Where Free Trade Is Popular

Memo From Colombia: So much for anti-Americanism. Condoleezza Rice went to Medellin last week to support free trade, and people unexpectedly lined the streets to applaud.

Can it be that free trade appeals to ordinary people? You wouldn't know it from reading media reports about the secretary of state's two-day visit to the city once ruled by fearsome drug lords.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the hotel last Thursday. As Rice's automotive entourage of eight Democratic lawmakers filed through the vast industrial city, outpost soldiers started saluting the VIP caravan. As if in chain reaction, civilians gathered along the streets.

Some came down from hillsides, and others stood at attention from gas stations. Some waved from cars that had been jammed in traffic.

They smiled, waved, applauded and saluted -- from poor people in front of brick shanties to richer ones from office balconies. Arriving at the Intercontinental Hotel, still more people applauded.

What was behind it? It was spontaneous, and maybe some were just gawkers. But there was no mistaking the happiness people showed that the American Congress was coming to see their city, and would perhaps hear their pleas for free trade.

"I wish they were all like this," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "It was a noticeably warm reception."

The usual word we get from VIP trips to Latin America is of burning flags and angry demonstrations.

A day before the Rice delegation arrived, a group of about five demonstrators got big publicity as the Associated Press dutifully photographed their flag-burning. AP did allow one photo to show that cameramen on the sidelines significantly outnumbered the flag-burners.

What didn't get camera space was the spontaneous well-wishing and cheers in Medellin upon the arrival. In one area, locals lined an entire bridge overpass to cheer.

Meanwhile, the trade pact is blandly reported as going nowhere and the dull canard repeated that the country is full of labor-union-member killings, with outside activists glibly quoted calling Colombia "the worst in the world" for labor, dishonestly distorting the figures to paint as black a picture as possible.

Nothing Colombia does will ever change their opinions.

Human Rights Watch founder Jose Vivanco, for instance, against all evidence, declared conditions in Colombia "deplorable." He showed no awareness of how things have improved or any understanding that a job and a living wage -- the fruits of free trade -- are a human right too.

But as Democrats cry crocodile tears about labor unions and wax about their human-rights sensitivities as their excuse to deny Colombia free trade, they're leaving out one group of interests: Colombia's ordinary people.

In polls, they have shown they favor free trade by an 80% margin with no way of showing it other than by standing at freeway off-ramps and holding up their arms.

They're among the 44 million people who would be punished by Congress' stone-hearted refusal to permit U.S.-Colombia free trade.

There's little doubt they sought to tell the Democrats that their interests are at stake. After all, they are the ones who will lose their jobs and pay the price if Congress decides to shut Colombia out of the pact.

It just goes to show that free trade is not ultimately about governments, activists, union interests or anyone who can get in front of the cameras.

It's about people and creating jobs for Medellin's -- and America's -- poor.

As thousands presented themselves to cheer the delegation, they reminded Congress that they matter too.

Let's hope the good people of the U.S. Congress who joined Secretary Rice on this trip looked out their windows in Medellin and actually noticed.

IBD's Monica Showalter filed this report while traveling with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her trip to Latin America last week.