ISDS Case Map
Colombia
U.S. lawmakers have begun talks on whether to extend a 15-year-old trade preference program for Andean countries while free trade deals with Colombia and Peru remain up in the air, congressional aides said on Wednesday.
Free trade agreements with Peru and Panama now seem headed toward approval in the US Congress, after the Bush administration agreed to incorporate the basic labor standards long insisted upon by House Democrats. But a separate trade pact with Colombia rightly remains in legislative limbo over a much starker labor problem.
President Alvaro Uribe has urged the US not to punish Colombia by denying it a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) or reducing military aid because of a deepening political scandal that is engulfing his government.
Colombia accepts proposed U.S. changes to a free trade agreement and is ready to take additional steps to address concerns of Democrats in Congress, the country's vice president said on Thursday.
Hundreds of thousands of Colombians joined the national strike in a score of cities on Wednesday to protest against the US-Colombia free trade agreement and Uribe's neoliberal policies, and to support public education.
Colombia's second largest guerrilla movement said on Tuesday it would agree to a cease-fire if the government dropped a free-trade pact signed in November with the United States.
Ana Valencia still tries to eke out a living as a miner in the hills near the headwaters of Colombia's Rio Salvajina. Her sisters are gone now to the nearest city of Cali, where they work as domestics. She's having a hard time hanging on.
The U.S. State Department's No. 2 official on Thursday expressed hope that free trade agreements with Colombia and Peru will be approved soon by the U.S. Congress.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe admitted he has found resistance among US politicians to the approval of a Free Trade Agreement with its country.
Colombia must resolve US concerns about a paramilitary scandal and the unsolved murders of trade unionists if it wants Congress to approve a free trade agreement, a spokesman for the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Thursday.
