Thanks to Bob Slaughter for pointing out this article:

Next week’s Pennsylvania primary is forcing supporters of former President Bill Clinton to view his efforts to produce free trade for Colombia reflected in an embarrassing looking glass.

In 1997, his own State Department condemned Colombia’s reign of terror against its citizens.

“During the first nine months of the year, government forces committed 7.5 percent of all politically motivated extrajudicial killings,” the Clinton administration’s report said. Particular targets of these state-authorized murders were labor leaders.

Five years later, in 2002, the International Labor Organization “deplored that, despite numerous requests, the [Colombian] government has thus far not reported any convictions of individuals for the murder of trade unionists.”

Human Rights Watch the same year said Colombia had allowed the paramilitary forces that did the killings to remain “beyond the reach of the law.”

Since 1986, 2,500 labor leaders have been murdered in Colombia.

Only Clinton knows why he took $800,000 in speaking fees from Colombia business interests that are pushing the free trade bill, or why he accepted a “Colombia is Passion” award by Colombia’s controversial President Alvaro Uribe last June.

The killings go on despite the deep interest shown by private citizen Clinton in the lethal Colombian regime.

“Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists,” Dan Kovalik, general counsel for United Steel Workers, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last month.

Also in March, the International Trade Union Confederation said: “So far this year, 10 workers have paid with their lives for being trade unionists and for fighting to improve the lot of the Colombian working class.”

The murders poke into the news cycle now because the Wall Street Journal revealed that Mark Penn, the top strategist in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, was working at the same time through March as a lobbyist for the Uribe regime in trying to pass the Colombia tree trade bill.

Penn’s company took $300,000 from Colombia, despite Sen. Clinton’s opposition to the trade bill.

Sen. Clinton said she didn’t know about Penn’s side job. Wide-eyed reporters said Sen. Clinton and the former president were “furious” with Penn. He was relieved of his title, but still does polling for her campaign.

With Penn gone from Sen. Clinton’s command, the slack will be picked up in part by chief spokesman Howard Wolfson. Wolfson was a principal in the Glover Park Group consulting firm that got about $100,000 to push for U.S. approval of the takeover of strategic American harbors by Dubai Ports two years ago.

While Sen. Clinton said she was opposed to the Dubai ports deal, which was subsequently quashed, her husband supported it. It turns out he earned $15.4 million between 2003 and 2007 from an investment firm that includes the ruler of Dubai.

Not only was Wolfson against Sen. Clinton’s position on Dubai ports, it turns out Wolfson also worked briefly last year for the Colombia trade pact she opposes, according to the Huffington Post.

How these conflicts play in Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary is anybody’s guess. In the general election, voters who gobble up goods from Communist China may not care about the assassinations of unionists in equatorial South America.

Moral principles aside, the conflicts raise serious management issues for Sen. Clinton if elected. What will be the role, and restrictions on the business lives, of her acquisitive husband and his eager posse of former aides if she rules the White House? How would their deals influence public policy? So far, they’re unanswered leadership questions.