In 2007 the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, in the context of a much publicized but relatively brief trip to several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced that the Americas would be a policy priority and that Canada would be re-engaging the Americas. Since then the Canadian government has negotiated free trade agreements with Peru, Colombia and Panama, although the Colombian agreement has yet to be approved. Canadian foreign aid and development priorities appear to have shifted toward the Americas as well and away from the more traditional concentration on Africa.
In light of the government’s stated policy priorities and the active role which Canada played at the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad/Tobago as well as at the North American Summit with Presidents Obama and Calderón, it is worth identifying some of the main trends in the region and their implications, if any, for Canada.
Potential or real security threats from outside the Americas have in general not been viewed as an issue since the end of the Cold War, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, the end of the El Salvador conflict and of what was at least seen to be Cuban-backed insurgency in Central America. There are, nonetheless, reasons to be cautious about the optimism which followed the collapse of the USSR and a significantly weakened Castro government in Cuba.
Russia under Vladimir Putin has reasserted its international presence, including developing closer ties with President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, ties which include the sale of weapons to the Chavez government and the symbolic visit of Russian heavy bombers to Venezuelan airfields. One estimate, by a Swedish think tank, suggests that Venezuela has become the leading purchaser of Russian weapons in the world. Russia and Venezuela have concluded agreements on energy, military and agricultural cooperation, including a joint venture between the Venezuelan state company PDVSA-services and Gasprom’s Latin American division. The two countries have also established a multibillion dollar development bank. The expansion of the bilateral relationship has not to date translated into any significant increase in Russia-Venezuelan trade. Sixty percent of Venezuelan oil is still exported to the United States, representing 11 percent of U.S. supply.
Iran, surprising to some observers, using funding to Hezbollah, has also continued to expand its presence, especially in Venezuela and in the border zone between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The presence of any Hezbollah sponsored interests in the region constitutes a distinct even if limited security threat to U.S., Canadian and regional players in the Caribbean Basin and the Southern cone.
China has been commercially very active in the region in the past decade, motivated largely by its increasing need for raw materials, especially petroleum, to feed its growing industrial might. A recent study prepared for the U.S. Congressional Research Service indicates that in 2006 China invested $9 billion in railways, telecommunications, mining and agriculture in Venezuela, $5 billion in energy in Venezuela and $7 billion in ports, railways, aviation and steel in Brazil. On one level China’s presence in the region is strictly commercial and thus not a security concern. Yet, given the U.S. determination to reduce its reliance on imported oil from the Middle East, China’s thirst for oil poses competition for hemispheric resources. It has also been suggested that China is an important source of precursor chemicals in the narcotics industry.
Although the days of the dominance of the generals in the 1970s and 1980s are well past and varying degrees of democratic governments the norm in the Caribbean and Latin America, meaningful democracy remains fragile, threatened in some instances by civil strife, inequalities of class, race, wealth and opportunity. The past decades have continued to witness the strength of major organized criminal groups, especially in Mexico and Colombia, associated with international narcotics trafficking, and the longest lived and still active guerrilla insurgency in Latin America, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The countries of the Americas have all adhered to the Democratic Charter, with the sole exception of Cuba, which because of an outdated, ineffective and politically driven U.S. policy, remains outside the American “family” of nations.
In late June 2009 the Honduran military, ostensibly at the behest of the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress, removed constitutionally elected President Manuel Zelaya from office and sent him into exile, claiming that his planned June referendum addressing the issue of a single term presidency was unconstitutional. In spite of the formal denunciation of what has been portrayed as a military coup by the Organization of American States, as the fall of 2009 moves to a close the provisional Honduran government remains adamant that President Zelaya will not be allowed to return to office. National elections are scheduled for November. OAS initiated negotiations led by former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias have failed to generate resolution, and some analysts suggest that at least one of the reasons for Arias’s failure is the encouragement that Zelaya has received from Venezuela President Hugo Chavez.
Three Caribbean and Latin American countries are at the time of writing in serious crises. One is Honduras as noted. A second is Haiti, where a UN force continues to work with international partners, including Canada, to bring political and economic stability to the impoverished nation. Although the Canadian role in Haiti is controversial in some circles, Haiti is by far the largest recipient of Canadian foreign aid in the Western Hemisphere. The third country which faces a mounting crisis of violence driven by organized crime is Canada’s NAFTA partner Mexico. The intensified levels of lawlessness, especially in the states bordering the U.S., have led the government of Calderon to intensify a military campaign, strengthen police forces, and attempt to reduce the level of impunity for those commiting crimes. To date those efforts have brought little concrete result.
In 2007, late in the George W. Bush administration, the United States and Mexican governments concluded an agreement for increased U.S. assistance. Plan Merida is designed to inject several billions of dollars into Mexican assistance, primarily for judicial and police training and reform, the technology necessary to facilitate legal operations, and some military hardware. Critics contend that Plan Merida is little more than a modest version of Plan Colombia, inaugurated in the Clinton years to address the problems associated with narcotics trafficking, and that it will result in a similar level of increased militarization of the Mexican situation. To compound Mexico’s woes with the narcotics driven violence that stains the nation’s image, analysts also suggest that the country’s oil industry is less than a decade away from crisis, primarily derived from a failure to engage in secondary recovery and the unwillingness of the state to attract the levels of foreign investment which would strengthen the industry.
Among Latin American nations there are also tensions. The Colombia-Venezuela relationship has rarely been harmonious historically, but tensions between the two countries have significantly increased with the emergence of Chavez in Venezuela and his efforts to promote his Bolivarian Revolution with other nations, including with Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia and most recently Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Chavez also draws on Fidel Castro for at least symbolic moral support. Cuba in turn, though largely bankrupt, has with Chavez scored a significant symbolic public relations victory by sending hundreds of Cuban doctors to work in the previously neglected slums of Venezuela and other countries.
Chavez’s relations with Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe Vélez have been volcanic at times. Chavez recently sabre rattled and moved Venezuelan forces to the Colombian border in an impulsive and overly dramatic response to Colombia’s brief military incursion into Ecuador territory in an effort to destroy an important FARC base. In spite of the indignant response from both Ecuador and Venezuela to the Colombian action, the fact is that Colombia had repeatedly sought through formal diplomatic channels Ecuadoran cooperation on the border; even more significant were the revelations from captured FARC computers of Venezuelan complicity with FARC operations, although this only added additional evidence to what had long been known.
If one looks at the hemisphere from the bottom up, on the other hand, suspicions of power focus on the United States rather than on Russia, China or Iran, or for that matter one’s immediate neighbour. In late August 2009 the Obama administration and the Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe exacerbated Latin America’s traditional concern with the U.S. projection of its military power into the region when they negotiated a ten year agreement permitting U.S. forces to use five air bases and two naval installations in Colombia as part of the U.S. counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism policies. The reaction in Latin America has been almost uniformly condemnation. That agreement quickly became the focus of often heated discussion when the presidents of the Union of South American Countries (UNASUR) met in Argentina shortly after the negotiations had been concluded. Although the chorus of criticism was led by Chavez, who claimed without a blush that the agreement constituted a declaration war against the Bolivarian Revolution, the only president to support Uribe’s actions as a legitimate act of Colombian sovereignty, was Alan Garcia of Peru, not the most reliable of allies.
The Colombia-Venezuela tensions will continue, just as the internal Colombian civil conflict fueled by narcotics continues to defy resolution.
In spite of tension and conflict elsewhere, the country in the region to watch is Brazil. Brazil is emerging as a hemispheric leader as well as gradually a significant international player. Brazilian military forces lead the UN peacekeeping operation in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and Brazil has begun to flex its considerable economic and political muscle in the hemisphere. Its state owned oil company Petrobras is widely respected for its technical competence as well as its leadership in the area of corporate social responsibility, and the company has quickly become a hemispheric player in oil development.
For Canadian governments, the challenges in dealing with the hemisphere are several. One is resolution of the longstanding Haitian crisis. A second is adapting to the reality of Brazil’s economic, political and diplomatic clout. A third is deciding the degree to which Canada should engage Mexico in its efforts to rein in the lawlessness associated with organized crime. Finally, Canadian governments need to question the extent to which a focus on trade liberalization in our dealings with the region really addresses some of the fundamental problems which beset the nations of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Stephen J. Randall, FRSC, is a professor of history with the University of Calgary and a senior fellow with the Canadian International Council and the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.