Colombia: The Only Risk Is Having To Stay – Canadian Mining in the South of Bolívar and the Release of Jernoc Wobert

On Tuesday, August 27, Jernoc Wobert was freed by Colombian guerrillas. The Canadian geologist and Vice-President of Braeval Mining Co. had been kidnapped by the National Liberation Army (or El Ejército de la Liberación Nacional, ELN). The ELN had kidnapped him seven months ago with 3 other Colombians and 2 Peruvians.  The Latin Americans were released a few weeks after they had all been taken from Norosí in the Serranía de San Lucas in the south of Bolívar, but the Canadian remained.

As a condition to his release, the ELN demanded that the Canadian and Colombian government investigate the company in question for having allegedly taken land illegally from communities in Bolívar. On the other hand, the Colombian government, who has been negotiating a peace deal with the largest rebel group (the FARC), since November, predicated any negotiations with the ELN on his release. The ELN had previously expressed interest in negotiating with the national government, and the FARC had called on the government to also negotiate with the second largest guerrilla group. A few months ago when the eleños tried to enter the peace talks in Havana, they were turned away. Today, President Juan Manuel Santos announced that “everything is ready” for talks with the ELN.

Wobert’s release by the ELN to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, who is a neutral party in most high-profile hostage hand-overs in Colombia), was seen as a “humanitarian gesture” on the part of the rebels in order to demonstrate good faith in what could be a peace process. However, Wobert’s kidnapping (and release) are actually microcosms of much larger dynamics of the Colombian armed conflict, and of the mining investment that largely defines Canada’s relationship to Colombia.

Who are the ELN?

The ELN began in the early 1960s by radical University students who organized peasants. They were inspired by Marxism, the Cuban Revolution, and Liberation Theology. The ELN, unlike the FARC, actually have been slow to get as involved in drug trafficking. Nevertheless like the FARC, they commit crimes against humanity and war crimes such as kidnapping and killing civilians, recruiting minors/practicing forced conscription, planting land mines (which is against the Ottawa Treaty) and forced displacement. However, the ELN are most well known for their attacks against infrastructure (particularly attacking oil pipelines), which have increased this year. They are Colombia’s second largest guerrilla group.

The ELN’s political discourse and military actions against multinational investment in Colombia, particularly in the extractive sector, is part of what scared foreign investment away during much of the 1990s when guerrillas retained significant control over large parts of the country.  Like the FARC, The ELN would charge “revolutionary taxes” on businesses (vacunas), threaten and kidnap large-land owners and company executives, and would carry out infrastructure attacks.

A significant proportion of the counterinsurgency campaign of the paramilitaries and the army directly preceding and during the government of ex-President Alvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) was to “pacify” regions so as to make them safe enough to encourage foreign investment. For example, a main focus of Plan Colombia was securing the Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline which had been attacked on several occasions by the guerrillas.

The ELN is currently in dire straits; it was weakened by the counterinsurgency much more than the FARC and they have currently between 2-3,000 fighters. There are few parts of the national territory  where they are the dominant armed group (oil-rich Arauca, for example), and many see the ELN now as a spent force who is desperate for a negotiated settlement out of the armed conflict.

The Serranía de San Lucas, where Wobert was taken, has been disputed by the ELN, the army, and the paramilitaries for decades given its geostrategic significance.  Over at the Tyee, Colombian journalist Sebastian Salamaca writes:

“[The ELN] decided a good place to start a revolution was the Serranía de San Lucas. Its rugged geography and lack of state presence made it ideal for organizing and gathering strength.

It took 20 years for them to control the area. By the 1980s, the ELN dominated the region. Their mixture of Marxism, liberation theology, and community activism helped them win the partial support of the population. They also regularly violated international law by blowing up pipelines and taking hostages.

In the late 1990s the ELN faced a potent foe, as Carlos Castaño, head of the far-right paramilitary forces in Colombia, or AUC, made it his obsession to take back the territory from the guerrillas.

The AUC knew about the strategic importance of the Serranía: whoever controlled it would profit from the massive cocaine traffic to the Caribbean and the huge gold deposits that were being discovered. Moreover, seizing the Serranía would ensure access to the largest watercourse in Colombia, the Magdalena River.”

What is Canada’s history in the South of Bolívar?

The Coastal department of Bolívar

In an earlier post I remarked how the Canadian government, through funding the Canadian Energy Research Institute, helped re-write and liberalize Colombia’s mining code in 2001.

In Francisco Ramírez Cuellar’s “The Profits of Extermination”, he also outlines how in the Serranía de San Lucas in the South of Bolívar, in land that was initially titled to a local elite family, over 90 mining associations started to work the land through artisanal practices. Under Colombian law, if land is unused by the owner but is being used by someone else, technically, artisanal miners for example have up to two years to ask for titles to that land. Around the early 1990s, a Canadian mining company (then called Conquistador mines) became interested in the gold-rich area.

According to Ramírez, they hired a lawyer to negotiate the land with the small-scale miners on behalf of the Illeras-Palacios (the family who claimed the land). This same lawyer, interestingly, helped draft the 2001 mining code with CERI. After a visit from the Minister of mines, the artisanal miners backed away from negotiations and they gave the land to the mining company.

In 1997, the paramilitaries of the Peasant Self-Defence Forces of Córdoba and Urabá or the ACCU, who would later become the AUC, came to the Serranía. Their stated reasons for doing so were to control the mines, to get rid of miners who were “collaborating with the guerrillas”, and “guarantee the entrance of multinationals who would create jobs”. The paramilitary incursion destroyed over 10 towns in the region, massacred over 400 people, raped both men and women, and left several supposed “guerrilla collaborators” dismembered. Until 2008 over 94,000 people were displaced from the region because of the violence.

It is also worth noting that the Congressman representing the region at the time of the deal and the drafting of the new mining code has since been investigated for having ties to paramilitary groups.

Braeval and Conquistador mines are not the only Canadian companies with interests in the south of Bolívar. B2Gold, a Canadian gold company in the region, claims that it can only operate there with guarantees of security from the Colombian army. As mentioned in a report by Interpares and Mining Watch Canada, the Vice-President of B2Gold has said that non-indigenous communities have no right to reject mining projects on their territory, and alarmingly, that FEDEAGROMISBOL had been “contaminated” by guerrillas. As any student of Colombian history will know, these kinds of accusations can lead to violence against FEDEAGROMISBOL by state security and paramilitary forces (which is what has occurred).

What do the locals think? 

This informative report from Colombia Informa which interviewed community members and associations in the south of the Bolívar state gives an idea into what perceptions were on the ground of the kidnapping and the release of the Canadian executive.

The Agro-Mining Federation of the South of Bolívar (FEDEAGROMISBOL) is an umbrella organization which represents 34 associations of small-scale farmers and artisanal miners in the region has for years been stigmatized as being sympathetic to the guerrillas by the army and the paramilitaries (and has consequently suffered violence against its members). Nevertheless, the group actually had put out a communiqué which rejected the kidnappings carried out by the ELN of the miners and emphasized the release of the Colombians who appeared to be members of FEDEAGROMISBOL. They also said that the kidnappings were “a direct consequence of the indiscriminate natural resource exploitation policy  promoted by the Colombian government, affecting the south of Bolívar and of the handing over of our natural resource to large transnational capital”.

The locals they interviewed emphasized how the kidnapping of the Canadian by the ELN made life more difficult in the region as it invited increased repression from the government security forces. Some community members say that they supported the actions of the ELN, as it “halted the [government’s] mining development plans”, and who felt that this development plan is more for the benefit of multinational companies than their communities who have always been marginalized by the national government.

Other community members expressed their opposition to the kidnapping, saying that it furthers the stigmatization of local community organizing as being complicit or supportive of the guerrillas. Others mention how one of the reason two FEDEAGROMISBOL members were kidnapped was because they were helping the foreign miners behind the backs of the community.

Other community members mention how FEDEAGROMISBOL was able to win more than 10,000 hectares of land from the Lleras-Palacios (the local elite family mentioned earlier) through “pure social struggle”, but that speaking out was extremely difficult given the intense military and paramilitary repression to community organizing and dissidence.

Why was Wobert kidnapped and why does it matter?

Whereas the Colombians and the Peruvians were let free relatively soon, Wobert was kept by the ELN until Tuesday (he had been kidnapped since January), because he could have been a bargaining chip at any eventual peace talks (or even, the key to starting a dialogue). At the same time, the ELN rejects the presence of foreign extractive companies in Colombia, who they see as imperialists, and therefore wanted to retain Wobert until Braeval gave up its mining titles in the region.

Braeval actually has since renounced its four titles in the region; the company’s press release however did not mention the kidnapping.

The ruthless paramilitary expansion in the early 2000s in the region left many with the impression that the region had effectively been pacified, and that although in the most remote areas the ELN remained, the Serranía was perceived to be relatively safe for investment.

Despite the fact that a Colombian government report study which says that industrial mining should not occur in zones of armed conflict (such as the Serranía) junior-based mining companies (who are often Canadian, and are the most likely to take on very risky projects) continue to explore Colombian communities that exist in a context of extreme physical and social vulnerability.

The Canadian government, with its naming of Colombia as a priority for CIDA aid, and the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA), is keen on having a stable (or “pacified”) Colombian countryside in which our companies can extract resources without being threatened. By the same token, the government of President Juan Manuel Santos has made resource extraction a pillar of his national economic development strategy. Wobert’s kidnapping is  a reminder that despite the strength of the paramilitaries and the Washington-funded Colombian army, the guerrillas, despite their losses, can still be a threat to multinational investment, and that Colombia is not as “safe” or “open” for business as it might seem. Kidnappings did not end with Uribe’s “Democratic Security”, and they probably won’t end with Santos.

The logical inverse of this premise (that the guerrillas are still a threat to investment), is that more pacification/repression of the guerrillas is necessary. Indeed, when Wobert was kidnapped, the Colombian government responded by sending 600 troops to the region. Wobert’s kidnapping reminds us that the steps of foreigners in Colombia’s most fragile and violent parts may provoke actions and counter-reactions by armed groups looking to show their dominance in any given region. And more of then than not, these struggles will take place on the backs of civilians (and sometimes in the name or interest of investment). As this Semana report notes, they allege that some companies have signed security/protection deals with the Colombian army, and that artisanal mining opponents to the investment of multinationals, particularly members of FEDEAGROMISBOL, have been systematically murdered.

Therefore, in this context, it must be asked whether Canadian mining investment in Colombia is worth the risk both that it poses to the Canadians who go to Colombia in search of resource riches, but more importantly, to the Colombians who call those communities home and ultimately have to live with the consequences of the instability and repression that mining investment might provoke.

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On How CIDA re-wrote Colombia’s Mining Code and UBC’s CIDA-funded Mining Institute

I think it’s very important for people to be critical of the Institutions they participate in, and the relationships of power they are implicated in.

Last November, the announcement was made that Vancouver-based University of British Columbia (UBC), Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Quebec’s Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal (EPDM) would receive $24.6 million to establish and run the Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development (CIIEID). The stated aims of the CIIEID is to share Canadian expertise so as to “reduce poverty” and “promote good governance” in developing countries.

Given CIDA, and the government of Canada’s extremely troubling history of supporting Canadian commercial interests in Latin America (as well as other places) and the extractive industry’s controversial reputation in a place like Colombia for being associated with violence and the perpetuation, not reduction of poverty, I think this Institutes merits a critical and public debate on behalf of all stakeholders (including all UBC students, who’s educational privilege will indirectly benefit from the creation of such an Institute).

I appeared on CBC Radio One yesterday to talk about some concerns I had with the Dean of Mining Engineering and Executive Director of the Institute, Dr. Bern Klein. My criticisms are by no means personal, or meant to challenge the stated intentions of the Institute; I think the Institute could have potential to do some positive things, but nevertheless it’s establishment is part of CIDA’s “Extraction as Development” trend and therefore merits scrutiny.

I would love your thoughts on the Institute, my comments, and Dr. Klein’s thoughtful response.

Below is my transcription of the interview. You can listen to it here under episode August 19, 2014.  It starts at approximately 1:00:40.

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August 19, 2013 6:40am. The Early Edition with Rick Cluff, CBC Radio One in Vancouver, 88.1 FM.

Rick Cluff: 24 minutes before 7 o’clock, you’re listening to the Early Edition here on CBC Radio One. A UBC student is concerned about his school’s role in promoting mining in developing countries. Now, earlier this year, the Canadian International Development Agency,  better known as CIDA, granted funding for the new Institute at UBC. The Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development is slated to open this year, its’ mandate: to provide expertise on sustainable mining to developing countries. In a few minutes we’ll speak with the Director of the Institute, but first we’re joined by Simon Child who studies Political Science at UBC, and he says he’s troubled by what the Institute is trying to do, and he’s with us here in Studio 10. Hello there.

Simon Child: Glad to be with you.

RC: What are you worried about?

SC: I’m worried about, well, um, firstly let me say that I’m here representing myself and I’m going to be speaking about some communities that, um, speak for themselves and that I can’t speak for them, and they can speak for themselves on their issues a lot better, but, I’m worried that, I think this Institute, some serious questions have to raised as to what extent this Institute is part of CIDA’s very problematic “Sustainable Economic Growth” strategy, which is, as we’ve seen, lined up Canadian international development interests with the promotion of Canadian commercial interests abroad.

A quite troubling aspect of this Institute for me is the Advisory Centre, which is going to, quote, “by supporting the design and implementation of better legislation” hopefully promote good governance and reduce poverty, but that begs the question, ‘better’ legislation, y’know, this Institute is going to help developing countries develop ‘better’ legislation, for whom? Let’s look at an example of that.

In Francisco Ramirez Cuellar’s book, “The Profits of Extermination”, he explains how in the late 1990s the Colombian government contracted a Colombian law firm, and CIDA gave money to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, a Canadian think-tank, and they were tasked with drafting a new mining code for Colombia.

What pro-what this resulted in was Law 685 or the 2001 Colombian mining code which lowered royalties for extractive companies from 10-15% to 0.4%! It also lowered environmental protections, and it made the formalization of artisanal miners harder. Basically it was – it begs the question, so if CIDA has this history of helping fund the development of a mining code in Colombia that liberalized mining, uh, practices and was more in the interests of Canadian industry instead of the Colombian government, y’know, what does that say about the prospects for this Institute, I hope it’d be better but…

RC: The Institute is being set up, as I understand it, to help countries develop their mining industries. Isn’t it good to share Canadian expertise on how to develop their industries responsibly and sustaina, and sustainably?

SC: Well again, in who’s interests are these, um, ind, erm, industries going to be developed? As I’ve said with the example of the 2001 mining code, y’know, the government could have said that this was “sharing expertise”, this was “economic liberalization is going to lead to more investment and that’ll create more jobs” but really what that lead to was the benefit, it benefiting Canadian industry and not the Colombian people. So, I think that you have to sort of ask, what are the power relationships here and why is this really going to happen?

RC: So Simon, what questions do you want specifically answered about how this Institute then will operate?

SC: Well, I would like to know, first of all, what’s going to be the role of local communities, ’cause ultimately, who are affected by mining, because ultimately they’re going to be the ones livings with the consequences of, y’know, advice given to legislators, or community development projects, or anything of that nature.

The second question that I have is what measures are there going to be to hold the Institute accountable or have some kind of, um, accountability mechanism so that something like the 2001 Colombia mining code doesn’t happen again.

RC: Is it the Institute’s responsibility though to police how companies mine in other countries?

SC: No! But that’s not what I’m saying, I’m not saying, and I don’t think that it’s the responsibility of the Institute to be responsible for industry. What I AM saying though is that, I think that, with something like the Advisory Centre you have this very problematic history with the 2001 Colombia mining code which CIDA arguably funded to help re-write, so, in things like this, where there may be a conflict of interest, where a Institute, funded by the Canadian government who has a policy of helping promote Canadian commercial interests in a country like Colombia, how is that conflict of interest going to be handled? I hope that the Institute would be independent and could handle it well, but, again, this 2001 example doesn’t give much confidence in that.

RC: Alright, well, let’s find out. Simon, Simon Child, Political Science student at the University of British Columbia. For more on this though, Bern Klein joins us now in the studio. He’s the acting Executive Director of the Canadian International Institute for the Extractive Industries and Development. Good morning!

Dr. Bern Klein: Good morning.

RC: ah, how do you respond to, first of all, to Simon’s concerns about, this is nothing more than an extension of the commercial side of mining, and tries to legitimize how Canadian companies operate abroad?

BK: Okay, well I think some background is probably helpful here. When there was an announcement that such an Institute was going to be created at a Canadian university, uh, we felt very well-suited to try to work in this area because we have been trying to work in this area for at least the last, um, almost 15 years at UBC as a mining program that’s quite unique, that we’ve had interdisciplinary research work, in areas, um, like social responsibility, human rights, environmental issues related to mining and a lot of work has been done globally and internationally.

So when the institute was cr-when the Institute was announced, we got very excited. We believe that we were awarded the Institute based on our track record, we had a unique qualification in this area, and the goal of the Institute is to support governance, not governments, support governance, in order to support sustainable development and reduce poverty, so, that’s what we want to do. Simon has raised issues about the Advisory Centre and if the Advisory Centre was solely intended to go in and uh, express what Canadian practices were, that wouldn’t be, that wouldn’t represent who we are as an Institute. We are actually made up of a coalition of Simon Fraser University, Ecole Polytechnique, and UBC, plus about 60 strategic partners across Canada, and these are people that we drew from from other universities, NGOs who have strong interest in communities, some companies, and other experts.

So, our intent is that whenever we work  in a country, that we are going to be engaging with the national government, but at the same time applying what we feel needs to be, needs to be done. And to do that, engagement in the community is a priority.

RC: Well since you brought up the Advisory Centre, earlier we spoke with Chris Arsenault who’s a Canadian journalist reporting for Al Jazeera. He specializes in extractive industries, and this is what he had to say about CIDA’s history in creating mining codes in Colombia.

[Clip] Chris Arsenault: The Canadian International Development Agency, partnered with a Colombian law firm, and a think-tank at the University of Calgary, CERI, the Canadian Energy Research Institute to help re-write Colombia’s mining code. This happened post-2001 in a period when security was improving in Colombia and there was a lot of interest in investing in the country. Now, critics of this new code say that either by design or by default, the code benefited companies, especially foreign companies, at the expense of Colombians because of a decrease in tax dollars for public services.

RC: So this is exactly what Simon mentioned as well. So there is concern about this. How do you respond?

BK: Okay, well, in two ways. First of all, we are independent. We are a University. We are not a part of the Federal government and we’re not part of industry. Secondly, one of the centres that make up this Institute is called the Engagement and Dialogue Centre and that was spearheaded by a group at Simon Fraser University who’d been working in areas of conflict at the community level for a long time.

In addition, one of my colleagues, Professor Marcello Veiga, he’s globally known for his work with artisanal mining. We are, we have a track record of working at the community level, and when we develop any program, we are going to want to make sure that we really understand what is the situation in a country, which means that we need to engage with the community. Quite often, conflict arises because the community is not listened to. We also know that in order to develop resources, you may have a permit from the national government, but if you don’t have community support, you’re never going to build that mine. And there are many examples of that. And I think that even industry is aware of that. So it’s in government’s, industry, as well as community interests to have a shared, to be able to share their, um, concerns, to make sure that things are being developed in a way that is acceptable to the community.

RC: Well, best of luck with it! Best of luck to you both on this. Simon’s gonna be watching, as well as the rest of the people interested in this, and Bern, best of luck with the Institute.

BK: Thank you.

’Because We Really Care’: Dissolution of CIDA, how it challenges myths about Canada, its impact on Colombia

“Charity…is the opium of the privileged” – Chinua Achebe, Rest In Peace.

I wanted to give a quick reaction to the news that the Canadian International Development Agency, or CIDA, the body of the Federal government in charge of administering Canadian overseas development aid, is going to be folded into the Department for Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).

There have been a mix of reactions in the Canadian foreign policy Twitter and blogospheres; Director of Partnership Africa-Canada Ian Smillie says that this is a further step away from Canada’s legacy of being a leader among giving assistance to ‘poor countries’; whereas another Canadian foreign policy heavyweight, Roland Paris from the UOttawa, argues that a merger may not in and of itself be a bad thing. Surprisingly some CIDA officials are lamenting the merger, whereas Lloyd Axworthy is welcoming it.

The rationale of the merger being presented by the government is to put development on “equal footing” with trade and diplomacy, and to have a more unified, consistent Canadian voice promoting Canadian ‘values and interests’ abroad.

Overseas Development Assistance, or ODA, in Canada is the legacy of Liberal governments trying to create a very particular image of Canada internally and externally. One of the founding moments for ODA was the Ceylon Conference in which CIDA’s predecessor was established by Nobel laureate Lester B. Pearson. Under Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, Canada’s was quite firmly committed to ODA in Sub-Saharan Africa. Canada, with it’s lack of colonial baggage and bilingual capacity/ties to the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, was always in a ‘good’ position to bolster ties with Francophone and Anglophone African countries through ODA. With the War on/of Terror and Canada’s participation in the NATO mission, Afghanistan also became a development priority. We Canadians framed ourselves as honest and disinterested brokers wanting to do what Americans couldn’t – be the benign and benevolent Westerners who wanted to promote growth, peace, and equality without any  vested interests.

This construction of an innocent and humanitarian Canadian foreign policy has been part and parcel of the discussion surrounding CIDA’s end. Take for example, this interesting commentary from the CBC piece (this is not an editorial or an opinion piece, I might add):

“A confidential draft document obtained by CBC News last fall outlined the broad strokes of a foreign policy shift toward focusing Canada’s international efforts primarily on one goal: forging new trade deals and business opportunities in the rapidly expanding markets of Asia and South America.

The document made scant mention of Canada’s traditional roles as peacemakers in war zones like Afghanistan or foreign aid providers in disasters such as Haiti. It also did not mention using trade deals to pressure countries such as China on human rights and other matters of democratic principle.”

The allusion to “peacekeeping” and “democratic principles” are not an accident. Perhaps the author of this article at the supposedly objective CBC is, like Smillie and Axworthy, in my opinion, a believer in the old form of Canadian aid and it’s ties to our national identity as somehow being altruistic abroad. However, whether Liberal or Conservative, it’s quite clear that this has never been the case, and Canada’s ODA has always come with conditions, and has always been influenced or driven by the extractive sector. During Chretien’s time this was painfully obvious during the First and Second Congo Wars, and the multiple blunders of Canadian industry, DFAIT, and other actors in the DRC. 

In other words, many of those, like Smillie, lamenting this change as a further erosion of Canada’s legacy of “leadership” in Africa with respect to ODA, are romanticizing an era which never really was in reality, but was integral to our identity as a country of people ‘who really care’.

This development ideology stands in stark contrast to the one of the Harper Conservatives. They have confidently, some would say aggressively, shifted Canada’s development interests away from “the poorest of the poor”, to use that extremely problematic language, to aligning Canadian development and diplomatic interests closer to commercial ones. The CIDA merger, I believe, is a significant moment as part of a larger pattern. CIDA, for the Conservatives, was perhaps a Liberal relic that really had no place in their vision for ODA.

Throughout the last few years, this change in ideology in Canada’s ODA has manifested itself in a variety of scandals and controversies, as the Conservatives were perhaps considered to be ruining something that Liberals and progressives saw as a dear part of Canadian national life (helping poor people in far away places). Moments of note include how former Minister for International Co-Operation (the head of CIDA) Bev Oda wrote in a “NOT” for a grant to KAIROS, a well respected NGO who had been doing advocacy around the Israel-Palestine conflict, a strict no-no among new CIDA guidelines for Canadian NGOs.Under Oda, there was also a slight creeping of social conservatism into the development agenda, such as when Canada refused to fund abortions as part of a G8 Maternal Health initiative.

Current Minister of International Cooperation, Julian Fantino (L), and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, John Baird (R).

Current Minister Julian Fantino, for his part, drew a lot of heat for freezing assistance to Haiti, a longtime charity ‘darling’ for Canada, due to a lack of ‘results’, and for CIDA giving funds to NGOs that are associated with the anti-Queer movement in Uganda/on their webpage describe homosexuality as a kind of deviance.  

The most significant change, for me however, is the cozying up of Canadian commercial interests with Canadian ‘humanitarian’ and development initiatives, and the leaving of a Liberal policy of helping “the poorest” in Africa to assisting countries that we need to get resources from in Latin America. Obviously, the Liberals’ development agenda, as mentioned above, wasn’t much better, but the Conservatives is definitely more blatant in what it’s after.

This has really taken shape in two key developments. Firstly, the dropping of many impoverished lower-income African nations such as the DRC from CIDA’s list of priority countries, to a slim list of 20 ‘countries of focus’ for bilateral assistance which will collectively receive 80% of Canadian aid.  The list includes many extremely unequal upper/middle-income Latin American countries such as Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. This was again, moving away from the Liberal CIDA policy of having smaller aid projects sprinkled around every corner of the earth (so everyone would know how amazing Canadians are, clearly) to consolidating development into a few key areas (of course, aligned with broader Canadian interests).

Well, what exactly are those other Canadian interests? This leads to the second shift, which is probably the most telling and controversial out of all the changes – that CIDA would be subsidizing public-private-NGO partnership pilot projects in South America and Africa. In other words, CIDA would be basically disbursing aid money through the CSR branches of Canadian mining companies along with NGOs.

Colombia, as usual, being one of the most unequal, poor, and violent countries in the region fit beautifully into this scheme. With the apertura economica or “economic opening” of Colombia under former President Alvaro Uribe and the beating back of the rebels from formerly marginal areas in the countryside rich in minerals/the “pacification” (read: counterinsurgency campaign) of the countryside, Colombia’s resources were ready for Canadian extraction. To make a very very long story short, Canada signed a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, Colombia made the list of the top 20 “priority” countries for CIDA, and the largest producer of gold in Colombia is a Canadian corporation, Gran Colombia Gold, which has been accused of having ties to paramilitaries. I leave it to you to make what you will of those four things and how related or not they are to each other.

CIDA has also been accused of tinkering with Colombia’s mining code, and industrializing and handing over to foreigners a gold and mining industry that has historically been run by low-income artisanal miners.

Here is a little gem from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA)’s report on the Canadian extractive sector in Colombia:

The report cites reliable sources that link ten Canadian companies in Colombia to the genocide of indigenous Colombians, to complicity in eight murders and one attempted murder, to other significant military/paramilitary repression, to large-scale displacement, and to environmental destruction on a massive scale, as well as to union-busting, strike-breaking, and worker exploitation.

… Never before have Canadian companies in Colombia been denounced as so destructive. They are now open to criminal charges of genocide, murder, complicity in murder, environmental damage, displacement of indigenous populations, and the violation of labour rights.

So what does this CIDA merger mean for Colombia? Probably what it will mean for other countries who also have, for better or for worse, a growing Canadian presence – aid will be more explicitly in the service of the Canadian extractive sector, and all of its alleged associated abuses, and not the ‘people’, to put it bluntly. However, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that aid was ever about ‘the people’. Until 2008, most of Canadian food aid was tied. Afghanistan was an aid priority because we invaded and occupied it. The extractive sector has had huge influence historically over Canadian interests in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Aid has always been a political tool for furthering Canada’s political and economic interests and making us look good with respect to sensational issues such as extreme poverty and war. To romanticize the era of Liberal peacekeeping and a ‘poorest of the poor’-centred CIDA is to deny that, to a certain extent.

CIDA under the Liberals was arguably just as bad as under the Tories, the question is one of representation and symbols. Under Harper, CIDA is no more because what CIDA stood for made no sense to him; aid to him should be about explicitly furthering Canadian economic/political interests. Under the Liberals, this was mostly the same except it was couched in a sinister and self-congratulating discourse of humanitarianism, benevolence, and how kind and wonderful Canadians are. However, many countries which CIDA focuses on, don’t need aid. Colombia is rich in resource and has one of the strongest economies in Latin America; however it’s rural communities exist in an almost feudal state of exploitation by mining companies, local and national oligarchs, guerrillas, neo-paramilitary groups, the army, and drug cartels. Whether it’s CIDA or the FARC, many communities in Colombia are just told about how they should be run, and never given true self-determination. What these communities and nations need, in my view, is a fundamental structural change in power relationships; that would be a discussion that really gets at the heart of poverty in somewhere like Colombia. But this has been absent from the debate about CIDA’s merger, which you would think would have something to do with poverty. The discussion is about what CIDA means to Canada. The discussion is about how some of us are not comfortable with what the Tories are doing which is being explicit about something that, actually has always been quite Canadian – making our charity all about what benefits us, and not those who we give it to.