"Free Trade" hurts women, families and traditional ways of life and local economies. We cannot build a peaceful world when transnational corporations negotiate agreements with governments that treat people as commodities, dismantle local economies, and "mine" natural resources needed by local and regional communities, and will move operations as soon as labor organizes leaving local peoples without a way to make a living.

One of the significant effects of globalized markets is the large scale migration, often illegal, that draws people toward international borders. The impact of this clustering of people creates situations conducive to such heinous phenomenon as the Femicide occuring in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico/El Paso, New Mexico, USA.

Andean "Free" Trade Agreement (AFTA) Negotiations took place in Tucson from November 30 through December 4th. Code Pink joined together with other local Tucson-based groups to create a No AFTA Alliance. Within this group's actions CODEPINK facilitated THE GLOBAL UNEMPLOYMENT LINE to symbolize the destruction of workers lives, families, livelihoods and communities throughout the Americas due to "Free" Trade that benefit only the transnational corporations.

• Corporate economies destroy sustainable economies. Unstable economies promote violence at all levels of society. These corporate economies are ultimatelysustained by dispatching troops (aka "war") to support the economic interests of those transnational corporations.
  
• Women are among the first to feel the negative impact of transnational corporations presence in their communities. Fatima Mello, the spokeswoman for the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Poor, said free trade agreements "would have definite winners and losers. In Brazil, the winners are the big business elites." "The agreement will (render) family agriculture uncompetitive so the winners will be large agribusinesses." Family equals women and children too, not just male laborers.
• Long-term consequences include: break-up, displacement and migration which isolates emigrant women from the safety of familial and community support structures.
• CODEPINK Tucson is autonomous as are all CODEPINK groups, there are no �official� endorsements or actions. We are just women working together to build personal, social, and political peace. Tucson is a border community so our concerns often reflect border issues and international issues.

Copies of fliers promoting the Global Unemployment Line

Download THIS MS Word 2 page (double sided) quarter-sheet (4 to a page) flier.

Download the GUL Pink Slip.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
On the Impact of Free Trade on Women and Families

FILM

"Se�orita Extraviada, Missing Young Woman", a film by Lourdes Portillo, tells the story of the over 370 kidnapped, raped and murdered young women of Juarez, Mexico. "It is the story of the underbelly of our global economy."

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS

To Die a Little: Migration and Coffee in Mexico and Central America. Special Report of the Americas Program by Luis Hern�ndez Navarro. December 13, 2004

ARTICLES

Links Between Global Trade and Poverty. Speech given to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, on May 14, 2003 by Ritu Sharma.