Thanks for posting this. I think that, while Colombia isn't a bad country, per se, this can't be good news for Hillary (with all due respect to idiotic).

The problem isn't so much that Clinton has ties to Colombia, as that he, like Mark Penn, supports CAFTA and is being paid to promote it, even as Sen. Clinton campaigns on a disingenuous anti-free-trade platform.

(I should say here that I don't believe either Clinton or Obama on their anti-free-trade pandering. Free trade is not what ails the American economy, and protectionism wouldn't save it (although I'd be happy to see better worker and environmental protections in the free trade deals). But it's crazy that he was the one who took the flak for the disingenuous pandering, when she's more committed to free trade than he is.)

Thanks flufferwink, for posting this (reformatted below, if it works). Media coverage should be intensive enough that every voter in the remaining primaries will understand the Clinton/Penn/Wolfson anti-union and anti-democratic ties.

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Sam Stein has a terrific post at Huffington Post about the ties between President Bill Clinton and President Uribe's Colombian government.

Former President Bill Clinton has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars speaking on behalf of a Colombia-based group pushing the trade pact, and representatives of that organization tell The Huffington Post that the former president shared their sentiment. In June 2005, Clinton was paid $800,000 by the Colombia-based Gold Service International to give four speeches throughout Latin America. ......
"He was supportive of the trade agreement at the time that he came, but that was several years ago. In the present context, I don't know what his position would be. It is not only about union trade rights. It is about what benefit or damage it can do to the US economy," said Franco. "Events with the Clinton campaign [concerning Mark Penn] are not good at all for the trade agreement... Right now it became a campaign issues and that is sad, because it needs to go through." .....
But evidence that the former president has been sympathetic to Colombia's position is widely known. In 2007, Clinton met personally with and accepted an award from Colombia's controversial president, Alvaro Uribe, during a time when the country was attempting to improve its image within the United States. ........
Moreover, Clinton has helped Frank Giustra, one of the biggest donors to the Clinton Global Initiative, score meetings with high-ranking Colombian officials. Giustra has several business interests in the country, and both he and Clinton have collaborated on an effort to fight poverty in developing world by partnering up with mining companies in Colombia and elsewhere.

Given the ties of President Clinton to Uribe, and his support of international development in Colombia, and his association with Mark Penn, the union-busting lobbyist campaign/strategist, on his wife's campaign, it begs the question:

"Is Hillary Clinton's record on the free trade agreement with Colombia just double-talk when her own husband is friends with the Colombian President, who has killed labor organizers, and still employs Mark Penn on her staff, who tried to help the Colombian government push the free trade agreement deal for a year?"

That's my question that I hope to see answered by the media.