Blood of Extraction

by Todd Gordon

  But however important the war on drugs is or is not to Canadian foreign policy in the region, Canadian spending is not aimed solely at narco-trafficking; and the Harper government certainly never suggested that. Its broader goal is to strengthen security forces in the isthmus, and its relations with them, in the fight to impose order in the region against any people or groups deemed a threat to that order. That may encompass narco-trafficking, but the security forces Canada is funding and training do not focus on that alone; these are the same apparatuses that attack anti-mining blockades in Guatemala, for example, or target political dissidents for allegedly criminal behaviour in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In order to advance this security agenda, Canada is funding police forces with seriously questionable human rights records, and which have faced sharp criticism for their treatment of political dissidents, including participants in anti-mining campaigns, such as in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The situation in Honduras has been the most egregious since the 2009 coup, as we detailed in a previous chapter, where the police, both on duty and through participation in unofficial paramilitary units, have been deeply involved in post-coup violence. Any claim that Canadian spending will improve or “reform” the behaviour of these security apparatuses, which is not even a significant claim in the government’s own announcements, is belied by the structural corruption endemic to these security forces, the persistent inequality in the region, and the strong opposition to neoliberalism that will require force to be contained. The fact that in its financing of police training in post-coup Honduras, Canada is partnering with police from Colombia, the country with the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, is indicative of the government’s commitment to genuine police reform and protection of human rights.

  CONCLUSION

  This chapter has sought to chart the deep contours of Canadian investment dynamics and diplomatic interventions in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. In so doing, it has linked these narratives to our earlier investigation of Honduras and Guatemala. What is plainly evident from the discussion so far is the systematic and structural character of the Canadian state’s defence of the basic material interests of Canadian capital across the entirety of Central America. Our six Central American case studies, and analysis of the security strategy of the Canadian state across the region as a whole, have together pushed aside the thin ideological veneer of democracy promotion and defence of human rights, to reveal the imperialist core of Canadian foreign policy.

  In providing such a map of Canadian tactics and strategies in Central America, we have sought simultaneously to recognize in full both the historical complexity of domestic developments in each country, and the agency of Central America’s popular classes in defending their rights and dignity in the face of powerful and violent enemies. As much as this is a story of Canadian imperial extension and control, it is also one of heroic resistance, rather than passive acquiescence, on the part of the regions exploited and oppressed.

  PART III

  THE ANDES

  CHAPTER 5

  CANADA’S EVIL HOUR IN COLOMBIA

  Export Development Canada (EDC) is the federal agency responsible for trade financing and insurance for companies seeking to expand or break into new markets. EDC, as part of its overarching strategy in South and Central America, opened an office in Bogotá in early February 2014. The objective of the new office is to strengthen Canada’s presence in Colombia’s Andean region, and to help Canadian corporations to exploit an expected expansion of infrastructure projects.

  According to Rajesh Sharma, senior vice-president for international business development at EDC, “the capital-intensive demands of large infrastructure projects present a number of opportunities for EDC to bring its significant financing capacity to the region, to the benefit of Canadian companies operating there.” With an eye on the expansion of extractive natural resource industries, the office in Bogotá will help Canadian firms, “link to the supply chains of upcoming infrastructure, oil and gas, and mining project opportunities,” according to Sharma. “Canada’s expertise in smart grids in the power sector, clean technologies and cost-efficient supply for the oil and gas sector could spur greater trade, given the natural match between what Colombia wants and what Canada is very good at providing.”592

  The new EDC office is merely the latest visible hub in Canada’s imperial network in the Andes. Its strategic location will enable Canadian investment coordination south from Colombia into Ecuador and Peru, and north into Central America. The base in Bogotá also reflects Canadian capital’s accelerating interests in Colombia itself, particularly in the extractive industries of mining and oil, but extending outwards into telecommunications, finance, arms sales, printing, footwear, food processing, education, and paper.593 Employing the mechanisms made available through development aid, a bilateral Free Trade Agreement between Canada and Colombia, and security support for the Colombian state’s militarization of the countryside, the Canadian government has facilitated a new wave of Canadian investment in the Andean country in recent years, after an earlier wave petered out in the mid-to-late 1990s, as a consequence of an uptick in violent conflict.

  Canadian investment in Colombia more than quadrupled from C$414 million in 2006, before Harper’s 2007 announcement of FTA negotations, to C$1.76 billion six years later in 2012, according to official Cansim statistics—although the Bogotá embassy suggests that if Canadian investment entering Colombia via Caribbean offshore financial centres was included in the data, FDI numbers could be as much as three times higher.594 Using numbers that the major Canadian investors in Colombia employ themselves, Asad Ismi argues that Canadian investment made by these investors alone was close to C$2 billion in 2012.595

  Mining is at the forefront of Canada’s investment penetration of Colombia. Of the ninety-eight extant mining properties in the country for exploration, development, or production at the end of 2013, eighty were owned by Canadian companies.596 This will only increase as more land is opened up for exploration in the coming years. One estimate suggests that roughly 40 percent of the country is being targeted by mining companies for exploration and development opportunities.597 Canadian oil and gas companies, meanwhile, have successfully participated in a major government auction of oil and gas concessions, and in 2010, Calgary’s Talisman, together with Ecopetrol, purchased British Petroleum’s Colombian assets for almost C$2 billion. Canadian company Gran Tierra Energy tripled its production in 2009.598 By 2013, Canadian oil investors accounted for 36 percent of Colombia’s total gross oil production.599 As the Globe and Mail notes, without any hint of irony, there is “a Canadian invasion under way in Colombia.”600

  The conquest by resource companies has spurred other Canadian industries to look to Colombia. Less by happenstance than by design, finance follows minerals. Brookfield Asset Management announced in 2009 that it created the biggest private equity and infrastructure fund in Colombia, which is designed to finance, and profit from, oil pipelines among other investments.601 Scotiabank in turn bought wholesale lending assets from Royal Bank of Scotland for C$64 million in 2010. “Everything indicates that this Canadian bank [Scotiabank] wants to become a major player in Latin America,” reported the Colombian weekly Semana following the Scotiabank purchase.602 This was followed in 2011 by a C$1 billion takover of Banco Colpatria, Colombia’s fifth largest bank, both acquisitions motivated by the prospect of significant profits from financing the expansion of the mining and oil sectors in the wake of the U.S. and Canadian FTAs.603

  The unfurling of Canadian dollars into the Colombian sectors of resource extraction and banking is taking place in a context of unremitting violence and dispossession. A long historical process, punctuated by the defeat of the Colombian Left by the end of the twentieth century, and the onset in the 1980s and 1990s of a neoliberalism armed with the legal and illegal forces of the bourgeoisie—the military and paramilitary respectively—has laid the groundwork
for the profitable entrance of Canadian capital. Once embedded in these environs, the violence that this capital requires as a regular feature of its accumulation process—to clear the land of inhabitants, to crush armed insurgents, and to terrorize unarmed social movements opposed to extraction in their territories—quickly dispels any illusions that Canadian companies might be in any sense neutral bystanders in a quintessentially Colombian armed conflict, or, worse, innocent victims of an irrational chaos surrounding them. These companies are, rather, integrally linked to the networks of violence in the countryside, and the configurations of elite Colombian power, which enable extractive capitalism to flourish, whatever the costs to displaced local communities of small-holding peasants, indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations, and artisanal miners, not to mention the workers sent into the open pits themselves. The history of blood and dirt that made possible the present is the subject to which we now turn in more detail.

  HISTORICAL BACKDROP

  Popular movements in contemporary Colombia operate in a dangerous political terrain. Rich in petroleum, natural gas, coal, iron ore, nickel, gold, copper, emeralds, and hydropower, the activities of multinational capital in mining and other extractive resource industries (most importantly, oil) play a major role in perpetuating civil war, military and para-military terror, grotesque concentrations of wealth, and the dispossession of land and resources from peasants, miners, and indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. Colombia, according to sociologist Jaime Rafael Nieto López, is perhaps the only country in Latin America in which the two characteristics of the contemporary hegemonic power of imperialism at the global level are inextricably united. While the majority of the countries in Latin America have endured neoliberal globalization since the last quarter of the twentieth century—with its perverse effects in terms of inequality, poverty, social exclusion, institutional instability, and so on—Colombia has had, additionally, to confront an endemic war of more than half a century, which has submitted the country further to the power of the international system and obstructed possibilities for constructing organically and politically robust social actors and movements.604

  The struggle between the guerrillas and the state in Colombia was born out of the historical violence of class injustice. Jorge Eliécer Giatán, leader of the Liberal Party, was assassinated on April 9, 1948. A popular uprising overtook Bogotá in protest against this crime. The bogotazo, as the protests became known, inaugurated a ten-year war between Conservatives and Liberals over the riches of the countryside, a conflict leaving over two hundred thousand Colombians dead.605 Peasants were excluded from the Frente Nacional (National Front), which in 1958 brought peace between rural Conservatives and the Liberals of the cities. The exclusion of the peasants was an expression of the fact that the war turned in no small part on their necessary displacement from the land and their disorganization as a class.606

  In order to survive in an ongoing context of violent rural dispossession, much of the Colombian peasantry was transformed into a guerrilla army, first through the creation of self-defence committees. Faced with persistent exclusion and perpetual violence from above, these defence committees metamorphosed into the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) in 1966, opening up a new epoch of peasant struggle in the country. Military offensives launched by the state to rout the guerrillas repeatedly failed and the territorial holdings of liberated FARC areas expanded.607 The state reacted on two separate occasions with the opening of peace negotiations. Under the presidency of Bolisario Betancur (1982–1986), a truce was established through which the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP) was formed in 1985. Included under the UP’s umbrella were the FARC and the Partido Comunista Colombiano (Colombian Communist Party). The new electoral front won five seats in the Senate, fourteen deputies in the National Congress, and twenty-three mayoralties. However, in subsequent years, the UP was practically exterminated by the conjoined offensive of paramilitaries, the armed forces, and narco-traffickers.608

  Under the presidency of Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) a demilitarized zone was granted to the FARC in the Caguán river region as part of a new process of peace negotiations. The zone encompassed four municipalities and forty-two square miles of territory. However, at the same time, the Pastrana government signed onto the U.S.-initiated Plan Colombia in 1999, a plan that subordinated any peaceful orientation in the politics of Pastrana and inclined the country back toward the rejuvenation of open warfare.609

  Neoliberal modernization over the last few decades in Colombia has involved the deepening of free market policies through fierce state intervention designed to flexibilize the labour market; boost the flow of capital and commerce; and expedite the privatization of key sectors of the national economy, such as telecommunications, the banking sector, the oil sector, public services, social security, education, and health. The economic transition to a new model of development began haltingly under the government of Virgilio Barco (1986–1990), and was then firmly consolidated under the government of Gaviria (1990–1994), through his politics of opening up and internationalizing the country’s economy. The governments of Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010) and Juan Manuel Santos (2010-) have been no exception in terms of conserving the basic trajectory of the political economy and social orientation of the preceding governments under the new development model. Indeed, Uribe and Santos have sought to deepen and extend the model even further, as reflected in the recent Free Trade Agreement with the United States (which came into effect in 2012), as well as one with the European Union (which came into effect in 2013).610

  By the mid-1990s, the FARC, with its base in the lowland plains and jungles of the south, and the smaller Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army, ELN), with a presence in the southwestern Pacific and eastern plains, were guerrilla movements with genuine social weight, military apparatuses, and political presence. The FARC, with eighteen to twenty thousand troops, controlled 90 percent of frontier municipalities and crucial roads circling the major cities, while the ELN, with three to five thousand combatants, was a significant thorn in the side of the ruling bloc that controlled the country.611 Neoliberal restructuring nonetheless proceeded apace throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, intensifying the historically unequal patterns of wealth and orchestration of terror from above.612 “It is not a mere coincidence,” contends sociologist Jasmin Hristov, “that the implementation of the neoliberal project has been accompanied by: enhancement in the capacity of the state’s security apparatus and paramilitary groups; expansion of violence and human rights [violations]; and subjection of social movements to various extermination tactics.”613 Threats, terror, and assassination from military and paramilitary forces have been the common obstacles to social movement activism for a number of decades. According to William Avilés, “Human rights activists, political leaders on the Left, trade unionists and the peasants perceived to be supporting the guerrilla insurgency represented the vast majority of these victims.”614 The main guerrilla forces, the FARC and the ELN, have also committed atrocities against social movement actors, but to a dramatically lesser extent (see Table II).

  Table II. Share of Responsibility for Non-Combatant Deaths and Forced Disappearances

  1993

  1995

  1996

  1997

  1998

  1999

  2000

  Guerrillas

  28%

  38%

  36%

  23.5%

  21.3%

  19.6%

  16.3%

 
Security Forces

  54%

  16%

  18%

  7.4%

  2.7%

  2.4%

  4.6%

  Paramilitary

  18%

  46%

  46%

  69%

  76%

  78%

  79.2%

  Source: W Avilés, “Paramilitarism and Colombia’s Low Intensity Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2), p 403. Derived from the Colombian Commission of Jurists.

  By some estimates, Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade union activists, with 2,800 unionists killed between 1986 and 2010.615 Forty-two percent of human rights violations against unionists take place in the mining-energy sector. Ninety-seven percent of the homicides against unionists have been perpetrated by military and paramilitary actors, with 3 percent being carried out by guerrillas and other armed actors.616 Three million people have been displaced in the twenty-first century in Colombia, 2 million of whom were displaced from mining regions.617 Levels of violence in mining zones are extraordinary. In the municipalities of these zones, between 1995 and 2002