In recent years, the Canadian state has lent its support to a repressive post-coup regime in Honduras; it has provided military and ideological backing for a repressive regime in Colombia, one which boasts the hemisphere’s worst record on human rights; it has aggressively interfered in the domestic affairs of left-of-center Latin American governments, such as that of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador; it has supported ecological destruction and the dislocation of vulnerable populations in the region through its support for Canadian natural resource companies; it has provided cover for exploitative working conditions in the factories of Canadian companies operating in the export processing zones of Central America; it has sought to delegitimize, coopt, or coerce popular movements that have directly challenged the economic interests of Canadian capital — this is the reality with which any honest study of Canada’s growing political and economic engagement with Latin America must start.

These are not extreme or isolated examples, unrepresentative of the broader character of Canada’s foreign policies in the Americas. These trends are at the core of Canadian foreign policy in Latin America, animating both Canadian capitalist expansion and popular resistance in the region.

Canadian multinational corporations (MNCs) have expanded rapidly into Latin America as a whole since the 1990s with devastatingly destructive force. Their deleterious impact on human rights has been matched only by their enormous ecological offences — indeed, the two often go hand in hand. Expansion of Canadian capital has in turn engendered waves of creative and militant community resistance, which has proved the most successful way thus far of containing predatory Canadian MNCs and the state policies that abet their operations.