by Todd Gordon
The case of Eco Oro is a reflection of the difficulties companies continue to face from organized opposition. The firm’s plans for its Angostura gold mine were stalled recently by the Minister of Energy and Mines in the context of a mounting movement against the project by local communities and environmental organizations. While the company worked to change its plans, including the possibility of building an underground mine, Colombia’s Ministry of Environment decided to ban mining and create a wilderness preserve in Satander, where the Eco Oro property in question is located.715 It is also worth mentioning that Eco Oro has a long history of conflict with local communities in the country. In the mid-1990s, when Eco Oro was still known as Greystar, the company was involved in fostering violent assaults by security forces against its opponents. This led eventually to the kidnapping of a Greystar executive by the FARC, lasting ninety-four days. The kidnapping ultimately precipitated the temporary exit of Greystar, and several other Canadian companies, from Colombia by the end of the 1990s.716
Cosigo Resources
In 2014, another representative conflict between indigenous communities and Canadian mining capital, which began in 2009, was still ongoing in Yaigojé-Apaporis national park, located in the Colombian Amazon region, in the department of Vaupés, bordering on Brazil. The Canadian corporation Cosigo Resources is hoping to extract gold from the park, while roughly twenty indigenous communities inhabiting the park—including the territories of the Macuna, Tanimuca, and Letuama peoples—are lined up against the extractive projects. The Colombian regulatory body of National Parks created the Yaigojé-Apaporis national park in 2009, a move which was pushed forward by rounds of community consultations in the region in which a majority of the inhabitants were in favour of the establishment of the park. The decision was supported, furthermore, by the Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales (Colombian Academy of Natural, Physical and Exact Sciences) which came to the conclusion that the cultural and spiritual values of the indigenous peoples in the region were intimately associated with the conservation of the natural environment. However, in October 2009, two days after the national park was formally established, the Servicio Geológico Colombiano (Colombian Geological Service, previously called Ingeominas) granted a mining title to Cosigo Resources covering 9,973 hectares of the park. The Canadian company is now mobilizing its resources to force progress in terms of facilitating the exploitation of gold in the area, pointing to its title as the legal basis for proceeding. Three judges were sent to the park in early 2014, along with the Minister of the Environment, to attempt to settle the legal components to the dispute.717
The legal battles remain unresolved to date, and the social pressure of activists is increasingly generating divisions within different components of the state apparatus. For example, the director of the National Mining Agency, María Constanza García, refuses to revoke the titles. Her logic is that the mining titles do not have accompanying environmental licences, the other requirement necessary to begin a mining project, and therefore it is not imperative that the titles be cancelled. The director of National Parks, Julia Miranda, questions this logic. She believes that it generates confusion because “anyone who holds a title is always going to try to exploit it.” She explains how, in the case of the Yaigojé-Apaporis park, indigenous communities are divided over a title to gold that the government awarded to Cosigo. Siding with Miranda, the Minister of the Environment, Juan Gabriel Uribe, has argued that the refusal to cancel these titles is unconstitutional.718
In June 2014, the office of Colombia’s Attorney General became embroiled in the controversy. The Attorney General has the power to protect strategic ecosystems, and for this reason can prohibit any mining activity deemed to seriously threaten the environment. However, this institution has not wanted to declare null and void the mining title granted to Cosigo Resources, in spite of requests to do so by the environmental authority of the National Parks system. In the park in question, there are thirty-six mining titles that have been granted, including that of Cosigo Resources. On one side of the conflict, there are the twenty indigenous communities in the area of Cosigo’s title that consider the site sacred, indeed the site from which life originated. Linked to the concerns of the indigenous communities is a secular, environmental worry, regarding the park’s natural, ecological diversity. According to the petition delivered to the Attorney General’s office by the National Parks authority, living in the million hectares which constitute the park, are 362 species of birds, 81 species of reptiles, 73 species of amphibians, 201 species of fish, 443 species of butterflies, and 16 species of mammals. On the other side of the conflict, Cosigo Resources sustains the position that it obtained the mining title according to the rules, regulations, and norms of Colombian law, and that it was granted title through legitimate processes. Furthermore, the company argues, against the evidence of all available precedent, that the mining exploration will have minimal ecological effects because of the clean technologies to be employed in the company’s activities, and the fact that there will be economic benefits to the communities in the form of employment.719
In summary, our discussion of a series of representative Canadian companies involved in extractive industries in Colombia has shown, unequivocally, that they are anything but neutral bystanders, or innocent victims caught in the crossfire of a merely domestic, Colombian armed conflict. To the contrary, Canadian corporations are benefiting from paramilitary and military terrorization of local communities which stand in the way of, and in opposition to, large-scale mining under the control of multinational capital. Canadian companies are intimately involved in the dispossession and displacement of small peasants, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, and small-scale artisanal miners. For those mines already in operation, Canadian capital is also involved in the exploitation of the mine workers. Set against this record, the human rights posturing by Canadian mining giants and the Canadian government, and their slogans of corporate social responsibility, are revealed as crude attempts to isolate Canadian capital and the Canadian state from political accountability for their role in the atrocities carried out over the last decades in Colombia. Indeed, the line on corporate social responsibility deployed by representatives of Canadian capital in the extractive sectors begs comparison to the cigarette industry’s denials of the addictive attributes of nicotine. Obviously, with commodity prices high since 2003, the stakes are high for investors. The mining and oil industries in Canada are hoping to improve the image of their activities in Colombia and elsewhere, as part of their general strategy within the battleground of ideas. If we clear away their smoke and mirrors, however, underneath lies a set of relatively straightforward geopolitical and investment motivations which underpin the actions of Canadian capital and the state in Colombia. It is to these motivations that we now turn our attention.
JANUS-FACED FREE TRADE
A major advancement for Canadian capital in the country was the Free Trade Agreement pursued by the Harper government, the path for which was cleared by the improved security situation (for corporate investors, at least). An opportunity to build both stronger economic and political ties, the FTA became a focal point of Canadian diplomatic energies after the announcement of negotiations during the summer of 2007. In this way, the Canadian government, led by a wave of ministerial visits, moved to formally consolidate the conditions already established on the ground during Canadian capital’s latest push into the country.
As they have in many other countries in the region, the PDAC meetings have been used as a tool to promote Canadian capital, with Colombian officials brought to Canada to meet with industry and government representatives about the state of Colombia’s natural resources sector and strategies for moving forward. Creating the space to give input on moving the country’s natural resources sector in a direction favourable to Canadian capital was the impetus behind Canada’s initiative to regularize its outreach to the Colombian government by establishing
a working group with officials in Colombia’s Ministry of Mines and Energy.720 Trips to Colombia by cabinet ministers and Canadian business executives continued after the agreement came into force in August 2011 as well: a November 2012 trip, led by Minister of State for the Americas Diane Ablonczy, for example, featured representatives of a major Bay St. law firm and several infrastructure firms planning on cashing in on the rapid growth of the mining and oil sectors.721
The FTA itself was a significant victory for the Harper government, given the difficulties Canadian capital had faced in Colombia a decade earlier. The terrible human rights situation of the country sparked greater public criticism of the deal than is normal for Canadian FTAs.722 In February 2014, for example, Amnesty International sponsored a human rights delegation of Colombians to Ottawa, including Colombian deputy justice Federico Guzman Duque and an indigenous rights activists who said she was afraid to have her name publicized. They noted crimes against humanity and war crimes against indigenous Colombians. Duque discussed the systematic rape and torture of indigenous women as a tool of armed conflict in the country. He stressed that there has been a campaign of displacement of indigenous communities whose land stands in the way of the development of mining concessions. Canada, in particular, they suggested has a responsibility to take action because of the FTA and the presence of Canadian companies involved in the extractive sectors of the Colombian economy. Duque noted that some Canadian-owned extractive corporations are associated with armed groups that protect them in territories that have been depopulated of indigenous peoples, “or they are simply profiting from that situation.”723
As with all other trade agreements, the new FTA legally locks-in the property rights of Canadian capital, which, together with the war on the Colombian countryside carried out under Uribe and Santos, creates a much more “secure” situation for Canadian investors than has previously existed. However, the severity of the repression in Colombia and the negative attention the agreement received both internationally and domestically as a result, forced the Harper government to include human rights conditions in the treaty. A minority government at the time, the Conservatives were only able to pass the FTA with the support of the Liberal party, which made a show of demanding the inclusion of human rights clauses. True to form (for both the Conservatives and Liberals), however, these concessions are superficial at best, and will not have a tangible impact on the practices of Canadian investors or the Colombian state. They are, as with the Harper government’s discourse around human rights in post-coup Honduras, a mere fig leaf designed to legitimate the plundering of the country’s natural resources, the exploitation of its workers, and the explicit and implicit support provided to a government that is a systematic violator of human rights. One such human rights concession is the establishment of financial penalties—fines—for the killing of trade unionists in the labour cooperation side agreement (note that this is a side agreement, i.e., not part of the actual FTA). The other major concession, an amendment added to the implementing legislation at the public behest of Scott Brison and the Liberals in return for their support, calls for the production of annual reports on the human-rights impact of the trade agreement.
The constant refrain about human rights in Colombia from both Conservatives and Liberals is that, while the situation is imperfect, it is not nearly as bad as critics make it out to be, and that Uribe took great strides during his two administrations to improve conditions (although, as evidenced by internal reports and communiques, both FAIT leaders and the Conservatives privately understand the situation is much worse than they publicly let on).724 Harper was effusive in his praise for Uribe, who has “made tremendous progress against the vicious cycle of conflict, violence and under-development that has plagued Colombia for decades.”725 Stockwell Day, while Minister of International Trade, offered a new level of absurdity to the debate on the FTA which took place in the House of Commons: “Are people still being murdered in that country? Yes, they are. They are still being murdered in Canada also…Is it perfect in Colombia? No, but it is certainly moving in the right direction.”726 Not surprisingly, the scale of ongoing repression in Colombia, the ties of the paramilitaries to state institutions, and the scandals around the false positives (the killing of non-combatants, often street youth, by the military, which said they were guerrillas in order to claim greater progress in the war) are ignored by the pro-FTA forces in their effort to defend the deal.
As in Honduras, the possibility of economic development and improvement in the human rights situation was also cited as justification for the FTA in the face of criticism.727 “Rules-based, liberalized trade and investment can…contribute to a domestic environment where…the rule of law [is] respected,” according to a FAIT report.728 The FTA will bring rule of law, which will somehow remarkably extend beyond the property rights of capital—the actual purpose of trade agreements—to protect the rights of Colombians. According to such fantasies, Canadian investment will plant the seeds of economic growth out of which will flower greater respect for human rights. But just as in the Honduran example, the trickle-down theory of human rights in Colombia has proven to be little more than crude ideological cover for the untrammeled pursuit of profit: deepening political and economic ties have not improved human rights in the country. An internal FAIT report on the Colombian human rights situation in 2010—three years after Harper’s praise for Uribe and a year after Day’s ridiculous pronouncements in the legislature, both quoted above—acknowledges that “Homicides and forced disappearances of unionists all increased in 2010,” and “violence and threats against human rights defenders continue,” including by “state agents.”729 In an foreboding sign of the meaning and potential impact of the FTA, a mere two days after the agreement was passed in Ottawa, Colombian police attacked a strike, seriously injuring a dozen people at Calgary-based Gran Tierra Energy’s operations.730 Colombian human rights organization Somos Defensores (We Are Defenders), reports that in 2012 (the year after the FTA came into force) the murder of human rights defenders was, at sixty-nine, fourteen times what it was in 2006. They attribute this growth to a land restitution law that was to provide displaced people the opportunity to reclaim stolen land: as more people came forward, more were targeted.731
None of this should come as a surprise: the human rights components of the FTA were never intended to genuinely alter the country’s sociopolitical conditions. The labour cooperation side agreement calls on both countries to respect basic core labour standards (right to unionize, no child labour, no forced labour, etc.), but offers no institutional body to which Colombian workers could complain, apart from those which previously existed, and which clearly had no substantive impact on workers’ rights prior to the FTA, given how terrible the situation was in that period. So there is no reason to assume anything will change with the treaty simply because a labour cooperation side agreement was tacked on at the end of it. The addition of fines imposed on governments for continued violation of labour rights, in a context of assassinations, death threats, and physical assaults, amounts to a de facto decriminalization of violence and intimidation. Moreover, there is nothing to indicate in the side agreement that the Colombian government will be held responsible for the actions of paramilitaries, who account for a significant amount of the violence against union activists, and do so with the tacit or explicit consent of the military, but retain a nominal independence from the government. Another major flaw of the labour cooperation side agreement is that it does not cover indigenous peoples who, as we have discussed, are victimized at staggering rates in the mining and oil zones.
As for the vaunted annual reports on human rights, proposed by the Liberals: they have proven meaningless. The Canadian government’s first annual report, submitted in May 2012, said nothing about human rights, and instead provided an overview of the economic relations between the two countries. The second annual report, submitted in June 2013, offered only a few sentences on human rights—enough to conclu
de that “It is not possible to establish a direct link between the CCOFTA [Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement] and the human rights situation in Colombia.” It helps that the embassy in Bogotá, in its contribution to the report, focused on only two industries—cut flowers and sugar—and within those industries merely on the impact of tariff reductions on human rights. So while Canadian investment in Colombia is dominated by the country’s rapidly expanding mining and energy sectors, both of which are connected to forced displacement, violation of labour rights, and assassinations, as is widely known and reported by international and Colombian human rights organizations, these sectors rate no mention at all in the legally-mandated human rights assessment.732
DEVELOPMENT AID AS TROJAN HORSE
Canadian aid policy is also clearly implicated in the drive to open up Colombia’s natural resources to foreign investment and thus bears some responsibility for the human rights tragedy, related in part to the intensification of activities in the country’s mining and oil zones. While CIDA boasted about its contribution to rights in Colombia through its funding of selected projects for the demobilization of the armed conflict and de-mining programs, this is contradicted by its role in establishing the country’s liberalized mining regime. Liberalization fuelled military and paramilitary assaults on communities in the way of resource development. The mining regime reflects Canada’s prioritization of mining as central to Colombia’s national development strategy, and offers another example of the interests of Canadian capital driving aid priorities regardless of the humanitarian crisis to which it contributes. According to an official at the agency, between 1997 and 2002, CIDA financed a project to help the country “strengthen its institutional capacity in both the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Ministry of the Environment and the regulatory agencies these agencies worked with.”733
