Union killings loom over U.S.-Colombia trade pact

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed1/idUSN13514939

Fri Feb 13, 2009 10:04am EST

By Helen Popper

BOGOTA, Feb 13 (Reuters) - Guillermo Rivera Fuquene's widow says her husband was kidnapped, tortured and killed just because he fought for the rights of Colombian workers and opposed President Alvaro Uribe's free-market policies.

Murders of labor leaders like Rivera Fuquene prompted U.S. Democrats last year to block a free-trade deal drawn up under President George W. Bush, and human rights groups are hopeful Barack Obama's arrival at the White House will see the killings face even greater scrutiny.

"It's absurd to approve a free-trade agreement when people get kidnapped and murdered and no one does anything about it," said Rivera Fuquene's widow, Sonia Betancourt, 36, in her apartment in a working-class Bogota neighborhood.

Colombia's trade pact will not be a top priority for Obama as he wrangles with the worst financial crisis in decades and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, his administration has already indicated it wants stronger guarantees on trade union rights from Uribe, a conservative who has twinned a U.S.-backed military crackdown on leftist rebels with market-friendly economics.

"Colombia must improve its efforts," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee soon before she was sworn in last month.


FULL story at link.