The Canadian Association of Journalists recently published an open letter calling on journalists to “better explain to readers and viewers just how little information Ottawa has provided for a story.” Ever since Stephen Harper took office in 2006, the letter notes,
“…the flow of information out of Ottawa has slowed to a trickle. Cabinet ministers and civil servants are muzzled. Access to Information requests are stalled and stymied by political interference. Genuine transparency is replaced by slick propaganda and spin designed to manipulate public opinion.”
This Kafkaesque MO is nicely illustrated by the Harper administration’s Americas Strategy, the policy I’ve been investigating over the past year.
Ottawa first went public with the decision to make Latin America the main target (Harperites might prefer “beneficiary”) of Canada’s foreign policy in 2007. “Democratic governance, prosperity, and security,” became our three stated priorities in dealing with our neighbors to the south. To that end, Harper appointed a new Minister of Foreign Affairs (Peter Kent) to focus on the region; the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) refined its “countries of focus” list to concentrate more heavily on Latin America; Panama received a shiny new security centre; Latin American embassies and CIDA headquarters alike increased staffs and boosted budgets.
All well and good. But last August, when I started researching a story for The Walrus about the expanding consequences of Mexico’s drug war, I had my first brush with the limits of government rhetoric. I wanted to know why, despite explicit guarantees during the NAFTA negotiations that we would never demand travel visas from our Mexican trading partners, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had just instituted that very requirement. I called Citizenship and Immigration Canada to ask if there was anyone I could speak with about it. I was told to go to CIC’s website, where I would find all the answers I needed; no one in the whole department had time to speak to a national magazine. (more…)
New myths are sprouting in the Sacred Valley. A medicine man called Puma Singona told me one in the Plaza de San Blas one glorious May morning, the sun slowly baking the last night’s chill out of Cuzco’s ancient boulders as he spoke.
“There was an old lady begging in the streets of Taray,” Puma began, referring to a town half an hour’s drive from where we sat. “In Quechua culture,” he explained, “we don’t give money to beggars — there always has to be an exchange. But it is different with the elderly, because one day all of us will be old and helpless. Nevertheless, a young mother came out of her house and scolded the old lady. ‘You can’t beg here,’ she exclaimed, ‘what kind of example are you setting for our children? You have to leave our town.’ ‘Oh really?’ replied the beggar. ‘Very well. I’ll leave and we’ll see how well your town does without me.’
“The old woman walked away with the slow, stooped gait that you see all around here — life has been hard to many of our people. It’s written in their spines. That night at two in the morning, a rumble came down from high in the mountains. It was the huayco — the mudslide — that everyone knows about now. It rumbled down the creek that runs through Taray, turning the trickle into a furious black river that destroyed the whole village.”
The old woman? The goddess Pachamama of course, come to test the generosity of the people. Other versions focus more on the environmental sins that have accompanied Cuzco’s tenfold growth in the past two decades — the raw sewage, for instance, that more than 200,000 people pour into the Sacred Valley’s Rio Urubamba every day. All the myths agree, however, that the disaster was a manifestation of Pachamama’s wrath. (more…)
The clumsy, kleptomaniac corruption that blooms so frequently in warm climates is to politics what alliteration is to prose — childish, and all too often lucrative. Take Peru, where fresh scandals have made telenovelas of the news in recent weeks.
We begin with José E. Crousillat. The Conrad Black-ish former owner of a prominent television station made his first star turn ten years ago, when he was busted taking bribes from Vladimiro Montesinos (the diabolical power behind the throne during the Fujimori regime) in exchange for providing upbeat coverage of government policy. Crousillat received an eight-year sentence in 2005 and joined both Montesinos and Fujimori in jail. But last December, current president Alan García (who had fled Peru on corruption charges after his first term ended in 1990) pardoned Crousillat on humanitarian grounds: his doctors had claimed he was nearly dead from a heart condition, prompting an appeal to spend his last days with his family.
Public sympathy, never high to begin with, evaporated altogether when, a few weeks ago, Crousillat was spotted sipping cocktails on a beach. He disappeared before he could be reeled in for a fresh medical, and continues to elude the police. No one knows where he’s soothing his valves now.
The Crousillat uproar was quickly overwhelmed by a second case involving not only past and present presidents, but potential future leaders as well. This one revolves around a private firm, Business Track, which specializes in spying on just about everyone who matters in Peru. The story began two years ago, when a series of tapes known as the “petroaudios” exposed Big Oil executives bribing senior government ministers for oil contracts. Nothing much came of the petroaudios until a few weeks ago, when Business Track released a treasure trove of even juicier dialogues. (The firm is now being investigated for espionage even as the fruit of its labours is used as evidence.) These new conversations revealed further players in the Petrogate scandal, as well as several unrelated bribings in other industries and ministries.
The Justice Department received the recordings on a single USB drive, but before the police could finish their analysis, or even duplicate the files, this nuclear piece of evidence was erased by an unknown hand within the Justice Department itself. Patchy, scintillating details have been emerging ever since, leaked from the snippets police did manage to peruse. One of the biggest emerging culprits is Jorge Del Castillo, secretary general of the ruling Apra party and heir apparent to President García in the 2011 election; Castillo is reported to have put in a few words tying him to Petrogate in no uncertain terms. On the other end of the political spectrum, Ollanta Humala, the far-left runner-up in the last election and Castillo’s strongest competitor in the next, was taped accepting money from Hugo Chavez via the Venezuelan embassy in Lima. Humala interprets this as evidence that García paid Business Track to spy on him during the 2006 campaign, lending fresh momentum to his longstanding claim that the president won the poll through fraud. (more…)
The first time I meet S. he talks about the importance of killing: “Only by killing his enemies can an Awajun establish his leadership. That is why we train our youth how to fight.”
He says this because, in his view, Peru’s native communities will never achieve their demands through dialogue alone.
What are those demands? First, to be granted title over ancestral lands — a step the government has agreed to in principal, while in practice signing over just a third of the recognized territory — and second, to be consulted before any industrial activity takes place on those lands.
Last week, the International Labour Organization declared that Peru’s government was obliged to halt all resource exploitation until proper consultation with affected natives and campesinos could take place. This derives from Article 169 of the ILO, which the Peruvian government has signed. The ILO’s demand was quickly, predictably repeated by groups ranging from Survival International, an NGO representing indigenous rights worldwide, to Peru’s own National Coordinator for Human Rights. The government, just as predictably, declined to respond, leaving it to a representative of Peru’s business community to remind leftists that Article 169 isn’t legally binding.
S. and I are sitting in a small restaurant beside the humble Lima office of AIDESEP, the national association of Amazon Indians. He is working through a plate of lomo saltado for breakfast; dressed in jeans and a plain red t-shirt, he’s a slight man in his early forties who speaks quietly, with a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth. (more…)
In the March 2010 issue of The Walrus, Arno Kopecky’s article “Law of the Jungle” took a hard look at Canada’s recent free trade deal with Peru. A few days ago, Kopecky flew back into Lima, Peru’s capital, en route to the country’s northern jungle. During the months to come, he’ll be “piping up semi-regularly” from the region with notes on local effects of the Canadian government’s so-called Americas Strategy. This is his first post of the blog series to come.
It seems that strategy matters to the Harper Administration, which made sure the proposed Free Trade Agreement with Colombia was the first bill Parliament saw after prorogation. The issue of free trade always inspires colourful debate, but this one is particularly heated, in light of allegations linking Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s government to an impressively wide range of human rights abuses. CBC’s The Current ran a good piece on the issue in late February; writing in the Globe and Mail a few days later, Campbell Clark suggested that our government’s motivations in signing the deal have less to do with money than power. After all, he noted, Colombia only buys about 0.2 percent of our exports, so what’s really going on here is a snub to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, arch enemy of Prez Uribe and all things fair and free.
While I don’t doubt Harper’s enthusiasm for the Great Game (and hockey too), I do think it’s important to consider what we might want to buy, and on what terms, from an oil-sodden country filled with precious woods and metals. So far, there’s little evidence that even the most benevolent intentions from Ottawa and Bogota can enforce human rights and environmental regulations in Colombia’s hinterland.
I haven’t been to Colombia yet, so rather than wade deeper into speculative cynicism, I’ll refer to an experience I had last fall in another resource-loaded, regulation-deprived country now linked by free trade to Canada: Peru. Speaking off the record (sigh) with a Canadian diplomat in Lima, I asked why Canada had refused to publicly criticize Peru’s government for a lethal clampdown on native protesters in the Peruvian Amazon last June — precisely the kind of action everyone fears in Colombia. (The Peruvian protests were a direct response to free trade and resource extraction on native land.) This seemed as good a chance as any to hold our trade partners accountable for human rights. The diplomat, however, assured me that conversations were taking place behind closed doors, and that to raise the issue publicly would be counterproductive.
Really? Then why did Peter Kent, our Minister of State of Foreign Affairs for the Americas, immediately and publicly condemn Chavez — with whom Canada is not even considering a FTA — for shutting down six television stations in January? I don’t ask that question to endorse Chavez or his tactics. But as Canada starts hurling sticks and carrots into Latin America, I wonder how carefully we’re watching where they land. Sooner or later, folks here will start throwing them back.
A favorite quote among activists is Margaret Mead’s old encouragement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
It’s a good rallying cry for the hopelessly outnumbered, which seemed a fair description of the two dozen people who gathered outside premier Gordon Campbell’s Vancouver constituency office last Saturday. The rally was scheduled to begin at noon; at ten after, organizer Ken Wu, the young and affable conservation biologist who is now director of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC2), said “let’s give it a few more minutes. Our supporters operate on dooby time.” A car honked – “is that for us?” wondered Wu, gesturing to the placards encouraging drivers-by to honk if you love old growth, “or just the usual Vancouver traffic?” (more…)
“The Canadian lifestyle is an act of terrorism against the rest of the world.”
I heard this assessment of our national modus operandi unleashed by Usman Majeed, a young activist. He was one of the speakers at two conferences I attended last weekend: one on ‘Environmental Racism’ and the other titled ‘Why I oppose the 2010 Olympics.’ I went in part because 2009 marks the ten-year anniversary of the Battle in Seattle, a seminal event in the history of protest, and I can’t help but wonder where the movement’s at a decade on. The Doha Round may have collapsed, but so have most of the world’s ecosystems, and poverty’s march across the planet hasn’t much slowed. There’s a lot left to protest, in other words, and I’m interested in the wackos actually doing it. (more…)
You may have come across a television show last year that featured celebrities visiting strange places: MIA in Liberia; Cameron Diaz on the Peruvian altiplano; Joaquin Phoenix, well before his exotic journey into hip-hop, dancing in a grass skirt deep inside the Amazon. The spirit of activism came quickly across – these celebrities were out to do good – but strangely, no one was wearing any make up, adopting children, or composing euphemistic hymns for sale on ebay.
The show was 4REAL, and in a series of eight installments it brought household names to faraway places where they could shine some starlight on young leaders you’ve probably never heard of. Thus viewers are benignly tricked into learning about Tashka, who grew up in remotest Amazon, became his Yawanawa tribe’s youngest chief at 25, and is now campaigning to become Brazil’s first aboriginal senator; or Salim Mohamed, a Kenyan whose contribution to the health and happiness of Nairobi’s poorest residents I’ve profiled in earlier posts; or Vancouver’s own Liz Evans, a nurse whose mission lies just around the corner from 4REAL’s headquarters in what the Globe and Mail recently called ‘Canada’s slum’ – she comes to us via Eva Mendez, who sheds gorgeous tears after Evans introduces her to residents of Vancouver’s downtown eastside. (more…)
On February 12, news media across the country celebrated the preversary of the 2010 Winter Olympics. That’s my word for a date marking one-year-to-the-day before something happens, the kind of non-event beloved by news editors because of all the copy it enables. Fair enough; too many issues go unreported for lack of timeliness, after all. But notice that if, in the spirit of healthy sport, you play around with preversary, it becomes perversary.
Perverse, that is, just like the Games themselves – but that’s to be expected, at least up to a point. Even so it was startling to read James Christie’s front page story for the Globe and Mail that day, gleefully detailing how Canadian athletes are being given vastly preferential access to Olympic facilities; apparently we’re limiting foreign teams’ practice time on our tracks, slopes, rinks and racecourses so as to give our own contenders the advantage of familiarity on competition day. How sporting. I wonder what Dick Pound, the Canadian pitbull formerly in charge of the World Anti-Doping Agency, would say? I suppose he’d be happy no substances were being sanctioned, but it does seem to go against the principle of fair play he and WADA so vehemently espouse. (more…)
Have you paused lately to consider how extraordinary it is that our bodies can turn sunlight into bone? Vancouver’s winter cloud blanket has prompted some nostalgic investigation into the process by which that takes place (or would if I were living somewhere else), with some surprising results.
Very roughly speaking, the magic begins when ultraviolet light waves strike our epidermis, where they become vitamin D through a process that’s about as well understood as photosynthesis in plants – ie, not really at all. We’ll gloss over that elephant in the room, since we must, and follow vitamin D as makes its way to the kidneys, where it’s transformed (much more transparently) into something known as 1,25(OH)2D. That little compound then helps calcium do its thing, and voila – bones develop in children, stay dense in adults, and nobody comes down with rickets. (more…)
In the spirit of existential angst now gripping the journalism industry, I paid a recent visit to the future of our trade. The route there took me through Vancouver’s downtown east side, a colorful, Dickensian neighborhood known chiefly for the homelessness on display at street level. Is this it, I wondered, picturing the New York Times’ Sulzberger family huddled on the sidewalk, begging Carlos Slim for a quarter billion dollars – but no, not yet it wasn’t. The future was inside an office high rise, four floors up and named after a fish.
The Tyee is an online magazine dedicated to investigative journalism of the kind we’re seeing less and less of on paper. It focuses primarily on issues facing BC, but many of the stories it breaks are geographically diffuse (ever heard of the 100-mile diet?), making it one of the premier news-gathering institutions in the country. (more…)
“By the time bodies start piling up, that’s just a detail.” — Ugandan journalist Kalundi Serumaga, speaking at the Kwani Litfest in Nairobi.
NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands. Binyavanga Wainaina—the next Achebe, or maybe just a good talker—going on about where’s a razor to shave his dreadlocks off: “I just want to see the shape of my skull.”
(“Ah,” said David Kaiza, Kampala’s neurotic genius, “you’re going to scalp yourself before someone else does it for you.”)
Meanwhile, investigative journalist Parselelo Kantai was describing the 1000-shilling bribe he’d paid the cops who caught him smoking a cigarrette on the street at four in the morning last night, while Kalundi was grumbling about everything in a very analytic way—that all the intelligence in this country had been trained outside of it, that everything we’d been talking about throughout the litfest was probably irrelevant, that the waitress had passed him three times without bringing him a menu and it took a blond mzungu to get her attention. “Hey man,” I said, “you could have lifted your hand too.” (more…)
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