WASHINGTON - A bitterly fought trade accord with six Latin American nations won House passage by the narrowest of margins Thursday morning after Republicans held the vote open well past the usual 15 minutes to muster enough members of their party to ensure approval.

When time for the vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement expired at 11:17 p.m. local time, the nays outnumbered the yeas by 180 to 175. But, a few minutes past midnight, the GOP leadership, ignoring Democratic protests that the rules were being violated, had rounded up enough votes to win by 217 to 215.

The House vote was effectively the last hurdle - and by far the steepest - facing CAFTA, which will tear down barriers to trade and investment between the United States, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., said the Bush administration and Republican leaders strong-armed Republican House members into voting for CAFTA. He said they used highway funds and the threat of stripping chairmanships from Republican House members if they didn't support CAFTA.

"I've seen the Republican leadership break arms on close votes before, but nothing quite this ugly," Pomeroy said.

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Although the deal was approved by the Senate last month, it was overwhelmingly opposed by House Democrats who contend that it is wrong to strike a free-trade pact with poor countries lacking strong protection for worker rights. During Wednesday night's debate, which lasted 2 1/2 hours, the intensity of their opposition shone through in emotional condemnations such as that by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who thundered: "CAFTA is for multinational companies who want to make a profit by shutting plants in the United States and moving to places with cheap labor."

To win, the White House and GOP congressional leaders had to overcome resistance from dozens of Republican members who were also concerned about the agreement because of issues ranging from the perceived threat to the U.S. sugar industry to more general worries about the impact of global trade on U.S. jobs.

Before the vote, GOP leaders, who had negotiated a number of deals in recent days to sway Republicans, made it clear they were prepared to twist arms and, if necessary, extend the voting period.

"It will be a tough vote, but we will pass CAFTA tonight," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, told reporters Wednesday morning. "And we will do it with very few Democrats on board." Asked how long the vote would be kept open, DeLay replied, "When we get to 218," one vote in excess of a majority.

Underscoring the importance President Bush attaches to the pact, he put his prestige on the line by making a rare appearance with Vice President Dick Cheney during the weekly closed-door meeting of the House Republican Conference. The president spoke for an hour, lawmakers said, stressing the national security implications of CAFTA, which are rooted in the concern that growing anti-American sentiment in Latin America may flourish if the United States refuses to open its markets wider to the nations that negotiated the pact.

"Mothers and fathers in El Salvador love their children as much as we love our children here," Bush said, stressing the need to look out for the young democracies in "our neighborhood," according to lawmakers. He also noted that four of the six countries - the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua - have assisted the U.S. military effort in Iraq.

Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said earlier Wednesday that much like the North American Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA is being oversold to Americans. For the first time in 50 years, this year the United States will import more agricultural goods than it exports, Peterson said. He fears CAFTA will only add to the growing trade deficit.

"I'm all for trade, but we've got to be smart about this. We just keep giving everything away," said Peterson of Minnesota's 7th District, who represents the largest sugar- producing district in the nation.

Approval of CAFTA handed a victory to Bush at a time when his clout on Capitol Hill has been called into question, and it also gave a badly needed boost to his broader free-trade agenda. The White House is hoping to hammer out a free-trade accord encompassing all the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

More important, it wants to successfully conclude the negotiations under way in the World Trade Organization to lower trade barriers on a global basis. A failure to push the much smaller CAFTA through Congress would have seriously dashed hopes for those deals.

Those considerations turned CAFTA into a political battleground far out of proportion to its economic significance. Proponents touted the six countries involved as constituting the second largest market for U.S. goods in Latin America after Mexico, absorbing $15 billion in U.S. exports last year. But that is just a little more than 1 percent of the $1.15 trillion in total U.S. exports.

Democrats and their union backers fear that congressional approval of the accord will signal that free-trade deals are possible with almost any country, no matter how low its wages or how inadequate its labor protections. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., warned that the political consequences will come back to haunt Bush.

"It will be a pyrrhic victory for him, because we will take our message to the American people that we are the ones looking out for them," Pelosi said before the debate.

In Wednesday night's debate, proponents cited the fact that CAFTA is the latest in a series of free-trade deals with individual countries - including Jordan, Singapore, Chile and Australia - that Congress has approved in recent years. They demanded to know why opponents would not give the same favorable treatment to neighboring countries. Although CAFTA might not be perfect, "On the whole this agreement does much more for Central America than we will have the opportunity to do for a long time to come," said Rep. James P. Moran Jr., D-Va.

Supporters also hammered home the argument that most imported goods from Central America already enter the U.S. market duty-free, under the Caribbean Basin Initiative. CAFTA "levels the playing field," contended Rep. Ron Lewis, R-Ky., because it would immediately eliminate the tariffs imposed by Central American nations on 80 percent of their industrial imports from the United States, and 50 percent of the agricultural imports.

Opponents retorted that CAFTA differs from accords such as the ones with Morocco and Australia. "This is the first agreement in which we would move backwards in enforcing international labor standards," said Rep. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., noting that the provisions requiring Central American countries to protect worker rights are weaker than those under the Caribbean initiative.

Others drew on the unpopularity of an older free-trade deal - the one with Mexico, which is often blamed, rightly or wrongly, for the loss of jobs south of the border. "CAFTA is NAFTA's ugly cousin," said Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., R-N.C., who said he was speaking on behalf of "the 200,000 North Carolinians who have lost their jobs due to NAFTA."

But the critics were unable to prevail in the face of the GOP leaders' legislative steamroller.

Pro-CAFTA forces gained additional momentum Wednesday afternoon when the House passed, 255 to 168, a bill that would give U.S. firms expanded means to seek duties on imports from China and other "non-market" economies. The bill was promised by GOP leaders to Rep. Phil English, R-Pa., in exchange for his vote in favor of CAFTA, together with those of a handful of others from industrial states. Democrats had blocked the bill Tuesday when it came to the floor under special rules requiring a two-thirds vote, but it sailed through Wednesday under the regular rules.

Pomeroy said sugar put up a good fight and that the Bush administration will likely think twice before offering further trade agreements that are detrimental to sugar.

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