You’d never guess it from the ho-hum reportage of the Establishment press, but the recently concluded Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico, was a revolutionary event of major magnitude. The two-day summit (January 12-13) attended by President Bush marked another step forward in a long-term agenda to abolish national borders and merge the countries of the Western Hemisphere into a regional Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The general spin by most of the media analysts is that the conference hosted by Mexican President Vicente Fox did not accomplish much, ending with a harmless declaration but little consensus among the hemispheric leaders.

The truth is far different. The summit’s final statement, the Declaration of Nuevo Leon, commits the 34 nations to courses of action that have little or nothing to do with increasing trade — the ostensible purpose for creating the FTAA — but much to do with destroying our borders, soaking U.S. taxpayers for billions of dollars more in foreign aid, and promoting socialism throughout the hemisphere. The Declaration, for instance, included a call for tripling the funding of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for loans to Latin American businesses. The IDB — like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other multi-lateral lending agencies — has a horrible record of corruption and of funding statist projects that have saddled Latin Americans with a crushing debt burden. With a huge infusion of new IDB bribe money for business and political leaders, the FTAA architects will be able to overcome much of the current resistance south of the border to their merger plans.

The Declaration is also rife with commitments and pledges to adopt more than a dozen United Nations conventions and protocols; implement the socialist "mandates" of the UN Millennium Summit; and increase government "investment" in health, education, welfare, employment training, and "social safety nets." One of the most radical elements of the Declaration is its commitment to "the full protection of the human rights of all migrants, including migratory workers and their families." "We support," says the document, "the adoption of programs for orderly migration as a factor of economic and social development." President Vicente Fox has been the most outspoken Latin American leader in pushing this issue and has not been the least bit shy about demanding the same "rights" as U.S. citizens (including the "right" to welfare, health care, social security and education benefits) for Mexicans residing illegally in the United States. Incredibly, President Bush has been one of Vicente Fox’s biggest supporters on this score, and at Monterrey he won the Mexican president’s endorsement for the new Bush immigration plan that would shred our borders and swamp the U.S. with millions of new "migrants."