Emergency Rally for Human Rights in Colombia (Photo: mar is sea Y)
At the Summit of the Americas in April, US president Barack Obama announced that a free trade agreement with the host country, Colombia, would go into effect on the 15th May 2012, months earlier than expected. The agreement, originally signed in 2006, has stretched over two US administrations, reputedly due to Colombia’s notoriously poor record on workers rights, with the highest level of trade union deaths worldwide.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama publicly opposed a bilateral agreement in a televised debate against John McCain, vowing that he would not push the deal forward until he was “certain they are not killing union leaders.” Four years later, in the face of mounting economic pressure, the Democrats have dismissed previous qualms, seizing the opportunity to intensify trade and investment, on the grounds that Colombia has made “historic progress in workers protections and human rights.”
For Angela María Orozco, a former Colombian minister of trade, the postponement of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is due largely to the “extreme polarity of party politics” in the US; as well as to “Colombia’s delay in negotiating the deal.”
Figures reveal that violence against unionists is slowly being curbed in what is considered to be South America’s most pro-US nation. But, with 40 trade unionists killed in the last year alone, 60% of the total global figure according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), exercising labour rights in Colombia is still a highly precarious act.
Agricultural Exports
Over the past decade, improved security and foreign investment have bolstered the Colombian economy, which has an expected growth rate of 4.7% in the next year, according to IMF figures. The US has, however, lost US$1bn in agricultural exports to Colombia over a two-year period due to regional accords and international competition.
Total US agricultural exports to Colombia plummeted from US$1.8bn in 2008 to US$827m in 2010, while Argentina’s agricultural exports to Colombia rose from US$457m in 2008 to $1bn in 2010, according to a report by the US Senate foreign relations committee. Colombia currently applies tariff protections on all agricultural produce, including some of over 100%. The FTA will provide duty-free access on 77% of all agricultural products, accounting for 52% of US exports to Colombia.
Farm workers carry sacks of coffee beans in Colombia's southwestern Cauca department. (Photo:Neil Palmer (CIAT))
In the short term, Orozco predicts, “displaced employment” is probable. But, she argues, “in the medium and long term, this will mean greater competitiveness for the country and will bring in foreign investment, both from the US and from other countries which have trade agreements with Colombia.”
In October, Obama stated that the implementation of the agreement “will significantly boost exports that bear the proud label ‘Made in America’, support tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs and protect labour rights, environmental and intellectual property.”
The ratification of the FTA is a victory for Obama, and for advocates of the belief that foreign trade can prop up the US economy in the face of rising protectionism across party lines. But the economic benefits of the removal of trade tariffs are reported to be “negligible” for the country, according to a federal agency estimate in 2007, with an increase in gross domestic product of US$14.4bn, or approximately 0.1%.
Moreover, the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), a trade preference system designed to promote alternatives to illegal drug production, already boasts Colombian exports.
Many US exports to Colombia, on the other hand, are subject to duties as high as 35%, which has caused the US business community to argue that the FTA would put US producers on a level playing field, granting them equal access to Colombian markets.
At a time when Latin America is deepening regional integration, cultivating strong ties with Colombia is seen as a strategic move on the part of the US government. One which, undoubtedly, bears domestic political currency in the lead up to the 2012 presidential elections.
Colombia might also thank China for the ratification of the agreement. Evidence from the US Senate foreign relations committee forecasts that China, already Colombia’s second largest trading partner, will oust the US if an agreement is not implemented.
Obama’s support for the measures has provoked outrage among his political base, including labour groups who fear that foreign competition will lead to unemployment back home. According to US union leader Richard Trumka, the signing of the agreement is “deeply disappointing and troubling” since it “perpetuates a destructive economic model that expands the rights and privileges of big businesses and multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment.”
Violence and Impunity
Since 1991, Colombia’s National Trade Union School (ENS) estimates there have been 2,245 killings, 3,400 threats and 138 enforced disappearances of trade unionists in the country. Impunity in these cases is over 90%. The Attorney General’s Office, which oversees the prosecution of such crimes, has opened investigations into more than 1,300 cases of anti-union violence. However, of the 298 cases of trade unionist murders between 2002 and 2004 under investigation, only four have resulted in a sentence, that is to say, just over 1.3%.
Human Rights March against the violence in Bogotá 2009 (Photo courtesy Nuevo Arco Iris)
According to Luis Celis, the political coordinator of NGO Nuevo Arco Iris, the high level of violence is attributed to the “affiliation of local governments, armed forces and police with the paramilitaries.” Moreover, the persistence of the armed conflict and territorial struggles are also contributive factors.
In response to increasing pressure from the US, the Colombian government has launched a new Labour Ministry to oversee the Action Plan Related to Labour Rights, initiated in April 2011.
For Orozco, the trade agreement has prompted measures which will ensure a “greater transparency and flexibility in administrative procedures.”
But, Celis argues, institutional impunity is still entrenched in the system and continues to “generate a logic of violence. The government needs to send out a message that trade unionists’ crimes will not go unpunished, strengthening the physical, political and judicial protection of trade unionists,” if this is to change.
“The aim is to reduce the death toll to zero,” says Celis. Such was the case in Guatemala, leading up to the ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2006. But since its implementation, trade union violence has skyrocketed and corporate rights remain prioritised above labour concerns.
Human rights activists have argued that while the Action Plan requires Colombia to create new programmes nominally dedicated to protecting unionists, it sets no benchmarks for reducing the homicide rate. They have petitioned accordingly for a number of guarantees built into the agreement, including a mechanism which would void the agreement in the event that violence escalates again.
The US government has refused to meet with the request. But, in an attempt to fend off opposition, the Obama administration has established various programmes by which workers, displaced by foreign competition, are offered retraining schemes and financial aid.
Harmonising Intellectual Property
Besides the controversial lack of union safeguards, the FTA also demands that Colombia abide by US intellectual property legislation.
The copyright bill Lleras 2.0 was pushed through Congress in just 18 days, the shortest period of time on record for a piece of legislation to be passed in Colombia. Critics have challenged the legislation on the grounds that it concentrates on importing homogenised US-style cyber enforcement procedures, while failing to provide protections and limitations for producers and consumers.
In response, a group of international academics have sent a letter to the Colombian legislature, asking them to recalibrate the balance between rights holders and other citizens by introducing flexible limitations and exceptions into the national law. Sean Flynn, a US expert in intellectual property, considers Colombia to be a “starting point in the global ramping up of intellectual property protections through trade agreements” which will lead to a “harmonisation of US norms.”
Encoded in FTAs are regulations which concentrate solely on obligations with regard to proprietor rights, while failing to safeguard other interests that include free expression, access to educational materials and technological innovation, as enshrined in the US Fair Use system.
Intellectual property governs creativity, free expression and innovation, that is to say, domestic policies. According to Flynn, a “one-size-fits-all intellectual property protection law” is likely to harm recipient countries developmentally and hamper economic growth, as well as market opportunities for US pharmaceutical companies and internet service providers.
Regional Alternatives
The revival of support for free trade, initiated by the Bush administration in 2006, comes at a time when both Democrats and right-wing Republicans have adopted anti-trade positions, albeit on different grounds.
Such agreements, which eliminate tariffs and other policies protecting domestic produce, are generally considered to benefit developing nations by creating a common market which jumpstarts industry and reduces poverty. But it is equally clear from recent studies that such deals are also liable to create “enclave economies,” the benefits of which are confined to the international sector and do not translate into growth and prosperity, as is the case with NAFTA in Mexico.
While FTAs continue to require developing countries to eliminate or reduce protection on agricultural and manufacturing exports, they perpetuate an economic model that plays straight into the hand of multinational corporations at the expense of local workers, thus reinforcing US dependency.
Latin America’s internal trade accounts for only 22% of its total commerce. But the increasing presence of Mercosur and the Community of Latin American States and the Caribbean (CELAC), recently created in response to the global economic crisis, is gradually shifting the regional economic landscape. Such blocs offer less rigid, regional alternatives in the face of deepening trade imbalance with the US, carving out a space for burgeoning economies to compete on a level playing field.
“The current commercial networks in Latin America offer enormous opportunities for increasing manufactured exports and added value, since they are the primary consumers of Colombian products,” says Orozco. “Creating a cohesive value chain within the hemisphere” is a priority for the immediate future.
Click here to find out what Argentines think about free trade agreements between Latin American countries and the US.
