Brenda Martin’s two years and two months at the Puente Grande women’s prison near Guadalajara, Mexico, were no doubt a punishing and emotionally damaging ordeal. She was placed on suicide watch last March, and her despair was apparent to anyone who listened to her speak to the media from prison.
But Martin, who was charged and eventually convicted of money laundering by Mexican authorities, was also the subject of an unprecedented and highly publicized campaign by Canadian politicians to have her released. Liberal MP Dan McTeague repeatedly called for government intervention in Martin’s case. Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism, twice visited Martin in jail. Conservative MP Rick Norlock joined him on one of those trips. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Mexican President Felipe Calderón to ask for his help on the case. Even Paul Martin, the former prime minister, visited Martin while he was in Mexico for a conference. When a deal was eventually negotiated for Martin’s transfer to a Canadian prison, the government sent a private jet to retrieve her, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $80,000. The Canadian government also agreed to pay her $3,441 fine. She was released on parole from Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., last May, about a week after arriving, and is now free.
Canadian politicians had cause to intervene in Martin’s case. That she was jailed for more than two years before her case was judged reflects flaws in the Mexican judicial system. But the fact remains that in Mexico the rule of law prevails to a greater extent than it does in much of the world—including countries where incarcerated Canadians languish in worse conditions, anonymously. Canadian politicians don’t mention their names, let alone fly across a continent to see them.
Last February, Maclean’s toured the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince, Haiti—a country that receives more than $100 million worth of aid from Canada every year. The prison stinks of the human waste that overflows from latrines in the open-air yard. Men and boys are crowded into spaces so small, in such large numbers, that there is not room for everyone to sleep at the same time. Inmates fight, bribe and do anything necessary to get a space near one of the windows high on the cell walls. Once there, they tie themselves to the bars with scraps of cloth that form hammocks and sometimes prevent them from crashing to the floor when they fall asleep. During the day they stare through the bars into the prison yard with eyes drained of hope.
Few have been formally charged, and it would hardly matter if they were. A United Nations mission, with significant help from Canada, is working to reform Haiti’s justice system. But it is still broken, and lacks everything from police who can read and write well enough to fill out reports and compile evidence, to judges, and vehicles that might transport prisoners to court.
When Maclean’s visited the prison, three Canadians were among the more than 3,000 inmates. “Drugs and other crap,” a prison official explained. There have been others. In April, Maclean’s filed an access-to-information request with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, asking for information on Canadians incarcerated in Haiti since 2006. Foreign Affairs responded at the end of September with more than 600 pages of documents, mostly memos from Canada’s embassy in Port-au-Prince. Because the names of all prisoners have been deleted, it’s impossible to know exactly how many there have been. But more than 12—most of them black—is a safe estimate. One had been jailed for 27 months without receiving any clothes. Another, a woman, had been jailed for 18 months but had not been formally sentenced.
The documents reveal that Canadian diplomats in Haiti are actively engaged in the cases of Canadians jailed there. They regularly meet with and petition Haitian political leaders and officials in the Haitian National Police and ask that cases involving Canadians be dealt with quickly and with due process. Sometimes they can get jailed Canadians moved to less crowded prisons. But their influence is limited. One memo notes that all of the Canadian ambassador’s interventions with the Haitian minister of justice have had no effect.
Still, the embassy avoids pressuring the Haitian government. Claude Boucher, Canada’s ambassador until July 2008, in a letter to relatives or friends of a jailed Canadian, said Canada cannot “impose” decisions on Haiti. Another diplomat writes that the embassy cannot ask Haitian authorities to deport a jailed Canadian “because that would be interfering in the legal processes of another country.”
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