Blood-of-Extraction-13

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

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

there have been 828 homicides, 142 forced disappearances, 117 people injured, 71 people tortured, 355 death threats, and 150 arbitrary detentions, every year. In addition there have been 433 massacres, which when added to the homicides gives a total figure of 6,625 homicides during those eight years.618

In the mid-2000s, the violence was compounded by an abysmal social situation. GDP per capita was US$7,900 in 2005.619 Yet, 64 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, 23 percent in absolute poverty. The worst rates were to be found in mining zones.620 Eleven million of the country’s 43,593,000 citizens did not meet their basic food requirements.621 Adequate health care, education, and employment were exclusive privileges of a small elite.

What Hristov has called the “spectre of paramilitarism” haunted the roll-out years of armed neoliberalism in Colombia, and facilitated repeated rounds of peasant dispossession and land concentration.622 Colombia maintains a rural population of close to 15 million, roughly 38 percent of the citizenry overall. Sixty percent of the rural populace lives off of a variety of agricultural livelihoods, while the “remaining 40 percent depend on service-related employment, artisan mining, fishing, tourism, labouring in extractive multinational corporations, and other jobs.”623 Between the 1980s and 2000s, large landowners increasingly “contracted and sponsored paramilitaries,” to assist in depeasantization of the rural areas, and illegal confiscation of land with ambiguous property titles.624 Between 1984 and 2003, a massive land grab was orchestrated, such that landownership of five hundred hectares or more grew from 32.7 percent of Colombia’s agrarian land mass to 62.6 percent, all of which is in the hands of a mere 0.4 percent of landowners. Roughly 2 million small peasants own fewer than 1.3 million hectares collectively, while 2,300 large landowners control 39 million. According to sociologist Nazih Richani, “it is plausible that many of the 2,300 owners constitute a hybrid social class of cattle ranchers, narco-bourgeoisie, land speculators, and agro-industrialists who make up the reactionary configuration that staunchly resists land reform.”625 Much of the ongoing dispossession of peasants and concentration of landholdings has been propelled by paramilitary violence. “Between 2002 and 2010,” historian Forrest Hylton points out,

in an increasing number of regions, the paramilitary Right took over the state by combining all forms of struggle. In 2002, their allies occupied one-third of congressional seats, while in 2006 they won 22 out of a total of 32 departmental governorships; between 1999 and 2007, 5.5 million hectares of land were usurped or forcibly abandoned. While cattle ranching took up 40 million hectares of land and agriculture occupied 4 million.626

Under Uribe and Santos there have been new labour market reforms to make the hiring and firing of workers easier, and public sector workers have seen their wages stuck below the rate of inflation. General sales taxes have been increased, hitting the poorest most severely, while royalties and taxation on national and transnational capital have been reduced in various ways. Alongside these trends, there have been systematic cuts in public spending destined for health and education, as well as reductions in resources transferred from the federal state to municipal and departmental governments.627 As a result of neoliberal restructuring there has been a deepening of poverty, social exclusion, and worsening inequality. In the words of Jaime Rafael Nieto López, the country has witnessed a hollowing out of citizenship (desciudadanización) whereby it has become impossible for large sectors of the population to exercise the rights of citizenship enshrined in the 1991 Colombian Constitution.628 The social panorama in the neoliberal era has been made that much worse by the consequences of war. The armed conflict has compelled close to 5 million people to leave their lands, villages, and homes through myriad processes of forced dispossession and massacres of civilian populations. A recent report from Human Rights Watch also notes that the armed conflict in Colombia has led to the abandonment of roughly 6 million hectares of farmland by small peasants, which were then illegally usurped by large landowners. According to Human Rights Watch, there are more forcibly displaced people in Colombia than any other country in the world. On top of this, the conflict has allowed for the redirection of state spending from social welfare, education, housing, health, and productive collective projects, toward military pursuits (US$80 billion over the course of the two Uribe administrations).629 In the last ten years much of the peasant population has been dispossessed of close to 6 million hectares of productive land by new and old landowners integrated into the narco-paramilitary networks that cut across various regions of the country.

Uribe’s strategy of “democratic security,” inherited now by Santos, has been predicated on the notion of deepening the war against the guerrillas until their defeat and submission is complete. In Colombia, under the ideological guise of democratic security, there was no longer a political armed conflict, but rather a “terrorist threat,” which meant that there was no possibility of dialogue with the “terrorists.”630 At the same time, the Uribe regime negotiated the ostensible demobilization of right-wing paramilitary groups that had been organized under the umbrella organization Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (Self-Defence Units of Colombia). This demobilization was predicated on granting paramilitaries immunity from their crimes and protection of the loot that they had acquired through the blood and fire of dispossessing peasant communities from the rural areas.631 Uribe’s program of democratic security struck tremendous blows against the FARC. Many of the FARC’s rural fronts were dismantled or reduced, and its urban structures in the principal cities were demolished. It is estimated that between 2008 and 2009 close to 12,700 rank-and-file members of the FARC surrendered to the authorities, as well as more than a thousand mid-ranking cadre. This forced a retreat of the FARC to the border regions, such as the departments of Nariño, Putumayo, Cauca, and Arauca. Territorial dispersion significantly reduced the combat capabilities of the guerrillas. While the FARC has been effectively neutralized, the ELN has also been reduced to passive resistance, avoiding military combat with the Colombian armed forces when it can.632

Despite inspiring resistance by Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities against violent dispossession over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as struggles by workers and the urban poor, the panorama remained bleak in the first decade of the twenty-first century:

Militarily strong Left insurgencies, imperially supported police and armed forces, and a semi-autonomous, increasingly powerful coalition of private right-wing narco-armies weakened the radical-popular movement. Patterns of counterinsurgent terror against civilians…were reinforced during the cold war, and repackaged under the anti-terrorist rubric after 11 September 2001. Not for the first time, in response to struggles for peace and justice, terror and official amnesia have become the lingua franca of Colombian politics and society.633

The important points to emphasize, from the anti-imperialist perspective advanced in this book, are that Canadian mining activity in Colombia is presently resurgent, and that such activity is deeply implicated in the war economy of violence and dispossession from which it benefits. This emphasis is especially vital to develop in light of the Canadian state’s consistent manipulation of the political realities in contemporary Latin America. On a visit to the region in 2009, Prime Minister Harper made a thinly veiled allusion to Hugo Chávez’s government in Venezuela, warning that the rest of Latin America has to avoid a return to “the syndrome of economic nationalism, political authoritarianism and class warfare.” By contrast, embracing Uribe’s record in Colombia, Harper stated,

When we see a country like Colombia that has decided it has to address its social, political and economic problems in an integrated manner, that wants to embrace economic freedom, that wants to embrace political democracy and human rights and social development, then we say, “We’re there to encourage you and we’re there to help you.”634

Indeed, in 2011 the Canadian Council for the Americas, the principal organization focusing on Canada’s foreign economic relations with Latin America, named Uribe “statesman of the year in 2011”—the same year it gave Peter Munck, the Canadian mining magnate of Barrick Gold infamy, a lifetime achievement award. According to Hylton, “Uribe’s [administration was] a semi-authoritarian form of parliamentary government that [did] not respect individual rights or international law.”635 Uribe was the preferred candidate of the paramilitaries in both the 2002 and 2006 elections. Prior to ascending to the presidency, Uribe spent two years as governor of Antioquia, two years in which the anti-guerrilla militias known as Convivirs (Rural Vigilance Cooperatives) displaced roughly two hundred thousand peasants.636 In the banana zones of that department the homicide rate increased under the governorship of Uribe: “in 1995, it doubled to 800; in 1996, 1,200; and in 1997, 700. In 1998, the year after Uribe’s departure, it dipped to 300.”637

Beginning in 2012, during the first government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2014), political developments offered up the possibility of a general accord being reached between guerrillas and the state, the termination of conflict, and the construction of a stable and lasting peace which would end sixty years of war.638 The balance of forces has shifted profoundly over the decades since the FARC took up armed resistance, as Colombian society has been radically transformed. Today, the majority of the population is urban, and the principal demand of the popular classes has shifted from land to housing. The urban populations want an end to the conflict. New urban social movements have erupted in the principal cities, none of which are controlled by Liberals or Conservatives.

Another development has to do with transformations internal to the country’s dominant classes. The preferred model of accumulation in the twenty-first century involves the crude extraction of natural resources—hydrocarbons, mining minerals, and agro-industrial mono-crops—rather than the older models of agriculture, rooted in peasant exploitation. The vision of the leading edge of the ruling classes—whose fullest expression today is President Santos—is that the state must divert some of its resources presently locked in a massive war budget toward the building of infrastructure designed to facilitate the acceleration of accumulation through the extraction of natural resources, via the foreign direct investment of multinational corporations.639 According to the analysis of Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi, the de-escalation of the open war between the state and the guerrillas—both the FARC and the ELN—has made visible a new war-in-formation, the one being waged by multinational capital against indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples in the countryside. The Colombian Constitution of 1991 recognizes the ancestral territories of Afro-descendents and indigenous populations under the designation “reserves” (resguardos). As a result, six hundred indigenous reserves have been created, occupying a third of Colombian territory. Many of these are located precisely in the areas in which the expansion of extractive capitalism is destined to target, making indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations frontline antagonists of the new war-in-formation. Indeed, by 2011 over 80 percent of legally-recognized indigenous reserve land already had mining concessions, granted by the central government, within their territories, and oil development projects had targeted a further 9 million hectares of indigenous reserves. 640

Over the last several decades, the Colombian armed forces, backed by the U.S., have been strengthened organizationally and technologically, and have vastly improved their capabilities in combat and surveillance. At the same time, the FARC have been weakened militarily, while also losing much of their political legitimacy as a result of a shifting demographic to the cities and alienating relations with the rural indigenous communities that remain. In the present moment, the end of war would not signify peace for the popular movements in Colombia, but rather the continuation of their struggle in a more favourable scenario. During the earlier periods of open conflict, facing repression and death, many movements were still capable of carrying off huge mobilizations—such as the Minga Social y Comunitaria (Communitarian and Social Cooperative Gathering) in 2008, and the establishment of the Congress of Peoples, and other social-movement collectives on a national scale. In the current conjuncture, the indigenous struggle will continue, defending territory against the multinationals. The “peace” of extractivism, according to Zibechi, is inaugurating a new cycle of struggles from below.641

One signal of this potential new cycle came with the national agrarian strike of August 2013.642 The strike mobilized thousands of peasants across the country and converged around a set of demands that spoke to the overlapping interests of truck drivers, small-holder coffee growers, artisanal miners, and a wide array of small-holding peasant producers of different food crops who have faced a crisis in reproducing themselves amid the neoliberal transformation of Colombian agriculture since the early 1990s. The various sectors involved in the protests were able to articulate themselves organizationally through the formation of the Mesa Agropecuaria y Popular de Interlocución y Acuerdos (Roundtable for Dialogue and Agreement among Popular Agrarian Producers).643

The Santos government responded initially with repression (12 dead, 4 missing, 385 injured, 262 detained, and 660 cases of human rights violations), and then shifted to a shuffle of his cabinet (a cosmetic move, because new general elections were just around the corner), along with other token gestures and stalling tactics.644 The strike held firm nonetheless for over four weeks, and was also significant insofar as it brought together in a powerful new synthesis indigenous and Afro-Colombian struggle, within a wider constellation of popular forces in movement. In addition to these relatively novel bridges of solidarity across oppressed peoples, different economic sectors were also involved. While the small-holding peasantry and the landless were at the heart of the strike in August, their actions were actually preceded in July that year by the protests of artisanal miners. The nine principal demands of the small-scale miners included the stipulation that the Colombian state must provide official recognition of small and medium-sized artisanal mining through the formational of a new mining code, such that the police and military would cease to repress the day-to-day activities at the heart of their livelihoods. They also demanded that there be official recognition and respect in the new mining code for indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities engaged in artisanal mining, and a simultaneous freezing of concessions to multinational mining corporations within indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories.645

SPECIAL VIOLENCE OF EXTRACTION

If large-scale mining for export was already an important feature of national development strategy in Colombia in the 1990s, it was really only in the 2000s that the pace of extractive capitalism accelerated sufficiently to transform the landscape of the countryside in earnest.646 The new era was inaugurated with a new mining code in 2001, followed by a concerted effort by the Colombian government to shape a new regime of accumulation under Uribe’s successive administrations (2002–2010). Uribe’s twin strategic horizons for the advancement of mining involved, on the one hand, a series of legal reforms to ensure an attractive juridical environment and a flexible labour force for foreign direct investment. On the other hand, it involved a policy of state and paramilitary violence—under the rubric of “democratic security”—so as to free specific geographic zones of their populations for purposes of natural resource extraction when necessary, and to otherwise crush, or at least tame, resistance emerging from those popular sectors affected by the advance of multinational mining capital into their territories: indigenous peoples; Afro-Colombian and peasant communities; small-scale artisanal miners; and, once the mines were established, the workers that pumped their veins.647

The speed with which mining took hold of the imagination of state leaders and foreign investors was impressive. Between 2005 and 2010, the contribution to total exports made by mining and oil together tripled, accounting for almost 50 percent of exports at the end of that period. In absolute terms, this translates in mining and oil exports moving from a value of US$19 billion in 2005 to US$39.8 billion in 2010. Private investment, almost entirely multinational capital, in mining exploration tripled between 2005 and 2010, and the area of Colombian territory conceded for exploration and/or exploitation increased by four times. Almost a third of all foreign direct investment between 2004 and 2009 was in the mining sector.648 Foreign direct investment in the mining and energy sectors combined rose by ten times between 2002 and 2010, moving from 42 to 57 percent of total foreign direct investment, or from US$466 million to US$4.5 billion in value.649 More than 8.4 million of Colombia’s 114 million hectares of territory are licensed for mining exploration, while nearly 6 million hectares are already licensed for mining exploitation, and 37 million are licensed for oil exploration.650 Canadian capital is a whale in this sea. By the end of 2011, Canadian companies accounted for over 65 percent of all companies engaged in mining exploration in the country, and more than 75 percent of all firms exploring for oil and gas.651

The shift to a regime of accumulation rooted in mining and oil extraction by multinational capital has quite fundamentally reconfigured the socio-ecology of what had been relatively remote geographic zones of the country, where small-scale artisanal mining and small-holder peasant farming persisted, where poverty levels were well above the country’s average, and where the presence of basic state infrastructure and social services was sparse. The social transformation of the countryside involved in the expansion and intensification of extractive capitalism necessitated violence, because it pitted the integrally conflictual interests of multinational capital against those of local communities sitting on the deposits of natural wealth.

The long-standing armed conflict in Colombia has provided a useful cover for the employment of state and paramilitary violence in potential zones of mining and oil extraction on behalf of multinational capital. The dynamic typically goes something like this: The corporation demands “security” for their investments, which means, in the first instance, the clearing of the relevant geographic area of insurgent groups in order to avoid attacks on the equipment or personnel of large-scale mines. However, the demands for “security” and “protection” also facilitate a violence that far exceeds the routing of armed insurgent groups. The flexibility with which opposition of any kind is associated by the state with the guerrilla movements is notorious.652 Under the mantle of security, virtually any expressions of resistance by local communities to the presence of mining and oil corporations can be dealt with using force from above, once the lines between armed insurgency and social movement mobilization have been sufficiently blurred. There is no innocence on the part of multinational mining and oil companies in this process. According to the Colombian sociologist Yohana Cuervo Sotelo:

In this way, when a transnational company situates itself in a territory of a country in conflict like Colombia, it represents itself as being a victim of that conflict, as a neutral actor, and it fervently insists on the intervention of the state and its military forces, to carry out actions to guarantee the stability of its investment. The reality is that the necessity to provide security and stability to large mining companies, or, to create propitious conditions for their entrance without large-scale resistance, and to reconfigure these regions in accordance with the logics of extraction, is what in the end drives and augments the implementation of violent measures on the part of the state.653

The Colombian Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement points out that there is a significant presence of military and paramilitary forces in the mining regions, and not surprisingly, according to the National Mining Company Minercol Workers Union, 87 percent of displaced persons have fled mining regions, and 80 percent of human rights violations occur in these zones.654

Indeed, instrumental to Uribe’s “democratic security” strategy was the dedication of huge numbers of military troops to extractive zones in order to protect the infrastructure of the mining and oil economies. Under Uribe, the defence budget was spiked to 5.6 percent of GDP by 2008, from 2.2 percent in 1990. As noted above, the connections of his regime to the paramilitaries, and their role in the repression systematically carried out in areas of extractive capitalism are well established. A full third of the lower house of Congress and a third of the Senate during the Uribe period were later investigated for links to paramilitary organizations.655 “There is a particularly controversial characteristic of the entrance of transnational corporations and the mining boom in the country,” writes Cuervo Sotelo, “the utilization of violence, militarization and repression as a mechanism to ensure foreign investment, which is to say, to carry out territorial appropriation on behalf of the corporations.”656

As we discuss in Chapter 9, as a result of the actions of both Liberal and Conservative governments since the 1990s, Canada is becoming more deeply implicated in Colombia’s security apparatus, which benefits Canadian capital, both in Colombia, as well as much of the rest of Latin America.

CANADIAN INVESTMENTS AND GRASSROOTS RESISTANCE

The second phase of the Canadian investment invasion, rolling out since the mid-2000s, has predictably faced opposition and led to violent confrontation between opponents and government and company security forces. Clearly anticipating an anti-mining push back, the Colombian government preemptively advertised to investor groups in New York, Calgary, Toronto, London, and Sydney, among other destinations, that it would provide security in the form of military battalions for companies during their exploration activities in the mining and oil and gas sectors.657 Military security, in other words, was an incentive for Canadian and other multinational oil and gas companies to enter the country.

Human rights organizations and trade unionists in Colombia have reported their concerns over Canadian companies’ complicity in atrocities carried out in the mining industry since the first major wave of investment in the 1990s. Conquistador Mines Ltd. was identified by activists, for example, because it was exploring gold deposits in southern Bolívar, where it was well known that “guerrillas and paramilitaries have battled for sympathies of local residents,” and where human rights groups argue “massacres carried out by paramilitaries have sown terror among peasants and [artisanal] miners who are opposed to foreign firms’ activities.”658 Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth also “raised the alarm about alleged abuses surrounding…Canadian projects.”659 The Toronto Star reported in 1999, “These companies are functioning inside a civil war zone, a war that has everything to do with wealth and power. Nobody—least of all the foreign gold miners—are [sic] neutral.”660 One report, stemming from a 1997 Canadian human rights delegation to Colombia of trade unionists and church members, reached the following damning conclusion:

The presence of Conquistador Mines and its interest in the South of Bolívar appears to have encouraged the murder of local community leaders and the massive displacement of peasant miners and their families. The other Canadian companies in Colombia are not directly linked to human or labour rights violations, but they still benefit from the “economics of repression.” The systematic massacres and displacements of Colombian citizens by a combined military-paramilitary assault have the dual effect of creating a vast pool of cheaper labour and giving foreign companies access to valuable natural resources they may not otherwise have been able to obtain. Repression serves to greatly reduce the price and organized resistance of labour and clears the land of people who would resist the takeover of Colombian natural wealth by multinational capital.661

Multinational corporations functioning in the extractive resource sectors in Colombia in the 1990s and 2000s have commonly turned to paramilitaries for “security” purposes. “Given that private property rights [are] contested in much of Colombia,” notes Forrest Hylton, “it is not surprising that foreign corporations [pay] protection money to paramilitaries as a ‘capitalist insurance policy’.”662 On more than one occasion, Canadian mining companies hired the notorious American mercenary aviation firm, AirScan, for security purposes. AirScan’s employees, “have been linked to a bungled 1998 airstrike on rebel forces in Colombia that killed 18 unarmed civilians, including nine children.”663 The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs stated in a 2002 report that Colombia offered rich commercial opportunities in mining, limited only by security concerns: “The report concludes, ‘The challenge is to balance the commercial opportunities with a wise intelligent approach to personal security’.”664 Ken Luckhardt, a national representative for the Canadian Auto Workers, expressed the sentiments of many human rights and trade union activists when he argued in 2002, “If Canadian mining companies require military forces to operate, they shouldn’t be there.”665

The two Uribe administrations (2002–2010) had a lot to do with the resurgence of investor confidence, after the relative waning of the first wave of Canadian mining interests in Colombia by the close of the 1990s. Business press reports during the Uribe administrations noted that, “Mr. Uribe…has implemented some of the most competitive taxation conditions in the world, not just in Latin America.”666 Peter Baxter, exploration manager of Vancouver’s Bema Gold Corp., was impressed with Uribe after seeing a presentation by him at a mining conference in Medellín: “Colombia is a lot better than I thought. Seeing President Uribe was impressive.”667 The reasons for the positive reception of Uribe by multinational mining capital were straightforward. At the same conference in Medellín, Uribe declared: “Colombia will be attractive for investors.…Colombia is ready to be a major mining country.”668

Community resistance to large-scale mining and oil extraction in Colombia began to pick up pace in the 2000s. Opposition to Canadian companies is drawn from indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, small farmers, and environmental activists who fear ecological disaster in the wake of massive mining development. But movements of resistance also include small-scale artisanal miners. Many of the areas Canadian companies are entering have been mined for decades, and in some instances centuries, by small-scale miners trying to eke out a living in impoverished and long-neglected regions of the country. State infrastructure and social service provisions are sparse in such districts. Describing small-scale mining practices as illegal despite their long history, and violating their property rights, Canadian companies have put pressure on the Colombian government to take action to defend Canadian investments. This paid dividends in April 2013 when the Colombian airforce—which, as we note below, has trained in Canada—bombed artisanal miners in Antioquia and Caldas, locations where Canadian companies are looking to expand.669

Indigenous movements, artisanal small-scale miners, Afro-Colombian communities, environmentalists, and small peasant farmers have engaged in various tactics, such as strikes, petitions, blockades, and direct action of increasing intensity, in an effort to prevent, or at least to slow, the expansion of multinational mining capital in their territories. When Juan Manuel Santos assumed the presidency in 2010 he faced a new phenomenon of popular consultations in local communities affected by mining. The phenomenon of popular consultations with local populations about whether or not to allow mining or oil exploration and development in the relevant municipal areas has been taking off for the last decade across much of South and Central America. Beginning in 2012, the tactic of formalized, popular consultation has also been advancing in Colombia. The present political conjuncture in the country, with a relative decline in violence, and peace talks taking place between guerrillas and state officials in Havana, Cuba, has meant that the organization of such experiments in local democracy has been less dangerous to carry out.

National legislation from 1994 seems to back the authority of municipalities to conduct such consultations and to implement their results. Article 55 of Law 134, in particular, indicates that “the decision taken by the people in a popular referendum is obligatory.”670 However, after three municipalities in the southeast of the department of Antioquia passed anti-mining agreements in 2013 following popular consultations, the Ministry of Mines and Energy at the federal level began to worry. The national government, under President Juan Manual Santos, issued decree 0934 on May 9, 2013, which intended to clarify the implementation of Article 37 of the existing Mining Code. Through this decree, the Minister of Mines and Energy was able to establish that no local or regional authority has the remit to exclude mining activity from its area—that is, no municipal or regional body has the authority to regulate mining, which remains a federal duty of the national government. The decree, contradicting as it does the 1994 legislation, was being challenged in Constitutional Court as of mid-2014.671 Popular consultations are merely the latest in a long line of techniques employed by communities in resistance to which the Colombian state and Canadian mining capital have had to respond in myriad ways.

The following sections cast light on a number of specific Canadian companies involved in the extractive resource sectors of the Colombian economy today. Each corporation has encountered particular expressions of opposition to its presence. The sample list of companies dealt with here could easily be expanded, but it does provide a representative illustration of dynamics that stretch out much more widely across the oil and gas and mining sectors.

Pacific Rubiales

The second largest oil company operating in Colombia, Pacific Rubiales Energy (PRE), is headquartered in Canada. Pacific Rubiales is an oil and gas company based in Toronto, with assets throughout different parts of Latin America. In September 2013, it struck one of Canada’s largest energy deals of the year when it agreed to pay US$935 million to buy Petrominerales Ltd. This move will provide Pacific Rubiales considerably more weight in Colombia and Peru. The deal with Petrominerales (also a Canadian corporation, with its head office in Calgary) will also give Pacific Rubiales access to light oil with which it can dilute its extant heavy oil deposits, allowing the company to use a pipeline to get its heavy oil to market, rather than much more expensive transport by truck. As part of this new acquisition process, Petrominerales is, meanwhile, buying out its partner in a Brazilian oil exploration project, allowing Pacific Rubiales to create a new exploration and production company in Brazil with roughly C$100 million to operate with immediately.672

Pacific Rubiales was only able to secure its first oil concessions in Colombia after security forces swept through and cleared populations that were standing in the way of extraction. It was a veritable campaign of terror and assassination.673 A 2009 article in Forbes magazine stresses the importance of the assault on the guerrillas, and the displacement of resident populations as a backdrop to energy sector expansion in the case of Pacific Rubiales:

Exxon abandoned the Rubiales field in the 1980s. Until recently, production there was constrained by how much could be trucked out—an armada of 1,500 tanker trucks hauled about 60,000 barrels of crude per day to civilization, much of it along dirt roads. Pacific Rubiales and analysts say that the region, once flush with rebels, is secure, and none of the trucks have been attacked.674

Interestingly, the chief executive officer of Pacific Rubiales is Ronald Pantin, a Caracas-born, Stanford-educated oil baron who cut his political and economic teeth as a member of the senior management team of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA. He held that position until the government of Hugo Chávez defeated the oil lockout that PDVSA’s senior management orchestrated in 2002–2003, in an effort to destabilize the democratically-elected administration in Venezuela through the debilitation of the country’s oil industry. Claims persist to this day that Pacific Rubiales, under Pantin’s direction, is financing right-wing opposition to Chávez’s successor as Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, although Pantin insists that, “the allegations are absurd and have no factual basis.”675 Indeed, most of the management team of Pacific Rubiales are former PDVSA officials who were sacked by the Chávez government once their role in the destabilizing lockout had been revealed.

According to John Galante, a Latin America energy analyst at ESAI Energy, a consultancy, “The company benefited especially from a combination of energy sector reform in Colombia, access to capital through its listing in Toronto and the integration of know how from Venezuelan expatriates.”676 “The situation that has occurred in Venezuela, with Mr. Chávez throwing out the good management at PDVSA, is fortunate for us,” according to Andrés Jiménez, head of equity research at Colombia-based investment firm Interbolsa. “They are people with a lot of expertise, especially expertise that you need to extract the heavy oil in Colombia.” As early as 2009, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) listed Pacific Rubiales as a “sector outperformer.” According to a report from CIBC analyst Robert Pare published that year, CIBC “believe[s] the company continues to offer further upside on strong operational momentum and ongoing drilling activity.”677

Pacific Rubiales began extracting 25,000 barrels of oil per day when it began operations in 2007. By 2013, that pace had risen to an estimated 250,000 barrels per day. Its activity was part of Colombia’s more general acceleration in oil production over the 2000s, solidifying the country as the fourth largest oil producer in Latin America, after Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil. According to the Financial Times:

Timing has also contributed to the company’s success. In the past decade Colombia has ridden a commodities boom. At the same time the government has enacted a security crackdown that has put its guerrilla insurgents on the back foot—though they are still active. Resource companies have been able to operate in territories that were previously in the crossfire.678

Pantin has confidence in his Canadian investors and thus bold plans for expansion in Colombia and elsewhere in the region. “Canadian investors are comfortable with exploration risk,” and as a consequence the corporation’s “greatest investments will be in exploration in the coming 5 to 10 years, this year Pacific Rubiales will be investing $405m in exploration.”679 “Pacific Rubiales and its management team changed the dynamic of the oil sector in Colombia,” according to Rupert Stebbings, vice-president of equity sales at Bancolombia. “They are agile, know exactly what they are doing when it comes to heavy oil and know how to exercise their plans and take seriously their responsibilities on all aspects, not just getting oil out of the ground at any cost.” From another perspective, the FARC have labeled Pacific Rubiales a “transnational vampire.”680

The initial displacement of people for the establishment of the oil field was followed by conflict between the company and its workers in Campo Rubiales, located in the eastern department of Meta. In the summer of 2011, the workers struck against terrible working conditions, including in some cases eighteen-hour work days and forty straight days without time off, unpaid salaries, and unhealthy work environments. The strikers were met with a large police and military presence, and the requisite death threats.681 The strike of ten thousand workers took place in Puerto Gaitán, and was sparked initially by the firing of over one thousand workers who the strikers demanded be reinstated, while also insisting on the improvement of working conditions and better wages for all workers.682 Pacific Rubiales shares in Toronto fell as much as 5.4 percent during one day of protests in late October 2011. The Colombian government sent four hundred additional police to guard the oil fields of Pacific Rubiales in Meta. The troops were sent when the company repeatedly threatened to suspend operations unless reinforcements were deployed to quell what it said were violent demonstrations. “Security forces have been reinforced by way of the National Police. A general law has been sent to take command of police activities with very specific instruction to arrest anyone who breaks the law,” claimed Mauricio Cárdenas, Minister of Mining and Energy at the time.683

Clashes between protesters and police took place in September 2011 at the oil fields of Pacific Rubiales, forcing the shutdown of its Rubiales and Quifa oil fields in Meta. At the time of the strike, the two fields were producing an average of 225,000 barrels of crude per day, roughly one-quarter of the 953,000 barrels the country averaged in daily output in August that year. The government sent in hundreds of anti-riot police to Puerto Gaitán, the biggest town near the rural area where the oil fields are located. The Colombian National Police also declared a curfew in the town. The police were called in once protesters had set up blockades that prevented company vehicles from entering and leaving the oil fields. PRE was instrumental in having the police escalate the conflict given that the company insisted it had broken no Colombian laws, and therefore was justified in repeatedly calling on the Colombian coercive apparatus to restore order and production in the region. The protests first began as early as July 2011, when the oil fields were first shutdown, and there were periodic blockades and clashes between the July and September actions. Pacific Rubiales was not the only Canadian company targeted. Earlier in September 2011, Petrominerales, the abovementioned Canadian oil corporation subsequently purchased by Pacific Rubiales, was briefly forced to shut down production in two fields in nearby Casanare state after residents from proximate communities blockaded roads to protest against pollution and heavy truck traffic on rural roads connected to the company’s oil fields.684

Dave Coles, President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (the CEP and Canadian Autoworkers were replaced by Unifor in 2013), participated in a seventeen-person Canadian delegation to investigate the activities of Pacific Rubiales in July 2012. During his visit, he was a juror at a preliminary hearing of what was called the Popular Tribunal Against Extractive Policies in Colombia. The tribunal took place close to the oil fields of Pacific Rubiales near Puerto Gaitán. According to Coles:

The testimony was heart-wrenching. Representatives of indigenous communities told the Tribunal about how oil exploration on their lands had forced them to move to makeshift villages in housing constructed of plastic sheeting, cardboard and sticks. Women from outlying communities showed the jury bottles of orange and charcoal-coloured water, which they said was from their local water source, a river carrying effluent from PRE’s extractive process. Union officials described the living conditions of workers forced to rotate off their shift to catch a few hours of sleep in a bed occupied by three other workers on different shifts.685

Coles reports that during the strike in the summer of 2011:

Colombian Senator Alexander López, who testified at the tribunal, said he was blocked by public security forces from freely travelling on a public road to the Rubiales oil fields. López concluded that PRE’s actions in Colombia warranted their expulsion from the country.

There were also anonymous death threats levied at key activists among the workers involved in the strike, directed both toward them and their families. In a context of generalized right-wing paramilitary terror against trade unionists in Colombia at the time, these threats could not be dismissed as idle chatter. Coles explains how the Canadian delegation

brought the information we had learned about PRE’s abuses to the Canadian embassy in Bogotá. But officials there were nonplussed, saying they meet monthly with their “customers” such as PRE. In fact, the ambassador’s representative expressed more concern about PRE’s lack of interest in Canadian Export Development Corporation financing than in the company’s social practices.686

In 2013, workers initiated a campaign against what they claimed was an effort by the company to break the union by blacklisting members from work. Ninety percent of the company’s approximately five thousand-person workforce was fired for supporting the union. Unionists also reported receiving death threats for their activism—something that, predictably, received no mention in Canada’s FTA human rights reports.687

If the situation for Colombians living in oil and mining zones is evermore unbearable, the environs for capital are something approaching paradise. Pacific Rubiales is hardly unique in its plans to expand operations still further in the country. In the Conference of Oil and Gas of Latin America in April 2012, in Punta del Este (Uruguay), Colombia was awarded first place status as the country with the most attractive investment climate for the hydrocarbons sector, beating out Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. In 2013, Pacific Rubiales sunk roughly US$7.1 billion into exploration and development.688 In 2014, the company expects that its investments in the country will surpass US$2 billion, and it hopes to double the number of barrels of oil it extracts per day over the next five years.689

Talisman

The Calgary-based oil giant Talisman has been facing resistance for several years as a consequence of the company’s drilling for oil on indigenous reserves, located in regions that have experienced violent repression since the 1990s by paramilitiaries, and which have been under periodic military occupation, funded, in part, by oil companies themselves.690 Ecopetrol, the Colombian state oil company, announced in December 2013 that it had discovered oil in two deposits in the department of Meta (an area in which Talisman is engaged in joint contracts with Ecopetrol). The new deposits mean that Ecopetrol’s proven reserves are now 40 million barrels richer than their previous count of 1,877,000. Colombia, it should be remembered, is the fourth largest producer of hydrocarbons in Latin America, with known reserves of 2,377,000 barrels. The problem for Canadian companies and the Colombian state is growing opposition to oil exploration and extraction. In the area of Meta where the new deposits were discovered, direct action against companies—which the state has labelled “terrorist attacks”—numbered 163 in 2013 alone.691

Meanwhile, community anti-oil plebiscites and blockades of exploratory activity in the area went from 308 in 2012 to 432 in 2013. The communities of Guamal and Catilla, near the municipality of Acacías in the department of Meta, where a separate Ecopetrol-Talisman joint operation is located, recently carried out a two-hundred-day occupation in order to prevent Ecopetrol from exploring a potential oil site that they thought would result in negative effects for a river that services all three communities. In a popular consultation in the municipality of Tauramena, 4,426 people voted against oil exploration in their hydrocarbon-rich area, against 151 residents who voted in favour. In response, the government said they would negotiate, but stressed that what is under the subsoil of this community is the property of the nation. Environmental consciousness, a phenomenon quite underdeveloped in Colombian social movements until recently, has now become a central priority in many municipalities struggling against hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation involving joint contract operations between Canadian oil firms and the Colombian state company.692

Talisman and Ecopetrol are so far undeterred by environmental opposition to their planned oil operations in Acacías, in which Ecopetrol owns 55 percent of the production contract, next to 45 for Talisman. “We will move forward to agree on a development plan and to obtain the necessary environmental licences. This important milestone reflects a significant step forward toward the realization of the potential of our company in Colombia,” Talisman president Hal Kvisle reported to the Colombian media in June 2014. For his part, the president of Ecopetrol, Javier Gutiérrez, affirmed that, “Acacías constitutes one of the biggest exploratory successes of the last few years in Colombia, and clearly shows the potential of heavy oil in the eastern plains.” The department of Mata, it is important to note, is a region of fragile plains and diverse jungle areas in eastern Colombia.693

Gran Colombia

In the town of Marmato, in the department of Caldas, the Canadian mining company Gran Colombia (after its merger with Medoro Resources) has operated as Colombia’s biggest underground gold and silver producer. At the time of writing, Gran Colombia is hoping to move an entire village and blow up a mountain to build a gold mine in the area. According to the company’s assessment, the Marmato project is potentially one of the richest gold deposits in the world. The drastic extraction technique is being proposed for an area in which steep hillsides, heavy rainfall, and abundance of waste rock have already increased the risk of landslides.694 The development would involve displacing five thousand inhabitants, and has generated concerted resistance, particularly on the part of small-scale artisanal miners who have worked the veins of the mountain for decades.695 Company manager Juan Carlos Santos, a relative of president Santos, stated blithely that “we can compensate them with our checkbook.” Reflecting on the possibility that villagers might have the temerity to resist petty buyouts, he stressed matter-of-factly that “when a country like Colombia needs to exploit areas, and our country is full of indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, we have to think in the big picture.”696 The big picture for Gran Colombia, in other words, does not include land rights for indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Adding to the tension surrounding Gran Colombia’s plans, in September 2011 the body of Father José Reinel Restrepo was discovered.697 An active mine opponent and leader of the Comité Cívico Prodefensa de Marmato (Civic Committee in Defence of Marmato), he had criticized the plans to displace the community and the “Canadian imperialism” behind it.698 With potentially 11.8 million ounces of gold deposits at stake, Gran Colombia is unlikely to leave quietly.699

In July 2011, a union leader working for Gran Colombia at another project in El Campo was assassinated.700 In early 2014, in the northeast of the department of Antioquia, conflicts with Gran Colombia persisted. Four hundred protesters—artisanal miners, their families, and sympathizers—gathered to march through the streets of the city of Segovia, calling for the Canadian mining corporation to respect the labour rights of 500 workers, 340 of whom are members of the Sindicato de Trabajadores Mineros de Segovia y Remedios (Union of Mining Workers of Segovia and Remedios). The immediate company in question is Estrategias y Minas, but this company is ultimately doing the contract work for Gran Colombia. According to the workers, with the historic fall in gold prices over the course of 2013—28 percent—the corporation suspended its mining operations in Segovia and Remedios, in violation of its contract with the workforce. The company is now asking workers to voluntarily rescind the contract, with the possibility of being hired back on to work in the near future, but for lower wages and benefits.701

Partly in response to the controversies surrounding their activities, some Canadian mining companies have fostered connections with political elites in Colombia, hiring former politicians with important political ties to help advance their interests. Gran Colombia is a good example. The company’s board of directors includes former Minister of Mines and Energy, Hernán Martínez, who during his tenure issued the most mining permits in Colombian history, according to former Colombian Environment Minister and head of the U.N. Forestry Forum, Manuel Rodríguez Becerra. Gran Colombia’s former president was María Consuelo Araujo, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and has two family members (a sibling and a parent), both politicians, who have been investigated for links to paramilitaries.702

Eco Oro/Greystar

The Canadian multinational mining company Eco Oro (formerly Greystar) has invested US$220 million in the last six years in search of gold in the municipality of California, near Bucaramanga, the capital city of the department of Santander in northeastern Colombia. The various projects proposed have not yet taken off because part of the potential mining site overlaps with the moorland habitat of Santurbán. The operations of the company have sparked reaction from communities in the area who fear the environmental consequences for adjacent rivers and the wider ecology. The company still awaits definitive delimitation of the borders of the moorland habitat by the Ministry of the Environment.703

The mountainous plateau of Santurbán, which crosses the borders of the departments of North Santander and Santander, has in many ways become one of Colombia’s most important battlegrounds between mining companies and the state, on the one hand, and anti-mining environmentalists, on the other. Through their exploration activities, Eco Oro discovered what could be one of the most important deposits of gold on the planet. The company calculates that it could extract 240 tons of the metal if its plans are allowed to proceed. However, in order to get at the gold, it proposes to open a massive hole in the mountain range, two kilometres long and one kilometre wide. The idea that this might transpire has led to massive marches of resistance in Bucaramanga, and has set off alarm bells for environmentalists across the country. The principal ecological problem has to do with the fact that these mountains are the originary source point for the fresh water of huge tracts of the country. It is from this mountainous plateau that 70 percent of water consumed by Colombians originates. It is also believed that roughly 2 million Santandereanos (residents of the department of Santander) depend on Santurbán for their access to water.704 Another concern of community residents has been the fact that Eco Oro’s original proposal noted the company’s expectation that the mine would use forty tons of cyanide per day during the extraction process. In response to these concerns, the Committee for the Defence of Water and the Santurban Páramo managed to gather 75,000 signatures for a petition protesting against Eco Oro’s presence, another factor stalling the company’s forward momentum in the region.705

A separate petition signed by Colombia’s most important environmental activists and leaders was sent to President Santos in June 2014. The letter demanded a new mining code and an immediate moratorium on the granting of titles and environmental licenses to mining corporations. One of the key targets of the petition was Eco Oro’s Santurbán initiative. Never has a mining project in Colombia generated a controversy as great as that which is ongoing in Santurbán. The intensity of social pressure around this project over the years was the reason Greystar retracted its original application for an environmental license several years ago, and changed its name to Eco Oro. Most significantly, the socio-environmental struggles in Santander have forced the Colombian government to set aside 11,700 hectares of the region as National Park land. At first glance, it was a victory for the environmentalists. However, in order for the newly established park to effectively halt Eco Oro’s ongoing interest in blowing up parts of the mountain range, and to definitively protect the moorland habitat in the area from the consequences of large-scale, open-pit mining, the park’s borders would need to be quickly and clearly defined. Thus far, the borders remain distinctly ambiguous and open to contention.706 As of the summer of 2014, Eco Oro remained hopeful that it would eventually be given a green light to exploit its proposed open-pit mine in Santurbán. Company officials insist that that the gold deposits they are interested in are located outside of the zone which was declared a part of the newly established national park territory.707

In one of the most thorough case studies of Eco Oro’s activities in Santander conducted to date, Land and Conflict: Resource Extraction, Human Rights, and Corporate Social Responsibility – Canadian Companies in Colombia, the NGOs Mining Watch and CENSAT-Agua Viva bring to light a series of damning conclusions flowing out of their extensive review of investment documents in the Colombian mining sector, interviews and focus group sessions with local community activists, and discussions with politicians of different persuasions, company representatives, and officials from government institutions involved in the mining sector.708 The conclusions turn on the pivots of displacement and dispossession, ecology, and the economic disruption of small-scale artisanal mining and peasant agriculture. The report finds that, based on available evidence, there are “medium to high potential risks” that Eco Oro (still Greystar at the time of the study) is

benefitting from dislocation and displacement of local populations; inadvertently rewarding people or groups who have committed human rights violations; imposing serious environmental impacts, especially on crucial water supplies; and imposing undue costs to local people’s economic livelihoods and food security.709

In terms of displacement and dispossession:

The Colombian Army’s efforts to regain control of the region and end the long-term presence of the FARC in the project area were at least partially intended to allow Greystar to return to its operations; paramilitary groups also became involved. The violence had the effect of temporarily and permanently displacing local people and permanently destroyed their food production capacity.710

Regarding ecological impact, the results of the study are equally sharp:

Local and environmental authorities have raised serious concerns about significant and unmitigable ecological impacts, especially to local and regional water supplies. The Angostura project is located in an ecologically sensitive area that is already suffering contamination from small-scale mining. Instead of improving small-scale mining practices and technologies, the project will increase water use and pose an additional risk of contamination.711

And, finally, in terms of the disruption of the livelihoods of artisanal miners and peasants in the area, the report concludes: “Small-scale miners are being displaced with little or no compensation or relocation plan. The local agricultural economy will have a more difficult time recovering from violence and dislocation as the mine occupies increasingly large areas of productive land.”712

As in the case of Gran Colombia, and many other Canadian mining companies, Eco Oro has made a study of establishing links with Colombia’s political elite in an effort to manage social resistance to their mining developments in the country. After running into difficulties from local authorities with the Angostura mine, for example, Eco Oro named former Justice Minister Rafael Nieto as its president.713 According to Mining Watch, Eco Oro has also “provided logistical support to establish a base for security operations” in the department of Satander, where it has its most important operations to date, as we have seen. “There are two military camps currently within the company’s exploration area and the High Mountain Battalion there has the capacity to house up to five hundred soldiers. The company also has retired military personnel within its private security detail.” Paramilitaries also maintain a presence in the area. Mining Watch notes further that the company has managed a CSR campaign with Canadian (and American) government support, in which it has “channelled funds from USAID and CIDA through a foundation it established to provide a number of community programs in the area, where there is notably weak presence of the state,” though it has not properly consulted with the local community about its mining plans.714

The case of Eco Oro is a reflection of the difficulties companies continue to face from organized opposition. The firm’s plans for its Angostura gold mine were stalled recently by the Minister of Energy and Mines in the context of a mounting movement against the project by local communities and environmental organizations. While the company worked to change its plans, including the possibility of building an underground mine, Colombia’s Ministry of Environment decided to ban mining and create a wilderness preserve in Satander, where the Eco Oro property in question is located.715 It is also worth mentioning that Eco Oro has a long history of conflict with local communities in the country. In the mid-1990s, when Eco Oro was still known as Greystar, the company was involved in fostering violent assaults by security forces against its opponents. This led eventually to the kidnapping of a Greystar executive by the FARC, lasting ninety-four days. The kidnapping ultimately precipitated the temporary exit of Greystar, and several other Canadian companies, from Colombia by the end of the 1990s.716

Cosigo Resources

In 2014, another representative conflict between indigenous communities and Canadian mining capital, which began in 2009, was still ongoing in Yaigojé-Apaporis national park, located in the Colombian Amazon region, in the department of Vaupés, bordering on Brazil. The Canadian corporation Cosigo Resources is hoping to extract gold from the park, while roughly twenty indigenous communities inhabiting the park—including the territories of the Macuna, Tanimuca, and Letuama peoples—are lined up against the extractive projects. The Colombian regulatory body of National Parks created the Yaigojé-Apaporis national park in 2009, a move which was pushed forward by rounds of community consultations in the region in which a majority of the inhabitants were in favour of the establishment of the park. The decision was supported, furthermore, by the Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales (Colombian Academy of Natural, Physical and Exact Sciences) which came to the conclusion that the cultural and spiritual values of the indigenous peoples in the region were intimately associated with the conservation of the natural environment. However, in October 2009, two days after the national park was formally established, the Servicio Geológico Colombiano (Colombian Geological Service, previously called Ingeominas) granted a mining title to Cosigo Resources covering 9,973 hectares of the park. The Canadian company is now mobilizing its resources to force progress in terms of facilitating the exploitation of gold in the area, pointing to its title as the legal basis for proceeding. Three judges were sent to the park in early 2014, along with the Minister of the Environment, to attempt to settle the legal components to the dispute.717

The legal battles remain unresolved to date, and the social pressure of activists is increasingly generating divisions within different components of the state apparatus. For example, the director of the National Mining Agency, María Constanza García, refuses to revoke the titles. Her logic is that the mining titles do not have accompanying environmental licences, the other requirement necessary to begin a mining project, and therefore it is not imperative that the titles be cancelled. The director of National Parks, Julia Miranda, questions this logic. She believes that it generates confusion because “anyone who holds a title is always going to try to exploit it.” She explains how, in the case of the Yaigojé-Apaporis park, indigenous communities are divided over a title to gold that the government awarded to Cosigo. Siding with Miranda, the Minister of the Environment, Juan Gabriel Uribe, has argued that the refusal to cancel these titles is unconstitutional.718

In June 2014, the office of Colombia’s Attorney General became embroiled in the controversy. The Attorney General has the power to protect strategic ecosystems, and for this reason can prohibit any mining activity deemed to seriously threaten the environment. However, this institution has not wanted to declare null and void the mining title granted to Cosigo Resources, in spite of requests to do so by the environmental authority of the National Parks system. In the park in question, there are thirty-six mining titles that have been granted, including that of Cosigo Resources. On one side of the conflict, there are the twenty indigenous communities in the area of Cosigo’s title that consider the site sacred, indeed the site from which life originated. Linked to the concerns of the indigenous communities is a secular, environmental worry, regarding the park’s natural, ecological diversity. According to the petition delivered to the Attorney General’s office by the National Parks authority, living in the million hectares which constitute the park, are 362 species of birds, 81 species of reptiles, 73 species of amphibians, 201 species of fish, 443 species of butterflies, and 16 species of mammals. On the other side of the conflict, Cosigo Resources sustains the position that it obtained the mining title according to the rules, regulations, and norms of Colombian law, and that it was granted title through legitimate processes. Furthermore, the company argues, against the evidence of all available precedent, that the mining exploration will have minimal ecological effects because of the clean technologies to be employed in the company’s activities, and the fact that there will be economic benefits to the communities in the form of employment.719

In summary, our discussion of a series of representative Canadian companies involved in extractive industries in Colombia has shown, unequivocally, that they are anything but neutral bystanders, or innocent victims caught in the crossfire of a merely domestic, Colombian armed conflict. To the contrary, Canadian corporations are benefiting from paramilitary and military terrorization of local communities which stand in the way of, and in opposition to, large-scale mining under the control of multinational capital. Canadian companies are intimately involved in the dispossession and displacement of small peasants, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, and small-scale artisanal miners. For those mines already in operation, Canadian capital is also involved in the exploitation of the mine workers. Set against this record, the human rights posturing by Canadian mining giants and the Canadian government, and their slogans of corporate social responsibility, are revealed as crude attempts to isolate Canadian capital and the Canadian state from political accountability for their role in the atrocities carried out over the last decades in Colombia. Indeed, the line on corporate social responsibility deployed by representatives of Canadian capital in the extractive sectors begs comparison to the cigarette industry’s denials of the addictive attributes of nicotine. Obviously, with commodity prices high since 2003, the stakes are high for investors. The mining and oil industries in Canada are hoping to improve the image of their activities in Colombia and elsewhere, as part of their general strategy within the battleground of ideas. If we clear away their smoke and mirrors, however, underneath lies a set of relatively straightforward geopolitical and investment motivations which underpin the actions of Canadian capital and the state in Colombia. It is to these motivations that we now turn our attention.

JANUS-FACED FREE TRADE

A major advancement for Canadian capital in the country was the Free Trade Agreement pursued by the Harper government, the path for which was cleared by the improved security situation (for corporate investors, at least). An opportunity to build both stronger economic and political ties, the FTA became a focal point of Canadian diplomatic energies after the announcement of negotiations during the summer of 2007. In this way, the Canadian government, led by a wave of ministerial visits, moved to formally consolidate the conditions already established on the ground during Canadian capital’s latest push into the country.

As they have in many other countries in the region, the PDAC meetings have been used as a tool to promote Canadian capital, with Colombian officials brought to Canada to meet with industry and government representatives about the state of Colombia’s natural resources sector and strategies for moving forward. Creating the space to give input on moving the country’s natural resources sector in a direction favourable to Canadian capital was the impetus behind Canada’s initiative to regularize its outreach to the Colombian government by establishing a working group with officials in Colombia’s Ministry of Mines and Energy.720 Trips to Colombia by cabinet ministers and Canadian business executives continued after the agreement came into force in August 2011 as well: a November 2012 trip, led by Minister of State for the Americas Diane Ablonczy, for example, featured representatives of a major Bay St. law firm and several infrastructure firms planning on cashing in on the rapid growth of the mining and oil sectors.721

The FTA itself was a significant victory for the Harper government, given the difficulties Canadian capital had faced in Colombia a decade earlier. The terrible human rights situation of the country sparked greater public criticism of the deal than is normal for Canadian FTAs.722 In February 2014, for example, Amnesty International sponsored a human rights delegation of Colombians to Ottawa, including Colombian deputy justice Federico Guzman Duque and an indigenous rights activists who said she was afraid to have her name publicized. They noted crimes against humanity and war crimes against indigenous Colombians. Duque discussed the systematic rape and torture of indigenous women as a tool of armed conflict in the country. He stressed that there has been a campaign of displacement of indigenous communities whose land stands in the way of the development of mining concessions. Canada, in particular, they suggested has a responsibility to take action because of the FTA and the presence of Canadian companies involved in the extractive sectors of the Colombian economy. Duque noted that some Canadian-owned extractive corporations are associated with armed groups that protect them in territories that have been depopulated of indigenous peoples, “or they are simply profiting from that situation.”723

As with all other trade agreements, the new FTA legally locks-in the property rights of Canadian capital, which, together with the war on the Colombian countryside carried out under Uribe and Santos, creates a much more “secure” situation for Canadian investors than has previously existed. However, the severity of the repression in Colombia and the negative attention the agreement received both internationally and domestically as a result, forced the Harper government to include human rights conditions in the treaty. A minority government at the time, the Conservatives were only able to pass the FTA with the support of the Liberal party, which made a show of demanding the inclusion of human rights clauses. True to form (for both the Conservatives and Liberals), however, these concessions are superficial at best, and will not have a tangible impact on the practices of Canadian investors or the Colombian state. They are, as with the Harper government’s discourse around human rights in post-coup Honduras, a mere fig leaf designed to legitimate the plundering of the country’s natural resources, the exploitation of its workers, and the explicit and implicit support provided to a government that is a systematic violator of human rights. One such human rights concession is the establishment of financial penalties—fines—for the killing of trade unionists in the labour cooperation side agreement (note that this is a side agreement, i.e., not part of the actual FTA). The other major concession, an amendment added to the implementing legislation at the public behest of Scott Brison and the Liberals in return for their support, calls for the production of annual reports on the human-rights impact of the trade agreement.

The constant refrain about human rights in Colombia from both Conservatives and Liberals is that, while the situation is imperfect, it is not nearly as bad as critics make it out to be, and that Uribe took great strides during his two administrations to improve conditions (although, as evidenced by internal reports and communiques, both FAIT leaders and the Conservatives privately understand the situation is much worse than they publicly let on).724 Harper was effusive in his praise for Uribe, who has “made tremendous progress against the vicious cycle of conflict, violence and under-development that has plagued Colombia for decades.”725 Stockwell Day, while Minister of International Trade, offered a new level of absurdity to the debate on the FTA which took place in the House of Commons: “Are people still being murdered in that country? Yes, they are. They are still being murdered in Canada also…Is it perfect in Colombia? No, but it is certainly moving in the right direction.”726 Not surprisingly, the scale of ongoing repression in Colombia, the ties of the paramilitaries to state institutions, and the scandals around the false positives (the killing of non-combatants, often street youth, by the military, which said they were guerrillas in order to claim greater progress in the war) are ignored by the pro-FTA forces in their effort to defend the deal.

As in Honduras, the possibility of economic development and improvement in the human rights situation was also cited as justification for the FTA in the face of criticism.727 “Rules-based, liberalized trade and investment can…contribute to a domestic environment where…the rule of law [is] respected,” according to a FAIT report.728 The FTA will bring rule of law, which will somehow remarkably extend beyond the property rights of capital—the actual purpose of trade agreements—to protect the rights of Colombians. According to such fantasies, Canadian investment will plant the seeds of economic growth out of which will flower greater respect for human rights. But just as in the Honduran example, the trickle-down theory of human rights in Colombia has proven to be little more than crude ideological cover for the untrammeled pursuit of profit: deepening political and economic ties have not improved human rights in the country. An internal FAIT report on the Colombian human rights situation in 2010—three years after Harper’s praise for Uribe and a year after Day’s ridiculous pronouncements in the legislature, both quoted above—acknowledges that “Homicides and forced disappearances of unionists all increased in 2010,” and “violence and threats against human rights defenders continue,” including by “state agents.”729 In an foreboding sign of the meaning and potential impact of the FTA, a mere two days after the agreement was passed in Ottawa, Colombian police attacked a strike, seriously injuring a dozen people at Calgary-based Gran Tierra Energy’s operations.730 Colombian human rights organization Somos Defensores (We Are Defenders), reports that in 2012 (the year after the FTA came into force) the murder of human rights defenders was, at sixty-nine, fourteen times what it was in 2006. They attribute this growth to a land restitution law that was to provide displaced people the opportunity to reclaim stolen land: as more people came forward, more were targeted.731

None of this should come as a surprise: the human rights components of the FTA were never intended to genuinely alter the country’s sociopolitical conditions. The labour cooperation side agreement calls on both countries to respect basic core labour standards (right to unionize, no child labour, no forced labour, etc.), but offers no institutional body to which Colombian workers could complain, apart from those which previously existed, and which clearly had no substantive impact on workers’ rights prior to the FTA, given how terrible the situation was in that period. So there is no reason to assume anything will change with the treaty simply because a labour cooperation side agreement was tacked on at the end of it. The addition of fines imposed on governments for continued violation of labour rights, in a context of assassinations, death threats, and physical assaults, amounts to a de facto decriminalization of violence and intimidation. Moreover, there is nothing to indicate in the side agreement that the Colombian government will be held responsible for the actions of paramilitaries, who account for a significant amount of the violence against union activists, and do so with the tacit or explicit consent of the military, but retain a nominal independence from the government. Another major flaw of the labour cooperation side agreement is that it does not cover indigenous peoples who, as we have discussed, are victimized at staggering rates in the mining and oil zones.

As for the vaunted annual reports on human rights, proposed by the Liberals: they have proven meaningless. The Canadian government’s first annual report, submitted in May 2012, said nothing about human rights, and instead provided an overview of the economic relations between the two countries. The second annual report, submitted in June 2013, offered only a few sentences on human rights—enough to conclude that “It is not possible to establish a direct link between the CCOFTA [Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement] and the human rights situation in Colombia.” It helps that the embassy in Bogotá, in its contribution to the report, focused on only two industries—cut flowers and sugar—and within those industries merely on the impact of tariff reductions on human rights. So while Canadian investment in Colombia is dominated by the country’s rapidly expanding mining and energy sectors, both of which are connected to forced displacement, violation of labour rights, and assassinations, as is widely known and reported by international and Colombian human rights organizations, these sectors rate no mention at all in the legally-mandated human rights assessment.732

DEVELOPMENT AID AS TROJAN HORSE

Canadian aid policy is also clearly implicated in the drive to open up Colombia’s natural resources to foreign investment and thus bears some responsibility for the human rights tragedy, related in part to the intensification of activities in the country’s mining and oil zones. While CIDA boasted about its contribution to rights in Colombia through its funding of selected projects for the demobilization of the armed conflict and de-mining programs, this is contradicted by its role in establishing the country’s liberalized mining regime. Liberalization fuelled military and paramilitary assaults on communities in the way of resource development. The mining regime reflects Canada’s prioritization of mining as central to Colombia’s national development strategy, and offers another example of the interests of Canadian capital driving aid priorities regardless of the humanitarian crisis to which it contributes. According to an official at the agency, between 1997 and 2002, CIDA financed a project to help the country “strengthen its institutional capacity in both the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Ministry of the Environment and the regulatory agencies these agencies worked with.”733

Strengthening “institutional capacity” is a euphemism for neoliberal reform. At the heart of CIDA’s spending was the establishment of Colombia’s mining code, which allowed international capital to enter indigenous territories and peasant communities containing mineral deposits unfettered. The code facilitated the unilateral expropriation of land, weakened environmental regulations considerably (including permitting exploration without environmental authorization), and limited labour rights. Significantly, the code also reduced the royalty rate foreign mining corporations must pay the Colombian government, from 15 to 4 percent. The code further established that small-scale artisanal miners had to sign a contract with the government within three years, or would risk losing access to their deposits. Many of these miners, however, were prevented from pursuing this route once they had been driven from their lands by paramilitary threats. The code, finally, fit nicely with U.S.-backed Plan Colombia, which Hristov notes, “guarantees private sector control over natural resources, even if this means the forcible removal of the existing population from certain areas of the countryside.”734

In other words, the Canadian state and Canadian mining corporations did not simply benefit from the neoliberal mining code of 2001 through happy coincidence. They played a central role in its development, beginning in 1996, as the project to develop a new mining code was initiated. According to Colombian trade union lawyer and activist Francisco Ramírez Cuellar:

Actions by Canada’s government cooperation agencies like CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) and CERI (Canadian Energy Research Institute, an NGO representing Canadian-based mining and energy companies), have created situations of conflict of interest with its private mining companies. CIDA-CERI has provided aid in the creation of mining, petroleum and environmental legislation in Colombia, and the multinational companies that provide financial support to CIDA-CERI have been in a position to benefit from the new laws.735

Indeed, Ramírez Cuellar reports that the code was written by a Colombian lawyer “connected to the Canadian company Corona Goldfields.”736

The possibility for improved social indicators for Colombians as a result of the Canadian-backed mining regime approaches zero. If large-scale, multinational mining leads systematically to displacement and violence, as it does in Colombia, how can there be any reasonable expectation of improved standards of living? The reality of tax and royalty revenues also undermines Canada’s claims to be supporting Colombia’s economic development: despite the high levels of investment in its mining sector, the industry generates relatively low earnings from tax and royalty rates. As one environmental consultant argues:

Foreign companies are the only companies able to do large-scale mining here. These mining companies keep 96 percent of profits and theoretically Colombia gets four percent. However, it’s not even four percent…Colombians finance these foreigners so that they get rich not with 96 percent but 99 percent of profits from our natural resources.737

One study of mining’s contribution to Colombia’s national income, by economist Guillermo Rudas, finds that in 2009 royalties paid were 1.93 billion pesos while exemptions were 1.75 billion; and between 2005 and 2010, for every US$100 companies paid to the government in taxes, they received US$200 in exemptions and other forms of financial support from the state.738

Together with Peru and Bolivia, Colombia has also been included in CIDA’s mining-oriented Andean Regional Initiative, the focus of which includes “sustainable development projects” and improving “dialogue between communities and the private sector.”739 C$6.5 million was earmarked for Colombia. Between 2008–2010 another approximately C$67,000 in projects to support the mining industry were provided through the CIDA-funded and embassy-run Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, while Foreign Affairs spent C$49,000 to “strengthen…social practices in the extractive sector.” The idea of creating better relations between the mining sector and the people being displaced by it and targeted for repression—which in Colombia is really what these various funding initiatives amount to—is so far removed from the plane of reality that, however much the government may reference the fund, it cannot possibly believe the line it is selling with regard to corporate social responsibility. Human rights and improved living standards are clearly not the drivers behind Canada’s aid program in Colombia.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has shown the myriad ways in which Canada has sought to secure its geopolitical and economic interests in Colombia, as well as the strategic role Colombia plays as an axis for the projection of Canadian imperial power throughout the rest of the Andean region. Canadian investment, it was demonstrated, enters into Colombia today against a long historical backdrop of violence and conflict, accentuated particularly in the special violence of the extractive sectors, in which Canadian capital has been so active. We have mapped out the broad array of Canadian investments in Colombia, as well as the grassroots resistance they have consistently engendered.

It was demonstrated precisely how, and to what great extent, the Canadian state has employed the nodal entry points of development aid and bilateral free trade in order to protect those investments. Using these mechanisms, Canadian diplomats and Canadian capital have lent support to the Colombian state’s militarization, and have benefited from the impunity with which paramilitary groups are able to terrorize social movements in Colombian society. Canadian foreign direct investment has flourished in environs that subject many Colombians to heightened insecurity, repression, and fear. The violent mining sector, as elsewhere in Latin America, has been a particular area of strength for Canadian capital in Colombia, followed by oil and gas investments, all supported by a Canadian banking infrastructure. The configuration of Canadian geopolitical power in Colombia contributes to and benefits from an environment of relentless violence and dispossession. Canadian companies are intimately tied to the networks of violence in the countryside, as well as the less visible networks of elite Colombian urban power. Extractive capitalism in Colombia enriches Canadian capitalists while intensifying the displacement and dispossession of peasant, indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and artisanal mining communities, while exploiting workers in the mining pits and oil and gas fields. The wealth repatriated to Canadian companies is routinely covered in blood and dirt. Similar patterns emerge in the case of Peru; to which we now turn.