"Freetrade" With Colombia: Double Speak, Deadly Silence and Deception

[Judi Lynn]

"Freetrade" With Colombia: Double Speak, Deadly Silence and Deception
Written by Raul Fernandez and Daniel Whitesell
Friday, 25 April 2008

Something peculiar happens in United States political and media circles when the discussion is about "free trade" with Colombia.

Take for instance the topic of labor conditions. We have grown accustomed to serious and needed condemnations against child labor, sweatshop conditions, etc, when discussing trade issues with China, Thailand and other countries. This is as it should be.

The same labor conditions obtain in Colombia as well. For example independent research sources estimate that there are at least 2.5 million children working in Colombia today, and that only 1 of every 5 children is working legally. In oil companies such as British Petroleum, Natural Gas of Spain, Shell and others, unions are prohibited. In the large chain supermarkets in Bogotá and other major cities workers who bag groceries work for tips alone. In American, Colombian and Spanish banks unions have been eliminated. The right to collective bargaining and the right to strike are denied to government employees. Clearly labor conditions in Colombia are deplorable.

U.S. media and political circles discuss labor in Colombia as part of debates over a free trade agreement. But unlike the approach used with other countries, commentators focus on only one thing, namely, the fact that it is dangerous in Colombia to become a labor organizer because your life is at risk. This is not to be minimized. But what is peculiar is the macabre calculus of death used by some commentators when arguing that because murders of Colombian unionists decreased from 275 in 1996 to 39 in 2007, labor conditions in Colombia have somehow improved. They have not. The reduction in the total number of union leaders killed (still horrific by any interpretation) reflects the efficacy of state-allowed terror, not of the judicial system. In a rhetorical sleight-of-hand it appears that, for Colombia, as long as the rate of murders linked to labor meets an "acceptable" limit, other miserable conditions for workers can be ignored and a "free trade" agreement with Colombia should be supported.

Let's turn to the issue of human rights crises. We hear about them, as we should, in the media everyday. We know about the suffering of peoples in Darfur caught in a cross-fire. Elected officials and presidential candidates make statements about Darfur, e.g. Barack Obama has indicated that the United States has a moral obligation to stop humanitarian catastrophes and has repeatedly called for a United Nations protective force on the ground in Darfur. The UN High Commissioner on Refugees just released its annual report on internally displaced people. The number of people forced to leave their homes in 2007 grew to more than 26 million. Darfur leads the list with 5.8 million people displaced. But Colombia is a close second: more than 4 million people displaced, up from 3.8 million the year before. These displaced Colombians, disproportionately Afro-Colombian and Indigenous people, have been forced off their land by violence or the threat of violence from armed guerrillas, vigilante death squads or both. Why does this Colombian refugee tragedy barely get a passing mention by the media or by officials in Washington? Shouldn't elected representatives discussing the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia wonder why millions of people have become homeless in their own land? Isn't that an indication of a major crisis and a nearly lawless state of affairs? The silence on this question is deafening. Apparently some politicians and the media don't want small distractions, like 4 million displaced refugees, to cloud our vision about the benefits of "free trade."

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1250/68/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Workers' Rights: a Good Reason to Oppose Colombia Trade Deal

Workers' Rights: a Good Reason to Oppose Colombia Trade Deal

By Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, The Hill. Posted April 26, 2008.

Congress can show that it's serious about workers' rights by pressing Colombia to change the pattern of violence and paramilitary influence.

Congress is right to delay consideration of the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). What's at stake here is a fundamental principle: that free trade should be premised on respect for human rights, especially the rights of the workers producing the goods to be traded.

Colombian workers cannot exercise their rights without fear of being killed. Just in the first three months of this year, 17 Colombian trade unionists have been assassinated--a substantial increase over the 10 killed in the same period last year.

Many of the killings are committed by paramilitary death squads, which openly admit to deliberately targeting unionists, whom they stigmatize as collaborators of left-wing guerrillas. The New York Times this week described how a unionist was forcibly "disappeared," burned with acid, and killed after he participated in protests against paramilitary violence last month.

Despite thousands of reported unionist killings in the last two decades, in only 68 cases has anyone ever been convicted in connection with the killings. Nearly half of those convicted have served no prison time. Others are serving dramatically reduced sentences: for example, paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso, who was recently convicted of ordering the killing of the two-year old granddaughter of a trade unionist, could be free by 2010 under Colombia's "Justice and Peace Law."

More:
http://www.alternet.org/audits/83595/

[bemildred]

2. "Free trade" agreements are really "cheap labor" and "captive market" agreements. nt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Readers' comments on Nicholas Kristof's article pimping "free trade" with Colombia

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/your-comments-on-my-colombia-column/#comments

Note the ratio of pro to anti articles, with the "antis" gaining strength toward the end.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Wow! If I hadn't read the letters to Kristof up to the point I saw this one, wouldn't have learned

about the fact Colombian Vice President Santos also has a cousin as a cabinet member, and a cousin who runs the country's only notable newspaper. Jesus.

Dear Mr. Kristof,

You have repeated a fallacy that began with a column by Mr. Alfredo Rangel in El Tiempo here in Bogotá, where I have lived as an expat now for 10 years. Ex-Minister Rudolf Hommes, an economist and no enemy of free-trade, rebutted Mr. Rangel’s assertion that the murder rate among union members was just 4 per 100,000 in El Tiempo, and chastised him for abusing statistics. That statistic is as compared to the population as a whole, while if we want to know the probability of being assassinated while a union member (or to increase, go to union leader), we must divide over the union member population, in which case we get a much higher number. A lack of an accurate number of these populations did not allow Hommes to rebut Mr. Rangel’s statistic with another, but the point is made. Mr. Rangel’s (farcical) bewilderment and amazement that union members were safer was simply a statistical manipulation.

Let’s add to that the situation where now 60 Congress-members (almost all Uribe-allies) are now under formal investigation for paramilitary ties. Let’s also add the fact that Uribe claims there are no paramilitaries any longer in Colombia, although the Episcopal Conference is complaining that their peace efforts in Magdalena Medio are now being targeted with death threats (including 2 priests directly being threatened). Uribe will not even go so far as to concede that there is a conflict in Colombia.

Putting aside the FTA merits and demerits, myself I am a free-trader and an economist as well, I insist that a columnist for a publication such as the NYT must be a little more reflective on the positions held by Obama and HRC regarding their other positions. Colombia’s ruling class (including the 2 Santos cousins who are VP and Min of Defense, and their cousin who runs El Tiempo, the only major newspaper) must be quite happy with the picture they are apparently painting successfully, albeit wrongly, about the conflict here.

Best,

JRV

— Posted by JR

This is a terrific letter!

Santos, the one who's pouting.
So mature!



He's not to be confused with American "comedian" (in his own mind) Marty Allen,
seen here dancing with former first lady, Betty Ford, at the White House.

On edit:
I'll finish reading the letters later, as I have to run, but these comments are an education. It's easy to see how exceptionally stupid some of the pro-FTA wingers are, and how deceitful the rest of them are. What a creepy bunch of people.
I'm down to posts #129, and can't just close the book on the rest of them. It's almost like a murder mystery! I'll have to finish later this evening.

It's disheartening to see so many voices for self-interest speaking out, but it's also great to see how many deeper, truer, more important points are being aired, and established by the decent people who really matter. Their posts have a ring of maturity, a larger vision, and they come from a superior moral perspective after all, don't they? Thanks for the link, it's worth reading all the way to the end.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Then you haven't gotten to my comment yet

:-)

I'm #150.