Canada: Fair trade better than free trade for Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Fair trade better than free trade for Colombia
May 21, 2009 04:30 AM

Right Rev. David Giuliano
Moderator of The United Church of Canada

The growing debate about Canada's free-trade deal with Colombia has me thinking about the people I met there during a visit in February 2008 – people and communities whose futures will be impacted by the kind of agreements we make with their government.

Brisas del Mar, in northern Sucre, is one such community. It is a packed-dirt field surrounded by clay-plastered homes with tin or thatch roofs at the end of an almost impassable road. In rainy season, it is a sea of mud. The Methodist congregation has built a clay-plaster church with an excellent thatch roof and a concrete floor. Plastic lawn chairs serve as pews. It is the best building in the village.

A blind girl – I'm guessing she was 14 – sang. Three young men played a guitar, a drum and one of those rhythm instruments that looks like a cheese grater stroked with a hair pick. We prayed and then we moved our chairs into a circle to talk.

We heard heart-wrenching stories about the years of killing, torture and disappearances by the paramilitary. Disappeared sons and daughters. Murdered husbands. One woman told us about the mass graves that were uncovered after the paramilitaries left.

Another talked about the night her daughter was taken from their home by the soldiers. "By the grace of God, she returned to us in the morning," she concluded. The horrors between that night and that morning were left unspoken. I don't know if it was simply too painful to mention or if in Brisas del Mar, the brutality to which she was subjected is already well known by all.

A young man wept as he spoke about the frustration of having lived his whole life under the thumb and then the shadow of the paramilitaries. The psychological and spiritual healing will take generations. Disappearances and murders still happen.

We heard about the challenges still facing the community: inadequate water, poverty, unemployment, no medical care or proper education for the young, and the lingering emotional scars.

Colombia is a country in a severe human rights crisis. The United Nations declares it has the worst record in the Americas. The present government has close ties with Colombia's notorious paramilitary forces, responsible for thousands of disappearances and executions. Under President Alvaro Uribe, more than a million additional people have become internally displaced for a total of 3.7 million. On average, eight civilians are killed each day.

More:
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/637101

[Peace Patriot]

1. Colobmbians, like Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorans, Argentinians, Brazilians,

Paraguayans, Nicaraguans, Uruguayans, Chileans, Hondurans, and most of Latin America is doing, need to look to each other--to Latin America--for Fair Trade. They will NEVER be given a fair deal negotiated by the U.S. or Canadian governments until the people in U.S. and Canada reform our democracies and throw off Corporate Rule. Look at all those utterly phony and hypocritical promises about the U.S./Peru "free trade" deal, which has plunged Peru into civil unrest, with a corrupt government with an approval rating as bad as Bush's. The rich benefit; the poor are fucked over once again.

[romy]

2. as long as the political (elite) class

in Colombia is benefiting from these deals they will continue to be made. Dependency theory with the class corrective explains this well. Be it Canada, the US, or the EU might see the need to show moral superiority, but this doesn't hold for long. The Colombia-EU deal is currently being drafted up very quietly...