Blood of extraction : Canadian imperialism in Latin America

Summary: Rooted in thousands of pages of Access to Information documents and dozens of interviews carried out throughout Latin America over the last four years, this is a critical study of contemporary Canadian intervention in Latin America. It integrates political economy with theories of development and social movements to interrogate the insertion of Canadian multinational corporations (MNCs) into Latin America, the role of the Canadian state in facilitating this process, and the impact of these interconnected dynamics on the region's people and ecology. Canadian-based MNCs, backed by the Canadian state through a coherent strategic framework of trade, diplomacy, development aid, and security policy, have developed extensive economic interests in Latin America over the last two decades. While Canadian investment is occurring across a broad range of sectors, it is most extensive, and controversial, in the resource sector. Canada has the largest mining industry in the world, while Latin America has become the most important regional destination for Canadian resource investment abroad. We demonstrate how resource extraction is a poor source of job creation and typically associated with increased inequality, environmental damage, and the proliferation of human rights abuses. Latin American communities affected by Canadian resource extraction are now organized into hundreds of movements of opposition, from Mexico in the north to Argentina in the south. This is organized around detailed case studies of Canadian geopolitical engagement with a number of countries in Central America and the Andes. Within each chapter we track the growth of Canadian investment, the human rights and ecological conflicts that attend that investment, and the different strategies mobilized by the Canadian state and embassies to advance the interests of Canadian MNCs in the face of social movement, and occasionally governmental, opposition.