I had the privilege to speak to Jesús Emilio Tuberquia last weekend at the Latin America Solidarity Conference in Washington, DC last weekend. Tuberquia is a representative of the Peace Community of San José Apartado in northwestern Colombia (see this writeup
from the Fellowship of Reconciliation on his visit to the United States).

I was speaking about certain improvements in Colombia during the last few years that I felt the human rights community could either be proud of or at least take advantage of. Jesús Emilio gave me a humbling answer, and explained why we are so far from being able to say that things are "getting better." "Be very careful throwing around statistics," he told me. "If we have a thousand deaths in some time period, but it's less than the previous period, that is not an improvement. That is 1,000 people who are not with us anymore. That is things still getting worse."

As President Obama attempts to push the Colombia Free Trade Agreement through Congress after his April 7 meeting with President Santos, we will surely be hearing a great deal from the agreement's supporters in the White House and Congress about Colombia's improvements on the issue of anti-union and anti-worker violence. Those in whose hands the decision rests should look beyond the statistics and hear from the workers themselves about whether they really enjoy the working conditions that were supposed to be a precondition for this deal.

And anti-union violence is of course not the only problem with the Free Trade Agreement. As Colombian Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo told me back in 2009:

It wasn’t just a few unions. And it wasn’t just because of the killings of union organizers. There was an immense resistance movement against this economic idea. I was in Washington when the leaders of the Colombian labor federations spoke to members of Congress, and those unionists were very clear that this wasn’t just a problem of unionist murders. The problem was with the economic model that the Free Trade Agreement imposes, and their position was the same as that of all the different popular sectors in Colombia.