[R-G] Is the Canada-Colombia FTA really going to help Colombia?

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=10915

Free Trade: No such thing as free trade
Is the Canada-Colombia FTA really going to help Colombia?

Dawn Paley / paley at vueweeky.com
When Minister of International Trade Stockwell Day signed the
Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in Peru on November 21, it
was a happy day for Canada's oil and gas sector, but the deal was
celebrated instead as a landmark for human rights and democracy in
Colombia.

"Deepening both economic and political engagement between our
countries is the best way Canadians can support the citizens of
Colombia in their efforts to create a safer and more prosperous
democracy," said Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the signing
ceremony.

The Canada-Colombia FTA was negotiated in secret, and the texts of the
deal have yet to be made available to the public.

As Day's pen slid across paper in Peru, a massive mobilization of
popular movements had taken over the central plaza in Colombia's
capital. The protests in Bogotá were the culmination of over six weeks
of demonstrations across the country, known as a Minga, spearheaded by
Indigenous peoples.

Crystal clear among the demands of the tens of thousands mobilizing in
Bogotá was the immediate end to all Free Trade Agreements and the
economic system these deals represent.

"Free Trade Agreements are never for the benefit of the people," says
Rafael Coicué, a Nasa leader from Cauca, in southwest Colombia, who
participated in the Minga. "These agreements are shaped by economic
interests at the cost of life and sovereignty."

Having signed the FTA with Colombia, the Harper government evened the
score with the Bush Administration in the US—both governments have now
signed the agreement, but neither one has yet ratified the deal.

According to Foreign Affairs Canada, bilateral trade with Colombia in
2007 totaled $1.14 billion, making it the fourth most important
destination for Canadian trade in Latin America. Along with select
exporters, Canada's extractive industries are among the sectors that
could cash in on a free trade agreement with Colombia.


The Role of the Wild Rose State

A briefing put together by Alberta's department of International,
Intergovernmental and Aboriginal Relations, calculates that exports
from Alberta to Colombia averaged $48 million a year from 2002 to
2006. Almost half of Alberta's exports to Colombia in 2006 were made
up of wheat and other crops, oil and gas equipment and transportation
equipment.

More than 20 oil and gas companies from Alberta are currently active
in Colombia, including Nexen, Enbridge and Petrominerales.

Enbridge owns 24.7 per cent of Oleoducto Central SA (OCENSA), the
company that controls the largest pipeline system in Colombia. The
outstanding portion of OCENSA is owned by Ecopetrol (Colombia's
national oil company), TOTAL, BP and Triton Pipeline Colombia.
Enbridge has been involved in the project since 1994, and today is
responsible for operations along Colombia's largest pipeline.

Enbridge runs a Corporate Social Responsibility campaign, but
according to the company's own power point presentation, they're
"prepared for some NGO questioning," relating to their operations in
Colombia.

There are 17 military bases and more than 1400 soldiers, airmen and
marines stationed near the 820 km long pipeline. Enbridge claims that
the constitution of Colombia requires them to have military personnel
guarding their operations. Colombia's military has recently come under
international scrutiny because of the "false positives" scandal, where
civilians killed by the army were dressed up to appear like
guerrillas.
In 1998, the OCENSA pipeline was bombed by the National Liberation
Army (ELN), a guerrilla group active in Colombia's northeast.
Seventy-one people were killed and many hundreds were wounded in the
blast.

Amnesty International condemned the blasts as a "flagrant violation of
international humanitarian law," and later revealed OCENSA was
transferring arms to the XIV Brigade of the Colombian army, as well as
employing a private security company whose operations aggravated the
human rights situation for civilians living in the area near the
pipeline.

"The relation with Israeli private security companies is potentially
of concern given that in the past such companies have provided
mercenaries, of Israeli and British and German nationality, to train
paramilitary organizations operating under the control of the XIV
Brigade," said Amnesty International.

Paramilitary activity along the OCENSA pipeline led to an eventual
payout of victims by BP, which was then operating the pipeline. BP now
carries out oil production and exploration in Colombia, and maintains
a smaller stake in the OCENSA pipeline.

Nexen, for it's part, has a non-operational stake in oil production in
Colombia. "It is not a focus area for us and we have about eight to 10
people in the country," wrote Carla Yuill, Nexen's Manager of
Corporate Communications, in an email to Vue. Nexen currently produces
about 5000 net barrels a day in Colombia.

John Wright is the president and CEO of Petrobank, which has
operations spanning BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and Petrominerales,
which produces oil in the Llanos area of Colombia, which comprises the
departments of Arauca, Casanare, Vichada y Meta. The company is also
exploring in Putamayo and Neiva. Their operations net about 20 000
barrels daily and employ upwards of 130 people, plus a large amount of
contractors.

Wright has been working in Colombia since 1992, and he's yet to come
across any of the problems others have experienced in Colombia.
"You find you'll have exactly the same security issues you'd have in
parts of Miami, or certainly in places like Caracas, or probably in a
place like Lagos," he says.

The day before Wright talked to Vue, 10 people were kidnapped by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Meta, one of the
departments where Petrominerales is active.

Nonetheless, according to Wright, "It's very calm where we are."


Free Trade: for better or for worse?

"Colombia is one of the most transparent places on earth to do
business, it's as clean as Alberta when it comes to the oil industry,"
says Wright.

He has strongly advocated for the passage of the agreement, and he
testified before the Standing Committee on International Trade's
hearings about the deal.

"We're huge supporters of [the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement].
I think Canada has an enormous role to play, we can show the world how
you can do things with rational regulations, rational oversight and
transparent business practices, and Colombia fits into that mould,"
Wright told Vue.

Not everyone agrees with Wright's perspective, however. Gustavo
Triana, the second vice-president of the Colombian United Workers
Federation (CUT) and a former Secretary of the Energy & Mining Sector,
says that, with relation to the oil and gas sector in Colombia, "What
the Free Trade Agreements do is ... stipulate that the services and
engineering that is today done by [Colombian] nationals will be
instead done by foreigners, by bringing in firms and technicians that
displace ours, and removing national control mechanisms."

Resistance to the passage of a free trade agreement between Canada and
Colombia goes beyond popular movements and trade unionists in
Colombia. After months of hearings on the agreement, the Standing
Committee on International Trade issued its report to the government,
in which it recommended an FTA with Colombia not be signed.

"The Committee recommends that the Government of Canada maintain close
ties with Colombia without signing a free trade agreement until there
is confirmation that the improvements noted are maintained, including
continued improvement as regards displacement, labour law and
accountability for crime, and until the Colombian government shows a
more constructive attitude to human rights groups in the country,"
reads the report.


Workers beware

Among the strongest voices of opposition against free trade agreement
in North America are labour, especially the AFL-CIO in the US, and the
Canadian Labour Congress north of the border.

Colombia is the world's most dangerous place to be a trade unionist.
Since 1996, Colombia's National Trade Union School (ENS) has recorded
the assassinations of 2690 trade unionists. According to Triana, these
numbers include 135 workers in the oil and gas sector.

ENS numbers for 2008 show that last year, 46 trade union members were
assassinated, 157 were threatened, 15 were arbitrarily detained, 13
taken hostage and four were disappeared.

"The union movement is pretty strong in Colombia and I don't see them
being persecuted in any way. The US side of it, of course, it's all
just a big political sham, it's the AFL-CIO who are against the
Colombia Free Trade Agreement," counters Wright.

"None of the Canadian companies linked to the oil sector ... have
unions, and the reason is simple—they rely on third parties for
labour, subcontracting, they don't hire [employees] directly and in
that way get around union organizing," says Triana.

In addition to being a dangerous place for trade unionists, Colombia
is home to a growing population of over four million internally
displaced people, and plays host to irregular armed groups ranging
from the FARC and ELN to paramilitary groups. Colombia is the
hemisphere's largest recipient of "aid" money from United States
though Plan Colombia, most of which goes towards military spending.

The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, modeled on the Russell Tribunals that
took place after the Vietnam war, spent three years studying the role
of multinational corporations in Colombia over the last three years. A
Nobel Laureate and a number of European Supreme Court justices issued
the verdict of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal last summer. Though no
Canadian oil companies were named in the verdict, other extractives
companies were denounced for their participation in human rights
violations.

"Colombia seems to be, in one sense, like a true institutional
political laboratory where the interests of national and international
economic actors are fully defended through the state's abandonment of
its functions and its constitutional duty to protect the dignity and
life of the population, to which instead the state applies the
Colombian version of the doctrine of national security," reads the
verdict.

"It is not true that terror is an enemy of development of capital in
Colombia, in fact, the opposite is true: there is terror so that
transnational corporate and Canadian capital can develop their
interests, because terror creates cheap access to the means of
exploitation and production," says Manuel Rozental, a Colombian
surgeon who has lived in Canada.

It is expected that the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will be
tabled in Parliament before the spring. Whether or not Liberal Leader
Michael Ignatieff will direct the Liberals to vote against the
deal—previous leader Stephane Dion promised during the election
campaign that he wouldn't support the FTA—is unknown. V