“This free-trade agreement is dead.”

Plan Colombia and Beyond » "This free-trade agreement is dead."

Oct 19
“This free-trade agreement is dead.”

Free Trade, U.S. Congress Add comments
“This free-trade agreement is dead.”
“This free-trade agreement isn’t going anywhere.”
“The Colombia free-trade agreement won’t come to a vote [in Congress] while Bush is president.”
I heard these statements, or variations of them, several times while accompanying Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro on a series of meetings with members of the U.S. Congress this week. The general sense I got from House Democrats was that, due mainly to domestic political concerns, there is little that the Colombian government could do at this point to guarantee enough U.S. Congressional support to allow the current free-trade agreement to come to a vote. As the 2008 presidential campaign heats up, it will become even less likely that this controversial issue will be debated.
Notice, though, that the Democrats we spoke with were talking about “this” free-trade agreement - the accord that the Bush and Uribe governments signed a year ago, in its current form. “That” agreement indeed appears to be going nowhere.
Right now, in the House (and probably in the Senate, though I have less of a sense there), most members of the Republican minority would vote for the existing Colombia FTA. Among the Democrats, as with most things, the picture is more complicated.
A first group would join the Republicans and vote for the existing free-trade agreement. Members of this group, which is a small but vocal minority, tend to be quite supportive of Plan Colombia and President Álvaro Uribe’s security policies.
A second group would be unlikely to support this or any other free-trade agreement. Many members of this group, whose size is anyone’s guess, are motivated by concerns about declining wages and job losses in their home districts.
A third group opposes the existing free-trade agreement in its current form, but is also concerned about the negative message that a flat-out rejection might send to the rest of Latin America. Recognizing that a vote will be unlikely in 2008, they wish to spend the coming year trying to come up with a “better” model of what an FTA should look like. Members of this group asked Senator Petro questions along the lines of, “What would you want? How would you change this agreement? Should it be conditioned, and if so according to what criteria? How can we incorporate the concerns of sectors in Colombia who didn’t have a voice in the negotiations that led to the current agreement?”
I have no idea how many members of Congress are in each of these three groups. I also have little idea about the mechanism by which the trade agreement would be “improved” - whether this would mean starting from scratch, amending some of the most controversial sections, or simply attaching strong pre-conditions and benchmarks to the existing accord. It could be a combination of all of these.
The Colombian government has been lobbying Democrats very hard lately, with little to show for it. That will continue to be the case as long as they insist on trying to move them into group one above, because the FTA is clearly headed back to the drawing board.