U.S. House Foreign Affairs chair opposes Haiti referendum
THE HAITIAN TIMES - Queens Congressman Gregory Meeks said that the current status quo in Haiti, including an increase in kidnapping and gang violence, is unsustainable.
Meeks, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, made the comments during a Zoom meeting which was broadcast live on Facebook on Wednesday evening. Comments and shares on social media indicate that the event was viewed by more than 400 people, including members of the Haitian community.“I will continue to urge the Department of State to use their voice and vote within [international] institutions to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are not spent in support of this referendum,” said Meeks, a Democrat and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, during the town hall. Meeks and several other members of Congress have been critical of Moise this year, going so far as to challenge the U.S. State Department’s position by calling for a transitional government.
They were live on Facebook when an armed man stormed in and kidnapped them in Haiti
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
For Haiti, it was a new low.
Four people, including a pastor and a well-known pianist, were kidnapped late Thursday night — and it all played out live on social media.
The group, members of the Seventh-day Adventist Gospel Kreyòl Ministry Church in Diquini on the outskirts of metropolitan Port-au-Prince, were performing live on Facebook and YouTube in a studio adjacent to their church when a heavily armed man walked up to the stage and abducted them. The incident was confirmed by Dr. Gregory M. Figaro, whose father, Greger Figaro, is the founder of the ministry.
“If this can happen, then anything is possible in the country because there is no respect for any institution, whether it’s a church or school,” Figaro told the Miami Herald. “They are even grabbing people from inside their home.”
Figaro said he was present during the incident, which many Haitians initially thought was an April Fools’ joke or poorly acted skit. He heard a knock on the door, then saw a man standing in the doorway with a gun. “At first I couldn’t believe it,” he said. Then after the man was hit by the door, Figaro said, he saw the armed men enter. Figaro and others immediately ran for a small hallway inside the studio to take cover.
There were 10 to 15 people present during the livestream, he said. The armed bandits, he said, numbered between eight and nine and came in two vehicles.
“It was only after I heard one of the women, the one on the video, crying in the hallway that I realized what had just happened,” Figaro said. “When we came out of the hallway, we saw that the guys had left.”
The kidnapped individuals included two technicians, Steven Jérôme and Francisco Dorival, along with pastor Audalus Estimé and musician Welmyr Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre is a well-known pianist who has performed alongside Beethova Obas, a famous Haitian musician and composer based in Europe. Two women who were also in the studio managed to get away, Figaro said.
Obas immediately took to Twitter after hearing the news, asking for Jean-Pierre’s freedom in Creole and English.
“Welmyr my little brother, I know your love for this country #LibereWelmyr#welmyrjeanpierre#FreeWelmyr.”
An unmasked heavily armed man wearing a dark shirt then appears on the screen motioning for them to come with him. The woman managed to get away when the man went back to grab Estimé.
There are no words for the level of impunity and complete lack of accountability in Haiti under Moïse. I will not be quiet. Let’s stop talking nonsense about legitimate elections being possible under these circumstances. We must work for change, right now.
— Rep. Andy Levin (@RepAndyLevin) April 2, 2021
The kidnapping unfolded on Holy Thursday, during what is traditionally a deeply religious week in Haiti, with revivals in Protestant churches and Mass and processions in Catholic churches. It has shaken not just the Adventist community but Haitians in and outside of the country, who fear that the country’s proliferating armed gangs are becoming increasingly emboldened as insecurity spreads.
“The situation is hard. We should not be talking about this. We are currently in Holy Week,” Obas told the Herald from Belgium. “It’s Holy Thursday and this guy enters a church and kidnaps people in front of a camera. It’s a sanctuary, you should have respect for this place.”
GANG ATTACK IN HAITI NEIGHBORHOOD LEAVES BODIES, HOMES CHARRED.
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
They arrived unannounced, brandishing heavy artillery as they scaled the rooftops of houses, firing shots and setting homes ablaze.
While some residents managed to escape amid the billows of black smoke and tear gas, others became trapped and died inside their burning houses. The Thursday assault on residents inside the poor, pro-opposition neighborhood of Bel Air in Haiti’s capital was the third large attack in less than two years. It occurred within walking distance of Haiti’s presidential palace and was perpetrated by gang members affiliated with Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a fired policeman-turned-powerful gang chief who is wanted in several massacres, including the slaughter of dozens of men, women and children in a 2018 attack in Port-au-Prince’s La Saline slum.
Chérizier, who is also accused of being behind a November 2019 attack in Bel Air, called a press conference Friday where he assumed responsibility for the latest assault, casting it as a response to attacks committed against his powerful gang alliance known as G-9 and Family and Allies.
“Everyone knows that once there is an action, there will be a reaction,” said Chérizier, claiming that six of his members were killed during Thursday’s incident before rattling off their names.
In December, Chérizier and two former Haitian government officials were sanctioned by the United States for the La Saline massacre. Despite the sanction and his being wanted by the Haiti National Police, he continues to walk free.
On Friday, as the gunshots resumed and fleeing residents prepared to spend another night exposed to the elements on the sprawling Champ de Mars public plaza outside the presidential palace, it was still unclear how many had been killed or injured, and how many homes had been torched.
“We know that there were a lot, a lot of people who were forced to abandon the area,” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights, one of several groups investigating the bloody assault. “There are people who were injured, houses that were burned down, but it’s difficult right now to have a tally.”
Marie Yolene Gilles, who runs Fondasyon Je Klere, or Eyes Wide Open Foundation, said getting into the community remained impossible. Her initial investigation revealed that some residents had been burned while still inside their homes.
Raymond Joseph to Gregory Meeks
Lettre de l’Ambassadeur Raymond A. Joseph addressée à Nathaniel Hezekiah, Chef de cabinet adjoint au Bureau du Député Gregory Meeks, Président de la Commission des Affaires Etrangères de la Chambre des Représentants
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Dear Mr. Hezekiah!
I am sorry to disturb you on this special Friday, but a very disturbing event that occurred in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, last evening must be brought to the attention of Congressman Gregory Meeks, who has been instrumental in getting the nation to focus on what is happening in Haiti.
For me, it is the last drop that makes the vase to overflow. Thursday evening, heavily armed bandits entered a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Por-au-Prince and kidnapped the pastor, Audalus Estimé, along with three members of his church, while he was preaching, and disappeared with them.
While nothing is said about ransom, I believe this is a dire warning to the Protestants of Haiti for having organized peaceful mammoth anti-government demonstrations on February 28, March 28 and 29. That’s the response of the de facto President Jovenel Moïse, in effect saying that’s what is in store for all who oppose his dictatorship, especially the Protestants.
We’re asking that the Chairman of the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee consider this situation an emergency and have him reach out to the State Department and the White House to take swift appropriate measures, not only to have the victims released, but to send a strong message to the regime that this has to be its last action in the series of criminal acts that have been perpetrated by the illegal government.
Sincerely yours,
Raymond Alcide Joseph
Former ambassador of Haiti to the US, (2005-2010)
Co-Founder-publisher of the Haiti-Observateur weekly in NYC (1971-present)
Biden Should Create A Haiti Development Corps
The Conversation | By Garry Pierre-Pierre | Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.
So far, the majority of Americans like the job that President Joe Biden is doing. He recently signed a $1.9 trillion package that saw most of us getting $1400 stimulus money and he is preparing a $3 trillion bill to tackle eroding infrastructure and the environment among other challenges. We’re feeling optimistic as the vaccine roll out is ahead of schedule. After four years under that previous guy, we welcome sane and steady leadership.
But Mr. President in the matter of Haiti, I need a little bit of your time. I know you’re busy, but this is urgent. Since its founding as a republic in 1804, Haiti has had a complicated relationship with the United States. We’ve vacillated from seeing America as our best friend one day and worse enemy the next day.
America has helped create the richest diaspora and we are working on building a stronger and sophisticated Haitian community as we carve out our niche in our beloved America. Lately, it seems that a day doesn’t go by without some hideous or heinous incident taking place in Haiti. Just the other day, a bus carrying soccer players from Belize was stopped by a group of former police officers who have turned into a gang. And I can go on and on, but I won’t because this news site does that on a daily basis.
Over the years, as Haiti finds itself in yet another crisis, the United States has had good intentions and tried many different approaches. Unfortunately, the US has not been consistent and has abandoned Haiti at its worst moment, knowing that the mission had not been accomplished. I’m thinking when President Bill Clinton took a political gamble when he sent in 20,000 soldiers to restore democracy in Haiti in 1994.
Facing withering criticism from the Republican, Clinton pulled out of Haiti keenly aware that the job was not finished. That created the mess that we’re living through today. I believe it is time that the U.S re-engages with Haiti in a novel way. Enlist the Haitian Americans to help rebuild their beloved homeland.
At the rate it is going- increase insecurity, grinding poverty and a looming political showdown – Haiti will need another intervention. If or when things blow up, America needs to try a new approach to turn things around.
After the earthquake, the U.S. State Department created a pilot program sending Haitian American police officers from the New York City Police Department to help train the Haitian National Police officers. That program was going well and getting traction until Donald Trump cut the funding in his effort to gut that agency.
The force that the Pentagon sent to Haiti in 1994, included scores of Haitian American soldiers some of whom I interviewed for a story for the New York Times. These soldiers were so proud to be in Haiti defending democracy in their birth land for their new country. It was heady stuff for them and one of the highlights of their life, if not their glory days.
The NYPD pilot project should be extended across all ministries in Haiti where you have highly competent Haitian Americans working with Haitian counterparts to help reform the administrative state so Haiti can create jobs and provide a better future for its citizens.
I believe that even if the political situation ameliorates, the underlying issues remain unaddressed because the country doesn’t have the manpower to properly run the bureaucracy.
That’s why I think that Washington has to make the creation of a Haiti Development Corps, the central tenet of its Haiti policy.
Haiti has suffered from a chronic and consistent brain drain. The best and the brightest are whisked away to flourish in other lands that provide them with opportunity Haiti simply cannot.
The NYPD program and the Pentagon choice of soldiers show that American leaders know whom to turn to when they really want to address the issue of Haiti: Americans of Haitian ancestry.
This Corps will consist of highly qualified, mostly Haitian professionals attached to a ministry to work alongside their Haitian counterparts. The selection process must be rigorous and highly selective. The successful applicants would have a proven track record in their field.
The Corps should require a 2-year commitment and members’ salaries will be underwritten by the State Department and the applicant’s employer. This program should be disbanded after 25 years, enough time to stabilize the country and attract private investors and once and for all break this pernicious cycle of instability that has marred the country since its founding.
Who would lead such a project? There is an abundance of Americans of Haitian ancestry that have defended U.S. interests in a variety of capacity across the world and it is time we give them a chance to change the conditions in Haiti. They have skin in their games. Many promised their fathers that they would leave Haiti a better place than they left it.
Three people come to mind to head this herculean task, but any one of them is more than able to tackle this challenge and ensure the success of this program.
In no particular order: One is Patrick Gaspard, a long-time political operative and former campaign manager for the first Obama run for the presidency. Gaspard later headed the Democratic National Committee before being nominated ambassador to South Africa.
Another person that comes to mind is Jacques Jiha, an economist with private and public sector experience. Jiha has held various deputy positions as a state and city comptroller, travelling the world over to invest in the state’s pension funds. He was NYC Finance Commissioner before he was tapped by Mayor Bill de Blasio to be the city’s finance czar to steer the city’s economy as the pandemic flattened it.
. There is also ret. Marine Corps Col Mario Lapaix, who was the Pentagon’s top liaison in Haiti. Col Lapaix also worked for years in various high-level positions in NYC government, including assistant commissioner, at the Emergency Management Operations and Planning. Col Lapaix’s experience goes way beyond Haiti. He was the first chief of staff of Marine Forces Africa in support of AFRICOM in Djibouti. Col Lapaix During the U.S Operation “Iraqi Freedom in 2006/2007, he served as the 4th Civil Affairs Group Commander and Director of all civil military operations in Al Anbar Province and played an integral part in the province’s recovery from local government failures and industrial challenges.
If we continue to approach Haiti in the same way it will be akin to washing your hands and wiping them on the floor to quote an old Haitian saying. It’s time we try a bold and innovative approach.
haiti development corps haiti reform
“Poor Rich Haiti”: How Imperialists and Local Oligarchy Have Sought to Destroy Haitian Agriculture
From Haiti, Lautaro Rivara unpacks the tired trope of “poor rich Haiti,” highlighting the role of foreign capital and local elites in the destruction of life in the countryside
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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Does the oft-repeated refrain that “Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere” explain anything? Is it a poor country or an impoverished country? Or perhaps it is unsuspectedly rich? Are its indifferent friends in the West really not interested in the country? Why then do the United States and European countries seem to be so zealous about the “Haitian thing”? In a series of notes and based on fieldwork carried out in four departments of the country, we will focus on understanding the “poor rich Haiti” and some of the initiatives of what has been called its “reconstruction” since 2010. We will discuss the economic interests of Western powers, expressed through initiatives such as industrial parks, mining operations, enclave tourism ventures, land grabbing and agricultural free zones.
Haiti’s borders are curious. The small country is bordered to the east by the Dominican Republic, dividing in two the territory of the island of Hispaniola. To the west it borders the Caribbean Sea and to the south, a forgotten maritime border with the Republic of Colombia. But what interests us here is a border that is not entirely imaginary: to the north and northeast, although the maps would like to indicate otherwise, Haiti borders the United States.
It is here, in this region, that most US economic interests – and also those of its smaller partners – are concentrated. This is the case of Canada, that peculiar North American colony that in turn colonizes others. But also those of France, Germany and other European nations. In this and the following notes, we will talk about industrial parks, mining and speculation, enclave tourism ventures, land grabbing and agricultural free trade zones. This does not include some unholy initiatives in other parts of the country, such as the seizure of entire islands, drug trafficking or tax havens where the money comes in dirty and goes out free of guilt and sin.
But it is in the northeast region of this “poor rich” country that the power enjoyed by the current de facto president, Jovenel Moïse, has been amassed. He has made this territory his personal fiefdom. His modus operandi has been land grabbing and the true foundation of his power, his economic alliances with transnational capital, both legal and extralegal.
For this, we will travel to the heart of the communities affected by what, after the devastating earthquake of 2010, has become known as the “Reconstruction of Haiti”. In this first note, we will talk – paraphrasing Eduardo Galeano – about the “Banana King” Jovenel Moïse and his numerous agricultural courtiers. But first, let’s take a look at the situation of the rural areas and the local peasantry.
Barefoot
One out of every two inhabitants of the country lives in the countryside. But an even higher percentage of the population, around 66%, depends on and subsists in relation to rural areas and agricultural production. According to a study by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the urban population has only overtaken the rural population in the last five years, and the current difference is only about 100,000 people.
Land everywhere is finite and vital. But it is even more so in a territory covered by extensive mountain ranges, and where the agricultural frontier is receding with every meter gained by deforestation and desertification – today the country retains barely 2 percent of its original vegetation cover. It is not surprising, then, that a large part of the peasant population is poor: they are the so-called pyè atè, the “pata en tierra”, the barefoot.
For a long time, however, an unprecedentedly radical measure was at least able to guarantee Haitians a piece of land on which to produce and reproduce life. Since the revolutionary constitution of 1805, land ownership was denied to foreigners on the grounds of sovereignty and national dignity, becoming an obstacle to the full implementation of capitalism on the island. At least until the definitive abolition of this prohibition in 1915, under the mantle of the American occupation.
Today, there are around 600,000 farms in Haiti, organized in small plots – jaden – of between 0.5 and 1.8 hectares. Peasant agriculture is mostly family and traditional, but there are many different forms of land ownership, work and usage: family landowners, tenant farmers, tenant farmers, day laborers, sharecroppers, etc. The tools used are rustic, often no more than the traditional pickaxe and machete, usually without draft animals, without any kind of machinery, without chemical fertilizers, with native seeds, all under a rain-fed agricultural regime. Despite the enormous contribution of peasant agriculture to national wealth – around 25 percent of GDP – the state’s contributions to the sector are practically nonexistent.
On the other side of rural life, a select group of families, usually living abroad, as well as a handful of transnational corporations, still concentrate around half of the available land and in many cases, worse still, keep it unproductive.
A requiem for the free market
Eat what you don’t produce and don’t eat what you produce. This is the secret of the offshoring and financialized export agriculture that has been promoted in the country in recent decades. A fundamental milestone in its implementation was the policy of trade and financial liberalization imposed in the mid-1980s, with the help of the International Monetary Fund, the US State Department and the enthusiastic action of the ineffable Bill Clinton – a self-styled “friend of Haiti” whose friendship, however, nobody here wants to reciprocate.
In the mid-1990s, this policy deepened, with tariffs on rice imports falling from 35 percent to 3 percent under external pressure. In the same year, the US invested 60 billion dollars to subsidize its own rice production. So-called dumping resulted in Haiti’s production falling by over 50% from 130,000 to 60,000 tons. The selling prices of the peasantry, exposed to unfair competition with the hyper-subsidized American farmer, led to the ruin and exodus of thousands and thousands of peasants. A vicious circle of agricultural ruin, unemployment, hunger, foreign food aid, impossibility of competing with the “free” food sent to the country, and again more ruin, unemployment, hunger, etc., was generated.
As a result, Haiti went from being practically self-sufficient in the production of the staple grain of its national diet to importing it massively. Although the case of rice is the most dramatic, it is far from the only one. The nation went from importing less than 20 percent of its food in the early 1980s to importing more than 55 percent from abroad today, mainly from the United States and the Dominican Republic.
This cycle resulted in the partial destruction of traditional peasant agriculture. Some may call it “subsistence”, but for the local peasant it was instead an agriculture of “abundance”, if we consider how trade liberalization has generalized the phenomenon of hunger today. On the other hand, the relationship between food assistance and hunger is direct, as was the case with the “Tikè Manje” program and others developed by USAID, through voucher systems that only allow the population to have access to North American products.
Agritrans S.A.: the flagship
In this scorched earth scenario, after the devastating earthquake of January 2010, the project of transnational, deterritorialized and financialized agriculture began to take shape. Transnational, due to the dominant influence of external capital, beyond the resounding publicity of certain local “entrepreneurs”. It is deterritorialized because the local space becomes a kind of non-place for the capitals that mold the territory in their image and likeness: bananas from Haiti or Guadeloupe, soya from Brazil or Paraguay, sugar cane from the Caribbean or European beet sugar, etc., are all the same. And it is financialized because what this agriculture tends to produce is not food, but foreign currency. In short, it is an agriculture that satisfies only the hunger for capital accumulation.
A cautious detour with a good local guide allowed us to enter the lands of Agritrans S.A., the company of de facto president Jovenel Moïse, which became famous for its involvement in one of the largest embezzlements of public funds in the country’s history, amounting to a quarter of the national GDP. This was confirmed by Senate investigations – before its closure in January 2020 – and by the Supreme Audit Court, before its reduction, by presidential decree, to nothing more than a mere consultative body.
The inhabitants of the Limonade and Terrier-Rouge area, in the North-East Department, are in awe of all things related to this fabled expanse of land. And for those who feel neither fear nor respect, there are armed guards to remind them. They told us to stop and threatened to shoot as soon as the motorbike we were traveling on around their perimeter on National Route 6 slowed down. Unable to film or photograph the accesses, we had to clandestinely enter the estate through some twisted wire fences on the side of a canal. Surprisingly, a barren plain then spread out before us. Whether because of the environmental damage resulting from intensive production without crop rotation, or perhaps because the tenure of these lands today serves more the assertion of local power than the process of real accumulation, we saw not even a trace of a cultivated field. Today, Agritrans S.A. is a huge, uncultivated estate, surrounded by crowds of peasants who cannot even get access to a “handkerchief of land”, as the locals eloquently put it.
The “Nourribio” project was set up here in 2013, on the land of the man who would later become the country’s president. The 1,000 hectares in front of us were donated for a project that envisaged the intensive production of bananas, mainly for export to Western countries. It also took the form of a free zone, exempt from taxes and other charges. The land for its establishment was expropriated from 3,000 peasants and granted in concession for a renewable term of 25 years. The aforementioned promises of employment fell far short of expectations: only 200 people were being employed, according to informationfrom 2014. And the people who lost land? The small amount of their compensation was spent on the basic necessities of everyday life. With no land to work or produce, their “beneficiaries” soon found themselves unemployed, expelled to the capital, expelled abroad, or reduced to starvation, if not a combination of all of the above.
According to the specialist Georges Eddy Lucien, in the face of the banana production crisis in the French overseas departments (Guadeloupe and Martinique), “the Northeast – of Haiti – appears in the eyes of investors and international institutions as an ideal alternative territory, where production costs (labor, available land) are much lower…”. The impoverishment of Haitian workers has meant that the wages of an agricultural worker can be 25 times lower – 25 times! Not to mention if we compare it with the average wages of a Frenchman or a North American.
History is a boomerang. The first shipment of Agritrans bananas arrived at the port of Antwerp in Belgium in 2015. The same port that flourished during the slave trade and during the reign of Leopold II. A century ago, thousands of kilos of ivory and rubber, the product of slave exploitation in the Belgian Congo, arrived there. Today, it is bananas from Haiti, produced by one of the most impoverished workforces on the planet.
Operation dispossession
However, at least the construction of Agritrans S.A. involved mechanisms that we will call quasi-legal – although not moral – through the expropriation and compensation of peasant properties, measures taken perhaps because of the international visibility of the project.
But the policy of land grabbing has deepened in recent years, according to the leaders of the main peasant organizations during a recent colloquium on the subject held in the central region. There, for example, the national government ceded by decree no less than 8,600 hectares of fertile land to the Apaid family, one of the richest in the country. Another agricultural free trade zone is supposed to be built there, but this time for the production and export of stevia for the multinational Coca-Cola
But back to the Northeast. After long walks along impassable rural roads, flooded by rain, mud and state neglect, we were able to visit several communities that have suffered and are today facing the dispossession of their lands by local landowners, foreign companies and armed gangs.
In Terrier Rouge, Irené Cinic Antoine of the “Small planters” movement told us that she has owned a large plot of 6,000 hectares of land since 1986. In 1995, under the progressive government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the process to legalize their tenure began. Since then, the common lands have been divided between agriculture, charcoal trees and livestock. Their ownership rights were even published in the official state newspaper, but the documents were later disappeared by anonymous hands.
We also talk to Christiane Fonrose and her husband, as they stoke the fire on the mountain of earth inside which burns the wood that will be turned into charcoal. It is one of the few remaining means of survival in the region, although its ecological costs are well known to all, particularly to the peasantry. From his unshakeable faith, Fonrose tells us: “The land is God’s thing, which God created for us. Before creating his children, God created the earth. (…) But then they took the earth out of our hands. Today we have nowhere to plant, nowhere to graze some small animals, the children cannot go to school (…) We are in a very difficult situation”.
We were also able to visit peasant organizations in Grand Basin who are currently resisting the permanent hostility of invisible actors who are trying to take over land that was ceded to them by the state, again during the Aristide era. After another long trek along the difficult rural roads, our interview had to be conducted in the pouring rain, as even the roofs and doors of the small house on the plot were stolen. Here, on the edge of mineral-rich mountains, 1,500 organized peasants have been able to work 148 kawo of land (about 200 hectares) to produce sugar cane, maize, manioc and even honey and kleren – a peasant sugar cane brandy – in a sovereign and agro-ecological way.
A little over a year ago, a heavily armed group broke in, disrupting their crops, stealing or killing their animals, destroying fences, buildings and their meager agricultural implements. Evidently these were neither neighbors nor amateurs, as the operation involved the deployment of expensive bulldozers. Even today, the land that was taken remains unproductive, and the peasants are constantly threatened not to try to recover it. So far, no state body has given them any response. “Without the land, outside the land, we peasants are worthless. We voted for them ourselves, but it seems that they don’t need us anymore,” concludes Antoine.
Today there are barely 350 people left, including only a handful of young people: most of them have been forced to migrate to the capital Port-au-Prince or even abroad. In the long siege they have been suffering since then. The National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INARA) has hardly dared to take sides with them. Coincidentally, according to recent reports, the Moïse government is seeking to eliminate this body in the new constitution it is now preparing. According to Wilson Messidor, leader of MOPAG, the project to dispossess them of their land would be closely linked to the mining resources in the area, and to the construction of the so-called villages, semi-closed residential neighborhoods that USAID is building for the workers in the free trade zones.
USAID appears, in fact, as the de facto civil authority in these territories, and its projects are constantly growing and multiplying, as indicated by the numerous signs on the roadsides. According to an anonymous Cuban engineer, the US mega-cooperation organization operates through loans and projects, indebting the state and the communities, in order to guarantee control of strategic areas for their water and mineral resources.
It matters little, following Eduardo Galeano’s metaphor, whether the monarch is King Banana, Queen Stevia or King Manufacture. Haiti continues to be determined by the blessings of nature and the curses of those who dominate history. We will continue, in the next note, to unravel the mysteries of this “poor rich country” which, in the international division of labor, has been subjected to the task of exporting poverty and importing humanitarian aid. We will talk about the export processing zones and the bizarre project to turn Haiti into the “Taiwan of America”..
Lautaro Rivara is a sociologist, researcher and poet. As a trained journalist, he participated as an activist in different spaces of communications work, covering tasks of editing, writing, radio broadcasts, and photography. During his two years in the Jean-Jacques Dessalines Brigade in Haiti he was responsible for communications and carried out political education with Haitian people’s movements in this area. He writes regularly in people’s media projects of Argentina and the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean including Nodal, ALAI, Telesur, Resumen Latinoamericano, Pressenza, la RedH, Notas, Haití Liberte, Alcarajo, and more.
All images in this article are from the author
The original source of this article is Peoples Dispatch