Bogotá, November 13, 2006

The Honorable U.S. Congress
Washington D.C.
U.S.A.

A cordial greeting:

Not a single organization that represents workers, peasants, native peoples, students, intellectuals or other sectors of the common people of Colombia supports the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States. Even the majority of organizations of agricultural businesspeople opposed the treaty until February 27, 2006, the day when the signature was affixed. But we do not reject the FTA because we are opposed in principle to international business or to relations with the United States. We are opposed because it sacrifices the sovereignty of Colombia, it annexes the Colombian economy to that of the United States, and it takes away from our country the main instruments of development and thus will increase the poverty of almost all Colombians.

The FTA makes irreversible the neoliberal reforms of the last fifteen years, reforms that caused great damage to industry and agriculture, replaced public monopolies with private ones, and generated the worst social disaster of the twentieth century. The backward motion in employment and poverty has been so great that we have not yet returned to the levels preceding the crisis, and the country is suffering one of the worst levels of social inequality in the world.

Official studies indicate that with the FTA, imports to Colombia will grow twice as fast as those of the United States and that Colombian exporters will lose sales to other Andean countries compared to the Americans. This is because Colombia will eliminate its tariffs while the United States, in addition to enjoying an economy that is 129 times greater, will maintain its immense subsidies to agriculture and industry. Furthermore, Colombia virtually eliminated health obstacles to American products, while the White House maintained all U.S. obstacles to Colombian goods. Because of the conditions that have been imposed in the area of intellectual property, Colombia gives up on the production of complex industrial goods and on progress in science and technology. This chapter, furthermore, will cause disease and death among Colombians, as it will raise the price of medicines by about 900 million dollars per year, according to the Pan-American Health Organization (OPS). The FTA's agreements regarding telecommunications and arbitration tribunals will have negative effects on the interests of the remaining official firms owned by the Colombian State.

FTA rules about public investments and purchases grant unheard-of advantages to U.S. monopolists in Colombia, and it would be a joke to say that Colombians in the United States will enjoy the same advantages. It is especially serious that that the Agreement takes away Colombia¹s right to have an effective balance of payments clause, a mechanism that the IMF itself has authorized and whose disappearance might signify catastrophic losses for the country. The FTA also consolidates the delivery of the financial system to foreigners and imposes unpayable costs on Colombia in order to define exchange and interest rates.

Supporters of the FTA say that American investments will wipe out the damage that the Agreement will cause to Colombians' capacity to generate internal savings. But they are silent about the fact that it will be necessary to attract those investments by permitting worse labor and environmental conditions, changes that the FTA authorizes explicitly (Articles 17.2 and 18.2). It is known that various reforms are coming in Colombia that will lower the price of the workforce, that in this country it is easier to create and maintain an illegal armed organization than a union, and that an ideological campaign is under way to lower the minimum wage. Colombia's current government is so unconcerned about the environment that it was willing to fumigate the national park La Macarena with powerful poisons.

It is also a factor in our rejection of the FTA that the further destruction of local small-scale agriculture obliges more Colombians to cultivate coca and opium poppies. Indeed "free trade¹ enriches the monopolists of the United States, while it deteriorates the economic conditions of the common people.

Those of us in the Congresses of Colombia and the United States who treasure an authentically democratic conception must fight for better relations between the two countries. But I tell you frankly that the imperial logic that animates the FTA is opposed to democracy. It is, therefore, one of our duties to reject this Agreement.

Sincerely,

Jorge Enrique Robledo
Senator of the Republic of Colombia
Member of The Democratic Alternative Pole party