Category Archives: Peace

Canadian casualties as U.S. takes aim at Cuban businesses

by Jim Hodgson

Readers of this blog may find it odd that I am concerned about the fate of a Canadian mining company operating overseas, especially just days after a new report showed that U.S. sanctions have tripled Cuba’s infant mortality rate over the past seven years. (By the way, retired Latin American studies professor John Kirk of Dalhousie University have a new article about the impact of sanctions posted May 7 at rabble.ca.)

But Sherritt International Corp. had operated a nickel and cobalt mine in Holguín province as a joint venture with the Cuban state for more than 30 years, an arrangement that ensured Cubans shared the benefits of the mining operation. On May 7, as legal implications of new U.S. sanctions became clearer, Sherritt suspended its operations in Cuba.

In response to Sherritt’s announcement, the Canadian Network on Cuba (CNC) said the Canadian government must “take immediate and decisive action in defence of Canadian sovereignty, international law, and the right of Canadian companies to conduct lawful business free from foreign coercion and intimidation.”

CNC said President Donald Trump’s May 1 executive order “constitutes yet another illegal attempt to extend U.S. domestic law beyond its borders and impose Washington’s unilateral sanctions regime on the entire world. This represents not merely an attack on Cuba, but a direct assault on Canada’s sovereignty, on international trade law, and on the principle that no state has the right to dictate the economic relations of other nations.”

Further U.S. measures announced May 7 targeted Grupo de Administracion Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), partner of many foreign tourist operations, and Moa Nickel SA, the joint venture between Sherritt and Cuba’s state-owned nickel company.

The current escalation is rooted in the infamous Helms-Burton Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996. The extraterritorial features of that law provoked anger in Canada and Europe, but those features were effectively waived by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. In April 2019, Trump revived then. Canada’s then foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, objected, saying Canada would “fully defend the interests of Canadians conducting legitimate trade and investment with Cuba.” She reminded Canadians that amendments in 1996 to Canada’s 1985 Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act (FEMA) stipulate that any judgment issued under Helms-Burton “shall neither be recognized nor enforceable in any manner in Canada.”

CNC now poses the question: will the current government enforce FEMA? If the Canadian government fails to act now, FEMA becomes little more than a hollow gesture, and Canada effectively concedes that U.S. law supersedes Canadian law on Canadian soil. CNC argues that Ottawa must therefore:

  • Publicly denounce the Trump administration’s Executive Order as an illegal extraterritorial measure that violates international law and Canadian sovereignty;
  • Immediately invoke and enforce the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act to protect Canadian corporations operating lawfully in Cuba;
  • Provide legal, diplomatic, and financial protections to Canadian firms targeted by U.S. sanctions;
  • Coordinate with Mexico, the European Union, CARICOM nations, and other states opposing the blockade to resist Washington’s unlawful coercive measures; and
  • Reaffirm Canada’s longstanding opposition to the U.S. blockade and demand its complete and unconditional end.

Taken together, more than six decades of U.S. sanctions are described in Cuba as a blockade. The term is most apt now after more than three months of a U.S. blockade of fuel shipments from Venezuela and Mexico. The UN General Assembly has overwhelmingly condemned the U.S. blockade in annual votes for more than three decades. CNC adds:

“The blockade and its extraterritorial application violate the UN Charter, international law, freedom of navigation and trade, and the sovereign equality of states. Yet Washington continues to intensify this economic siege, now seeking to punish not only Cuba, but also Canadian companies, Canadian workers, and Canadian economic interests.”

The new U.S. sanctions follow a “long-standing policy and campaign of economic warfare, sabotage and destabilization aimed at strangling Cuba regardless of the collateral damage inflicted internationally,” says CNC. “Canada must choose whether it will defend its sovereignty and uphold international law, or whether it will permit itself to be subordinated to the extraterritorial dictates of a foreign power: whether to join empire or challenge it.”

Bruce McLeod: an inspiring ecumenical educator and communicator

by Jim Hodgson

Here today, I want to share some of the words and teaching of the Very Rev. Dr. Bruce McLeod, former moderator of The United Church of Canada (1972-74) and former president of the Canadian Council of Churches (1991-94). He passed away this week at age 96.

It was in that latter role that I knew him best. (The United Church’s memorial is here, and there is more information too on the site of the United Church’s archives.) He was interviewed by Broadview magazine less than a year ago.

I can’t be sure, but I think I first met him in the mid-80s when he co-hosted the United Church’s weekly television program Spirit Connection. (Bruce was also an early ally to 2SLGBTQIA+ people who sought full inclusion and ministry in the United Church and beyond.)

In 1989, I had joined the CCC staff to serve as its secretary for ecumenical education and communication. Bruce was an inspiration for me in my new role (and long since). Some reflections from those years follow.

Entre-nous (the CCC newsletter), July 1991, p.3

Soon after his election as CCC president, he spoke to the CCC’s executive (June 21, 1991):

It’s especially important, in this kairos time of economic retrenchment in which God speaks to us for the Council to address the churches from which we come.

  • To remind them again of the Lund Principle which commits churches to doing separately in God’s world only those things which cannot be done together;
  • To summon our member churches from those ingrown, competing and duplicated enterprises which often preoccupy us;
  • To challenge separated structures (and our own denominational hearts) to think and act together – nationally, regionally and locally – in the name of Jesus who prays that we might be one.

Not for our sakes; but that the world might know that it’s bathed in the love of God, whose Spirit uses us, with others, to make the breaking world a home.

Refugee rights: “We saw their faces”

Back in the late 1980s, the government of Brian Mulroney brought in new rules to restrict the numbers of people who could claim refugee protection in Canada. Bruce was part of the CCC’s board when it launched a court challenge to a new refugee determination system in January 1989.

The churches’ concern then was much as it is today: rules were too tight and would endanger the lives of some refugee claimants by sending them back to persecution, imprisonment or possible death. The specific alarm was over the process for determining whether individuals were eligible to make a claim, and if rejected, whether they would be able to make a meaningful appeal. (We didn’t win the suit then and the fight for protection continues in the face of ever-harsher anti-refugee rhetoric and stricter measures in many parts of the world.)

In a sermon at the council’s assembly in Charlottetown in 1994, he said the churches challenged the new rules “because they knew refugees not as numbers or statistics; they saw their faces, knew their stories and wiped their tears. They heard God calling them to come; they did together what they couldn’t have done separately. It was as though something more than the initiative of the churches was at work here — as though a presence or purpose was waiting in the issues themselves, plucking at the churches to respond.”

Bruce McLeod with his successor as president of the CCC, Dr. Alexandra Johnston (1994).

To cherish and preserve this small world

I heard Bruce tell the story of his encounter in 1992 with astronomer Carl Sagan more than once. They met at a “religion and science” gathering in Washington, and he included the story in a report to the CCC executive that I reproduced in Entre-nous, the CCC newsletter, in July 1992:

“Sagan said that when the Voyager spacecraft spun past Neptune and Pluto edging beyond the solar system to wander forever across the Milky Way, its cameras focused backward for one last glimpse of home.

“’Planet earth from there is not the same as looking at it from the moon where you see the outlines of the continents. Planet earth from there is just a pale blue point of light. That’s where we live,’ he said, his brooding face alight. ‘Where every human being who ever lived, lived – every couple in love – every political leader,’ every church with its earnest positions. Voyager’s photographs he said, ‘conveyed a sense of vulnerability. At least to me it cries out the need to cherish and preserve this small world.’”

Bruce continued: “Here where it is night, we remember the words of Rubem Alves: ‘Hope is the melody of hearing God’s future, faith is dancing it now.’ Together in Jesus name, taking each other’s hands around this table and beyond our different churches, we dance as well we can.”

“God’s single love in the world”

In 1994, at the end of his term as CCC president, Bruce challenged the churches over funding cuts to ecumenical bodies. “Over-lapping mandates” was among the reasons cited for cuts to the council and the inter-church justice coalitions.

Bruce refused to accept those excuses. In a sermon delivered in Charlottetown in 1994 at the CCC’s triennial assembly, he said: “For all the shared ministries at the unpublicized edge, there’s no dearth of ecclesiastical leaders ready to explain why there have to be ten different churches, all struggling to repair their roofs, in one Ontario town with 2,200 people. For all the examples of coalition cooperation, there remain competing church publishing houses (each with separate, crushingly expensive, hymn book projects) and duplicated church head offices, each with floors devoted to world outreach and justice issues, all claiming their share of sacrificial weekly gifts dedicated, to the accompaniment of doxologies across the land, for the work of God’s single love in the world.”

U.S. approach to Venezuela is “imperial madness”

by Jim Hodgson

The claim by U.S. President Donald Trump that his forces attacked “a big facility” in Venezuela left me wondering if he was (again) flat-out lying, having another cognition meltdown, or maybe speaking some sort of truth.

In a radio interview Dec. 26, Trump said: “We just knocked out – I don’t know if you read or you saw – they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”

In Venezuela, officials reacted hesitantly. It turns out there was a fire earlier that day at a chemical warehouse run by a company called Primazol in Maracaibo, a major hub for the export of petroleum. But in Venezuela, the fire was treated as a minor event, and the company issued a statement rejecting “the versions circulating on social media,” stating that they “have no relation to the incident and it does not correspond to official or verified information.”

Headline and photo from TeleSur English site.

The Primazol plant is located five km from the sea, making it doubtful that there was any facility there from which boats carrying drugs could depart, much less a “dock,” as Trump claimed in a second set of comments at Mar-a-Lago Dec. 29. (“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.”)

Today’s New York Times morning newsletter quotes U.S. officials who may be trying to provide cover for their boss or offering a semi-truthful account:

A port strike

The C.I.A. [Central Intelligence Agency] conducted a drone strike on a port facility in Venezuela last week, people briefed on the operation said. The strike was on a dock where U.S. officials believe a Venezuelan gang was storing narcotics, and it did not kill anyone, they said. The strike is the first known American operation inside Venezuela.

This Times story offers new details on the strike, which President Trump has already discussed openly, despite the secrecy that typically surrounds C.I.A. operations. 

The Trump administration has focused on three goals — to limit Nicolás Maduro’s power, to use military force against drug cartels and to secure access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for U.S. companies.

“We’ve had 27 weeks of imperial madness”

Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello denounced the silence of the international community, particularly the United Nations (UN) and other multilateral organizations, regarding the months-long offensive waged against his country by the United States government.

“We’ve had 27 weeks of imperial madness… harassment, threats, attacks, persecution, theft, piracy, murder, and the world – I mean the world, that UN and its cronies – is silent; nobody says a word,” he stated during the activation of a new security program in Aragua state. 

He added that “imperialism, those who think they own the world,” not only intend to steal Venezuela’s natural resources, but “want to go further” and subjugate the Venezuelan people because “they don’t like dignified peoples who demand respect and respect themselves.”

Cabello, who highlighted the character of the Venezuelan people in the face of years of attacks of various kinds, offered assurance: “They are not going to ruin our Christmas or New Year, they cannot because of how many things we have endured, how many things they have tried against this people.”

On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Southern Command announced that it had struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two more men. The new strike means that the U.S. military has killed more than 100 individuals in an operation widely condemned as illegal.

Mexico’s president rejects interventions, call for greater UN leadership

Speaking at a news conference early on Dec. 30, President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the UN should play a more prominent role in these cases.

“What we have to say is that we do not agree with interventions, especially military ones. That is enshrined in our country’s constitution, and that is what we will continue to defend,” she said in response to a question about the case.

When asked if there should be a call in the region to support Venezuela, she replied, “Yes, and as we have said, the United Nations must take a more prominent role in these cases.”

Mexico and other countries backed Venezuela in a Dec. 23 meeting of the UN Security Council, but the United States used its veto power to block a Venezuelan resolution from even coming to a vote. 

Diverse parts of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) are responding to the situations facing Venezuela in different ways. 

On Dec. 24, several UN experts (“special rapporteurs”) denounced the partial maritime blockade imposed by the United States on Venezuela as violating fundamental rules of international law. The same day, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil welcomed the statement: “The truth about Venezuela is breaking through around the world.”

Meanwhile, the OHCHR has announced a new “fact-finding” mission to Venezuela that will include Alex Neve, former secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.

And Canada?

Silence from Ottawa regarding U.S. aggression towards Venezuela has been resounding – even in the face of reports that Canada helps the United States in those boat attacks. It’s clear that the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney is choosing its words carefully in the face of U.S. threats to Canada’s sovereignty.

But Canada should at least uphold the 2014 declaration by Latin America and Caribbean countries that their region is a “zone of peace,” support calls for UN leadership in peace-making, and reject the new U.S. National Security Strategy.