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June 30, 2009
Obama and Uribe Get Together
Presidents Obama and Uribe met yesterday at the White House to talk about some crucial topics in Colombia-U.S. relations, notably the free trade agreement and the second reelection.
1. The FTA
The U.S.-Colombia FTA is a project that dates back to the Bush administration. It has taken years to pass in part because the debate about the trade pact coincided with a period of increasing awareness within the U.S. government of the tragic human rights situation in Colombia. The United States has signed FTAs with several Latin American countries, and it seemed natural that Colombia would follow. Both Bush and Uribe were strongly committed to it and Colombia was, and remains, the U.S.'s most loyal ally in the region.
In recent years, however, protecting human rights has become a prerequisite for the passing of the Colombia FTA. A series of scandals have made it increasingly clear that the Colombian government and several multinational corporations have tolerated and even taken part in serious human rights violations. Most worryingly for U.S. lawmakers, these violations have often targeted trade unions and labor leaders.
In other words, in Colombia, business is often done through death threats, assassinations and forced displacements. Chiquita, the international fruit company, recently went through a difficult legal ordeal after it was proven that they paid Colombian paramilitary death squads for protection.
Colombia is by far the world's most dangerous country for union leaders. In one of the Obama-McCain presidential debates, Obama brought up union leader assassinations as a cause for concern in relation to theFTA. McCain responded that such murders had in fact decreased under Uribe and that the murder rate for union leaders was actually lower than the rate for Colombians in general.
With regard to the first point, murders of union leaders have again gone up both in 2008 and 2009 so far. With regard to the second, the point of comparison should not be the general population, but the murder rate in other countries. If the FTA passes, the U.S. will be signing a trade agreement with a country where union leaders are murdered in far higher numbers than any other country in the world.
Beyond the Chiquita scandal, human rights groups have found other ways to communicate effectively with American lawmakers. One interesting approach has been to expose the suffering of Afro-Colombians. Colombia's afrodescendant population has suffered disproportionately as a result of the country's armed conflict. Further, many Afro-Colombian communities have been threatened, displaced and attacked by paramilitary groups as a result of their opposition to business projects in their lands, particularly palm oil cultivation. African American leaders in Congress have repeatedly gone to Colombia and experienced first-hand how big business has participated in the displacement, exploitation and murder of Afro-Colombians.
2. The Second Reelection
As I have explained in previous posts, the dominant topic in contemporary Colombian politics is the possible second reelection of the hugely popular Alvaro Uribe. Uribe has already changed the constitution to allow a second term. It is one of many political power grabs by the president. There have been a number of serious allegations that politicians were bribed to support the referendum to allow a second term. Because most Western countries have two-term limits, the possibility of a second referendum for a third term has become a huge scandal.
Most people believe that, were he to run again, Uribe would win. The difficult thing for Uribe supporters will be to convince Colombia's lawmakers to allow a third term. A far more complex challenge to maintain Uribe's strong relationships with the U.S. and Europe if he does run again, given international opposition to a second reelection.
During the meeting, Obama apparently told Uribe that, in the United States, two terms are enough because people want change. Of course, the reason there is a reelection debate in Colombia is that many people don´t want change and would vote for Uribe's third term. Obama clearly could have used stronger words.
Uribe apparently told Obama that he saw it as inconvenient to keep himself in power. The President has used the word 'inconvenient' before, and it is notable that inconvenience, not democracy, is what is keeping him from running again. Many Colombians believe that Uribe is still very open to running again when the political climate at home and abroad allows it.
While it is never entirely clear what happened behind closed doors, this meeting was more about continuity than it was about change. A recent Washington Post article argued that the Obama-Uribe meeting would have a markedly different tone from that of the Bush-era Uribe visits. Indeed, Bush and Uribe really disagreed about very little. What is remarkable, however, is how friendly the tone was.
Few contemporary governments in the Western Hemisphere have faced such serious allegations of corruption and human rights abuses as Colombia's. One can only imagine Obama's attitude toward Rafael Correa of Ecuador (a nearby Chavez ally) if his government, not Uribe's, was accused of overseeing hundreds of murders of innocent civilians by the military and widespread wiretapping of opposition politicians or if dozens of his political allies had links to drug traffickers and warlords.
Obama, like every American president before him, has been very forgiving of Colombia's failures in terms of democracy, human rights and political integrity for two reasons. First, Colombia and the U.S. are held together by a common commitment to the fight against drug trafficking. Second, the Chavez phenomenon makes Uribe seem like a precious ally in an increasingly hostile region.
Indeed, in the presidential debates, Senator McCain argued that the FTA should be passed regardless of what he saw as minor human rights concerns in order to improve relations with the region as a whole. In his view, criticizing Colombia for human rights abuses would be seen as Yankee imperialist intervention.
In my opinion, McCain could not be more mistaken. Historically, Latin Americans have viewed the U.S. as an arrogant, selfish superpower that respects human rights and democracy selectively and very inconsistently. While Americans like to think of their country as a nation held together by a set of values, our neighbors in the South view the U.S. as a country of soldiers and corporations. Today, Colombia-U.S. relations simply confirm this negative stereotype.
Indeed, the problem has never been that the United States insists too much on human rights and democracy. Rather, the problem is that America seems to care about human rights and democracy only when it is convenient.
In order to start to improve relations with the people of Latin America, Obama should be more consistent in his defense of democratic values. In that sense, his condemnation of the coup in Honduras is an important step forward.
Posted by Pablo Rojas at June 30, 2009 11:41 AM
