Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that defined the rights of all federal citizens, both blacks and whites; prohibited states from abridging rights for citizens in the state; but did not define the relationship between citizens and private entities.
Congress submitted to the states the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on June 13, 1866. The states ratified the amendment on July 9, 1868, and Congress officially made it part of the Constitution on July 18,1868. This amendment overturned the Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that had declared blacks were not citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment provided citizens, both black and white, with the right of due process—that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” It guaranteed equal protection under the law, and it excluded from federal office any state or federal official who violated his oath to the U.S. by participating in the Confederate rebellion.
However, the Supreme Court effectively nullified the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1873 with its decision in The Butcher’s Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slanghter-Honse Company restricting the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment by severely limiting its due process clause to national citizenship, again lessening the rights of black citizens. (Although the Fourteenth Amendment declared that states could not discriminate against individuals, it did not prohibit private companies or individuals from doing so.) Then, in 1886 in Santa Clara Connty v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court asserted that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations, which the Court defined as legal persons with rights that cannot be alienated. economic and political relations with Latin America by opening its market to its southern neighbors, particularly by lowering tariffs and nontariff trade barriers in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush declared his “Enterprise for the Americas” initiative aimed at promoting free trade within the hemisphere. This program evolved into the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993, which was signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. By the end of the twentieth century, Western Hemisphere trade with its annual sum of $675.6 million accounted for 39 percent of U.S. foreign trade.
At a Summit of the Americas in Miami in December 1994, U.S. President Bill Clinton and leaders of 33 other American states declared their intention to create a free trade area in the Western Hemisphere within the next ten years. Summits of the Americas in Santiago (1998) and Quebec (2001), as well as conferences among trade ministers and other negotiations among American states, formalized the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The initiative involves the United States, Canada, and all 31 countries of the Caribbean and Latin America except Cuba, which is communist, and French Guiana, which is under French authority. Participating nations hope to finalize the agreement by January 2005 and implement it by December 2005. Its objective is the establishment of a free trade zone encompassing (as of 2000) nearly 800 million people and more than $11 billion in gross domestic product.
The concept of the FTAA covers trade liberalization (including elimination of tariffs and nontariff trade barriers), transparency and market access, cooperation in the development of infrastructure, customs procedures, agriculture, investment policies, subsidies, intellectual property rights, and settlement of disputes. It envisages the establishment of a hemispheric common market—the world’s largest trading block—based on economic integration and free exchange of goods, services, and capital. This concept, also closely linked with the development of a new kind of the hemispheric community, rested upon comprehensive cooperation, shared democratic values, and rule of law.
However, several economic, political, institutional, and cultural obstacles and difficulties exist in the process of developing the FTAA. Economic ties between North America and South America remain significantly unbalanced: U.S. trade with its NAFTA partners is substantially greater than U.S. trade with all of South America and the Caribbean. Political culture, institutions, legal systems, economic traditions, and values still differ between the United States and Canada in North America and the Central and South American nations. A huge gap in the well-being of populations between the Americas also exists. Some Latin American countries, particularly Brazil (which dominated MERCOSUR, the South American common market extant between 1991 and 1995) and Venezuela, have reservations about the FTAA. These reservations are motivated by political concerns about national sovereignty and the two nations’ reluctance to open their markets to North American competitors, particularly in the chemical and papermaking industries as well as in machinery and electronics. Some Latin American countries complain about U.S. antidumping rules (which prevent the sale of foreign products at below-cost prices) and farm subsidies (which provide funds for farmers who can then sell their products cheaply. Inclusion of provisions against dumping and farm subsidies allows participating countries to compete on an even basis.
Public and domestic political opposition to the FTAA continues both in the United States and other American countries. Impeding progress are a controversial antiglobalist movement against the World Trade Organization and other entities that promote global trade, environmental concerns raised by associations such as Greenpeace, rudiments of anti-Americanism in Latin America, and concern by organized labor in the United States about possible job losses to cheap foreign labor. To overcome these difficulties, the U.S. government has attempted to strengthen bipartisan domestic support for the FTAA, entice trading partners in the Americas by improving their access to the U.S. consumer market, and promote liberalization of bilateral trade.
