It’s So Nice to Be Here

The event at a New York Hotel last June was called "Colombia Is Passion," but it was really a celebration of its guest of honor, Bill Clinton. 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. According to lobbying records filed with the Justice Department, publicity for the event was handled by Burson-Marsteller, the powerhouse public-relations firm headed by Mark Penn, Bill Clinton's longtime pollster. While he was representing Colombia under a $300,000 contract to promote the pact, Penn was also working as chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Uribe certainly needed an image boost. Allegations that his government was tied to murderous paramilitary groups (linked to the deaths of hundreds of trade unionists) had eroded support in Congress for the free-trade agreement. In April, former vice president Al Gore had pulled out of an environmental conference in Miami rather than appear with the Colombian president. But Bill Clinton, who had a friendly relationship with Uribe and had long been a free-trade booster, had no such qualms. In 2005, Clinton had first touted the virtues of a free-trade pact with Colombia during a tour of Latin America that netted him $800,000 in speaking fees.

At the June gala, Clinton's hosts played a video depicting him as a hero to Colombia; Uribe praised him as the country's unofficial minister of tourism because of his many trips there. Clinton then took the microphone and praised Uribe for reducing violence in the country. Without explicitly endorsing it, he touched briefly on the "debate that is taking place in Washington" over the trade deal. "We need to remember that we are friends," Clinton said.

At the time, nobody seemed to notice a potentially awkward problem with the event: while Bill Clinton was praising the Colombian leader, candidate Hillary Clinton was taking a hard line against free- trade agreements with Latin America. More recently, stumping for blue-collar votes and union endorsements in Pennsylvania, Hillary has intensified her opposition to the Colombian trade pact and denounced the Uribe government's human-rights record.

Last week, the intersecting and sometimes conflicting interests of Uribe, Penn and the two Clintons erupted as a campaign issue—and became a new distraction for the New York senator's presidential bid. When The Wall Street Journal reported that Penn had recently met with Colombia's ambassador, Penn tried to explain it away as an "error of judgment." The Colombians, offended by the remark, promptly fired him. Hillary then removed him as top strategist. She could not defend a senior aide who was being paid by a foreign government to promote policies at odds with her own campaign positions. (Some in the campaign saw the incident as a pretext for easing out Penn, a prickly character whom many insiders blame for giving Hillary bad advice.)

It was one thing for Hillary to push out a key adviser. But she could hardly fire her husband. "Like other married couples who disagree on issues from time to time," Clinton spokesman Jay Carson tells NEWSWEEK, "she disagrees with her husband on this issue." He adds: "President Clinton did not have any involvement in Burson's contract or any discussions regarding it with the Colombian government."