Much of the discussion of the proposed US-Colombia US Free Trade Agreement has centered on the murder of unionists and the loss of jobs in the United States due to outsourcing, both very important considerations. As is well known, Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to engage in union activities and the murder of union leaders and activists goes almost entirely unpunished. The standard of living in the United States is reduced as well-paying jobs are eliminated and production is exported to low-wage countries including our neighbors Mexico, Central America, and Colombia.

Some in the United States have suggested that only under extraordinary circumstances should the United States consider signing a free trade agreement with a country in the developing world, meaning circumstances that would make that country particularly deserving or with which we should feel a sense of obligation due to destructive US policies in the past. These arguments assume that free trade agreements that richer and more powerful countries enter into with poorer and weaker ones are beneficial to the latter countries but that they should only be entered into if these poorer and weaker countries deserve this generous consideration on our part.

While there is no doubt that union activity in Colombia is violently repressed and that deadly crimes against unionists take place with nearly absolute impunity, the number of assassinations has decreased in the recent years and the presidents of the United States and Colombia have reached an agreement to address this issue going forward.

Should we conclude that the human rights crisis in Colombia is finally being addressed and should no longer be considered an impediment to an agreement, that Colombia should be rewarded for this positive change? By no means. Workers have a fundamental right to organize unions and to carry out union activities but this is only one aspect of the Colombian human rights crisis. Thousands of murders by the Armed Forces have gone unpunished in the Falsos Positivos or Body Count scandal in which army units collected monetary and other rewards for guerrillas killed in combat but actually kidnapped and killed poor and unemployed civilians, dressing them in guerrilla fatigues, planting weapons by their side and then quickly burying them in common graves. Abusive counterinsurgency operations are rife in areas where the guerrillas have long been entrenched, and millions of rural Colombians are unable to participate in the legal economy due to low prices for agricultural goods, the lack of transportation infrastructure or access to agricultural credit or inputs, and the continuing armed conflict. The Colombian countryside continues to be depopulated by waves of criminal activity conducted by organized illegal groups that have grown out of paramilitary structures developed over decades. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, nearly 3.5 million people have been displaced in a humanitarian crisis that continues to this day.

The Colombian government claims that paramilitary organizations that collaborated with the Armed Forces in a massive counter agrarian reform over the last 20 years have been demobilized and that new and unrelated criminal organizations are the culprits in this continuing rural violence against the poor. However, many of the most powerful paramilitary leaders have been extradited to the United States where they face drug trafficking charges but will not be giving testimony regarding their reign of terror in the countryside under the protection of and in cooperation with State forces. At the same time, a new generation of illegal armed groups plays much the same role driving small farmers off the land to make room for ever-larger properties more suited to monoculture and agro-industrial production for export. In addition to the massive banana plantations for the export of fruit, African palm is being planted for the production of biodiesel so that food acreage is giving way to plantation agriculture for nonfood products, an industry that is capital intensive, is highly mechanized, requires little labor input, and contributes to the wellbeing of a very few investors, usually foreign.

Anticipating criticism for favoring large agriculture to the detriment of family farmers and hoping to placate the scruples of some in the U.S. Congress, the government of ex-President Álvaro Uribe established a program called Agro Ingreso Seguro, or Safe Agricultural Income, in order to subsidize poor farmers and protect them from overwhelming competition under a free trade agreement. Instead of being given to poor farmers to stimulate their businesses, however, millions of dollars were funneled to wealthy and politically powerful landholding families. The scandal has implicated numerous land-rich families and high officials from the Uribe government. Two former agriculture ministers are currently under criminal investigation and have had their assets seized, and a former vice minister is in jail. With the complete collapse of Agro Ingreso Seguro, the new Santos government has established a controversial new program called Desarrollo Rural con Equidad, or Equitable Rural Development. It remains to be seen if this program will also fall victim to the endemic corruption that plagues Colombian government initiatives, but many small producers of potatoes, rice, maize, and fruit are already crying foul for having been left out of the program. There is no program firmly in place to support small and midsize Colombian producers and probably no reason to believe that an effective of program is in the works.

On the contrary, a new scandal is emerging around INCODER, the Colombian Institute of Rural Development, as it has been revealed that lands abandoned during the paramilitary terror of the 1990s are now being illegally transferred to absentee investors or their family members while displaced rural families remain destitute and landless, with some individuals having been murdered when they attempted to physically approach what was in fact their stolen farm property. These are some of the conditions that small and medium-sized Colombian landholders and agricultural producers face as they prepare for the inundation of their regions by highly capitalized transnational agricultural producers. It is the same kind of onslaught that led to the collapse of Mexican corn production after signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the waves of economic migrants streaming north from that country and from Central America after the signing of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). These are the same unauthorized immigrants whose exodus from their countries has led to the presence of 12 million undocumented residents in the United States because they are unable to survive at home.

Instead of reproducing these failed policies we should be doing all we can to avoid worsening the scandal of human trafficking that we see all along the migration routes and within the borders of our own country. In fact, millions of economic refugees from Mexico and the CAFTA countries are now supporting their families at home and provide their home countries with sorely needed hard currency earned at low-wage jobs in the United States where they are subject to increasing discrimination and deportation. Aside from the human and family tragedies that this situation entails, it simply is not a rational or even viable way for our hemispheric economy to function.

Just last year, Former President Clinton publicly apologized for promoting similar policies in Haiti when told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” adding, “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.”

It is not in the interest of Colombia’s poor and middle income majority to enter into a free trade agreement with the United States. It will do great harm to that part of Colombia's agricultural sector which is dedicated to production for internal use, and devastating harm to small and middle-sized producers who are particularly unprepared to compete with a flood of highly subsidized U.S. food products. It will worsen the long-standing crisis of rural displacement, depopulating large expanses of rural land for large-scale agriculture requiring high rates of capitalization available only to foreign corporations and enormously rich individuals and organizations which in many cases are also seeking means with which to launder drug profits. Hundreds of thousands will continue to be driven to take refuge in urban slums, exacerbating the wide range of social crises associated with rapid urbanization by desperately poor internally displaced people in Latin America. Those who survive the traumas of slum life in the context of rampant violence and criminality may be driven into the low-wage sector of light industrial production for export as long as a market for Colombian goods can be found. The US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement would be a good deal for transnational investors and a few wealthy Colombians but a raw deal for the vast majority of the Colombian people. It would deepen and prolong the tragedy experienced by many Colombians inhabiting what is one the one of the world’s most unequal societies.