The full extent of taxpayer funds spent and US government power exerted that helped Giustra cannot be fully known. In Colombia, as in other countries, he uses a web of companies, shell companies, foreign affiliates, and offshore entities that make tracking his investments extremely difficult.
In addition to the investments mentioned in this chapter, he also controls a private company called Blue Pacific, which "owns ports under construction in Cartagena and Barranquilla, as well as power plants, farms, mines, and other infrastructure assets" in Colombia.
Colombia had long been a focus of interest for the Clintons. During his presidency, Bill won praise from the Colombians for pouring aid into the country to fight both drug cartels and a revolutionary insurgency.
In 2000 he had initiated Plan Colombia, an ambitious program to escalate the war on drug that came with more than $1.3 billion in aid. Once he was out of office, his attention shifted from the war on drugs to Colombia's ambitions to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States.
The Colombian government wanted a free-trade agreement so that it could sell its products, including natural resources, in the US market tariff free. President George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress generally favored the deal.
Opposition mostly came from Democrats (and organized labor) who felt the move would hurt wages for US workers. Democrats also argued that Colombia's human rights record was poor. For Colombians themselves, it was clear that, as the leading Colombian newspaper, El Pais, put it in 2006, “The support of Senator Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, will be decisive."
The story began, as it often does, with a lucrative speech. In June 2005 a South American business group called Gold Service International offered Bill $800,000 to deliver four speeches in South America. Gold Service was a keen supporter of the proposed US-Colombia free-trade agreement, because it would boost Colombian exports to the United States.
This was a lot of money at that time. Though Bill's fee would go up appreciably when his wife became secretary of state, his average payment through 2010 was $150,000. Giustra loaned Bill his jet, and Bill made stops in Mexico City and Bogotá, and then gave two speeches in São Paulo, Brazil.
The link is here.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/hillary-clinton-to-endorse-joe-biden-for-president
As Andres Franco, the group's chief operating officer, explained, “he was supportive of the trade agreement at the time that he came." And Bill spoke openly about his support for it. Meanwhile, Bill made efforts to bring Giustra and Uribe together so that the Canadian investor could expand his operations in Colombia.
Thus, in September 2005 Bill hosted a “philanthropic event" with Uribe. And as he often did, he mixed philanthropy with business. According to the Wall Street Journal, the purpose of the meeting was to introduce the two men.
As the Journal reported, Uribe and Giustra “put up two chairs in a hallway and talked for about ten minutes .... Later in the day, a top Clinton aide told Mr. Giustra that he heard the meeting with Mr. Uribe went well."
The link is here.
In January 2007 Giustra's new company, Pacific Rubiales, signed a pipeline deal with Ecopetrol, the state-owned Colombian energy company. One month after the deal was sealed, Bill, Giustra, and Uribe met at the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York.
In March, they met again, this time in the Colombian port city of Cartagena. All along, Democrats remained opposed to military assistance to Colombia as well as the Colombian free-trade agreement. But Senator Hillary Clinton's views on the matter remained ambiguous.
As one Latin American financial publication put it, when it came to her positions on trade “we find a bit of everything." She was in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and supported trade deals with Chile, Peru, and Singapore. But she was against the Central American Free Trade Agreement and extending trade preferences with other South American countries.
So the Colombians continued their courtship by various means. In June 2007 President Uribe arrived in New York City to headline a dinner event at a posh hotel. The event was titled "Colombia Is Passion." In fact, the night was largely about Bill. Uribe presented him with the "Colombia Is Passion" award for “believing in our country and encouraging others to do the same."
As Newsweek reported, Eager to repair its image in the United States and help boost support for a controversial United States-Colombia free-trade agreement, the beleaguered government of Alvaro Uribe came up with a clever PR move: give Clinton an award at a banquet, where the popular former president would say nice things about the country.
The dinner included a video depicting Bill as a Colombian hero. Uribe even praised him as the country's unofficial minister of tourism. Bill praised Uribe in turn and declared that, while there was currently a debate in Washington about the free-trade agreement, "[w]e need to remember that we are friends."
Then he invited Uribe to be a “featured attendee" at the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York that September.
