The form without the substance

Barack Obama has repeatedly said he opposes the Colombia Free Trade Agreement because "the history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions"—one of the few genuinely laudable stances he's taken, even if it may have been just a sop for labor unions in the US who've lobbied against the deal for just those reasons.

However:

Although no final decision has been made, the New York Times reports that the President-elect’s transition team has signaled to Eric H. Holder Jr., a senior Clinton Justice Department official, that he will be selected as the next attorney general. ...

What is not being discussed too much, and was not even mentioned in today’s New York Times report, is Holder’s key role in defending Chiquita Brands International in a notorious case relating to the company’s funneling money and weapons to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, AUC, the right-wing paramilitary organization on the U.S. State Department’s own list of terrorist organizations.

In 2003, an Organization of American States report showed that Chiquita’s subsidiary in Colombia, Banadex, had helped divert weapons and ammunition, including thousands of AK-47s, from Nicaraguan government stocks to the AUC. The AUC – very often in collaboration with units of the U.S.-trained Armed Forces - is responsible for hundreds of massacres of primarily peasants throughout the Colombian countryside, including in the banana-growing region of Urabá, where it is believed that at least 4,000 people were killed. Their systematic use of violence resulted in the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of poor Colombians, a disproportionate amount of those people being black or indigenous.

(Much more on Chiquita's financing of chainsaw-murderer paramilitaries here.)

As you ponder whether or not Obama's consideration of Holder fatally contradicts his professed concern for human rights in Colombia, consider the veritable army of lawyers he could choose for Attorney General who didn't defend the interests of massacre-funding corporations like Chiquita.

Comments

[KDelphi]

Oh no....I read about Chiquita in Shock Doctrine...also, Dachle is for the insurance companies, samosamosamosamosamo

[Jonathan Versen]

I've watched snippets of his stump speech, and it's both A. pretty impressive, and B. suggests he disagrees with many other positions he's offered in Meet the Press style settings. I seem to recall that P.T. Barnum warned us about this sort of thing...

[John Caruso]

So did Obama: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified. ... Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself."

[SteveB]

On the other hand, Glenn Greenwald says:

Attempts to criticize a lawyer for representing unsavory or even evil clients are inherently illegitimate and wrong -- period.

See, Holder representing Chiquita is like a public defender representing an accused child-rapist - only it pays better.