This is most troubling for the Colombian government as it made a big
push in the spring of 2007, headed by Colombian Vice-President
Francisco Santos himself, to plead their case for a Free Trade
Agreement (FTA) largely on the basis of their claim that these
allegations against the former DAS chief were without merit.

Moreover, all of this comes even as U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary
Locke publicly stated that "Colombia needs to address the issue of
violence against union leaders before the U.S. Congress votes on a free
trade agreement with the South American nation." See, Story.

Instead, however, the human rights situation continues to spiral
downwards in Colombia. Another area where human rights is deteriorating
is in the area of forced internal displacements -- an area in which
Colombia is already ranked second only to the Sudan. As the UNHCR has
also reported, there have been "an average of 300,000 new cases
registered yearly in the past two years" -- a huge increase over the
previous period.

Meanwhile, in a strange twist, the Colombian government, angry over
efforts by U.S. and British unions to derail the Colombia FTA over
labor and human rights concerns, has turned to stigmatizing and
intimidating these unions just as they do those in Colombia. For
example, Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos publicly insinuated
that those in the U.S. and Britain who have been speaking out against
the FTA "could be" funded by "illegal money," though he conceded that,
as yet, there is no evidence for this. See, Story.

While Francisco Santos admits that his insinuations about alleged
connections between "illegal money" and U.S. and British advocates
against the Colombia FTA are without factual basis, he is making such
insinuations for the same reason that the Colombian government makes
these against unionists in Colombia - to try to intimidate them into
abandoning their organizing efforts.

Indeed, in advance of a high-profile delegation of British MPs and
U.S. and British labor officials to Colombia, the Colombian government,
through its Ambassador to Great Britain, even went so far as to tell a
prominent activist of Justice for Colombia -- a workers-based human
rights and solidarity group based in London and the group which helped
organize this delegation -- that he was being investigated for ties
with the illegal FARC guerilla group of Colombia. The goal of this
outrageous claim was clear - to try to instill fear in the delegation
members before they headed to Colombia that they might be arrested if
they went forward with the delegation trip. The Colombian government's
hope was that the trip would thereby be prevented altogether.

While the Colombian government's intimidation tactics have not
worked to quash the movement in the U.S. and Britain to oppose the
Colombia FTA and stand up for the rights of Colombian unionists, these
tactics nonetheless expose the lengths to which the Colombian
government will go to try to win passage of the Free Trade Agreement -
an agreement the Colombian government desperately wants as a
ratification of its own human and labor rights record. Given how
abysmal that record continues to be, the FTA should be withheld from
the Colombian government.

In addition, the Colombia FTA, as a practical matter, will only
serve to perpetuate human rights abuses in Colombia. As just one
example, the FTA will permit palm oil to flow into the U.S. duty-free,
greatly aiding Colombian palm oil companies. Sadly, many of these
companies, as exposed recently by the Washington Office on Latin America and in an expose in the Nation by Teo Ballve,
are notoriously owned and controlled by paramilitary leaders which
continue to be responsible for gross human rights violations, including
the displacement of Afro-Colombians from lands in the rich Choco region
of Colombia.

As WOLA notes, President Uribe hopes for a massive expansive of the
cultivation of palm from 285,000 hectares to 6,000,000 hectares through
the Colombia FTA - an expansion which will entail the forcible and
violent displacement of civilians from their land by
paramilitary-controlled palm companies. This will only add to the
already 4 million or so internally displaced people in Colombia. The
FTA is therefore unacceptable on this basis as well.