People in Honduras are taking to the streets to demand a recount in their recent election. One young woman has been killed by the Military Police. Even elite police units are withdrawing to their barracks in protest over being asked to shoot at their fellow citizens.
Why should Canadians care?
Though most Canadians don’t know it, Canada has played a major role in what’s called the Northern Triangle of Central America. Its three countries – Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – are three of the highest per capita homicide countries in the world.
Since the early 1960s proxy wars—first against Communism, then against the drug trade, have played out across these countries. Over 300,000 people died in the first war from 1960 to 1996, of whom 200,000-plus were Guatemalans (mostly Maya), with 85 per cent killed by government forces trained and abetted by the United States, South Africa, Israel, Taiwan and others. This figure comes from the Commission for Historical Clarification of the United Nations.
What most Canadian don’t know is that one of the roots of this war was an agreement between the then Guatemalan government and the Canadian company INCO to strip-mine large regions of the country’s northeast.
Since then Canadian mining companies have continued to play a disastrous role in the region, their conduct barely covered by the Canadian news media. The Canadian government, first under Stephen Harper and now under Justin Trudeau, has been silent on these companies’ conduct, even when their operations have repeatedly involved the killing of Indigenous activists protesting destruction of their environment, and of their communities.
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