by Todd Gordon
B2Gold’s projects of exploitation and expansion in Chontales have been the focus of sustained resistance from various community organizations.557 In late July and early August 2013, for example, five hundred artisanal miners, from an association of small miners called El Cafetal, re-established a road blockade against B2Gold, near Chontales. The blockade had been set up initially in February 2013, but police forces were sent in to repress the activists, resulting in forty-seven detainees, twelve of whom were ultimately convicted of various charges, and seven injuries. Javier Amador, one of the leaders of El Cafetal, said in the August protest:
We will continue on our feet, rejuvenating force and courage in our struggle, in order to continue confronting the monstrous power of B2Gold, which represents death, hunger, and destruction—the enrichment of its associates, while leaving nothing for our people, except misery and illnesses.558
The Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights) has formally presented complaints over the police repression of anti-B2Gold activists to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights within the Organization of American States (OAS).559
Likewise, B2Gold has faced opposition in the community of Rancho Grande, in the department of Matagalpa, a zone rich in biodiversity, with forests, rivers, and small-producer agriculture, located 213 kilometres north of the capital Managua. There is no active mine in the region as of yet, but B2Gold was granted a concession for exploration in the area in 2010. Since that time, there have been three major marches in opposition to exploration, the latest, on March 21, 2013, involving over four thousand protesters. The grassroots of the Catholic Church in the area, still imbued with the progressive legacy of liberation theology, has been behind much of the anti-mining organization.560
Pablo Espinoza, one of the forty-three priests of the local diocese of Matagalpa opposed to B2Gold, justified the community’s opposition with the following:
Nature is the only wealth here, as a resource of our area. More than that, I would say that [to develop mining here] would be to eliminate the source of life for the entire Matagalpa region, and for Nicaragua as a whole. From here comes the oxygen that we all need to breathe. These mountains, these rivers, are why the local population [has gathered] freely and voluntarily in this assembly to make their presence felt.
Espinoza condemned the petty handouts that he said B2Gold offers those in the community in exchange for allegiance to the corporation’s activities. He described being offered a car and a job with a good salary if he stopped his activism. “Can you imagine the weight on my conscience if I had opened my door to that? It would be like sending all of these people to the slaughterhouse.”561
The Red de Mujeres de Matagalpa (Network of Women of Matagalpa, RMM) is another community organization involved in the struggle against B2Gold in Rancho Grande. One RMM activist, Carola Brantome, notes that “there is very strong resistance from the population of Rancho Grande to the establishment of a mining company.” Brantome laments the fact that the Ortega government has not lent its support to opposition to the project. “We are sure that the government is conscious of the damage that this could do to the environment and population,” Brantome says, “of the damage that will bring misery and death, as occurred in the past in the banana zones.”562 Norma Chavarría is another leading activist in Rancho Grande. “The people are conscious of the damage and consequences that will follow if permits for extracting gold are given to B2Gold,” she says. “The people of the community are not only thinking of the immediate area in which the mine will be located, but the entire region and all of the sources of water in the surrounding communities” that are facing contamination. Rejecting B2Gold’s claims of corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability, for Chavarría the company “is selling a discourse of bread for today, we are going to have resources today, but it’s bread for today and death for tomorrow.”563
Given the opposition to B2Gold, we can expect similar developments if the open-pit mine planned by Vancouver-based Golden Reign Resources Ltd. goes ahead in San Albino-Murra, in the department of Nueva Segovia. Exploration thus far has suggested large quantities of gold in the area, and Golden Reign, having won a twenty-five-year concession of several thousand hectares in the area from the Ortega government, is optimistic that they will be able to develop an open-pit mine in the near future.564
Despite his support for the mining industry, Ortega’s past and current association with Hugo Chávez has made him a target of Canadian criticism. The embassy and Canadian government have also targeted what they perceive as his attack on Nicaraguan democracy. Following municipal elections in 2008 that the Nicaraguan opposition criticized as fraudulent, the Canadian embassy, with instructions from Ottawa, “urged” the U.S. not to simply ask for a recount of ballots, but to support a more thorough investigation as per the opposition’s wishes. When Nicaragua’s Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional ban on consecutive re-election of officials, opening the way for Ortega’s successful run for re-election in 2010, the Harper government hypocritically attacked the decision, suggesting it “continues the very worrying trend of narrowing democratic space in Nicaragua.” 565
Constitutional change permitting re-election in Nicaragua is unacceptable for the Canadians, despite the fact that, as noted above, nothing was said when the brother of Canadian ally Óscar Arias successfully led the charge in Costa Rica, which enabled Arias to run for presidential re-election—not to mention the fact that Canadian prime ministers, such as Stephen Harper, can run for re-election as many times as they like. During a trip to Nicaragua in 2009—not long before the election of Lobo in Honduras, which Canada fully supported—Kent stressed to Ortega and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Samuel Santos, “Canada’s concern over the narrowing of democratic space in the country.” Following Ortega’s re-election in the fall of 2009, Canada again publicly criticized supposed “irregularities and deficiencies in the preparation for elections and on election day” and warned of the lack of “democracy and the rule of law,” accusations it repeated at the OAS.566 As a result, the Harper government shifted C$1.5 million in Nicaraguan aid to democratic and electoral reform in the country.567
PANAMA
While it has received comparatively less attention than other countries in the isthmus, Panama has become another important site of struggle against Canadian capital, while the Harper government has actively pushed for stronger access to the Panamanian market.568 These efforts culminated in Harper’s stop in Panama City in August 2009, during one of his regular Latin American forays, in which he signed a free trade agreement and met with current President Ricardo Martinelli of the conservative Cambio Democrático (Democratic Change) party.569 Identified as a friendly and stable economic ally in a region where recent political shifts have not typically favoured the interests of foreign powers, in 2011 Export Development Canada selected Panama as its Central American and Caribbean regional hub, establishing a new office there.570 Martinelli’s election in 2009 marked the consolidation of a long neoliberal turn, beginning with the governments of Guillermo Endara (1990–1994) and Ernesto Pérez-Balladares (1994–1999).571
But stability for Canadian capital in Panama, as elsewhere in the region, has proven elusive. Martinelli is at heart a friend of Canadian mining, which dominates the industry in Panama. From early in his presidency, Martinelli sought to make it easier for foreign companies to access the country’s untapped mineral deposits, many of which lie on or near indigenous lands. In 2010, for example, the government modified over sixty articles of the Charter of the General Congress, in order to limit the rights to autonomy and self-governance of the Ngäbe-Buglé, Panama’s largest indigenous nation.572 This laid the basis for a series of attempts to modify the Mining Law in order to free the way for foreign investors to establish mines in Ngäbe-Buglé territory. Martinelli also sought to expedite environmental assessments. These are the kinds of things that endear someone t
o Canadian mining leaders and the Harper government.573
But Martinelli’s accommodation to large-scale mining interests has caused a sharp backlash, which has centred, in part, on Canadian company Inmet Mining. In 2011, Inmet became the subject of a national debate, emblematic of the potential environmental destruction associated with large-scale mining and the government’s willingness to sell out to foreign capital. In February of that year, amidst angry protests from indigenous activists outside and inside its halls, the Panamanian Congress repealed a decades-old mining law preventing foreign governments from investing in its mining sector. Under the new legal scenario, Inmet—which was seeking financing from sovereign wealth funds from Singapore and South Korea—could proceed with the construction of Central America’s largest copper mine (it is estimated it will produce 266,000 tons of copper annually), the controversial open-pit Cobre Panama project located 120 kilometres west of Panama City.574 A month later, as protests escalated, Martinelli announced his intention to reverse the repeal and to reinstate prohibitions on investments from foreign governments.575 But Martinelli’s stated intention has never been concretized in a new law. Furthermore, several proposals remain on the table for the potential construction of mines on indigenous lands. The government also announced a tender for another large and controversial copper deposit, the Cerro Colorado. In such a setting, it is unsurprising that protests continued through to the end of the year.
The opposition to mining expanded even further in January and February 2012, with a wave of blockades and marches initiated when thousands of Ngäbe-Buglé blockaded the Inter-American highway in San Félix in the western part of the country, on the border of Costa Rica. The demonstrators demanded the government annul the mining and hydroelectric concessions that had been granted in their territory.576 Martinelli’s government responded by sending in riot police, who shot teargas—and bullets, according to many on the scene—at the protesters, killing two, and injuring thirty-two. Forty more activists were detained. “They sent their riot police. Our demonstration was peaceful and they repressed us,” said Omayra Silvera, an indigenous leader involved in organizing the blockade. Carlos de la Cruz, a Catholic priest supporting the demonstrations, reported that a contingent of police attacked protesters without provocation, and were supported from the air by a helicopter.577 The January-February 2012 revolt was in many ways a re-enactment of similar blockades in February 2011, after which the Martinelli government had agreed to prohibit mining and hydroelectric projects in Ngäbe-Buglé territory. It was only when the government failed to live up to its word that the blockades of 2012 were set in place.578 These violent acts of repression, because they were carried out by an ally, drew no comment from Canada. The repression sparked more blockades and marches across the country, including in Coclesito in central Panama where protesters blockaded entrances to Inmet’s Cobre Panama project, and a mine belonging to the Canadian Petaquilla Minerals.579
Despite opposition to its plans, Inmet’s environmental assessment received approval from the Martinelli government in January 2012.580 However, the Panamanian Supreme Court declared that the area where the project is located is protected as part of the Mesoamerican biological corridor, and so the company would have to apply to the Directorate of Protected Areas to get approval. In April 2012, after continued and sometimes violent protests by indigenous activists, the government was forced to pass a law that cancels all mineral exploitation concessions in or near Ngöbe-Buglé territory.581
In a further development that remains unresolved, Martinelli is alleged to have been involved in a corruption scandal linked to the Canadian companies Financial Pacific and Petaquilla Minerals. According to the testimony of the principal accused figure in the case, Mayte Pellegrini, Martinelli used privileged information and his secret account in Financial Pacific to manipulate the price of shares in Petaquilla Minerals.582 Directors of Financial Pacific have been accused of falsifying documents, among other crimes.583
All of the intricate patterns of violent dispossession of communities, and the policing of dissidents within those communities, that have been associated with Canadian investments in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama have increasingly raised the necessity of reinforcing the coercive apparatuses of these states. Flowing both from the immediate material interests of Canadian capital in the region, and the wider geopolitical concerns of the Canadian state, the expansion of Canadian investment was paralleled by a heightened concern on the part of Harper’s government for security in Central America. The remainder of the chapter highlights some of the most crucial components of Canada’s security strategy in the region.
TOWARDS A REGIONAL SECURITY AGENDA
Given Canadian capital’s growing interests in Central America, and the threats to those interests from both social movements and governments, it should hardly come as a surprise that the region would become a focus of Canadian security policy, as it has under the Harper government. Conservative thinking about the isthmus was captured by Kent, speaking as Minister of State for the Americas in 2009, when he identified it as “a key region where the issues of security, prosperity and democratic governance are crucial.”584 The Conservative’s security strategy for Central America was not clearly worked out at that point, and it would only begin to be gradually unveiled two years later, but linking prosperity with security and democracy was by no means new to the Conservative government or the Liberal ones preceding it. And thus there is little reason to expect significant change under the new Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. These have long been abiding and interconnected themes in the Canadian state’s orientation toward towards the Global South.
Nevertheless, Kent’s observation is exemplary of how the ruling class conceptualizes the region in the present. The reference to “prosperity” is left purposely vague—suggesting they are concerned as much about living standards in the region as they are the growing economic interests of Canadian investors—but, as we have discussed, Canadian foreign policy in Central America and the broader region is clearly driven by the needs of Canadian companies and the challenges they face from hostile communities and, occasionally, less-than-compliant governments. And while not elaborated by Kent, subsequent actions and statements by the Harper government and FAIT, as discussed throughout this book, leave little ambiguity as to the nature of their concerns regarding democracy in the region. It seems hardly coincidental that Kent’s statement came as social movement challenges to Canadian mining multinationals were on the rise in Central America, and three left-of-centre governments held the reins of power in the region in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, with another soon to be elected in El Salvador.
Although smaller contributions had been made earlier, the Harper government really began the process of inserting Canada into the security plans of the isthmus and its governments in 2011, including the process of building links with local security forces.585 Citing concern about Guatemala’s “deteriorating security situation,” Foreign Affairs announced C$7.1 million for the country in June of that year to “reform security and justice institutions,” with participation from the RCMP.586 The exact nature of the security deteoriation is not discussed in the announcement; Guatemala certainly has been beset with significant gang violence fuelled by the drug trade (as have Honduras and El Salvador). But we should also not forget that a Canadian ambassador raised concerns about law and order in the country relating to anti-mining activism on national television several years before, while a 2009 National Defence report on Guatemala interestingly notes that “widespread poverty and inequality continue to pose a serious threat to the country’s fragile democratic order”—suggesting at least an implicit recognition that the neoliberal measures Canada advocates could be a source of instability.587
The announcement regarding Guatemala was followed in August of that year with a commitment of another C$9.2 million for security spending for the region, including support for the war
on drugs, port security, and the surveillance and investigation endeavors of the post-coup Honduran police.588 Less than a year later, during the 2012 Summit of the Americas, Harper announced a significant expansion of Canada’s security spending in the region with the establishment of the Canadian Initiative for Security in Central America, through which Canada will spend C$25 million over five years. The initiative includes RCMP training for, and donation of navigation equipment to, the Costa Rican national police; the donation of utility vests by DND to Belize’s military; training for security forces in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in the use of specialized equipment for wiretapping, surveillance, and intelligence analysis; and partnering with Colombia to support police forces in Honduras and Guatemala.589 We can add to these new spending commitments the ongoing engagement by DND with military officers from Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua through the Military Training and Cooperation Program. What is more, the Canadian military has also participated in the annual Plan Panamex war-game manoeuvers since 2003, which were initiated to exercise responses to threats to the Panama Canal, a key regional transit way for shipping. Canada’s participation has included naval destroyers.590
Compared to U.S. security spending in the region, Canadian spending is small (and Canada of course is a much smaller country without the history of foreign intervention). All the same, the level of Canadian spending is significant for Canadian interests in Central America, as well as for the recipient countries. Canadian security spending is often justified as part of the fight against narco-trafficking. While narco violence in Central America is real, the war on drugs has had significant human rights consequences, with beefed up security forces violently intervening in poor neighbourhoods, trampling on poor and young peoples’ rights, and creating significant collateral damage. None of this has done much to curtail the highest echelons of power within the narco-trafficing industry, which are often tied to political and economic elites within Central American countries. Canada’s financing the war can only intensify these problems further. But the war on drugs has also provided convenient cover to Central American governments and their backers to evict peasant and indigenous communities from their lands in the name of fighting crime. While not every militarized operation in the war on drugs is aimed at dispossessing the poor of their land in order to make way for tourist and resource development, some such operations appear as thinly veiled efforts to do exactly that; a pattern has clearly been established between violent evictions in counternarcotics operations and land coveted by multinational capital.591
