by Todd Gordon
It is not just a matter of Canada being miserly with its aid budget. For Canadian policymakers, aid, like the rest of the foreign policy toolkit, is about creating the conditions for capital accumulation throughout the Global South.76 Julian Fantino, former Minister for International Cooperation, argued bluntly enough that CIDA’s role is “to make countries and people, trade and investment ready.”77 Fantino’s position, which is really echoing the sentiment of the Conservatives, Liberals, and leaders at CIDA, is rooted in the notion that the only proper developmental path a country can take is one rooted in strong free markets and private property rights—where profit reigns supreme, parts of which trickle-down to the impoverished communities where the investment is targeted. As Fantino added in an opinion piece for Embassy: “It is simply not plausible to expect sustainable economic growth without a stable government or vibrant private sector.” Anyone who suggests otherwise is merely “reverting to antiquated dogmas.”78 This was the same argument used by the Harper government to defend its FTAs with Colombia and Honduras in spite of the severe political repression in these countries: everyone is better in the end, as free markets will raise living standards and, somehow, improve human rights.
This is the trickle-down theory of economics, spun off into a trickle-down theory of human rights. It is theoretically spurious and empirically unsubstantiated by the reality on the ground in these countries. In fact, Fantino et al.’s argument is nothing more than political expediency, dressed up to justify Canadian plunder of the wealth and resources of poorer and weaker countries. In the last several years, for instance, Canadian aid has become increasingly tied to the Canadian mining industry. CIDA committed to spend C$100.7 million on mining-related training, infrastructure, and reform projects in the region between 2002 and 2019, though the bulk of that will be in the latter half of that time frame. Elizabeth Blackwood and Veronika Stewart have highlighted the number of different ways CIDA supports Canada’s mining sector, all of which are of course cloaked in the rhetoric of poverty reduction.79
At the same time, Latin America has become a target of Canadian aid policy in recent years, factoring heavily in the former Conservative government’s Country of Focus development program. CIDA recently reduced the number of recipient countries as part of this program, many of which are African, and among the poorest in the world. The aid was redirected and concentrated on a much smaller number of countries. The Latin American countries included in the program are Bolivia, Honduras, Colombia, and Peru. Neither Colombia nor Peru is among the poorest tier of Latin American nations. But what all the targeted Latin American nations have in common is considerable untapped resource riches and the rapt attention of Canadian investors. This aid orientation was summed up effectively by a spokesperson for Stephen Harper: “Our government is strengthening its development assistance in the Americas because this is our neighbourhood, where we have significant interests.”80 Towards this end, CIDA initiated a wave of funding cuts to long-time recipients of its financial support that did not fit into its more public and aggressive desire to push Canadian resource projects, though we should be careful not to overstate CIDA’s historic support for progressive or independent-minded developmental aid organizations. The fate of the ecumenical group Kairos is a telling example of CIDA’s political purges in the late 2000s. Cuts to Kairos have been linked to its work with organizations critical of Canadian mining in Mexico (rather than its possible connections to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, as initially reported in the media).81 CIDA also cut funding to Development and Peace and the Mennonite Central Committee, both organizations that have worked with groups opposed to Canadian mining projects.82
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
While CIDA was cutting funding to organizations that did not share its stance on Canadian resource investment, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) began receiving a growing part of Canada’s development budget. With the intensification of protests against resource development projects in the late 1990s and 2000s, and subsequently more international attention focused on the activities of companies, the industry and the Canadian government have taken up CSR as the new face of large-scale industrial resource extraction. No discussion of mining or oil and gas development can be had by industry or the government without rote reference to CSR. But CSR is little more than an attempt to offer a social gloss to the predatory activities of resource companies. The money offered communities, as we have noted, is a pittance of what companies earn off their ecologically-destructive investments, and it is always politicized, and frequently used to buy-off sections of the affected communities. Furthermore, the premise for the small medical clinics, poorly-funded schools, and soccer fields built by the companies is that the community accepts the resource development—no mine, no financial assistance.
The companies see this as a necessary financial burden, the costs of which they try to minimize. But the Harper government increasingly directed Canadian development aid towards CSR, helping companies with their already meagre CSR programs. The Canadian government was, in effect, offering state subsidies to some of the largest mining companies in the world in their pursuit of super-profits, taking on what is, in reality, the public relations expenses for advancing environmentally-destructive, large-scale Canadian mining projects, which typically face strong opposition from impacted communities. As Pierre Gratton of the Mining Association of Canada notes, “These [CSR] projects help improve the image of the industry.”83 Harper, meanwhile, declared that CSR programs “will contribute to a more stable regional business and investment climate.”84
The Canadian aid-CSR nexus projects are growing in number. They include a C$200,000 two-year project being planned for Central America.85 In 2012, CIDA announced a grant of C$25.6 million to establish the Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries as a partnership between the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the École Polytechnique de Montreal. According to Julian Fantino, it “will deliver knowledge on proven regulation and oversight” to resource-rich countries.86 But the most publicly controversial project to be announced thus far was CIDA’s decision in 2011 to partner directly with Canadian mining companies and large NGOs, and explicitly link Canadian aid, via CSR, to specific mining projects. C$26.7 million will be spent over five-and-a-half years in this initial corporate partnering project in Africa (Ghana, Burkina Faso) and Latin America (Barrick in Peru, and the Andean Regional Initiative for Promoting Effective Corporate Social Responsibility in the Andes). In the case of Barrick’s planned Peruvian open-pit mine, which is included in CIDA’s partnership program, the company has faced stiff opposition from local farmers worried about the dangers to local freshwater sources. The municipality in which the mine is located also passed an ordinance for the creation of a conservation zone in the mine area, just months before the CIDA announcement.87
cSR is a tool of foreign intervention; it is being used to replace community decision-making about foreign investment and the requirement under international law that governments seek informed consent from indigenous peoples for development projects that will impact them and their land. Instead, companies, now with the active support of CIDA, are trying to buy communities off on the cheap. Rather than respecting the sovereignty of indigenous communities, CIDA offers up C$5.2 million for the Indigenous Peoples’ Partnership Program to “build the capacity of Latin American indigenous organizations” in “natural resource management.”88 It finds willing proxies in large NGOs to dangle rotting carrots in front of impoverished communities. And if CSR efforts to front for the mining sector are successful, Blackwood and Stewart remind us that CIDA does not even have mandatory regulations enforcing the “socially responsible” character of the projects it funds.89 But the true depth of Canada’s commitment to social responsibility is betrayed when CSR efforts fail: violence, intimidation, and the heavy hand of security forces are usually not far behind, and the Canadian government�
�s public pronouncements on CSR transform into silence. Support for Canadian corporations can also be gleaned from what the Canadian government does not do—most notably, both Liberal and Conservative governments have refused to implement legislation to hold Canadian companies accountable for human rights abuses and ecological damage caused abroad.90
EXTRACTIVE COMMODITIES AND MILITARIZED NEOLIBERALISM
A set of unique regional dynamics in Latin America over the last decade, related to patterns of accumulation elsewhere in the world market (notably high rates of growth in China), kicked off a concerted shift towards the acceleration of mining, oil and gas extraction, and agro-industrial mono-crop cultivation throughout the continent.91 Three basic processes are at work in the region.
First, as part of the region’s return to an extractivist, export-driven, commodity-fuelled growth regime, we are witnessing the intensification of forms of accumulation by dispossession. On a wide scale, violent appropriation of natural resources is precipitating the transfer of communal properties into the hands of multinational capital. Second, the process is changing Latin America’s position within the international division of labour. As extractive capitalism advances, so too do processes of deindustrialization and the return to the region’s historic role as provider of primary commodities to the core of the world system. With this change in the region’s insertion into the world market come attendant dynamics of renewed imperialism (this time in the form of multinational capital) and the resurgence of enclave economies (such as with mining or sweatshop manufacturing) with their characteristic traits of dependency.
Third, beginning in 2008, the rhythms of extractivism in Latin America have intensified still further with the onset of the deepest crisis of global capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This crisis ought to be understood in all of its multidimensional richness; in other words, this is an economic crisis, but it is also one of depleting natural resource energy supplies and the intensification of competition between large powers to control these supplies; a food crisis (expressed in dramatic price fluctuations) related to the acceleration of agro-industrial monocropping and the financialization of the global agricultural sector; and an ecological crisis, tightly linked to advancing climate change, among other factors.92
The extractive model of capitalism maturing in the Latin American context today does not only involve the imposition of a logic of accumulation by dispossession, pollution of the environment, reassertion of power over the region by multinational capital, and new forms of dependency. It also, necessarily and systematically involves what we call militarized neoliberalism: violence, fraud, corruption, and authoritarian practices on the part of militaries and security forces. In Latin America, this has involved murder, death threats, assaults, and arbitrary detention against opponents of resource extraction.
A fundamental part of militarized neoliberalism is the ideological attempt by states to demonize social movement opponents as criminals, narco-traffickers, or terrorists. Indigenous peasants resisting dispossession at the hands of a Canadian mining company become part of the “dangerous classes” according to the logic of such narratives. Under the guise of combating violent crime and the drug trade, or “neutralizing” subversive movements, a perverse rhetoric of “democratic security” has emerged, which justifies a range of changes meant to harden the coercive apparatuses of the state: legal reforms that provide the police with greater power; the legal system with tighter restrictions on individual and collective democratic rights and liberties; the armed forces with the power to intervene in domestic social conflicts; and paramilitary groups with ever greater impunity.93 In recent years the most violent and nefarious examples of militarized neoliberalism in Latin America have been the administrations of Felipe Calderón in Mexico (2006–2012), whose militarization of the “war on drugs” led to tens of thousands of deaths; and Álvaro Uribe in Colombia (2000–2010), whose turn toward “democratic security” meant the full-scale state and para-military terrorization and dispossession of large swathes of the country’s rural population. The entirety of the Central American corridor, linking Colombia to Mexico, has likewise been permeated by the violent dynamics of military neoliberalism, advanced, we argue, with the active support of Canada.94
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
In what follows, we trace the increasingly aggressive insertion of the Canadian state and capital into the complex political economy of Latin America, with a particular focus on two sub-regions: Central America and the Andes. Canadian capital, especially in banking and natural resources development, plays a leading role in capitalist accumulation throughout the Americas, while the Canadian state is assertively pursuing the conditions amenable to Canadian investors: liberalized markets, weak environmental regulatory regimes, and contained or repressed social movements. The first section of the book looks at the dynamics of capitalist expansion and resistance as they have played out in Central America. Canada has positioned itself as an important player in the isthmus, supporting reactionary forces, including the pro-coup actors in Honduras. The section is anchored by the chapter on Honduras, which pivots on the 2009 coup against democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, but also includes a detailed account of Canada’s political-economic intervention in Guatemala and the rest of the region. The second section of the book looks at the Andes. Canadian capital has major interests in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, while the Left resurgence in Latin America has been strongest in the central and northern Andes. Thus there is a great deal at stake for Canadian investors in a region where their interests are regularly challenged by strong social movements and, occassionally, governments. As our chapters covering Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela argue in detail, the Canadian state has worked assiduously to weaken Andean social movements and the Ecuadorian and Venezuelan governments, while simultaneously seeking to strengthen diplomatic and military ties with conservative governments in Colombia and Peru.
In situating Canada as an imperialist power whose capitalist class has its own objective interests to pursue in Latin America, our book stands outside the mainstream and, indeed, much of the left-wing analyses available of Canada’s place in the world. Mainstream observers have traditionally viewed Canada as a benign, so-called middle power that must navigate and seek out a place for itself within the complexities of a world order shaped by the (often competing) “great powers,” and offer no effort to contextualize Canada’s position in the international hierarchy of nations within the dynamics of global capitalist accumulation and the sharply asymmetrical relations between countries of the capitalist core and those of the Global South. Imperialism as a concept and the scale of the internationalization of Canadian capital are completely eschewed in this literature. The traditional “critical” literature on Canada’s place in the world sometimes employs the concept of imperialism, however this use is often accompanied by flawed empirical analysis of Canadian capital—as truncated in its development and subordinated to more powerful national capitals, such as British and, eventually, American—or presumptions based on dated and flawed empirical data. Drawing on dependency theory, which was originally derived to explain the unequal insertion of Third World nations into global capitalism, many left-wing analyses have argued that Canada is also a dependency, qualifying it however as a rich one (since no serious thinker can conflate Canada with the Third World). A recent example of this is Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s The Making of Global Capitalism, in which the authors reiterate the notion of Canadian dependence on the U.S. (with no empirical justification), and argue that the rest of the world has been “Canadianized” in its relation with the global hegemon.95 In other words, the argument of their work, in this respect, rests on a faulty assumption.
The traditional literatures, then, obscure more than they reveal about Canada’s role in the world. In the last several years, however, a growing body of work has emerged that has challenged the status quo consensus and argued that Canada must, in
fact, be understood as imperialist. While this is not a homogeneous literature, authors who have offered an empirical and theoretical analysis of Canada as an imperialist power include Todd Gordon, Greg Albo, Dru Oja Jay and Nik Barry-Shaw, and Jerome Klassen.96 At the same time, and helping to inspire this emerging literature, independent journalists and solidarity organizations have done important work documenting individual cases of Canadian corporate malfeasance in the Global South.97 By analyzing Canada within the context of the broader patterns of global capitalist accumulation and North-South relations, and diving deeply into the murky waters of Canada’s investments and practices in Latin America, this book cuts against the grain of the traditional literature on Canada’s role in the world and endeavours to make a contribution, with a new regional specificity, to the emergent literature on Canadian imperialism.