The 434-page draft of the agreement was posted Wednesday on the Web site of the Free Trade Area of the Americas secretariat.

In a statement, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick called the release of the negotiating text an unprecedented effort to make international trade and its economic and social benefits understandable to the public.

President Bush and leaders of the 33 other nations involved in the negotiations had pledged at an April summit meeting in Quebec to make the negotiating document public after thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators had protested in the streets over what they called seven years of secret negotiations.

Critics said their initial look at the documents on Tuesday did not allay their concerns that environmental and labor rights were being sacrificed in the pursuit of free trade.

Under this anti-environmental, antidemocratic trade agreement, multinational investors will have the right to sue governments and challenge environmental laws and regulations before secret and unaccountable international tribunals, said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizens Global Trade Watch, said that the heavily bracketed text, indicating language still in dispute, showed how little progress negotiators have been able to make despite seven years of effort. None of the brackets indicated which country was backing which position in the disputed portions of the text.

Wallach questioned whether the full negotiating text was being released given that the North American Free Trade Agreement, which covered the United States, Mexico and Canada, was over 700 pages long.

This was supposed to be a PR move aimed at calming FTAA opposition, but the governments have obviously put out a fragment of the total agreement, one that has been sanitized by eliminating vital information, she said.

But U.S. officials insisted that the text that was released is the official negotiating text. They blamed the delay on the need to translate the document into the four FTAA official languages English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, a critic of the administrations trade policies, said he was troubled by the contents of the draft text and the delay in releasing the document. He and 53 other Democrats in Congress had called on the administration to make the document public in March, well before the Quebec summit.

The Bush administration has shown only minimal interest in addressing either the impact of trade on environmental and labor standards or in assuring a reasonable level of transparency and public participation in trade decision-making, Doggett said.

The goal of negotiators is to wrap up discussion in time for the free trade area to go into effect in 2005. But the many brackets in the agreement language underscore how much ground negotiators have to cover to achieve that goal.

The United States is hoping the deal will eliminate Latin Americas high tariffs on American manufactured goods. Brazil, the largest economy in South America, is insisting that the United States reduce its farm subsidies and antidumping rules, which keep out Brazilian products such as steel, sugar and orange juice.