What they would find are several hundred thousand displaced people from
Colombia's long-running guerrilla war and many thousands more from the last
three months of extraordinary flooding and landslides that washed away houses,
roads, farms and even entire villages in a slow-motion catastrophe that
meteorologists say may continue until May.

    
About 2.2 million Colombians have had their lives damaged, according to
the popular new government of President Juan Manuel Santos, which has had to
tear up its ambitious development plans to focus on the recovery that he now
expects will take up to four years. The surrounding state of Bolivar has been
the hardest hit.

    
Then Obama and his American entourage of well-meaning people should hang
their heads in shame. They aid the misery.

    
They do so by blocking a free-trade agreement signed four years ago and
still awaiting ratification in the Senate. Their actions have little to do with
the human rights they proclaim and a lot to do with ideology and politics. The
ideology is against anything that smacks of freer trade. The politics was
opposition to George W. Bush and Alvaro Uribe, the presidents who negotiated
the deal.

    
An irony that a truly beneficent person might find bitter is that, under
a temporary Andean drug program, Colombia for the past 19 years has enjoyed
almost all the access to the American market that the trade agreement offers.
Actually, it is American companies and workers who would benefit from access
they don't now have to the Colombian market.

    
Colombia's interest is that the trade agreement makes its U.S. access
permanent, giving confidence to investors the country badly needs as it
attempts to pay for the resettlement of more than a million people displaced by
the war, pay indemnity to victims of violence, finance its ever expanding and
ever more effective judicial investigations and other such measures that are
central to real human rights.

    
The investment is also needed to build a modern infrastructure of
highways, railroads, telecommunications and affordable electricity that
Colombia desperately needs to be economically competitive but has been unable
to achieve because of war, and now natural disaster. Economic development that raises
the standard of living to a decent level in poor urban barrios and rural
villages is also a human right.

    
The right that groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International, in alliance with the AFL-CIO, claim to be protecting has to do with
the murder of unionists. As of Nov. 11, according to the main Colombian union
federation, 38 union members were killed this year. But as scores of such cases
have come to be investigated and resolved with convictions by Colombia's very
professional judiciary system, few of the solved murders have had to do with
union activity. More importantly, nothing indicates a systematic, anti-union
campaign, much less government complicity.

    
The murders, in other words, appear to be isolated cases, usually having
more to do with passion or common crime in a country whose culture of violence
is such that a third of all murders nationally this year were due to feuds, the
national police reported this week.

    
The human rights groups are carrying the protectionist water for the
AFL-CIO, which itself is not defending its members' interests. Together, they
have cowed the president and congressional Democrats so that the trade
agreement hasn't even come up for a vote. 

    
What rings very hollow is their attempt to blame the Republicans, as the
resident's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, did when he said Dec. 17 that Obama would
not send the Colombia deal to the Senate "because it doesn't have the
votes."

    
Colombia has paid dearly in blood in fighting our drug war and the
guerrillas, whose customers primarily are Americans. Santos leads a national
unity government and has popularity ratings of up to 90 percent. What have we
done to help? Congress last week extended the expiring Colombian preferences by
just another six weeks, creating even more uncertainty for the Colombian
economy.

© 2010, The Washington Post Writers Group