International trends / Comment
USA 2008: candidates confront the critical issues in Colombia
28/05/2008 By Robert Matthews
Robert Matthews argues that the US presidential candidates’ attitudes toward the issues surrounding US-Colombian relations provide an opportunity to speculate on changes in US policy toward Colombia and the region in general after November 2008.
STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images
US-Colombia policy today represents the ideological intersection of free trade, human rights, counternarcotics and US geopolitics.
Hillary Clinton’s positions and statements in the late primary season are not starkly different from those of Barack Obama. Neither Senators Clinton nor Obama have openly questioned the basis for Plan Colombia, the huge US military aid programme, and both have opposed the pending Colombia free trade agreement on humanitarian grounds. However, both as senator and candidate, Clinton has shown less rhetorical consistency than Obama on both free trade in general and Colombia in particular. Moreover, her advisers’ efforts on behalf of the Colombian FTA further the impression of inconsistency.
On the other hand, unlike Clinton, Obama’s harsh criticism of Colombia predates the presidential campaign. In addition, differences in content and the tone of their rhetoric lead one to suspect that an Obama administration would be more apt to scrutinise Colombian human rights carefully before supporting Plan Colombia or backing a free trade pact. Thus, at this juncture in the campaign, Obama gets the nod as having the greater potential for translating campaign positions into a progressive shift in US foreign policy.
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Keywords
Colombia Conflict Democracy Elections Human rights Latin America & Caribbean United StatesRelated publications
Bio author: Robert Matthews
Robert Matthews, Associate Fellow of FRIDE, holds a Ph.D in Latin American history from New York University, where he was a teacher at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. For twenty years was a collaborator with the Peace Research Center - Centro de Investigación para la Paz (CIP) - in Madrid, specializing in United States foreign policy.
