Will Trade with ‘U.S. Imperialists’ Damage Colombian Interests? (Semana, Colombia)

Will the free trade deal recently agreed to by the Colombia and the White House actually hurt Colombia?

According to this roundup of Colombian reaction by columnist Antonio Caballero of Semana, some Colombians sense a ‘whiff of imperialism’ in concessions that force Colombia to protect trade unionists, which will diminish the one real trade advantage Colombia has cheap labor.

For Semana, Antonio Caballero writes in part :

Taking suspicion to its logical extreme, it’s not too much to note that the new and principally humanitarian obligations that the FTA imposes on Columbia largely deprive it of most of its only advantage in this unequal agreement: the low cost of her labor force.

Those costs are going to rise if benefits are to be paid and intimidation by threat of death for those seeking better wages is to be abandoned.

So what do we think about Washington’s concerted effort to force Colombia to pay everyone a fair wage? 

We think it would sink the country.

And the entire population will have to emigrate en masse to find decent employment in the United States.

Yet the same suspicion is what makes me doubt this will happen. 

I note that in his account, Semana columnist León Valencia says that the most commonly murdered unionists are apart from teachers, inherently endangered because they teach those who work in banana farming and the oil sector.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are the sectors that include the largest number of U.S. companies in Colombia.

As I said a few lines ago, U.S. imperialism has not been distinguished by its inclination to protect the lives of others, but its tendency to exterminate them.