The Colombian government said a proposed US trade deal will grow its economy by 1 percent and it hopes the pact can create new markets, while critics said the deal could lead to bigger cocaine crops.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe thanked US President George W. Bush on Monday for sending the trade pact to Congress and said he hoped for “a grand bipartisan agreement” to approve the deal.
“I want this message to get to the US Congress: I beg you to look at the current problems [in Colombia] and the favorable evolution that Colombia has experienced,” Uribe told reporters.
Since taking office in 2002, Uribe has demobilized many of the paramilitaries under an amnesty program and gone on the offensive against leftist rebels, sharply lowering levels of kidnapping and murder.
But the nation’s trade unions and other critics see the opposite scenario if the US Congress approves the deal — the loss of millions of jobs and an economic downturn that could drive even more farmers into the cocaine trade.
The number of labor activists who have been killed has declined since 2002, but the unions say Uribe’s administration has encouraged assassinations of trade unionists who cause problems for companies.
“It tries to stigmatize us, it tries to paint us as rebels and that’s when the right-wing death squads try to kill us,” said Fabio Arias, vice president of Colombia’s largest trade union federation.
“These death squads still work with parts of the military and police to kill trade union members in Colombia,” he said.
Arias estimates 3.5 million Colombians would be put out of work — especially producers of poultry, corn, clothing and furniture — as tariff-free US imports flood the market and companies use the language of the accord to more easily fire workers.
Colombia’s Treasury Minister Oscar Ivan Zuluaga predicts an entirely different scenario — economic growth of more than 1 percent thanks to locked-in terms for exports of Colombian clothing, flowers, textiles and other products, which already get preferential US treatment under the Andean Trade Preference Act, which is a temporary measure.
Permanently eliminating tariffs on Colombian goods would also create more viable alternatives for farmers who often resort to growing coca — the main ingredient of cocaine — because they lack markets for legal products, the Colombian government says.
But Adam Isacson, a Colombia expert with the Center for International Policy in Washington, warned that the pact may have a reverse effect because it could jeopardize farmers in Colombia who grow legitimate crops, forcing some of them to grow coca.
Bush said failure to approve the deal would encourage Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s anti-US regime and cast the US as untrustworthy in a region where Uribe is the Bush administration’s strongest ally.
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