‘Recurrent’ attacks’ shut Dominican Republic consulates in Haiti
Santo Domingo.- The Foreign Ministry (Mirex) said last week that its counterpart in Haiti was informed about the Dominican Government's decision to temporarily close its five consulates, because of recent "recurrent" attacks by Haitian groups, which it affirms pose a risk to their staff.
Mirex spokesman Miguel Medina said Foreign minister Andrés Navarro sent the missive to Haiti counterpart Pierre Duly Brutus Wednesday, noting that the attacks on Dominican consulates there have prevented their day-to-day activities.
In the letter, Navarro says the decision was made because in is view it’s impossible to achieve the security Dominican consular personnel needs, adding that the facilities will remain shuttered until Port-au-Prince guarantees adequate protection.
Caricom again slams Dominican Republic on Haiti row
Santo Domingo.- Caribbean Community (Caricom) leaders expressed "serious concern" with the difficulties which people of Haitian descent face in Dominican Republic, EFE reports.
The statement by Caricom is the latest salvo in a war of attrition pitting the Caribbean’s biggest economy and the regional bloc over the issue of undocumented Haitian immigrants, but which they also reject.
"We’re concern with the increasing number of policies that seriously affect Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic" said Caricom leaders in a statement released today.
The regional leaders said Govt. Dominican representatives didn’t extend the deadline to apply for the Foreigners Regularization Plan, in which only 6,937 of those affected could request legalization on time.
Dominican Republic’s special Naturalization Law and Plan emerged after a Constitutional Court ruling in September 2013, which sets the parameters to request citizenship, and unleashed a backlash across the region.
The deadline to apply for the Plan, aimed at people without an official ID and who were born outside the country, ended on February 1.
According Caricom, the fact that 6,937 persons requested to join the Plan implies that "over100,000 people are vulnerable to expulsion."
Caricom cited the Inter-American Human Rights Court ruling handed down on October 22, 2014, which orders the Dominican court to amend its laws to recognize the citizenship of those born in that country.
Haitian immigrants' Brazilian dream sours as work hard to find for tens of thousands
SAO PAULO – Under a scorching sun, dozens of Haitians shuffled impatiently about the brick-walled courtyard of Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church. The sight of an approaching employer sparked a skirmish, with the men pushing against each other, jostling for attention.
"How many people you need?" several men shouted. "I need a job, what do you want me to do?" No matter what the job was, someone in the crowd yelled out, "I can do that!"
There are fewer jobs in Brazil than there are Haitians looking for work. An open-door policy intended to help migrants from the impoverished island is fueling Brazil's largest immigration wave since World War II and prompting calls for lawmakers to do more to help the new arrivals.
"Seeing so many seeking jobs and so much hunger for work, it creates tension," said the Rev. Paolo Parise, a priest who directs the parish's efforts to help Haitian migrants and other impoverished newcomers.
While Haiti is picking itself up from the 7.0 earthquake that devastated its capital in 2010, progress has not been enough to keep tens of thousands of Haitians from chasing opportunities abroad, mainly in the United States and the Dominican Republic. But Brazil also has become an attractive landing spot for migrants eager to find a toehold in Latin America's biggest economy.
Brazil has no limit on the number of humanitarian visas it issues to Haitians. National Migration Council figures suggest more than 52,000 Haitians have migrated since 2012 and have become the country's largest group of foreign laborers, outpacing Portuguese who long held the top spot.
"No other country opened the doors for them like Brazil," said Duval Magalhaes, a demographer at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais state who has researched the Haitian migration in Brazil.
Wooldeens Turenne, 23, once earned a reliable income guiding missionary workers helping quake victims in Haiti. But such work gradually dried up and, last year, Turenne saw it was time to leave. Despite being fluent in English, going to the United States wasn't an option due to its restrictive immigration laws. Instead, he flew to Panama, then Ecuador, where he received his visa to enter Brazil. He then flew to Sao Paulo.
Jobs can be found in construction, agriculture and factories, but the salaries barely cover Brazil's high cost of living, let alone leave Haitians enough money to support family back home. Employers know Haitians are desperate, and commonly pay them $300 to $400 a month, barely above the legal minimum.
"If they know you are an immigrant, they don't pay you the salary they are supposed to, and they will give you a lot of work to do," Turenne said. "It's better than Haiti, yes, but it's not possible to make a good living."
Two out of three companies interested in hiring migrants through Parise's church are turned away because they don't want to comply with labor laws, or their work sites don't meet safety standards.
Migrant advocates say the Haitians also face racial discrimination, and many struggle to understand Portuguese. Trying to survive on sporadic and meager incomes, most crowd into shared rooms amid the poorest slums ringing cities such as Sao Paulo.
Brazil has gone through a construction boom, both due to an economic expansion that lifted tens of millions out of poverty and because of public works projects tied to last year's World Cup and next year's Olympics. But the economy is now sluggish, contracting the first half of 2014 and barely moving as the year closed.
Former Presidential Security Chief Shot to Death in Haiti
The chief of presidential security under former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was shot to death Monday in the capital, where he had lived since returning to the country after finishing a prison sentence in the United States.
Oriel Jean, who had received a reduced sentence because he provided substantial assistance to U.S. authorities investigating allegations of drug trafficking tied to the Aristide government, was killed in an apparent ambush in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince, police said.
National Police spokesman Gary Desrosiers said two men on a motorcycle came up to Jean and one opened fire before they fled into the crowded streets. The former official was struck in the neck and stomach. No suspects were in custody.
After the attack, as officials tried to collect evidence and witness testimony, Jean's body was sprawled on the street as if he had been shot just as he stepped out of the vehicle, a grey Toyota SUV with tinted windows. The street, in a busy commercial and residential district, was packed with people heading home in the late afternoon.
Jean, who was about 50, had returned to Haiti after completing a sentence in the U.S. for money laundering.
From 2001 to 2003, he had been the head of security for Aristide, who was forced from power in a violent rebellion in February 2004. The following month, Jean was arrested in Canada and extradited to the United States to face charges stemming from an investigation focused on officials and associates of the former government.
Jean had faced up to 20 years in prison but was sentenced in Miami to only three years after providing what officials described in court documents as "substantial assistance" with other cases. The three-year investigation resulted in the arrests of 14 Haitians who held top government and private jobs during the Aristide administration.
He testified in one case that an accused Haitian drug kingpin received a security badge, at a cost of $40,000, which enabled him to travel freely about the country without Haitian police searching him at a time when the Caribbean country had become a transit point for cocaine bound for the United States. Jean testified that the badge had been approved by Aristide but said that the then-president was unaware at the time that his security chief was involved in the drug trade.
Aristide, a former priest who became the first democratically elected president of Haiti, was forced out by a violent rebellion in February 2004. He returned from exile in March 2011 and has kept a low profile though he has been under investigation for corruption while in office.
As a potential witness in that case, Jean had been ordered not to leave the country, Desrosiers said.
Film Review: 'Murder in Pacot'
(variety.com) A chamber drama in which even the chamber itself is on the verge of collapse, Raoul Peck’s “Murder in Pacot” offers little scope for healing as it surveys the geographical and psychological wreckage wrought by Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake. A dramatic companion piece to “Fatal Assistance,” Peck’s 2013 doc on the same subject, this allegorical story of two couples warring across divisions of class and turf in Port-au-Prince’s post-quake wasteland positively trembles with the weight of its own symbolism; in his first narrative feature since 2000’s “Lumumba,” former Haitian culture minister Peck remains a political filmmaker of stern conviction. Overlong and far from subtle, “Pacot” is nonetheless engrossing enough to entice topically-minded arthouse distributors, and should make considerable waves in Francophone territories.
Peck claims Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Theorem” as the guiding inspiration for his original screenplay, co-written with veteran scribe Pascal Bonitzer (who also worked on “Lumumba”) and Haitian novelist Lyonel Trouillot. The surface resemblance is clear — both films detail the effect of a sexually magnetic drifter on a fractiously fragmented household — though the social context of the invasion and ensuing fallout in “Pacot” is a world away from Pasolini’s Euro-bourgeoisie satire. Instead, Peck’s narrative complicates notions of outsider identity by bringing race and nationality into the stew, while still identifying subtler conflicts within Haiti’s indigenous community.
For starters, the household in question is divided across every imaginable fault line, including the physical ruptures that have rendered most of the house — a once-substantial villa in suburban Port-au-Prince — uninhabitable. Having been all but bankrupted by the earthquake, its married, pointedly unnamed owners (played by Alex Descas and Nigerian singer-actress Ayo) are ordered by the authorities to renovate their ruined home or face having it demolished. To raise money for the necessary repairs, they are forced to move into an adjacent shed, renting out the house’s remaining rooms to Alex (Thibault Vincon), a young white Frenchman working for a foreign aid organization. That this would-be do-gooder is purportedly bringing relief to disenfranchised Haitians while benefiting from one couple’s homelessness is just one of the film’s many blunt ironies. The husband regards Alex with scarcely-contained hostility; his traumatized wife is haunted by less material losses, principally that of their adopted son, who disappeared during the disaster and may be buried under the rubble.
Despite the film’s intimacy of scale — set over just eight days, methodically marked with title cards, it never leaves the confines of the property — this is expansive, high-stakes storytelling, ramping up the melodrama ahead of a punchy, somewhat overwrought climax, complete with thunderclaps and rain-soaked fisticuffs. “Murder in Pacot” (not the most discreet of titles) is most powerful, however, when it tunes into finer sociopolitical observation, as it does in one remarkable sequence where Andremise throws an all-native party in Alex’s absence, with previously separated classes grinding up against each other on the dance floor. Despite such fleeting glimpses of unification amid adversity, Peck’s outlook remains angrily pessimistic: Referred to at frequent intervals, the fetid odor emanating from the couple’s basement is yet another broad metaphor for decaying national foundations.
Handed such a bristling script, the actors are smart enough to underplay the material, largely letting the subtext speak for itself. Kermonde Fifi, in her screen debut, is a particularly riveting presence, playing the heated facade of “Jennifer” with sultry humor while exposing the cool, crafty wiring of the prematurely grown woman behind her.
Tech credits are stark but strong. With its liberal use of astute, peering close-ups, Eric Guichard’s bright, clear lensing contributes to the hothouse atmosphere of the enterprise — a virtue that could use more assistance from Alexandra Strauss’s overly deliberate editing.