Blood of Extraction
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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.
HUMALA’S FALSE PROMISE
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 o
il 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
CANADIAN MINERAL DIPLOMACY
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