On Oct. 30, Sandra Suarez quit her job in Washington as Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's special envoy to get his Free Trade Agreement through Congress because, she told him in her letter, it won't pass, which might be news to some Bush administration officials who are still touting it.
Her resignation just happened to occur on the same day Rafael Garcia, the former intelligence chief for the Colombian FBI, testified in Bogota that Sandra Suarez had ties to the Colombian paramilitary group AUC, which the U.S. State Department lists as a terrorist organization because of its massacres, tortures, rapes, and other human rights violations, all bankrolled by drug trafficking. But that's not why she quit.
She insisted in her letter that she'd left only because she'd failed her president. She hadn't persuaded the Congress to pass the FTA.
And here's why she failed: Uribe had sent a woman accustomed to negotiating with politicians whose backroom deals were with murderers. What she found in Washington were politicians whose backroom deals are with lobbyists.
It seems Congressmen are harder to sway. Who would have guessed?
What's more incredible is that Sandra Suarez made it to Washington at all. Within days after her appointment by Uribe in July, The Spectator, a major newspaper in Bogota, raised the issue of her connection to the AUC in a column, entitled "Questions without answer." It began, "Mr. President, did you know the person who coordinated the [campaign] meeting in Barrancabermeja with various paramilitary leaders was Sandra Suarez, the same person who you designated to defend the interests of this country in Washington?"
Now, of course, the president referred to in the news story is Uribe and not Bush, but you'd think American investigators checking visa requests might be able to get a hold of accounts in major newspapers when reporters have made the connection between an envoy and a terrorist organization.
How did Sandra Suarez come to live among us in Washington D.C. when innocent American-born infants somehow end up on do-not-fly lists and can't get their names removed?
And what does it say about the Colombian FTA that its chief advocate, a woman Uribe sent to this country and one Bush welcomed in, has terrorist ties?
For those unfamiliar with the AUC, it's a paramilitary group that controls some areas of Colombia like an official military police force. "Settlements" are made to sustain this arrangement between elected politicians and AUC officials.
The official line is that the AUC is a right wing group fending off the leftist FARC guerrillas. But unofficially, the AUC has been involved in thousands of killings of trade unionists, rival drug lords, FARC members and human rights activists since the 1980s.
It is essentially a private army, financed by Colombia's infamous cocaine sales, and estimated to be as large as 31,000 at one point. Uribe claims to be trying to rid the country of both the FARC and the AUC with an amnesty plan, under which some leaders have come forward and testified, placing dozens of generals and lawmakers under indictment for their alleged involvement with the paramilitaries.
And, of course, anyone familiar with the situation will point to Rafael Garcia and say his testimony against Sandra Suarez is questionable because he's in prison himself for his own consorting with paramilitaries.
On the other hand, maybe that makes it all the more credible. He knows about the paramilitaries because, he admits, he was involved. And his previous testimony about other prominent Colombian figures' connections to the paramilitaries has been corroborated and led to key indictments, including charges against the former chief of the Colombian FBI Jorge Noguera.
Anyway, it's not like he's the only voice piping up. There's also the story in The Spectator that was printed three months before he testified.
Maybe Bush was personally comfortable welcoming to Washington someone at ease with drug kingpins.
But somehow it just doesn't seem to fit into his political agenda. After all, every year he asks Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars for "Plan Colombia" to pay for cocaine eradication there. And now he wants to start a new drug war, asking Congress for $500 million to stop them from crossing the Mexican border.
And it certainly does not fit into this country's moral agenda. This country need not accept terrorist sympathizers, whether they are sent as envoys or sent deliberately to blow up buildings. Bush's subjecting Washington to a terrorist sympathizer for the sake of an FTA illustrates the moral bankruptcy of both the administration and the agreement.