By Hugh Bronstein BOGOTA, Feb 12 (Reuters) - A trade deal with Colombia will not pass the U.S. Congress until it is revamped to protect union members being killed at a rate of almost one per week in the Andean country this year, U.S. labor leaders said on Tuesday. A delegation from the AFL-CIO, the United States' largest labor organization, is in the capital city Bogota to lobby the government to crack down on right-wing militias that have assassinated hundreds of union members. "They will have to renegotiate the deal in 2009," said Dan Kovalik, a delegation member and lawyer for the United Steel Workers, a union with strong ties to the Democratic Party. Since 2002, when President Alvaro Uribe was first elected, 470 union members have been killed in Colombia, Kovalik said. There have been five killings so far in 2008, he said, or nearly one a week. The government says only three have been killed since the start of the year and that the cases are being investigated. Few of the slayings have been prosecuted through the years, but Colombia says it has tripled its budget for protecting union leaders with bodyguards and bulletproof cars, cutting murder rates sharply. The two governments signed the deal in late 2006 but Democrats in Washington want Colombia to improve its human rights record before bringing the deal up for a vote. "We see no chance that the trade deal will pass in the United States this year. Period," said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. The Democratic majority will allow a vote only after the pact is renegotiated, a scenario most likely to take place if a Democrat is elected U.S. president in November, Kovalik said. Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama oppose the deal as written while Republican front-runner John McCain backs the pact. The Colombian economy has picked up under Uribe, who won re-election in 2006 after cutting crime and spurring investment with his U.S.-backed crackdown on drug-running leftist rebels. But opposition politicians say Uribe, an ally of Republican U.S. President George W. Bush, backs anti-labor policies that have cut the number of Colombian union members to 850,000 from 1.2 million five years ago. "This is not just about the death of union members. It's about the death of unions in Colombia," Cohen said. (Reporting by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Xavier Briand)
Yolanda Pulecio (R), the mother of Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt, speaks to Pope Benedict XVI after the weekly general audience in Paul VI hall at the Vatican February 6, 2008. Betancourt ...
