When Canada’s Parliament reconvenes for its fall sitting, one of the items expected to feature prominently on the legislative agenda is the implementation of the Canada-Colombia Free-Trade Agreement. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s right-wing government has mounted a concerted lobbying campaign in Canada to pass Bill C-23 in the hopes of parlaying the ensuing diplomatic capital into an eventual accord with the United States. Congress had already rejected a free-trade deal with Uribe’s government in 2007, citing Colombia’s poor human rights record.
Recently however, Uribe has made his case directly to Barack Obama. In what appeared to be a dramatic reversal of his position when he was a Senator, President Obama spoke glowingly of Uribe’s administration at the follow-up press conference, and expressed support for a U.S.-Colombia free-trade deal.
It was beginning to look unlikely that the deal would happen here in Canada, as the previously undecided Liberals hinted at joining the NDP and Bloc in opposition to Conservative plans to see it through. But Obama’s blessing will likely affect the bill’s implementation.
A Liberal reversal now would be a bitter pill for Canadian civil society and international NGOs like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Crisis Group. They have all come out against free trade agreements with Colombia, claiming these deals would probably end up worsening an already terrible situation in the South American country.
When asked about President Obama’s statement that there was “great progress” in Colombia, Beth Berton-Hunter of Amnesty International Canada told The Varsity that while “[Obama] is very good at presenting a positive case, he doesn’t have the evidence to prove it.”
“We [had] four groups of Colombians represented here,” Berton-Hunter said at an Amnesty event at Harbourfront on July 1. “They felt that there was no way Colombians would be better off under free-trade.”
The UN, too, has weighed in—the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay argued that the government and military have committed crimes against humanity. Her comments followed a major scandal late last year, when it was revealed that Colombian security forces were killing civilians, many of them children and teenagers, and dressing the bodies as rebels in order to inflate the government’s numbers of guerrillas killed in the country’s ongoing internal conflict.
The government responded to the “false positive” scandal, as it has become known, by firing 27 officers, including three generals, and disbanding a brigade.
But the atrocities have continued, leaving many wondering about the extent of the government’s involvement in extrajudicial killings. The UN Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Killings, who concluded a fact-finding mission to Colombia on June 18, noted in a preliminary press release that “[extrajudicial] killings were carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military.”
The number of unionists killed by government and paramilitary groups in 2008 increased by 18 per cent from the year before, and is on course to continue rising in 2009. Suspicion that the Uribe government had prior knowledge of these murders was heightened in late May by the resignation of Colombia’s former ambassador to Canada and CCFTA negotiator, Senator Jorge Visbal Martelo, as a result of his ties to paramilitary groups.
With over 380,000 Colombians being forced to flee from their homes last year alone, the number of internally displaced people in the country is second to only to that of Sudan.
Implementation legislation for the CCFTA was stalled after the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade released a report in June of last year recommending that Canada first undertake an independent assessment of the impact of a free-trade deal on human rights in Colombia.
Canadian NGOs have been front-and-centre of the debate. As the numbers of internally displaced people, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances continued to grow last year, civil society organizations like the Canadian Council for International Cooperation have warned that the CCFTA could very plausibly exacerbate these problems. In a CCIC report entitled Making A Bad Situation Worse, Scott Sinclair of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives notes that much of the paramilitary violence is in resource-rich areas where Canadian oil and mining companies are active. While the CCFTA would give these investors—whose interests are intertwined with the paramilitary groups that are responsible for the massacres—broad and directly enforceable investment rights, it would not institute countervailing legal safeguards to protect the millions of Colombians living in terror, and would even hamper Colombia’s ability to introduce such measures in the future.
After a series of disastrous foreign policy blunders in recent years, it appeared as if Canada would get this one right. Michael Ignatieff began saying publicly that the Liberals needed an independent assessment of the deal before giving it the go-ahead. President Obama’s praises for Uribe’s “diligence” and “courage,” his statement that “the burden is not simply on Colombia” but also somehow on Congress, and his emphasis on Uribe’s high approval rating—with no mention of how that rating was brutally achieved—could very conceivably cause the Liberals to reverse course and side with the Conservatives later this year and pass Bill C-23.
While Obama’s change of tone is deeply disappointing for those of us who hoped that he would make human rights a centrepiece of U.S.-Colombia relations, Canada does not have to go down the same road. If the Liberals manage to hold their ground on this issue, refusing to use Obama’s endorsement of Uribe as political cover to pass the CCFTA, Canadians will be able to say, on the Colombian issue at least, we were able to find a more humane footing than our neighbours to the south.
