Nadja Drost
Nadja Drost covers Colombia for GlobalPost. She has reported in print, radio and video from New York, South America and West Africa.
Nadja directed and produced the documentary...
Colombia's Uribe to visit Obama in Washington
Although the White House called off a bilateral meeting that was in the works between Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and President Obama at the Summit of the Americas, Uribe managed to get some face time with Obama nevertheless over lunch on Saturday. And it appears that Obama more than made up for not making the time for a meeting with Uribe this time around: he promised to visit Colombia on his next trip to Latin America.
Not only that, Uribe will travel to Washington in the days following the Summit and meet with Obama. On the agenda: Plan Colombia (a multi-year anti-narcotics aid package) and the Free Trade Agreement.
Representatives of the Colombian government regularly travel to the U.S. to promote the trade pact. It was signed by both governments in 2006, but Democrats have held it up in Congress, due to concerns over Colombia's human rights record and the lack of protection for labor leaders — more are killed every year in Colombia than anywhere else in the world.
As a result of this obstacle to ratification, Uribe's government is eager to demonstrate progress on the human rights front. Over lunch at the summit, he told Obama that in the last few years, the number of convictions for murders of trade unions has jumped from two to 184.
But as is so often the case in Colombia, there is a war over statistics. The National Labor School has recorded that of 2,690 murders of union leaders since 1986, there have been convictions in just 90 cases. And while the number of murders has dropped the last several years, the school points out they rose from 39 murders in 2007 to 49 in 2008.
The Colombian labor school's president, Luciano Sanin Vasquez, delivered these facts in his testimony in February to the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee.
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