And the argument that it was about the principle of the thing might be bolstered by the decision of Rep. Jim Matheson, Utah's lone nominal Democrat in Congress, to support the pact. He did so, he said, because he thought Utah would benefit from the increased exports the deal would encourage, and in spite of the mobilized opposition of his most generous campaign financiers - organized labor.
Standing up to the labor lobbyists may win Matheson points for political courage, particularly if the campaign checks from CAFTA supporters on the business side continue to go to Republicans despite Matheson's standing as one of only 15 Democrats to vote that way.
But even folks who stand on principle can be mistaken on the merits, and both the merits and the demerits of this particular trade deal are hard to detect. In fact, one of the most often heard arguments in favor of approving a deal that formalizes what is already a mostly open trade system among the United States, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua was that it is, to us anyway, insignificant.
Most of the goods those small nations sell to us are already duty-free. The worry that it will mean the export of still more American jobs is real, though perhaps less troubling than the alternative of those jobs being shipped to China.
Whether CAFTA is good or bad, and whether it will or should lead to wider free trade pacts, will depend on other decisions yet to be made. One is whether Congress can stand up to another powerful lobby - agriculture - and end the farm subsidies that are the real knife at the throat of our hemispheric economy.
The combination of CAFTA's lowering of Central American import barriers with long-time U.S. farm subsidies is likely to have the same effect on the farm economies of those nations as it has had on Mexico's - to destroy them and push displaced farmers either into work in American-financed sweat shops or into the growing stream of illegal immigrants to the United States.
Unless we clean up our own act on farm subsidies, and put more pressure on our trading partners to uphold modern labor standards, they won't have the income, and we won't make the sales.
