Interview with Manuel Rozental, organiser with Canada-Colombia Solidarity Campaign, for Fighting FTAs
A 30-minute interview with Manuel Rozental a grassroots organizer with the Canada-Colombia Solidarity Campaign and medical surgeon, who is currently campaigning in Colombia in opposition to the Canada Colombia and U.S. Colombia Free Trade Agreements. This interview addresses the current push by the Conservative government in Canada and the Republican government in the U.S. to establish bilateral trade relations with Colombia. This interview addresses the contemporary push toward bilateral trade relations within the context of the ongoing armed conflict within Colombia and the recent scandal facing the right-wing government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe linking the highest levels of the current administration to paramilitary forces within the country accused by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International as carrying out multiple extrajudicial assassinations of leftist leaders. This interview addresses the current negotiations toward bilateral trade agreements with Colombia within a contemporary context of war while also within the context of the disintegration of the U.S. driven Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). — Stefan Christoff
US-Colombia and Canada-Colombia free trade agreements: Economics and war in Colombia
An interview with Manuel Rozental, organiser with Canada-Colombia Solidarity Campaign, produced by Stefan Christoff for Fighting FTAs in December 2007
Rush transcript by Marisa Berry-Mendez
Stefan Christoff: You are listening to: Fighting FTAs.
Fighting FTAs presents a current audio review on the international state of free trade policy. Focusing on regional and bilateral trade accords and their impacts on the environment, people and economies around the world; featuring rare voices of progressive political analysts, labour organizers, independent journalists, and from grassroots peoples’ movements around the world who offer critical views on the present day currents of corporate and state-driven free trade policy in the 21st century.
Now we will feature an interview from Colombia with Manuel Rozental, a grassroots organizer with the Canada-Colombia Solidarity Campaign, and a medical surgeon who is currently campaigning in Colombia in opposition to the Canada-Colombia and U.S.-Colombia bilateral free trade agreements. This interview addresses the current push by the Conservative government in Canada and the Republican government in the United States to establish bilateral trade relations with Colombia within the context of the ongoing armed conflict within Colombia.
Let’s focus first on Canada and Colombia. This year, [Canadian] President Stephen Harper made a trip to Colombia, he met with President Uribe. This was exactly in the same period where the US-Colombia free trade agreement was stalled because of opposition from even some members of the Democratic Party in the United States, but Mr. Harper openly and forcefully opened negotiations of what is to be Canada-Colombia free trade agreement. Can you talk about this agreement? How do you view it? Give us a basic picture to start.
Manuel Rozental: Yes, I think you’ve framed the question the way it has to be framed, and it’s the timing of the situation. There’s clear evidence that there was a meeting between President Bush and Stephen Harper after which Harper initiated these free trade negotiations. And the stalling of the negotiations between, or the signing of the agreement between, the U.S. and Colombia was actually because of what is known in Colombia as the “para scandal”, which is the connection between the Uribe administration, the Uribe-backed and Uribe-supported Colombian congress and the death squads that have been acting throughout the country, particularly the systematic assassination, disappearance and threats against union leaders and leaders of social movements and human rights organizations for the benefit of multinational corporations and trade interests. At this point when the whole free trade agreement was stalled is when Harper comes to Colombia, and he actually uses the term “ridiculous” when he is told that human rights abuses are used in a systematic way in Colombia, and the collusion between the government and the death squads precisely for profit of corporate interests. He says, “That is ridiculous” and in fact he states that promoting free trade and corporate investment will support the improvement of human rights conditions, which he states wrongly, and against all evidence, [as being] actually the outcome of the efforts of the current Colombian administration, the Uribe government.
In essence, this exposes what the free trade agreement really is about in Canada and Colombia. In the first place, it’s a political move by Harper in support of President Bush, and that’s the main interest of this effort. This could have been a hypothesis until last week, when President Bush clearly quoted Prime Minister Harper as following the right line and stating that Harper is promoting free trade in order to promote human rights and the benefits of both countries, when we all know that Harper was acting on behalf of Bush. So first of all, it’s political interest in support of the Bush administration — [it] becomes increasingly clear that Harper and Bush act together, or better still, that Harper acts for the benefit of the Bush interests.
And then the second interest is of course not trade, but much more than that: it is the annexation of Colombia — resources, territory, labour, savings, etc. — through free trade agreements, which is what it really is about. Free trade agreements, bilateral free trade agreements, particularly with Colombia, are actually supra-national constitutions through which corporate interests gain access to all these resources and wealth. And what Harper is showing, as well as what Bush has shown before, is that they do not act in representation of Canadian interests but that they act in support of and in representation of transnational corporate interests — in the case of Canada represented by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which actually are inseparable from transnational and U.S.-based interests. These are governments of these corporations that act on behalf of Canadian people or the U.S. people without their approval.
SC: Let’s expand on this point [and] talk about the potential implementation of the Canada-Colombia free trade agreements. You talked about some of the political context but what are the details? What is involved? And how will this agreement allow for economic exchanges to take place between Canada and Colombia? What role will corporations have both in Colombia and also Canadian corporations?
MR: First of all, we have to say that the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement negotiations have taken place in secrecy. The ministers for commerce and foreign affairs in both countries have stated that these agreements must be negotiated quickly and in total confidentiality, and that’s what has happened. Only the negotiators from both governments sit together, and they produce statements in strange jargon that cannot be understood, but in a very positive optimistic tone such as the last round of negotiations, the fourth one, taking place in Peru, where the statement issued said, “75% of what is required has been achieved”. The only people allowed in the room next door are private entrepreneurs from Colombia who can oversee but cannot comment on what is happening, and of course who do not act on behalf of anything but their own particular interests. But we do know, because it has been stated openly, that the free trade agreement between Canada and Colombia is in essence the same as the free trade agreement between the U.S. and Colombia, plus more concessions from the Colombian government.
In essence, what they involve is the following: it’s much more than a free trade agreement. It isn’t free. It’s not about trade. And there’s no agreement, because there’s an imposition of corporate interests from a larger economic power to a very small power, such that the imbalance is tremendous. [There are] several chapters, but in essence what happens is that the multinational corporations receive what is technically known as “national treatment”, which is [that] in Colombia, the Colombian government will treat on an equal basis a Canadian corporation as it would treat a Colombian corporation or business, pretending that they are competing on a level playing field. In fact this gives every advantage to the multinational corporations just because of the size of them.
What the national treatment refers to is in terms of purchasing goods and all kinds of services for government purposes, but it’s also about several lines of trade. For Canada specifically, and it has stated it publicly, the lines include: mining, first and foremost, oil, and the telecommunications sectors as one of the largest trading areas in the country. There’s also the huge area of the intellectual property rights, which in fact according to the Pan-American Health Organization, on the free trade agreement between Colombia and the U.S., this will mean that pharmaceutical corporations, for example, will have longer periods for their patents being exclusive monopoly to them, so that people in Colombia will have to pay higher costs for medications for twenty to twenty-five years. And the other uses that are given to these medications are also patented which, for the Pan-American Health Organization, will mean that by 2020, should the agreements be signed, 40% of Colombians will not have access to cheap medication, which will lead to tremendous complications and even death and disease that will not be treated.
But then you have the largest component, which involves the privatization of the health sector, the educational sector, and then the essence of the agreement which is free or very cheap access to labour and to natural resources. In the case of Colombia, I’ll give you the framework. Colombia has used, systematically, violence and terror against labour, against the peasants, against all kinds of organizations from social movements in the country. The outcome of this has been the imposition of legislation through terror to cheapen labour and to open natural resources to multinational corporations. There are close to four million internally displaced people in Colombia — the second largest humanitarian crisis in the world after Sudan. But the thing is that people are being displaced from resource-rich territories where corporate interests come for these resources. So the free trade agreement is absolutely linked to the death squad actions, as well as the legislation to impose this kind of abuse.
In essence, the Colombian model involves dismantling labour — 15% of labourers were linked to unions five years ago and now only 4% are organized in unions, so they cannot bargain their salaries etc. Then, during Uribe’s administration, 556 labour union leaders have been murdered: 28 this year, the last one two weeks ago, while we were on tour in Canada to expose the risks of the free trade agreement, and that last leader assassinated worked for SINAL-TRENAL, which is the union that represents Nestle and Coca-Cola.
So essentially, on the one hand, you use terror to have people work under the worst possible conditions, to displace people from areas where there are mining, oil and other essential resources for corporations, and to cheapen the cost of labour. It is within this framework that the free trade agreements are signed. So in essence you cannot have the kind of free trade agreement the Canadian government is negotiating with Colombia unless you have the human rights abuses and the legislation that leaves people in Colombia unprotected and delivers the resources of the country to the transnational corporations.
SC: From your perspective, why do you feel that there is this push, this effort to establish bilateral trade accords? For years we’ve been witnessing efforts to create a multilateral hemispheric trade agreement in the Americas called the Free Trade Area of the Americas which now is on hold, in a sense. Why is there this push, this effort, to establish bilateral relations on the part of Canada and the United States generally, but specific to Colombia also — what are the differences between this bilateral context and the multilateral one?
MR: That is the essential question — they’re both connected. The free trade agreement that you say is on hold, or essentially the one that Bush Senior proposed, has failed. And it has failed mostly because of the resistance of governments and social movements that have taken power over in places such as Venezuela, even Brazil (where the corporate interests are still evolving, but not within the free trade framework), Ecuador, Bolivia, etc., So half of the Americas — and this is what is now known as the half-FTAA — are involved in this type of negotiations, and these are the regimes that are mostly controlled by corporations and their counterparts, and if you follow them from north to south they include: Canada; the U.S.; Mexico; Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras for the Central America free trade agreement; plus Costa Rica, although the resistance in Costa Rica is growing and actually a referendum was won in favour of the free trade agreement through obvious manipulation of the electoral results — people in Costa Rica don’t want the free trade agreement. And if you go south from there: Panama, Colombia, Peru and Chile. Then you’ll have a map of one free trade area of the Americas, and then you have the other countries that reject this free trade area. So what the bilateral agreements do is to consolidate this Half-Free Trade Area of the Americas. And in essence, once the Free Frade Agreement of the Americas, the general agreement negotiation process failed because of this resistance and opposition, then Canada and the US moved swiftly into negotiating bilateral agreements.
And that’s only one aspect of it. The other aspect is that these free trade agreements, say for example the first free trade agreement which was NAFTA — Canada, Mexico and the US — with its horrendous impact on the main needs of Mexicans, as having the worst share of these agreements. From that agreement to the other ones that have been negotiated and signed since, each new generation of agreements has greater demands on the poorest counterpart or country. So the free trade agreement negotiated with Central America is much more aggressive and abusive in terms of capturing resources and exploiting labour than the previous one. And now the one with Colombia is much worse than the one with Central America and so one and then the one with the US is less aggressive than the one that Canada is trying to negotiate. So, in essence, the strategy of negotiating bilateral trade agreements is to go further than what the [FTAA] was trying to do, but actually to achieve what the Free Trade Area of the Americas could not achieve in certain specific areas that are of more interest to the bilateral partners with each specific country. That is the kind of negotiation that is taking place. In other words, it’s the FTAA, but done through specific counterparts to advance and do what the FTAA could not do.
SC: Now, we’re talking about trade agreements within this regional hemispheric context currently, but on the ground in Colombia, and you’ve worked extensively with Indigenous communities in the country, with the proposed trade agreement joining Canada and Colombia economically, there’s definitely a trans-section of exchange that is happening here between economic policy and military policy. Now, we’re discussing this bilateral trade accord, but also trade accords within the American context and that’s the context of what is being called the "war on terror". Stephen Harper has taken a very strong position in support of this conflict. Can you talk about the trade agreement and if it has any relationships to this context of war in which we live?
MR: Yes, I mean, that’s exactly the point. We tend to look separately at this issue: the war on terror is one issue, and then the trade issue is another one. That’s intentionally the way these things are presented so that we don’t make links, when in fact these components are inseparable.
Let me start by giving people an example of the Colombian situation. Plan Colombia was a U.S.-based and -written initiative in order, in principle, to act against [the] drug trade, and then eventually was expanded to act against terrorism, so it was in fact a counterinsurgency strategy and also supposedly a "war on drugs" strategy. The first phase of Plan Colombia was implemented in southern Colombia, but is in fact a plan for the entire Andean region. [It] has not been evaluated, but the evaluations that exist and come even from the State Department show that they have failed in both those explicitly stated purposes. It has failed in terms of the war on drugs — the more fumigation, air-spraying there is against, supposedly against cocaine production, the more coca is produced in the country. And also the war on terror is not being fought through these mechanisms, in fact it is being promoted.
In essence, if you see it in combination with the trade agreements that I was telling you about before, these people are displaced from their territories. If the dumping of agricultural products from North America — the U.S. and Canada — get into Colombia, you know that most of the food produced in Canada and the U.S. is heavily subsidized by the government, so artificially cheaper prices are made non-competitive for Colombian agriculture. So people cannot grow food and make a profit out of growing food because it is cheaper, artificially, to buy imported goods that are subsidized. Therefore, people are forced out of producing food, the rural areas are impoverished, and the only crops that will produce some cash for them to buy the goods that they require, including the food that they cannot grow anymore, is actually coca, which has maintained and increased its market price. So, in fact, these trade agreements and this war are actually pushing people towards growing coca.
But they are also pushing people towards war and terrorism because these people are forcibly displaced from their territories and the larger landholdings for corporate interests — like mining, oil, as well as bananas and all these necro-fuels — then the outcome is that people that have been displaced through terror have two options. Either they fill up the slums in the city and starve to death, where they will not find jobs because of the labour conditions I’ve told you about. Or they find their way to join armed insurgency, which seems to become the only mechanism to resist these strategies for many people. Although most Colombians reject armed insurgency, most Colombians find themselves in the trap that they either join this armed insurgency or they join the misery that is structurally established throughout the country.
So here’s where the connection with war and war strategy comes. There is an intentional push for the political debate and the social conflict of our countries to be displaced from a battle of ideas and a confrontation of positions through democratic processes and mobilizations, into forcing people into war, so that they can intervene militarily and through terror. And that explains what we just know as Colombians recently: there is a "phase two" of Plan Colombia. And that phase two is to be implemented on the border with Venezuela and the border with Ecuador (both with popular governments now), as well as on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (where mega-projects have been built, harbours etc., to take out natural resources and manufactured products from Colombia), as well as in northern Cauca where I have been working and which is the birthplace of national resistance today.
The Plan Colombia Phase Two, if you read it and then you read a document by the U.S. South Command called “Friendship with the Americas 2016”, you’ll find out that they are essentially the same text. One apparently produced in Colombia (Plan Colombia Phase Two) and the other one produced by the U.S. South Command. And what it entails is essentially that the countries are divided into areas. The areas are used for what they call the "social recovery of territories" that have been saved from or taken from the hands of "terrorists" — essentially the armed insurgency. So the argument is that these territories should never go back to the hands of the terrorists, therefore an implementation of an integral initiative that involves the economic, the social, the political and the military will "recover" these territories completely.
In fact what is going on is a military occupation of territories, and the control by the military of all resources and all programs. And what happens in these territories is that they are directly linked to corporate projects and to these trade agreements. They are controlled by military, the population is under the hands of the corporate interests, and these plans are actually the military consolidation of the economic project for the Americas.
That’s why Colombia is of such importance for the entire continent: because it is an experiment in a mostly and essentially military occupation of the country, through which economic and political and social interests in favour of capital are used. So these military operations such as Plan Colombia are closely articulated with the free trade agreements in order to access and put these resources and territories definitely in the hands of transnational corporate interests.
If you look at the Latin American map you’ll know that the U.S. South Command is building three bases in Colombia that are fully established and more are being implemented. The Manta base in Ecuador, that President Correa wants to dismantle, two bases in Peru and throughout Brazil, Argentina, etc., throughout the rest of the continent and the Caribbean bases are being built in order to promote this kind of strategy. This is added to the fact that the School of the Americas still exists and the largest number of officers in Colombia linked to paramilitary and human rights abuses were trained in the School of the Americas, and the Colombian military[’s] highest ranking officials were trained there. And it’s also linked to the link between the Colombian government and the paramilitaries which were essentially trained by U.S. advisors in the past and currently.
So what you see is a combination of three strategies that are inseparable: one is this war, or terror strategy, that uses legal and illegal components and is at the service of corporate interests; two is the entire legal and economic strategy which involves free trade agreements, whether FTAA or bilateral agreements, and national legislation that corresponds to them; and thirdly, because you cannot control populations and resources through law and coercion, then there’s propaganda, which is the mechanism for consensus which is being used throughout the continent to present this whole horror and for-profit effort as an effort for human rights and well-being of the population — which is exactly what Canada is brought into the picture to do, because of its tradition, apparently, of support for human rights and promotion of democracy, human security and well-being.
So we are presented one image, that people believe, when in fact the opposite is happening. They force people both into terror, as I explained before, drug trade, as I explained also, as well as to massive migration for survival. And in a systematic way both the U.S. and Canada are using illegal immigration in order to cheapen the cost of labour in Canada, and attempting to create the racist conflict between Canadian labour, Canadian people, and forced immigration that has become a source of comparative advantage for Canadian corporations within North America.
So the Free Trade Area of the Americas is being established. It combines these three strategies. And it is not for the benefit of Canada. It is for the benefit of the corporations at the expense of the people of the entire continent, including Canada.
SC: You have been listening to an interview with Manuel Rozental, a grassroots organizer with the Canada-Colombia solidarity campaign, and a medical surgeon who is currently campaigning in Colombia in opposition to the Canada-Colombia and U.S.-Colombia bilateral free trade agreements. This interview has been brought to you by Fighting FTAs: a current audio review on the international state of free trade policy, focusing on regional and bilateral trade accords and their impacts on the environment, people and economies around the world. This interview series is produced and conducted for Fighting FTAs by independent journalist Stefan Christoff based in Montréal, Quebec. For more information visit www.fightingftas.org.
Canada-Colombia Solidarity Campaign http://www.en-camino.org/
