It has been reported that Colombia President Alvaro Uribe will be in Washington DC on September 9th to do a tour of Congress and meet with the media to make his case for the Colombia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA). This will then be followed by a visit in New York for a meeting of the United nations later in the month.
According to Colombia Reports, this will be a last ditch effort by the Colombian President to secure Congressional support for the deal. However, this comes on the tail of yet another trade unionist killing in Colombia in recent days.
Labor leaders in both the U.S. and Colombia continue to resist efforts to secure the bi-lateral trade deal between the countries, believing that a completed deal will open up the flood gates of paramilitary killings of labor officials and workers attempting to seek collective bargaining rights in the workplace in the Latin American country. In addition, critics of the proposed trade deal point to the failure of the Uribe administration to bring paramilitary leaders and soldiers to justice for the decades long killing sprees.
On a related note, Dan Kovalik, writing for the Huffington Post noted what the Colombian press has been reporting that the Uribe administration has falsely claimed that former President Jimmy Carter has endorsed the FTA.
“PC [President Carter] has not yet adopted a public position. Uribe met with him during his recent visit to Atlanta. The media made its own interpretation. The Carter Center information office issued a clarification but it has not have [sic.] the same impact.”
This suggests that the Uribe administration’s apparently despirate attempts to gain passage of the FTA are unbound.
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