The Anti-Free Trade Strike in Colombia
Building Momentum
The Anti-Free Trade Strike in Colombia
by STEVEN MATHER
August 27, 2013
As Colombian peasants ended their eighth day of an anti-free trade agreement strike last night by forcing President Juan Manuel Santos to the negotiating table, thousands of protesters banging pots and pans filled the main plaza of the capital Bogota in solidarity.
According to organizers around 300,000 strikers are involved in the action. They have blocked roads across Colombia and put the brakes on the agricultural sector of the national economy, demanding the government suspend the fta with the US and the EU.
The economic pressure and the high level of support there is for the strike across the country – reflected by the protest last night in Plaza Bolivar – has seen the govenment’s position shift. Santos has now agreed to speak to the peasants’ national representatives and keen to do some kind of deal.
The free trade agreement with the US came into force in July 2012 and within a year agricultural imports have increased by 70%. In 2011, Colombia imported 5,000 tons of rice from the US. In the year after the fta came in, 98,000 tons were imported.
Poverty levels in rural Colombia were already at 65% before the US fta came into affect.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/27/the-anti-free-trade-strike-in-colombia/