I think that's actually a great model and one we should look at, because the underlying assumption of the FTA approach has been that we offer access to our markets and to our investment. The countries will line up and try to create the conditions that make them most attractive to our investors. There will be a competition, a competitive liberalization process by which countries attempt to make themselves as attractive as possible to our investors and seek to negotiate agreements with us. That was supposed to result, ultimately, in a free trade agreement of the Americas.
I think the fact that it hasn't happened is a consequence of a couple of things. One element is that the record of market liberalization has not been sufficiently robust. People have not seen the benefits of free trade and market liberalization to the point that they're willing to support these agreements as a way of getting toward a hemispheric agreement.
For example, we're negotiating bilaterally because we can't negotiate with the Andean region, as a region, because the Andean bloc is now divided. You have Chavez, on the one hand, who has pulled out of the Andean Community of Nations; and you have other countries that have different views, between Peru and Ecuador, and so forth. Really, the whole process of integrating the hemisphere around free trade seems to have fizzled, and the most visible evidence of that is that the FTAA itself is dead.
I want to say, very quickly, on the question of democracy, that Peru has made great strides towards democracy. Canada played a big role with our high-level mission and supporting, through the OAS, the transition to democracy in 2000 and 2001. Since that time we've seen a number of elections that have been free and fair, and really, this is to be celebrated and encouraged. I think it's great that the Canadian government wants to promote and assist democracy.
At the electoral level, democracy is pretty robust, although one has to recognize that there are a million people who don't have IDs, so can't vote, and a quarter of a million people don't even have birth certificates. People sometimes have to walk for days to get to polling stations to vote. But I think the real problem is that with that level of social exclusion, with the degree of marginalization in some communities, the electoral mechanisms of democracy are not enough. That's where we're seeing this experimentation with more participatory instruments, and that's where there exists a profound tension between the initiatives for participation, on the one hand, and instruments such as the free trade agreement.