Evo Morales responds to John Kerry: Never Again Will We Be Your Backyard

[karynnj]

20. Too bad you did not hear the full comment in context

I don't have a link - other than to the House Foreign Relations committee. The comments were Kerry saying that we needed to pay more attention to Latin America. The comment was essentially saying that we were neighbors.

It is true that you could say that this is something that did not translate well - however, you could also say that a President of a country should consider the FULL statement and the tone in which it was delivered. Here, he is ignoring Kerry's record on Latin America which is better than most American leaders and likely the best of any of his stature. ie Kerry, unlike the Clintons was strongly against the Contras in the 1980s - and continued to speak on that for years.

In addition, in 2005, Kerry won praise of the AFL/CIO for leading the fight on the Finance committee on CAFTA. He fought for an amendment in the Senate Finance Committee that would have added some worker’s and environmental rights to CAFTA. The amendment was defeated in the Republican controlled committee on a 10 to 10 vote and there are no such provisions in the CAFTA treaty that Senator Kerry voted against. That amendment was praised by John Sweeney , head of the AFL/CIO as:
“Senator Kerry (D-Mass.) will introduce an important amendment to the administration’s draft implementing legislation that would address a key failing of agreement by giving workers’ rights the same priority as corporate rights. His amendment would go a long way toward fixing the inadequate workers’ rights provisions in this lopsided trade deal by making protections for core labor standards fully enforceable. The Kerry amendment would ensure that all the CAFTA countries meet international core workers’ rights standards, a change to the agreement that has been a key demand of workers in both the U.S. and Central America.”

He may be the only person to have ever quoted Latin American Liberation Theory bishops in the Finance Committee on the harm done by NAFTA and the fact that CAFTA was worse. In early 2005, at the hearing on the nomination of Robert Portman to be the U. S. Trade Representative, Senator Kerry spoke of earlier treaties and their negative impacts of workers in both the US and the other countries and reiterated that he would not support CAFTA as it was. Senator Kerry in his comments spoke of the fact that in addition to NAFTA having the known negative impact on US jobs, it had hurt poor Mexicans as well.

“Obviously, in the opposition to CAFTA in the Central American region is striking in and of itself. You’ve got small farmers, indigenous groups, environmentalists, bishops, parliamentarians. Many others have spoken out against it. And what they do is they cite the experience of Mexico as one of the reasons that they’re deeply concerned about it. In Mexico, real wages have fallen. Poverty has risen. More than a million small farmers lost their land. Many civil society groups and people of conscious believe that you’ve got an even, you know, worse enforcement mechanism and a worse starting point here. Tens of thousands of Central Americans have taken to the streets to protest this. They’re demanding a public referendum on the agreement. A recent Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Guatemalans think it’s going to harm rather than help their country. You’ve got a number of immigrant groups here in our country, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, CARACEN, Salvadorian American National-Network, others have come out against it.
Why do you think such a broad and diverse range of Central Americans here and there are against it? And what does that say about this consensus that is so necessary to proceed forward and make it work?”

I do think that SoS Kerry should call him and apologize for how it sounded and explain what he was speaking of.

I frankly am not surprised at your lack of surprise - as your cynicism about Kerry - makes you jump to conclusions far beyond anything said in this article.