Introduction

Concluding a trade agreement between the United States (US) and Colombia proved surprisingly difficult considering the long-standing geopolitical and ideological ties between the two countries. Colombia has been a strong ally of the US not only in the war on drugs but also in the century-long crusade against Leftist movements in the hemisphere. In that environment, economic integration has been seen as an important but secondary goal of the US–Colombia relationship. Closer economic ties are always sold as a means to some other end, be it political stabilization or providing economic alternatives to drug cultivation. So when the success of the North American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) prompted a bold, but ultimately unsuccessful, initiative in the hemisphere to sculpt a comprehensive Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), there was no question that the US and Colombia would be eager partners. It was only as the FTAA fell apart, however, that the US and Colombia found themselves working toward a regional Andean Free Trade Agreement that eventually devolved into a bilateral PTA.

Although it was not their first choice, negotiating the United States–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (USCTPA) fitted well into the existing policy of the George W. Bush administration to pursue bilateral PTAs with countries around the world whose ties to the US are important for US foreign policy goals. The most illustrative examples of the policy to pursue PTAs for strategic rather than economic reasons are the PTAs the US negotiated with Jordan, Oman, and Morocco. In South America, the US focused its energy on securing agreements with ideologically compatible governments in Chile and Peru, as opposition to US influence intensified in other parts of the continent.

While non-economic foreign policy concerns played a large part in prompting and shaping the agreement, the greatest threat to the ratification of the USCTPA turned out to be US labor unions. Opponents in the US pointed to violence against labor activists, and apparent acquiescence to that violence by the Colombian government, as a reason to deny ratification of the USCTPA. After renegotiation of key labor obligations and years of delay in legislative purgatory, the USCTPA finally came into force a decade too late for the ambitious Latin American trade policy experiment that gave it birth.