Dying for Free Trade in Colombia
"Free Trade" deals of course are nothing of the kind. They are, as we learned to our devastation from NAFTA, Kill Jobs and Pollute Workers' Neighborhoods To Enrich the Rich deals.
But the new trade deal proposed between the U.S. and Colombia is far, far worse even than that.
Michael Norby and Brian Fitzpatrick at The Nation:
But in Plaza de Bolívar, the capital’s iconic central square, comes the first sign of the humanitarian crisis that rights groups are struggling to cope with. Fifty or so families line the square holding placards; some grasping pictures of loved ones. A man with a bullhorn is lobbying for attention, determined to convince ambivalent passers-by that reports of a miraculous turnaround in Colombia are greatly exaggerated.
These are a tiny fraction of what is the world’s largest population of internally displaced people, refugees in their own country. According to Colombian NGO Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (CODHES), more than 5.4 million IDPs—over 10 percent of the nation’s entire population—have been displaced since 1985.
While the IDP crisis predates both of their tenures, roughly half have been displaced in the years since Uribe took office in 2002, and the number continues to rise under Santos. According to CODHES, 259,000 additional Colombians became internal refugees in 2011.
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In its 2013 World Report, Human Rights Watch reported that Colombia’s attorney general’s office was investigating 1,727 cases of extrajudicial killings involving almost 3,000 victims, allegedly carried out by state agents between 2004 and 2008. The report also stated that additional cases were reported in 2011 and 2012. As of August of last year, 539 army members (seventy-seven officers) had been convicted—fewer than 10 percent of cases.
A constitutional amendment secured by Santos late last year threatens to transfer cases of military atrocities from civilian courts to the military justice system. HRW says the move “would virtually guarantee impunity for such crimes.” Santos served as defense minister from 2006 to 2009, a period that saw his military implicated in some of the most sordid crimes of the entire conflict.
The ITUC reported that thirty-five unionists were murdered in Colombia in 2012, solidifying the country’s status as the most dangerous place on earth to be a union member. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Colombian unionists have been killed since the late 1980s.
Colombian NGO Somos Defensores reported that attacks on human rights defenders reached a ten-year high in 2012. A total of sixty-nine were murdered, up from forty-nine in 2011. Of 357 total acts of aggression, the Bacrim were blamed for 41 percent, state actors and guerrillas were responsible for 13 percent and 9 percent respectively, and the remaining culprits were unknown.
Once a splintered network of autonomous death squads, the Bacrim are now consolidating and becoming more powerful. A June 2012 report by the International Crisis Group put their numbers between 4,800 and 8,000. Colombian think tank Nuevo Arco Iris reports that the Bacrim have condensed from thirty-three groups in 2006 to just six in 2012 and have expanded their presence to 337 of Colombia’s 1,119 municipalities.
The US State Department has made it illegal for US corporations to associate with the Bacrim, not that the terror tag has stopped them in the past. In 2007, US company Chiquita Brands International was fined $25 million in a plea agreement with the US Justice Department after it admitted paying the AUC, a designated terror group, $1.7 million from 1997 to 2004. The company, then represented by current US Attorney General Eric Holder, claimed extortion, but documents in a current civil lawsuit allege that Chiquita also transported 3,000 Kalashnikov rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition for use by the death squads.
This past December, the Colombian attorney general reopened a criminal investigation into the relationship between the banana giant and the AUC. Other US corporations have been accused of paying death squads to—among other alleged charges—kill trade unionists. Lawsuits against Coca-Cola Bottlers and Dole Food Company were dismissed, but proceedings against Alabama-based Drummond Coal on behalf of victims’ relatives are ongoing.
“It’s really sick,” says Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a strong critic of the CTPA. “US multinationals have been associated with helping to fund some of these paramilitary death squads that are operating in Colombia. You have to understand, the motivation for negotiating these trade agreements on the part of multinational businesses is to drive down their cost of production, take advantage of low wages and take advantage of a totally de-unionized labor environment.”
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Congressman Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, voted against the CTPA and is a member of the Congressional Monitoring Group on Labor Rights in Colombia. He has hosted delegations from affected communities. “They are so courageous, they will even come to America and meet with congressional representatives,” he says. “They know that when they go back, the people who are hurting them know that they have been here.”
The CTPA, he insists, is another nail in their coffin. “It’s economic exploitation. To understand that our government has helped to foster the businesses that exploit people is not something that I am comfortable with at all. That’s why I must continue to speak out.”
Wallach, who has been studying such agreements for twenty years with Global Trade Watch, says she has never seen the merging of a trade agreement with terror like this. Not on this scale. “It’s obscene,” she says. “Colombia is unique. It is above and beyond. I have seen lots of bad things, but Colombia is in a totally different category. We are giving away all potential economic leverage in our relationship with a country that has [a history of] horrific human rights violations.”
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