Category Archives: sanctions

From Palenque, Chiapas, Latin American leaders call for migration solutions

In recent weeks, my partner and I took a long drive from British Columbia through the western United States and then almost the length of Mexico to arrive in Chiapas.

While people who migrate northwards either for seasonal work or for more permanent refuge from poverty, violence and impacts of climate change were on our minds and in the news, at least some of the people we met alongside us in gas stations and cafés were seasonal workers heading home for the winter. 

Migration, my friends, is normal. In southern Texas and northern Mexico, we encountered thousands of monarch butterflies as they headed for Michoacán. And here in Chiapas, the migratory birds are arriving daily.

At around the time of our trip, leaders of ten nations of Latin America and the Caribbean – frustrated by slow progress with the United States (and other northern countries) in advancing meaningful human development and managing the flow of people – gathered in the historic Maya city of Palenque, Chiapas, and proposed some ways forward.

Photo from the Office of the President of Mexico

Led by Mexico, the governments of Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Panama and Venezuela signed the Palenque Declaration on Oct. 22 and called for solutions. (A representative of the newly-elected government in Guatemala also joined the talks.)

In the declaration, presented by the Mexican Foreign Minister, Alicia Bárcena, the leaders described several structural causes of migration: internally political, economic, social factors and the effects of climate change. But they also pointed to “external factors such as unilateral coercive measures of an indiscriminate nature – dictated from the United States – that negatively affect entire populations and, to a greater extent, the most vulnerable people and communities.”

They urged the United States to lift the sanctions imposed on Cuba and Venezuela that help drive the exodus. Such sanctions are against international law and, as the migration flow shows, they have impacts beyond the countries to which they are applied.

The document also proposed undertaking efforts to modify the financial architecture of debt; to close social gaps to as to reduce the impulse to migrate; push for measures aimed at increasing agricultural activity to promote food self-sufficiency in the region; and to promote intraregional trade and investment for socioeconomic development.

The signatory nations stressed that measures must be taken to confront transnational organized crime, human trafficking and corruption, as well as promote joint cooperation in security matters.

They called for destination countries to “adopt immigration policies and practices in line with the current reality of our region and abandon those that are inconsistent and selective, to avoid arbitrarily producing both ‘call effects’ and ‘deterrent effects’ – advantages given to certain countries for political reasons while nationals of other countries are blocked.

They encouraged destination countries to widen their regular migration pathways, with emphasis on labour mobility and promotion of re-integration and safe return of temporary workers to their homes.

The declaration makes special mention of Haiti, and called on nations to support efforts by the United Nations and others to re-establish conditions for human security so that the political, economic and social situation may be normalized, and to focus on sustainable development. (The presence of the Haitian president at the gathering angered some of the Haitian migrants camped out in the centre of Palenque, reported La Jornada.)

Undated photo from Prensa Latina.

The declaration’s emphasis on economic drivers of migration did not satisfy everyone. Eunice Rendón of the Mexican advocacy group Agenda Migrante told Courthouse News Service that while insecurity was mentioned as a factor driving migration, “it’s not one of the causes, it’s the principal cause,” Rendón said.

“People go because the gang members threaten to kill them, because they try to forcibly recruit them,” she said. (Some might argue that the lack of education and employment opportunities are drivers as well in recruitment for organized crime.)

Meanwhile, migration dramas continue. On Nov. 9, authorities reported that they found found 123 Central and South American migrants trapped in a trailer in Matehuala, San Luís Potosí (less than a week after we passed through there). And than 400,000 migrants have crossed the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama in 2023, according to the Panamanian government, up from 250,000 in 2022.

Turning the world upside down: systemic change needed now

Photo: Granma.cu

by Jim Hodgson

In the face of deep inequality within and among the nations of the world, leaders of the so-called “less developed countries” find they must still appeal for basic fairness from their richer neighbours.

More than 75 years after the United Nations was formed, and almost that long since the first development programs were implemented (e.g., the Colombo Plan, 1950), and almost 60 years since the first gathering of the Group of 77 developing nations, leaders gathered last week in Havana and this week in New York to plead their case again.

Not that you would have read about the Havana meeting in mainstream media, but representatives from 114 countries attended the G77+China meeting in Havana. Among them were 30 heads of state or government, as well as senior officials from international organisations and agencies, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The meeting was held under the banner title, “Current development challenges: The role of science, technology and innovation,” but the talk was all about the systems of wealth and power that are rigged against developing countries.

In their final declaration Sept. 16, the G77 demanded fair “access to health-related measures, products and technologies” – a problem highlighted by “vaccine apartheid” during the Covid pandemic when richer countries had first access to vaccines. 

G77 called for an end to “existing disparities between developed and developing countries in terms of conditions, possibilities and capacities to produce new scientific and technological knowledge.”

They revived calls for a “new international economic order” and “new financial architecture,” including “through increasing the representation of developing countries in global decision and policy-making bodies which will contribute to enhance the capacities of developing countries to access and develop science, technology and innovation.”

Among the countries participating (including the host, Cuba) were several that have been harmed by sanctions that are usually imposed by wealthier countries to try to provoke changed behaviour by less powerful countries. Sanctions (referred to in the declaration with the UN Human Rights Council term “unilateral coercive measures”), together with external debt, inflation, displacement of peoples, inequality and “the adverse effects of climate change” are all among the “major challenges generated by the current unfair international economic order” and there is “no clear roadmap so far to address these global problems.”

Criticism of the existing international order carried over from the G77 meeting to the UN General Assembly, which met days later in New York.

“They don’t have the $100 billion to aid countries so that they can defend themselves against floods, storms and hurricanes,” said Colombian President Gustavo Petro, referring to the Loss and Damage Fund promoted at the COP climate negotiations to “new and additional” funding from donor nations.

Wars and climate change, he said, are related to that other unprecedented crisis: migration. “The exodus of people toward the north is measured with excessive precision in the size of the failure of governments. This past year has been a time of defeat for governments, of defeat for humanity.”

The political systems that we use to effect policy changes are failing to respond to the urgent needs of our time. Most politicians are beholden to the corporations and rich people who fund their political parties and perpetuate their hegemony. In four-to-six year electoral cycles, the deep changes needed to confront those problems are rarely undertaken. 

In Canada, think of the power that mining corporations have wielded to block meaningful investigation of human rights and environmental abuses by their subsidiaries overseas. Or the influence land speculators have over the Ontario government. Or the actions of oil, gas, coal and pipeline companies to stall meaningful action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

And then scale that up globally. Think of the ways pharmaceutical companies blocked access to HIV and AIDS medications until a global fund was found to pay them – and then pulled the same stunt over Covid vaccines. At the UN on Sept. 20, Guterres said time was running short for climate action thanks to the “naked greed” of fossil fuel interests.

What is delivered through Official Development Assistance and Sustainable Development Goals may be crumbs and band-aids. While necessary, those funds are not sufficient to counter instruments of power like corporations and their allies in the international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Political change is required to make the systems change.

As Xiomara Castro, president of Honduras, told the G77 in Havana: “The time has come to put an end to the backyards [using a U.S. term referring to its relationship to Latin America] because we are not pieces on a chessboard of those who are apologists for dependence. Our nations should not continue to suffer the mass privatization of their territories.”

Mafalda: But Liberty, you’ve put the map upside down!
Liberty: Upside down compared to what? Earth is in space where there is no up or down.
Liberty: That story that says the north has to be above is a psychological trick invented by those on the top to make those who are on the bottom continue to believe that we are the bottom. But, beginning today, conventional ideas are over!
Last panel, a voice: Where were you, Mafalda?
Mafalda: I don’t know, but a conventional idea has taken a blow.

(For that last line, Quino, the great Argentinian cartoonist who created Mafalda, wrote in the original Spanish version, “No lo sé, pero algo acaba de sanseacabarse” – the sense being that something has ended.)

Perceptions of the Ukraine war in the Global South and Reflections on Peace

Too few of us are talking about peace – or about dialogue and diplomacy – these days. As U.S. journalist Katherine vanden Heuvel writes, it’s time to challenge conventional views on the war in Ukraine.

On a humid evening at the end of May, I spoke with a local parish group convened by Toronto members of Development and Peace/Caritas Canada. I talked more than I usually do about my faith and about the teachings in our religious traditions about peace: “Blessed are the peace-makers,” the artisans of peace.
Not everyone sees this war in the same way. Whether every perception is correct is not the point. At their root is a reluctance to take sides in what looks like a conflict between the empires.

At the same time, Russia’s invasion draws from the tsarist past to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty and right to self-determination. It is also strengthening Ukrainians’ sense of identity and nationhood. Changes should be negotiated without military threats and consented to in free and fair referendums. The 2014-15 Minsk Accords might have offered a way forward.

“Many people think that it is better that the winners be those who oppose U.S. imperialism, which leads them to support Russia or China, or occasionally, Iran or any other nation that opposes the western powers,” writes Raúl Zibechi, the Uruguayan observer of Latin America’s social movements. “Social movements should oppose war so as to deepen their own agenda: strengthening their ‘territorial roots so as to exercise autonomy and self-government, building other worlds that are new and different from the capitalist, patriarchal and colonial world.”
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the Argentinean winner of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize, says there are no “just wars.” But he adds that there are “just causes.” I think of the revolutionary struggles in Central America in the 1980s, but those did not bring about the social changes people hoped for (largely because the United States supplied weapons and mercenaries to the far-right forces), and tens of thousands of people died.
On the left is the garden were six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered by a death squad in November 1989 at the University of Central America in San Salvador. On the right are Rev. Miguel Tomás Castro of Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Salvador and a group of student leaders in the ongoing effort to build a “culture of peace.”

The “peace” that Central Americans, together with others across the Global South, ended up with after the wars has advanced a model of development that impoverishes, excludes and drives people from their land. Even the new development proposals from the U.S. and Mexican governments are inadequate in the face of political-economic devastation and climate change. Hondurans, at least, at this moment, have a shot at something better. But their military (and its U.S. backers) may not tolerate real, meaningful change. The way forward must be different from the ways of the past.

The current war in Ukraine, in addition to the human and material costs of fighting, is having ripples far beyond the two countries directly involved. Not just higher energy prices, but the likelihood of food shortages. Russia and Ukraine have been responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s wheat exports and for large quantities of barley, corn and vegetable oil too.

I have been critical of the use of sanctions. Sanctions, as we see now in the case of Russia, are warfare by other means. (You can track the imposition of sanctions here.)

With regard to sanctions, it’s not the world against Russia. As Zhou Xiaoming has written, few non-Western countries have answered the U.S. call to isolate Russia economically, fearing the impact of disruptions to global production and trade on their own people. And countries that have already felt the effects of US sanctions and have no desire to inflict them on others.

This time, I am not exactly against the use of economic measures. Over the short-term, targeted measures seem reasonable. Between now and the onset of winter, their impact on civilians will need to be measured and their effectiveness evaluated. Space for diplomacy, public health and science, however, should remain open, including the Arctic Council and the International Space Station. 

What happened to our peace movement? NATO expanded, and seems likely to expand still further.

What should we do now?

We should do what we who believe in peace do in every other armed conflict: call for peace, withdrawal, dialogue, diplomacy. 

  • Support the refugees – and those Russians who dissent from Putin’s war. Indeed: support ALL refugees, wherever they are. By mid-2021, an unprecedented 82.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are 26.4 million refugees, around 42 per cent of whom are under the age of 18. 
  • Support humanitarian efforts by Development and Peace/Caritas Canada, the churches and agencies that are part of the global ACT Alliance, and other reputable organizations.
  • Revive conversations on common security and mutual understanding and increase official development assistance to 0.7 per cent of gross national income. These are investments in security and sustainability for all.
  • Whatever happens in Ukraine, keep nuclear weapons out. 
  • Support debt relief: Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has borrowed more than $125 billion from international financial institutions, which pushed the sell-off of public enterprises and rewarded oligarchs and the super-rich with every loan they made. But being under attack doesn’t mean you can catch a break from international lenders. In 2022, unless loans are forgiven or suspended, Kyiv will spend $6.2 billion paying down foreign debt. Nearly half of that will go to the International Monetary Fund. 
The Hill Times, April 27, 2022. See as well a piece by Beth Woroniuk in iPolitics: “The world’s response to the invasion in Ukraine is only the latest example that ‘old school’ approaches to conflict resolution are not working. It is the time to bring anti-racist and decolonial analysis to international relations. It is time to ask questions about whose voices matter. This includes going beyond the warriors and including people who have a vested interest in stopping the guns for good, including women building peace at local, national and international levels.”

Early on in the conflict, it seemed that Pope Francis had potential as a mediator because of his pretty good relationship with Patriarch Kirill. But Kirill, like Putin, seems tied to a view of history – the Kievan Rus, the ancient state that converted to Christianity in 988 – that would subsume Ukraine into Russia. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has largely broken with the Moscow Patriarchate.
Can churches that have fomented division in the past now lead the way in showing they can live with diversity?

The horrible thing about making peace is that you have to talk with your enemies. Diplomacy is a tool for doing that.

Deliver us from evil, deliver our leaders from evil and grant us peace in our day.