By Greg Spotts

CAFTA is modeled on NAFTA, the 1993 trade agreement that reduced trade barriers between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. CAFTA would expand our regional trading block to six of our southern neighbors: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. With a combined population of 45 million people, these six countries could be a pretty big market for American-made goods…if only they had any money to spend.

The combined Gross Domestic Product of the six CAFTA countries is around $86 billion, less than the Gross State Product of Kansas. That’s right, the state of Kansas, with 3 million people, produces more economic activity than 45 million Central Americans.

CAFTA’s champions promise us jobs and riches by selling expensive American-made products to Central Americans who earn less than $1 per day. Perhaps the United States might lose a few "low-end" garment and textile jobs, but that will only "free up" Americans to move into "more desirable" kinds of work.

CAFTA’s supporters warn us that time is of the essence, that the United States could be "locked-out" if we let other nations rush into our backyard to take advantage of the huge opportunities in the Central American market. Failure to ratify the treaty would send a "dangerous signal" to the world economic community, and would be tantamount to "turning our backs" on progress and democracy in Central America.

Sound familiar? The same arguments were made for NAFTA twelve years ago, and experience has proven every one of them to be false.

Any way you slice it, NAFTA has been a big loser for American workers and the many communities around our country that depend on manufacturing. Before NAFTA, the United States had a small trade surplus with Mexico. Now our trade deficit with Mexico is more than $40 billion per year.

We run a trade deficit with Mexico in many of the world’s most important high-tech industries: motor vehicles ($27 billion), televisions and VCR’s ($7.7 billion), telecommunications equipment ($2.2 billion) and medical devices ($1.3 billion). Rather than selling our innovations to Mexican consumers, we’ve moved some of our best industrial production to Mexico and now ship the finished product right back across the border.

As American factories shut down and move to Mexico, the economic impact on blue-collar Americans has been devastating. The U.S. government has identified 525,000 layoffs that are a direct result of NAFTA, including 164,000 lost jobs in garment and textiles, 22,000 lost jobs in auto parts and 13,600 lost jobs in circuit boards. Americans in the hard-hit states of Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Texas are using words like "deindustrialization" to describe their hollowed-out communities. It turns out we did need those manufacturing jobs, every one of them, as we have not been able to generate enough good-paying jobs to replace the ones we’ve lost.

The bigger picture isn’t looking so pretty either. Inflation is rising faster than wages, and the value of the U.S. dollar has plummeted. The U.S. trade deficit for February set an all-time record, putting us on course for a $700 billion trade deficit for the year. America’s exports are stagnant while imports continue to surge, especially from China, a country that uses currency manipulation, intellectual property theft and systematic customs violations to game the system in every way possible. Meanwhile, white-collar jobs in call centers, computer programming, engineering, accounting and the financial sector are moving to India, the Philippines and other low-wage havens.

Twisting the knife in the back of the American worker, CAFTA’s supporters are now saying that "a vote against CAFTA is a vote for China," as if China’s export juggernaut would be any way reduced by a trade alliance with Guatemala and Honduras.

The CAFTA countries are decades away from becoming viable consumers of American-made goods. Through the Caribbean Basin Initiative, we’ve already provided them with preferential access to the U.S. market as a means to stimulate economic growth in our hemisphere.

Let’s prioritize and face our urgent problems head-on. We must confront China and revamp our failed trade relationship with Mexico. With the American economy slowly bleeding from a thousand cuts, it’s time to reject a failed strategy and go back to the drawing board. There’s no need to rush into CAFTA.

Our neighbors to the south will be ready, willing and able to take a second look at an expanded trade relationship once we’ve put our own house in order. Perhaps down the road these countries might be willing to put in place more rigorous employment, worker safety and environmental protection laws that would promote sustainable rather than exploitative economic development.

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Filmmaker, author and blogger Greg Spotts is author of CAFTA and Free Trade: What Every American Should Know and WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price, the forthcoming companion book to the fall documentary by Robert Greenwald. Find out more at: www.gregspotts.com.