Latin America
Related: About this forumThe strange, distasteful case of Canada and Honduras
By Rick Salutin
Contributing Columnist
Thu., Aug. 15, 2019timer3 min. read
I feel flummoxed, a word Ive never resorted to, by Canadas policy in Honduras. Its a poor, Central American country, the original banana republic. It suffered many military dictatorships.
In 2009 it had an actual election that was overthrown by military coup. The president, a moderate from the national elites, had developed some mildly progressive ideas so the army hustled him out of the country in his PJs.
The rigged election that followed, which all respectable monitoring bodies shunned, was nevertheless approved by Canada (in Harpers era) even more heartily than by the U.S., which has military bases there. Maybe it was due to heavy Canadian investment in mining and sweatshops.
Subsequent rigged elections ensued; 2017 was a classic. A reformist party led till the vote counting was shut down for 36 hours, then suddenly the militarys favourite surged and won. Thirty protesters were killed afterwards.
Canada endorsed this joke, too, but now under Trudeaus Liberals. Perhaps they had the added incentive of doing backflips whenever the U.S. asked, in order to cement NAFTA, one of their they say great successes (and a joke itself, since Trump has shown he can always block our exports, NAFTA or not).
More:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/08/15/the-strange-distasteful-case-of-canada-and-honduras.html
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The role of Canadian mining in the plight of Central American migrants
August 15, 2019 7.06pm EDT
In October 2018, a group of some 4,000 migrants set out en masse from Honduras, headed north toward the United States-Mexico border.
In the weeks that followed, an all-out panic over this migrant caravan gripped the U.S. political mainstream. Donald Trumps administration painted the caravan as a Trojan Horse, teeming with traffickers, criminals and gang members. The spectacle of the caravan eventually gave way to that of the border itself, which daily throws up new horrors: harrowing images of migrant detainees crowded into squalid concentration camps, held in cages under freeway overpasses, drowned in the waters of the Rio Grande.
It can be easy to imagine that as Canadians, we have little direct stake in this drama. We are reassured in this thinking by recent reports declaring that Canada resettled more refugees than any other nation in 2018. Such accomplishments, we tell ourselves, make us mere observers of the humanitarian calamity currently unfolding at the U.S. southern border.
Never has it been more necessary to abandon this fantasy. Canada is centrally involved in the life-and-death struggle for migrant justice in the United States. Our foreign economic policies and domestic asylum laws are working in tandem with the U.S. and exposing asylum-seekers, particularly those from Latin America, to the worst excesses of a punitive American immigration system.
More:
https://theconversation.com/the-role-of-canadian-mining-in-the-plight-of-central-american-migrants-120724