Call your members of Congress while they are home for Presidents’ Day recess and ask them to oppose this move by taking a public position against the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Our collective energy has stopped the FTA for a year. This is a victory that could be dashed by the powerful all-out campaign launched by the Administrations of U.S. President George Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. With six official U.S. Congressional delegations already sent to Colombia to experience carefully staged tours highlighting the efforts supposedly undertaken to end the systematic assassination of Colombia labor leaders, five more are scheduled.

These delegations are clearly not seeing:

• the 3.8 million displaced people forced from their homes, a disproportionate number are Afro-Colombian and Indigenous people;
• families of union organizers, rather than labor leaders themselves, murdered so not to count in the closely watched assassination statistics;
• purportedly demobilized paramilitaries resurfacing with new names and intimidating those in the act of defending human rights; and
• increased extrajudicial executions of civilians by members of the Colombian armed forces.

Approving a FTA in a country engaged in a five decade conflict will perpetuate these abuses and exacerbate the humanitarian crisis lived out every day. Neither we nor the people of Colombia can afford a NAFTA-style trade agreement that will cause more displacement and suffering.

People of faith all over the world are calling for international trade and investment systems that respect and promote the dignity of the human person, ensure the development and well-being of people in all nations, foster gender and racial equity and lead to environmental sustainability. However, the U.S.-Colombia FTA takes us far away from this goal.

A few calls can sway your members of Congress to take a public stand. It’s easy. Here’s how.

Call (202) 224-3121 and ask the Capitol Switchboard operator to connect you to your member of Congress’ office. Visit www.congress.org to find out who represents you in Congress. Give them one of the following talking points: 

If Passed the U.S.-Colombia FTA will:

• Undermine human rights and fuel the fires of conflict. Colombia is still a country at war. Its record on human rights is dismal. Attacks on civil society, union leaders, Afro-Colombians and Indigenous people continue with impunity. The FTA will deepen the economic disparity, which is a root cause of the conflict, and diminish human rights.
• Destroy small farmers. The agreement will favor only a small sector of Colombian farmers who export to the U.S. The Colombian Ministry of Agricultureestimates that if tariffs on agricultural imports from the U.S. were eliminated,overall income for farmers would drop by more than fifty percent. This could wipeout local farmers like what happened to the 1.3 million who have been displaced in Mexico since NAFTA passed 12 years ago. This will only add to Colombia's 3.8 million internally displaced people.
• Increase drug trafficking. Colombia is already the world's largest producer of cocaine. The FTA will threaten livelihoods and displace small farmersleaving, for some, no other alternative than to join the lucrative drug trade.
• Harm Indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians. The internal conflict has disproportionately displaced Afro-Colombian and Indigenous peoples from their resource-rich, ancestral territories, ignoring their constitutional and legal rights. Laws put in place in anticipation of the FTA to attract investment dismantle the legal rights related to territory, mineral and forest resources of these communities. Once the FTA is in place, under its investment rules, multinational corporations benefiting from these legal reforms will be able to sue the Colombian government for compensation for future lost profits if the laws are revoked.
• Hinder access to life-saving medicines. While the amended text of the Colombia FTA removes the most egregious, CAFTA-based, provisions limiting the access to affordable medicines, it still includes NAFTA provisions that undermine the right to affordable medicines. This will further exacerbate a failed Colombian health system that only covers ten percent of Afro-Colombians.
• Harm workers and environment. The nominal changes made to the labor and environment provisions are insufficient. The Colombia FTA allows FTA dispute settlement panels to interpret and apply the terms of the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work differently than the Declaration has been interpreted and applied by the ILO itself. Enforcement of the new changes will be dependent on Colombian President Uribe who has a consistent record of undermining domestic labor and environmental law enforcement.