Democrats on Colombia

09Jul08

John McCain took a lot of flack for being out of the country during the July 4 weekend, but it was only to his benefit that his visit to Colombia coincided with the dramatic rescue of Ingrid Betancourt, three Americans and eleven other hostages held by the FARC.  Images such as the one above flashed alongside those of Betancourt and the Colombian military to the point where I wouldn’t blame anybody for thinking that McCain somehow had a role in the operation (he most certainly did not).

The role that Colombia has come to play in American politics this campaign season is detrimental to Colombians and to the soundness of the Democratic platform.  Even though it was Bill Clinton who initiated the enormously successful Plan Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe has cast his lot with Republicans out of necessity, and Democrats are starting to look pretty silly.  Barack Obama is soon heading to Europe and the Middle East, but it would be a smart move on his part if he could depoliticize our relationship with Colombia.

A brief summary of the situation: the American Left has been quicker than their European counterparts to realize that the FARC and the ELN are nothing but drug-smuggling thugs with no popular support whatsoever.  In the primaries both Obama and Clinton spoke out harshly against the so-called insurgency.  Similarly, even the Republican candidate addressed concerns over human rights abuses in Colombia.  The major policy difference has to do with a free trade agreement – the Republicans are for it, and the Democrats are against it.

First of all, as my friend Kit Cutler said last weekend, I thought the success of the Clinton years had killed any serious belief in protectionism.  But I suppose, with the Bush economy in full effect, that Lou Dobbs jingoism has more resonance than good old fashioned intelligent thinking.  The truth is that no companies are going to ship jobs to Colombia, but we continue to punish an ally with some pretty steep tarriffs on a lot of goods.  The Colombian free trade agreement is a good thing, period.

The standard Democratic line opposing the free trade deal is that Colombia needs to improve its human rights record before they would consider backing the plan.  And even though everybody admits that there is plenty of work to be done on the human rights front, life in Colombia has improved considerably in the past decade, if only from the drastic reduction in guerrilla and paramilitary violence.  There is evidence that by using this deal as a carrot on the human rights front, Democrats have achieved some good: Robert Novak, the Dark Prince himself, reported in the Washington Post that pressure from Democrats had led Uribe to sweep out corruption from the military.  And a recent Carnegie Council article argued that the free trade agreement is likely to improve human rights.  So now, why not support the free trade deal?

What’s at play here is a refusal on the part of the Democrats to remove Colombia from the old Left-Right dichotomy, where Uribe is on the Right, and we have to be sceptical of him.  Outrageously enough, just last year Al Gore refused to appear on a panel with President Uribe because of “troubling allegations” in Colombia.  And Bush invites him to his ranch, and McCain visits him in Cartagena.  Uribe is, in American politics, a Republican.

But in Colombia, Bush is as unpopular as he his here, if not moreso.  The signal Obama sends by keeping his distance from Uribe and repeating the standard lines about human rights abuses is that he’s being classically partisan on the issue of Colombia and that he’s not in touch with the realities of the situation.  Perhaps he sees a spectrum with Chavez on one end and Uribe on the other, and he’s staking out the middle ground – except there is no such spectrum, at least not when it comes to the issue of trade.

At this point, Obama has painted himself into a corner and can’t change his tune on Colombia before the election.  I’m just hoping that, as president, he’ll bring his post-partisan approach to Latin America, too.

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