Who exploits Oaxaca, eh?

I’d hinted that Canadian mining interests might be a factor in the on-going Oaxaca situation recently.  What I wrote then was that we’re all focusing on the protests against the pillagers in the state capital, while the pillaging goes on out in the campo.  Mandeep Dhillon, writing for Upside Down World looks at the role the vested interest his country’s  business and government have in continued violence and ingovernability in Oaxaca in “Made in Canada Violence: Mining in Mexico“: 

Canadian mining corporations in Oaxaca and Chiapas are not just witnesses to the violence that is occurring there but rely on that violence to protect their profits. Businesses and governments have identified one of NAFTA’s short-comings as the failure of its benefits reaching Mexico’s southern states rather than an increase in poverty and inequality caused by NAFTA itself. In more recent business reports and talks between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico focused on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), the opening up of Mexico’s energy resources – in particular to Canadian corporations – has been accorded prime importance. (So has the further development of energy sources in Canada.) According to the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, which has been identified as one of the major business think-tanks behind the SPP, “improvements in human capital and physical infrastructure in Mexico, particularly in the center and south of the country, would knit these regions more firmly into the North American economy and are in the economic and security interest of all three countries”. It comes as no surprise that the same corporate and government bodies are calling for expansions of Canada’s exploitative agricultural guest-worker program which they cite as an example of bi-lateral success. For Canadian and Mexican governments and business, such guest-worker programs are a win-win situation as they provide a means to control forced migration caused by corporate and military displacement while reaping the economic benefits of a moveable, exploitable labor force in Canada and through remittances sent to Mexico. According to a Mexican government official who ran the program for two years in one of the southern states, these programs also allow for the Mexican government to weaken social movement building by intermittently removing thousands of its poorest citizens. Canadian complicity in increasing displacement both at home and in Mexico is to be anticipated.  

The perception of Canada as the U.S.’ junior partner often comes with a lack of clarity on Canadian responsibility in the history of violence and displacement within and beyond its national borders. Often, language around Canada-based solidarity work with the struggles of Indigenous communities, campesino and labor movements in Mexico distorts the responsibility of Canadian governmental and corporate players in the violence which has engendered those movements. Canadian mining corporations are but one example of how Canadians are complicit beyond just silence on the issues but through a very active process.