A Second Hand Conjecture

Colombian flower farms (photo: Mike Freedman-Schnapp)

Colombia’s flower farm workers have for some time been benefiting mightily from industrial support communities, which practice heavy nongovernmental social investment in workforce collectives. Many of the workers in these communities outside Bogota and Medellin are essentially resettled refugees from the war in the countryside. The community support in the form of daycare, retraining, and counseling have rescued many workers lives.

But they’re in trouble, as the Colombia Free Trade Agreement with the US –which congress is holding up on grounds of Colombian worker rights– can have profound implications if unsigned. The effects:

“If tariff exemptions are canceled on account of not signing the Free Trade Agreement, we would immediately be leveraged between six and seven percent to enter the U.S. market,” said flower consultant Felipe Arango.

“We’d disappear.”
(Reuters)

But there is an alternative view on that. As Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown might put it, Colombian flower workers need to understand that in order to avoid “shortchanging” them, their jobs and communities have to be destroyed:

“For the sake of both of our nations, the United States should not sign a trade deal with Columbia that shortchanges workers, that rewards polluters, and that gives businesses the same power as sovereign governments. And we should absolutely not sign a trade deal that forgives treachery toward labor leaders,”
(Teamsters)

I can only recoil from that argument, given the suffering it would induce as policy, and echo Fausta:

The USA needs to show its support of this progress, and must approve the free trade agreement with Colombia. As Ambassador Shapiro said, it’s good for Colombia, good for the US, and good for our national security.
(Fausta’s Blog)

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Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal is a frustrating columnist. In April he made the head scratching argument that Khost province in Afghanistan, which has, along with the rest of RC-East, experienced a 36% jump in insurgent attacks over last year, was really on the verge of victory and only John Kerry says otherwise.

Today he writes that FARC, the LTTE, and the Sadr militia are really the same because they were defeated militarily. He of course ignores the very salient fact that neither are alike at all and each required completely different tactics to weaken. The Sadrists have been quelled through concerted American-backed military action in a warzone; the Tamil Tigers were undermined by decades of systematic police and intelligence work before the latest of many military forays to the north of Sri Lanka, most of which had failed (according to some excellent research by RAND scholar C. Christine Fair). And FARC? FARC has been around for 30 years, wholly impervious to our best efforts to undermine it militarily. FARC is weakened now because of political and economic changes. Not the military.

But Stephens feels comfortable spending a week strutting around a few disparate FOBs in Afghanistan, then declaring victory. So I don’t really take what he has to say at face value… or any value at all. But his column is a textbook example of what happens when you really love your hammer—everything looks like a nail.

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McQ alerts us to this developing story in South America.

Colombia, apparently, struck at a narco-terrorist camp inside Ecuador after tracking FARC spokesman Paul Reyes and other leaders there. Reyes and 16 other terrorists were killed.

Chavez reacted by sending troops to the Venezuela/Colombia border:

Now you might ask why Chavez would involve himself in this conflict that essentially had nothing to do with him. Of course he could just be trying to take advantage of a situation to let him attack the rightist and US allied Colombian govt, or he could be trying to protect himself from what the raid would possibly find.

Evidence found in computers seized in a raid over the weekend suggests that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recently gave the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia $300 million, Colombia’s national police chief said Monday.

Let’s also note Chavez’s past ties with Iran when this part shows up:

Naranjo said other evidence in the computers suggests FARC purchased 50 kilograms of uranium this month.

This could be an interesting story to watch unfold.

UPDATE: More on the story on the Ecuadorians. It seems they were in negotiations with FARC to post friendlier security forces on their border. Also, want to throw a link out there to the US Presidential Election? The files also stated

Americans have reached out to Correa’s government, saying Barack Obama is likely to be the next U.S. president. ”We responded we’re not interested in relationship with governments … and in the case of the United States, we require a public announcement expressing interest in talking with the FARC, given their eternal war against us,” the memo said.

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You don’t have to be Colombian for this beautiful advertisement to touch your heart.

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John Lilyea has the goods:

So I decided to add my voice to the millions worldwide from here in DC.

I was really surprised that an ad hoc organization put together such a large demonstration in such a short period of time.

More at Gateway Pundit.

UPDATE: Commenter logtar supplies a link to pictures of anti-FARC rallies from around the world. Protest babes abound (albeit some not exactly, um, real.)

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Venezuelans not fond of Hugo Chavez’s new found affinity for narcoterrorism, are planning street marches in Caracas and Maracaibo to explicitly reject FARC and their murderous barbarism. This is an enormously heartening sign of genuinely worthwhile international solidarity, unlike the vile and dictatorial version Hugo likes to promote. Details in English from Kate at A Colombo-Americana’s Perspective.

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JammieWearingFool hilariously points out that Hugo Chavez’s recent appeal to the world to refer to the FARC as “insurgents,” rather than terrorists, is off to a smashing start. It only took Reuters four paragraphs into the story before they began to comply.

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