Roskam reports from the other side of trade debate

By Jim Tankersley

DAYTON, OH – For the past week, and with increasing intensity, Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have tried to top each other in their critiques of American trade policy and its effects on factory jobs in Ohio and the nation. They've decried outsourcing and promised to rewrite trade rules to protect U.S. workers.

In Dayton, a city where many workers blame trade for thousands of lost factory jobs in recent years, it got to the point this week where you couldn't watch "SportsCenter" or "Ellen" without Obama or Clinton bashing trade policy at the commercial breaks (er, or so we're told).

But other members of Congress say trade has benefited the country and should keep expanding, including the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain – and a small contingent of Cabinet secretaries and House and Senate members who flew to Colombia this weekend to build a case for a proposed trade deal between that country and America that is currently pending before Congress.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), a freshman who favors expanded trade, called the Tribune from Colombia today to recount a morning of meetings with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who made "a very compelling case" for the proposed agreement, Roskam said.

(Actually, the first topic on Roskam's mind was the news, which Colombian leaders shared with the American contingent earlier today, that Colombian troops on Saturday had killed the No. 2 leader in a cocaine-trafficking rebel group that the U.S. State Department designated a foreign terrorist organization in 2001.)

Colombia sits on the northwest tip of South America, next to Venezuela. Its economy has grown for the past five years, according to the CIA's World Factbook. It's famous for two agricultural exports, coffee and cocaine, but also produces bananas, corn, rice and sugar cane. Roskam says it is a key ally in "a region where we need friends" – and a potential boom export market for Illinois firms such as Caterpillar.

"This is a market of 44 million people," he said. "There are great export opportunities. This is a country that buys a tremendous amount of agricultural equipment."

The best argument for approving the agreement, he said, is geo-political: "We have a lot at stake to see this place flourish and do well."

Other members of Congress argue against the Colombian deal on several fronts, including the oft-heard-in-Ohio concerns about pushing more American jobs overseas. They also add a more specific complaint: Colombia's long history of violence against organized labor leaders.

The Bush Administration said last year that violence was ebbing. A group of Democratic senators, including Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), responded with a letter stating that "there is overwhelming evidence that Colombia remains the most dangerous country in the world in which to be a labor leader… Through five years there have been more than 400 trade unionists murdered, and only ten convictions for those murders."

Roskam, who will return from the country tomorrow night, said the Colombian government had convinced him "the trend is good" on curbing violence against labor leaders. He called the concerns about that violence and American job losses "fair questions" that are being "simplistically caricatured in the Democratic debate you're seeing right now in Ohio."

For the record, both Clinton and Obama oppose the Colombian free-trade agreement as proposed.