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MEDELLIN, Colombia—A convoy of passenger vans escorted by machine-gun-wielding police on motorbikes wound through the mountain roads overlooking this bowl-shaped city, passing shacks where locals sell fried plantains and gated estates where wealthy residents live.

The delegation of nine U.S. House members was en route to Almacafe, a major coffee warehouse and processing facility in the region. After a lunchtime presentation by Harvard-educated Juan Esteban Orduz, head of the country’s National Federation of Coffee Growers, aides snapped pictures while lawmakers clowned around with an actor dressed as Juan Valdez, the iconic face of Colombian coffee.

Led by the seemingly tireless U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, the members took turns posing with the mustachioed “Valdez” as perplexed coffee workers watched from a nearby building. The Valdez logo is big business here—where tours and tastings have earned the prominence of wine tastings in California. “You slurp [the coffee], like soup,” explained a U.S. Embassy aide, one of several assigned to accompany the delegation.

Colombia is the third-largest coffee producer in the world, surpassed only by Brazil and Vietnam, and the United States is its biggest market. Schwab frequently pops into a Juan Valdez Café near her downtown D.C. office, sometimes several times a day, aides said.

The Medellin coffee-tasting was part of a carefully orchestrated, 48-hour April congressional junket organized by the U.S. and Colombian governments. Schwab, who approaches her job with a missionary’s zeal, said that practically her entire staff was on hand for the trip, including trade negotiators doubling as an advance team. “We’re not set up to do this,” she said.

“I think there’s sort of an esprit de corps,” Schwab said on the return flight to Washington. “A lot of people at USTR put a huge amount of time into negotiating this agreement, … several years of their lives, … and they are at a point now where they’re feeling they have no control over what happens next.”

After last week’s House vote to indefinitely postpone action on the free-trade agreement, which President Bush sent to Congress two weeks ago, a deflated Schwab called it a “reckless and senseless act” by Democratic leaders. Nonetheless, she plans to keep pushing for approval this year.

The jumping-off points for the House delegation—Medellin, home of the notorious, deceased drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, and Cartagena, the destination of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the 1984 film Romancing the Stone, were picked for a reason: to show how far they’ve come since the bad old days.

To critics, however, the entire trip may as well have been a movie. “It’s a dog-and-pony show,” said Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Latin America Working Group, in an interview this week. LAWG is a coalition of U.S. groups that pushes for U.S. policies in Latin America that emphasize human rights, justice, and peace. Lawmakers met with demobilized Colombian paramilitaries, who traded in their guns for reduced sentences, job training, and a small stipend. Haugaard said that Medellin is one of the few places the program works, however, and even there paramilitaries still roam the countryside and control access to some neighborhoods.

House members also visited a flower farm—flowers are probably the second most recognizable Colombian export. In 2006, Colombia exported about $966 million worth of flowers—80 percent of which were sold in the United States, according to the Colombian Association of Flower Exporters.

Young men and women displaced by violence explained through translators that cutting flowers was the best job they ever had: It gave them better wages plus housing and health care for their families.

Will a trade agreement do much to help Colombia move into a more peaceful era?

But skeptics argued that the lawmakers were shown a Potemkin village. “This is a case that would be very difficult to find anywhere else, and I would know—I’ve been working in the flower sector for 18 years,” said Dora Acero, a Colombian flower union worker and activist, through a translator. “They don’t give us adequate protection from the fungicides and pesticides, and they don’t give us water to drink. People have to ask permission to use the restroom. They hire people to work the high season between 14 and 18 hours a day. And [at] a lot of these companies, people are fired without just cause, and in many cases they aren’t paid social security or minimum wages,” Acero said in an interview arranged by the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project.

Lawmakers sat for a private breakfast in Cartagena at the weekend retreat of Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, a man whose energy matches Schwab’s. Uribe wakes up at 4 every morning to do yoga and conducts 10-to-12-hour weekend campaign trips even though he is not eligible to run for re-election (unless the country tweaks its constitution, which some observers have not ruled out).

After breakfast, in a poor Afro-Colombian neighborhood, House members witnessed Uribe whip a crowd into a frenzy. “You have not been elected by man. You have been elected by God!” a young woman exclaimed through a translator during the rally. “He called it a town hall meeting; I would say it’s more like a rally,” Rep. Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., observed.

Nicole Lee, executive director of the TransAfrica Forum, a human-rights group based in Washington, disputed the extent of the adulation for Uribe. “Cartagena is a paradise for Afro-Colombians in comparison with how most Afro-Colombians live,” she said this week in Washington. “We have very good people in [the U.S.] government who care a lot about human rights, who care a lot about economic justice, but they’re not seeing the whole picture.”

Among Democrats, the chief obstacle to the trade pact is the ongoing violence in Colombia, particularly against union members. Despite improvement since Uribe took office in 2002, paramilitaries continue to target trade unionists; they’ve killed 15 this year alone, activists say. It remains difficult for workers to join unions, because of intimidation, said Jana Silverman of the Medellin-based National Union School, a research group.

Still, there are fewer murders each year in Medellin, Cartagena, or the capital of Bogota than in Washington, the government points out. The nation is safer than ever for tourism and investment, officials argue. “I think it’s important to note that all of our neighbors already have [free-trade agreements] with the U.S. … So not having an FTA to us is comparable to U.N.-imposed trade sanctions,” Luis Guillermo Plata, Colombia’s trade minister, explained.

Plata noted that the agreement will benefit U.S. exporters, who will see the Colombian tariffs on about 82 percent of U.S. products—tariffs that now average 12.5 percent—immediately drop to zero. “We’re negotiating a free-trade agreement with Canada. If the U.S. doesn’t want to have a trade agreement with Colombia, we’ll buy the wheat and the barley and the corn from Canada,” he said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is caught between labor unions that exert much influence on her party’s base and business interests that centrist Democrats have been courting. She also has her party’s presidential candidates to contend with. Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are busy campaigning in Rust Belt states, such as Pennsylvania, where trade deals are unpopular.

GOP Rep. Phil English is a thoughtful seven-term lawmaker from northwestern Pennsylvania, which is heavily unionized steel country. He is that rare breed that can pivot from a discussion of his district’s high-tech exports in one breath to a comparison of economic development in Mauritius and Madagascar in the next. Undecided on the Colombia pact, English came to see for himself, he said, as he took a break from reading the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on the return flight.

The North American Free Trade Agreement has hurt his constituents, English said, as have unfair Chinese trade practices. But other recent trade agreements—with Chile, Oman, and Singapore—have not hurt the U.S. economy, he said, and it was hard to see how the Colombia deal would either.

Lurking beneath the surface, however, is the violence against people whom AFL-CIO President John Sweeney calls his “brothers and sisters” in Colombia. English said, “It’s going to be years before this country fully digs itself out from its dark days.”

The author is a reporter for CongressDaily.