Former US President George W. Bush once called Alvaro Uribe an "amigo." Before leaving office last January, Mr. Bush also awarded Mr. Uribe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Such an honor had previously been bestowed on other foreign leaders of the caliber of Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II. Along with President Uribe, former British PM Tony Blair and Australia´s John Howard also received the Medal on the same day. In other words, with the Republicans in the White House, Mr. Uribe knew he was part of a selective constellation of leaders that the US President trusted and supported fully.
But almost five months into the Obama Presidency, the scenario has changed significantly. The relations between the Casa de Nariño and The White House are definitely not what they used to be. Last April, in the Summit of the Americas held in Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia’s diplomats were embarrassed after they had to rectify that President Obama would not be meeting privately with Mr. Uribe, contrary to what they had announced before. There finally was an informal meeting between the two leaders, during lunch, and since, they have only been in touch by telephone.
In contrast, Mr. Obama has already visited President Felipe Calderón in Mexico City, and he received Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula in the Oval Office last month. Moreover, Mr. Obama announced recently that American aid to Colombia would be reduced by US$ 33 million in fiscal year 2010, which starts this October. Unlike his predecessor, President Obama has also been unwilling to make any calls to the US Congress to approve the FTA the two countries signed almost two and a half years ago, and which is a priority for the Uribe administration. Colombia may still call itself the United States' strongest ally in Latin America, but the support is no longer going both ways.
Yet, Mr. Uribe has a chance to turn the tide in his favor in a few weeks, when he will finally meet with President Obama in the White House. And the stakes are high. No other country is as important as the United States for Colombian foreign and economic policy, with the possible exception of Venezuela. The US is, by far, Colombia’s first source of foreign aid, and Americans buy about one third of Colombian exports. The US is also the largest source of Foreign Direct Investment inflows to Colombia. Furthermore, for all the credit Mr. Uribe gets for keeping FARC at bay, restoring consumer and investor confidence and lowering crime, those three things would have been impossible without the 5 billion dollars the US has provided under Plan Colombia since 2000. Although I do not like counterfactual history, there can be no doubt that without American aid, President Uribe’s attempt to revive Colombia from collapse would have proven fruitless.
So here is a list of things Mr. Uribe should bring up during his meeting with President Obama. First of all, President Uribe must assure Mr. Obama that he is determined to decrease murder rates of labor leaders by half before the end of his presidency next year. The perception among Democrats about the rights of labor leaders in Colombia could hardly be worse, and it is Mr. Uribe's task to tell President Obama that his government has done enormous progress on this matter. Even though there was a rise in the rate of trade unionist killings last year, it is only a quarter of what it was when Mr. Uribe took office. Yes, shamefully, Colombia remains the most dangerous country for trade unionists, but the levels of killings under Mr. Uribe’s presidency have been low by the country’s terrible standards: the 49 murders last year are well below the annual average of 120, taken since 1986. In short, Mr. Obama should be told that trade union leaders have been safer under President Uribe than under any other Colombian leader in the past 22 years.
But Mr. Uribe needs to make the points above in order to bring forth a second, more important issue: the ratification of the Free Trade Agreement. During the presidential campaign last year, Mr. Obama spoke against the FTA with Colombia, saying that “the violence against unions […] would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.” But President Obama’s perception of the issue may be different from that of Candidate Obama. Crucially, he now has to oversee an economy that has seen its worst recession in over 70 years and its 14.5 million unemployed.
Mr. Uribe must insist that approving the FTA is vital for Colombia’s economy, but also that it “would be good for the American economy and for American jobs”, as the New York Times (yes! Even the New York Times supports the FTA with Colombia!). Given that Colombian exports currently do not pay tariffs to enter the US, due to the Andean Pact Trade and Drug Enforcement Agreement (APTDEA), American exporters to Colombia would be benefitting more, and Mr. Uribe would do well in reminding this to the US President. The fact that PM Stephen Harper of Canada has promised to ask his country’s parliament to approve its FTA with Colombia, in what he called “a strong message to Washington”, should help Mr. Uribe. said last November
Finally, enter American foreign aid to Colombia. President Uribe should tell Mr. Obama that his government is willing and capable to take a greater portion of responsibility in Plan Colombia. However, he must get Mr. Obama’s word that his administration will remain committed to supporting Colombia’s war against drugs and terrorism. For this purpose, President Uribe should remind Mr. Obama of two things: first, even if the Mexican drug war has caught America’s attention, Colombia remains the largest producer of the cocaine that the Mexican cartels smuggle to the US. Fight drug production in Colombia, and you will be weakening the drug cartels in Mexico. Second, there is no other place in the world, besides Israel, where US foreign aid has recently had greater success in such a short amount of time. After US$ 11 billion in US aid in the past 10 years, Pakistan is now a semi-faile state enmeshed in a bloody war with the Taliban. Egypt, which has received US$ 28 billion in the past three decades remains an autocracy whose people are considerably poorer and more anti-American than Colombia’s.
In a nutshell, what President Uribe should tell Mr. Obama is that if he chooses to help Colombia, he shall not regret it. If Thatcher and Gorbachev, were able to “do business together”, I am certain that Presidents Uribe and Obama will be able to go much further than that – they may even become amigos along the way.
Author Gustavo Silva is Colombian and studies
Public Policy and International Affairs at Princeton University in the
U.S. He has his personal weblog.
