A behind-the-scenes look at some of the key globalist architects and apparatchiks responsible for launching and promoting NAFTA, FTAA and other "free trade" traps.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on January 1, 1994, amid great hoopla and promises that it would bring a continuous wave of progress and prosperity to all three nations involved: Mexico, Canada and the United States. Although some U.S. businesses have indeed benefited from the new arrangement, many others have not. Thousands of businesses and millions of jobs, especially in manufacturing, have fled the U.S. for Mexico, China and elsewhere. Many critical skills, technologies and production plants have disappeared from America�s economic landscape.

Another major promise of the "Free Trade" advocates was that once NAFTA went into effect, Mexico would experience dynamic economic growth and, as a result, there would be little or no incentive for Mexicans to move to the U.S. The decades-long massive influx of illegal aliens would end. Unfortunately, that has not been the case; over the past 10 years, the deluge of illegal migrants has grown steadily worse.

Far more serious than NAFTA�s economic and immigration consequences, however, is the dangerous threat it presents to our national sovereignty. As we pointed out during the ratification debate, if NAFTA were truly about freeing up trade, the agreement wouldn�t have required 2,000 pages of legalese establishing dozens of governing councils, committees, commissions, working groups and tribunals concerned not only with trade but also with environmental and labor standards, as well as other matters. Now, the same forces that designed and promoted NAFTA are insisting that it must be "broadened" and "deepened" under the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). By "broadened" they mean that NAFTA must be expanded geographically to include all 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception (for now) of Communist Cuba. And by "deepened" they mean that NAFTA must be strengthened politically to allow for hemispheric governance and regulation on matters of education, health care, immigration, security, population, unemployment, agriculture, workplace safety, transportation, energy � virtually every area that is now under the sovereign jurisdiction of the nation-state and its political subdivisions.

In 1992 and 1993, the campaign to pass NAFTA built to a heated crescendo. However, few American citizens � on either side of the NAFTA debate � realized that the whole process had been put in motion decades before and systematically built into a seemingly unstoppable force. Although Presidents George Bush (the elder) and Bill Clinton were the most visible figures associated with the campaign for NAFTA, they were merely fronting for much more powerful forces operating behind the scenes.

Regular readers of The New American are very familiar with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC), two of the premier organizations dedicated to undermining the U.S. Constitution and submerging the United States in a global government. Leaders and members of these two pillars of the Establishment have provided the critical economic and political impetus for NAFTA and the FTAA.

In addition, there are several organizations focused specifically on Latin America that have provided essential support for the effort to merge the countries of the Western Hemisphere. The most important groups in this category include the Council of the Americas (COA), the Americas Society, and the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD). These organizations, founded by David Rockefeller and dominated by CFR and TC members, have, over the course of the past three decades, drawn many business, political, media and academic leaders in the U.S. and Latin America into the globalist camp. The influence of these groups is immensely enhanced by their close association with central banks, major private U.S. banks, and multilateral lending institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank. (These banking institutions are also dominated by CFR and TC members.)

As a result, what appears to be a popular, widespread and organic "movement" to "integrate" the hemisphere is, in reality, an entirely contrived fa�ade, propped up by a relative handful of one-world elitists, numbering no more than several hundred. Their advantage is that they are very well organized, well funded, and strategically placed in highly leveraged positions of power and influence.

In the remainder of this article we profile key members of this coterie of Insiders who aim at nothing less than the destruction of our freedom. The individuals described below represent a number of different levels and functions in this perfidious plot against America.

� 2004 http://www.stoptheftaa.org/