This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The arguments over a free trade deal with Colombia revolve around violence against

unionists and are rooted in fiction.

Those claims should have no bearing on the decision to approve the FTA now awaiting votes

in Congress.

That from Juan Carlos Adalgo, Project

Coordinator for Latin America at the Cato Institute

Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

He is the co-author of a new report on the importance of

approving the US-Columbia trade deal. of and since then has been pending for a vote in Congress.

The main reason why this free trade agreement hasn't been approved by Congress

is that the Democratic majority then and now the White House controlled by the Democratic Party

opposes this FTA because they claim that union violence in Colombia is very high.

They claim that being part of a union in that

country in Colombia is almost equivalent of a death sentence and thus the

United States cannot ratify a treaty with a country that

has such a poor record in protecting the rights of organized labor. However if you look

at the numbers you can see that the level of violence against Union

members in Colombia has been dropping dramatically.

Let's remember that Colombia back then was a very violent country in general.

You had a three-way armed conflict between the left-wing guerrillas of the FARC and the

...