Agrarian Uprising Against Free Trade and 'Government Lies' Sweeps Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Agrarian Uprising Against Free Trade and 'Government Lies' Sweeps Colombia
By Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams
Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014

Second agrarian uprising in less than a year met with tanks, soldiers, and riot police



Agrarian strikes, protests, and road blockades are sweeping Colombia this week as peasants voice outrage at the "free trade" policies, backed by the Colombian government, that they say are exacerbating the country's crisis of rural poverty.
"The countryside has been abandoned by the state in favor of big companies," Jimmy Torres of Conciencia Campesina in Cajamarca told The Guardian. "That's why we block the roads and protest."

The second major mobilization of its kind in less than a year, the strike launched Monday and has so far been met with government tanks, troops, and riot police, The Guardian reports. Human rights organizations estimate that 200 participants have been "illegally arrested," Neil Martin of the Colombia-based labor solidarity organization Paso International told Common Dreams.

The strikes and protests are organized by dignity movements for potato, rice, and coffee growers and other rural workers, said Martin. Peasants have levied a range of demands for greater social protections and relief from debt, mining projects, and "free trade" agreements that have bankrupted and displaced Colombia's peasants, workers, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities.

The "U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement," passed by U.S. Congress in 2011, slashed tariffs on U.S. exports to the country while prohibiting protections for Colombian farmers, forcing peasants and farmers to compete with an influx of subsidized U.S. products.

More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_66577.shtml

[lunasun]

1. subsidized U.S. products ,,,isnt this like the corn in Mexico after NAFTA?

[Judi Lynn]

2. Yes it is so much the same.Same monstrous results.Colombian farmers knew about Mexico before the FTA

and justifiably worked so hard to prevent it.

The US knew the results from Mexico, too, and clearly knew what the aftermath would be in Colombia, but so what, apparently?

How are poor people who can't afford legal representation do anything about it? They are simply screwn because those in power can do it to them.

I think in Mexico, people whose families had been raising corn, and beans, and rice on their land, some living on land owned by their families for generations, suddenly were out of business, along with any paid workers, if they could even afford to hire them.
Out of business, their land useless to them, cut adrift, they went bankrupt. This added many faces to those trying to find work in the United States, of course, coming here where they could be resented and hated by our right-wingers.

[lunasun]

3. Thanks and I do not think this is thhe first FTA protest in Columbia now that I am thinking about it

[polly7]

4. K& R for a good article. nt.