The Deadly Wages of Free Trade
The Deadly Wages of Free Trade
Posted: 01/15/2014 2:53 pm
Back in the mid-1990s, the signatories to the North American Free Trade Agreement promised that the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico would become the model city for the new "free trade" pact. Indeed, it has become a model city for NAFTA, but not in the way its architects had intended. Thus, rather than becoming a showcase for economic development and prosperity which "free trade" promised to usher in, Ciudad Juarez instead has become a city plagued by murder rates equivalent to nations at war, and has witnessed the bizarre phenomenon of "femicide" which has violently claimed the lives of around 400 girls and young women since the passage of NAFTA. [1]
In a similar vein, the port town of Buenaventura has become the poster child for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Even before the FTA was finally ratified by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in October of 2011, violence began to plague Buenaventura as armed paramilitary groups vied for control of the new ports being built in preparation for the influx of trade which the FTA was to bring. Thus, in September of 2011, acclaimed human rights advocate, Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., wrote to U.S. Ambassador P. Michael McKinley of
Since the passage of the Colombia FTA, the violence in Buenaventura has only increased, and sadly bears resemblances to the violence in Ciudad Juarez after the passage of NAFTA. Thus, as explained by a recent report on the growing post-FTA violence in Colombia by two top Democrats on the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce ("Committee report"the permanent genocide that is being carried out in Buenaventura, where the neighborhoods and the Community Councils around the port are being invaded by paramilitaries supported or tolerated by the armed forces. They cut people in pieces with horrifying cruelty throwing the body parts in to the sea, if any of them dare to resist the megaproject for the new port. This included the expulsion of people living in the poorest areas and it includes the expropriation of the plots of garbage dumps where these people, in the midst of their misery, have over decades tried to survive.
:More:three illegal post paramilitary demobilization groups or re-grouped paramilitaries (La Empresa, Los Urabeňos and Los Rastrojos) are engaged in a violent battle for control of the neighborhoods in the port areas [of Buenaventura]. These groups utilize brutal terror tactics to exert control and dominate the population. The Member and his staff were told about the use of chainsaws to dismember persons in broad daylight or in "torture houses" where residents can hear the screams. Among the victims were a large number of women who were first raped or sexually tortured before being killed in a sadistic manner and their body parts displayed publicly to set an example to others. Local groups estimate that at least eight Afro-Colombian women have been assassinated in this fashion in 2013 alone. This situation unfolds in areas where the public and security armed forces (police and military) are either present or very close by.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/the-deadly-wages-of-free-_b_4603784.html