Castro Balanta became president of the Buenaventura Port Workers Union, and in 2011, he traveled to Washington during negotiations over the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement to testify to Congress about poor labor conditions. Around then, the death threats started, he recalled, speaking to Foreign Policy over the phone from New York City, where he is now seeking asylum after fleeing Buenaventura in November 2020.

Buenaventura, a city of roughly 460,000 people with rampant unemployment and gang violence, sits on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Over the years, more and more Colombians displaced from conflict in the country’s interior have ended up there, many of them living in abject poverty. The city’s main source of employment is the port, which handles more than half of Colombia’s imports and exports.

But resentment simmers among Buenaventura residents over the fact that little money flowing through the port enriches the city, where armed groups run rampant, controlling every aspect of the economy and hiking up prices for even basic food items. Castro Balanta and other Bonaverenses say locals are only hired for menial labor, don’t receive a living wage or social security benefits, and face death threats if they try to unionize. Employees often work 24 to 36 hours at a time, sometimes even staying 23 days without returning home until a ship is loaded, Castro Balanta said.

These labor abuses are what held up the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement for years before it was eventually signed in 2012. Legislators had fiercely debated signing such an agreement with a country where unionists are regularly murdered with impunity. Some expected it might actually be the first deal of its kind to get voted down in U.S. Congress. To move forward, then-President Barack Obama and then-Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos signed an Action Plan Related to Labor Rights, which included a commitment to address violence against labor union members and bring perpetrators of such violence to justice.

At the time the accord was struck—around the time formal negotiations to end the war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were beginning—the U.S.-Colombia Business Partnership said the agreement would “strengthen democratic institutions in Colombia that are under threat by violent actors in Colombian society—guerrillas, self-defense forces, and narco-traffickers” and bring “more legitimate jobs and opportunity.”

But as the countries mark nearly a decade of the plan, few of those promises have come to fruition. Gang violence, unemployment, and narcotrafficking have only increased. In fact, Buenaventura has gained notoriety in recent years for its “chop houses,” where tortured victims of gangs and armed groups later end up dismembered. Colombia was ranked the deadliest country in the world for human rights defenders in 2020, and 172 trade unionists have been murdered since the labor rights action plan went into force. Indeed, residents contend that increased trade has actually worsened gang violence as armed groups compete for control of territory designated for the planned expansion of the port.

Obama and Santos may have had good intentions with the Labor Action Plan, but it had no enforcement mechanism. “A lot of the institutional changes and a lot of the policies that had to start happening, they happened like halfway or they weren’t really implemented, and once the agreement was passed in Congress in the U.S., the Santos government didn’t do anything to continue these kinds of commitments,” said Daniel Rangel, Global Trade Watch research director for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “Since the agreement wasn’t part of the main deal, then it was very hard for stakeholders to make the Colombian government accountable for this lack of enforcement of the obligations.”

Both Rangel and Castro Balanta surmise if U.S. Congress had waited longer, it might have been able to incentivize the Santos government to make more concrete changes by leveraging the trade agreement. “The trade agreement could have helped, but I think that in their eagerness or because of pressure from the big businessmen, the big multinationals, that both governments turned the page,” Castro said. “Colombia was lying that it was complying, and the U.S. government turned a deaf ear to the various statements of NGOs and unions and workers’ commissions that came and expressed that things were not getting better.”

Beyond the lack of an enforcement mechanism, residents, researchers, and activists say the Colombian government has felt free to neglect Buenaventura and similar regions because they are majority of Afro-descendant, a group that has historically faced worse social conditions, lack of public services, and discrimination compared to the country’s white-mestizo majority.

“The national government invests in Buenaventura through the port infrastructure,” said Danelly Estupiñán, an activist who works with a local nongovernmental organization called the Process of Black Communities. “It does not make investments to the Buenaventura society, to the people of Buenaventura.” The city’s population is about 95 percent Afro-descendant and Indigenous. “From our judgment,” the lack of investment is “precisely for that reason.”

Estupiñán travels under constant protection of two bodyguards and an armored car ever since a report she worked on five years ago exposed links between the city’s port and rising violence and poverty. “Because they don’t conceive of us as people, they conceive us as things, and that is a colonial legacy,” Estupiñán said. “In the colony, people of African descent, Indigenous people were not seen as people. They were not even human. They were seen as things that were marketed, things that were sold, things that were controlled.”

In 2017, anger in Buenaventura led hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets in a massive Civic Strike. After a wave of violence in December 2020 and January of this year, hundreds of residents demonstrated, claiming lack of government attention even after it made concessions to fund the city’s lack of basic services in the wake of the 2017 strike. These February series of demonstrations blocked access to the port and called for government intervention.

The unrest and recent wave of violence is perhaps what led the U.S. Labor Department to announce a $5 million “cooperative agreement” in January to improve labor rights for Afro-Colombian port workers in Buenaventura and other ports. (Neither the U.S. nor the Colombian Labor Department responded to requests for comment.) But at a time when Colombia’s government is undoing old agreements and facing criticism for its antagonistic relationship with international human rights bodies, there is little reason to trust it will live up to its word.

The landmark 2016 peace accords with the FARC was supposed to reintegrate former paramilitary members and bring economic development to Indigenous and Afro-Colombian regions, which were affected disproportionately by the conflict with the militant group-turned-political party. But the current conservative government under President Iván Duque Márquez campaigned on dismantling those peace accords and has dragged its feet on implementing them.

Indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups, as well as the United Nations’ human rights body, have demanded action from the president to fully implement the peace accords and tackle lawlessness and poverty in remote and poor regions. If he doesn’t, violence will continue to rise and push people toward cities like Buenaventura, which are already on a knife’s edge.

Many displaced people have ended up in neighborhoods like Isla de la Paz, where roughly many families hail from different violence-ridden regions of the country. The port is set to expand to accommodate free trade agreements with 17 countries, including the United States, and it is neighborhoods like this that are under threat of being razed.

One mother of three from Isla de la Paz, said that residents are unable to expand to build houses for more neighbors because, in the middle of the night, men will come to knock down any houses under construction. She said utility companies don’t want to provide services like internet because they know the community is soon to be displaced and spending money there would be a “lost investment.”

“What’s happening in a lot of those areas has been, first, the real hesitance from part of the national government and departmental governments to really provide people in those areas with basic things like potable water, sewage systems, or what have you,” said Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli from the Washington Office on Latin America. “And really pressuring them to get out of those areas so that they can rebuild those areas for the port infrastructure.”

The mother of three, who fled violence and kidnappings from armed groups and fumigation of coca crops from the town of Buenos Aires in Cauca province when she was 12 years old, said armed men often came and threatened residents, including the children, putting them always on the defensive

“We’re slaves to our own surroundings,” she said.

With national demonstrations planned for April 28, Sánchez-Garzoli predicts they will restart protests in Buenaventura—and eventually trigger another repressive response. The current conservative administration has been reluctant to engage with the leaders of social movements, and she anticipates they might only pay lip service to the Labor Action Plan—if that.

“They just don’t see the importance of engaging or trying to find solutions for those sectors,” she said. “Their priority really is the private sector. I just think that’s all going to explode.”

Genevieve Glatsky is a journalist in Bogotá. Her writing has appeared in Politico, the Independent, and more.

To read the full commentary from Foreign Policy, please click here. 

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While vaccines are available in China and the Russian Federation to some extent and emergency approval of two vaccines may be presented to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the second half of November 2020, countries is the Americas and Europe in particular are seeing sharp increases in the number of new cases as cooler weather and greater time indoors accompanies the start of Fall.

Here are all countries (13) that had 100,000 new cases or more in the last two weeks according to the ECDC report. They account for 3,605,666 of the cases in the last two weeks (71.5%). All but India and Brazil are increasing, most dramatically:

India – 871,291 (down from recent periods)

United States – 786,488 (increasing)

France – 303,912 (increasing)

Brazil – 298,078 (down from recent periods)

United Kingdom – 244,954 (increasing)

Russian Federation – 198,716 (increasing)

Argentina – 196,410 (increasing)

Spain – 169,394 (increasing)

Italy – 115,708 (increasing)

Czechia – 113,555 (increasing)

Colombia – 104,017 (increasing)

Netherlands – 103,024 (increasing)

Belgium – 100,119 (increasing)

Individual countries in Europe are reimposing some restrictions in response to the sharp spike in new cases, including lockdowns in Ireland and Czechia. See Politico, October 21, 2020, EU leaders to discuss Coronavirus on October 29, https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-leaders-to-confer-on-pandemic-oct-29/. The EU has made arrangements with three groups developing vaccines for early supplies and is reported to be close to arrangements with three more (and possibly with a fourth).

Different states in the United States are responding to the rising number of new cases in different ways reflecting in part the politicization of prevention measures like wearing masks and the continued mixed messages coming from government officials on the pandemic. Rural America which had escaped most of the early infections has been going through large surges, particularly in the middle of the country and in the northern states in the midwest. Hospitalizations have increased in many states and will likely continue to climb if predictions of worsening new case counts continue to play out. The U.S. has made arrangements with a number of pharmaceutical companies and groups for early access to vaccines that receive approval for distribution.

In a recent WTO TRIPs Council meeting, the U.S. and U.S. reportedly opposed a proposal from India and South Africa to waive certain intellectual property protections for a period of time to address getting vaccines and therapeutics to all peoples when available. See World Trade Organization press release, October 20, 2020, Members discuss intellectual property response to the COVID-19 pandemic, https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news20_e/trip_20oct20_e.htm; Inside U.S. Trade’s World Trade Online, October 20, 2020, U.S., EU oppose WTO effort to waive IP protections amid pandemic, https://insidetrade.com/daily-news/us-eu-oppose-wto-effort-waive-ip-protections-amid-pandemic.

As the pandemic continues to rage with a shifting focus on hot spots back to more developed countries and as vaccines get close to approval and mass production, the question of distribution of vaccines and therapeutics to countries in need will become a more pressing issue. While there has been greater international cooperation (with the exception of the U.S.) in supporting groups focuses on getting vaccines to developing and least developed countries, there obviously remains a tension between the role of government in taking care of its citizens and its role in contributing to global outreach. See Nature, 24 September 2020, Who Gets a Covid Vaccine First? Access plans are taking shape, https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-02684-9/d41586-020-02684-9.pdf While the WHO would like to see all countries pool vaccines and make them available to vulnerable groups globally before addressing other national needs, that is a highly unlikely scenario among major producing countries. Particularly for developed countries experiencing large surges in new cases, the political pressure to address the immediate needs at home will likely rule government actions. The good news is that some pharmaceutical companies involved in vaccine development have plans to produce or license production in multiple countries, including in countries for broader distribution to developing and least developed countries. This is in addition to the government and private sector support to GAVI and others for obtaining vaccines and therapeutics and making them available to countries in need.

Conclusion

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to accelerate and will likely worsen for the Americas and Europe in the coming weeks. If there are increased restrictions by countries in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, that will slow the economic rebound in important parts of the world and will likely slow the rebound in trade in goods and services.

At the same time, the world is getting close to knowing whether a number of the vaccine trials underway by western pharmaceutical companies have been successful and whether vaccines from these companies will join those of China and Russia. As vaccines and some therapeutics become commercially available, there will be the important challenge of seeing that all peoples with needs are able to access the vaccines and therapeutics on an equitable and affordable basis. The jury is out as to how access will actually work and whether the roll out of vaccines and therapeutics will in fact be equitable and affordable.

Terence Stewart, former Managing Partner, Law Offices of Stewart and Stewart, and author of the blog, Current Thoughts on Trade.

To read the original blog post, please click here.

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