Public Comments
August 26, 2009
Oregon Fair Trade Campaign Comments in Opposition to the Colombia Free Trade Agreement
Re: Docket ID: USTR-2009-0021-0001
The Oregon Fair Trade Campaign (ORFTC) is a coalition of more than twenty-five labor, environmental and human rights organizations, which together represent nearly 200,000 people across the state of Oregon. Our members are unified in their steadfast opposition to the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, and appreciate this opportunity to speak out against it.
Trade cannot be “free” when working people are denied their basic freedoms of speech and assembly. Since 1991, more than 2,300 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia for attempting to exercise these basic human rights. ORFTC opposes the approval of any free trade arrangement with Colombia until the violence against trade unionists there is brought to an end, the perpetrators are brought to justice, and the country’s unionization rates begin to climb back to their historic levels.
Passing the Colombia Free Trade Agreement under the current circumstances would reward human rights violators by granting them permanent reduced-tariff access to U.S. markets. As explained below, implementation of this FTA could also make the ongoing violence in Colombia even worse.
These comments answer many of the questions posed in the Federal Register notice regarding violence against trade unionists in Colombia, and in doing so, provide justification for our position that no FTA be approved until on-the-ground human rights abuses in Colombia are resolved. Nonetheless, we believe the proposed FTA has numerous additional problems that should be addressed, even if this more-difficult prerequisite is met.
One of the most damaging affects of the North American Free Trade Agreement has been the way in which subsidized agricultural exports from the United States have displaced Mexican producers.
It is a trend that is also beginning to play out in other Latin American nations under the Central America Free Trade Agreement. According to Colombia’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the proposed Colombia trade pact would cause a 35% decline in agricultural employment in conflict-ridden regions of Colombia, leaving the unemployed with little choice but “migration to cities or other countries (especially the United States), working in drug cultivation zones, or affiliating with illegal armed groups.”
Given the experiences in other countries under similar trade pacts, it seems likely that the Colombia FTA will only exacerbate the ongoing human rights catastrophe in Colombia—setting back ongoing U.S. efforts at drug eradication, immigration control and peace.
President Obama acknowledged this general issue when, in June 2008, he told a reporter: “Not only did [NAFTA] have an adverse affect on certain communities that saw jobs move down to Mexico, but, for example, our agricultural section pretty much devastated a much less efficient Mexican farming system… As a practical matter, those are millions of people from Mexico who are displaced. Many of whom now are moving up to the United States, contributing to the immigration concerns that people are feeling. And so, those human factors should be taken into account.”
This knowledge of the “human factors” of free trade agreements must be applied in the case of the proposed FTA.
Thus, in addition to requiring respect for basic human rights in Colombia before moving forward with an FTA, significant changes must made to the proposed pact regarding agriculture.
ORFTC also believes that, at a minimum, provisions of the agreement affecting food and consumer safety, intellectual property, trade in services, public procurement, investor-to-state legal challenges, the environment and states’ rights must also be renegotiated.
It’s worth noting that most of these issues were also flagged as in need of reform by President Obama while on the campaign trail in 2007 and 2008. ORFTC suggests that the U.S. Trade Representative take a close look at the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act (HR.3012) — a bill with 116 cosponsors at present — as a way to move forward on these issues and meet the President’s promises of reform.
In response to USTR’s specific questions:
1.) Are there gaps in Colombia’s labor law regime with respect to providing for the fundamental labor rights of its citizens?
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has found that several of Colombia’s labor laws violate international standards. For example, many of the Colombian Labor Code’s limitations on the right to strike are in violation of international norms. Remedies suggested by the ILO have reportedly been ignored by the Colombian government.
These “gaps” are important, but respect for labor rights requires far more than just having good laws on the books. To be at all meaningful, positive laws need to be fully enforced. Unions in Colombia have charged that the government routinely fails to enforce even its existing laws. For instance, the Colombian government has been charged with arbitrarily denying the recognition of new unions; illegally revoking the registration of existing unions; allowing the use of indefinite temporary contracts and phony worker cooperatives in order to prevent unionization; limiting public-sector collective bargaining; banning collective bargaining on pension benefits; and permitting the widespread use of blacklists.
More striking than these repeated violations of basic labor rights is, of course, the well-known and ongoing violence against anyone who speaks out for better working conditions. Assault, kidnapping, torture and murder are all illegal on paper in Colombia, but they are commonplace against union organizers there. As such, the simple passage of new laws and regulations regarding worker rights in Colombia is clearly insufficient. Again, the Obama administration should not grant tariff-free access to U.S. markets for products produced in a country that is unable or unwilling to protect the basic human rights of its citizens.
2.) Is the Colombian government taking adequate steps to protect Colombia’s workers from acts of intimidation or violence that impede the exercise of their fundamental labor rights?
No, the Colombian government is not adequately protecting its citizens’ basic labor rights. In the time since the Uribe administration took office, there have been more murders of trade unionists in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined. Yet as recently as May 2007, President Uribe told reporters that, “There are no assassinations of workers in Colombia.” The number of murders — let alone kidnappings, beatings, rapes and simple death threats — increased by 25% between 2007 and 2008. With 49 trade unionists assassinated last year, Colombia remains by far the deadliest place on Earth to be a union organizer.
This violence has had its intended consequences. Over the past 20 years, unionization rates in Colombia have been cut in half. The number of Colombian number of workers covered under new union contracts has fallen from 260,000 to 60,000 over the past decade. Those seeking a real “benchmark” for reductions in intimidation against trade unionists in Colombia should consider these figures as a starting point, rather than just the death toll. As one Colombian labor leader recently explained, “Insofar as the number of murders of union members is down from its historic highs, it is only because there are fewer of us left to kill.”
The United States has invested money in trying to protect labor leaders in Colombia. For many, these protection programs are a cruel joke.
We’ve heard of union officials being offered classes in which they’re taught to execute extreme caution when at work, when at home and when in other places where they spend time.
Those who want actual bodyguards are often told they’ll need to pay a significant portion of the costs out of their own pockets — something many of them cannot afford.
While unable to protect its citizens from violence without assessing a surcharge, the Colombian government has found the funds to erect large heart-shaped sculptures throughout Washington, DC this year as part of a “Discover Colombia Through Its Heart” public relations campaign. This seems quite perverse.
3.) Has the government of Colombia made sufficient progress in its efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of violence and intimidation against unionists exercising their fundamental labor rights?
The backlog of unresolved cases of murder against trade unionists has increased by more than 350 cases under the Uribe administration. More than 96% of the cases remain without conviction. For those few cases where an initial conviction was obtained, some were tried in absentia, meaning that the perpetrator remains free.
In addition, because of government reconciliation programs with paramilitaries, some convicted murderers may end up receiving prison sentences as light as two-and-a-half years.
Whether through neglect, incompetence or by design, the vast majority of assassins continue to walk the streets with complete impunity. Some commentators have suggested that the Colombian government has intentionally tried to block prosecutions, pointing to the termination without cause of one of the three “specialized judges” assigned to pursue these cases.
Meanwhile, evidence of the Uribe government’s ties to the assassins continues to mount. The president’s cousin and closest political ally, Mario Uribe, as well as at least 29 legislators from President Uribe’s governing coalition, are all under investigation for alleged ties to paramilitaries.
Again, no free trade arrangement with Colombia should be considered until the violence against trade unionists there is brought to an end, the perpetrators are brought to justice, and the country’s unionization rates begin to climb back to their historic levels.
Thank you for your attention. If you have any questions about this testimony, please contact Arthur Stamoulis, director of the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign, at (503) 736-9777 or orftc@citizenstrade.org