Better in their words…

Not George’s fault?
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Vice President Joe Biden returned from his trip to Latin America last month a convert to free-trade and an enthusiast for the peace that former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe brought to his country. Or so said the veep in an op-ed he penned for this newspaper last week.

If Mr. Biden now sees the connection between prosperity and free trade, I say huzzah. The U.S. is part of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free-trade agreement among a group of Asian countries and the democracies of Canada, Chile, Peru and Mexico. If TPP talks are to succeed, U.S. commitment is a must.

But count me a skeptic. The protectionist, anti-development and collectivist agendas of Big Labor, green radicals and the ideological left are woven into Obama administration policy. Democrats rely heavily on these groups for financing, and the Obama administration can’t afford to offend them. It’s hard to believe that it is ready to walk away from some of its most generous donors in exchange for an expansion of free trade that will make individuals less reliant on government.

It gets even harder to believe that anything has changed after reading Mr. Biden’s op-ed, which is a mix of ignorance about the region and revisionist history.

Residents of the world’s superpower are not known for their knowledge of foreign lands. But Mr. Biden’s Dick-and-Jane report on the lives of the natives south of the border ought to make Americans cringe. Our vice president comes off as a caricature of the stereotypical gringo, patronizing the locals and taking credit for their successes wherever he can.

Exhibit A is Mr. Biden’s ah-ha moment when he visited a “cut-flower farm outside Bogotá” and found “one-quarter of the workers are female heads of households.” Not only do Colombians grow flowers, he discovered, but they export them! “The carnations and roses they were clipping would arrive in U.S. stores within days, duty free.” The Colombian flower-farm, the vice president explained, is “just one sign of the economic blossoming in the year since a U.S. free-trade-agreement with Colombia” went live.

Not quite, Señor Biden. Colombians have been growing flowers for export to the U.S. for decades, and women have long played an important role in the market. Notable moments in the industry’s history include the 1991 passage of the Andean Trade Preference Act. ATPA slashed import tariffs on a range of goods—including cut flowers—coming from the region in order to boost economic alternatives to the narcotics trade.

By April 2007, when the Bush administration sent the U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement to Congress for ratification, the cut-flower export industry was thriving. One reason was preferential access to the U.S. market granted by Congress. Mr. Biden certainly is familiar with ATPA since he voted against its reauthorization in August 2002.

That year is memorable for Colombians because the country was being overrun by FARC terrorists, and Mr. Uribe was elected president. Over the next eight years the former governor of Antioquia, whose father had been murdered by the FARC, worked tirelessly and at great personal peril to restore order. As Mr. Biden notes in his op-ed, the road from Bogotá to flower farms was “impossibly dangerous ten years ago,” though he doesn’t give Mr. Uribe or the Colombian military the credit they deserve for that reversal of fortune.

In late December 2010 I had numerous conversations with Colombian officials who were sweating it out because a modified version of ATPA (called ATP-DEA) had not yet been renewed. The Obama administration was refusing to send the free-trade agreement to Congress for a vote, and Valentine’s Day—a crucial holiday for flower growers and by extension the economy—was less than two months away. An estimated 200,000 Colombian jobs were tied to the industry and a roughly equivalent number in the U.S.

Mr. Obama eventually signed the U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement in late 2011 after sitting on it for 3½ years. A Colombian official told me last week that he believes it was only completed because Mr. Uribe—whom Mr. Obama’s international-socialist friends hated—was no longer in office. There were two other crucial developments, he said. Congressional Republicans insisted that it be voted on together with the pending Panama and South Korea free-trade agreements, and Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) pushed for it in conjunction with the stipulation that Colombia would expand laws raising the cost of labor.

Mr. Biden voted against the U.S.-Chile free-trade agreement in 2003 and the Central American free-trade agreement in 2005. Mexican trucks still don’t have unfettered access to the U.S., in violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, because the Teamsters and therefore Democrats won’t allow it. Mr. Biden doesn’t explain any of this.

Perhaps Mr. Biden is a convert. But with his track record, it will take more than mouthing the words to be credible.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 10, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Joe Biden’s Free-Trade Epiphany.

O’Grady: Joe Biden’s Free-Trade Epiphany – WSJ.com.