Candidate Watch
Obama Misleads on Colombia
Posted on October 17, 2008 at 3:06 PM ET | Category: 2 Pinocchios, Barack Obama, Candidate Watch, Other Foreign Policy
Washington Post
Presidential debate, Hofstra University, October 15, 2008.
"The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions."
--Barack Obama, Hofstra presidential debate, October 15, 2008.
In between all the controversy over "Joe the Plumber," a foreign policy issue sidled its way into the final presidential debate earlier this week: should the United States conclude a free trade agreement with Colombia? John McCain calls the trade agreement "a no-brainer." Barack Obama opposes such an agreement, at least for now, on the grounds that the Colombian government has done little to stop the "targeted assassinations" of hundreds of Colombian trade unionists.
The Facts
Over the last two decades, Colombia has been one of the most violent countries on Earth. Trade Union activists have been frequent targets. According to Human Rights Watch, there have been more than 2,600 murders of trade union activists in Colombia since 1991, including many by right-wing paramilitary groups. Since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002, the violence has been coming down, as the security situation in the country improves. The question is: has it come down enough?
According to data provided by the Colombian government, assassinations of trade union members declined from 205 in 2001 to 26 in 2007, significantly outpacing the overall fall in the murder rate. The government attributes the decline in part to a state-run protection program that now covers around 2,000 senior union leaders and the creation of a special sub-unit in the Attorney General's office to investigate killings of labor activists.
Colombia's critics concede that the murder rate of Colombian trade unionists has dropped since Uribe took office. According to USLEAP, a labor rights group that has tracked the situation closely, murders of Colombian trade unionists declined from 186 in 2002 to 39 last year. At the same time, convictions rose from 3 in 2002 to 26 in 2007. (The Colombian government claims 38 successful convictions in cases involving murdered trade unionists in 2007, up from only one in the entire decade from 1991 to 2001.)
Maria McFarland, principal specialist in Colombia at Human Rights Watch, linked the declining violence against trade unionists to pressure from the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress on withholding free trade benefits from Colombia, which pushed the Colombian government into forming the special sub-unit. "Without substantial pressure on the government, this would all fall apart tomorrow," she told me, in a telephone interview from Bogota.
While some of the murders were the work of common criminals, McFarland said that most had been carried out by right-wing paramilitary groups, linked in some cases to members of Uribe's ruling party. After a sharp decline in 2007, the murder rate increased during the first half of this year, to around 40 for the period January-July.
The debate over anti-trade union violence in Colombia has become intertwined with a larger debate on whether to approve the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, concluded by the Bush administration in February 2006. Advocates of the agreement, including the Wall Street Journal editorial page, have played down the problem of political violence in Colombia. Opponents have made the assassinations the central plank in their campaign to persuade Congress to delay ratification.
The Pinocchio Test
Obama was correct in noting that Colombian labor leaders have been "targeted for assassination," but he failed to note that the murder rate has dropped significantly over the last few years. While the vast majority of the murders have gone uninvestigated, it is untrue to say that "there have not been prosecutions." The prosecution rate may still be unacceptably low, but it has risen over the last two years, thanks in part to measures taken by the Uribe government under pressure from the United States.
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Help Colombia
Álvaro Uribe gets blamed for the success of his own reforms.
Thursday, March 15, 2007; Page A18
MUCH OF President Bush's tour of Latin America was haunted by what his administration has failed to accomplish during the past six years. In Brazil, the shadow was the absence of progress on trade between the United States and Latin America's largest country; in Mexico, the absence of immigration reform. The mood of the president's stop in the third-largest country on his tour, Colombia, was somber, too -- but, oddly enough, because of his policy's success, not its failure.
Since the beginning of this decade the United States has invested nearly $5 billion in Plan Colombia, a broad attempt to reduce drug trafficking and violence through military aid, economic development and drug eradication. From the beginning, skeptics in Congress have grumbled that the program was too focused on military measures and that it did not go after the right-wing paramilitary groups that were often linked to the military.
Now, at last, the paramilitary network in Colombia and its military and political alliances are being exposed and uprooted. Last year some 30,000 members of the right-wing groups demobilized under an agreement with the Colombian government; their leaders have been imprisoned and are testifying about their activities in exchange for reduced sentences. This flood of information, combined with parallel investigations by the supreme court and attorney general, has led to the arrests of eight congressmen and the former head of the security police, the indictment of a state governor and the resignation of the foreign minister, whose brother and father were linked to paramilitaries. For the first time, military officers are being turned over for prosecution in civilian courts.
Most of this redounds to the credit of Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's president, who pushed through the demobilization plan despite criticism that it was too weak. Mr. Uribe is immensely popular in Colombia because he has greatly reduced homicides and kidnappings while overseeing rapid economic growth. Yet in Bogota on Sunday, Mr. Bush found himself obliged to defend Mr. Uribe against criticism that the exposure of the right-wing networks reflects poorly on his government.
The critics might have a point if Mr. Uribe had tried to shield political allies from the investigations. Instead he has urged that the probes go forward and has apologized for his faith in officials who proved compromised. The revelations come at an awkward moment for Colombia, with Congress considering Mr. Bush's request to extend Plan Colombia for several more years, at reduced levels of aid, and a free-trade agreement with Colombia. Yet Mr. Uribe has not flinched.
Sure enough, opponents of trade agreements and those who reflexively resist U.S. military aid to Latin America are citing the paramilitary revelations as a reason not to support Mr. Uribe. In fact they prove that Colombia's president can deliver on his promise to reform the country's political system and extend its authority to a long-lawless countryside. If Congress wishes to see those changes continue, it should approve the new Colombian aid plan as well as the free-trade agreement.
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