Two Colombian human rights lawyers traveled to Teamster headquarters recently to thank the union for blocking the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.  

Teamsters strongly oppose any deal with Colombia, where 2,700 union members have been assassinated since 1986. Teamsters marched in the streets, issued press statements and lobbied representatives in Congress. So far, the union has succeeded in blocking the agreement, which was negotiated by the George W. Bush administration. Congress has not approved the deal.  

Reinaldo Villalba Vargas, who defends human rights as president of the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, thanked the Teamsters for their efforts.

“It inspires us to keep doing our work,” he said. “Colombia fears international public opinion, particularly the U.S. What you do in the U.S. is important, more than you know.”

Villalba said the trade deal, opposed by all workers, would hurt the working class. “It would hurt agriculture and industry, and it would produce tremendous inequality,” he said.

Yessika Hoyos Morales, also a human rights lawyer with the collective, told the Teamsters that the trade deal would open the door for multinationals to seize land belonging to indigenous people. Four million people have already been driven from their property in Colombia.

Nothing would happen to the multinationals, no matter what they did, she said.

Hoyos lost her father to paramilitary hit men in 2001, when she was 17. The Colombian government tried to make his assassination appear to be a crime of passion. Yessika knew her father, Jorge Dario Hoyos Franco, was killed because of his work as a union leader. He trained Colombian workers to organize, bargain collectively and deal with conflict.

“He was our friend and our hero,” Hoyos told the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor in February. Two hit men have been sentenced and a police officer involved in her father’s killing was convicted—after he died. But the intellectual authors of the crime have yet to be brought to justice.

Since her father’s death, Hoyos became a lawyer, founded the movement Sons and Daughters for Memory and Against Impunity, and joined the lawyers’ collective.

The collective’s defense of human rights in Colombia brings with it a price: threats, harassment and persecution. Hoyos believes the Colombian government’s policy is to do away with political opposition.

Fighting the trade deal with Colombia can help bring about much-needed change in that country, Hoyos said.

“Economic pressure is the way to make a difference on the government,” she said.