Solidarity in check!

by Alexandra Henao (she/her), Education Program Director, CoDev

The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF/FEESO) has worked with CoDevelopment Canada (CoDev) on various projects in different parts of Latin America, often in partnership with other education unions in Canada. These projects have focused on supporting public education initiatives with education unions in Latin America.

CoDev has developed a partnership model for its international solidarity work with Latin America for the last 40 years. Throughout this journey, CoDev has focused on facilitating long-term partnerships between Latin American organizations working for labour rights, human rights, public education, women’s rights, and with Canadian unions and other civil society organizations sharing the same interests towards structural change.

The partnership model promotes relations based on solidarity, not charity, in which partners view each other as colleagues, respect everyone’s experience, and learn from one another. Thus, partnerships are based on mutual respect, knowledge exchange, and providing support as equals, rather than from a place of paternalism and authoritarianism.
Being in solidarity with an organization that is fighting for social justice sounds great and the correct thing to do; however, it is not as easy as it seems. As remnants of a colonial past continue to manifest in multiple aspects of our lives today, international solidarity does not escape these challenges.

During this journey, we have witnessed several instances of the painful disconnect between progressive leaders, members of Canadian organizations, and the realities of the South. This has resulted in the re-victimization of Latin American partners. Some members of Canadian partner organizations demonstrated their disdain for the experience of Latin American partners, wanting to impose their vision or understanding of how Southern organizations should do their work or make their own decisions. The disregard of the Latin American organizations resulted in emotional distress of two Southern partners on two occasions, and the sabotage of the Southern partner’s political campaign on another. These examples of disconnect serve as lessons to our international solidarity work.

So, what does it actually mean to stand in solidarity with organizations in the Global South? These groups have much to teach us about how to resist systemic oppression—we need to take heed of their lessons, to listen to what they have to say. Here we offer some reflections on CoDev’s work during this 40-year journey, in the hope that both Latin American and Canadian partners will engage in this conversation too. We would also like to offer some tips we have learned throughout our solidarity work.

Responsibility to our partners

CoDev is committed to evaluating its practices to strengthen the partnership model with the aim of facilitating respectful interactions between partners while also prioritizing avoiding the re-victimization of individuals and organizations who are already in a disadvantaged political position in their own contexts. Key to this conversation with partners in the North (most of which are Canadian unions), is to acknowledge that Latin American partners and their communities have faced and resisted power structures of oppression that have excluded and deprived people of their basic rights for five centuries. This struggle is not new to the people of Latin America, and we cannot approach solidarity work without fully grasping this long and challenging history.

CoDev’s partners in Latin America are women, public education workers, human and labour rights defenders, all working together (many for years or even decades) with their communities to improve the living and working conditions of everyone. Their work involves a wide spectrum of challenges and risks, sacrificing free time with loved ones, engaging in long hours of volunteer work, experiencing impacts to their physical and mental health. This ensures effective planning and logistics, the implementation of activities, and the development of project reports and new proposals—all aimed at continually improving collective material conditions.

Active members of these Latin American organizations are often survivors of human rights violations as well as victims of smear campaigns and sabotage of their work. Despite these challenges, they endure and deepen their understanding of the economic, social, and political contexts they want to change. They foster capacity strengthening by educating their communities to recognize the issues affecting them. They engage in political lobbying whenever possible and mobilize the masses when necessary. All these actions are done as part of the demand for change and justice. Many of the organizations we have partnered with face neocolonial projects delivered through multinational corporations in the resource-extraction industry, often linked to ongoing violence against nature, people, and communities around the world.

While we may feel powerless to dismantle those structures, we do have a responsibility to acknowledge them in our practices and words, and to rebuild ourselves and the organizations we are part of to avoid reproducing systemic racism and oppression through the partnerships we are building.

While an examination of our work can take many forms, we hope to learn from critical, intercultural, and decolonial approaches to build stronger relationships to look at ourselves, to consider the colonial power dynamics and hierarchies that we have learned which consciously or not are often reproduced in what we say and do. They can also contribute to understanding the root causes of systemic oppression that CoDev’s partners in the Americas are facing and working together to dismantle.

Stronger partnerships involve understanding, support, and the courage to challenge colonial definitions of problems and achievements, approaching them from a different perspective. This is key for our partners, both the South and the North, to foster better understanding of the intersectionality of oppression and exclusion, to trust more deeply in each other’s work, and to refrain from demanding perfection from anyone.

Evaluating our practices

Over four decades of this work, we at CoDev have learned about the need to take a humble position to learn from the Indigenous peoples in the Americas. We must listen to those who, for centuries, have shared lessons on how to relate to each other, how to learn from each other without imposing one culture on another. Thus, CoDev is undertaking an existential analysis based on a social awareness of the responsibility of being located on the stolen, unceded, and unrelinquished land of the Coast Salish peoples, in what is now known as Vancouver. Additionally, this understanding is linked to the Latin American heritage and experience of our Southern partners, staff, and board members. This starting point is especially important in the context of solidarity programs created and financed in the Global North to benefit communities in the Global South.

To meaningfully analyze our work today, we must begin with a shared understanding that the social and historical contexts of Canada and Latin America are deeply interconnected. Colonization in the whole continent known today as America was the primary civilizational expansion project of Europe in the 15th century where millions of Indigenous peoples were annihilated, forcibly displaced, and decimated. A racist assumption of discovery and possession (Pasternak 34) led Europeans to seize the land that Indigenous peoples had taken care of for thousands of years and to impose by force a system of values, exterminating native cultures, knowledge, and worldviews. In addition to a legacy of dispossession, dependence, and oppression for Indigenous people (Manuel 19) in both North and South, slavery also played a significant role during the colonization of the Americas. Millions of people were forcibly taken away from their communities on the African continent and brought to the Americas as enslaved people. To this day, both Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples continue to face systemic racism that stems from this colonial history.

Some questions that have motivated CoDev throughout this journey arise from the understanding that societies in the Global North have historically and continue to benefit from colonial and neocolonial projects in the Global South. That is, the power dynamics, material wealth, and social hierarchies (like those based on race, gender, language, ableism, etc.) that allowed European settlers to feel entitled to colonize Indigenous peoples and their land still often define how individuals, organizations, and institutions perceive themselves in relation to the Global South. Entitlement and a sense of superiority are at the heart of a colonial legacy that prevails in large sectors of our societies, where racial capitalism, social hierarchies, and human superiority are embraced as natural, affecting the way we relate to each other and build relationships with others.

Residing in solidarity with others who have historically been marginalized and oppressed requires a serious commitment, especially from people in the North. We must examine ourselves, we must identify and combat any trace of the colonial legacy which leads us to reproduce social hierarchies in our communities and workplaces. In a world where white supremacist ideologies constitute significant parts of the political agenda in many countries, where these biases are reproduced by the media with no restrictions, and where they permeate and infect progressive spaces, those of us who adhere to principles of internationalism and solidarity must remember that actions speak louder than words.

This cannot become a rhetorical call to examine ourselves. It requires courage and humility; it entails facing personal and political challenges to strengthen our capacity to respond to the people with whom we want to act in solidarity. Then we must find practices to build even stronger solidarity partnerships—the loop of solidarity building is continuous and reciprocal. Some tips we invite you to consider are to:

• Create a better understanding of the root cause(s) of the social, political, economic, and environmental problems that people resist and that they fight against to improve their lives.
• Find connections between the systemic issues faced by Latin American partners and those that you or your organization face in Canada.
  Learn about the history, struggle, and work of solidarity partners before judging their decisions.
• Be humble, understand that your opinions are welcome, but embrace that people know what is best for themselves.
• Be aware of your temporary presence in their lives and territory when visiting them.
• Appreciate how exchanges of knowledge and experience are crucial in solidarity partnerships but then let people decide what part of your experience and knowledge is relevant for their cause.

Understanding an intrinsically intertwined history of colonization can strengthen the possibility of finding connections between issues affecting both Canadian and Latin American partners, at least at the macro level. The idea of the interconnectedness of people fighting against the same systems of oppression demands a united response in both the North and the South.

Indigenous people across the Americas have been leading the way in building equal and respectful relationships. For instance, the idea of interconnectedness of all life and the relationship between human and the natural world, explained through the Anishinaabe people’s Wheel of life and the Sioux Nations’ belief in that “we are all related” is one we can relate to the powerful slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” used in the labour movement and historically in various other social justice and civil rights movements. Another idea to learn is “walking the word” which the Nasa people in South America use to reach agreements through dialogue. That is, we can undo the fear of the unknown and recognize the other and their truth through the word.

Partnerships become stronger when partners in the North and the South can exchange ideas and experiences; when partners take time to hear and learn from each other; when partners get to know each other’s challenges, achievements, failures, and struggles. As mentioned above, disconnection can lead to paternalism and imposition even in well-intentioned people. We have the responsibility to reflect and challenge the systems of oppression within ourselves.

In order to advance one step forward, we would like to share the words of a Cuban philosopher who focused his studies on interculturality as “an attitude that opens the human being and impels them to a process of relearning, and to cultural and contextual relocation. It is an attitude that, taking us out of our theoretical and practical certainties, allows us to perceive the cultural illiteracy of which we are guilty when we believe that one culture, our “own,” is enough to read and interpret the world” (Fornet- Betancourt 15).

This is just the beginning of this conversation. At CoDev we hope to provoke constructive responses through our reflections on how to strengthen our principles of international solidarity. We will continue to mobilize our ideas to deepen the connections between our values and our actions, rethinking our practices, protocols, and relationships to facilitate stronger partnerships among equals in the Americas.

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WORKS CITED:
Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl. Crítica Intercultural de la Filosofía Latinoamericana Actual.” Madrid: Editorial Trotta, S.A, 2004
Manuel, Arthur. “From Dispossession to Dependency.” Whose Land Is It Anyway? Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, 2017
Pasternak, Shiri. “Blockade: A Meeting Place of Law.” Whose Land Is It Anyway? Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, 2017