The Price of Business as Usual

In Canada's free-trade agreement with Colombia, business and profit trump human rights.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper loves the way the government of Colombia operates. Defending the Colombia-Canada free-trade agreement that was passed in 2009 with the support of the Liberals, he ludicrously claims that concerns about human rights in that country are merely protectionism in disguise.

Harper’s dark vision of governance needs to be more widely acknowledged by Canadians.

If murdering trade unionists and human-rights activists, and driving the poor off their land by the millions to make way for “development,” is your thing, then by all means keep supporting Harper. Or, if you’re a Liberal, throw your full support behind interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae and the morally reprehensible Liberal MP Scott Brison, who seem to have no difficulty with this sort of thing either.

Stephen Harper secures free-trade agreement with Honduras. Read about it here.

If you happen to support human rights, however – and most Canadians are decent folk who do – maybe it’s time to take a stand. Here are some inconvenient truths: From 1987-2008, more than 2,500 unionists were assassinated in Colombia. In fact, more union activists are killed each year in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined. These murders usually go unpunished. And they are continuing to this day.

The country is crawling with paramilitary groups, often working in concert with government forces to suppress the indigenous population, eliminate human-rights defenders, and murder trade-union leaders.

Between three and five million people, mostly from indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant farmer communities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes.

The new government of Colombia, with an eye to international public relations, recently passed a law supposedly permitting people to reclaim their land. But Amnesty International (AI) has exposed it as an essentially toothless piece of legislation, unlikely to reverse the massive dispossession of Colombia's poorest citizens.

A health crisis is looming in Colombia due to the gold industry's growth. Read about it here.

Meanwhile, what AI describes as a full-blown “human-rights crisis” in Colombia continues. Here are some examples of what has been happening over the past few months alone:

August 9, 2011: Two Afro-descendent members of a community council in Caracolí, northwest Colombia, were “disappeared” by paramilitaries.

June 19, 2011: Ten NGOs based in Bogotá, and 18 individuals, many belonging to women’s NGOs, were threatened with death by a paramilitary group for “opposing the policies of our government.”

May, 2011: Paramilitaries threatened Afro-descendent and indigenous communities in the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó River Basins in northwest Colombia. They have abused women in the area and, in one case attempted to seize a child. The Colombian army, which operates in the area, has deliberately turned a blind eye, and has refused to offer protection to the communities when asked.