Colombia Free Trade Deal Could Boost Cocaine Exports

Published on Monday, May 9, 2011
by OtherWords
Colombia Free Trade Deal Could Boost Cocaine Exports
There's only one Colombian industry that can potentially employ workers who would lose their job in the wake of a free trade deal.
by Jess Hunter-Bowman

Manuel Esteban Tejada was a teacher in the Colombian province of Cordoba, near the Panamanian border. Unfortunately for him, he was also a union member. On January 10, paramilitary gunmen broke into his house at 6 a.m. and shot him multiple times, killing him.

Tejada was the first trade unionist killed in Colombia in 2011, but not the last. At least five more have already been killed this year. Colombian and international labor officials report that 51 unionized workers in Colombia were killed in 2010--25 of them teachers. More union members were killed in Colombia last year than in the rest of the world combined.

The fact that Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world to belong to a union hasn't kept President Barack Obama from backing a free-trade deal with the South American nation that would further erode labor rights and wages.

Obama and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos recently announced a labor rights "action plan" as a ploy to gain congressional votes in favor of the controversial deal. The Obama administration hopes this effort, which would do virtually nothing to deal with the violence targeting labor leaders, will convince some Democrats to hold their noses and vote for the trade deal, despite Colombia's deadly labor track record.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/09-11

On both sides! Or lose/lose, depending on how you look at it.

"Countries that enter (U.S. "free trade for the rich") agreements can no longer protect strategic industries and sectors to ensure they are competitive. // For example, once Mexico eliminated corn tariffs and quotas under NAFTA guidelines, an estimated 2 million Mexican corn farmers went bankrupt. They simply couldn't compete with U.S. corn prices. // Research has shown that 1.8 million Colombian farmers will see their net income fall 17 percent if the U.S.-Colombia trade deal is enacted. An estimated 400,000 will see their net incomes fall by between 48 percent and 70 percent.

"When Colombian farmers are pushed out of grain farming due to cheap U.S. imports, expect them to face a terrible choice. They'll either lose their farm, join the vast ranks of Colombia's unemployed, and watch their children drop out of school and become malnourished--or switch to farming coca crops to stay on their farm, keep their kids in school, and put food on their tables."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/09-11

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Jeez. There is no end to the diabolical aspects of U.S. (transglobal corporate/war profiteer) relations with Colombia. First they use our $7 BILLION in military aid to slaughter thousands of trade unionists, teachers, human rights workers, political leftists, peasant farmers and others--decapitating the grass roots leadership in the countryside--and to displace five MILLION peasant farmers from their lands--giving the lands to rightwing cronies, big drug lords and other shits--now this. They've driven millions of small farmers into urban squalor, to create a big slave labor pool for multinational corporations, and some of those will be driven back out and into slave labor for the big, protected drug lords, or, if they're "lucky," will be able to create a small coca leaf farm for themselves, if they manage to get their land back or weren't in the path of the Colombia/U.S. war machine and retained their little plots.

It's a twist that I didn't know about, when I guessed that Uribe's other job was to consolidate the trillion dollar+ cocaine trade into fewer hands and direct its profits to U.S. banksters, the CIA and the Bush Cartel. This is yet another flourish on that hypothesis--to dramatically INCREASE the cocaine revenue stream due to the pressure on the poor from U.S. "free trade for the rich," which will not, and has never, created decent jobs for ANYBODY except the managerial class/urban elite, and even many of them get used, abused and discarded.

the dictators of Columbia against the other leaders who are fighting for rights of their people? It must be corporate lust of some kind.

exploit the extremely poor laborers, hire paramilitaries to assassinate union workers, keep the workers in fear, and they all make out like bandits.

Congressional Democrats have tried to make a stand against the FTA looming, based on Colombia's evil record of torturing and assassinating union workers, but they aren't getting support from the President, himself, who is getting vicious pressure from the right-wing about it. At one time he stood with the Congressional Democrats on this.

Absolutely horrid, inhuman, dirty beyond words.