Unfortunately the reprieve will not guarantee immunity from White House pushing drug company protectionism in this agreement or the other agreements that are stepping stones for the hemispheric-wide Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA), said Rob Weissman of Health GAP. The office of USTR is stating its intention to get the negotiations back on track and finalize the agreement this year.

The CAFTA would have established 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. Costa Rica had left the negotiations early citing U.S. demands for opening its telecommunications and insurance industries to foreign competition.

The five countries in Central America dodged a bullet, but the guns are still loaded, said Asia Russell of Health GAP. Lives are at stake in these negotiations. 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.

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.

The Bush Administration, along with all WTO members, signed the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health (Doha Declaration) in November 2001, reaffirming 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.

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 - 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 - beyond the capacity of almost all of the relatively small generic companies - 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.