Colombia as a Model for Latin America
by Leonard Morin / August 4th, 2008
~snip~
As Libardo Sarmiento, an economist and editor of the magazine Cepa, puts it: “The Colombian government has steadily been opening the Colombian economy more and more to U.S. corporations ever since 1985. The free trade agreement between Colombia and the U.S. is the marriage after a long courtship.” Simultaneous with the internationalization of the Colombian economy, economic power has become concentrated in fewer hands. There are now only 17 banks in Colombia while in 1990 there were over double that many.7 Since the Colombian bourgeoisie is now so linked to foreign capital, it forms a reduced segment of the movement to stop the FTA compared to the movements in other Latin American countries. So the debate over the Colombia-U.S. FTA is chiefly a battle between the right and the left; or more fundamentally, a battle between the rich and the poor.
According to Sarmiento, the violence that has raged in Colombia over the past decades is a struggle for economic power. In order to carry out macroprojects for oil, wood, gold, silver, and other raw materials, the government and the paramilitaries have massively displaced the campesino, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian populations in the countryside. There are currently 3.5 million persons who have been forcibly displaced as part of the effort to accommodate the pillaging of the country’s raw materials; 552,000 of those are external refugees.8 As Aura Rodríguez, of Corporación Cactus, a group that campaigns against the Colombia-U.S. FTA, puts it: “If you were to map out the paramilitary activity in Colombia and then superimpose a map of the country’s natural resources, they would coincide completely.” Estimates range from 31,000 to two million deaths in Colombia’s civil war.9
In addition to exploiting the country’s raw materials, the multinationals exploit Colombia’s workforce. Apparently in an effort to facilitate the passing and implementation of the free trade agreement, the Colombian government recently passed a law extending Colombia’s regular workday from twelve to sixteen hours, i.e., from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. so that working evening hours no longer gives entitlement to overtime pay.10 Since 1985, more than 2,500 trade unionists have been killed.11 Drummond Company and Coca-Cola, among others, have been accused of paying paramilitaries to bust unions. Cincinnati-based Chiquita brands pleaded guilty in a U.S. court last year to funding Colombian paramilitaries.
While the paramilitary violence seems to have somewhat subsided, the Colombian government’s perpetration of human rights violations skyrocketed from 17 percent when President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002 to 56 percent at the end of his first term in 2006.12 While some have noted a decline in union assassinations, others have pointed out that as more unionists and union leaders have been killed, there less are left to kill. In Guatemala, killings of unionists dropped during the DR-CAFTA negotiations but then increased sharply once the treaty had been implemented.13
More:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/colombia-as-a-model-for-latin-america/
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