Senator
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

RE: Stop US-Peru Free Trade Agreement

Dear Senator ,

CAFTA helped cement an uneven playing field in Central America which helps a few people get richer and entrenches the grinding poverty of the great majority of Central Americans.

Now the Administration has signed a free trade agreement with Peru, where more than half of the population lives in poverty. Trade could be an engine to pull millions out of poverty, but this agreement will institutionalize an uneven playing field between the two countries. It will make it virtually impossible for peasant farmers to market their crops. Desperately needed drugs will rocket to unaffordable prices.

I strongly urge you to oppose this agreement.

If passed, the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement will put access to important life-saving drugs at affordable prices out of the reach for the majority of Peruvians. It will make it harder for small-scale farmers in Peru to compete with subsidized agricultural products from the US. It will also weaken the Peruvian government's ability to pass laws to ensure that foreign investment helps promote sustainable development.

This is a bad deal for the vast majority of the people in Peru, and therefore a bad deal for America’s future, since agreements of this type increase illegal immigration into the U.S. and damage the long-term relationship between the U.S. and the people of other nations. Any meaningful discussion of immigration policy must address the root causes of migration. This includes "free trade" policies that have devastated the rural economies of Latin America, leading to millions losing their livelihoods and the doubling of undocumented immigrants from Mexico since NAFTA. Trade policy should improve standards of living, not cause a jump in poverty and desperate migration.

Please do everything you can to stop the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement and any further expansion of the NAFTA model, with its well-documented record of economic damage and dislocation here and abroad.

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