The owners of two small North Carolina textile companies said Tuesday they're not interested in the message of visiting Honduran president Ricardo Maduro.

The proposed free trade agreement he's promoting between the U.S. and six Central American and Caribbean countries -- including Honduras -- is bad for business.

"CAFTA is NAFTA on steroids," said Amy Daugherty, the owner of Miami Thread Co. in Drexel, where she employs 15 workers.

NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, between the U.S., Mexico and Canada, is similar to the Central American Free Trade Agreement that Maduro and the leaders of five other nations are promoting this week before meeting Thursday with President Bush.

Maduro had a morning stop in Alabama at which he called the agreement a "main pillar" of stability in his region that could help strengthen fledgling democracies in Latin America.

"I guarantee you if we lose more democracies in Central America, that is going to be bad news for the United States," said Maduro, a former Xerox executive who graduated from Stanford University.

The trade agreement would eliminate duties on most American products, promote U.S. investment and increase protections for U.S. intellectual property.

Daugherty was joined at a news conference by Charles Saunders, president of Gastonia-based Saunders Thread, and officials from the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, which labeled the agreement a "job killer" filled with loopholes designed to encourage the offshoring of American jobs.

The coalition said that since the enactment a decade ago of the North American Free Trade Agreement, jobs in the U.S. textile and apparel manufacturing industry had gone from 1.5 million to 666,500.

The objections of the two textile companies' owners run counter to the National Council of Textile Organizations, which is supporting the deal, as is Bush.

"They are shortsighted and they've probably been made some promises by the administration," Saunders said. "As in the past, they will not be kept."