AGONIES OF MINERAL DEPENDENCY IN PERU
For centuries, Peru has been the standard bearer for a classical natural resource dependency—a country integrated into the broader rhythms of the global economy on the basis of the wealth of its raw materials. The principal demand for the extraction of these resources has long emanated far from the borders of Peru, and the control of these resources has likewise rarely been in the hands of Peruvians. The country has experienced the deprivations, economic swings, constant external interference, and violence that are de rigueur for countries incorporated along these lines into the world market. The neoliberal period has only served to extend, and in some ways intensify, long established historical patterns. Canadian capital has leapt into the new openings for access to Peru’s mineral wealth brought about by the latest round of market liberalization. As in Central America, Canadian companies, supported of course by the Canadian state, are investing in a country haunted by the long shadows cast by colonial and Cold War violence, products in part of the curse of its natural resource wealth. This history of violence has been perversely advantageous to contemporary Canadian investors, however much they are willing to ignore it. Canadian capital now has a significant presence in Peru. With almost C$8 billion invested in the country by 2013, Canada is one of the largest foreign investors in the Andean nation. Mining, in particular, is at the centre of Canada’s investment profile, and conflict with local communities and Canadian political intervention are dominant features of the Peruvian landscape.
In the first section of this chapter we discuss the breathtaking dimensions of the neoliberal mining boom, and the role of Canadian investors therein. The second section situates the current round of natural resource dependency within the longer historical arc of resource extraction in Peru and the legacy of racist colonial violence endured by its poor majority, particularly indigenous communities. From there we discuss patterns of ecological predation and conflict surrounding the current extraction regime, led by Canada. Lastly, we discuss the ways in which the Canadian state has intervened to defend the rights of Canadian investors, reinforcing the long Peruvian trajectory of resource dependency, poverty, and dispossession.
For hundreds of years the territory now known as Peru has been one of Latin America’s traditional mining areas. Throughout much of the colonial period under Spanish rule, and ever since its foundation as an independent republic in the early nineteenth century, the country has been articulated into the world economy as a provider of raw materials.740 And yet, mining in Peru assumed an unprecedented scale and intensity in the 1990s and 2000s. In a world context of rising metal prices, Peru’s domestic political and economic structures were transformed through a neoliberal package of structural adjustment introduced by authoritarian President Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000). The new economic policies were devised to boost investment opportunities and juridical security for foreign capital operating in the country. And since the early 1990s, large-scale mining and hydrocarbon extraction has expanded into new geographical areas within Peru, and intensified in older areas of traditional exploitation. This dynamic has gradually generated a new wave of socio-environmental conflict, with rural indigenous communities in the Andean highlands squaring off with multinational mining corporations, while similar lowland movements in the Amazon confront the oil equivalent of the mining giants.741
The new recipe of authoritarian neoliberalism under Fujimori, within an auspicious international context, generated an extraordinary pace of accumulation in Peru, putting the country at the top of growth charts in Latin America and the Caribbean for much of the last two decades. Between 2006 and 2013, Peru’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average rate of 6.6 percent, with a low of 1.0 in 2009, in the immediate fallout from the global economic crisis, and a high of 9.1 in 2008.742 From 1990 to 2005, the mining sector was an important driver of development on a national scale, with global GDP in the country growing by 80 percent over this period, next to 221 percent in mining alone.743 Likewise, between 2002 and 2007, the stock of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the mining sector increased by 65 percent, in contrast with the 12 percent overall increase in FDI.744 Mining investment expanded exponentially, from US$200 million in 1993, to US$1.5 billion in 2000, and to US$5 billion in 2010. Some estimates expect investment to continue along these lines, on a scale of US$35.4 billion between 2010 and 2016.745 However, this rate of investment might now be cooling down in a changing world context. The recent global downturn in commodity prices, with slowing demand in China, has meant a corresponding easing of Peru’s growth generally, and in mining in particular. In 2014, the country expanded by only 2.6 percent, the lowest growth rate in a number of years.746
Peru ranks among the highest producers in Latin America, and indeed the world, across a number of different mining minerals: tin, first in Latin America and third internationally; zinc, first in Latin America and second internationally; lead, first in Latin America and fourth internationally; gold, first in Latin America and sixth internationally; silver, first in Latin America and first in the world; copper, second in Latin America and second in the world; iron, fifth in Latin America and seventh in the world.747 This natural abundance, in conjunction with domestic economic restructuring and the insatiable thirst of mining capital in a boom context, helps explain over two decades of continuous mining expansion and intensification. Between 1994 and 2009, mining accounted for an average of 6 percent of Peru’s GDP, 60 percent of its exports, and 21 percent of foreign direct investment flowing into the country. At the same time, it accounted for an astonishingly low 1 percent of employment.748 Between 2002 and 2007, the contribution of mining to internal tax revenue shot up from 3.6 to 24.7 percent.749 Geographically, the sheer territorial area covered by mining concessions has increased impressively, from 2.3 million hectares at the beginning of the 1990s to 24 million hectares, or 19 percent of national territory, by November 2013.750 While once an economic activity confined exclusively to the Andean highlands of the country, the recent geographical spread of concessions has come to encompass valley areas, coastal regions, and the highlands and lowlands of the Amazon.751
Of Peru’s 229 mining properties at the end of 2013, 180 were owned by Canadian companies. There are also a dozen Canadian oil and gas companies with operations in the country.752 In 2012, Canadian engineering firm Dessau acquired a Peruvian counterpart that specializes in energy infrastructure, making it the second largest engineering company in the country. Dessau’s Peruvian growth followed 2011 acquisitions in Colombia and Chile.753 A free trade agreement between Canada and Peru in effect since 2009, together with Canadian dominance in the natural resource sectors of the Peruvian economy, has also provided a platform for extension in other areas, not least in banking: Scotiabank was the third largest bank in Peru by 2011, with 17 percent of the country’s market share. Scotiabank’s expansion in Peru, as has been the case elsewhere in Latin America, is tightly linked to Canada’s growing weight in the country’s natural resources and energy sectors.754
The nefarious socio-ecological impact of mining growth in the country has accounted for much of the uptick in social conflict in the country in recent years. According to the monthly reports on social conflict issued by the country`s Ombudsman, roughly 50 percent can be characterized as socio-environmental, with conflicts over hydrocarbon extraction, and, especially, mining, accounting for most of the conflict in this area. In 2010, for example, mining conflicts apparently constituted 64 percent of the socio-environmental disputes documented that year.755
The level of confrontation in mining zones is unsurprising given what we know about the consequences of capitalist extraction across Latin America in recent years. There is now ample evidence of the impact of such intensified extractivism—including open-pit mining and Amazonian oil development in the Peruvian case. Some of the ecological and social repercussions include the destruction of ecological systems and natural habitats, pollution, displacement of local communities, destruction of regional economies, manipulation and imposition by representatives of foreign mining corporations and the state vis-à-vis rural and indigenous communities, as well as rampant everyday corruption.756 This runs alongside the type of development that this kind of mining predictably produces, a type of development incapable of improving the lives of Peruvians or protecting the environment, in which the presence of multinational mining and oil companies involves their simultaneous and connected activities of expatriating profits and externalizing the social and environmental costs of mining production.757 Finally, there is the basic fact of declining resources—that is, the ecological limits on exhaustible mineral extraction, or the incalculable permanent loss of this natural wealth once it has been extracted and exported from the country.758 A recent paper of mainstream economists sought to measure “the loss of natural capital and [correct] the measure of economic income generated by the metal mining of Peru during the period 1992–2006.” In the dry, measured language of the economics profession, the authors find that “metal mining activities have caused significant environmental impacts,” and that their “estimates show that the economic income corrected for the depreciation of mineral resources and the environmental degradation has been significantly overestimated by the usual GDP measure for the period.”759
By some accounts, mining activities now affect roughly 50 percent of Peru’s peasant communities.760 Water is one of their principal worries. Access to and control over water quantity and quality have been at the centre of many recent conflicts between indigenous and peasant communities and mining companies. “Peru is South America’s most water-stressed country,” note Anthony Bebbington and Mark Williams, a geographer and hydrologist respectively. “Water draining from the Andean highlands serves as a water tower that supports the downstream population and attendant agricultural activities, including the country’s dynamic agricultural export economy.”761 Water scarcity in the country makes it, according to some experts, the third most vulnerable country to the outcomes of climate change in the world.
Already scarce quantities of water have been put under tremendous pressure as mining has expanded. Many mining concessions in Peru are situated in headwater regions of the Andes, and mining’s adverse impact on water quality—acid mine drainage (from acids and heavy metals used for ore separation), leakage of ancillary products of production, and dumping of tailings (finely ground rock from which ore has been extracted)—can therefore extend well beyond the immediate mine site, carried along by rivers and aquifers.762 “In July 2008,” Bebbington and Williams remind us, “Peru declared a state of emergency at a mine near Lima over fears that its tailings dam, weakened by seismic activity and subterranean water filtration, could release arsenic, lead, and cadmium into the main water supply for the capital.” They point out that experts estimate that “every year mining and metallurgy release over 13 billion m³ of effluent into Peru’s water courses.”763
In their recent study of “water grabbing” in the Peruvian mining industry, engineers and social scientists Milagros Sosa and Magreet Zwarteveen have scrupulously documented multinational mining companies’ expropriation of water resources in the country. They show how large mining operations have fundamentally altered how, and by whom, water is controlled.764 The net effect of these operations is the reconfiguration of water governance in Peru, whereby marginalized local communities lose access to and control over water. They are “effectively being dispossessed by losing their water rights.”765
HISTORICAL BACKDROP: RACE, CLASS, GEOGRAPHY, TERROR
One useful point of departure for understanding the historical trajectory of Peru’s political economy and social struggles are some of the foundational insights in the work of the country’s preeminent Marxist theorist of the early twentieth century, José Carlos Mariátegui. Central emphases running throughout Mariátegui’s writings are precisely those which continue to animate—albeit in new forms—much of Canada’s foreign policy in Latin America in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—the history of colonialism, the world market and dynamics of imperialism in a an asymmetrically patterned world system of states, the uneven and combined development of capitalism in late-developing societies, and the enduring legacies of racism through slavery and conquest.
Mariátegui begins from the premise that the Spanish conquest of Peru “destroyed economic and social forms that were born spontaneously from the Peruvian land and people,” forms which were “nourished by an indigenous sense of life.”766 The conquest was, above all, “a terrible carnage,” after which the “political and economic organization of the colony…continued the extermination of the Indigenous race. The viceroyalty established a system of brutal exploitation.”767 In what is probably his most famous essay, “The Land Problem,” Mariátegui describes Peru’s economy in the early twentieth century as “colonial,” in the sense that its “movement, its development, are subordinated to the interests and the necessities of the markets in London and New York.”768 Peru is reduced to supplying the primary products to the dominant imperial powers, as well as serving as a market for their manufactured goods. Elsewhere, he charts a large part of the flow of profits from mining, commerce, and transportation leaving Peru for capitals based in the imperial countries, forcing the South American country into a position of requesting them back through loans and the acquisition of debt.769 Mariátegui also notes the way in which imperialism “does not allow any of these semicolonial peoples, whom it exploits as a market for capital and goods and as a source for raw materials, to have an economic program of nationalization and industrialization.” The recurring crisis of the Peruvian economy “arises from this rigid determination of national production created by forces of the world capitalist market.”770
Unique to Mariátegui’s work in this period is the systematic treatment of the racialized character that uneven and combined development assumed in republican Peru. “Feudal and bourgeois elements in our countries have the same contempt for the Indians, as well as for the blacks and mulattos, as do the white imperialists,” Mariátegui stresses in his dissident address (read in his absence) to the First Latin American Communist Conference in Buenos Aires in 1929:
The ruling class’s racist sentiment acts in a manner totally favorable to imperialist penetration. The native [Peruvian, not indigenous] lord or bourgeois has nothing in common with their pawns of color. Class solidarity is added to racial solidarity or prejudice to make the national bourgeoisie docile instruments of Yankee or British imperialism. And that feeling extends to much of the middle class, who imitate the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in their disdain for the plebeian of color, even when it is quite obvious that they come from a mixed background.771
“The republic has the responsibility to raise the status of the Indian,” Mariátegui notes in the essay “Peru’s Principal Problem.” “And contrary to this duty, the republic has impoverished the Indians. It has compounded their depression and exasperated their misery. The republic has meant for the Indians the ascent of a new ruling class that has systematically taken their lands.”772 Considering the centrality to Mariátegui’s framework of the racialized character of economic and political development in Peru, it is not surprising that a politics of anti-racism, and especially of indigenous liberation, proliferates throughout his discussions of emancipatory strategy and the potential sources of liberation.
Many of the themes taken up in the work of Mariátegui—racial, class, and geographic divides between coastal oligarchic elites rooted in Lima and the indigenous communities of the Andean highlands and Amazonian lowlands, waves of racist dispossession of indigenous peasants by light-skinned Peruvian elites allied with foreign capitalists, the subordination of Peru to the dominant powers of the world market, and the resistance to these injustices offered by indigenous peasants and Peruvian workers and the poor—have been of continued relevance to Peruvian reality throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first.
The local dynamics of the Cold War in Peru merely intensified long-standing patterns. Beginning in the late 1950s, a powerful indigenous-peasant movement was forged in the Andean highlands, weakening and threatening the hegemony of the Peruvian ruling class. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 further inspired peasant movements, rural guerrilla formations, and urban labour activism in Peru in the 1960s, as it did other movements and popular organizations elsewhere in Latin America.773 The worker and peasant protests which continued to grow over the course of the 1960s constituted a New Left of a breadth and depth which was never matched in the country in the often devastating decades that followed.774
A coup by the armed forces in 1962 was the first signal of a response from above to the growing momentum of social movements from below, and this was followed six years later by a second coup in 1968, this time under the leadership of reformist-nationalist generals. “The experiment in authoritarian nationalist reform launched by the Peruvian military in 1968,” notes historian Gerardo Rénique, “did not solve the crisis of oligarchic legitimacy that began in the late 1950s, but merely postponed its resolution.”775 According to Rénique, once the military had allowed for the return of democratic rule in 1980, “the country was in an even more volatile situation than it had been in the 1960s.”776
The stage had been set for the most extreme period of political violence in the republic’s history, the civil war between 1980 and 1992, in which the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Peruvian state were the principal players.777 Peru’s deep historical backdrop of geographically uneven capitalist development, intense levels of class-based inequality, racism, and repressive violence on the part of military and paramilitary allies trained in U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, conjoined in the 1980s and early 1990s with the the fundamentalist strain of Maoism adopted by Sendero to produce catastrophic levels of violence. “Although the Peruvian state had previously used arbitrary detentions, killings, torture, exile, and deportation to discourage mass action and eliminate opposition leaders,” Rénique points out, “during the 1980s war…‘traditional’ modes of repression gave way to harsher forms of exemplary and punitive violence aimed against civilian men, women, and children.”778
So-called “death caravans” run by the military
carried out rapes, tortured, executed and disappeared not just alleged subversives and their relatives but also college professors and students; they also corralled peasant villagers into strategic hamlets and arbitrarily detained and harassed thousands of citizens, including large numbers of journalists and lawyers.779
The state justified these actions with reference to the “just war” it was carrying out against terrorist subversives. Mobilizing the well-honed racism of coastal elites in the capital, the Peruvian military tended to see the rural indigenous population of the Andean highlands in particular as “natural” allies and social bases of Sendero, and thus there was often a distinctly racialized character to the repression of civilians carried out by the Peruvian state and right-wing paramilitaries.
Meanwhile, Sendero saw anyone without explicit allegiances to the guerrilla movement as obstacles standing in the way of the successful resolution of its revolutionary war against the Peruvian state, or worse, collaborators of that state. “It executed leaders of the many unions, peasant federations, women’s groups, neighborhood organizations, and student federations who had not pledged allegiance,” Rénique, together here with anthropologist Deborah Poole, points out. “Activists, elected officials, nuns, priests, nongovernmental organization workers, and local government functionaries were also targeted, often in public executions of ‘people’s trials’.”780
According to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (June 2001—August 2003), roughly seventy thousand people were killed between 1980 and 2000, with 54 percent of casualties coming at the hands of Sendero—an anomalous proportion of deaths perpetrated by a guerrilla group in any Latin American civil conflict in the twentieth century, as in other cases the vast proportion of killing was done by the armed forces and allied paramilitary groupings.781 Nonetheless, the atrocities committed by the state and its paramilitary allies were near equal in number and stature, argue close observers of Peru, such as Poole and Rénique. The country was increasingly militarized, and special powers were granted to the executive branch during the administrations of Fernando Belaúnde (1980–1985) and Alan García (1985–1990). “Curiously,” Poole and Rénique point out,
among the most frequent targets of the state’s terrorism laws were the same people targeted by the PCP-SL [Sendero]. Grassroots leaders and elected officials from the United Left coalition (at the moment the country’s second most important electoral force) were charged as sympathizers or terrorists. Antiterrorist legislation also provided justification for rounding up all the dark-skinned cholos and indios who the state perceived as the “natural” allies of Sendero Luminoso.782
FUJIMORI AND AUTHORITARIAN NEOLIBERAL RULE
Alberto Fujimori was elected president on a far-Right ticket in 1990, promising a combination of hard-line policies against Sendero terrorism; more power to the executive office; further militarization of Peruvian society; and the establishment of a coordinated and centralized national intelligence service, to be directed by the now notorious Vladimiro Montesinos.783 In 1992, Fujimori’s popularity was strengthened when, thanks to a pre-existing police surveillance operation, Abimael Guzmán, the leader of Sendero, was captured, and the civil war was for all intents and purposes brought to a close. Still unsatisfied with his powers as president, however, Fujimori launched an auto-golpe, or self-coup, against his own government in April 1992, suspending Congress and delegating unrestricted authority to the executive. In so doing he established unmitigated authoritarian rule in Peru that would last until 2000.
As was the case elsewhere in Latin America, the concentration of power within the Peruvian state, and the violence unleashed against any and all progressive expressions of opposition to state authority, under Fujimori, provided the necessary political freedom of manoeuver to simultaneously introduce an extreme economic program of neoliberal restructuring; this economic dimension of authoritarian rule under Fujimori was ultimately the domestic basis for the “mining boom” into which Canadian foreign direct investment would flow in abundance over the following decades. “In this respect,” Rénique observes,
the counterinsurgency launched against not just Sendero but also the broader Peruvian Left and popular movement not only enhanced the military capabilities of the state but, more important, expanded its ideological hold over the political and cultural imagination of a society in which the memory of war and the privatizations of neoliberal reforms have combined to undermine the appeals of collective organization and the critical stance of utopian thinking.784
The market reforms under Fujimori were multifaceted, but their underlying motive was to secure a juridical environment in which the rights of foreign direct investors in the mining industry could be held over and above virtually all other considerations. Inalienable communal property rights of indigenous and peasant communities, established in the 1920s, were seen as a serious obstacle standing in the way of private mining development. Likewise, legal conditionalities for approval for foreign concessions in extractive industries were seen as prohibitively bureaucratic, particularly those involving environmental obligations and restrictions. The attack on these and other components of excessive “red tape” in the mining industry by the Fujimori regime was enabled precisely by the concentration of decision-making power within the hands of the executive.785
In a single year, 1991, an entire program of structural reform was introduced. This involved a series of laws designed to guarantee the stability of Foreign Direct Investment. Environmental, land, and indigenous communities laws were passed in lightening succession, the motive of all of them subject to the logic of extending foreign investment in private mining as commodity prices began to rise on the international market. The dynamic of the 1991 legislation culminated, ultimately, in a new General Mining Law and a new Constitution in 1993, both of which consolidated the reforms by favouring the rights of foreign investors in the country in myriad ways.786 A new land law of 1995, implementing many of the themes embodied in the undemocratic constitution of 1993, made it possible to commercialize indigenous and peasant communal lands for the first time since the 1920s.787
Other small peasant landowners were also forced into selling off their land to facilitate large-scale mining operations under the control of foreign capital. Landowners’ property rights in Peru do not extend below the surface, as the rights to subsoil minerals belong to the state. In the case of any recalcitrance on the part of a landowner—for example, refusal to sell at the market price or above—Fujimori’s reforms made it possible for the state to expropriate the property in question. In effect, this facilitated transfer of title to the mining company. The threat of this legal possibility alone stimulated huge transfers of private and communally held land to foreign mining firms across large swathes of Peruvian territory.788 Fujimori also smashed residual protections of workers in the extant labour code, introduced a floating exchange rate, and eliminated restrictions on remittances of profits, dividends, and royalties.789 Legislation exempted new mining operations from royalty payments, and under the new rules multinational mining companies investing in Peru were not required to pay the standard 30 percent tax on profit until they had recovered their initial investments.790 Meanwhile, at a regulatory level, the Ministry of Energy and Mines was simultaneously made responsible for: “(i) promoting investment in new mining operations; (ii) granting mining concessions; and (iii) reviewing and approving the environmental impact assessments required for new exploration and extraction activities.”791 In addition to these economic incentives and regulatory laxities, the military defeat of Sendero Luminoso made the investment environment more attractive to foreign capital. The end of guerrilla activities in the Andean region, “allowed geologists to travel safely through the highlands in search of new mineral deposits and to establish new mining claims,” the geographer Jeffrey Todd Bury points out. “Consequently, in 1992, more mining claims were staked than for the previous fifteen years.”792
CONTINUITIES IN POST-FUJIMORI PERU
In terms of political economy, the continuities between Fujimori and his immediate successors (Alejandro Toledo, 2001–2006; Alan García, 2006–2011) were pronounced. The orthodox economic mixture of neoliberal policies that had transformed the country into a sought-after destination for new mining investors was continued with striking fidelity by both Toledo, a former employee of the World Bank, and García, an erstwhile left-populist president (1985–1990) turned born-again neoliberal during his second administration.
If the economic trajectory remained largely unchanged in post-Fujimori Peru, however, the end of explicit authoritarian rule opened up new space for organizing social movements, and anti-mining protests rose to the surface in a dramatic way, embroiling a number of Canadian mining concessions into new conflicts with local communities in the process. What had been relatively isolated mining protests throughout the 1990s made an organizational advance into a national network of activism just at the end of Fujimori’s rule, in 1999, with the establishment of the Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería (National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining, CONACAMI).793
In the context of Fujimorni’s authoritarian rule, strike activity and protests of various sorts experienced an overall decline. This pattern changed dramatically under Toledo, with the weekly magazine Caretas documenting eight hundred separate protests in Lima in 2002 alone.794 A major anti-neoliberal protest threw the city of Arequipa into crisis in 2002, when citizens rose up to protest the privatization of the municipal electricity companies. More than any other sector of conflict, however, mining became the new frontier of emergent activism and protest. While these protests were geographically fragmented and more often than not locally organized and unarticulated at the national level, all of their local expressions began to have a national impact economically and politically in the mining sector.795 One detailed scholarly study of social conflict in Peru between 2004 and 2011 notes that the “total number of social conflicts…considering all types of disputes, has increased dramatically since 2004.” The study goes on to show that the conflicts in question:
are varied; they extend well beyond a single episode; and they frequently go unresolved for months or years. The spike in their number is largely a result of the public reaction to the activities of mining companies and other extractive industries in environmentally sensitive areas. In fact, in 2011, these “socioenvironmental” disputes represented well over half of all conflicts, and they continue to roil national politics.796
International mining companies, including Canadian investors, were closely observing this upturn in social protest in the extractive sectors of the Peruvian economy. One expression of this worry can be discerned in the annual reports of the conservative Canadian think-tank, the Fraser Institute, on metal mining and exploration companies. These reports attempt to assess natural mineral wealth, and public policy, taxation, and regulation in mining sectors across different countries and regions of the world. The surveys include two indexes based on the information they collect, a Policy Potential Index (PPI) and a Mineral Potential Index (MPI). As the sociologist Moisés Arce points out:
These indexes serve as a report card to governments on how attractive their polices are from the point of view of an exploration manager. In the 2005–6 survey, for instance, the MPI index placed Peru at the top of the sample of 64 countries, suggesting that the sheer potential of the country’s mineral resources was extremely high. In contrast, the PPI index—which takes into account, among other things, the presence of political stability and societal conflicts—has consistently dropped since 2003.797
Even if such protests never reached a comparable scale to parallel social movements in nearby Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador over the same period, anti-mining activism was undoubtedly making its presence felt in Peru.798
CANADIAN MINING CONFLICTS: THE CASES OF TAMBOGRANDE AND ANCASH
Canadian capital has been at the forefront of the mining drive since the 1990s under Fujimori, and it is therefore not surprising that Canadian mining giants ran up against the new dynamic of expanding socio-ecological activism in the newly democratic context of the early 2000s.799 Indeed, new anti-mining struggles pitted directly against Canadian capital were widespread by the early 2000s, stretching from the peasant communities of Vicco, Tintaya-Marquiri, and Yauli, to the district of San Marcos in the Andean department of Ancash.800 The conflict in Tambogrande, beginning in earnest in 2001, was representative of many others in the country.
Tambogrande is located in the northern region of Piura, 1,050 kilometres from Lima. The Canadian corporation, Manhattan Minerals Corp., began surveying the Tambogrande reserve when it won an exploration concession in 1999.801 At the time, Manhattan Minerals estimated the value of gold, silver, copper, and zinc deposits in their concession to be approximately US$1.6 billion.802 A number of concerns about the Tambogrande project made it a highly unpopular venture in the affected community.
There were concerns about the large scale displacement of residents—projected to be between eight thousand and twenty thousand—due to the fact that parts of the concession were based inside the town centre.803 Manhattan Minerals had initiated exploration drilling soon after the company won the concession. They had established plans to develop an opencast mine three kilometers in diameter, within an urban area. As a result, they made it clear that their intention was to relocate at least eight thousand people into a nearby area, in a town which they planned to build.804
Fears were widespread that water scarcity and contamination, as well as other deleterious environmental effects from mining, would negatively impact the 226,000 hectares of mango, lemon, and other fruit trees which are harvested for export in the area, and which provide employment for 26,000 people and US$105 million annually to the local economy.805 The San Lorenzo valley in which Tambogrande is located suffers from acute water scarcity. The utilization of water resources for mining interests was expected to have devastating consequences for local consumption and agricultural activities. The opponents of the mining development were also concerned with company plans to divert the Piura River in order to access ore bodies currently under water.806 Based on their long historical memory of earlier colonial and republican mining activities in Peru, anti-mining activists in Tambogrande believed that the vast profits expected to come from the concession would, by and large, fall into the pockets of foreign capital, while only the devastation wrought on the community and the environment would be left in its wake.
In the 1970s and 1980s the principal actor in the popular struggle in the mines was the National Federation of Mining, Metallurgical, Iron and Steel Workers of Peru, established in 1969. The miners of this federation were a driving force of the Peruvian labour movement as a whole. They developed a powerful ideology of resistance rooted in anti-imperialism and workers’ rights.807 With the rapid expansion of mining activities into new rural areas during the 1990s, however, the principal axis of contention in mining zones shifted from miners struggling for their rights in existing mines, to peasant, indigenous, and community resistance to new mining expansion. A major turning point in this shift was the foundation of CONACAMI in 1999, following a series of meetings between forty different communities in six different regions of the country beginning in 1998.808 The conflict in Tambogrande was part of this new wave of struggle beginning in the late-1990s, which then expanded fairly dramatically over the course of the next decade and a half.
A coalition of “small- and medium-sized farmers, smallholders and day-labourers, teachers, traders, the Catholic Church, and in general the various social sectors of the locality and the region,” resisted Manhattan Minerals through the formation of the Tambogrande Defence Front, which was, in turn, part of the national CONACAMI coalition.809 The front utilized a series of tactics to resist Manhattan’s goals in the area, including strikes, occupations, and a referendum on mining activities. In a strike in late February 2001, “some 5,000 local residents stormed the company’s premises on February 28, burning machinery.”810 According to a witness report from Francisco Ojeda Riofrío—the Human Rights Secretary of CONACAMI, President of the Tambogrande Defence Front, and mayor of the Municipal Government of Tambogrande—the strike happened
because the people were frustrated, indignant, because nobody was paying attention to them. The company hired 700 police, and the people from Tambogrande confronted them. When violence broke out, they said that we had hired terrorists to come to Tambogrande. Halfway through that strike they killed our main leader, our big brother, Godofredo García Baca, and to this day his killer has not been captured, although it is widely known that he is a former air force sergeant.811
Despite the fact that García Baca was president of a local agricultural association and a central leader in the opposition movement, Manhattan Minerals claimed his murder was apolitical, the tragic consequence of a robbery gone awry.812 According to Ojeda Riofrío, however, infiltration and recording of popular meetings by company informants was a common occurrence. Even more seriously, three months after the strike in which García Baca was murdered, “seven armed thugs abducted [my] daughter from the university, and dumped her in the main street of Piura. The next day we had a public debate scheduled with the mining company—I don’t know if they were the ones behind my daughter’s abduction, but it was someone who wanted to scare me.”813 Death threats against Ojeda Riofrío and his family continued.
In 2002, the Tambogrande Defence Front held an unbinding popular referendum on whether or not the Manhattan mining projects should proceed. Indeed, this was Latin America’s first self-organized popular referendum of this type, a tactic that, following on the successes of Tambogrande, became a common feature of the repertoires of collective action employed by anti-mining activists from Argentina to Mexico in the coming years.814 Of 37,000 eligible voters, over 27,000 participated. Ninety-four percent of votes cast were opposed to the mining project.815 The company denied the credibility of the referendum, and apparently later conducted a poll of its own—but failed to publish the results when they reaffirmed those of the earlier referendum.816 Over the next three years, the anti-mining movement of Tambogrande persisted vigilantly in their multifaceted efforts. Another three-day explosive protest took place in November 2003, for example. Such activism on various levels continued until Manhattan Minerals finally abandoned their concession in 2005, under pressure by the Peruvian government, but also citing the ongoing protests as standing in the way of the financial feasibility of the project.817 As the Norwegian sociologists Håvard Haarstad and Arnt Fløysand point out:
Under intense national and international pressure, the Peruvian government revoked the operating license of Manhattan Minerals in Tambogrande, effectively putting a stop to the project. In a country traditionally dominated by mining and the interests of the elite, a rural community had halted a large, foreign-controlled mining project through what can be said to be significant political empowerment by drawing on their network of national and international organizations.818
A similar rhythm to conflict in the mining sector continued under the administration of Alan García, and, once again, Canadian mining firms found themselves at the centre of numerous popular anti-mining campaigns. During his successful 2006 presidential campaign, García made a promise to review mining contracts, because the extraordinary profits being expatriated by foreign multinationals was becoming well-known and widely repudiated in the Peruvian body politic, and the calls for a windfall tax were becoming louder. However, once in office García’s windfall tax was watered down to a voluntary commitment on the part of mining firms. If that was not enough on its own, under García, the Ministry of Energy and Mines continued to be simultaneously responsible for the entirely contradictory roles of attracting new foreign mining investment, granting mining concessions to private capital, and reviewing and implementing environmental impact assessments required before beginning any new exploration or extraction activity in the country.819
One of the exemplary social conflicts involving a Canadian mining company under García became a flashpoint only a month after the April 2006 general elections in Peru. The conflict in question pivoted on the Pierina gold mine in the region of Ancash. The deposit had been discovered back in the mid-1990s by a Vancouver-based exploration company, but that company was then acquired by Barrick Gold in 1996. Soon thereafter, Barrick began a land acquisition program to obtain approximately 2,300 hectares of surface area in order to develop the mining concession. The bulk of the area was positioned in the headwaters of three valleys, in which small-scale farmers used grasslands as commons for their cattle and sheep ranching.820
Residents eventually agreed to sell their land to the company after they were promised social development and jobs in the new mine. “In the years since,” writes geographer Matthew Himley, drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic research in the area, “permanent employment at Pierina has been unavailable for most area residents: though many of my 46 interviewees in these two communities expressed interest in steady work at Pierina, none had been hired full time.”821 In early May 2006, frustrated with the lack of job prospects and Barrick’s unfulfilled pledges for social development, men and women from seventeen communities blocked two of the mine’s main access roads at midnight. On the second day of the road blockade, a special-operations police unit was sent in to clear away protestors. In the ensuing conflict, one protestor was killed, and at least ten were seriously injured. Nine police officers were also injured that day.822 According to Himley, again drawing on lengthy discussions he carried out with interviewees in the area between 2006 and 2012:
Residents’ positive depictions of local history were often embedded within broader narratives regarding the unfavorable socio-environmental consequences of large-scale mining. Along with references to the adverse impacts of mining on resource availability and social life, these narratives often included mention of the inadequate social-development support that communities received from Barrick.823
The protests against Barrick continue in Ancash, as residents in the area defy state repression carried out on behalf of Barrick’s operations in the area.
VIOLENCE AND ECO-DESTRUCTION BEYOND TAMBOGRANDE AND ANCASH
The cases of Tambogrande and Ancash are symptomatic of the conflict that has accompanied Canadian investment in Peru. The Canadian government has actively supported Canadian economic interests and, in the process, made allies of local political leaders willing to use whatever means necessary, including repression, to defend Canadian investors. Alain García, for instance, proved a useful asset to Canada, bending over backwards for foreign investors. In a speech delivered in Ecuador to the Canada-Peru Chamber of Commerce, Helena Guergis, Canadian Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Trade, ignored Peru’s poor human rights record under García, counting him instead as a foreign-investor friendly ally. “Under the leadership of President Alan García,” she intoned, “Peru is showing a new determination to…develop stronger governance mechanisms; and encourage more openness to trade and investment.”824 Both of those aspects of García’s leadership were in ample display for Canadian and foreign capital. An eager supporter of Canadian foreign investors, García signed a free trade agreement (FTA) in 2008, intensifying the process of opening up wide swaths of the country to foreign investors—as noted, between 2006 and 2010 the area of the country covered by mining concessions almost doubled, extending to 16.7 percent of the national territory. In 2010 alone, as García opened up the country, Peru received 7,000 requests for exploration permits from 150 junior companies.825
García, ever willing to please the Canadians, also continued his predecessors’ policies of allowing no charge of royalties or a windfall tax on mining investments. As noted, García instead established a voluntary windfall payment. The outcome of García’s financial generosity to foreign investors was entirely predictable and demonstrates the absurdity of the mining industry’s rote public relations claims to being an important contributor to development in poor countries. Despite the global commodities boom, the voluntary tax netted a meager US$638 million from mining companies by the end of 2010, while the total net global earnings of the five biggest foreign miners in the country from 2005 to June 2010 (including Barrick) was US$20 billion. Over that same period, only 12 percent of the mining industry’s profits in Peru went to taxes and royalties. The absurdity of the neoliberal fantasies of García and his Canadian supporters is captured in the fact that in the region of Cajamarca, one of the biggest destinations for mining investment in the country in the late 2000s, poverty increased over this period.826
Adding to his esteem in the eyes of the Canadian government, García did not hesitate to crush opposition to natural resource development. In perhaps the most ignominious episode of his presidency, he sent security forces on June 2, 2009 to smash an indigenous blockade in its second month near Bagua in northern Peru close to the Ecuadorian border. The blockade was set up in opposition to government decrees issued following the signing of the FTA, which permitted mining, oil, and logging development in 70 percent of Peru’s Amazon rainforest without requiring the prior consent of indigenous inhabitants. Security forces shot and killed a number of protesters and injured over two hundred; a number of police were also killed during the conflagration. As journalist David Hill reports:
The conflict broke out in northern Peru after mainly indigenous Awajúns and Wampis had been peacefully protesting a series of new laws which were supposed emitted to comply with a trade agreement between Peru and the U.S. and which made it easier, among other things, for extractive industries to exploit natural resources in their territories. Following a blockade of a highway near a town called Bagua—and an agreement that the protestors would break up and go home, reached the day before—early on 5 June the police moved to clear it and started shooting. In the ensuing conflict, 10 police officers, five indigenous people and five non-indigenous civilians were killed, more than 200 injured—at least 80 of whom were shot—and, elsewhere in the Bagua region, a further 11 police officers were killed after being taken hostage.827
Canada’s FTA with Peru was actually passed into law by the Harper government just a few days after this massacre, with no mention of the violent repression in Peru.828 But the shooting of dozens of indigenous protesters pales in importance compared to a new FTA that will, in the words of Minister of Trade, Stockwell Day, “open new doors in key sectors such as extractive industries, manufacturing, agriculture and financial services.”829
The following August, Awajún and Wampis indigenous communities issued statements demanding Vancouver-based Dorato Resources leave their ancestral territories. Dorato received its concession in the Awajún and Wampis territories and approval for its environmental permit even though it did not consult with the indigenous communities. But the Awajún and Wampis are not only fighting Dorato. IAMGOLD is also operating in their territories without consulting them, and in fact without initially being given permission from the Peruvian government, which in 2009 reported that the company had not even asked for a permit and that its operations there were “illegal.”830
In the spring of 2010 poor artisanal miners in Chala in southern Peru, led by the National Federation of Artisanal Miners of Peru, set up blockades in opposition to the government’s decision to open large tracts of their land to foreign investors. The blockade was met with the heavy hand of the state: police fired on the protesters, killing five.831 Peru’s security forces would launch another assault on artisanal miners in the twilight days of García’s presidency, in February 2011. Nineteen river dredges were blown up, sparking country-wide protests by fifteen thousand poor miners that precipitated the end of the assault and the creation of a new registry for them.832
Undeterred in his commitment to foreign investors, though, García cast his security gaze to the southern Puno region near the Bolivian border in June 2011. Security forces were sent to smash month-long blockades against Vancouver-based Bear Creek that had virtually shut down most activity in the area. Protesters were demanding an end to all mining practices in their region, but Bear Creek’s CEO responded with the predictable claim that the community actually supports his company and the protesters were really just outside agitators who, to his alarm, “are not just anti-mining” but are “taking on the flavour of the Aymara resistance to the presence of the state, as well as foreign and even Peruvian investment.” During this period, the company met with the Canadian embassy “on numerous occasions,” according to embassy officials. The initial assault did not abate the protests, however, instead intensifying the blockades and drawing in Bolivian protesters, according to a report by the embassy. The security forces responded by firing on protesters at a local airport, killing four activists. But when the killings ignited ever more militant protests, the government was forced to revoke Bear Creek’s permit.833
Not only did García pursue policies that escalated conflict, he also actively undermined even moderate efforts to place limits of resource development and assuage the indigenous opposition. In June 2010, for example, the Peruvian Congress passed a bill, written following the violent clashes in Bagua, that would have adopted parts of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. García, however, blocked the bill, arguing with a hyocrisy befitting an imperial client that “Peru is for all Peruvians…and, for there to be democracy, we can’t place limits on future legislatures or governments.”834 García, of course, had already signed the FTA with Canada, the principal aim of which was to lock in the rights of Canadian multinationals and limit the ability of governments to prioritize social and environmental concerns.
Popular disgust at the massacre in Bagua and the more general militarization of Peruvian neoliberalism under Fujimori, and in the mining zones at least continuing under Toledo and García, was part of the reason Ollanta Humala won in the first round of the presidential elections in April 2011. Humala ran on a Centre-Left ticket, modelling his campaign on that of the moderate Workers Party in Brazil, and generally offering a nationalist-populist alternative to orthodox neoliberalism. In office, however, Humala’s allegiance to the basic parameters set out by his predecessors in the mining sector became evident almost immediately.
“In the first two years of the Humala regime,” development studies researcher Jan Lust points out, “nineteen people have died as a consequence of the repression of social protests against (transnational) mining capital.”835 Lust goes on to argue that the
attitude of the Humala regime towards the ongoing anti-mining protests is identicial to that of previous governments. A state of emergency is declared in those regions where the struggle against extractive capital is persistent, protests are criminalized and leaders of social movements are accused of adhering to an “archaic” ideology, i.e., one that is progressive and left-wing.836
Humala’s government has also not hesitated in its application of Decree 1085, first introduced by García’s administration. This decree authorizes the intervention of armed forces to control internal order and qualifies protesters as “hostile groups,” while violations of human rights committed by repressive state forces are dealt with by military tribunals, outside of the reach of civilian scrutiny.837
Humala won the presidency by offering a message of social and economic reform, of inclusive and sustainable development in Peru. Even within the first year of his administration, however, the deviation from these promises was self-evident.838 The pressure on Humala from foreign capital came fast and furious. During his electoral campaign, one of the most vigorous demands of the most powerful economic groups in the country, as well as representatives of foreign capital with interests in the country, was that Humala needed to respect investments of transnational mining capital.839 A “Chief Risk Officer” of a consultancy firm that services the mining industry captures where the threat to Canadian capital lies in Peru. Where Humala “has made Peru a favourable destination for mining and extractive sector investments,” he notes, “at the local level, mining projects are at a real risk of disruption, delay or cancellation owing to community opposition.”840
Given Humala’s support for the natural resources industry, conflicts between companies and communities continued during his presidency. The year 2012 was one of major social conflict in Peru, where, in his first year in office alone, mining protests forced two cabinet changes in the Humala government. The dynamic to the socio-ecological struggles has been conditioned by the same configurations of political-economic power under the Humala administration as it was under the García and Toledo regimes. Mega-mining under the control of transnational capital remains a key feature of capitalist accumulation in Peru under Humala’s watch. Peasant resistance of a communal, often indigenous, character continues to explode intermittently in response, with strategic control of territory being one of the indigenous-peasant movement’s key aims. It is also apparent that the localized, fragmented character of anti-mining protests is limited, on the one hand, by its relative inability to build a secure, organizational infrastructure at a national level. On the other hand, new forms of decentralized, anti-bureaucratic forms of grassroots coordination have emerged that are extremely difficult for the state and mining companies to coopt or repress entirely.841
In 2012, there were 167 conflicts registered by the Ombudsman. Of these, 123 were denominated socio-environmental, while only 7 were labour conflicts. Indigenous and peasant movements, mobilizing communally and territorially against mining companies, and in order to defend their access to land and water, are the cutting edge of contemporary resistance to neoliberalism and imperialism in Peru. Their forms of struggle include local defence fronts, the organization of municipal and provincial referenda on mining developments, marches, regional strikes, and road blockades. One of the most interesting tactics of late is the renewal of rondas campesinas in a novel context of anti-mining struggle. Rondas campesinas were self-defence, communal organizations of peasant and indigenous communities in the 1970s, designed to prevent cattle theft. During the civil war, they subsequently played a self-defensive role against incursions by both the armed forces and paramilitaries, on the one hand, and the Shining Path, on the other.842
Sociologist Lewis Taylor says this about the role of rondas campesinas in anti-mining mobilizations in the Province of San Marcos and Condebamba Valley:
Historical “memory” in the shape of the legacy of the rondas campesinas proved invaluable in getting the movement started and facilitated the swift building of support. In this regard, the crucial point is that the nightwatch patrols created during the early 1980s still enjoyed widespread legitimacy among the rural population. Although the rondas had ceased to exist by the late 1980s, or in a few cases operated clandestinely below the radar of army and guerrilla, they continued to be viewed with a mixture of nostalgia and pride, having emerged as an authentic peasant solution to peasant problems. A model for village-level organization was therefore readily available, one that was comprehensible, commanded loyalty and was based on deep-rooted community traditions of discussing issues in open assemblies.843
As noted, the ongoing socio-ecological protests under Humala have often involved direct confrontations with Canadian mining firms. Hudbay Minerals, whose security forces are implicated in extreme violence towards opponents in Guatemala, including murder, was targeted in a new wave of indigenous protests against the mining industry in early 2012, forcing Humala, in an effort to contain the social explosion, to ask the company to suspend its operations during an environmental review.844 Fortuna Silver, opponents of which in Mexico have been murdered, faced blockades against its Caylloma mine.845 In September 2012, Talisman withdrew from its oil exploration activities in the Achuar territory of the Amazon in the face of strident indigenous opposition, even though it claimed to have consulted with and received support from local communities. As one indigenous leader commented on Talisman’s withdrawal:
We have fought long and hard against Talisman’s drilling in our territory because of the negative environmental and social impacts we have seen from oil drilling around the world. Now that Talisman is leaving we can focus on achieving our own vision for development and leave a healthy territory for future generations.846
That same month, one person was killed and several injured when police attacked a blockade against Barrick Gold’s Pierina mine in northern Peru. Opponents of Barrick were protesting a growing water shortage associated with its activities in the area.847 In 2013, Matsés indigenous people initiated mobilizations against Canadian company Pacific Rubiales, which is engaging in oil exploration in their Amazonian home.848
CANDENTE COPPER AND CAÑARIACO NORTE
In one of the most emblematic popular struggles against Canadian mining capital in the Humala era, Candente Copper’s Cañariaco Norte project has been targeted by the Comunidad Campesina San Juan De Kañaris—in the northern Andes of Lambayeque—which voted against its presence in October 2012 in a popular referendum, causing a sharp drop in the company’s stock price. The district of San Juan de Kañaris contains 96 percent of the surface conceded to Candente for its mining project. The district has roughly fifteen thousand inhabitants, two thirds of whom are Quechua speaking. 849 Candente ignored the vote, arguing that it was not binding. The referendum had been carried out in the presence of the national police, CONACAMI, Red Muqui, and the Comando Unitario de Lucha de Lambayeque, (Unified Command of the Lambayeque Struggle). The president of the community, Cristóbal Barrios, asked the company to respect the will of the local population, as expressed in a popular referendum through secret ballot.850 Candente’s refusal to adhere to the community’s demands netted no response from the government, inciting mass protests, blockades of roads leading to the mining camp, and the temporary detention of three geological engineers by protesters. Demonstrations spilled over into 2013, with several protesters injured by police, including from gunshot wounds, while trying to enter the mining site to shut down operations in late January. In May 2013, Candente had to temporarily suspend its operations in order to quell the protests.851
According to the Uruguayan sociologist and journalist Raúl Zibechi, the struggle against Candente Copper had three main features, which are representative of the direction of anti-mining protests in Peru more generally. First, he argues, the popular referendum has clearly become a method of struggle. It has less to do with the Peruvian electoral system, or recognition of the community by the state, than it does with demonstrating communitarian cohesion in resistance against the presence of the mining company and the coercive apparatuses of the state. Second, Zibechi contends, the struggle against Candente revealed new forms and repertoires of collective action in the mining zones of Peru. Again, the rondas campesinas were important in this case, as rotational committees of self-organized indigenous peasants camped on the lake nearby, at four thousand metres above sea level, fighting both the wind and the cold and the ever-present possibility of terror at the hands of state security or private security forces. Third, Zibechi notes, the new territorially-based peasant indigenous resistance in Peru’s mining zones has, over the last fifteen years or so, developed a coherent layer of young leaders, with a large presence of young women, and solid communitarian links with the local grassroots.852
We get a sense of the depth of ideological contestation with the neoliberal mining model present in such movements in the following selections from a February 2013 communiqué of the resistance to Candente Copper:
We demand as a condition for dialogue the immediate retreat of police forces from our territories, since according to our customary law communal security is to be guaranteed by rondas campesinas [self-defence community organizations], and there is no need for the presence of such a large, heavily armed police force in our territory.…We are aboriginal, communal, and self-defence authorities who are not disposed to giving up the principals and rights of our peoples, and will not allow subordination to colonialism, which is bent on breaking up our authentic and natural structures as indigenous peoples.853
The embassy in Lima and Foreign Affairs in Ottawa have kept a vigilant eye on the challenges facing Canadian capital in the country, actively working both publicly and behind the scenes to defend its ability to extract profit from the Peruvian earth regardless of the social and environmental cost. Peru has received a series of Canadian cabinet ministers as follow up to the FTA signing in 2008, including a trade mission led by Diane Ablonczy in November 2012, which included representatives from sixteen different companies and a Bay Street law firm.854 Foreign Affairs minister John Baird travelled to Peru in February 2013 to discuss investment with Humala and meet with representatives from Canadian companies.855
The embassy, as Ottawa’s eyes, ears, and voice on the ground, has taken a more directly active role. This has not simply been under the directive of a Conservative government. During the Liberal government of Paul Martin, the embassy partnered with the Americans to strategize about the growing opposition to mining in Peru. According to a U.S. embassy cable from August 2005 released by Wikileaks, the “U.S. and Canadian Ambassadors hosted a meeting…for representatives of international mining companies to review their operating difficulties in Peru and to coordinate efforts to improve the investment climate.” The cable continues: “Consensus among the companies is that radical forces (Communist Party-Patria Roja, drug traffickers and rural defense committees-ronderos) are increasingly active in rural communities, seeking to target mining operations throughout the country.” The cable suggests that this was not the first such meeting hosted by the U.S. and Canadian embassies. One mining executive reportedly “suggested that the Embassies urge the Catholic Church to rotate bishops operating in these regions.” A suggestion that “the Ambassadors agreed to consider…but needed specific examples of anti-mining teachers and priests, who engage in inappropriate activities.”856 The cable also notes the role NGOs are playing in the militant opposition to mining and community mobilization efforts, shedding early light on the Canadian government’s subsequent decision to end the funding of NGOs throughout the Americas that it felt were too close to mining critics or were providing such critics with legal defence support. For example, Canadian Lutheran World Relief, supported by CIDA for its work in Peru, was reportedly told that it would lose its government financing if it did not break its relations with anti-mining organizations.857
In response to blockades in 2010 against the Antamina mine, part-owned by Canadian Teck Resources, the embassy responded by publishing an article on its website praising the project’s commitment to social responsibility.858 The embassy also kept a close eye on the regional Peruvian elections in 2010, reporting to Ottawa on how the Left fared, and in particular those victorious politicians it identified as anti-mining. One situation report includes a lengthy discussion about whether the mayoral victory of Susan Villáran in Lima constituted a meaningful shift to the Left with implications for the presidential elections in the following year; the embassy’s assessment, correctly given the victory of Humala, was that it did not.859
Canada’s mining industry itself has also actively intervened in Peruvian politics to advance its interests. It flexed its muscles in the late stages of the García presidency when the windfall tax debate re-emerged following a period of explosive unrest, lobbying heavily to help quash it, and again during the 2011 presidential campaign. During the campaign, the industry threatened divestment if “populist promises” being raised by some candidates led to a significant increase of royalties and taxes.860 In a sign of its influence on Peruvian politics, presidential candidate Alejandro Toledo travelled to Vancouver in December 2010 to meet with Canadian mining executives to assure them that, if elected “I’m going to call them all to the table and we’re going to establish the rules of the game and once we agree to that, we’re going to have no surprises.”861 As Humala moved into first place in the campaign during 2011, harbouring an undeserved reputation among mining executives for being a radical leftist, the soon-to-be-president likewise assured the industry’s heavy hitters that “we will always be open to dialogue…We promise to maintain macroeconomic prudence and a balanced fiscal position.”862 By that stage in his political career, however, Humala’s attentiveness to the needs of capital would not be a surprise to investors in Peru anymore than it was to the American embassy, which had reported in a cable in 2008 that in a meeting with the ambassador, the future president “warned that dangerous, anti-systemic radicals could ultimately threaten the stability of the state.” He added that he is a “‘nationalist, not a leftist’” and only “represents…pragmatic change.”863
One area in which the Canadian state’s intervention in Peru has been especially pronounced is aid. From 2002 to 2012, CIDA, through its PeruCan project, spent C$13.8 million on liberalizing regulatory reforms in the country’s mining industry to benefit Canadian investors.864 But Peru is also emblematic of the trajectory of Conservative aid policy. A site of extensive mineral wealth but beset by sharp opposition to mining, Peru was targeted in CIDA’s Countries of Focus program in 2009. Following the 2011 election, when populist appeals to mining reform found an increasingly receptive audience, the Harper government stepped up its financial intervention in the country’s beleagured natural resources sector through its aid budget. Canadian aid was used to provide financial support to a government open to natural resource development, while clearly influencing the trajectory of an industry dominated by Canadian capital. While CIDA has committed over C$60 million for Peru’s natural resources sector between 2002 and 2019, most of it is from 2011 onwards, which accounts for the largest component of its total aid budget in the country. In 2011, for example, it announced C$4.9 million for “training and capacity development in conflict management” in the extractive sector that will promote “dialogue at national, regional and local levels.” The program includes regional conflict offices, “technical assistance” to develop tools to “address specific conflicts” and “dialogue tables.”865 During his visit to Peru in the spring of 2013, in which he brought along Canadian investors, Harper announced C$38 million for Peru’s extractives sector, cloaked in the language of development, including for the writing of regional laws and regulations in the sector and for the establishment of a process for environmental impact assessements—all to “help Peru to maximize the benefits of its natural resources.”866 As Lee Berthiaume points out, Harper’s visit and funding announcement came at a time when over C$7 billion in mining projects were bottlenecked in the country’s environmental assessment process. The Peruvian government was seeking to develop a new streamlined system, which Canada stepped in to support.867
Of course, funding the creation of an environmental review process or the training of staff presupposes the existence of a natural resources sector open to and likely dominated by Canadian capital, whose very existence is hotly contested by many of the peoples on whose territory it is being developed. “Conflict management” training means nothing if the Peruvian state, supported by Canada, proceeds with opening up vast areas of the country to Canadian (and other foreign) companies. Indeed, insofar as it is premised on the existence of large-scale industrial mining, the program will inevitably contribute to conflict not diminish it; the real goal is to provide ideological cover for the draining of billions of dollars in wealth from indigenous territories while leaving the latter economically and ecologically impoverished, and to channel anger and militancy into safer, and ultimately useless, pathways.
The same premise underlies CIDA’s direct partnership with mining companies, formally announced in March 2011 by Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda, with a commitment of C$27 million over five years for companies’ CSR initiatives in Africa, the Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Peru was one of the first countries targeted by this new aid strategy. CIDA backed Barrick’s contested open-pit mine in Laguna Sur with C$500,000 for CSR projects implemented by World Vision. The strongly-opposed development is located in an area near several small lakes that provide fresh water for thousands of farmers living downstream.868 As noted above, Peru was also included in CIDA’s C$5 million Andean Regional Initiative to “improve dialogue between communities and the private sector.”869
Peru’s future certainly has not been decided. Communities, in the face of immense obstacles, continue to challenge Canadian capital and defend their land and ecologies—sometimes with success. The struggle, as elsewhere in Latin America, remains, however, an uphill battle. The yoke of dependency is not easily broken, and there are wealthy forces, both Peruvian and external, working to ensure the status quo of poverty, disposession, and ecological destruction is not upset.
This chapter has sought to convey the dramatic scope and depth of the neoliberal mining boom in Peru in recent years, and the critical part played by Canadian investors and their political backers in pushing this process as far as it has come. It has demonstrated how the neoliberal era has enabled the extension and intensification of long established patterns of natural resource dependency in Peru. We have also made it clear precisely how Canadian capital today benefits from the legacies of racist violence endured by indigenous communities in different ways over the colonial, republican, and Cold War periods. Finally, the chapter has highlighted the particular ecological dimensions to intensified capitalist extraction in the twenty-first century, and the way ecological devastation is associated with the dynamics of Canadian mining investment and the Canadian geopolitical strategy developed to provide that investment with elaborate infrastructures of diplomatic support and cover. In all of these senses, it should now be evident that Peru is but one particularly dramatic case of a set of patterns characteristic of the new Canadian imperialism in the Americas more generally.