Andanh.com

In Latin America, it is Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, not President Bush, who are seen as the go-it-alone cowboys, by opposing the United States' free trade agreement with Colombia.

Some Democrats claim that they are against the pact because Colombia has abused human rights. Those concerns are legitimate -- but they shouldn't be used to punish people like Norma Reynosa, a 35-year-old woman who just may snip the flowers that go into the Mother's Day bouquet that you buy.

Human rights aren't abstract to Reynosa. Two of her relatives were killed in the brutal warfare and insecurity that plague her home region in the southern part of Colombia. A third was killed by a land mine, and a fourth was kidnapped at age 12 to work for guerrillas in the National Liberation Army. Reynosa ran a small restaurant but had to flee when the guerrillas demanded that she pay more extortion money than she could afford.

So in June 2005, Reynosa and her husband abandoned their home and fled to the outskirts of Bogota to see if they could get jobs in the booming flower industry. Colombian cities like Medellin were the most dangerous cities in the world in the 1980s and '90s. But now they are thriving, and homicide rates are well below those of some American cities.

One reason is those bouquets you buy, entering duty-free from Colombia. These days Colombia is the world's second-largest exporter of flowers after the Netherlands, and almost 200,000 people work in the flower industry. Up to 28 cargo planes a day carry flowers from Colombia to the United States.

Lilly Ledbetter worked in a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala., for 19 years before she received some valuable information from an anonymous tipster: She learned that she was making $6,500 less than the lowest-paid guy who had her job.

She did what anybody might do. She sued. She was in for a surprise. So were a lot of civil rights experts. If any cases were intended to be covered by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they thought, it was cases like hers.

But after Ledbetter's case made it all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, the high court ruled 5-4 that the law did not apply to her. She was too late. She should have filed her complaint years earlier, when the original discrimination occurred.

The law said she had to file her complaint within 180 days of the alleged unlawful discrimination. The surprise came with the Supreme Court's interpretation of when the clock is supposed to start on that 180 days.

Since the 1960s, nine federal circuit courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had ruled that the 180-day clock started -- or restarted -- every time the employee received an unequal paycheck.