A new investigative look at the ties between big business interests in Colombia, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and her family’s charitable foundation are raising troubling questions about the role that corporate trade deals and big oil may have played in softening the powerful Democrat’s position on human rights in the South American country.
During her time heading the State Department, presumptive 2016 presidential nominee Clinton stayed silent on reports of violence and threats against labor activists in Colombia, even as her family’s “global philanthropic empire” was developing—and benefiting from—private business ties with a major oil corporation accused of worker-intimidation in the country, according to new reporting published Thursday by International Business Times.
In addition, the IBT investigation shows that after millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation, Clinton reversed her position on a U.S.-Colombia trade pact she had previously opposed on the grounds that it was bad for labor rights.
As IBT journalists Matthew Cunningham-Cook, Andrew Perez, and David Sirota report:
“The details of these financial dealings remain murky,” the article states, “but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation—supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself—Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact.”
What’s more, an IBT review of public State Department documents shows that “as the Giustra-Clinton foundation relationship deepened, Hillary Clinton and the State Department never criticized or took action against the Colombian government for alleged violations of labor rights at Pacific Rubiales.”
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