Democratic leaders in the House refuse to allow a vote on the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, claiming the government there has not done enough to stem violence against union members. But a story in this morning’s Washington Post helps to expose the hollowness of their objections.
As Juan Carlos Hidalgo and I documented in our study earlier this year, under President Alvaro Uribe, violence in Colombia has dropped dramatically. The general homicide rate has dropped by 40 percent since president Uribe took office in 2002, and killings of trade unionists have dropped by more than 80 percent.
No place symbolizes the transformation of Colombia more than Medellin. A decade ago, the city was a symbol of the violence and chaos spawned by illegal drug trafficking and a 40-year-old civil war with the Marxist guerrilla group known as the FARC.
Today Medellin is a thriving city. Thanks to President Uribe’s crackdown on crime and the FARC, the murder rate in the Medellin metro area has dropped from 174 per 100,000 in 2001 to 26 last year. Progress has also been aided by economic growth fueled by globalization. Colombians are exporting records amounts of textiles, apparel, flowers and other goods to the United States, which creates some of the better paying jobs in that country. As the Post story, summarizes:
Exports surged in the 1990s as the United States granted temporary trade preferences to Colombia, allowing many of its products to enter the world’s largest market duty-free. They really took off after 2002, when Washington expanded that agreement to include Colombia’s all-important textile sector. Humming assembly lines making Ralph Lauren socks and Levi’s jeans sprang up across this picturesque Andean valley, creating tens of thousands of jobs and turning Medellin into a model of the curative power of liberalized trade.
Democratic leaders who oppose the U.S.-Colombia FTA are not only ignoring the real progress that has been made against violence in that country. They are also blocking the very trade expansion that has so visibly helped to make that progress possible.
