By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2   

Senator Hillary Clinton demoted her chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn, last Sunday. Penn had retained his lucrative role as chief executive of the influential Washington, DC, lobbying firm of Burson-Marsteller. Penn met with one of his firm's clients, the Government of Colombia, to coordinate a strategy aimed at moving the bilateral Colombia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement through the U.S. Congress.

Free trade has become a hot issue in this U.S. presidential campaign season, especially in the industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania which have suffered massive job loses over the past decades, devastating the largely white, Catholic, and unionized working class that no longer enjoys high-paying factory jobs and the pensions and medical benefits these union jobs used to guarantee.

Senators Clinton and Obama are in an intense close and increasingly bitter contest in Pennsylvania where the April 22 primary could be a make-or-break moment for Senator Clinton, and where she has (or had) a good chance of breaking Senator Obama's momentum. Both Senators oppose the trade deal with Colombia.

But Penn had nevertheless gone ahead with his meeting with the Colombians, and news of the meeting was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. This provided an exquisite moment of retribution for the Obama campaign. In Ohio Obama's economic adviser had spoken privately to the Canadians to reassure them that the anti-NAFTA (the trade deal with Mexico and Canada) positions taken by Obama in Ohio were "rhetorical." The Clinton campaign had used this information to undermine Obama's credibility with white working class voters.

NAFTA, had been one of President Bill Clinton's major achievements, who continues to support the Colombian trade deal. Colombia is President Bush's leading Latin American ally. In a curious way these controversies have brought the "forgotten continent," as Michael Reid, the Economist's editor for Latin America calls Latin America, back to the center of political debate in the United States.

In Brazil, however, Ambassador Rubens Ricupero stills worries about FTAA. Someone should tell him that initiative died in the last century.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper