mexico's, even dream of competing under a similar model?

U.S. agribusiness will get $180 billion in subsidies in the next 10 years, while Nicaraguan farmers cannot even receive credit to plant their crops. U.S. agribusiness, which funds political campaigns to the tune of millions of dollars, has Congress and the administration in its pocket. The potentially ruined growers in Central America have no representation or advocates in their government, their political parties or the business community.

CAFTA was signed by United States and Central American ministers on May 28 and now awaits a vote in the U.S. Congress and Central American parliaments.

The president's constantly reiterated goal of bringing democracy to the countries of the world would suggest that Congress and the people of the Central America and the United States should have been provided with all the information on this agreement, should have had time to debate it and should have had the opportunity to vote on it in a referendum. On the contrary, the negotiations were carried on in secret and no information was released on them. Negotiations were completed without congressional hearings in little more than a year.

U.S. farmers and workers were led to believe that NAFTA would expand the U.S. export market, adding jobs and increasing production levels at home. True, large corporate farms have made out like bandits, but family farms have suffered. Low floor prices and U.S. subsidies to larger producers allow agribusiness to sell their products at below production cost in Mexico, undercutting both Mexican and U.S. small producers.

The claim by NAFTA supporters that U.S. exports would create jobs ignores the fact that we are importing far more than we are exporting. This trade deficit has led to the elimination of millions of jobs in automobiles, textiles, apparel, electronics and lumber. One of the most shameful effects of NAFTA is that weaker labor standards in Mexico have allowed U.S. corporate management to use the threat of relocation to suppress wages, discourage union organizing and allow working conditions to deteriorate.

What can we do to stop CAFTA? First, get in touch with Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of whom have not yet taken a position on CAFTA, and voice our opposition to this unfair agreement.

Next, come to a PeaceWorks presentation on Friday at 7 p.m. in the Morrell meeting room at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick. We will show a film called "Trading Democracy" about how a trade agreement supported by two presidents and ratified by the Congress became an end-run around the Constitution. After the film, Matthew Schlo-bohm of the Maine Fair Trade Campaign will speak about free trade agreements and what we can do to stop CAFTA.