Absolutely, Mr. Speaker, and this is the point I would like to drive home. Here are a couple of facts. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that in 2011 there 92 murders per 100,000 people per year in Honduras, making it the most violent country in Latin America. In 2012, it reached a record high of 7,172 homicides, and since 2010 there have been more than 200 politically motivated killings in Honduras.
Here is the real kicker to this. The people with whom we want to do business, who are trying to go pro-democratic, are being killed in this country with which we want to now increase our trading relationship. That is exactly backward. We should be protecting those individuals by benchmarking the actions of the government to make sure those people get proper justice, are not going to be killed, and will not leave a void of good people who want to do the right thing.
When there is so much cocaine moving through that state, it makes us very vulnerable to increasing its wealth and capability to produce drugs and distribute them around the world, including Canada.