[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 65 (Thursday, May 12, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H3223-H3224]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE COLOMBIA TRADE AGREEMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. George Miller) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. This Congress is entering its fifth 
month without bringing a single jobs bill to the House floor, and there 
are no jobs bills in sight. But we do hear calls for a series of trade 
agreements, including ones with Colombia and Korea.
  At a time when millions of Americans are still looking for work, the 
House will be spending time protecting corporate investments in foreign 
countries and not jobs here at home. At a time when multinational 
corporations have fired 2.9 million American workers, they will be 
hiring 2.4 million workers overseas. The House will be spending time 
shoring up corporate overseas investments rather than encouraging 
investments here at home. And at a time when so many in the Middle East 
are rising up for democracy and human rights and are receiving support 
from the United States for those efforts, the House is taking up trade 
agreements with Colombia that fails to live up to those very values.
  One of our most important responsibilities as elected officials is to 
promote and to protect American jobs. We do this by trying to ensure 
that American workers do not face unfair competition with countries 
that keep wages low by repressing essential democratic rights. These 
are important rights, the right to speak out, the right to protest, the 
right to organize unions, the right to bargain collectively and 
directly with their employers, and to support political efforts to 
improve their economic conditions without reprisals.
  But reprisals are what you get in China. Thousands of strikes last 
year were met not by their employers but by the police and the army, 
beating up on the workers who were seeking better wages and better 
working conditions in plants all across China.
  What do you get when you protest your rights in Colombia? You get 
assassinations. You get death squads against union members, union 
leaders, members of union families all across the country. The American 
worker can compete; but you can't compete against the Colombian Army, 
the Colombian death squads, the Chinese Army. That's not fair 
competition. But that's what's protected in these trade agreements.
  Tragically, Colombia stands out as a country where wages are kept low 
and workers are repressed through widespread violence and other human 
rights violations. Colombia has earned the reputation as the most 
dangerous country on Earth for workers trying to build a better life. 
During the last Colombian President's 8 years in office, 570 union 
members were assassinated--149 in the last 3 years--and the violence 
hasn't stopped with the election of the new President.
  Reports of assassinations against union members and leaders keep 
coming. The two most recent ones include the April 8 assassination of 
Ramiro Sanchez. He was shot repeatedly as he left a union meeting. Mr. 
Sanchez had received death threats after organizing workers to demand 
local hiring at an oil company. And the March 30 assassination of 
Hector Orozco, who was an official with the peasant farmers' union. He 
and his colleague Gildardo Garcia were found murdered. Days earlier, 
Mr. Orozco reported that he and other peasants were threatened by an 
army officer.
  On top of the violence is the problem of impunity. Authorities have 
only investigated a quarter of the union killings since 1986. No one 
has been held accountable for 98 percent of the crimes against 
unionists. The violence and impunity came together in another recent 
case. A few weeks ago, Judge Gloria Gaono was shot in the head in broad 
daylight. At the time, she was presiding over a politically sensitive 
case of a military officer accused of murdering three children, one of 
whom he apparently admitted to raping.
  Now Colombia has a new President who says he wants to turn the page 
on Colombia's past. But these murders and human rights violations are 
not the past. They are happening today. Before we consider any 
agreement with Colombia on free trade, real changes must come to 
Colombia. That is why I

[[Page H3224]]

have joined with colleagues to lay out a series of benchmarks that 
should be met by Colombia before the Obama administration sends 
Congress any trade agreement with that country. These benchmarks are 
designed to reduce the violence, to protect human rights, and to end 
the impunity of the death squads and the army, and the actions they 
take against these families. They require on-the-ground results and 
verification.
  The administration, however, has adopted an action plan for Colombia 
that does not demand the results on the ground. I appreciate that U.S. 
and Colombia finally are bringing labor rights into the equation, but 
their plan only demands results on paper. Under their plan, nothing 
really needs to actually change in Colombia. Colombia could have a 
record year of assassinations and still meet the requirements of the 
plan. Indeed, before the action plan has been fully implemented, the 
administration is already preparing the way with Congress to implement 
this trade agreement. If this action plan were made fully enforceable 
under the agreement and into the future, we could have something more 
than just results on paper. Unless it is enforceable, this is less than 
a serious commitment. It is not fair to Colombians, and it's not fair 
to the American workers, and it's not fair to our national values and 
does not reflect our national values.
  The American worker can compete with any worker in the world. They're 
rated time and again the most productive workers in the world. But they 
cannot compete against currency manipulation in China. They cannot 
compete against the Chinese Army that breaks up the rights of workers 
to protest, and they cannot compete against the death squads that have 
been assigned to assassinate union members, union leaders, and union 
families.

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