A commitment to free trade

A commitment to free trade

Scripps Howard News Service: President Bush has sent the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement to Congress, starting the clock ticking under fast-track authority in which lawmakers have 90 days to vote it up or down, no amendments, no filibusters.

It is vital to U.S. interests that Congress approves the treaty.

Lined up behind Colombia are pending free-trade agreements with Panama and South Korea. If Congress votes down the Colombian deal, it will be the death of free trade in this Congress and, given the way the issue is being demagogued in the Democratic campaign, perhaps for several Congresses to come.

The importance to the United States of the pact is more symbolic than economic. It certainly will not, as the critics like to imply, cost the U.S. economy jobs. Under a year-by-year arrangement, Colombia’s exports already enter the U.S. market largely duty-free. The treaty would make that permanent. Indeed, it might add jobs since it would remove Colombia’s tariffs, some of them as high as 35 percent, on 97 percent of U.S. goods and services coming into Colombia.

For years, Colombia had a sorry record of right-wing paramilitary violence against trade unionists and rural organizers. But Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, ironically thanks in part to a program that began in the last year of the Clinton administration, has achieved impressive reductions in terrorist attacks, paramilitary violence, violence against trade unionists and drug trafficking.

He has also begun to make inroads against a murderous guerrilla movement known as FARC, which survives with support from neighboring leftist regimes. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Chavez believes that he can add to his troublemaker credentials by destabilizing and perhaps overthrowing a pro-U.S. democracy.

In sending the treaty to Congress, Bush said, “If Congress fails to approve this agreement, it would not only abandon a brave ally, it would send a signal throughout the region that America cannot be counted on to support its friends.”