by Todd Gordon
HUMAN RIGHTS AND ECOLOGY
The dynamics of uneven development, poverty, and violence in contemporary Latin America are intimately linked to the political economy of an environmentally-destructive extractive capitalism, in which multinational corporations displace peasant and indigenous communities in order to reap the tremendous profits available in natural resources in the midst of a global commodities boom. Export-led development in manufacturing based on extremely cheap, mostly female labour, in which Canadian companies play an important part in Central America, offers no better hope for Latin American countries than dependency on the natural resources sector. The purpose of this book has been to highlight the central role played by Canadian capital and the Canadian state in the extension and deepening of this human and ecological disaster.
The number of Canadian multinationals operating in Latin America has exploded since the early 1990s, particularly in the sectors of natural resources and finance. The consequences for the human rights of affected communities, as well as the sustainability of their ecological environs, have been calamitous. The presence of these corporations, and the advancement of their interests in the region, has depended upon the systematic intervention of the Canadian state in all of its multifaceted complexity. The response from thousands of Latin Americans has been the heroic formation of movements of resistance in the face of often ferociously repressive military and paramilitary goons. The expansion of Canadian capital has been met at every step with popular confrontation, ranging from legal disputation against Canadian corporations, to direct action against the frontlines of Canadian mining development. This unstable and evolving dialectic of Canadian capital’s expansion and popular contestation has been at the core of our empirical and theoretical investigation of contemporary Canadian imperialism in Latin America.
Rather than a series of isolated incidents carried out by a few bad apples, we have shown that the extraordinary violence and social injustice accompanying the activities of Canadian capital in Latin America are systemic features of Canadian imperialism in the twenty-first century. We have argued that the only thoroughgoing framework capable of understanding both the drivers of Canadian foreign policy in the region and their consequences for local populations is one that situates Canada as a secondary imperialist power within a global system which systematically benefits capital from the Global North at the expanse of the people and the environment in the Global South.
Crucially, this world-enveloping system of imperialism is entirely capitalist in the twenty-first century. An inherent compulsion toward self-expansion is one of the key features of capitalism as a social system. The history of capitalist imperialism is one characterized by the production and reproduction of monumental structural inequalities between regions and states of the world system. Global capitalism has developed through the rhythms of uneven development, and the active reproduction of this uneven development through the actions taken by international financial institutions and the core state powers, including, at a secondary level, the Canadian state. The world system as it is currently organized has the effect of draining wealth and resources from subordinate countries, and redirecting them toward the powerful few. This unevenness is internal to the logic of capitalist accumulation on a world scale, with complex implications across the national and regional levels of the global political economy. But while the logic of accumulation creates unevenness in patterns of development, these patterns are also produced and reproduced through the intentional state intervention of imperial powers. Fundamentally, the motivation of these powers, including Canada, is to keep the world safe for capitalist accumulation generally, and specifically to benefit the interests of their own capitals.
In addition to its role in producing and reproducing a highly stratified world system of states, we have also demonstrated that imperialism has an ecological logic. The dynamics of contemporary imperialism are molded by ecological regimes, insofar as the naturally occurring resources upon which capitalist accumulation is dependent are distributed geographically in different concentrations throughout various regions of the world. The geography of accumulation is rooted in the targeting of such resources and the systematic intervention in, and transformation of, the local and regional ecologies attached to these locations. The sustainability of these ecologies is a very distant priority compared to the short-term impulse of capitalist profit and self-expansion. Ecological destruction, as we have repeatedly demonstrated in our examination of contemporary Latin America, is a predictable outcome of a system institutionally structured around the needs of capital over and above all other considerations.
Furthermore, just as imperialism and racism have been linked throughout their histories, the operations of contemporary Canadian imperialism in Latin America continue to be characterized in the twenty-first century by the rampant dispossession of indigenous peoples. Outside Canadian borders, indigenous peoples of Latin America have been subjected to a pattern of abuse by Canadian capital which parallels its relationship to indigenous peoples at home. Indigenous claims to land and territory are consistently ignored by Canadian capital and the Canadian state. In the worldview underpinning Canadian capital at home and abroad, multinational corporations are seen to be in unique possession of the progressive capacities both to appreciate and to profit from the production of the riches hidden under the soils. Indigenous communities living atop resource deposits ostensibly lack this necessary awareness and drive, and are thus transformed into obstacles to be removed—through cooptation if possible, but also coercion if necessary—so that economic development can proceed. The thrust of Canadian capital’s resource-sector expansion in Latin America has been premised in many ways on this racist operative principle, with disastrous consequences for those indigenous communities conceived as impediments to progress.
The super-profits available to Canadian corporations in Central America have catalyzed the entanglement of the activities of the Canadian state and Canadian capital in the region and enhanced their mutual instincts of predation. Indeed, the depth and extent of Canadian capital’s penetration of Latin America would never have been possible without the backing of the Prime Minister’s Office, Foreign Affairs, including the embassies, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), both of which are now housed in Global Affairs, National Defence, Natural Resources Canada, and Health Canada—the true nature of the so-called “whole-of-government” approach to foreign policy in action. All of these variegated agencies of the Canadian state have acted with common purpose in Latin America to ensure the expansion and protection of Canadian capital at the expense of local populations. Because of the resistance that this expansion inevitably generates, repression of social movements becomes a necessity. Ideologically, this is justified through a distortion of notions such as “security” and “democracy,” where the former becomes narrowly conceived as the exclusive security of private property and the ability of corporations to make profit, and the latter is reduced to a juridical and political environment that ensures the same. Canadian foreign policy in Latin America around the themes of security and democracy is straightforwardly motivated by securing optimal conditions for foreign investors in the region. There is perhaps no clearer expression of this ideological framework than Canada’s cynical defence of “democracy” in the authoritarian context of today’s Honduras.
Other related facets of the ideological and political toolkit of Canadian imperialism in Latin America include development aid and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Canadian spending on legitimate development aid is paltry in comparative perspective, and the little it does distribute under the formal rubric of aid is, again, systematically targeted toward the reproduction of the conditions for capital accumulation generally, and the ability of Canadian corporations to profit more specifically. CSR is in some ways development aid’s still worse twin brother. As we have demonstrated in detail, CSR emerged precisely as a way of containing the fierce social contradic
tions generated in local communities as Canadian resource extractivism advances. Even petty handouts to communities from corporations—infinitesimal next to profits—are contingent on utter submission to the interests of private resource development. Barely concealed behind the carrot on offer by way of CSR is always the club of state or paramilitary repression for any recalcitrant communities standing in the way. CSR is a deeply cynical ideological ruse, designed to buy off communities for pennies once resource development projects have already been presented as fait accompli.
The uptick in Canadian FDI flows to Latin America has taken place in a context of a global commodities boom driven by the most dynamic zone of accumulation in the world market, China. As a response to this international environment, there has been a wide-scale extension and intensification of mining, oil and gas extraction, and agro-industrial mono crop cultivation across the region. These processes, as we have demonstrated, time and again entail violent strategies of accumulation by dispossession, whereby peasant and indigenous communities are displaced, and communal properties are transferred to the holdings of multinational capital. Accompanying this shift to extraction is a changing role for Latin America within the international division of labour, in some ways a regression to an earlier era when the region’s principal role was as supplier of raw materials to the core of the world system.
As we have shown, extractivism in contemporary Latin America is wedded to a politics of militarized neoliberalism. Violence, fraud, corruption, and authoritarian practices are routine on the part of militaries and paramilitaries acting at the behest of big mining companies and resource sectors more generally. The assassination of social movement leaders and rank and file activists has become commonplace. The behaviour of participants and social movements is criminalized through the use of highly flexible labels that can be attached to any organizer standing in the way of development projects—narco-trafficker, terrorist, or even narco-terrorist.
This book has tried to link the world-systemic dynamics of imperialism and Canada’s location in those dynamics to the specific manifestations of Canadian imperialism in the context of contemporary Latin America. Canada has worked behind the scenes in Honduras, an extremely poor Central American country, to support violent coup forces, which has opened greater space for Canadian investors in mining and sweatshop manufacturing. Canada has deepened its economic ties with Colombia, where opposition to resource extraction or activism in a union in the resource sector can be a death sentence. Indeed, opponents to Canadian mining projects have been assassinated in not just Colombia, but Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Mexico as well. On top of this, Canada has established stronger links with various security apparatuses in the region, most notably including those implicated in murder, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, and a general commitment to supporting foreign investors against recalcitrant communities. Canada has been training, conducting joint exercises with, funding, and selling arms to security forces in Colombia, Peru, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Canadian capital continues to tread heavily over the lives of ordinary Latin Americans. The mass of evidence we have accumulated in this book makes a mockery of mining or maquila executives who plead not guilty, pointing to their firms’ commitments to corporate social responsibility. We have likewise exposed the cruel hypocrisy of Canada’s claims of genuine commitment to democracy in contemporary Latin America. Most importantly, we have revealed a systematic, predictable, and repeated pattern of behaviour on the part of Canadian capital and the Canadian state in the region. To conclude otherwise would be to willfully miss the forest for the trees. More than merely revealing the pattern, we have suggested that it is necessary to explain its recurrence. In order to do so, we have positioned Canada within a hierarchical world system of imperialism and the uneven accumulation of capital on a global scale. Canada needs to be understood as a secondary imperialist power reaping benefits from a wider system that flourishes on the subordination of the Global South to the benefit of the Global North. There is no inevitability to the smooth unfolding of these dynamic tendencies, however. Instead, they are chock full of contradiction and unpredictability. Out of the cracks in this international system of domination, powerful and creative forms of self-organization and resistance have emerged against the odds. They represent the greatest threat to the reproduction of capitalist imperialism, and thus the greatest hope to humanity, social justice, and ecological sustainability.
NOTES
1 S. Day, “Address by the Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, to the Canadian Council of the Americas,” Ottawa: Foreign Affairs and International Trade, May 1, 2009. Available online at: http://www.international.gc.ca/media_commerce/comm/speeches-discours/2009/387207.aspx?lang=eng. Accessed on February 3, 2011.
2 H. Burnett, C. Mouawad, and L-A Bret, “Resource Nationalism and Mining Reforms: An increaseed potential for international disputes,” Northern Miner, September 26, 2013. Available online at: http://www.northernminer.com/news/commentary-resource-nationalism-and-mining-reforms-could-mean-more-international-disputes/1002758767/. Accessed on September 30, 2013.
3 Exceptions include the reports coming from organizations like Rights Action (www.rightsaction.org) and Mining Watch (www.miningwatch.ca), or articles published on Upside Down World (www.upsidedownworld.org). See also T. Gordon, Imperialist Canada, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010. In terms of offering critical insights into Canada’s increased political and economic engagement in Latin America, independent journalists and solidarity organizations have been well ahead of the academic literature. Independent journalism and solidarity organizations, however, do face structural limits that often prevent them from broadening their insights and identifying deeper patterns. This book attempts to provide a much-needed theorization of underlying political-economic processes, and the ways in which these are tied to wider governmental objectives.
4 P. McKenna’s recent edited collection of essays is emblematic of the weaknesses of mainstream academic frameworks. While offering some critical insights, it is significantly limited by the lack of a deeper analysis framed by an understanding of the broader contours of imperialist-anti-imperialist dynamics that mark capitalist growth and state power today—no less in the case of Canada than that of other advanced capitalist powers. Nor does it offer any investigation into political thinking and decision making within Foreign Affairs, the Canadian International Development Agency, Natural Resources Canada and the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, or diplomatic missions abroad—often behind the scenes—as they relate to the imperatives of Canadian capitalist expansion in the region and the challenges it faces; nor, for that matter, does it make any serious effort to explicate the expansion of Canadian capital abroad in the first place. In particular, M. Cameron and J. Tockman’s chapter on the Honduran coup, while correct in some of the criticisms it offers of the Canadian government’s actions, downplays the broader Canadian geopolitical and economic motivations for those actions and overstates the Canadian desire to please the U.S. Shamsie’s article on Haiti, shockingly, says nothing on the Canadian military’s direct role in the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and post-coup pacification of his supporters. P. McKenna, ed., Canada Looks South: In Search of an Americas Policy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
5 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, New York: Penguin, [1888] 2002, p. 83.
6 D. McNally, Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism, 2nd Edition, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2006, p. 28.
7 C. Mooers, Imperial Subjects: Citizenship in an Age of Crisis and Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 74.
8 H. Bernstein, “Colonialism, Capitalism, Development,” in T. Allen and A. Thomas, eds., Poverty and Development in the 21st Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 242. The living consequences of settler colonies established historically continue, of course, by way of dynam
ic internally colonial race relations in relevant areas of the world, including Canada.
9 E.M. Wood, Empire of Capital, London: Verso, 2003, p. 153.
10 Wood, Empire of Capital, p. X.
11 Ibid., p. 12.
12 Mooers, Imperial Subjects, p. 5.
13 Wood, Empire of Capital, p. 127.
14 Bernstein, “Colonialism, Capitalism, Development,” p. 250.
15 Quoted in Gordon, Imperialist Canada, p. 26.
16 For a critical survey of the relevant dependency debates as they played out in the Latin American context, see C. Kay, Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment: London: Routledge, [1989] 2013.
17 For a general survey of the modernization school within development studies, and how it compares to dependency and world-systems theories, see A.Y. So, Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency, and World-Systems Theories, New York: Sage, 1990. For an interesting set of reflections on contemporary iterations of modernization theory in the present global conjuncture, see M. Taylor, “Conscripts of Competitiveness: Culture, Capital and Institutions,” Third World Quarterly, 31, 4, 2010, pp. 661–579.
18 Perhaps the most notorious proponent of this view was the British Communist Bill Warren. B. Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: Verso, 1980.
19 A. Saad-Filho and J. Weeks also problematically entertain uncritical notions of FDI in the natural resources sector as an important potential source of development under certain conditions. A. Saad-Fihlo and J. Weeks, “Curses, Diseases and Other Resource Confusions,” Third World Quarterly, 34, 1, 2013, pp. 1–20.