The promise of a Colombia trade pact

(Globe staff illustration/Josue Evilla)

DEMOCRATIC presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may have their hearts in the right place in opposing a trade agreement with Colombia. It's their better judgment that is mistaken.

The two candidates are wrong about the Colombian human rights violations they cite and the jobs they hope to save for Pennsylvania workers.

The agreement, which President Bush sent this week to Congress for an up or down vote, essentially makes permanent the trade preferences that Colombia has had for 17 years. What is new is that the treaty opens the Colombian market to US exports.

The virtual elimination in 1991 of duties on Colombian flowers, textiles, and other products was done to help wean Colombia from violence and drugs. Whatever minor adjustments it forced on the American economy and workers has long since happened.

US goods, however, still face tariffs of 35 percent and higher. Under the new agreement, 80 percent of US auto parts, medical equipment, and farm and other products will be duty free immediately. The rest will be phased in over 10 years.

The Colombian government is making the bigger sacrifice because a permanent agreement removes uncertainty for investors. Trade, combined with US support for Colombia's military and justice system, have helped Colombia beat back a leftist insurgency, largely demobilize right-wing paramilitaries, and spark a boom that has reduced poverty, unemployment, and the economic weight of drug mafias.

Congress has been extending the temporary preferences for months at a time. Kill the trade agreement and the preferences by all logic should be killed, too. That undercuts hundreds of thousands of Colombians who work in the higher-paying new export industries.

The proposed agreement already includes the environmental and worker protections that the Democrats wanted, but free trade is the third rail for populist and union voters. Both Clinton and Obama in recent weeks have fired senior advisers over trade. Still, both candidates have supported trade liberalization in the past. One suspects they still know it benefits the country, even though supporting anything that smacks of free trade in places like Pennsylvania is like touching the third rail.

Enter human rights. The Democrats also say they oppose the agreement because of the assassination of unionists in Colombia. It is a powerful argument, except for this: While the murder of even one union organizer is deplorable, the numbers being used are so misleading that they should not be cited in opposing the agreement.

All sides agree that the killings are dramatically down, and no one accuses the government of orchestrating them. By the unions' own count, the killings dropped from a high of 275 in 1996 to 39 last year. The government says 26.

The assumption by the Democrats is that all were killed for union organizing. It is an assumption implied in reports they cite from groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Those groups, however, rely on Colombian unions for their numbers, instead of collecting their own. The number of convictions now being won in the union's own cases reveals that perhaps one-fifth, and almost certainly less than half, of the killings had to do with unionism.

Of convictions won in 87 cases since the first one in 2001, almost all for murder, the ruling judges found that union activity was the motive in only 17, according to the attorney general's office. The judges found 15 of the cases had to do with common crime, 10 with passion, and 13 with being guerrilla members. No motive was established in 16 of the cases.

The unions don't dispute the judicial findings, and deep in their reports say that they, in fact, have no idea of suspect or motive in 79 percent of their cases going back to 1986. The killings, in other words, are isolated and not part of a campaign against unionizing. The unions further benefit from the reduced paramilitary and guerrilla violence. The convictions have cut impunity. The government provides protection, from free mobile phones to bodyguards, for nearly 2,000 union leaders.

What Colombia needs is the continued economic growth that is overcoming both social ills and the violence. The free trade agreement promises that, just as it promises growth for American workers.

Edward Schumacher-Matos, a former New York Times reporter, is a visiting professor for Latin American studies at Harvard University.