Category Archives: Uncategorized

Labour, development NGOs demand Canada condemn U.S. boat attacks in Caribbean

By Jim Hodgson 

Canadians need to call on their government to speak out against illegal U.S. airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, say two coalitions in which I have participated for nearly three decades. 

Left: Calling on Canadians to act (Artwork by Harmeet Rehal); Right: AP news story on the 20th boat strike carried out by the United States since September. Another attack was reported a day later.

Common Frontiers and the Americas Policy Group sent a letter Nov. 13 to Foreign Minister Anita Anand, Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu, and Defence Minister David McGinty urging Canada to: 

  • Speak out publicly and condemn the unlawful attacks and extrajudicial killings of civilians in the Caribbean and Pacific by the U.S. military;

  • Contribute to the promotion of peace and security in the region and join efforts to press the Trump administration to respect national sovereignty and uphold the rule of law;

  • Suspend participation in Operation CARIBBE to avoid the risk of Canadian complicity; and

  • Adhere to Canada’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty by removing regulatory exemptions that allow loopholes for the export of arms to the U.S. without oversight or human rights risk assessment.

Just a day earlier, Anand had told reporters that it was not her job to determine if the United States has breached international law when striking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. 

“As Canada’s foreign minister, I hold responsibility for Canada’s compliance with international law—we are always seeking to comply with international law,” Anand said. “Regarding the question that you asked, I would say it is within the purview of U.S. authorities to make that determination.”

Her comment was soundly criticized by international law experts, including Ketty Nivyabandi, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada’s English section. She told Hill Times that international law only works if it is upheld by all states. 

“It is a collective responsibility to uphold international law. It is not up to a country to focus on itself and decide whether or not it is applying international law—in that case, nobody would,” she said. “What the United States is doing is truly making a mockery of international law. It is normalizing what are, in effect, extrajudicial killings.”

The attacks take place amidst months of arrests and deportations of Venezuelans in the United States; false allegations of Venezuelan state collusion with a criminal gang called Tren de Aragua; massive U.S. movement of troops and warships into the Caribbean; and conjecture about what the Trump regime intends to do. On Nov. 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “President Trump ordered action—and the Department of War is delivering. Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR.”

Former CBC News correspondent Dan Rather cited the Washington Post in calling it the biggest military presence in the Caribbean in decades. And he added: 

… a curious build-up if the stated goal is simply drug interdiction. Another explanation would be Trump wagging the dog, creating a diversion by manufacturing a crisis that he can then fix and allowing him to flex and crow about taking down the leader of a small country. Or it could be just about commandeering Venezuela’s oil.

Here below, from the Venezuela Solidarity Network, are some reasons to help stop a potential U.S. war against Venezuela:

Please write to your own Member of Parliament to express your views.

Join actions across Canada for the No War on Venezuela Days of Action, November 15-23:

📍VANCOUVER, BC
Rally & Info Tabling
Friday, November 21, 5:00pm
Vancouver Art Gallery – Robson Street Side
Organized by Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice 

📍OTTAWA, ON
Saturday, November 22, 3:30pm
U.S. Embassy – York and Sussex
Organized by Alba Movimientos Ottawa

📍WINNIPEG, MB
Sunday, November 23, 1:00pm
River and Osborne
Sponsored by Peace Alliance Winnipeg, Manitoba-Cuba Solidarity Committee, United in Action, Communist Party of Canada – Manitoba & Araucaria

The Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network (CWPJN) encourages members and all antiwar and peace organizations to register their actions at https://unac.notowar.net/no-war-on-venezuela-action-registration and with the CWPJN at canadapeaceandjustice@gmail.com
For updates visit: tinyurl.com/Hands-Off-Venezuela

“Security for whom?” asks KAIROS after Canada cuts foreign aid

by Jim Hodgson

Canada’s newest cuts to foreign aid spending follow cuts by other wealthy countries (most notably the elimination earlier this year of the U.S. Agency for International Development). Beyond immediate impacts, these cuts point to a reshaping of sixty years of international cooperation for development.

Over the next four years, Canada will chop $2.7 billion from its aid budget. At the same time, at the behest of the Trump regime next door, it will increase military spending with $81.8 billion over five years.

In June, Canada announced its commitment to increase military spending: CodePink, Development and Peace, and CBC headlines.

Few analysts bring together the issues of development assistance, militarism and climate justice the way that the ecumenical coalition KAIROS Canada has in its statement on the budget:

Canada needs to decide what role it wants to play in the world. These issues are inseparable: climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, migrant justice, gender equality and peacebuilding rise or fall together — and Canada’s future depends on advancing them as one interconnected project of justice. 

KAIROS added that it is concerned by the prospect of a scaled-up military-industrial complex in Canada. “Even today, arms components made in Canada are used against civilians in Gaza and other conflict zones due to loopholes that allow them to flow indirectly through allies, helping to further entrench global insecurity.” (Canadian-built military surveillance and targeting equipment was used in at least two of the U.S. attacks on small ships in the Caribbean Sea, as reported recently by another Canadian ecumenical coalition, Project Ploughshares.)

KAIROS said the government “could have introduced a wealth tax to tackle the historic wealth gap and fund real climate action. It could have ended subsidies for fossil fuel corporations. Instead, it cut public services, forcing job losses that fall hardest on women, Indigenous Peoples and racialized communities,” as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives warns.

While there are no actual projections yet of where the foreign aid cuts will hit, the budget statement cites Canada’s spending on global health programs as an example, saying this has “grown disproportionately” in comparison to other countries.

“Any reductions to Canada’s global health investments will have devastating consequences for women and children around the world, while threatening the health, security and prosperity of Canadians,” said Charmaine Crockett of the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health (CanWaCH) in a joint statement with Cooperation Canada. “Canada’s decades of leadership in global health have always been about investing in a safer, more equitable world, because we know that when we turn our back on the world’s most marginalized people, we all suffer.”

The cut to Canadian aid, elimination of USAID, and reduced spending announced by Britain, Germany, Netherlands and others means that in total, G7 countries are trimming their aid budgets by nearly one-third, the steepest reduction since 1960, according to the Globe and Mail. 

Several Canadian organizations (350.org Canada, World Beyond War, Migrant Rights Network, Council of Canadians, and the Canadian Association of Professional Employees) have come together in a letter-writing campaign to opposition leaders to encourage them to demand change before Parliament votes again on the budget.

Where to now with international development?

I want to share links to some articles that delve more deeply into the significance of what may become a shift away from a model in which rich countries of the Global North “donated” funds to impoverished countries of the Global South. The model has always been criticized as it promotes dependence and blocks systemic change. This is “big picture” stuff, very distant from issues of how to support refugees at border posts or funding for cooperative farming in Central America. (I am, as always, grateful to Brian Murphy for sharing these and other articles. You can follow him on Bluesky @murphyslog.bsky.social.)

First, “The end of the global aid industry,” by Zainab Usman. Usman proposes a focus on industrialization – what has worked for China and South Korea and is unfolding now in Vietnam and Thailand. Usman writes:

Part of the problem with the aid industry is that its benefits have been spread too thinly across a multitude of domains and not focused enough on productivity-enhancing sectors. To this end, advocates of global development should focus on enabling poorer countries to access cheap development financing for targeted investments in sectors that connect people, such as electricity, telecommunications, and mass transit. 

Second, “The geopolitics of international development (after foreign aid),” by Ken Opalo in An Africanist Perspective. Opalo examines a series of essays in Foreign Policy magazine’s Fall 2025 issue that all deal with development issues. Opalo sets his description of the decline of the foreign aid model in the context of a rising multipolarity that is matched by the “ongoing general decline of the authority and influence of Western states.”  

There’s no denying that the financial, intellectual, and institutional hegemony of Western countries significantly shaped development practice over the last 60 years. This era had both good and bad elements. The good elements included efforts to incentivize the modernization of economic management and policymaking in low-income countries (work that’s far from finished, and which has yielded some good results); while the bad elements included the fostering of aid dependence, cyclical faddism, reflexive policy extraversion, lack of elite ambition, and implicit support for a hierarchical world order that permanently placed low-income countries at the bottom of the global totem pole.

AIDS prevention education in decades past: Haiti in 1984 (top); Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in 2007 (below). Jim Hodgson photos.

Third, “Three ways to help the developing world survive the end of aid,” by Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, in The Guardian. Byanyima reminds us that developing countries are still drowning in debt and facing interest rates up to 12 times higher than wealthy countries. “Low- and middle-income countries now pay $4 to the richest in the global north for every $1 they receive in aid. Thirty-four of Africa’s 54 countries spend more on debt than on healthcare.” She adds:

  • Governments must relieve the “chokehold of sovereign debt.”
  • The richest need to pay their fair share: the wealth of billionaires soared by $2 trillion in 2024, but they paid an effective tax rate of just 0.3 per cent.
  • Governments need to treat lifesaving medicines not as commodities, but as global public goods. “This has been one of the great successes of the HIV response” (at least over the past 20 years, though not before—and threatened again with loss of U.S. funding this year).

Is Trump looking for war in the south Caribbean?

by Jim Hodgson

In this decade of Donald Trump at centre-stage, it has been hard to choose a moment or an issue about which to react. The former reality TV star is an expert in deflection and distraction.

Yet some things (Israel’s genocide in Gaza is one) matter more than others. So too Trump’s threats against Venezuela.

Trump’s statement below defending extrajudicial executions shows again how little he values human life. He was responding to a question from a journalist on Oct. 23 about why he didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war against drug cartels he claims are at war with the United States: 

“Well, I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them. You know? They’re going to be, like dead. OK?”

Over the past two months, Trump’s assassins have killed at least 43 people and sunk ten small boats in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coast of Colombia. As Greg Grandin has documented, when the U.S. withdraws from the rest of the world, it doubles down in this hemisphere.

This time, the United States isn’t even bothering with its usual lies as it moves from a decade of sanctions (“unilateral coercive measures”) to threats of war as it presses for regime change in Venezuela. Sanctions have had devastating effects in Venezuela, according to a study conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and published in August in The Lancet Global Health.

Trump’s ire is mostly directed against Venezuela, which since 1998 has refused imperial orders about oil, medical care, governance, and individualistic notions of human rights. But he has plenty left over for Colombia and Mexico.

“He’s a thug” and an “illegal drug leader,” Trump said of Colombian President Gustavo Petro. And he said Mexico is governed by drug cartels, even while expressing respect for President Claudia Sheinbaum.

The text below is translated and lightly adapted from an Oct. 25 editorial in the Mexico City daily La Jornada.

Washington seeks war

The Trump administration is sending increasingly alarming signals about its determination to attack Venezuela to impose regime change and install a puppet administration. Trump uses a “combination of threats of armed action and economic extortion” to support right-wing politicians in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and now Bolivia “to facilitate the rise or consolidation of the far right throughout the hemisphere.”

On Oct. 24, his “War Department” announced the deployment of an aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and its strike group to the U.S. Southern Command—that is, the southern Caribbean and northern South America. This entails the presence of the aircraft carrier itself, the 75 aircraft it carries, and the full range of necessary operations: three destroyers, a replenishment ship, a dry cargo ship, and a Coast Guard cutter. The Gerald R. Ford alone carries 4,600 military personnel, in addition to the crews of auxiliary vessels. 

The argument that all these vessels are being deployed with the goal of “dismantling Designated Terrorist Organizations (DTOs) and countering narco-terrorism in defence of the homeland” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First of all, they could be deployed off the US coast, thereby reducing the cost of maintaining long supply chains and avoiding diplomatic friction. 

The thousands of soldiers already sent to the Caribbean could have provided a much greater service to their homeland by monitoring land and air points of entry, where narcotics actually enter the United States. Instead of spending billions of dollars operating its fleets abroad, Washington could gain vast resources by combating money laundering within its own financial system, where authorities estimate that organized crime launders $300 billion annually. If traffickers were unable to collect and move the profits from their activities, they would be immediately paralyzed. But it is clear that the White House is not interested in the health of its citizens or the legality of the money circulating through its banks.

The bellicose tone of this escalation is so evident that even Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula—who is not friendly to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro) criticized the U.S. bombing of boats in the Caribbean, noting that “if it becomes fashionable, everyone will believe they can invade someone else’s territory and do whatever they want,” thus turning the region into a lawless land. 

Lula’s special advisor and former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim warned that external intervention, whether armed or through intelligence services, is not the way to decide who will govern Venezuela, a problem that concerns only Venezuelans. He also warned of the danger of setting South America ablaze and leading to the radicalization of politics throughout the continent. At the same time, Washington is making clear its longing to empower the Colombian oligarchy in Bogotá, always ready to follow its directives and make the Andean-Caribbean territory available to its troops and spy agencies. 

In this regard, Trump escalated his attacks against President Gustavo Petro and imposed sanctions for “allowing drug cartels to flourish and refusing to stop this activity.” No evidence was presented, which is what happens in his constant diatribes against Mexico, Venezuela, and other nations whose governments protect their independence and sovereignty.

In South America, there is no war that justifies besieging the subcontinent with a series of attacks. But it becomes increasingly clear that the White House is determined to start a conflagration, no matter how absurd its pretexts. 

The international community, and particularly Latin American and Caribbean societies, must join forces in rejecting Trump’s attempt to plunge the region into barbarism in order to divert attention from his own ineptitude and hand over vast amounts of money to the military-industrial complex, the only sector whose prosperity apparently interests the U.S. president.

…

Here’s a way to keep up with Trump’s threats and responses from Caribbean and Latin American political and social movement leaders. The Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) has been a good source of information on U.S. intervention in the region for decades.