The Columbia FTA is a NAFTA retread.  Same deal, different country.  Wonderful benefits for the U.S. like more outsourcing, gutting our sovereignty, job loss, and the like.  The country is too small and poor to buy our stuff so cannot produce the economic benefits the Editorial Boards and admininistration promises.  It simply entrenches old and failed trade policy.

But the Colombia deal has powerful added aspects making it toxic for many Congress-men and women.  The government is tied to right-wing paramilitary groups that kill people they don't like.  President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002.

Still, 400 union members have been killed since 2002, and dozens of Mr. Uribe’s supporters in Congress and his former intelligence chief are under investigation for ties to paramilitary death squads, which are classified as terrorists by the United States and responsible for some of the union killings. ...

In recent weeks a new wave of threats has emerged, from groups identifying themselves as a new generation of private armies, against human rights and labor organizers. Many of those organizers have opposed the trade deal, raising the specter of still more anti-union violence to come.

U.S. trade policy is adrift and destructive.  We tolerate Asian currency manipulation,
foreign tax tariffs and export subsidies, and foreign companies suing U.S. government bodies for rules that harm their investments here.  We hamstring ourselves from passing laws to benefit American citizens, like buy-local laws and food and product safety rules... because trade (imports) is king and those laws bar noncompliant products.

No more trade agreements should be passed until we re-tool trade policy to benefit America.

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