By Robert D. Novak
Friday, April 4, 2008

President Bush will send Congress a trade agreement next week forcing Democrats to make an unpleasant choice. Will they do the bidding of organized labor and reject a pact negotiated more than a year and a half ago with the country's strongest ally and best customer in South America?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not want to make her members cast votes on the Colombian free-trade agreement. It is unconditionally opposed by the AFL-CIO, which is uninterested in negotiating changes. But to forget about a vote this year, as Pelosi wants, would be akin to an outright rejection in its international implications. It would humiliate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a free-trader and a bulwark against the spreading influence in Latin America of Venezuela's leftist strongman, President Hugo Chávez.

The difficulty in getting even 30 House Democrats to provide the needed votes for victory reflects the Democratic Party's abandonment of free trade over the past half-century. Less obvious, labor's intense opposition shows that the AFL-CIO no longer leads the way against the far left throughout the world, as it did under George Meany and Lane Kirkland in bygone years. Their successors are not concerned about the prospect of Chávez, allied with communist Cuba, dominating Latin America.

Colombia has fought a long, successful battle against leftist guerrillas supported and financed by Chávez. As a faithful U.S. ally, Uribe has been astounded by the fate of the trade agreement. Since it was signed in November 2006, not one congressional hearing has been held. In an effort to please Democrats, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab went back to Bogota and won changes on labor and environmental issues. Even now, she is willing to add trade-adjustment subsidies for displaced workers to achieve a bipartisan deal. But nothing budges labor.

Schwab's pleas to Democrats are about bread and butter. The agreement would remove a $200,000 tariff on Caterpillar off-road tractors going into Colombia, producing large numbers of jobs for Americans. Under the Andean Trade Preference Act recently extended by Congress, Colombia has nearly full duty-free access to the United States, but the AFL-CIO insists it cannot endorse the agreement because of what it maintains is persecution of Colombian unions.

A rare insight into what the Uribe regime thinks is really going on was provided to me by Vice President Francisco Santos on one of the many trips senior Colombian officials have made to Washington to court congressional support. Santos said that Chávez-controlled labor unions in Venezuela are in close contact with Colombia's leftist unions, which in turn influence the AFL-CIO. Thus, the labor intransigence in Washington can be traced to Caracas.

An AFL-CIO delegation to Colombia in mid-February headed by Linda Chavez-Thompson met with Uribe, who promised to deal with alleged violence against Colombian labor leaders. But the Americans spent most of their time with their Colombian compatriots, who recited horror stories of persecution. On March 4, the AFL-CIO executive council announced: "Should [the trade pact] come up for a vote this year, we will mobilize the unions and the resources of the federation to defeat it."

Rep. Sander Levin, a longtime labor stalwart from Michigan who has become the vicar of protectionism as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's subcommittee on trade, has called Bush's decision to send the trade agreement to Congress "a step backward." That implies a step away from a bipartisan accord, but what the Democratic leadership wants is no action at all.

This attitude cannot be separated from the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over who hates the North American Free Trade Agreement most. At a Johnstown, Pa., town meeting last weekend, a questioner blamed NAFTA for local jobs being outsourced to India. Obama had to politely remind the questioner that the treaty concerned Mexico and Canada, not India, before getting in his licks against NAFTA.

There are enough Democratic politicians who are embarrassed by protectionist sloganeering that they would be inclined to support the Colombian free-trade agreement -- were it not for labor's intervention. How many Democrats in Congress will qualify for a profile in courage by not heeding the AFL-CIO's dictates?

© 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.