The day after his already paper-thin constitutional legitimacy completely eroded, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse gave significant amounts of the country’s land to a light-skinned tycoon working with Coca-Cola. Why would the state offer land to a firm producing for Coca-Cola rather than invest in local food production in a country where nearly 42 percent of the population, or four million people, are experiencing acute hunger?

It is time to change Canadian policy towards a nation born in struggle to liberate Africans from slavery. The Canadian government must end its support for a repressive, corrupt Haitian president devoid of constitutional legitimacy. For the past two years Haitians have demonstrated their overwhelming opposition to Jovenel Moïse with massive protests and general strikes calling for his departure from office.

Although it remains to be seen how many gains will be made and how many existing gains will be secured, there is no doubt that the integration measures of Luis Arce’s administration in Bolivia, and the continued push for socialist governance across Latin America and the Caribbean, represents a great opportunity for the new regionalism of which Chávez spoke in 2011, and for which his allies continue to struggle today.

After forcing Duvalier out, Haitians struggling for a more just and democratic society face a similar predicament. They not only have to contend with the power of their own ruling elite, but they are also up against Canada and the US. Canadians of conscience should support those mobilizing in Haiti today against creeping Duvalierism. It is the least we can do to make up for the shameful role this country has played in that impoverished nation.

Recently, Canadian officials have been publicly critical of Venezuela’s position regarding its territorial dispute with Guyana, all while laying the groundwork for dozens of partnerships between Canadian and Guyanese private sector organizations in the oil and gas sector. Why is Canada pushing Guyana, an impoverished nation of 800,000 people, into conflict with Venezuela while helping multinational corporations grab its oil?

The Trudeau government’s policy of backing Venezuela’s self-declared “interim president” Juan Guaidó, an individual without an electoral mandate or control over any government institution, has backfired spectacularly. One can understand why the incoherent and belligerent Trump administration would continue with this farce, but why are the Liberals still going along with it?

Canada’s Latin America policy remains almost identical to that of the US State Department—a status quo that insists on demonizing the Maduro government and supporting any and all efforts to depose it. Unfortunately, this position echoes a rather distasteful posture taken by the Trump administration: elections are only fair if our side wins. If not, they’re rigged.

The true reason for intervention in Latin American is the region’s irresistibility to transnational capital, and not just capital based in the US. Canadian mining and energy companies have taken advantage of the free trade policies encouraged by Washington in order to extract profits from the region while ignoring the most atrocious human rights records in the hemisphere, particularly in Colombia.

As gold prices soar to record levels, the Los Filos gold mine in Mexico has sat idle since early September after its owner, Vancouver-based Equinox Gold, failed to uphold its agreement with the nearby community of Carrizalillo, a small town of about 3,000 people. Equinox blames the community for the shutdown, but in reality, the company and its executives have no one to blame but themselves.

China is prepared to increase its interaction with other countries, both through investments into those countries or by welcoming investment into China. To accomplish this, China has developed three distinct pillars toward Latin America: purchases of Latin American goods, Chinese investment in Latin America, and Chinese political solidarity with key Latin American governments.