McCain and Obama on Colombian Free Trade: Business as Usual

Today's post is from Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. Leech is an independent journalist and editor of Colombia Journal. For the past eight years his work has primarily focused on the US war on drugs and Colombia's civil conflict. He is the author of several books including Crude Interventions: The United States, Oil and the New World (Dis)Order (Zed Books, 2006) and Killing Peace: Colombia's Conflict and the Failure of US Intervention (Inota, 2002). He also teaches international politics at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

In the final presidential debate, the South American country of Colombia briefly became a central theme in the U.S. election campaign, not so much because of its infamous history of drug trafficking and civil conflict, but because of international economic policies. In November of 2006, the Bush administration signed a free trade agreement with the Colombian government. However, its ratification in Congress has been stalled because many Democrats oppose the pact on human rights grounds. During the debate, Republican candidate John McCain decided to take the offensive against his opponent Barack Obama by attacking the Democratic candidate's opposition to the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement. The arguments presented by each candidate are telling with regard to the degree of difference between the two of them on international economic issues.

In the debate, McCain repeatedly made Colombia a topic of discussion. In fact, as Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker put it, McCain appeared to have a "strange preoccupation" with the South American country. In actuality, McCain was preoccupied with suggesting that Obama's opposition to the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement exemplified the Democratic senator's protectionist tendencies and that such an economic approach would be bad for Americans. "I just recited to you the benefits of concluding that agreement, a billion dollars of American dollars that could have gone to creating jobs and businesses in the United States, opening up those markets," McCain argued.

Obama responded by suggesting that the United States should ensure such agreements contain adequate human rights and environmental protections, particularly in the case of Colombia where more unionists are killed each year than in the rest of the world. "We have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn't being perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organize for their rights," Obama declared, suggesting that human rights trump U.S. trade interests.

Not surprisingly, McCain's position on free trade agreements is consistent with that of President George W. Bush, who again urged Congress to ratify the U.S-Colombia pact the day after the debate. McCain, like the Bush administration and many other Republicans, advocates the expansion of the neoliberal, or "free market," global economic order that has been established over the past quarter century. But is Obama's position markedly different?

Living Under the Trees: Indigenous Mexican Farm Workers in California

Today’s post is from award-winning photojournalist David Bacon. Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. His articles appear in The Nation, American Prospect, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he hosts a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, will be published by Beacon Press this fall. The photos in this essay are from his photography project, Living Under the Trees, and are used here with the photographer’s permission.

In 2006, Mexico experienced profound social turmoil. Dramatic political and economic conflicts uprooted and displaced thousands of families, forcing many to consider leaving home. Teachers struck in Oaxaca, and after their demonstrations were tear-gassed, a virtual insurrection paralyzed the state capitol for months. Economic desperation lies at the root of these political and social movements — one major basis of the pressure on people to migrate north. But repression brought to bear on those movements also leads to migration.  It's no accident that Oaxaca is one of the main starting points for the current stream of Mexican migrants coming to the U.S.

About 30 million Mexicans survive on less than 30 pesos a day — not quite $3. The minimum wage is 53 pesos a day. The federal government estimates that 37.7% of Mexico’s 106 million citizens — 40 million people — live in poverty. Some 25 million, or 23.6%, live in extreme poverty. In rural Mexico, over ten million people have a daily income of less than 12 pesos — a little over a dollar. In the southern state of Oaxaca that category of extreme poverty encompasses 75% of its 3.4 million residents, according to EDUCA, an education and development organization. That makes Oaxaca the second-poorest state in Mexico, after Chiapas.

Indigenous Peoples Day

Today's post is from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an historian, university professor, co-founder of Indigenous World Association, which lobbies the United Nations on behalf of indigenous peoples’ rights, and author of a number of books and articles on indigenous peoples of the Americas, most recently, Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She is at work on a history of the United States from the indigenous perspective, which is forthcoming from Beacon Press.

“I'm convinced that indigenous peoples are the moral reserve of humanity.” Evo Morales, Aymara, President of Bolivia, Democracy Now! September 26, 2007.

Every year as October 12 approaches, there is a certain sense of dread that can be felt in indigenous communities in the Americas. That it is a federal holiday in the United States is regarded as hideous, a celebration of genocide and colonization. However, beginning thirty years ago, indigenous peoples formed an international movement, demanding, for one thing, that October 12 be commemorated as an international day of mourning for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Informally, the day has been appropriated as Indigenous Peoples Day.