Economy & Trade, Headlines, Human Rights, Labour, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

POLITICS-COLOMBIA: Uribe Seeks Trade Deal, Aid from U.S.

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 2 2007 (IPS) - Opening a three-day drive to pry a new aid and trade deal out of a wary, Democratic-led U.S. Congress, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe received a warm endorsement at the White House where he met with President George W. Bush over breakfast Wednesday.

Praising Uribe as a “true democrat, a strong leader, and a friend,” Bush urged Congress to approve the pending free trade agreement which, he said, “has strategic implications” for Washington’s increasingly troubled relations with Latin America.

But Uribe spent much of the rest of the day on the defensive, as several dozen human rights and labour protesters trailed him from engagement to engagement, seeking to draw attention to Colombia’s human rights record and recent reports tying him and his family directly to right-wing paramilitary forces.

“We are ready to improve whatever we have to improve,” Uribe told the Council of Americas, an association of sympathetic businesspeople who support the proposed trade accord. “My government needs every day to apologise for mistakes – never for crimes – because our fight is to (rid) Colombia of crimes.”

That was a theme that he found himself repeating throughout the day, particularly during an appearance at the Centre for American Progress (CAP), a predominantly Democratic think tank, where, uncharacteristically, he personally engaged the protestors for some 10 minutes on the street before entering the building.

Uribe clearly hopes that such gestures – including a meeting later Wednesday with John Sweeney, the head of the largest U.S. labour confederation, the AFL-CIO – will disarm opposition to both continuing high levels of military and economic aid and a new trade deal with his country. Indeed, most of his time while in Washington will be spent meeting with his critics.

“He’s got a lot of work to do in creating relationships, particularly with Democratic members of Congress, with whom he hasn’t had to deal much in the past,” said Dan Restrepo, who hosted his appearance at CAP.

“This is his first real interaction with divided government in Washington,” he noted, adding “He’s got a very hard sell.”

Indeed, Uribe’s visit here comes amid renewed attention to the human rights situation in Colombia, especially in light of the recent allegations, known as the “para-politics” scandal, that have linked some of his closest political allies to right-wing death squads responsible for the killings of thousands of people, particularly labour and community activists, over the past decade.

Apart from the news reports about the scandal out of Bogota, the latest focus was motivated in part by the decision in early April – after a delay of almost a full year – by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to certify that Uribe’s government is making progress on human rights, including severing links between the Colombian military and paramilitaries.

The certification was required in order for the State Department to disburse the last remaining tranche of 55.2 million dollars in military aid to Colombia left over from 2006.

Citing a Central Intelligence Agency report leaked to the Los Angeles Times documenting extensive collaboration between Colombian Army chief Gen. Mario Montoya and paramilitaries implicated in the drug trade, however, Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chairs a key Senate appropriations committee, immediately placed a hold on the money.

Leahy’s move was immediately applauded by several major human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which subsequently issued a joint statement urging Congress to maintain the hold “until alleged (paramilitary) links with Gen. Montoya and any Colombian policymakers are investigated, and in cases where links are confirmed, charges are brought against those involved.”

At the same time, former Vice President Al Gore canceled an appearance at an environmental conference in Florida in which Uribe was also participating. Gore’s office explained at the time that the allegations regarding the president’s own complicity with paramilitaries – an opposition lawmaker had charged the previous day that paramilitary leaders met at his ranch in the late 1990s – were “deeply troubling”.

Bush, however, who visited Uribe during a brief swing through Latin America in March, has defended the Colombian leader, as he did again Wednesday.

“The president is here to speak strongly about his record, and it’s a good, solid record,” Bush said. “I thank the members of Congress for giving him a hearing.”

Since 2000, Washington has provided some 700 million dollars a year in aid to Colombia – far more than any other Latin American country. About 80 percent of the aid is earmarked for military and security assistance, particularly in support of efforts to suppress coca production and drug trafficking, and the rest for economic and social programmes.

The administration has asked Congress to authorise an additional 3.9 billion dollars for Colombia over the next six years, an extension of the so-called “Plan Colombia”, a major anti-drug initiative launched under former President Bill Clinton.

Whether Congress will go along with the request depends a great deal on how convincing Uribe is during this trip. Most analysts believe that, while Congress will likely approve another 700 million dollars in aid for 2008, a significantly larger proportion of the assistance will be earmarked for economic, development, and judicial reform purposes, while the military aid may be subject to tighter restrictions.

Prospects for Congressional approval of the trade accord are likely to hinge on the fate of ongoing negotiations between the White House and key Democratic lawmakers on the latter’s demands that all pending trade accords – including those with Panama, Peru, and South Korea – include stronger protections for labour rights.

In that respect, Colombia’s reputation as the world’s most dangerous country for trade unionists – in a letter to Uribe Wednesday, the director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, cited 72 killings in 2006 and nine so far this year – is likely to make approval of the Colombia deal “incrementally more difficult” than the pending accords, according to Restrepo.

Uribe, who, despite the recent scandals, enjoys a sky-high popular approval rating of around 80 percent in Colombia, is seen by the administration as an increasingly important strategic ally against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the kind of left-wing, anti-U.S. populism that has prospered in the other Andean nations over the last several years.

Uribe’s anti-drug efforts also have enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress, despite accumulating evidence that they have had little effect on the amount of cocaine entering the United States. Last month, new data released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy showed that the price of cocaine sold on the street here actually fell in 2006, while its purity increased.