Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-20, with some experience in Honduras. I was a member of the Comisión de Verdad, one of the two truth commissions set up after the coup in 2009. I stepped down when I was elected to the House, but I have been following it ever since, including the report that the commission put out in October 2012, which I may refer to now and again.
It is important to give some human rights context. My colleagues have given lots of reasons why human rights, rule of law and the overall governance structures in a country matter for a free trade agreement. However, it is important to remember that 65% of Hondurans live in poverty and around 46%, almost 50%, live in extreme poverty. As our former ambassador to Costa Rica and Honduras, Neil Reeder, said, “It suffers from extremely unequal income distribution”.
It is a country that not only has serious problems meeting the social and economic rights of its population, but it has become a very repressive state, even though there is the veneer of democracy since the coup and the subsequent election six months after the coup. In 2013, Human Rights Watch's report indicated that 23 journalists had been killed since 2010, and in 2014, PEN International's report told us that 34 journalists had been killed since the coup in 2009.
Before the committee, COFADEH, probably the leading human rights organization in Honduras, led by Bertha Oliva, told us that it had documented at least 16 activists or candidates from the main opposition party before the most recent election, the party that is called “LIBRE”, had been assassinated since June 2012, and 15 others attacked.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, which basically does surveys every few years on countries and their overall state of affairs, downgraded Honduras from what it called a “flawed democracy” in 2008, even before the coup, to a “hybrid regime” in 2012. That is a regime that is not even actually a democracy. From all my experience in the country after eight visits, I can attest to that as being an accurate qualification.
My colleague from Toronto Centre has mentioned on occasion, as did my colleague from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca in his speech, that the situation of the LGBTQ community in Honduras has long been one of great precarity. It was never great, especially for transsexuals who were always subject to extreme violence. However, after the coup in 2009, between 2009 and 2011—only a year and a half, because it is only the first part of 2011 that these numbers count for—35 members of the LGBTQ community were assassinated in ways that were associated with the fact of their membership in that community and the fact that by and large that community supported the efforts of the previous administration and were against the coup. At some level, the coup also resulted in a general opening up or licence for others, such as paramilitary groups and conservative forces in society, to kill with impunity.
I would like to pay tribute to three people before I go on to some of the economic issues.
Walter Trochez is kind of the symbol of the LGBTQ community in Honduras. I talked to his apartment mate about the night that he died. He was murdered by being shot. The apartment mate received Walter's final call just before he lost his life, literally saying “They killed me, they killed me”. This had been preceded by endless encounters with the police where he had been detained, and abductions as well by hooded men. In all of those instances, every one of the three or four instances that the Comisión de Verdad documented, he was taunted with the fact that he was a marica or maricon, which excuse me, translates as “faggot”.
[Member spoke in Spanish and provided the following translation:]
Faggots are not worth anything. Faggots do not have rights.
At the same time, when he was abducted by four armed men and had managed to escape from them, they linked him to the resistance to the coup, so ultimately he was killed for the fact that he not only was an active human rights advocate for the LGBTQ community but also he dared also to support at the political level the resistance to the coup.
I would like to salute Walter Trochez as a symbol of that community's suffering.
I would also like to speak about Eddy, who was the lead security guard for the Comisión de Verdad. He was almost the one person who lost his life during the Comisión's time. We had a couple of Honduran commissioners who had to flee the country, and he almost lost his life.
He was approached by four men with pistols in their hands who tried to shove him into a car in the middle of the street, with all kinds of onlookers. Brave as he was and knowledgeable as he was about what would happen if he ever got in the car, he made a bolt for it. The men shot after him as he was running down the street. He escaped, not without psychological trauma, but with his life.
The last person that I want to pay tribute to is Eva, who is a constituent in Toronto--Danforth. She was recently accepted as a refugee in Canada, having been shot multiple times while tending her small business in Tegucigalpa, by somebody dressed in plaIn clothes, but who all the neighbours identified as a policeman.
That is the kind of context at a broad human rights level. It is important to know that economically, Honduras is an extremely problematic country to be investing in and to have our corporate actors going down and expecting to be doing good, rather than harm.
As the Comisión de Verdad reported—and I will be translating from page 47 of the report—career politicians serve and have served businessmen and leaders of political clans in their demands, creating and reproducing the discourses and the beliefs of the entrepreneurial or business classes and the industrial classes without actually generating conditions for economic prosperity for others. New interests, as well, have begun to interact with the political parties to the point that they have been working with global economic classes to propose whole zones, called “model cities”, that would be completely free from Honduran governance. They would effectively be multinational capital sovereigns.
There is this interpenetration of the six to nine traditional families and the newer groups interacting with various global interests. Frankly, all analyses indicate how they have completely captured the state apparatus, both of the main parties, the executive in terms of the civil service, and, I am sorry to say, much of the judiciary and the police.
In that context, it is important to note that the situation in Bajo Aguan is kind of emblematic. It is one of the worst situations, but it is also emblematic of what can happen.
In February 2014, Human Rights Watch published a report called “There Are No Investigations Here”, documenting how between 150 and 200 homicides in the Bajo Aguan region were alleged to have been committed by security forces hired by large landowners. Many of those landowners are cultivating the land for agri-industrial business in African palm oil for global markets.
The report also shows how there is absolutely no police, prosecutorial, or judicial protection for the campesinos who have been murdered in this fashion.
Only a few months ago, the World Bank Group ombudsman ruled that the World Bank itself had inappropriately invested $15 million of a promised $30 million in a group called Corporación Dinant, which is owned by the Facussé family. The ombudsman said that the World Bank Group should never have given money to that operation because of the involvement of Dinant in conducting, facilitating, and supporting forced evictions of farmers in Bajo Aguan and violence against farmers in and around the plantations, including multiple killings.
I would end by saying that the UN Working Group on Mercenaries in February 2013 also ruled that private security forces in the hands of the larger agricultural and other corporations in Honduras had been responsible for, or there are reasonable concerns that they are responsible for, serious repression in that country. That is the pattern. That is not an environment in which Canadian companies at this time should have any involvement through a free trade agreement.
