The Dominion - Chile

Chilean Supreme Court Red Lights Goldcorp Mine

Tim McSorley — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:50:58 +0000

Indigenous community leader celebrates ruling, promises continued opposition

MEXICO—On Friday, the Chilean Supreme Court ratified a lower court ruling that rendered Goldcorp's environmental assessment for the El Morro mine null, due to irregularities including the company's failure to properly consult with the Diaguita Huascoaltinos Indigenous and Agricultural Community, whose lands would be destroyed if the mine is built.

Following the lower court ruling, Goldcorp stated that they would not stop working until they received an order declaring the Resolution of Environmental Quality, a kind of environmental permit, to be without effect. "This is the order, and there is no appeal," said Sergio Campusano Villches, President of the Diaguita Huascualtino community.

The Chilean press is reporting that the Supreme Court decision was unanimous, and that the company must respond to the ruling before taking further steps towards opening the mine.

The judgement in their favour was a surprise, according to Campusano, who was already preparing to take the legal battle international.

"We were afraid because three of the five judges in the Chilean Supreme Court have been accused of being bought off," Campusano told the Vancouver Media Co-op. "We were actually even preparing to go to the Inter American Commission, since we know there's a lot of money at play here."

The decision has raised the question of whether Goldcorp actually would prefer to deal with this case inside of Chile rather than in international courts, says Campusano. But, he says, his people will continue to oppose proposed copper mine, which requires an almost $4 billion investment by co-owners Goldcorp (70 per cent) and New Gold (30 per cent). Both companies are based in Vancouver.

"These days the ideas of 'consultation' and 'consent' have been manipulated by consulting and human resources firms that work for the government, local governments also stick their noses in there without knowing what they're doing," said Campusano. "All we did was play the game that they want us to play, and 'the illusion' has ended."

The Diaguita Huascoaltinos Indigenous and Agricultural Community have already taken a case against Barrick Gold to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Campusano will be in Vancouver in early June to speak at the Shout Out Against Mining Injustice event, organized by the Council of Canadians.

Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist and co-founder of the Vancouver Media Co-op. This piece was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Diaguita Huascoaltinos Indigenous and Agricultural Community

Goldcorp Base Camp El Morro

The Roots of Mapuche Resistance

hillarybain — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 05:46:10 +0000

For Indigenous people in Chile, the struggle for life is labeled a terrorist activity

VANCOUVER—More than 34 Mapuche political prisoners in Chile have entered into day 75 of a hunger strike. They are seeking significant changes in the way the Chilean state treats Indigenous Mapuche people.

The hunger strike has entered into a critical and possibly deadly phase: Bobby Sands, an Irish revolutionary and a well known casualty of hunger striking, died after 66 days. Other hunger strikers have survived for longer, including ex-political Mapuche prisoner Patricia Troncoso, who refused food for 112 days to protest the "predatory and inhumane economic model" in Chile and the still active anti-terrorist laws used to criminalize the Mapuche people.

The central demands of the hunger strikers and their supporters are that Mapuche people be tried in civil courts instead of in both civil and military courts, and that dictatorship-era anti-terrorist legislation not be used against them. Their struggle, at its roots, is in defense of Mapuche territory and culture, a plight common to Indigenous peoples around the world.

The Mapuche fight to maintain their freedom and independence dates back to the first Spanish invasion of their territory in 1541. Since then, their land base has been whittled down to a series of reserves, which, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, were broken up into individually held parcels.

Since the end of the dictatorship in 1990, laws have been passed that recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples to land. However, these laws have not been honoured, and Mapuche people have continued to organize against transnational corporate activities in their lands.

Clare Sieber, an anthropologist who graduated from UVIC, has spent time working with the Mapuche people. "Although there have been many Chilean and international policies implemented to strengthen and support Mapuche communities… the dominant model of industrial development including foreign investment still imposes structures of power over, rather than collaboration with, the Mapuche people," Seiber explained in correspondence with the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Canada's relationship with Chile has long been based on mining and free trade, Canada having signed a bilateral Free Trade Agreement with Chile in 1997. In 2008, Canadian outward foreign direct investment in Chile totalled $8.346 billion. Canada's priority sectors in Chile are among those that have most aggravated the Mapuche conflicts, including "mining, forestry, fishing and agricultural industries."

Hydroelectric projects have also created tension and conflict between the Chilean state, private investors and the Mapuche people.

Dams have flooded vast expanses of Mapuche territory, displacing entire communities. In the 1990s, the Spanish owned Empresa Nacional de Electricidad (National Electricity Company, ENDESA) began a project of building six dams on the Bio Bio River in the South Andean region of Chile, home of the Mapuche Pewenche communities. Some of these dams were funded through loans from the World Bank's International Finance Corporation and the Inter-American Development Bank.

The effects of the damming and flooding of Mapuche territory continue to be felt, according to Sieber. "Although ENDESA supplied some Pewenche in El Barco with new homes and electrical appliances… they did so not taking into account the seasonal mobility and community organization of the Pewenche." Sieber says electrical appliances are of limited utility without electricity or employment opportunities to pay electricity bills. “I have seen gas ovens and laundry machines used as cupboards.” She also notes that the rectangular plots of land fenced with barbed wire offered by ENDESA are “contrary to the semi-nomadic and communal land organization of the Pewenche.”

Forestry disputes also flared up during the late 90s, and in December 1997, the police fought Mapuche protestors from the Pichi–Lincoyan and Pilil–Mapu communities.

“The communities were claiming their lands, and this generated a conflict because the government ignored Mapuche demands," explains Mapuche writer Aldisson Anguita Mariqueo. He notes that at this time:

The response of the ‘democratic’ government of Chile was to arrest twelve Mapuche under the legal umbrella of the Internal Security Law. This law, inherited from the military dictatorship, allows the security forces to search private residences and to arrest and interrogate any ‘suspicious’ individual without judicial intervention.

Road building and airport construction have increased the incursions into Mapuche territory, furher threatening the survival of the Mapuche people. In a 2008 report, Amnesty International noted that unresolved territorial disputes related to the extractive and logging industries have caused "tension resulting in violence":

Mapuche leaders have informed us that police officers have used excessive force, including tear gas and rubber bullets, and firing shots from moving helicopters, including lead shot, in order to suppress the protests…

The hunger strike that is ongoing in Chile today is a wake-up call to the world about the criminalization of Mapuche peoples who continue standing up to defend their lands.

Colombian supporter Manuel Rozental writes that for the Chilean state to put Mapuche resistance on trial "under anti-terrorist legislation is preposterous, and actually transforms the struggle for life into a terrorist activity, a precedent from Chile to the Continent and, indeed, the world."

A global day of action in support of political prisoners in Chile has been called for September 24, 2010.

Dawn Paley is a journalist in Vancouver. This article was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Mapuche Drummer

Underground Diplomacy

Moira Peters — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 05:57:53 +0000

Canada’s transnational mining industry implicated in abuses

TORONTO—Balochistan Chief Minister Nawab Aslam Raisani announced the termination of a mining contract for Barrick Gold’s Reko Diq project on January 5, 2010, following a unanimous decision by the Pakistani province’s cabinet. According to the minister, “They [Barrick and Chile’s Antofagasta, co-owners of the mine project] only have an exploration license, which does not cover extraction,” adding his government would not approve an agreement undermining people’s rights.

Immediately afterwards, US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson warned that “multinational corporations will not invest in a country where deals are cancelled.” Canada’s international trade ministry followed suit, pressing Pakistani officials to “fulfill their obligations under a 2006 Pakistani-Canadian-Chilean agreement potentially worth billions of dollars,” according to the Vancouver Sun.

According to the Asia Times, “Critics said the local government’s action [to cancel the mining contract] was politically motivated to appease Baloch nationalists in the desperately poor and insurgency-hit province, who have been demanding the cancellation of the agreement.”

Balochistan, the province in Pakistan bordering Iran and Afghanistan, has been struggling for independence from Pakistan since 1948. The fifth uprising of the Balochistan independence movement was in 2004. More than 8,000 Baloch have been disappeared since then and 26 prominent leaders have been assassinated.

This ongoing independence struggle was overlooked by Canadian and US delegates as they pushed the Pakistani state to force Balochistan’s approval of the Barrick/Antofagasta mine. Meanwhile, in a move that the group American Friends of Balochistan say reveals insensitivity to the region’s politics, Barrick hired a Pakistani army colonel as its public affairs manager and head of security for its Balochistan mine project.

Disregard for political conflict reveals an international diplomacy concerned primarily with profits, and is consistent with the actions of Canada and its corporate ambassadors in situations around the globe where mining profits conflict with human rights.

Despite their human rights record, these corporate ambassadors of the mining sector will again be well-represented at discussions during the G20 summit in Toronto in June. Mining companies Banro, Barrick, Iamgold and Freeport McMoran will attend a parallel conference to the G20 summit, “G20 Business Leaders: Partnering with Africa’s Dynamic Markets,” at Toronto‘s Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre.

Questions about the ties between the mining sector and governement do not end in Balochistan though. Canadian Ambassador to Guatemala James Lambert published an op-ed in support of mining in Guatemala on the same day a survey revealed that 95.5 per cent of the people in San Miguel Ixtahuacan, Guatemala, opposed mining projects in their region.

Six years after that survey and the subsequent establishment of Goldcorp’s Marlin mine in San Miguel, villagers suffer from health issues linked to arsenic levels seven times the maximum limit recommended by the World Bank.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Barrick Gold officials during diplomatic visits to Chile and Tanzania, where Barrick mines have been widely protested for mistreatment of workers, environmental destruction, and for failing to pay Tanzanian taxes and royalties. Since Harper’s visit, a toxic spill killed 43 people and 1,358 livestock, according to the Ward authorities near Barrick’s Tanzanian North Mara mine.

An Amnesty International report published in February 2010 found Indigenous peoples in Colombia are at risk of being exterminated by state forces, right wing paramilitary groups and guerrilla organizations. “Far from creating a legitimate economy, as Liberal MPs have been suggesting in defence of the Colombia free trade agreement, the deal before Parliament would increase the chances that Canadian companies invested in agriculture, mining and resource extraction in sensitive areas will be doing business with murderers, drug traffickers and arms smugglers,” said Stuart Trew of the Council of Canadians in a recent press release.

As a consequence of this growing list of allegations, Canada has drawn criticism from around the world, first from environmental, religious and human rights organizations and labour unions, and now increasingly from international institutions such as the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the UN Special Rapporteur on Toxic Waste and Products.

The Canadian government has also begun to acknowledge its lack of accountability within the transnational mining industry. The first National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Canadian Extractive Industry in Developing Countries was organized in 2006, in reaction to a 2005 report from Canada’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (SCFAIT). The report acknowledged Canada does not have laws ensuring Canadian mining companies “conform to human rights standards, including the rights of workers and [I]ndigenous peoples.”

The Roundtables released a consensus-based, multi-stakeholder report approved by the main industry group, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC).

The Harper government took two years to respond to the Roundtables’ recommendations. Its report, “Building the Canadian Advantage: A Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Strategy for the Canadian International Extractive Sector,” rejected the recommendations and offered no tools for redressing the documented abuses of Canadian industry abroad.

Instead, the report offered increased subsidies to Canadian mining companies under the CSR banner. The “voluntary approach of CSR” is a strategy advocated by G8 countries as part of the Heiligendamm Dialogue Process, initiated at the 2007 G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany. Before this dialogue process, the Commission for Africa (CfA), launched in February 2004 by Tony Blair in the lead up to the G8 in Gleneagles, advocated the same strategies in a 2005 report.

In an analysis of the report, watchdog NGO Corporate Watch said, “The Commission for Africa does concede that ‘oil, diamonds, timber and other high-value commodities all fuel Africa’s conflicts.’ However, [CfA] points the blame at the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] Guidelines on Multinational Companies for failing to provide ‘clear enough guidance on what companies should do in these situations.’...Rather than regulating, or even dismantling, these corporations, the CfA will allow them to continue plundering at will, apparently satisfied by their ‘corporate social responsibility’ policies and promises to be more transparent.”

Recently, members of Canada’s parliament have proposed legislation to hold Canadian transnational resource extraction companies accountable to Canadian law. Liberal MP John McKay introduced private members bill C-300 to the House of Commons February 29, 2009. The bill would withhold government funds, including billions of dollars in Canadian Pension Plan investments and diplomatic support for companies found—following a government investigation—to be abusing human rights. Some contend that this bill—while a positive step forward in holding corporations to account for their crimes—is most valuable in its exposure of the Canadian government’s support for its mining industry abroad.

Canada is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Private member’s bill C-354 aims to codify these international agreements into Canadian law. The International Promotion and Protection of Human Rights Act (IPPHRA), introduced by NDP MP Peter Julian, amends the Federal Courts Act to permit people who are not Canadian citizens to initiate lawsuits based on violations of international law or treaties to which Canada is a party if the violations occur outside Canada.

“The IPPHRA contrasts with Bill C-300 in that C-300 keeps the monitoring of corporate activities out of the criminal or civil courts, in administrative processes controlled by ‘the Ministers,’” said Grahame Russell of Rights Action in an email.

“With respect to reforming Canada’s criminal code so that corporations and their directors could be brought to trial for criminal actions in their corporate activities in ‘developing countries,’” he added, “no one in Canada has taken up this challenge.”

Sakura Saunders is an editor for protestbarrick.net, an all-volunteer news site that networks organizations and community groups around the world against Barrick Gold.

This story was published in The Dominion's special issue on the G8 and G20 summits in Ontario. We will continue to publish independent, investigative news about the G8 and G20 throughout the month of June.

For up-to-the-minute G8/G20 news from the streets of Toronto, visit the Toronto Media Co-op.

G20 Mining image

Jalil Rieki

Indigenous Community Leaders Confront Barrick Gold in Toronto

Sandra — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:45:41 +0000

On April 29th, as Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold held its annual general meeting inside Toronto's Metro Convention Centre, a colourful protest took place across the street.

Indigenous leaders from Diaguita territory in Chile, affected by Barrick's upcoming Pascua Lama mega-project, and from Ipili territory in Papua New Guinea, were permitted to address the AGM as proxy shareholders.

While the company recognized that there have been "some deaths" around the mine in Porgera, Papua New Guinea, Barrick vehemently denied any link to or responsibility for the documented extrajudicial killings, harassment by company security forces, or - more recently - the grave human rights violations currently continuing under a State of Emergency in Porgera.

A national newspaper in Papua New Guinea ran a
front page story on April 30th about security forces burning the homes of several hundred landowners living around the mine. Community activists involved with the Porgera Landowners' Association estimated that the number of torched homes has reached between 500-600 as of April 30th.

Protest Barrick, an activist network that has been working to link affected communities and raise awareness about the issues they are facing, has organized a speaking tour in southern Ontario and Montreal over the next two weeks, with the participation of affected community leaders.

Mirage of El Dorado - trailer

Van Ferrier — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:27:09 +0000

Mirage of El Dorado, the new film by Martin Frigon, takes us high into the Andes of northern Chile where Canadian-owned Barrick Gold, the biggest gold producer in the world, is set to move glaciers if necessary to get at the mineral riches beneath.

Canadian Prime Minister enters Barrick’s Offices through the Back Door

dawn — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:18:32 +0000

Citizens protest the meeting of Canadian Prime Minister and Barrick

Two hours late and in the presence of a huge security entourage that included guards, police and special forces, Stephen Harper arrived at the offices of Barrick Gold and entered through the parking area, in order to avoid the peoples’ protest that started at 8:00 am at the entrance to the building.

The Gold Standard

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 23:42:26 +0000

Chileans fight to protect their environment from Canada's Barrick Gold

In what direction is Barrick's Pascua Lama mine headed? photo: Mining Watch

In the face of local grassroots opposition, the Chilean government has given Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold the go-ahead for its controversial Pascua Lama mine. Chile's National Environmental Commission heard only two of the nearly 50 complaints filed against Barrick before giving the project its approval.

Founded in 1983 by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Barrick is the foremost gold mining corporation in the world, with sales exceeding $2.6 billion in 2005 and the largest reserves in the industry, at nearly 90 million ounces.

High in the Andes Mountains, the Pascua Lama mine straddles the border of Chile and Argentina and represents a $1.5 billion investment for Barrick. The company plans to extract 615,000 ounces of gold, 30 million ounces of silver and 5,000 tons of copper annually over the 21-year lifetime of the open-pit mine.

Despite all the wealth that will soon be extracted, few Chileans are likely to benefit. Thanks to a combination of favourable tax legislation, legal loopholes and corporate malfeasance, no Canadian mining corporation paid any Chilean income taxes in the 1990s.

The mine is located in the Huasco Valley, a semiarid ecosystem that is entirely dependent upon the mountains for water. Residents argue that the mine will poison the land upon which they depend, endangering their health and jeopardizing their agriculture-based livelihoods.

In order to process the ore at Pascua Lama, Barrick will use 7,200 kilograms of cyanide and 10 million litres of water per day. Cyanide contamination of water resources can be devastating -- cyanide concentrations as little as 1 microgram (one-millionth of a gram) per litre can be fatal to fish. Barrick's site manager, Julio Claudeville, insists that cyanide is innocuous.

One report on mining in northern Chile found high levels of arsenic in the region's ecosystems. Health problems directly linked with arsenic exposure include cancer, deformation, miscarriage and underweight children. Other toxic contaminants found in nearby water supplies include sulphuric acid, diesel oil, urine and faecal matter.

After discovering dead fish floating in the San Juan River in 2004, locals found Barrick trucks dumping waste from their nearby Veladero mine into the adjacent wetlands. Barrick admitted to the practice, but argued that the waste was treated and posed no harm to the environment. No explanation was given for the dead fish.

Deeply concerned about the environmental dangers posed by the new mine, locals formed the Coordination for the Defence of the Valley of Huasco. Several demonstrations took place in 2005, culminating in thousands gathering in the Chilean capital of Santiago for a vibrant protest. In November, a petition signed by 18,000 valley residents and people opposed to Pascua Lama was delivered to President Lagos.

Seeking an international intervention, the Chilean Consumers' Organization filed a complaint with the Organization of American States alleging that the mine represents a great risk to the subsistence rights of the local indigenous population and that Chile would be breaking its international commitments by allowing the Barrick project to go ahead. More recently, the environmental group Oceana held a demonstration outside of the Canadian embassy in Santiago, arguing that the mine would enrich the Canadian corporation but would "do nothing for Chile except destroy its environment."

The president of Barrick Gold South America acknowledged the local resistance, pointing out that sustained opposition to the company was by no means unique to the Pascua Lama project. "The biggest challenges we are facing by far, in both South America and Africa, are social in nature."

Although the mine is still slated to go ahead, these grassroots efforts have proven successful. Initial plans for the mine included the "relocation" of three glaciers that form the basis of the valley's water system. In its first environmental impact assessment, Barrick withheld this information from the Chilean government, who remained ignorant of the plans until residents brought the situation to their attention.

In approving the Pascua Lama mine, the Environmental Commission stipulated several conditions, including one that prevents Barrick from "intervening" in the glaciers. According to Argentinian biologist Raúl Montenegro, "it is absurd to pretend you can just move glaciers, as if it were a sustainable practice." Opponents of Pascua Lama are claiming this as a significant victory and only hope that there are more to come.

Chileans worry the Pascua Lama mine will pollute their water and destroy their way of life. Rob Maguire learns that Canada is involved.

Textbook Treatment

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 21:39:55 +0000

State-Sponsored Violence in Pinochet's Chile

A mural painted in Pisagua, 25 years after the concentration camp was closed. On the left is the torso of an executed prisoner. In the middle: "25 years, Pisagua: Nothing is forgotten!"

IQUIQUE, CHILE--It is easy to become frightened, watching the world around you respond to the world at large. In the suburbs, some flip on the news at 7 for war on Iraq, the tsunami, and the NASDAQ index. Some eat breakfast and drive to work. We move through our days both aware and oblivious. We listen to the news and are affected, but things seem apart. We have our own concerns.

Perhaps a part of our difficulty in responding to injustice today is the too-little of our responses to violence in the past.

On September 11,1973, Augusto Pinochet bombed the government buildings in Santiago, Chile. Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president, was killed inside. The American government and members of the Chilean business community were said to have supported the coup. Allende was known for nationalizing industry and for the long lines in which people would wait for provisions after the economy crashed. He once provided all school children with milk.

Nadia, reading the mural in Pisagua: "What hurts most in not defeat, nor the shameless hegemony of the powerful ... nor the pardon of the executioners.... The most painful thing, is always when people forget."

The cemetery in Pisagua, where the desert falls into the sea. To the left lies the town. To the right is the site where a mass grave was uncovered in 1990.

A stencil in Santiago: "Because they take everything from us... we reclaim everything, we take everything. Capitalism is misery."

A stencil in Santiago: "As long as there is misery, there will be rebellion."

In 1973, a crew of German human rights activists, disguised as military officials, shot a film in Pisagua. Prisoners were asked why they had been detained; most had no answer. The film was shown overseas, fueling pressure to close the camp. For this shot, which appeared in the film, prisoners were made to pose, shirtless, in ranks. (Photographer unknown.)

A mural in Santiago. On the figure's hand is a line from Pablo Neruda: "Even though the footsteps of a thousand years pass over this site, they will not erase the blood of those who fell here."

Pinochet undertook an aggressive campaign to detain or execute those who had been involved in Allende's government or in unions and community organizations. His tactics were both quiet and horrifying. Those who survived have yet to see justice.

As a student in Peace and Conflict Studies at Conrad Grebel University College, in May and June of 2004, I worked with ex-political prisoners in Iquique, Chile. Most had been detained in Pisagua -- a small fishing village in the north. They wanted to create a book of memories that could speak to younger generations.

Our interviews lasted for hours, over tea and bread with plum jam, or shots of Pisco Sour and off-colour jokes. Some took on a fantastical air, and I would wonder which was more important, the real or the believed?

Nadia is a survivor of Pisagua. In 1973, Pinochet's soldiers came for her in the night, leaving her two children alone. She is in her sixties now, sharp featured to her laugh lines. When she passes those who once tortured, in the supermarket, she yells "look what you have done!" and points to the man who begs for money outside. Juan Hervas was beaten so badly that he often doesn't remember his past.

When the soldiers came for Sextor, he jumped from the old trees at the cliff's edge into the river. He hid until nightfall when his uncle came, calling through the fog. Later he stood with hundreds in a cell that reeked of urine and rotten bean gas. He showed the bloodstain on the wall - the place where they shot the man gone crazy from torture - to the people from the Red Cross.

One afternoon, in a lime green office cluttered with pills and patients' files, I spoke with a doctor who had been detained in Pisagua for having studied medicine in Cuba and later refusing to strike against Allende. Our talk moved on from torture under Pinochet to Iraq today and the abuse of those detained there: "This type of torture is not new," he said. "It is textbook treatment. We have known that for years." I asked the doctor what he thought of Pinochet's pending trial and current talk of reparations. He said he thinks that both are important, but that the world will never see real justice if we continue to support an economic system that destroys the environment and abandons the poor. I left his office with a twenty-page letter from him to the Canadian government. It outlined economic and environmental disaster resulting from Canadian mining operations in Chile.

Shortly after speaking with the doctor, I visited Pisagua. I went with Nadia, Lalo (another survivor), and Cesar (a painter and human rights activist). We headed up the cliff behind Iquique, then travelled north across a desert plain. We passed the dusty remains of the salitreras, English-run salt mines, where thousands of Chileans worked for tokens at the company store at the turn of the last century. We dipped into a river valley where bull's-eyes were painted on cliffs across the way - military training. Then the terrain gave way and we descended a slope where the road was broken by fallen debris and ruts in the sand. Below us was Pisagua, where there was a group of fisherman, drinking to Sunday.

First, we went to the theatre where the women were kept in 1973-74. We passed the courtyard where prisoners were made to stand, naked through the night, before their last interrogation. We went to the cemetery where, in 1990, a mass grave was uncovered while military helicopters hovered above. We went to the jail. Images from the interviews came flooding back to me. (The building is now a hotel, shy on business and painted red, with pink trim. In a concrete courtyard outside, a giant puppet of Sponge Bob sits watch above the impoverished village.)

I left Chile via Santiago. From the top of a hill, I could see the black building where Pinochet made his headquarters. I tried to imagine myself working there, or working as a guard at the camps. How do people bring themselves to abuse others? How is a torturer's violence different from that of a society, quietly going about its business while others are denied human rights?

Back in Canada, I still don't understand what happened in Chile, nor can I imagine what the videotapes showing torture, recently released on Chilean news, might mean for survivors.

Our own reporters trudge along. I imagine the news anchors, ironing their jackets and applying make-up carefully, reciting the names of places, reading body counts, and updating the terrorist alert -- all in the same tone of voice. What has made us so accustomed to hearing of horror in a matter-of-fact or distant way? Is this partly why our responses to violence are subdued?

Nadia once told me that she wanted to share her story "so that younger generations will know what a coup really is... so that they will never allow one to occur in the future." I asked how she thought a society numbed by violent television and bland readings of the news might respond to her story. "People may have heard of misery before," she said, "but they have not yet heard about it from me. Don't you think that would be different?"

The courtyard in front of the jail in Pisagua. Spongebob Squarepants sits in the background.

15 years after Pinochet, Carey Jernigan looks at the effects of state-sponsored violence on Chilean society.

Canada, Empire

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 17:48:47 +0000

Humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and other myths

The United States is engaging in a bloody occupation in Iraq; it overthrew the democratically elected government in Haiti, enforced by the Marines; it sowed already devastated Afghanistan with cluster bombs and replaced the Taliban with warlords; it is engaging in ongoing efforts to oust Cuban and Venezuelan governments; it is supporting repression in Colombia; it is constantly threatening Iran, Syria, and North Korea; it offers unconditional support to Israel's bloody occupation of Palestine.

These actions are part of a very deliberate agenda to deny self-determination to the peoples of the world, keeping the world 'safe' for investors, corporations and militarists. This agenda undermines democracy on behalf of elites in the rich countries and their clients in the poor countries.

In most of these ventures, Canada has been openly supportive; in others, its support has been behind the scenes. What is the historical pattern of Canadian foreign policy? What is Canada doing today and why? Opposing imperial depredations is something everyone of conscience must do, but in order to change Canada's policies it is important to know what that entails. The record is mainly one of complicity and hypocrisy, with the occasional open crime.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist living in Toronto. He has written for Dollars and Sense, Frontline India, New Politics and Z Magazine, where he serves as a editor. An earlier version of this essay originally appeared on ZNet. A previous version of the article, complete with footnotes and references, is available here.

Canada's real role in the world is covered by a lot of mythology. There are a variety of narratives about Canada-what it is, how it works. Canada is seen as an 'honest broker', a moderating influence on the United States. It is said that Canada doesn't have the power or will to have imperial aspirations, and if there is a division between the US and the rest of the world, Canada stands with the world. These are myths a lot of people subscribe to.

Yet, there are a lot of people who know better. The Council of Canadians held a series of events across the country called: "Canada: Country or Colony?" They point to free trade pacts, defence sharing agreements, US investment in Canada, US encroachments into Canada's public sector, the majority of Canadian trade going to the US...and conclude that Canada is in a colonial relationship with the US. What the US says goes. Canada imports manufactured goods and exports natural resources. It's colonialism.

I have a lot of respect for the Council of Canadians, and for that Canadian 'nationalist' sentiment. I recently read a book by David Orchard, who twice ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. David Orchard is not an ordinary conservative. In his view, the Conservative Party is the force that built the national railway system, that built up the public sector, that defended Canadian sovereignty against US encroachment, and only recently betrayed its noble traditions with Mulroney and the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

For Orchard, the entire history of Canada is one of resistance to US attempts to take it over: alliances of indigenous-French and indigenous-French-British repelled repeated military invasions. Visionary politicians realized that unity alone could create a state and economy that could be independent. Those visionaries passed and were replaced by venal men who don't care for independence or sovereignty and who want to sell the country to the US. Those colonial collaborators, Orchard points out, have always existed in Canadian history: for every invasion there were those in Canada eager to be absorbed.

John Ralston Saul, the husband of Canada's Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, not a conservative, someone who would probably call himself a 'humanist', makes similar assertions about Canada. To Saul, the defining characteristic is the intertwining of British, French, and indigenous that created something unique and worth preserving here in this northern country. He always goes back to the alliance between Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine in Lower Canada (Quebec) and Robert Baldwin in Upper Canada (Ontario), an alliance that enabled these politicians to outflank those who wanted union with the US and bring about 'responsible government' in Canada.

This, too, is an interesting story, but I'm not sure that it is true. Struggles between elites are rarely between those with vision and those who lack it. They are, instead, based on different interpretations of how elite interests are best served. The men who built the railway (and it is interesting that when people talk about "the men who built the railway" they are referring to the capitalists and government officials here, and not the people who actually laboured on it, sweating and dying in terrible conditions for terrible wages), the men who sought tariff protections for Canadian manufactures, they had their own reasons for doing so. And in recent years, even the most 'nationalist' parts of the Canadian elite dared not assert too much independence.

Years ago in Mexico a friend lamented her country's problem: "We are too far from heaven and too close to the US." Canadian nationalists would say the same-but for Canada there is another aspect. On the one hand, there is a question about how independent Canada could be even if it wanted to be. On the other, there is a question about whether Canada wants to be independent. In other words, the Council of Canadians question: "Canada, Country or Colony?", should be expanded to: "Canada: country, colony, or colonizer?" And the answer isn't pretty.

Gwynne Dyer, in his foreword to Victor Levant's excellent history of Canadian involvement in the Vietnam war, puts this issue very clearly:

The fact is that Canada did have choices about its behaviour in Vietnam in the 1950s, and chose to behave badly. The same is true of the 1960s. We have choices in the 1980s too, although every choice involves a potential price.
We cannot know how high the price would have been if we had...refused to serve US interests in Vietnam. Nobody in Ottawa even considered the question seriously until the very end...Nobody knows what the cost to Canada of serious dissent from US policy would be today, either, though the United States could clearly hurt us a lot if it chose to do so. But always behind the lines...looms the vast misery and suffering that Canada's complicity helped to perpetuate in Vietnam, and that is a kind of cost too. In many cases Canada does have the ability to choose, and it has a duty to itself and to others to make the right choices.

I want to look here at just a few of Canada's choices. Why does Canada make these choices? What are the effects of these choices? How could we change things?

Vietnam

Some might think of Paul Martin as a liar and a gangster. Unsurprisingly, it is a family tradition. Paul Martin Sr.'s own words are some of the most eloquent on why Canada got involved in the US war on Vietnam. What follows comes mostly from Victor Levant's fine book, 'Quiet Complicity'.

We know Canada is an economic power of some consequence. There was just a G8 summit in Georgia, where protesters couldn't get anywhere close. Canada was there, making decisions about the rest of the world as part of this elite club. Canada is a major exporter both of raw materials and of manufactured goods.

Subject to US Power?

A lot of Canada's manufacturing is automotive. Before Canada had NAFTA, it had the Auto Pact of 1965, which created a continental auto industry and thus made the main part of Canada's civilian manufacturing base subordinate to US capital. The alternative was to develop an indigenous auto industry: "insistence on high domestic content for vehicle assembly operations, high tariffs, quotas, and licences. Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Britain, and Europe had gone this route." But Canada under Pearson opted for integration with the US.

Some of Canada's manufacturing is military. The Defence Production Sharing Agreement of 1959 turned Canada into a major exporter of military goods-really, a subcontractor-to the United States. US procurement in Canada between 1959-1973 totalled $3.2 billion. Today, "Canadian Defence Industries Association figures show that Canadian 'defence' industry revenues grew 35% between 1998 and 2000, far outpacing growth of the rest of the economy, which grew at approximately 3%. Canada's 'defence' market grew from $3.7 billion in 1998 to $4.08 billion in 2000, up 22.6%. Exports to the USA grew by 17% from just under a billion to $1.25 billion. And our arms exports to the rest of the world grew a staggering 75% in the same period from $798 million to $1.5 billion" (quoting Stephen Kerr). Canada's arms industry does $5 billion in business annually, with 650 firms and 57,000 direct jobs. The business is handled through the Crown Commercial Corporation.

Most of the Canadian manufacturing economy is owned by the US, and the final destination of the goods - and most of the resources - is the US. This was true during the US war on Vietnam and it is true today. During that period US interests controlled 47% of the manufacturing, 61% in petroleum and natural gas, 59% in mining and smelting (figures cited by Levant). After NAFTA, US control has grown further.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, who the mythology treats as a peacekeeping hero (and who we will be hearing more from), said at the time: "[N]o country in the world has less chance of isolating itself from the effect of American policies and decisions than Canada. If Washington 'went alone' where would Ottawa go?"

The prime minister who preceded Pearson, Diefenbaker, himself no anti-imperialist (he established his anti-communist credentials by saying he had "no ear for the lullabies of the neutralist"), showed a slight inclination for an independent foreign policy for Canada. He criticized US tactics in Laos. He kept Canada out of the Organization of American States, which the US used to isolate Cuba's revolution and which Che Guevara called the 'Department of Colonies'. Diefenbaker was unenthusiastic about posting US nuclear missiles in Canada. He tried to establish greater trade ties with Britain.

How did the US react? With regime change, of course! According to Levant, "In the 1962 Canadian election, US action played a role in the Conservatives' decline from a 208 seat majority to a 116 seat minority. President Kennedy received Opposition Leader Pearson for a forty-minute conversation three days after the election was called, and the Kennedys lent their polling expert, Louis Harris, to the Liberals. One billion dollars in US funds left Canada in the first quarter of the year." The next election saw even more blatant US intervention. Levant cites a US columnist who commented on the event: "Adroit statecraft by the American State Department brought down the bumbling crypto-anti-Yankee government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, and replaced it with a regime which promised to be faithful to the concept of Canadian-American interdependence."

"The lesson," Levant notes, "was not lost on succeeding governments in Ottawa."

Canada's own imperialist ideas

But be careful. David McNally points out that "Canadian capitalists are also major players in the world of foreign investment and global takeovers...Between 1994 and 2001, for example, 384 more US businesses were bought up by Canadian corporations than the number of Canadian businesses that US companies managed to purchase. Judged in dollar amounts, Canadian capitalists spent $46 billion more purchasing US businesses than did the latter buying firms in this country."

Levant notes that during the war on Vietnam, Canada exported $21.3 billion to Asia and imported $14.6 billion-a big surplus. Canadian business didn't want to 'lose' Southeast Asia to what they called 'communist aggression' and what we might call 'self-determination' any more than the US did. Canadian elites wanted to make sure Asia was 'safe' for their investments just as US elites did.

Lester B. Pearson himself stood up in the House of Commons in the 1950s and told the parliament that "aggression" by the Vietnamese against France, in Vietnam, was only one element of worldwide communist aggression and that "Soviet colonial authority in Indochina" was stronger than French control!

Now we are ready to meet Paul Martin Sr., who was capable of wielding US President Dwight Eisenhower's "domino" theory with the best of them. Remember that the domino theory is a justification for intervention anywhere, any time, because any place is a domino that, if it is allowed to "fall", may well lead to the collapse of the entire world. As External Affairs Secretary, Martin told the House of Commons in 1965:

Vietnam is a test case. I suggest that if the North Vietnamese aggression with Chinese connivance succeeds, it will only be a matter of time before the next victim is selected...If the US were to leave Vietnam at the present time, what would happen to that country? What would happen to Burma? What would happen to India, a commonwealth country?

Martin helped the US aggression by calling the Vietnamese national liberation movement "Viet Cong aggression". Martin even compared the Vietnamese to Hitler: "If North Vietnam succeeds in taking over the whole of Vietnam by force, if the rest of the world is prepared to sit back and see this happen...we would, in my judgement, be guilty of an error of the same nature as the mistakes at Munich... Aggression is agression, whether it takes place in Europe, Ethiopia, or Vietnam."

But aggression is not agression, according to Martin Sr. and Lester B. Pearson, if the United States is the aggressor.

The US is capable of bullying Canada and has certainly done so. But it is also the case that Canada's elite has its own corporate interests in plundering the poor countries. Canada's elite has the same contempt for self-determination-once called "communism"-as the United States does. Canada jumps to help imperialism. If it didn't, the US has demonstrated that it can push.

Consequences

What did Canada jump to do, in Vietnam? A number of things. In Levant's words:

Canadian food and beverages fed US troops, Canadian war material was used on the battlefields of South Vietnam and flown in sorties over Hanoi and Haiphong, auto parts fabricated in Canada were installed in US army vehicles, and many Canadian raw resources stoked the fires of the US military-industrial complex.

Everything from napalm components to green berets, from gunsights to whiskey, from radio relays to rocket warheads, were provisioned. The Toronto Star's weekly magazine tracked TNT from a plant in Quebec to Crane Indiana where it was poured into bombs. The May 27, 1967 supplement commented that "With luck, the explosive that left [Quebec] could be hailing down on a Vietnamese village six weeks later." These were boom years for the whole Canadian economy, a boom the Vietnamese paid for with their lives, by the million.

To be sure, the Canadian government compensated Vietnam by providing 'humanitarian' aid-but only to the South Vietnamese regime, the US client, whose principal victims were the South Vietnamese people. Canadian aid escalated with American bombing: the more the Americans bombed, the more the Canadians 'aided'. However, the main purpose of these few millions of dollars, according to External Aid Office Advisor Michael Hall, was to "demonstrate publicly that they were on the same side of the war as the US".

Claire Culhane went to Vietnam as a nurse with one of these "aid projects" and became one of the most outspoken activists against the war. She presented the real face of these Canadian aid projects in her book, Why is Canada in Vietnam?, in 1972. She describes a tour of a hospital ward she conducted with a supervisor.

Dr. Mosely was keeping a careful check of the time as she had to meet a friend to play tennis at 12:30, and was getting ready to leave. When I straightened the patient's bedsheets, I found a ghastly condition of disembowelment and shattered limbs, lying in a mixture of crushed bone and blood-altogether an unbearable sight, in need of much more work. When I called this to [Dr. Mosely]'s attention, she stopped long enough to laugh and say: "Don't be silly, why bother, she'll be dead by morning anyway, she will just smell a little sweeter when she dies."

Back in Canada, Culhane wondered about a Canadian project to fund artificial limbs.

I sought out Dr. Claude Gingras of the Montreal Rehabilitation Institute, who had initiated the Qui Nhon Rehabilitation Hospital (he was later decorated by President Thieu) to enquire why he was making no attempt to provide trained surgeons who could save limbs, instead of fitting artificial ones. His reply consisted of a ten minute dissertation on the other-worldliness of the oriental mind and how its attitudes towards death differed from our own!

The medical teams that went over as part of the aid program also helped out the US war effort by denying that US chemical warfare was harmful and that napalm was bad for you.

On the subject of chemical warfare, Canada allowed testing of defoliants in New Brunswick in 1966. From a US Army technical memorandum:

In March 1965, the Canadian Ministry of Defence offered Crops Division large areas of densely forested land for experimental tests of defoliant chemicals...the test site selected contained a mixture of conifers and deciduous broadleaf species in a dense undisturbed forest cover that would provide similar vegetation densities to those of...Southeast Asia.

B-52s practiced bombing runs over Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1968 and 1970.

Canada participated in what was called the International Control Commission (ICC), along with Poland and India. ICC teams travelled in Vietnam and determined whether ceasefires were being violated. Canada used its presence on the ICC not only to help whitewash what the US was doing and deny the facts, but also to spy on the Vietnamese, providing intelligence to the US on what the effects of its weapons were on the population and more.

There is no way of teasing out the damage inflicted by Canada's role specifically, in Vietnam or anywhere else. But one can summarize what the effect of the war was as a whole on the Vietnamese. I like David Orchard's summary:

[O]n April 30, 1975, the last of the US military fled in helicopters from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, abandoning millions of dollars of weapons, helicopters, tanks and other equipment, hundreds of thousands of CIA operatives, more than five hundred thousand prostitutes and drug addicts in Saigon alone, over eight million refugees and orphans, hundreds of thousands of wounded, deformed and chemically damaged Vietnamese, the world's greatest demand for artificial limbs, and 150,000 tons of unexploded bombs in the fields and forests. More than 10,000 Vietnamese, mostly farmers and their families, died in the years following 1975, when their ploughs inadvertently hit these hidden bombs containing delayed-action fuses.
Approximately six million died in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and countless others were maimed and wounded as the result of American military aggression. For its war crimes in Southeast Asia, the United States has never paid.

And neither has Canada.

The use of sanctions

Vietnam is a good demonstration of the myths and their relation to the real patterns of Canada's behaviour in the world. Canada came out of that war smelling like a rose, in spite of everything, and there are still legends that Pearson challenged Johnson over bombing North Vietnam. According to the Pentagon Papers, Pearson actually made a tactical suggestion to Johnson not to use nuclear weapons on Vietnam, but "iron bombs" were just fine. In 1965, Martin and Pearson were engaging in all manner of apologetics for the US assault.

Kim Richard Nossal, a mainstream Canadian foreign policy academic, compiled a brief list of the use of economic sanctions by Canada. Sanctions were used against-guess who?-Vietnam in 1979 for its invasion of Cambodia (one of the only interventions that actually had a humanitarian effect, stopping Pol Pot's murderous regime). Against the USSR for invading Afghanistan in 1979 (though not against the US for doing the same in 2002). Against Iran after seizing the US embassy in 1979. In 1981 against the USSR and Poland after the latter declared martial law. In 1982 against Argentina for the Falklands war with the UK. In 1983 against the USSR after shooting down a Korean airlines plane. In 1984 against South Africa. In 1989 against China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1990 against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. In 1991-2 against Yugoslavia. In 1991 against Haiti after the coup against Aristide. Aid was also suspended against Afghanistan, Cuba, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Indonesia, Libya, Suriname, Sri Lanka, and Uganda, at various times.

But Canada, Nossal himself notes, never considered sanctions against the US for its invasion of Grenada in 1983, or its bombing of Libya in 1986, or its shooting down of an Iranian airliner in 1988, or its invasion of Panama in 1989, or its ignoring of the World Court ruling and Security Council condemnations while it escalated the terrorist war against Nicaragua through the 1980s.

And rather than imposing sanctions on the US for its 1990-91 Iraq slaughter, Canada joined in.

The War on Iraq, 1990-91

Canada sent warplanes and ships to participate in the US attack on Iraq in 1990-91. In an unusual role for Canada, the Canadian military was used directly against Iraq, and thus Canada shares responsibility for the horrors that the Iraqis suffered then and since

Again, quoting David Orchard:

This was a war to give the United States control of Arab oil, from where much of the wealth of the seven major British and American oil companies has come, and which is also the energy source of its major industrial competitors, Europe and Japan.
The price tag...was between 150,000 and 300,000 dead in Iraq-90% civilian. Since the end of the war, more than 100,000 infants have died from malnutrition, dysentery, and other effects of the bombing and ongoing blockade of Iraq...

Canada's minister of external affairs, Joe Clark, said early in the war that the reason Canadian forces were in the Gulf was that Canada would not stand for the invasion of small countries by powerful ones. In the last 200 years, the United States has invaded smaller countries more than 300 times.

From local 'threats' to global 'threats'

Desmond Morton, another mainstream, conventional historian, makes a good point about the implications of Canada's military relationship with the US. The only plausible military threat Canada has ever faced has been the United states, and in Morton's words: "Canadians found that one good way to keep the peace is not to prepare for a hopeless war. Imagine if Canadians had dutifully assumed the old British defence burden...hundreds of thousands of Canadians would have spent their youth drilling and maneouvring for a war they could never win. Ottawa would have spent millions of dollars on defence, but it could never be enough. Alarmed at military threats on their border, Americans would have mobilized armies and matched cannon for cannon."

What does a military do when it is not focusing on plausible external threats? Too often, it becomes an instrument for suppressing the local population.

Many of the major Canadian military mobilizations in recent history have been against the population, especially the indigenous. In 1990 in Mohawk communities at Oka, Quebec, and Akwesasne Ontario, 5,000 soldiers were mobilized. In 1993, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the military coordinated another mission against these same communities. 800 RCMP were mobilized, backed by "several thousand soldiers", to "take control of the reserves." The Second Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment "requested seven M113 armoured personnel carriers, 13 heavy machineguns, and large stocks of riot gear...the 5e Groupe Mecanise du Canada... asked for an extra $4.2 million worth of ammunition." Luckily for everyone involved, that operation was called off before massive violence ensued. But the Canadian authorities are confronting these same communities again today.

Not too long afterwards, 400 RCMP officers mobilized in British Columbia against a small group of Secwempec indigenous at Gustafson Lake who were claiming a part of a ranch as an ancestral burial site. The RCMP fired thousands of rounds into the forest. This operation, too, was called off, thankfully, before bloodshed.

These kinds of mobilizations against indigenous people were practice runs for Canadian units to work in other countries. Joint Task Force Two, a secret commando unit (which may or may not have been present at these indigenous assaults), helped train the Haitian police in the mid-1990s: "JTF2's job was to train Haitian police officers in the art of 'door kicking' and building takedowns...SWAT team would be used to hunt down and seize arms caches held by extremists and former army officers intent on overthrowing the Preval government." JTF2 went off to Zaire in the period between the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the genocidal war in the Congo of 1998-2001. JTF2 helped train the Royal Nepalese Army in counterinsurgency techniques, advising that institution on "tactics and the best use of its forces against the guerrillas."

A long tradition of profiteering

War profiteering in Canada went on before the war on Vietnam (WWI and WWII have their own shining examples). The Vietnam War took it to new heights, and Canada has stayed at those heights since, providing arms and other services for human rights violations all over the world. Following are just three instances in a very long list.

Chile

Chile is an interesting historical example. On the University of Toronto campus there is a building called the Munk Centre. Its namesake, Peter Munk, had a remarkable view of the events in Chile.

At a shareholders meeting in Toronto on May 9, 1996, Peter Munk, Chairman of Barrick Gold corporation, praised General Augusto Pinochet for "transforming Chile from a wealth-destroying socialist state to a capital-friendly model that is being copied around the world." Regarding Pinochet's human rights record, Munk said, "they can put people in jail, I have no comment on that, I think that may be true...I think [the end justifies the means] because it brought wealth to an enormous number of people. If you ask somebody who is in jail, he'll say no. But that's the wonderful thing about our world; we can have the freedom to disagree."

Pinochet's protection of the "freedom to disagree" went as follows, in Asad Ismi's words:

In the year after the coup, the armed forces and police murdered 5,000-30,000 Chileans for their beliefs and associations. A quarter of the organized work force were dismissed for political reasons. Every labor right was suspended and most labor federations were dissolved. The regime's opponents were tortured, kidnapped, exiled, jailed and sent to concentration camps. During 1975-79, between 1,600 and 2,500 Chileans disappeared after detention by Pinochet's secret police.

With his opponents killed, jailed, or in exile and the union movement crushed, the general reversed 35 years of economic development. Pinochet's monetarist model was supervised by Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago. Starting in 1975, the "Chicago Boys" reduced import duties, deregulated industry, eliminated limits on foreign investment, sold public enterprises at low prices, freed the prices of basic necessities and privatized such government services as parks, prisons, utilities, schools, health care, and pensions.

Despite Munk's admiration, Pinochet did not help Chile's economy by doing all this killing and deregulation, instead bringing about the worst economic crisis in Chile's history. By 1982, after all the 'privatization', the state controlled more of the economy than it had under Allende, after bailing out investors and Chile's own elite. Even today, Chile's economy relies on the nationalized copper company, CODELCO.

Pinochet did, however, help set the stage for Canadian mining to make handsome profits. Canadian investment in Chile was $4 billion in 1997, making Canada the biggest foreign investor there. At Barrick Gold's mines, workers are paid $500-1000 a month, while Canadians at the same mines make $5000. Gold mining company Placer Dome and gas company Nova Corporation also cleaned up in Chile.

Indonesia and East Timor

Indonesia was taken over by brutal dictator Suharto in 1967. Suharto's first act was to kill several hundred thousand people: communists, independent nationalists, and any others who might have been rivals to his dictatorship. The United States helped Suharto out because of his anti-communist credentials. So did Canada. Prime Minister Trudeau visited Suharto in 1971 and announced a $4 million interest free loan.

Suharto visited Canada in July of 1975, while Indonesia was planning the invasion of East Timor. Canada offered him a $200 million line of credit. Sharon Scharfe's book Complicity: East Timor and Canadian Foreign Policy quotes a Prime Minister's Office memorandum as saying: "[A] successful Canadian aid program in Indonesia...will contribute to a range of Canadian...interests including economic growth and quality of life...the commercial spinoff is proving to be a not insignificant benefit."

East Timor was set to become an independent country when it was invaded by Indonesia in 1975. The Indonesian military killed some 200,000 people in the conquest, one of the worst slaughters ever relative to population (the inhabitants numbered about 600,000) and occupied the country for 24 years until it was forced out in 1999.

In August of 1976 , Allan McEachen, Secretary of State for External Affairs, visited Indonesia. By that time, Indonesia had already admitted to killing 60,000 Timorese in the course of the invasion. Two UN Security Council and one General Assembly resolutions had condemned Indonesia (Canada abstained from the General Assembly resolution). McEachen signed for the $200 million line of credit promised the year before.

Glen Shortliffe, Canadian Ambassador to Indonesia, visited occupied East Timor in September of 1978, and provided useful propaganda service to the Indonesian occupation in the process. His insights included: "East Timor is not self-sufficient in food" (he was unable to figure out that the invasion's mass destruction of crops and animals might have something to do with it); "[I]t is impossible to consider that the bulk of the population is even capable of being politicized in any sophisticated sense"; and "[M]any, if not a majority of Timorese, live in rugged mountain areas connected only by footpaths" (he was unable to figure out that these people might be living in the mountains because they were escaping the Indonesian military). He also provided figures on displacement and hinted that perhaps no one had been killed in the invasion. Jack Whittleton, ambassador in 1987, went even further, helping the government party candidate, Golkar, during his campaign tour for the sham elections of that year, during which some districts had voter turnouts of 327.6% and more than 100% of registered voters elected Golkar with 93.7% of the vote.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien visited Indonesia in 1994, announcing $1 billion in new trade deals and pledging $30 million in new aid projects. Between 1988-1994, Canada's total exports to Indonesia amounted to $2.66 billion. Military exports were at least $22.26 million. When the Canadian government was asked why at least these military exports couldn't be cut off, an anonymous foreign affairs official said: "If Canada decided unilaterally not to sell to Indonesia, it could be removing market opportunities for Canadian companies and creating a gap which other countries would run to fill." Again, quoting Asad Ismi:

As the Indonesian army and its militias set fire to Dili and killed thousands of East Timorese in September 1999, the Canadian government refused to stop the export of military goods to Indonesia. This at a time when even the United States, Jakarta's main backer, had suspended military sales to Indonesia, as had the European Union and Australia.

According to documents obtained from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) through the Access to Information Act, six military export permits for the Indonesian Air Force and Ministry of Defence, worth a total of $119.3 million, were granted by the Canadian government during 1998-1999 to unidentified companies. The permits were for aircraft engines, navigation systems and training simulators or parts.

Israel/Palestine

The Canadian Highways Infrastructure Corporation calls itself a "world renowned, full service, toll highway development company specializing in public-private partnerships with capabilities in finance, design and engineering, operation and maintenance of large-scale toll highway projects". CHIC helped build the infamous 407 toll highway in Ontario, courtesy of the neoconservative government there.

Now they are building settler-only highways in Israel/Palestine: "The Derech Eretz Consortium (DEC), led by CHIC, is the State of Israel's private sector partner in the development of the all-electronic Cross Israel Highway...DEC won a two-year international competition to finance, design, build and operate the 86km toll road, which will run north-south through the heart of Israel near Tel Aviv." You would think that this $1.2 billion road was just an innocuous path. The only hint that something might be amiss is this little line: "Instead of adding roads and interchanges in already densely populated areas, the Cross Israel Highway is diverting traffic to the central region of the country, thus reducing vehicle density and pollution in the greater Tel Aviv region."

Israel's network of bypass roads is designed very deliberately to reach from the core areas of Israel itself into settlements in the West Bank without allowing traffic or communication between West Bank towns. These bypass roads are an integral component of what Israeli activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control", by which Palestinians are isolated, surrounded, and disconnected from each other, made wholly dependent on the whims of the Israeli regime. It is an appalling program of imprisoning an entire population. It is also good business for the Canadian Highways Infrastructure Corporation.

Canada's place today

Afghanistan/Iraq

A good researcher on Canada today is Stephen Kerr who, in addition to his written investigative reports, does a weekly radio show called "Newspeak" on CIUT-FM in Toronto. Last year, Kerr wrote a piece on Canada's role in the current Iraq war that was very valuable. He noted that three Canadian warships escorted the US fleet in 'Operation Apollo'. The US fleet was firing Tomahawk missiles at Iraqi targets at the time. Canadian aviators manned AWACS aircraft to direct missiles at their targets. Canadian officers worked at Central Command in Qatar, helping with logistics. US troop transport planes used over-flight and refueling privileges in Canadian aerospace. Quoting Kerr: "US military doctrine describes refueling as the 'key' to US global airpower. This reporter's request for a full accounting of these over-flights was refused by the Canadian Department of National Defence." US troops were relieved by Canadian troops in Afghanistan and Canada took command of the Afghan occupation. 35 Canadian soldiers served on 'exchange' with the Iraq invasion forces.

Haiti

Despite Canada's rather extensive assistance to the US's aggression in Iraq, there was a widespread line in Canadian media that Canada had to "mend a fence" for its defiance of the US on Iraq. Canada's politicians duly complied, "mending the fence" on the bones of Haitians, acquiescing in the coup against democratically elected President Aristide, and sending troops to occupy that country.

Relying on Stephen Kerr again:

Prime Minister Paul Martin first committed approximately 180 troops from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment, as well as the Joint Operations Group from Kingston, to provide "security" for the criminal Haitian thugs. When on Thursday it became apparent that the political facade created for the coup was crumbling, Martin scaled back Canada's commitment to 60 soldiers. Martin claims he is keen to get Haiti "on the right track."

Aristide, Kerr notes, "had Haiti on the wrong track...feebly trying to deliver what Haitians have been demanding for years"-an agenda made almost impossible by the embargo against Haiti by the US, an embargo Canada participated in. Kerr quotes from Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), which provides various services to corporations doing business in countries like Haiti: "[S]ome Canadian companies are looking to shift garment production to Haiti." Kerr notes that "Montreal based Gildan Activewear is already subcontracting work to Haitian owned sweatshops, and they have opened a new factory in Port au Prince which employs 400 to 500 people." Gildan is one of the largest T shirt makers in the world. It pays its Montreal workers 10 times the wages it pays Haitians, who get less than they need to live on and not enough to keep up with inflation.

The above, from Kerr, does not come close to describing Canada's full role in the coup. Aristide's attempts at changing Haiti's pattern of poverty were so "feeble" because Haiti was denied development loans by the InterAmerican Development Bank. Those loans were vetoed by the US (no one in Haiti even knew the US could veto IADB loans) after the US decided to oust Aristide some time around 2000. There was an election that year, in which some senate results were contested-all international observers concluded that all irregularities aside, Aristide would have won the election handily. But this was "contested", and so the US cut off aid to the starving country. So did Canada.

After the coup, Canada led the way in repressing Aristide's supporters. The RCMP picked up Oriel Jean, Aristide's security chief, at the Toronto airport, and handed him over to the US, who gave him some bogus drug charges, and sent him off to a Miami jail, where he now sits. This while real drug traffickers and paramilitaries were released from prisons all over Haiti and are now terrorizing the population-while US and Canadian soldiers look on. (Similarly, Canadian security services probably handed bogus information on Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar over to the US immigration authorities who sent him off to Syria for 10 months of torture. No one twisted Canada's arm to do this either.)

The details of a meeting in Ottawa a year before the coup, called the "Ottawa Initiative", at which the future of Haiti was discussed by countries all over the Americas except for Haiti, have yet to be revealed. But a special representative of the OAS secretary-general, Luigi Einaudi, told a crowd at Hotel Oloffson on New Year's Eve 2003, "The real problem with Haiti is that the international community is so screwed up that they're actually letting Haitians run the place." That contempt for self-determination, going back through Pearson and Martin Sr.'s "anti-communism" to the 19th century and Canada's Indian Act-which was a model for the South African apartheid regime-and continuously throughout Canada's history, is something Canada's elites share with the British and French imperialists who founded colonies here, and with the US imperialists who are colonizing the world today.

Even Diefenbaker, who got "regime-changed", shared this contempt for the people of the Third World. This contempt, this racism, coupled with the many corporate and capitalist interests, would be enough to make Canada somewhat imperialist even if it wasn't so vulnerable to US power. The integration of the economies, the integration of the elites, and the innumerable opportunities the US has to retaliate against a show of independence only make Canada's elites even more eager to do the wrong thing.

Conclusions

I've tried to present some of the realities behind the various myths about Canada and its role in the world. First, there is the myth about Canada's benevolence: that one is handily shattered by the evidence. The other one is the myth about Canada's helplessness before US power: that's almost like a Nuremberg defence: Canada was only following orders-there was no scope for a moral decision. Well, it's worth remembering that that defence didn't work at Nuremberg. There are always choices; some are costly. But how could Canadians morally argue against choosing not to profit from murderous policies because such choices were too costly?

If we don't opt for such a sleazy way out, what's left? A country like Venezuela, much weaker, more subject to US power if less interdependent, is paying the costs of an independent course. That isn't the Chavez regime alone that is doing that-it is a result of powerful social movements, and of class struggle in that country. Because of those pressures from below, Venezuela was able to condemn the war in Afghanistan while Canada participated. Venezuela condemned the war in Iraq while Canada applauded. Venezuela refused to recognize the paramilitary criminals who replaced Aristide in Haiti, while Canada joined the forces guaranteeing their power. Venezuela puts Canada to shame, and is facing regime change, violence, and coups because of it.

Borrowing a page from Paul Martin Sr., Venezuela's elite, along with various US political authorities, accuse Chavez of wanting to implement "communism" in Venezuela. But all Venezuelans want is self-determination, a chance to develop their own way, according to their own choices. Instead they are getting a well-funded, orchestrated destabilization campaign. It is only self-determination that Iraqis want, and they are getting an occupation. It's all Haitians want, and they got a coup. If Canadians decided they wanted that, instead of a thin slice of imperial profits and power and all the nightmares and hatred that come with it, there would be a price to pay as well. But, as Dyer noted, empire has a price, too.

Humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and other myths