The CAFTA would establish a regional trade agreement between the U.S. and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Four of the six Latin American countries with the highest HIV prevalence are Central American, according to the World Bank.

"Lives are at stake in these negotiations," said Asia Russell of Health GAP. "Generic competition has lowered HIV drug costs within Central America and is beginning to increase access to treatment for some. If Bush gets his way, the CAFTA will lock countries into tough new patent rules that will drive the cost of life saving drugs up and delay or obstruct generic competition."

The Bush Administration, along with all other WTO members, signed the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health (Doha Declaration) in November 2001, under extreme pressure from developing countries and civil society. The Doha Declaration reaffirms WTO member countries' right to break drug company patent monopolies in order to promote access to medicines for all. According to activists, the Bush Administration is disregarding this pledge in the CAFTA by establishing new rules that are tougher than what the WTO requires.

"Bush's CAFTA is a platform to increase the monopoly power of US drug companies," according to Sharonann Lynch. While the actual CAFTA negotiating text is secret, other trade deals such as the US-Chile Free Trade Agreement, and the draft text of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, reveal U.S. trade negotiators are pursuing the same agenda throughout the region, through a number of other bi- and plurilateral agreements in the Western Hemisphere. There are a variety of ways these agreements would interfere with countries' rights to promote generic competition. These include: dramatic limitations to compulsory licensing Ð wherein a government authorizes itself or a third party to make use of an on-patent product, with payment of reasonable compensation to the patent holder. Other provisions would require generic companies to redo costly tests to obtain marketing approval Ð beyond the capacity of almost all of the relatively small generic companies Ð or to delay using the results of tests already completed by brand-name companies for a period of five years, creating patent-like barriers to market entry of generics, even where no patent exists.

"Almost 2 million people in the Caribbean and Central and South America are HIV-positive," said Rob Weissman of Health GAP. "George Bush and US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick would consign tens of thousands of them, or maybe many more, to death Ð simply to serve the short-term profit interests of the brand-name drug companies." Generic competition has driven down the price of AIDS drugs by more than 98 percent, from $10,000 to $140 per person, per year. But those price savings are only available to countries that can use generics, according to the activists.

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