The Clinton campaign’s decision to get rid of chief strategist Mark Penn because of his work on behalf of the Colombian government has obscured a far more serious issue.

 

Penn had to go because he was being paid to promote a US-Colombia free-trade agreement that Hillary Clinton opposes. What remains, though, are the Clintons’ longstanding ties to Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, a right-wing strongman whose human-rights record is repellent enough to have nauseated Al Gore, Amnesty International and a host of religious and humanitarian organisations.

 

Uribe tried to insert himself into the US presidential campaign last week even before the Wall Street Journal revealed Penn’s ties to his government. My former Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano, founder of the groundbreaking Narco News Bulletin, reported that Uribe had criticised Barack Obama in the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo.

 

"I deplore that Senator Obama, aspiring to be president of the US, ignores Colombia‘s efforts" to improve its human-rights record, Uribe was quoted as saying. Obama, Giordano noted, had announced that he opposed the free- trade agreement because of "the violence against unions in Colombia".

 

It was interesting, to say the least, that Uribe had chosen to single out Obama even though both Democrats publicly oppose the free-trade agreement. Only one candidate’s chief strategist, after all, was working the other side of the fence, whether Clinton knew it at the time or not.

 

More important, though, the Clintons have long been supporters and enablers of Uribe, overlooking his dubious record of human-rights abuses, including long- whispered ties to right-wing death squads.

 

To be sure, Uribe is in a difficult position. Colombia‘s Marxist insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is among the most vicious and intractable in the hemisphere. Uribe has won considerable support from Colombians for his efforts to bring the insurgency under control.

 

But Uribe’s methods have been questionable, to say the least. Last year former vice-president Gore refused to participate in an environmental conference in Miami lest he share the stage with Uribe, who had been accused of letting paramilitary groups use his family’s farms to kill opponents during the 1990s. US senator Patrick Leahy cut off $55m in military aid to Colombia over the allegations.

 

Just within the past few weeks Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and 20 other organisations wrote a letter accusing a top Uribe adviser of endangering the lives of labour leaders by claiming that a protest march against right-wing death squads had been organised by the FARC. The letter charged that four people involved in the march were subsequently murdered, and dozens more were threatened with death.

 

All the while, Giordano notes, the Clintons have both tolerated and promoted the Uribe government. Last year the Uribe government presented Bill Clinton with an award for his efforts on behalf of Colombia. Uribe, in turn, was honoured as a "featured attendee" at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. Less than two months ago, Hillary Clinton voiced her support for a Colombian military excursion into Ecuador to root out FARC fighters – an attack of ambiguous legality at best.

 

The Clintons‘ support for the Uribe government – their maybe-they-do, maybe-they-don’t stand on the free-trade agreement and their tolerance of Uribe’s human-rights abuses – makes a shambles of their criticism of Obama for his stand on Nafta and Canada.

 

Obama, you may recall, denied that his chief economic adviser had assured Canadian officials that Obama didn’t really mean his denunciations of Nafta, when apparently the adviser had done exactly that. Obama was left looking like an amateur – a legitimate concern given his lack of high-level political experience.

 

The Clintons are anything but amateurs, of course. Rather, they are cynics, practitioners of a realpolitik that allows them to snuggle with characters like Uribe and Nursultan Nazarbayev, the thuggish ruler of Kazakhstan with whom the former president helped broker a lucrative mining deal on behalf of a Canadian businessman. The businessman, in turn, donated more than $100m to Clinton‘s foundation.

 

Mark Penn this week managed the neat trick of being fired by both the Colombian government and the Clinton campaign. Ultimately, though, he was a minor figure in a drama much larger, and much darker, than the current dispute over free trade.   

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