Colombia Trade Agreement

April 7, 2008

The pending Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is fraught with serious and multifaceted issues.  Some most certainly concern the effects of its provisions on both the United States, particularly our workers, and on the people of Colombia, a highly fractured society. Others demonstrate a pending dispute between the Bush Administration and Congressional leadership. 

It is thought that President Bush, conscious of the Congressional leadership’s mixed reviews of the Colombia FTA and its consequent reluctance to move the agreement, will force the bill, sending it up by April 8. This would give Congress the exact number of legislative days possible under fast-track rules to consider the agreement before September. This would also avoid the countdown to the election, when little legislative activity is presumed.

However, if the President pursues this course and forces Congress to vote on the Colombia FTA, thereby bypassing Congressional leadership, it is likely to face defeat. Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Congress will not be forced into considering the agreement, stating that congressional Democrats have legitimate questions about Colombia’s “troubled history of labor activist assassinations and human rights violations.”  Berman’s assessment was bolstered by Rep. Phil Hare (D-IL), a member of the House Trading Group, which opposes the Colombia FTA.

Rep. Hare, in response to remarks made by President Bush, who characterized Colombia as “our courageous ally in South America” said, “ Colombia is home to the worst violence against union members in the entire world.”  He further noted that “in Colombia thirty nine trade unionists were murdered in 2007, and another 10 to date in 2008. Of the more than 2500 murders of trade unionists since 1986, only 80 cases – around 3 percent- have resulted in convictions.”

Another legislator, Rep. Payne (D-NJ) sponsored House-passed Congressional Resolution 618, which highlighted the historical racism, exclusion and poverty experienced by the Afro-Colombian community.

Meanwhile, the administration has led congressional delegations to Colombia to meet with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, as well as Colombian labor leaders and the business community. These efforts are bolstered by Republicans who portray the Colombia FTA as a vote against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, from whom military action against Colombia was predicted last month. However, these legislators fail to see the brutal totality of the implementation of a trade agreement with a nation historically so fractured in its commitment to human rights.

NETWORK is working in conjunction with the Interfaith Working Group on International Trade and Investment hosted Elizabeth Garcia Carrillo, an Afro-Indigenous Colombian lawyer. While visiting Members of Congress whom the administration had taken to Colombia, she described in vivid and frightening detail the early effects of the investment provisions in the trade agreements on her people in northern Colombia. Lands held by these people are being wrested from them to provide for the “investments” of corporations. Resistance is met by brutality from Colombian paramilitary troops.

It is incumbent on U.S. citizens to demand a rethinking of U.S. trade policy. Trade should be a vehicle of positive development for both signatories to an agreement. Current U.S. trade policy fails that test and must be redesigned.