by Todd Gordon
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
CONCLUSION
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.
CHAPTER 7
TAPPING THE VEINS OF ECUADOR
Luis Macas has long been a proponent of the simultaneous struggle against colonial racism endured by indigenous peoples and the exploitation of popular classes under capitalism. When, in mid-July 2010, we sat in Quito with this ex-president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), and former presidential candidate for the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement – New Country, we began our exchange with his reflections on the government of Rafael Correa. “From my point of view,” Macas began,
this is neither a socialist nor even a left-wing government. This is a populist government, whose objective is to challenge the model on a few points, through a series of modest reforms, so that the model as a whole can continue advancing. Fundamental changes, radical changes in this country, are not going to come about with this government.870
Correa first scraped his way into the presidency in the second round of elections in 2006. This was a political contest scheduled in a time when the prestige of the indigenous movement—by far the most important popular force in Ecuador for several decades871—had still to recover from the acute setback it suffered as a consequence of the movement’s participation in the ill-fated government of Lucio Gutiérrez.872
The wildly popular process of a Constituent Assembly in 2007 and 2008 offered up an extended honeymoon for Correa and large cross-sections of society. A new, progressive Constitution received the approval of 64 percent of voters in a referendum in September 2008, and Correa was re-elected—this time in the first round—with 52 percent of the popular vote in April 2009. Things began to sour soon after, however, when Correa’s failure to break with many of the quotidian banalities of the neoliberal economics he had inherited was difficult to reconcile with the President’s romantic and ostentatious slogans of “twenty-first century socialism” and a “Citizen’s Revolution.” Indeed, the President would strain to align his practical commitment to aggressively reorienting the Ecuadorian economy toward the extraction of minerals by multinational corporations with his preferred rhetorical schemas for the next several years.
“But one of the recurrent paradoxes of the bourgeoisie’s political history,” Catherine Conaghan rightly points out in reference to twentieth-century Latin America, “lies in its capacity to oppose even the most tepid reformism. Polices that do not directly damage dominant-class material interests are sometimes opposed with an intensity seemingly out of proportion to the issues at stake.”873 This incongruity between the actual threat of reform and the hostility of bourgeois response can be partially explained by the “unpredictability of policy outcomes,” Conaghan suggests:
Policy shift may replace the devil you know for one you don’t know. With this principle in mind, the business community can be expected to oppose any sort of policy change that would upset the environment that they have already mastered.874
With very little need for alteration, Conaghan’s formula can be generalized in many respects from the dynamics of the domestic bourgeoisie to the reaction of imperialist powers operating in Latin America when faced with reformist challenges to their immediate and longer term interests in the region. Unsurprisingly, then, just as the relatively minor contestation of the neoliberal status quo offered by the government of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was sufficient to provoke a right-wing coup in June 2009, Correa’s embrace of radical slogans and his early connection to social movements was seen as a threat, both by sections of the Ecuadorian capitalist class and imperialist powers alike.
Consequently, as part of Canada’s broader geopolitical intervention in the Andean region, Ecuador became a strategic focus following Correa’s election. While in mainstream media commentary Correa’s Ecuador is often lumped together with Venezuela and Bolivia as part of the Andean red tide challenging imperialist hegemony in the region, this is, in many ways, a misleading diagnosis: Ecuador is not as large or politically influential as Venezuela, the Correa government has not opted to nationalize its natural resources (even partially, as in Bolivia), and its redistributive and social policies are modest when compared to those in Venezuela. But the context of relatively strong social movements in Ecuador, many of which have focused a considerable part of their energies on directly challenging Canadian mining and oil companies, has nonetheless been viewed as an obstacle to the broad economic and geopolitical interests of Canada in a region with a resurgent Left. Especially important to the Canadian state is the potential threat posed to Canadian multinational companies with substantial investments in the country.875 The Correa government, elected initially with the support of many social movements, is seen by Canadian officials as having a disturbingly ambivalent orientation toward the neoliberal imperial project, especially when compared to its considerably more pliant neighbours, Peru and Colombia. Ecuador’s new strategic alliances
with Venezuela and Bolivia are also viewed with concern.
Canadian capital has a lot to lose in Ecuador. Canadian economic interests are relatively extensive in the country, and Canada’s political engagement certainly reflects this fact. The Canadian government has sought systematically to rein in any perceived serious movement leftward—beyond the occasional rhetorical flourish—by the Correa government. Canada’s mining industry is the largest in Ecuador, which is dependent on natural resource exports, and Canadian companies are more generally one of the principal foreign investors in Ecuador. Canadian interests in the country grew through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, with over thirty mining companies with properties by 2008, but the extent of investments ebbed in the face of growing resistance in the 2000s and the uncertainty of the early stages of the Correa presidency.876 A Canadian oil company was among several in the industry to sign exploitation contracts with Ecuador in February 2012.877 Most of the Canadian mining corporations active in Ecuador are juniors, playing the role of exploration and determining whether or not the contextual environment—geological, political, and economic—is conducive to making profit. Ultimately, most juniors fail to find sufficiently profitable deposits to attract a major that could then buy them and bring forward the necessary finances to begin extraction and production; but for those few juniors that are successful the profits can be enormous.878 In 2010, FAIT estimated a cumulative C$1.5 billion invested in the Ecuadorian mining sector with C$4 billion more possible over the next decade should Canada successfully put its stamp on the small Andean nation’s developmental path.879 In the words of one FAIT appraisal of the political-economic context of Ecuador from 2010:
Ecuador has mineral resource potential similar to neighouring countries Peru, Chile and Colombia, however it does not have a well developed mining industry.…there remains significant opposition to mining in Ecuador from certain Indigenous groups (particularly the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador).880
Thus in its Country Strategy reports the Quito embassy consistently highlights the pursuit of “trade and investment” and increased “business and investment opportunities” as one of its “primary interests in Ecuador.”881
Canada’s view of Correa has been coloured by his initial association with anti-mining activists (an association that unravelled rather quickly after the first years of his presidency), his government’s suspension of the activities of Canadian companies EcuaCorriente and Ascendant Copper due to violence and strong local opposition surrounding their projects, and the generally reformist mood towards natural resource development surrounding his election. However, as we discuss below, Correa has been far from unresponsive to Canadian demands. Despite a hard-line position adopted initially by many social movements and some members of his government vis-à-vis Canadian capital, this orientation has largely been defeated inside the government thanks in part to Canada’s mostly behind -the-scenes intervention. Indeed, Correa has shown a willingness to sit down on multiple occasions with Canadian executives, embassy officials, and cabinet ministers to hear their concerns. Yet for Canadian executives, the embassy, and Ottawa, Correa is still not their guy. His occasionally close relations with sections of the Ecuadorian Left, and his modest but popular redistributive social policies are reasons to worry. Correa’s association with Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, his participation in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), his defaulting on US$3.9 billion in foreign debt obligations, his renegotiation of contracts with oil multinationals that leave a larger share of revenues in the hands of the state, and his periodic antagonism against U.S. wishes in international politics—such as offering WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and (briefly) National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum—are not signals of consistent submission to the dominant playmakers in the international system.882 Most importantly, Correa’s unwillingness to completely prostrate Ecuador to Canadian mining interests has meant that, despite Correa’s conflicts with indigenous and environmental activists, Canada clearly does not trust him, and this distrust has framed Canadian policy in Ecuador. 883
Canada has aggressively pushed back against all attempts by Ecuador’s government and social movements to adopt robust environmental measures, limits on foreign investors in the natural resources sector, and stronger corporate taxation and royalty regimes. From the time of Correa’s first election until the passage of a new mining law just over two years later, Canadian embassy staff, cabinet ministers, and representatives from FAIT and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) met regularly with key Ecuadorian officials, including President Correa and members of his cabinet. What amounted to the embassy’s full frontal diplomatic assault won praise from the mining industry. EcuaCorriente executive, Ian Harris, remarked in 2008 that “the Canadian embassy has worked tirelessly to affect change in the mining policy.”884 “IAMGOLD benefits from” the “greater diplomatic leverage” offered by the Canadian government and embassy in Ecuador and the Andean region, an IAMGOLD executive gushed to the international business press. “We can access, as needed, prompt diplomatic Canadian support for management issues in countries like Ecuador, Peru and Colombia,” which is extremely important in the Andean region, he stresses, because “anti-mining groups, indigenous rights groups and environmental groups are better organized, better funded and often more confrontational.”885
The Canadian campaign, coordinated by the embassy in Quito, supported by Ottawa, and involving Canadian companies themselves, effectively reframed a national debate on the future of Ecuadorian development and environmental justice to portray the interests of Canadian investors as those of Ecuadorians and isolate the call for alternative development strategies. All along, this Canadian strategy has deployed constant reference to that liberal imperialistic concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as cover for its attempt to shape Ecuador’s natural resources policy to its liking. But this did not constitute the only form of Canadian intervention in Ecuador. As we discuss in more detail in Chapter 9, the Canadian government began pouring money into the country following Correa’s election and the writing of a new constitution by the democratically-elected Constituent Assembly. In the words of FAIT, this flow of resources was directed towards the “promotion of democracy, pluralism and human rights.”886 Canada’s intervention has been premised on the ideological argument that Correa’s election and the establishment of a new constitution have posed a threat to Ecuadorian democracy, much like in the Venezuelan case. In the logic of Canadian imperialism, any government which does not fully conform to the norms of neoliberal policy, and which stretches, however modestly, the narrow strictures of liberal democracy is by definition a threat to democracy as such.
THE SHIFTING POLITICAL WINDS OF THE CORREA GOVERNMENT
In order to navigate the conflicts surrounding mining developments in Ecuador, the way in which Canadian capital and diplomacy are wrapped up in these conflicts, and to understand how the Correa government situates itself vis-à-vis the popular struggles on one side and the interests of multinational capital on the other, it is important to begin with the complex backdrop of social movement-state relations over the last number of years. In April 2005, a mass explosion of resentment and agitation in the streets of the capital against the corruption and betrayal embodied in the administration of then-President Gutiérrez successfully forced that disgraced figure from power. The protests were characterized politically by a largely urban middle-class sentiment—anti-party, anti-neoliberal, and anti-corruption—but lacked a coherent political project of their own.887 Rather than signifying a deep rearticulation of popular sector power or organizational capacity—indeed, the indigenous movement was almost completely absent from the scene—the April 2005 revolt instead encapsulated a relatively spontaneous expression of disdain for the political elite and inchoate rage against the ongoing imposition of neoliberal economic restructuring in the country.
This was the vacuum into
which Correa’s newly constructed political coalition, Alianza País (Country Alliance, AP), positioned itself during the 2006 presidential campaign. His main right-wing contender, the multimillionaire banana magnate Álvaro Noboa, received more votes than Correa in the first round, but was sufficiently hated by the popular sectors that a second-round rally for the AP circumvented his rise to the presidency. The marketing team of AP pitched Correa as a heterodox outsider, an anti-neoliberal economist who—as a consequence of missionary work as a youngster—spoke Kichwa and was familiar with the needs and aspirations of the country’s indigenous, peasant, and urban popular sectors. The 2007–2008 Constituent Assembly process solidified the President’s early popularity, as the country polarized around a hard-right camp represented by Noboa, and a progressive poll led by Correa. Within the Constituent Assembly, as a result of this wider societal divarication, a “mega-bloc” of the Left emerged around Correa, which included Pachakutik, the Maoist Movimiento Popular Democrático (Democratic Popular Movement, MPD), and the Izquierda Democrática (Democratic Left), although always under the hegemonic guidance of Correa and the AP.888
