Featured image: Edgar Degas’ “Scène de guerre au Moyen-âge,” 1865, is one of the exhibits said to be inspired by Sade RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Gérard Blot
While the alternative culture “celebrates political disengagement,” what it attacks are conventions, morals, and boundaries. It comes down to a simple question: Are we after shock value or justice? Is the problem a constraining set of values or an oppressive set of material conditions? Remember that one of the cardinal points of liberalism is that reality is made up of values and ideas, not relationships of power and oppression. So not only is shock value an adolescent goal, it’s also a liberal one.
This program of attacking boundaries rather than injustice has had serious consequences on the left, and to the extent that this attack has won, on popular culture as a whole. When men decide to be outlaw rebels, from Bohemians to Hell’s Angels, one primary “freedom” they appropriate is women. The Marquis de Sade, who tortured women, girls, and boys—some of whom he kidnapped, some of whom he bought—was declared “the freest spirit that has yet existed” by Guillaume Apollinaire, the founder of the surrealist movement.63 Women’s physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent—and appalling—than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography.
The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere.
The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Those people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pennies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances.
And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or “focusing on the worst,” as feminists are often accused of doing. “Double-anal” is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it—not masturbating to it, but actually looking at it—you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is “what the end of the world looks like.”
By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don’t have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornography, we get a glimpse—in a very visceral, powerful fashion—of the consequences of the oppressive systems in which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like if we don’t reverse the pathological course that we are on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society.… Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity—the things that make decent human society possible—are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic shapes most relationships and interaction.… [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornography and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so normalized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male population of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?64
All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that’s men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of fourteen. The number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called “Dad.” Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a “barricade of sexual terrorism”65 inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroticize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down.
In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing antifun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony.
Gail Dines writes, “When I critique McDonalds, no one calls me anti-food.”66 People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations—with economic, political, and ideological components—that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $100 billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cruelty.67 This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm?
And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as “natural.” Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hierarchy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want.
On a global scale, the naked female body—too thin to bear live young and often too young as well—is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale of women.68 Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can’t decide?
We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation.
This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of “transgression, excess, sexual outrage.” Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire” as well as Camus and Barthes.69 Wrote Camus, “Two centuries ahead of time … Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom.”70 Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche’s will to power. His ethic ultimately provides “the erotic roots of fascism.”71
Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it’s time to listen. College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72 If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear—and, finally, know—this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”73
Stories of bloody, degrading violence associated with Canadian mining operations abroad sporadically land on Canadian news pages. HudBay Minerals, Goldcorp, Barrick Gold, Nevsun and Tahoe Resources are some of the bigger corporate names associated with this activity. Sometimes our attention is held for a moment, sometimes at a stretch. It usually depends on what solidarity networks and under-resourced support groups can sustain in their attempts to raise the issues and amplify the voices of those affected by one of Canada’s most globalized industries. But even they only tell us part of the story, as Todd Gordon and Jeffery Webber make painfully clear in their new book, The Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America (Fernwood Publishing, November 2016).
“Rather than a series of isolated incidents carried out by a few bad apples,” they write, “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.” While not completely focused on mining, The Blood of Extraction examines a considerable range of mining conflicts in Central America and the northern Andes. Together with a careful review of government documents obtained under access to information requests, Gorden and Webber manage to provide a clear account of Canadian foreign policy at work to “ensure the expansion and protection of Canadian capital at the expense of local populations.”
Fortunately, the book is careful, as it must be in a region rich with creative community resistance and social movement organizing, not to present people as mere victims. Rather, by providing important context to the political economy in each country studied, and illustrating the truly vigorous social organization that this destructive development model has awoken, the authors are able to demonstrate the “dialectic of expansion and resistance.” With care, they also show how Canadian tactics become differentiated to capitalize on relations with governing regimes considered friendly to Canadian interests or to try to contain changes taking place in countries where the model of “militarized neoliberalism” is in dispute.
The spectacular expansion of “Canadian interests” in Latin America
We are frequently told Canadian mining investment is necessary to improve living standards in other countries. Gordon and Webber take a moment to spell out which “Canadian interests” are really at stake in Latin America—the principal region for Canadian direct investment abroad (CDIA) in the mining sector—and what it has looked like for at least two decades: “liberalization of capital flows, the rewriting of natural resource and financial sector rules, the privatization of public assets, and so on.”
Cumulative CDIA in the region jumped from $2.58 billion in stock in 1990 to $59.4 billion in 2013. These numbers are considerably underestimated, the authors note, since they do not include Canadian capital routed through tax havens. In comparison, U.S. direct investment in the region increased proportionately about a quarter as much over the same period. Despite having an economy one-tenth the size of the U.S., Canadian investment in Latin America and the Caribbean is about a quarter the value of U.S. investment, and most of it is in mining and banking.
Canadian mining investment abroad
To cite a few of the statistics from Gordon and Webber’s book, Latin America and the Caribbean now account for over half of Canadian mining assets abroad (worth $72.4 billion in 2014). Whereas Canadian companies operated two mines in the region in 1990, as of 2012 there were 80, with 48 more in stages of advanced development. In 2014, Northern Miner claimed that 62% of all producing mines in the region were owned by a company headquartered in Canada. This does not take into consideration that 90% of the mining companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges do not actually operate any mine, but rather focus their efforts on speculating on possible mineral finds. This means that, even if a mine is eventually controlled by another source of private capital, Canadian companies are very frequently the first face a community will see in the early stages of a mining project.
The results have been phenomenal “super-profits” for private companies like Barrick Gold, Goldcorp and Yamana, who netted a combined $2.8-billion windfall in 2012 from their operating mines, according to the authors. (Canadian mining companies earned a total of $19.3 billion that year.) Between 1998 and 2013, the authors calculate that these three companies averaged a 45% rate of profit on their operating mines when the Canadian economy’s average rate of profit was 11.8%.
Compare this to Canada’s miserly Latin American development aid expenditures of $187.7 million in in 2012—a good portion of this destined for training, infrastructure and legislative reform programs intended to support the Canadian mining sector. Or consider that the same year $2.8 billion was taken out of Latin America by three Canadian mining firms, remittances back to the region from migrants living in Canada totalled only $798 million (much more than Canadian aid).
Without spelling out the long-term social and environmental costs of these operations—costs that are externalized onto affected communities—or going into the problematic ways that private investment and Canadian aid can be used to condition local support for a mine project, Gordon and Webber posit that “super-profits” may be precisely the “Canadian interests” the government’s foreign policy apparatus is set up to defend—not authentic community development, lasting quality jobs or a reliable macroeconomic model.
State support for “militarized neoliberalism”
The argument that the role of the Canadian state is “to create the best possible conditions for the accumulation of profit” is central to Gordon and Webber’s book. From the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) down, Canadian agencies and foreign policy have been harnessed to justify “Canadian plunder of the wealth and resources of poorer and weaker countries.” Furthermore, they write, Canada has actively supported the advancement of “militarized neoliberalism” in the region, as country after country has returned to extractive industry, and export-driven and commodity-fuelled economic growth, which comes with high costs for affected-communities and other macroeconomic risks:
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 of the region by multinational capital, and new forms of dependency. It also, necessarily and systematically involved 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.
The rapid and widespread granting of mining concessions across large swaths of territory (20% of landmass in some countries), regardless of who lives there or how they might value different lands, water or territory, has provoked hundreds of conflicts and powerful resistance from the community level upward. In reaction, and in order to guarantee foreign investment, in many parts of the region states have intensified the demonization and criminalization of land- and environment-defenders, while state armed forces have increased their powers, and para-state armed forces expanded their territorial control.
Far from being a countervailing force to this trend, the Canadian state has focused its aid, trade and diplomacy on those countries most aligned with its economic interests. It is not unusual to see public gestures of friendship or allegiance toward governments “that share [Canada’s] flexible attitude towards the protection of human rights,” such as Mexico, post-coup Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia. Meanwhile, Canada has used diverse tactics (in Venezuela and Ecuador, for example) to contain resistance and influence even modest reforms.
Canada’s ‘whole-of-government’ approach in Honduras
One of the more detailed examples in Blood of Extraction of Canadian imperialism in Central America covers Canada’s role in Honduras following the military-backed coup in June 2009. Documents obtained from access to information requests provide new revelations and new clarity into how Canadian authorities tried to take advantage of the political opportunities afforded by the coup to push forward measures that favour big business. Once again, though other economic sectors are discussed, mining takes centre stage.
After the terrible experience of affected communities with Goldcorp’s San Martin mine (from the year 2000 onward), Hondurans successfully put a moratorium on all new mining permits pending legal reforms promised by former president José Manuel Zelaya. On the eve of the 2009 coup, a legislative proposal was awaiting debate that would have banned open-pit mining and the use of certain toxic substances in mineral processing, while also making community consent binding on whether or not mining could take place at all. The debate never happened.
Instead, shortly after the coup, and once a president more friendly to “Canadian interests” was in place following a questionable election, the Canadian lobby for a new mining law went into high gear. A key goal for the Canadian government, according to an embassy memo, was “[to facilitate] private sector discussions with the new government in order to promote a comprehensive mining code to give clarity and certainty to our investments.” Another embassy record said that mining executives were happy to assist with the writing of a new mining law that would be “comparable to what is working in other jurisdictions” and developed with a resource person with whom their “ideologies aligned.”
In a highly authoritarian and repressive context, and under the deceptive banner of corporate social responsibility, the Canadian Embassy—with support from Canadian ministerial visits, a Honduran delegation to the annual meeting of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), and overseas development aid to pay for technical support—managed to get the desired law passed in early 2013, lifting the moratorium. Then, in June 2014, with full support from Liberals and Conservatives in the House of Commons and the Senate, Canada ratified a free trade agreement with Honduras, effectively declaring that “Honduras, despite its political problems, is a legitimate destination for foreign capital,” write Gordon and Webber.
Contrary to the prevailing theory in Canada that sustaining and increasing economic and political engagement with such a country will lead to improved human rights, the social and economic indicators in Honduras have gotten worse. Since 2010, the authors note, Honduras has the worst income distribution of any country in Latin America (it is the most unequal region in the world). Poverty and extreme poverty rates are up by 13.2% and 26.3%, respectively, after having fallen under Zelaya by 7.7% and 20.9%. Compounding this, Honduras is now the deadliest place to fight for Indigenous autonomy, land, the environment, the rule of law, or just about any other social good.
A strategy of containment in Correa’s Ecuador
In contrast to how Canada has more strongly aligned itself with Latin American regimes openly supportive of militarized neoliberalism, the experience in Ecuador under the administration of President Rafael Correa illustrates how Canada considers “any government that does not conform to the norms of neoliberal policy, and which stretches, however modestly, the narrow structures of liberal democracy…a threat to democracy as such.”
In the chapter on Ecuador, Gordon and Webber provide a detailed account of Canada’s “whole-of-government” approach to containing modest reforms advanced by Correa and undermining the opposition of affected communities and social movements to opening the country to large-scale mining. A critical moment in this process occurred in mid-2008, when a constitutional-level decree was issued in response to local and national mobilizations against mining. The Mining Mandate would have extinguished most or all of the mining concessions that had been granted in the country without prior consultation with affected communities, or that overlapped with water supplies or protected areas, among other criteria. It also set in place a short timeline for the development of a new mining law.
The Canadian embassy immediately went to work. Meetings between Canadian industry and Ecuadorian officials, including the president, were set up to ensure a privileged seat at talks over the new mining law. Gordon and Webber’s review of documents obtained under access to information requests further reveals that the embassy even helped organize pro-mining demonstrations together with industry and the Ecuadorian government. Embassy records describe their intention “to create sympathy and support from the people” as part of a “a pro-image campaign,” which included “an aggressive advertisement campaign, in favour of the development of mining in Ecuador.” Meanwhile, behind closed doors, industry threatened to bring international arbitration against Ecuador under a Canada–Ecuador investor protection agreement (which a couple of investors eventually did).
Ultimately, the authors conclude, Canadian diplomacy “played no small part” in ensuring that the Mining Mandate was never applied to most Canadian-owned projects, and that a relatively acceptable new mining law was passed in early 2009. While embassy documents show the Canadian government considered the law useful enough to “open the sector to commercial mining,” it was still not business-friendly enough, particularly because of the higher rents the state hoped to reap from the sector. As a result, the embassy kept up the pressure, including using the threat of withholding badly needed funds for infrastructure projects until mining company concerns were addressed and dialogue opened up with all Canadian companies.
Not discussed in The Blood of Extraction, we also know the pressure from Canadian industry continued for many more years, eventually achieving reforms, in 2013, that weakened environmental requirements and the tax and royalty regime in Ecuador. Meanwhile, as the door opened to the mining industry, mining-affected communities and supporting organizations were feeling the walls of political and social organizing space cave in, as they faced persistent legal persecution and demonization from the state itself, while the serious negative impacts of the country’s first open-pit copper mine started to be felt.
Canada’s “cruel hypocrisy”
The Blood of Extraction is a helpful portrait of “the drivers behind Canadian foreign policy.” Gordon and Webber lay bear “a systematic, predictable, and repeated pattern of behaviour on the part of Canadian capital and the Canadian state in the region,” along with its systemic and almost predictable harms to the lives, wellbeing and desired futures of Indigenous peoples, communities and even whole populations. They call it Canada’s “cruel hypocrisy.”
The problem is not Goldcorp or HudBay Minerals, Tahoe Resources or Nevsun. These companies are all symptoms of a system on overdrive, fuelling the overexploitation of land, communities, workers and nature to fill the pockets of a small transnational elite based principally in the Global North. If we cannot see how deeply enmeshed Canadian capital is with the Canadian state—how “Canadian interests” are considered met when Canadian-based companies are making super-profits, even through violent destruction—we cannot get a sense of how thoroughly things need to change.
Jen Moore is the Latin America Program Coordinator at Mining Watch Canada, working to support communities, organizations and networks in the region struggling with mining conflicts.
Featured image: Francisco Tiul Tut mourns the burning and destruction of his home in Barrio La Revolucion. On January 8th and 9th, 2007, the Guatemalan Nickel Company, local subsidiary of Canadian Skye Resources, ordered the forced eviction of five Q’eqchi’ Mayan communities around Lake Izabal in El Estor and Panzos, Guatemala (Photo: James Rodríguez/mimundo.org)
While much of the controversy surrounding Canada’s extractive industry centers on oil and gas projects like SWN Resources’ drilling plans in New Brunswick, Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline and the widely felt impact of Tar Sands extraction in Alberta, there is a significant lack of debate concerning Canada’s larger and much more influential mining sector.
It’s estimated that 75% of the world’s mining and exploration companies are based in Canada. Collectively, they account for 42 billion dollars of Canada’s gross domestic product, making mining and exploration one of Canada’s most economically powerful sectors. Some 40% of global mining capital is raised on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The impact of Canada’s mining sector, however, goes far beyond mere facts and figures.
Wherever Canadian mining companies operate, they have an indelible imprint on the social, political and environmental realities in which they insert themselves. In countries that are politically unstable or where a culture of impunity is permitted to thrive, that imprint can span generations with successive mining companies following in the footsteps of their predecessors. Such is the legacy of shame that the Maya Q’eqchi people in Guatemala have been forced to endure for the last half century.
The “Fenix” Mining Project in El Estor, Guatemala. Established in 1965 as the EXMIBAL nickel mine owned by Canadian mining firm INCO, the project was transferred to the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN) in 2005 after the expiration of the original 40-year license. CGN was the local subsidiary of Canadian Skye Resources, a junior mining company comprised of former INCO directors. Skye was bought by HudBay in 2008, and the project sold to the Russian-based Solway group in 2011. (Photo: James Rodríguez/mimundo.org)
For the average Canadian, the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction are not immediately apparent; indeed, those who tend to benefit the most from such projects also tend to be shielded from the harsh realities that befall those who are affected by them, as Mi’kmaq lawyer and activist Pam Palmater toldIntercontinental Cry (IC).
“People in far-away cities may enjoy oil for their cars, diamonds from their city jeweler, or minerals needed to build cities and never have to see the housing crisis and lands stripped of trees and wildlife, or see the deformed fish and contaminated water.”
“The people who benefit are separated from the people who pay the social and environmental price,” she added.
For more than two years, Palmater, who leads the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University, worked closely with Mathias Colomb Cree Nation (MCCN) Chief Arlen Dumas, who, in 2013, served two Stop Work Orders to Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Ltd (Hudbay) in connection to the Lalor mine project in Northern Manitoba. According to Chief Dumas, Hudbay failed to obtain MCCN consent to operate its proposed mine, situated on unceded MCCN lands. Soon after the Stop Work Orders were delivered, Hudbay sought out and obtained a court injunction against Palmater and Chief Dumas, restraining them and others from interfering with access to the company’s property.
A long line of Canadian mining companies have adopted a similar modus operandi, avoiding their constitutional obligation to consult, accommodate or even inform First Nations before seeking approval of mining projects that could adversely affect their indigenous rights.
Far more companies have been under fire for human rights abuses and other transgressions that took place outside of Canada. Among them, there is Barrick Gold, Fortuna Silver, Sherritt International, IAMGOLD, Curis Resources, Tahoe Resources Inc., Denison Mines Corp., First Majestic Silver, TVI Resource Development, Inc., Nevsun Resources Ltd., New Gold Inc., and GoldCorp.
In their unyielding pursuit for justice and accountability, Indigenous Peoples are presently pursuing at least three of these companies in Canada’s court system. Foremost among them is Hudbay Minerals.
In 2010, Toronto-based law firm Klippensteins Barristers & Solicitors filed a set of civil suits against Hudbay Minerals on behalf of Maya Q’eqchi people in Guatemala who suffered three separate injustices in connection to the Fenix Mining Project in El Estor municipality near the Pacific Coast.
The ongoing case against Hudbay Minerals centers on the actions of its former subsidiary Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN) and security forces hired by CGN between 2007 and 2009, specifically the murder of Adolfo Ich Chaman, a respected community leader; the attempted murder of German Chub, who was paralyzed after being shot at close range; and the gang rape of eleven women.
The case is widely considered to be a major step forward to holding the Canadian mining sector to account for its actions abroad.
The story of Hudbay in Guatemala goes back several decades to another Canadian mining company, INCO (now Brazilian company Vale). Linking together the history of INCO and Hudbay in this Central American country is crucial to understanding not only the Canadian mining sector but also its role around the world.
HISTORY OF INCO IN GUATEMALA
The violence against Indigenous Peoples who have opposed mining in Guatemala should be viewed as part of the wider violence that swept through the country in the 1950s when a military coup overthrew a democratically-elected government. “The history of INCO in Guatemala is [in its simplest form] the history of the military coup in 1954 and then the aftermath of that military coup”, Graham Russell, director at Rights Action network, stated in an interview with IC.
From 1944 to 1954 two nationalist, reformist and capitalist regimes attempted to modernize and equalize the country[1]. Part of this effort stemmed from a moderate agrarian reform bill in 1952 that would have redistributed hundreds of thousands of acres of land to landless peasants. This bill greatly affected the United States-based United Fruit Company (UFC), which was at the time the largest landholder and employer in Guatemala. Seeing the bill as a threat to its deeply entrenched economic interests, UFC hired legendary public relations expert Edward Bernays to carry out an intense misinformation portraying then-president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán as a communist threat. While Bernays was busy winning hearts and minds, the company carried out an equally energetic lobbying effort back home to convince lawmakers and the U.S. public that Guatemala desperately needed a regime change.
Once U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to office, it wasn’t long before he authorized Operation PBSUCCESS, a covert op in which the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded, armed, and trained 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas, the first of many dictators to succeed Guatemala’s presidency.
A long and brutal civil war ensued that would – over the course of 36 years – take the lives of more than 200,000 civilians and displace more than 1.5 million, culminating in a genocidal rampage against the Maya in the 1980s.
INCO had its own role to play in this vicious circle of violence. The Guatemalan military repeatedly used the company’s airplane landing strip to bring in soldiers and INCO trucks to transport them to Maya Q’eqchi lands for de-population. Graham Russell told IC that INCO’s position in the mining industry was a key factor as well, explaining that “…at this point (INCO) was the biggest private investor in all of Central America, not just Guatemala. These brutal military regimes and the wave of brutal violence starting in the late 60s and all through the 70s was directly associated to INCO’s mining interests in Guatemala.”
INCO was able to gain its status in Central America by cultivating a monopoly on nickel extraction. The company controlled nearly 54 percent of the nickel market in the West. During the 1950s it controlled 75 to 80 percent of the US nickel market[2]. Part of building this monopoly also involved Nazi war profiteering. Prior to World War II, INCO arranged a cartel agreement with the German company I.G.Farben to allow the stockpiling of nickel for the Nazi war effort[3].
INCO and the U.S. Hanna mining company formed Izabal Mining Operations Company (EXMIBAL), a subsidiary company, to operate in Guatemala in 1962. EXMIBAL attained a tax-exemption in Guatemala in 1968 for leading what was described as an “industry of transformation.” Under its contract, EXMIBAL would pay the Guatemalan government $23,000, a tiny fraction of the estimated $10 million it would make each year between 1971 and 1980.
With the civil war well underway, both government and private security forces seized the opportunity to remove any indigenous-led opposition to mining under the auspices of fighting communism. Over 400 massacres were carried out during the period of the civil war, including the notorious slaughter of more than 100 Q’eqchi who were peacefully protesting EXMIBAL’s mining operation in El Estor.
Although there was considerable resistance to EXMIBAL’s mining operation and controversy over how little INCO paid in taxes what lead to the end of the company’s mining operation was the 1980 demand from the military government of Romeo Lucas Garcia that EXMIBAL pay 5% of the value of nickel extracted to the Guatemalan government. EXMIBAL suspended operations and left Guatemala, retaining rights to its mining concession.
In 2003, the former director of INCO became the president and executive of the Canadian company Skye resources. Days before the 40-year concession on the old EXMIBAL mine expired, it was transferred to CGN, the local subsidiary of Canadian Skye Resources (purchased by Hudbay Minerals in 2008). The concession also gave CGN the “right” to expel the Maya Q’eqchi. In 2006, the International Labour Organization (ILO), a branch of the United Nations, held that Guatemala broke ILO Convention 169, a binding international law, by failing to carry out free and prior consultations with the Maya Q’eqchi. Five years prior to this, in 2001, the constitutional court of Guatemala held that the property rights of the land in question belonged to the Maya Q’eqchi. Both rulings were ignored by the Guatemalan government and CGN.
As if tearing a page straight out of Guatemala’s civil war, CGN proceeded to order the eviction of five indigenous communities from the concession area. In January 2007, a combined police and military force arrived to carry the order out with help from residents from neighboring areas who were trucked in by CGN. During the eviction, hundreds of homes were burned to the ground and, in the community of Lote Ocho, a total of 11 women were gang raped by CGN’s mine security personnel and members of Guatemala’s police and military forces.
Homes in the community of Barrio La Revolucion are burned and destroyed by personnel hired by the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN). (Photo: James Rodríguez/mimundo.org)
One year later, HudBay Minerals purchased Skye Resources and promptly changed the company’s name to HMI Nickel Inc.
Despite the re-branding, however, the Maya Q’eqchi would continue to face a routine of repression with HudBay’s security forces shooting and killing Adolfo Ich Chaman and paralyzing German Chub Choc in 2009. One year later, Angelica Choc, the wife of Adolfo Ich Chaman, announced her intent to sue HudBay Minerals and its subsidiary in Canada.
Eager to evade a potentially catastrophic ruling, HudBay Minerals promptly sold CGN, the Fenix mine and its other Guatemalan assets to the Cyprus-based Solway Investment Group. The sale, however, did not deter Canada’s courts from agreeing to hear the case(s) against Hudbay.
PATHWAYS TO JUSTICE
A favorable ruling could have far-reaching implications not only for Hudbay but for the entire Canadian mining sector. As Graham Russell explained to IC,
“…there is a growing number of Canadians becoming aware that there are hundreds, if not more, [Canadian mining companies] operating in many places around the world [that] are often involved in creating environmental harm or contributing directly or indirectly in serious human rights violations including killings and gang rapes.”
The possibility that anyone who suffers at the hands of a Canadian mining company could turn to Canada for their day in court could very well change the face of the industry.
Katherine Fultz, visiting Instructor of Anthropology at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA, who has studied opposition to mining in the Highlands of Guatemala, told IC by phone that community referendums as a tool to resist mining projects are also gaining popularity among mine-affected communities:
“It actually started elsewhere in Latin America. The first one was held in Peru and a number were held in Argentina and later in Columbia … Guatemala has held more than any other country with more than sixty votes at this point. Over half a million people have participated in them.”
These community referendums have rejuvenated anti-mining activism in the highlands of Guatemala leading many communities to take direct legal action against the Guatemalan government to protest mining on a national level.
Recently, the Guatemalan constitutional court ordered the suspension of two hydro-power mega projects (Vega I and Vega II) for failure to properly consult with affected Indigenous communities. Other mining projects have also been suspended due to lack of consultation with indigenous communities. In one case, the rural community of Zunil in the municipality of Quetzaltenango carried out referendums (consulta) declaring their territory to be a mining free zone.
An avenue that Canadians can use to stop international human rights abuses by mining companies may one day be found in Canada. In 2009, Liberal MP for Scarborough-Guildwood John McKay introduced Bill C-300 as a private members bill to the Canadian House of Commons. The bill called for the creation of an ombudsperson that would oversee Canadian mining firms. Bill C-300 ultimately lost by six votes in 2009, even though the NDP and Liberals held a majority in the House of Commons at the time. McKay said in a recent interview that, although he thinks existing structures that oversee mining companies need to be strengthened, re-introducing the bill is a high priority for the Liberal government.
Instead of the provisions in Bill C-300, Canadian mining and extraction companies fall under “Building the Canadian Advantage” (BCA) which the Conservative government put in place instead of Bill C-300. Viewed by critics as an irresponsible PR gimmick, BCA moved Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funds to support community projects run by Canadian mining companies and created a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) councilor to mediate disputes between affected communities and mining companies. None of these provisions, however, are binding; and while there is strong language about protecting human rights in BCA they are little more than guidelines that companies are under no obligation to follow.
The historical and contemporary case of Canadian mining companies operating in Central America shows that one should have no illusions about the role these companies play around the world. While building more north-south solidarity and mine-affected communities holding referendums are positive steps on the road to justice, there is the bigger issue related to the way that mining is tied to larger social, political, environmental and economic realities.
In an interview with Canadian Dimension Magazine, Alain Deneault, who was sued along with his co-author and publisher by Barrick Gold for the exposé Noir Canada, ties together the issues of over-consumption and planned obsolescence to the mining industry. “If we could put all of these questions on the agenda at the same time, we could say, okay, maybe it’s worthwhile to dig that hole in that specific area because we need zinc, but we’ll use it carefully. We’ll exploit zinc carefully because we’ll make sure that what we dig out will be recycled in many objects that we will use.” Deneaut went on to advocate for the creation of a permanent and independent commission of inquiry that would have powers to not only inquire into the activities of corporations but also summon their representatives to appear and submit documents.
For now, the more the Canadian public is informed about the activities of Canadian mining companies, the better. Pam Palmater advocates for a broad approach to bring Canadian mining companies abuses to light and urges that we work together to fight for our collective futures:
“…the more the public knows about the destructive activities of mining companies, who’s really profiting and what it means for our collective futures, the better chance we have at forcing change through varied means used simultaneously – including protests, court cases, political pressure, shareholder pressure, advocacy at the international level and building allies amongst social justice activists, environmentalists, scientists, First Nations, other countries, politicians and legislators.”
Notes[1] Guatemala: the politics of violence pg 1.
