The new US administration has expressed enthusiasm for closer relations with Latin America. It will take political resolve to turn that enthusiasm into a new generation of free trade agreements.
Economic integration can be a hard sell.
Throughout the region, labor and environmental groups have mobilized against the liberalization agenda. These constituencies, active against the backdrop of a general economic slowdown, have raised viable challenges to the free trade consensus of the 1990s. The political demands of economic integration in the Americas must be met with insight and realism.