The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti.  The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti.  Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?”

Here are seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go.

One.  The largest single recipient of US earthquake money was the US government.  The same holds true for donations by other countries.

Right after the earthquake, the US allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops.  The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in some cases even indirectly, to Haiti.  They documented in January 2010 that thirty three cents of each of these US dollars for Haiti was actually given directly back to the US to reimburse ourselves for sending in our military.  Forty two cents of each dollar went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the Children, the UN World Food Program and the Pan American Health Organization.  Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their government.

The overall $1.6 billion allocated for relief by the US was spent much the same way according to an August 2010 report by the US Congressional Research Office: $655 million was reimbursed to the Department of Defense; $220 million to Department of Health and Human Services to provide grants to individual US states to cover services for Haitian evacuees; $350 million to USAID disaster assistance; $150 million to the US Department of Agriculture for emergency food assistance; $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration fees, and so on.

International assistance followed the same pattern.  The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the $2.4 billion in humanitarian funding, 34 percent was provided back to the donor’s own civil and military entities for disaster response, 28 percent was given to UN agencies and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) for specific UN projects, 26 percent was given to private contractors and other NGOs, 6 percent was provided as in-kind services to recipients, 5 percent to the international and national Red Cross societies, 1 percent was provided to the government of Haiti, four tenths of one percent of the funds went to Haitian NGOs.

Two.  Only 1 percent of the money went to the Haitian government.

Less than a penny of each dollar of US aid went to the government of Haiti, according to the Associated Press.   The same is true with other international donors.  The Haitian government was completely bypassed in the relief effort by the US and the international community.

Three.   Extremely little went to Haitian companies or Haitian non-governmental organizations.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research, the absolute best source for accurate information on this issue, analyzed all the 1490 contracts awarded by the US government after the January 2010 earthquake until April 2011 and found only 23 contracts went to Haitian companies.  Overall the US had awarded $194 million to contractors, $4.8 million to the 23 Haitian companies, about 2.5 percent of the total.  On the other hand, contractors from the Washington DC area received $76 million or 39.4 percent of the total.  As noted above, the UN documented that only four tenths of one percent of international aid went to Haitian NGOs.

In fact, Haitians had a hard time even getting into international aid meetings.  Refugees International reported that locals were having a hard time even getting access to the international aid operational meetings inside the UN compound.  “Haitian groups are either unaware of the meetings, do not have proper photo-ID passes for entry, or do not have the staff capacity to spend long hours at the compound.”  Others reported that most of these international aid coordination meetings were not even being translated into Creole, the language of the majority of the people of Haiti!

Four.  A large percentage of the money went to international aid agencies, and big well connected non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The American Red Cross received over $486 million in donations for Haiti.  It says two-thirds of the money has been contracted to relief and recovery efforts, though specific details are difficult to come by.  The CEO of American Red Cross has a salary of over $500,000 per year.

Look at the $8.6 million joint contract between the US Agency for International Development (USAID) with the private company CHF for debris removal in Port au Prince. CHF is a politically well-connected international development company with an annual budget of over $200 million whose CEO was paid $451,813 in 2009. CHF’s connection to Republicans and Democrats is illustrated by its board secretary, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, a partner with the Livingston Group LLC.  The Livingston Group is headed by the former Republican Speaker-designate for the 106th Congress, Bob Livingston, doing lobbying and government relations.  Ms. Fitz-Pegado, who apparently works the other side of the aisle, was appointed by President Clinton to serve in the Department of Commerce and served as a member of the foreign policy expert advisor team on the Obama for President Campaign.  CHF “works in Haiti out of two spacious mansions in Port au Prince and maintains a fleet of brand new vehicles” according to Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone, in an excellent article by Janet Reitman, reported on another earthquake contract, a $1.5 million contract to the NY based consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors.  The article found Dalberg’s team “had never lived overseas, didn’t have any disaster experience or background in urban planning… never carried out any program activities on the ground…” and only one of them spoke French.  USAID reviewed their work and found that “it became clear that these people may not have even gotten out of their SUVs.”

Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced a fundraising venture for Haiti on January 16, 2010.  As of October 2011, the fund had received $54 million in donations.  It has partnered with several Haitian and international organizations.  Though most of its work appears to be admirable, it has donated $2 million to the construction of a Haitian $29 million for-profit luxury hotel.

“The NGOs still have something to respond to about their accountability, because there is a lot of cash out there,” according to Nigel Fisher, the UN’s chief humanitarian officer in Haiti.  “What about the $1.5 to $2 billion that the Red Cross and NGOs got from ordinary people, and matched by governments?  What’s happened to that?  And that’s where it’s very difficult to trace those funds.”

Five.  Some money went to for profit companies whose business is disasters.

Less than a month after the quake hit, the US Ambassador Kenneth Merten sent a cable titled “THE GOLD RUSH IS ON” as part of his situation report to Washington.  In this February 1, 2010 document, made public by The Nation, Haiti Liberte and Wikileaks, Ambassador Merten reported the President of Haiti met with former General Wesley Clark for a sales presentation for  a Miami-based company that builds foam core houses.

Capitalizing on the disaster, Lewis Lucke, a high ranking USAID relief coordinator, met twice in his USAID capacity with the Haitian Prime Minister immediately after the quake.  He then quit the agency and was hired for $30,000 a month by a Florida corporation Ashbritt (known already for its big no bid Katrina grants) and a prosperous Haitian partner to lobby for disaster contracts.  Locke said “it became clear to us that if it was handled correctly the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity…”Ashbritt and its Haitian partner were soon granted a $10 million no bid contract.  Lucke said he was instrumental in securing another $10 million contract from the World Bank and another smaller one from CHF International before their relationship ended.

Six.  A fair amount of the pledged money has never been actually put up.

The international community decided it was not going to allow the Haiti government to direct the relief and recovery funds and insisted that two institutions be set up to approve plans and spending for the reconstruction funds going to Haiti.  The first was the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and the second is the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF).

In March 2010, UN countries pledged $5.3 billion over two years and a total of $9.9 billion over three years in a conference March 2010.  The money was to be deposited with the World Bank and distributed by the IHRC.  The IHRC was co-chaired by Bill Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister.  By July 2010, Bill Clinton reported only 10 percent of the pledges had been given to the IHRC.

Seven.  A lot of the money which was put up has not yet been spent.

Nearly two years after the quake, less than 1 percent of the $412 million in US funds specifically allocated for infrastructure reconstruction activities in Haiti had been spent by USAID and the US State Department and only 12 percent has even been obligated according to a November 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The performance of the two international commissions, the IHRC and the HRF has also been poor.  The Miami Herald noted that as of July 2011, the $3.2 billion in projects approved by the IHRC only five had been completed for a total of $84 million.  The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which was severely criticized by Haitians and others from its beginning, has been effectively suspended since its mandate ended at the end of October 2011.  The Haiti Reconstruction Fund was set up to work in tandem with the IHRC, so while its partner is suspended, it is not clear how it can move forward.

What to do

The effort so far has not been based on a respectful partnership between Haitians and the international community.   The actions of the donor countries and the NGOs and international agencies have not been transparent so that Haitians or others can track the money and see how it has been spent.  Without transparency and a respectful partnership the Haitian people cannot hold anyone accountable for what has happened in their country.  That has to change.

The UN Special Envoy to Haiti suggests the generous instincts of people around the world must be channeled by international actors and institutions in a way that assists in the creation of a “robust public sector and a healthy private sector.”  Instead of giving the money to intermediaries, funds should be directed as much as possible to Haitian public and private institutions.  A “Haiti First” policy could strengthen public systems, promote accountability, and create jobs and build skills among the Haitian people.

Respect, transparency and accountability are the building blocks for human rights.  Haitians deserve to know where the money has gone, what the plans are for the money still left, and to be partners in the decision-making for what is to come.

After all, these are the people who will be solving the problems when the post-earthquake relief money is gone.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

In the past, however, many theorists of imperialism of varying political persuasion, ranging from Max Weber to Vladimir Lenin, argued that imperialism unified the country, reduced internal class polarization and created privileged workers who actively supported and voted for imperial parties.  A historical, comparative survey of the conditions under which imperialism and democratic institutions converge or diverge can throw some light on the challenges and choices faced by the burgeoning democratic movements erupting across the globe.

The Nineteenth Century

During the 19th century, European and US imperial expansion covered the world.  In tandem, democratic institutions took root, the franchise was extended to the working class, competitive parties emerged, social legislation was passed, and the working class increased its representation in the legislative chambers.

Was the simultaneous growth of democracy and imperialism a spurious correlation reflecting divergent and conflicting underlying forces, one favoring overseas conquest and another promoting democratic politics? In fact, there was a great deal of overlap between pro-imperialist and democratic politics and not simply among the elites.

Throughout the 19th and especially in the 20th century, important sectors of the labor and social democratic parties and numerous prominent leftists and revolutionary socialists, at one time or another, combined support for workers’ demands and imperial expansion.  None other than Karl Marx, in his early journalistic writings in the New York Herald Tribune critically supported the British conquest of India as a “modernizing force” breaking down feudal barriers, even as he supported (with criticism) the European revolutions of 1848.

The ruling classes, the driving force of imperialism, were divided. Some saw the democratic reforms, “citizenship”, as a means of raising mass conscriptions for imperial wars; others feared that the democratic reforms would enhance social demands and undercut the accumulation of capital and rule by the elite.  Both were right.  Along with greater popular participation came virulent modern nationalism, which fueled empire building.  At the same time  mass access to democratic rights led to heightened class organizations, which threatened or challenged class rule. Within the ruling classes, democratic institutions were seen as an arena to peacefully resolve conflicts between competing sectoral elites. But once they took a mass character they were perceived as political threats.

Imperial and class-based parties competed for voters among the newly enfranchised urban workers and rural poor.  In many cases, imperial and class allegiances “co-existed” within the same individuals.  The question of which of the two – imperialist or class consciousness – would become ‘operative’ or ‘salient’ was, in part, contingent on the success or failures of the larger competing political projects.

In other words, when imperial expansion succeeded in easy conquests resulting in lucrative colonies (especially settler colonies) democratic workers embraced the empire.  This was the case because empire enhanced trade; namely, profitable exports and cheap imports, while protecting local markets and manufacturers.  These in turn expanded employment and wages for substantial sectors of the working class.  As a result, labor and social democratic parties and trade unions did not oppose imperialism.  Indeed many supported it.

In contrast, when imperialist wars led to prolonged bloody and costly conflicts, the working class shifted from initial chauvinist enthusiasm to disenchantment and opposition.  Democratic demands to ‘end the war’ led to strikes challenging unequal sacrifice.  Democratic and anti-imperialist sentiments tended to fuse.

The conflict between democracy and imperialism became even more apparent in the case of an imperial defeat and military occupation.  Both the defeat of France in the German-French war of 1870-71 and the German defeat in the First World War led to massive democratic socialist uprisings (the Paris Commune of 1871 and the German revolution of 1918) attacking militarism, ruling class domination and the entire imperial capitalist institutional framework.

The Imperialism and Democracy Debate and “History from Below”

Historians, especially practitioners of the fashionable “history from below”, exaggerated the democratic values and struggles of the working class and understated the prolonged and deep felt support among important sectors for successful imperial expansion and conquest.  The notion of ‘inherent’ or ‘instinctual’ class solidarity is belied by the active role of workers in imperial conquest as soldiers, overseas settlers, merchant mariners and overseers.  Imperial collaborators and empire loyalists were numerous among English and French workers and, especially later, within the US labor movement.

The theoretical point is that the pre-eminence of democratic over imperial consciousness and action among workers is contingent on the practical material outcomes of imperial policies and democratic struggles.

Workers and Imperialism

Empire building makes demands on workers to produce more for less in order to export and invest profitably in colonized regions.  This led to capital-labor conflict, especially in the initial phase of imperial expansion.  As imperial rulers consolidated their control over the colonized countries they intensified exploitation of markets, labor and resources.  Imperial exports destroyed local competitors.  Profits rose, wages increased and workers turned from initial opposition toward imperialism to demanding a share of the increasing income of the export oriented manufacturers.  Labor leaders and trade unionists approved of the policies of ‘imperial preference’, which protected local industries from competition and privileged monopoly control of colonial markets.  They did so because imperial policies protected jobs and raised living standards.

Workers who were active in social struggles, blacklisted or jailed, voluntarily moved or were exiled to colonized countries.  Once settled overseas, they were given privileged access to better paying jobs as overseers, skilled employees or promoted to managerial positions.  Imperial based militant workers, once overseas, became colonial collaborators.  Many encouraged former workmates, relatives and friends to join them as successful settlers or contract workers.  The ‘domestication’ of workers and the reconciliation of democratic and imperialist sentiments was a cause and consequent of successful imperialism.

Empire Loyalism:  Not by Bread Alone

While material benefits accruing to workers from “successful imperialism” are one factor enhancing workers’ imperial consciousness, this was reinforced by symbolic gratification, the sense of being a member of the “leading country in the world” where “the sun never sets on the empire”, was equally important.  It is rare to find a country where the majority of workers express “solidarity” with the exploited miners, plantation workers or displaced peasants and indigenous small landholders in the ‘colonies’.  The stronger the hold of the colonial power, the greater the ‘colonial opportunities’, the longer the colonial ties, the deeper the economic penetration, and the stronger the sense of imperial superiority among the imperial states’ workers.

It is not surprising that the British workers, the unions and Labor Party raised few objections to the savagery of the imperial opium wars against China, the imperial-induced genocidal famines in Ireland in the 19th century and India in the 20th century.  Likewise, the French workers’ parties – Socialists especially – were in the forefront of the post WWII colonial wars against Indo-China and Algeria only turning against them in the face of imminent defeat and internal disintegration.

In the same vein, US successful colonial wars against Cuba and the Philippines, its invasions of Caribbean and Central American countries were supported by the American Federation of Labor and many ‘ordinary workers’, even as a minority of radicalized workers opposed these wars.  The ‘partial turn’ of labor against US colonial wars occurred during the Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, and was a result of prolonged losses and high economic costs with no victory in sight.  It should be added that US workers, in opposing the imperial wars, expressed no solidarity with the national liberation and workers movements of the colonized countries.

Imperialism and the “True Democrats”

To argue, as some on the Left have, that imperialism does not co-exist with “true” democracy, is to argue that the last 150 years have been devoid of free elections, party competition and citizens’ rights, however abbreviated, especially over the past decade.  The reality is that imperial intervention and expansion has drawn precisely from citizens’ sense of “obligation” to uphold the democratic institutions, which has enabled imperial leaders to elicit legitimacy and active citizen support or compliance in waging bloody, even genocidal, colonial wars.

If democracy has not usually been an obstacle to imperial expansion – indeed a facilitator under certain circumstances – under what conditions have workers and citizens movements turned against imperial wars?  What has been the political response of the ruling class when the majority of the electorate has turned against imperial wars?  In other words, when the democratic institutions no longer function as vehicles for imperial policies, what gives?

From Imperial Democracy to Imperial Police State

The past ten years provide important lessons on the relation between imperialism and democracy in the United States.

Beginning with the controversial political circumstances surrounding known terrorists’ gaining access to the US and subsequently hijacking the airplanes on 9/11/2001, the US government launched two major colonial wars and numerous overt ‘clandestine’ ground and air attacks in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and other countries.  The “global war on terror”, launched under the Bush regime, and implemented by non-elected senior militarist–Zionist officials in co-operation with NATO and Israel was supported by the democratically elected Congress.  For that matter the vast majority of the electorate, influenced by an immense propaganda campaign of fear, media manipulation and lies endorsed the wars on terror.

Given the unprecedented scope and breadth of the wars, (a global war on terror), the vast increase in military spending and the huge outlays for an all encompassing internal repressive (security) apparatus (Homeland Security), a new executive-centered police state was constructed which superseded the existing democratic institution and rights of citizens.

The trajectory of imperial politics moved from early military successes to problematic prolonged occupation.  This led to escalating resistance, growing state expenditures , a deepening fiscal crises , social decay and rising political opposition.

As in the past, contemporary imperial wars that are prolonged, costly and with no decisive victory in sight, have led to citizen disenchantment, followed by increased open rejection.  The wage and salaried majorities who voted for imperial policymakers and backed their enabling legislation, including laws (Patriot Act) which suspended basic civil and constitutional rights, have turned away from the imperial agenda.  Today the democratic majority prioritize their class, economic interests, especially in the face of a prolonged recession and unemployment and underemployment of close to 20%.  Beginning in 2008-2011 endless wars and prolonged crises have set in motion a conflict between democracy and imperialism.

In other words, the democratic majority has become an obstacle to the implementation and pursuit of imperial wars.  Imperial military activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. did not lead to quick victories, the conquest of lucrative export markets and take-over of natural resource.  Jobs were not created and no benefit accrued to employees and workers in the imperial country.  High expenditures for arms undercut public investments in labor-intensive employment in critically overdue infrastructure projects.  The small number of dangerous jobs in occupied countries was unattractive and too risky for the unemployed.

In other words, unlike most previous imperial-colonial wars, none of the plundered wealth was used to secure workers loyalty to the empire.  The burden of empire progressively undercut wage and salaried workers’ living standards.  Over time, regressive taxation gradually eroded any sense of chauvinist grandeur or superiority.  Instead citizens of the empire developed a political inferiority complex.  Faced with determined Islamic opposition and China’s rising economic power, exaggerated bellicosity among a minority and critical introspection among the majority took hold.  Popular consciousness of “something basically wrong” in Washington and Wall Street took over.  The earlier war chants and mindless flag-waving, as the armies of Empire marched to Afghanistan and Iraq, were replaced by angry defeatism directed at misleaders.  Over 80% of the public now articulates a negative view of Congress, rejecting both war parties.  Similar negative views are held toward the White House, the Pentagon and Homeland Security.

After a decade of war and four years of economic crisis, mass protests erupted.  The “Occupy Wall Street” movement puts new options on the table, displacing the imperial agenda with a powerful denunciation of the militarist-financial elite.

The executive rulers, especially the judicial, intelligence and police apparatuses increasingly implemented arbitrary police state measures.  Tens of millions are subject to surveillance by Homeland Security.  The police state intercepts billions of faxes, e-mails, web sites and taps telephone calls.  The link between imperialism and democracy broke at the point where declining empire no longer could secure the electorate’s support or compliance.

More and more bizarre terrorist plots were fabricated by the intelligence agencies.  The Iranian bomb plot against the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington was the most primitive and crude effort to regain public support for imperial militarism in the Gulf region.  Apart from the politically influential, but infinitely small, pro-Israel Zionist power configuration, US public opinion is not distracted from its domestic agenda, its quest for jobs at home and opposition to Wall Street.

As the conflict between imperialism and democracy intensifies, the previous ‘consensus” fractured.  The White House and Congress opt for imperialism backed by a profoundly anti-democratic police state.  The majority of the electorate presses forward, utilizing their remaining democratic rights to change the political agenda from empire toward a social republic.

Conclusion

We have argued that empire and democracy have been complementary in times of ascendant imperialism.  We have shown that when wars of conquest have been short and inexpensive, and when the results have been lucrative for capital and job-creating for labor the democratic majorities joined in support of imperial elites.  Democratic institutions flourished when overseas empires provided markets, cheap resources and raised living standards.  Workers voted for imperial parties, held positive opinions of executive and legislative officials, and applauded the colonial war veterans (our troops).  Some even volunteered and joined the military.  With vast citizen support for empire, the state more or less ‘abided’ by the constitutional guarantees.  But the marriage of democracy and imperialism is not ‘structural’.  It is contingent on a series of variable conditions, which can cause a profound rupture between the two, as we are witnessing today.

Prolonged, losing, costly imperial wars that increasingly erode living standards for over a generation have undermined the consensus between imperial rulers and democratic citizens.  Early signs of this potential divergence were evident during the latter period of the Korean War, when public opinion turned against President Truman, architect of the Cold War and the US invasion of Korea.  More evidence emerged during the Vietnam War.  Faced with a prolonged, losing war, which imperiled the lives and opportunities of tens of millions of draft age Americans, millions in civilian life and the military opted to end the war and question imperial interventions.  The repressive state was still not organized sufficiently to terrorize and contain the democratic upsurge of the 1970’s.  The end of the Vietnam war represented the high point in democratic America’s quest to counter imperialism and rebuild the republic.

Subsequent small, quick, low cost and militarily successful imperial interventions in Panama, Grenada, Haiti and elsewhere did not provoke any conflict between imperialism and democracy.  Nor did imperial clandestine and surrogate wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and the Balkans elicit any significant democratic opposition since they were low cost (in lives and funding) and were not accompanied by any sharp cuts in social expenditures and incomes.

The onset of the current Afghanistan, Iraq, and global offensive wars were seen by some imperial strategists in the same light: Quick, low cost victories with few domestic costs.  One highly placed pro-Israel official in the Pentagon even argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be “self-financing” via an oil grab.

The 21st century wars turned out otherwise:  They followed the Korean-Vietnam pattern, not the Central American/Caribbean pattern.  Immensely costly, the 21st century wars have not led to quick victories and, worse still, occurred in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, without the manufacturing and market boom of the 1950’s/1960’s which had cushioned the retreat from Korea and Vietnam.

The divergence between imperialism and democracy has become acute.  Democratic dissent has increased and the police state has become more prominent and direct.  Imperialism increasingly relies on “fabricated domestic and external terror plots” to augment the powers of the repressive machinery and rule by fiat.  White House exhortations ring hollow.  The public puts less and less credence in their rulers’ claims of ‘justifiable’ arbitrary detentions, massive surveillance and extrajudicial assassinations of US citizens (and even their children).

We now face long-term, large-scale dangers, inherent in imperial democracies.  Not because of “internal contradictions” but because sooner or later imperial powers meet their match in the form of protracted struggles by anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.  Only when imperials wars take their toll on the wage and salaried majority, does the rupture between democracy and imperialism take place.  Then, and only then, are democratic forces set in motion to create a democratic republic, with social justice and without empire.

The present danger is that imperial structures are deeply embedded in all the key political institutions and are backed by an unprecedented vast and sprawling police state apparatus, called Homeland Security.  Perhaps it will take a major external political-military shock to ignite the kind of mass democratic uprising needed to transform an imperial police state into a democratic republic.  A growing sense of isolation and impotence affects the ruling regime in the face of overseas military defeats and unyielding, deepening domestic economic crisis.  The danger is that these fears and frustrations could induce the White House to attempt to regain popular support by attacking Iran under a manufactured pretext.

A US/Israeli assault on Iran will result in a world-wide conflagration.  Iran could and would retaliate.  Saudi and Gulf oil wells would go up in flames.  Vital shipping lanes would be blocked.  Gas prices would skyrocket while Asian, EU and US economies crash.  Iranian troops with their Iraqi allies would lay siege to the US garrisons in Baghdad.  Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the Moslem world will take up arms.  US forces would surrender or retreat.  The war would shatter the US Treasury.  Deficits would spiral out of control.  Unemployment would double.  This likely sequence of events would trigger a massive democratic movement and a decisive struggle between an emerging republic struggling to give birth and a decaying empire threatening to drag the world into the inferno of its own demise.

In contrast the same opinion makers, plus their academic counterparts, project images of the United States and the European Union as stable societies, with steady economic growth, incremental expansion of social welfare programs, resolving issues via consensual compromises and practicing sound fiscal policies.

In recent times, the better part of the current decade, these images have taken on the character of ideological dogmas – they no longer correspond to reality. In fact, a good argument can be made that the roles have been reversed: the US and EU are in perpetual crises and Latin America, at least most of the major countries, have experienced stability and growth which is the envy (or should be) of Washington pundits and financial commentators.

This ‘role reversal’ has been recognized by many US, EU and Asian investors and multinationals, even as respectable journalistic hacks for the Financial Times, NY Times and Wall Street Journal still write about vulnerabilities, imbalances and other weaknesses while grudgingly acknowledging the dynamic growth of the region.

Progressive opinion is equally at fault, focusing on the ‘advances’ of the left regimes but overlooking the underlying dynamics affecting most of the region and thus losing sight of the new points of conflict and contention.

We will proceed to outline the contrasting realities between the crises ridden “North” (US/EU) and the sustained growth of the “South” (South America). The analysis will raise questions of whether the South American experience is transferable to the North and what ‘structural adjustments’ would be necessary to pull the US and EU out of the downward spiral of stagnation and violent conflicts which have characterized these regions for the better part of the past decade.

The Lost Decade, US and EU Style

The Latin American countries during the 1980’s experienced a deep and persistent crises, manifested in negative growth, increased poverty levels and heavy indebtedness, which allowed creditors (like the IMF) to impose harsh and regressive austerity measures and “structural adjustment” policies which came to be known as neo-liberalization. These included the privatization of most strategic, lucrative public enterprises, and the ending of any semblance of state-directed industrial strategies.

For the peasants and the working and middle class the short-lived neo-liberal “boom” of the 1990s was a continuation of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. The neo-liberal policies of the 1990s were based on fundamentally flawed structural foundations and polarizing income and public expenditures involving huge transfers of income to capital and downward pressures on wages and welfare. The neo-liberal regimes went into a deep crisis early in 2000 provoking major popular upheavals. The outcome resulted in a new set of political configurations and social power equations, which evolved into new post-neo-liberal regimes, at least in most of the major countries in Latin America.

In contrast and, in part thanks to the profitable opportunities opened by the debt crises and neo-liberalization of Latin America in the 1990s (and in the ex-Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Baltic/Balkan states) the US and EU prospered. In Latin America over 5,000 lucrative extractive resource-based industries, banks, tele-communications and other industries passed into the hands of foreign private MNC and local capital. High returns on bonds and loans and rents from technology transfers enriched the Northern capitalists even as poverty multiplied in the South. The 1990s was the “golden age” of Western capital as profits rose and leftist parties and the traditional urban trade unions appeared unable to withstand the ‘wave’ of predatory capitalism capturing the commanding heights of the economy.

The very successes of the US and EU countries, the enormous easy gains from pillage, speculation, and exploitation led to the dominance of financial capital and the belief in an irrevocable “new world order”. The dominance of the US and EU was built on their military superiority backed by pliant, collaborative, neo-liberal client regimes. The ‘new order’ lasted less than a decade: the economic crises of 1999/2000 smashed the illusions of a century of imperial grandeur. As markets collapsed so too did the Latin American oligarchic electoral regimes (dubbed “democracies”) which along with the financial elite and the military formed the triple alliance that defined Western supremacy. The final blow was the economic crises of 2001-2002 in the US and EU which steeply eroded their capacity to intervene and prop up their collapsing Latin clients ousted by rebellious masses.

The first decade of the new millennia has been the “lost decade”  of the North.   Over the course of the past eleven years the North has witnessed stagnation and recessions which have not given way to recoveries. The capitalist states temporarily saved the bankers but were powerless to set in motion economic growth.

The credit rating of the US economy was downgraded by the risk agencies. Unemployment and underemployment hovers close to one-fifth of the labor force, figures comparable to stagnant Third World countries. Social programs  are severely slashed in the US and throughout the European Union, reversing decades of incremental gains. Trade and budget deficits in the US have become chronic, while private and public lenders are becoming increasingly reticent to lend in the face of deep-seated recessionary tendencies.

The financial sector in the US and EU is rife with large scale fraud, swindles, mismanagement and falsified balance sheets, conditions previously prevalent among Latin economies. Wars proliferate. Military spending far exceeds productive investments, draining the US economy in a fashion reminiscent of the weapons spending during the reign of the warlords of Africa and the military dictators of Latin America.

In the EU, faced with brutal cuts in wages, pensions and jobs millions of workers and unemployed youth in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy have taken to the streets. General strikes threaten the stability of increasingly isolated regimes, reminiscent of the popular rebellions which resulted in regime changes in Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the US, public protests reflect deepening private discontent: over 75% of the population expresses negative views of the Congress and 60% of the White House. Deepening political alienation of the US electorate is comparable to the loss of popular faith in Latin governments during the “lost decades”, 1980-2000.

Both the US and the EU have been radically transformed for the worse during the lost decade of the current century. Economically, politically and socially the ‘North’ has been “Latin Americanized”: social instability, economic stagnation, political alienation, growing class inequalities and poverty is presided over by corrupt political elites.

Signs of the Better Times: Latin America

Recently the finance minister of Brazil raised the possibility that the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) might take a hand in a “rescue plan” to prop up the crises-ridden economies of Europe. While the statement had greater symbolic rather substantive consequences, it does reflect a certain reality: while the North plunges into deeper, unending crises, the Latin economies are doing reasonably well.

Except for the Latin countries still under US dominance, especially Mexico and most of Central America, the rest of Latin America has not only avoided the crises afflicting the North but have been growing at a healthy rate, three times that of the US over the decade. The new millennium, especially between 2003-2011 (except for a brief interlude in 2009) has been a period of high growth, general prosperity, booming exports, rising imports, greater inter-regional co-operation, and large scale poverty reduction.

Brazil alone has reduced the number of poor by 30 million. Regular elections, relatively honest and competitive, result in stable legitimate transfers of political power. Except for US-backed coups in Honduras and intervention in Haiti and Venezuela, violent seizures of power have disappeared over the past decade. Regional institution–building has prospered with the advent of UNASUR and a Latin American regional bank.  Because of fiscal controls and banking regulations, both results of the lessons learned from the crisis of the lost decades (1980-2000), Latin America was only slightly affected by the US-EU financial crash of 2008-2011.

Latin American trade has doubled, especially with Asia, aided by China’s double digit growth. Demand for agro-mineral commodities has tripled. The key to this new export-powered growth is Latin America’s growing economic independence. This has led to the diversification of its markets, taking advantage of new opportunities and reducing their dependence on the US. Latin America’s emphasis on economic growth, new markets and investments has led it to avoid entanglements in the proliferating and costly colonial wars which engage the US and EU.

While the US and EU print more money and increase indebtedness to cover trade deficits, Latin America has quadrupled its foreign reserves. These cushion any downturns and avoid any dependence on the IMF, architect of the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s.

Within Latin America, the issue of poverty reduction has been tackled with varying degrees of effectiveness. With Venezuela under President Chavez leading the way the general direction has been toward increasing social payments, by increments in most cases, but with greater efforts in others. Except for Mexico, nothing resembling the social cuts of the US-EU has taken place in Latin America. The most striking structural advances have occurred in Venezuela and to a lesser degree in Argentina. They have significantly increased the minimum wage and pensions and increased welfare payments to the most vulnerable (single mothers, the disabled, those in extreme poverty).

With the exception of Colombia (the US’s principle military ally in the region) which is still the murder capital of the world for human rights advocates, trade unionists and peasant activists, human rights violations have declined. While the US-EU have vastly increased their human rights violations geometrically via multiple colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and clandestine death squad ‘operations’, Latin America’s overseas human rights violations are largely limited to its occupation forces in Haiti – at the behest of the US and EU. Nevertheless repression of popular movements, especially indigenous peoples and peasant movements and students has increased in Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere as the high growth policies on community rights and social expenditures.

Because of Latin America’s current political stability and dynamic growth, institutional and corporate investment is pouring into the region. In contrast the US and EU are suffering from disinvestment and declining rates of private investment. In other words, the development of Latin America is the other side of the coin of the US-EU under-development.

Latin America: New Contradictions

The class struggle is still the motor force in the social progress of Latin America. But unlike EU-US, Latin America’s class struggle is directed at increasing social and monitory wages, even if incrementally, as part of an offensive strategy to capture a greater share of rising income. In the US and EU the class struggle is ‘defensive’: an effort to stop declining income shares, limit job losses and cuts in pensions.

While militant class action including land occupations, street demonstrations and strikes are still part of the repertory of working class social weapons, they take place within the political parameters of democratic institutions. In Europe the elites have increasingly ignored mass street protests and strikes, largely pursuing austerity policies dictated by non-elected domestic and foreign bankers and creditors.

The limitations and ‘contradictions’ affecting all Latin American countries are located in the internal class inequalities. As national income has increased and exports boom, the inequalities between the ruling investor class and the mass of wage earners has increased. While initially the problem of class inequality was papered over by the general rise in living standards and employment, over time the employed and productive classes are no longer satisfied with incremental gains which barely surpass inflation rates. The rising standards of living have raised expectations. The percentage of poor may have declined but subsisting just above $4 dollars a day is increasingly unacceptable. Growth brings forth its own set of contradictions and a new set of demands. Formerly excluded classes included in the system, but exploited, have only their class organizations as their weapons to advance their socio-economic interests.

This is clearly the case in contemporary Chile where long term growth is accompanied by deeply entrenched inequalities comparable to the worse in the OECD. Beginning in July 2011 massive student protests over the high cost of public and private education and low levels of social expenditures have detonated mass activity from trade unions covering the gamut of economic sectors from teachers to copper miners.

The new and explosive issue confronting rulers and ruled in most of high growth Latin America is raising incomes for whom? The class issues are front and foremost in the current period and immediate future.

Growth, stability and democratic class struggles characterize most of the major countries, but not all. In several countries, the authoritarian and violent legacy of the dictatorial regimes continues robust. Colombia’s practice of murdering trade unionists, peasant leaders, journalists and human rights activists continues unabated: over 30 trade unionists were murdered during the first eight  months of 2011.

Honduras’ ruling regime, product of a US-backed coup and its allies among the paramilitary private armies of landowners, have killed scores of peasants and dozens of pro-democracy political and social activists.

Mexico’s killing fields are notorious: over 40,000 people have been killed by the police, military and drug gangs in a ‘war on drugs’ promoted by Obama and implemented by President Calderon.

What these three retro-regimes have in common is that they continue to follow the dictates of Washington, remain highly militarized states, with a strong US military and police presence in the form of bases, overseas advisers, and an intrusive role in setting policy. All three have failed to diversify markets and continue with a high degree of dependence on the stagnant US market. All have secured, or are in the process of signing, bi-lateral free trade agreements at the expense of exploring greater links with the dynamic Asian markets.

The three retro-regimes have never experienced the kind of popular rebellions and resultant center-left regimes which have emerged in most of Latin America. In Mexico pro-democracy candidates were twice defrauded of electoral victories, first in 1988 and later in 2006. In Honduras, a progressive liberal democratic President seeking to diversify markets was ousted by a military coup backed by the Obama regime in 2010. In Colombia, the murder of 5,000 activists and leaders of the pro-democracy Patriotic Union between 1984-86, the subsequent assassination of several thousand social activists, blocked a democratic opening. The abrupt termination of peace negotiations in 2002 and the total militarization of the country (2002-2011) funded by $6 billion in US military aid precluded the emergence of the political and social changes, which have dynamized the rest of Latin America’s sustained growth and opened the door for ‘democratic class struggle’.

While most of Latin America has forged ahead, thus far largely avoiding the instability and economic crises of the US and EU, past legacies and present inequities present a new set of structural impediments to the consolidation of long-term growth and political and social stability. The biggest structural contradiction is found in the high growth/increasing inequalities, socio-economic model based on the “3 ½ alliance”: foreign capital-national capital-the developmental state and the co-opted trade union/peasant leaders.

The profits and investments of this power configuration has been driven by the growth of agro-mineral exports, rising commodity prices, easy consumer credit and state regulation of financial markets. The economic returns on growth have been disproportionately appropriated by the “big three” with incremental payoffs to a minority of better paid organized workers. The ‘residuals’ are used to “lift the poor” from abject poverty to subsistence.

These growing inequalities have been “papered over” by the general rise of income, easy credit and improved public services. But rising incomes have set in motion a new set of class conflicts which will be exacerbated when the prices of commodities decline and the governments can no longer fund incremental improvements. Even today, severe conflicts have emerged between predator mining and timber, multi nationals and Indian/peasants in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. These sometimes violent struggles between the state/MNC and peasants in the “periphery of the countryside” can detonate a larger conflict in the central cities, if export revenues decline.

The second contradiction is between the “marginalized working poor” and a new class of local middle and business class investors who have invested their “savings” in shares of the foreign and locally-owned mining companies. Conservative and closely aligned with the rapacious multi-nationals, these new middle class investors have enriched themselves on the bases of unregulated plunder of natural resources and contamination of the adjoining rural communities. If, and when, commodity prices nose dive, the regimes will face a bankrupt hysterical middle class looking for a political savior where none exist, at least among the existing civilian parties.

The rightward drift of the center-left regimes and their opportune links to big business especially in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay has led to corruption in high places. Liberalization and exorbitant executive salaries has been accompanied by “unofficial payoffs” to public officials. Corruptions has eroded the social ethic of center-left politicians and replaced it with the ethos of “bringing in new and bigger investments”, whatever shortcuts and payoffs it requires. Corruption at the top spreads downwards greasing the wheels for foreign investors, but certainly lowering the trust and loyalties of employees and formal and informal workers not in the ‘magic circle’, a bribe takers and givers. “Patronage” and poverty reduction payouts can limit the fallout from corruption in high places among poverty-funded recipients. However, in time of economic downturn, it can turn social protests toward political regime change.

The third contradiction is found between the high level of dependency on commodity exports (which heretofore have been the dynamic element of growth) and the relative and absolute decline of manufacturing exports and production. The growth of income from commodities has led to the appreciation of the currency which has lessened the competitiveness of nationally produced manufactured products, leading to a sharp decline in profits and even bankruptcy.

Asian manufacturer-exporters – especially in China and to a lesser extent India and Korea – are increasingly penetrating Latin markets with lower cost finished products “de-industrializing” the Latin economies. In some cases, Latin American capitalists are looking to investing in Asia to lower costs and exporting back to their “home markets”. Brazilian industry, which has been hardest hit, has initiated “protectionist” measures including tariffs, 65% local content rules and state subsidies to counter the de-diversification of the economy.

The fourth contradiction is found precisely in the successful economic growth and high returns, which has attracted both speculative and “takeover” capital as well as productive investments. Speculative capital will flee and destabilize the financial system at the first sign of slowdown. Foreign ownership will lessen the government’s ability to leverage investment decisions in time of crises. Productive investments respond to expanding markets. They do not create them.

In summary, Latin America’s decade long dynamic growth has certainly out-performed the US and EU on a whole series of important economic, social and political dimensions. Yet, out of this growth have emerged a new set of contradictions and the need to correct increasingly grave “imbalances”: popular demands for a shift in income distribution, industrialist pressure for a rebalancing of the economy from dependence on finance and commodities to manufacturing and the urban poor demand improved social services especially in public health care and crowded classrooms.

These changes require a structural adjustment in the power structure. The economic imbalances reflect the growing concentration of political power among the extractive capitalists, bankers and local middle class investors of the major cities. Public employees, labor, the urban poor, the peasants and environmentally concerned Indians and ecologists, are marginalized from the key economic posts. They need to once again take to the streets with new independent movements which raise two basic questions: What kind of growth and growth for whom?

Lessons of Latin America: Listen Yankees and Eurocrats

Can the positive lessons of the dynamic Latin American experience provide a ‘model’ for the US and Europe? Is the “model”, in whole or part, transferable to the North or are the two regions so different that the lessons are not applicable?

Granted there are vast historical, cultural, economic and political differences between the regions yet some lessons from the Latin America’s decade of dynamic growth provides new ideas to counter the negative, self-defeating economic formulas put forth and practiced by US and EU experts, economists and policymakers.

Let us start from the beginning. The rise of Latin America was precipitated by a deep economic crisis, the breakdown of the economy, large scale unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle class. The crises led to the total discrediting of what has been called alternately the “free market”, “neo-liberal” and “de-regulated” capitalist model. So far so good: the US and EU likewise are experiencing a prolonged and deepening economic crises which has bankrupted Southern Europe, plunged the US into a double dip recession and led to a 20% un and underemployment rate. The entire “political class” in the US and Europe is largely discredited. From there forward the regions diverge.

In Latin America, the crises led to mass protests, popular uprisings and regime changes. Post neo-liberal center-left regimes, under mass pressure, subsequently launched employment generating investments and aid poverty reducing public works programs. Argentina, facing a financial crisis similar to Greece, Portugal and Spain today, defaulted on its foreign debt – channeling public revenues into reviving the economy. Because financial speculation linked to Wall Street and the City of London precipitated the crises, the Latin regimes instituted financial controls and regulations which limited financial volatility. The new regimes, influenced by the commodity boom, diversified their trading partners, entering dynamic Asian markets, reaping high returns and stimulating local consumption and public investments. What lessons can the crises-ridden US and EU learn from the Latin America’s successful recovery and expansion?

First, the beginning of a successful response depends on a political transformation. Regime change, a complete break with the ‘neo-liberal’ free market, and the political leaders and parties who are totally embedded in failed institutions and policies. Regime change presupposes the eruption of dynamic mass organizations, new, old, improvised and organized, capable of moving from protest and resistance to political power.

The object is to rebalance the US and EU economies from “financialization” and “militarism” to large scale, long term investments in manufacturing, applied technology, civilian infrastructure and social services. Direct public investments and loans applied to concrete employment-generating projects; total rejection of trickle down, monetary policies which never move from private banks to public works.

The entire militarist- Zionist-permanent war mentality is entirely vulnerable to change: doing so, will create jobs, the top priority for over two-thirds of the US public. The “war on terrorism”, the banner of the warlords in office, is considered a priority by only 3% of Americans. Once again the shift from militarism to the civilian economy in Latin America was a result of popular civilian upheavals via the street and the ballot box.

Of course, the Latin American republics had an easier time in rebalancing their economic priorities from failed military rulers and discredited neo-liberal policies. Citizen movements in the US and EU imperial states will have a harder time in closing down hundreds of military bases, ousting militarist politicians backed by powerful domestic and foreign lobbies and converting the empires to productive republics. Yet, Latin American exporters have prospered by avoiding entanglement in overseas imperial wars. They continue to pursue new markets in the Middle East and elsewhere instead of destroying adversaries of Israel as the EU and US have done through colonial wars in Iraq and Libya and sanctions against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

The contrasting performance between Latin American republics and Euro-American empire builders is striking. The US and EU should shed their self-centered images of “successful” developed countries and outdated stereotype of Latin America as a collection of “volatile”, coup prone underdeveloped countries. The US is in deep trouble and it is heading into a deeper, less manageable economic crisis with few resources to counter it. Internationally it is increasingly isolated and in conflict with potential economic partners. Washington sides with Israel, alienating over 1.5 billion rich and poor Islamic peoples, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and all points east, west and south. It antagonizes Brazil via financial pump priming, overpricing the real (Brazilian currency) without helping US recovery.
Domestic and international failures multiply as the crisis deepens and nothing proposed by the blighted incumbents and besotted opposition offers any programmatic solution.

As in Latin America during the first years of this decade we need a popular rebellion: we need a profound regime change; we need to think of productive public investments not monumental loss of capital via Wall Street speculation and the waste of public resources via expenditures in weapons of destruction.

On August 6 a unit of the 12,000 member United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) based in the Central Plateau city of Hinche was caught dumping feces and other waste in holes a few meters from a river where people bathe and drink. After complaints by locals and an investigation by journalists, city officials burned the waste near the Guayamouc river. The mayor of Hinche, André Renaud, criticized MINUSTAH’s flagrant disregard for the community’s health and called for the expulsion of some foreign troops.

On August 21 the UN was again accused of improper sewage disposal fifteen kilometers from Hinche.

As is their wont, MINUSTAH officials simply deny dumping sewage. Last Thursday the UN released a statement claiming they had no reason to dump waste since the base in Hinche built a treatment plant and sewage disposal on June 15. “The United Nations Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) formally denies being responsible for the dumping of waste in Hinche or elsewhere in the territory of Haiti.”

For anyone who has followed MINUSTAH’s operations this denial rings hollow. Ten months ago reckless sewage disposal at the UN base near Mirebalais caused a devastating cholera outbreak. In October 2010 a new deployment of Nepalese troops brought a disease to Haiti that has left 6,200 dead and more than 438,000 ill.

The back story to this affair is that the waste company managing the base, Sanco Enterprises S.A., disposed the fecal matter from the Nepalese troops in pits that seeped into the Artibonite River. Locals drank from the river, which is how the first Haitians got infected with cholera.

Despite a mountain of evidence collected from local and international researchers, the UN refuses to take responsibility for the cholera outbreak. A November investigation by prominent French epidemiologist, Renaud Piarroux, pointed to the Nepalese troops as the probable origin of the cholera strain, as did a study published by the journal of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention and an investigation by Nepalese, Danish and Americans researchers at the “Translational Genomics Research Institute” in Arizona. Released last Tuesday, the latter study showed that the genomes of bacteria from Haitian cholera patients were virtually identical with those found in Nepal when the peacekeepers left their country in 2010.

A week ago MINUSTAH spokesperson Vincenzo Pugliesse said the international organization was aware of the new study but maintained that “we follow the recommendations of the report released by the group of experts appointed by the Secretary-General.” That report refused to pinpoint any single source for the cholera outbreak, concluding it was caused by a “confluence of circumstances.”

The debate over cholera’s origin takes places as the disease continues to ravage the country. In June, the beginning of the rainy season, there were a whopping 1800 new cases per day.

Despite the ongoing impact of cholera and widespread anger at MINUSTAH over the issue, the UN’s sewage disposal has been of little interest to the international media. Recently, the weekly Haiti liberté published a picture of a UN vehicle dumping sewage into a river on its front page, but an English-language Google search found no reports in the global press about the criticism towards the international organization’s waste disposal (aside from passing mentions in the leftist San Francisco Bay View and Truthdig).

Media indifference to the UN’s lax health standards is mirrored in the aid world. Supposedly concerned with Haitian well being, the innumerable foreign NGOs working in Haiti have said little about MINUSTAH’s waste disposal and disregard for public health. In fact, when the cholera outbreak began, various international humanitarian organizations belittled those calling for an investigation into its source. A few weeks after the outbreak Médecins sans frontières’ Head of Mission in Port-au-Prince, Stefano Zannini, told Montreal daily La Presse, “Our position is pragmatic: to have learnt the source at the beginning of the epidemic would not have saved more lives. To know today would have no impact either.” For their part, Oxfam criticized those who protested the UN bringing a disease with no recorded history in Haiti. “If the country explodes in violence then we will not be able to reach the people we need to”, an Oxfam spokeswoman, Julie Schindall, told the Guardian after the outbreak.

Rather than support calls for UN accountability, the NGOs jumped to the international organization’s defence. Highly dependent on Western government funding and political support, NGOs are overwhelmingly focused on a charitable model that fails to challenge the political or economic structures that cause the poverty and illness they seek to cure. But without political pressure the practices that engender poverty and illness will continue, a point driven home with the UN’s waste disposal and cholera. Without pressure MINUSTAH will continue to dispose of waste however they see fit.

To right some of what’s wrong MINUSTAH needs to immediately stop dumping sewage without concern for public health. They should also apologize for introducing cholera to Haiti and to make the apology meaningful the UN ought to compensate Haitians by making the country cholera-free through massive investments in the country’s sanitation and sewage systems.

The larger story of Canaraan is tightly linked to its neighbor, camp Corail, once touted as the very model for the international community’s humanitarian effort in Haiti.  The Corail experiment, and its dismal consequences, is well documented in a recent Rolling Stone article: In short, several thousand earthquake victims were relocated from urban Port-au-Prince to temporary shelters planted in an empty wasteland some distance north of the city.  Marked by the inefficiency, confusion, and high-handedness emblematic of Haiti’s stalled reconstruction effort, the Corail ‘model camp’ did not go as planned, leaving transplanted families far from economic activity and at the mercy of flooding, landslides, and hurricanes.  It is widely recognized as a failure.

Yet any major building project, even an ultimately unsuccessful one such as Corail, offers hope of something to those who have nothing, and soon enough Corail was surrounded by the sprawling series of unplanned settlements now known collectively as Canaan or Canaraan.  Like Corail, Canaraan residents are vulnerable to wind and water and find themselves cut off from the economic life of the city.  But lacking Corail’s official designation as a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), Canaraan residents are routinely dismissed as mere ‘squatters’ unworthy of assistance however pressing their need.  Ignored by both the Haitian government itself, and the 3,000+ international NGOs which function like a de facto shadow government, President Martelly’s visit to Canaraan was thus both a validation of  resident’s existence and a sign that perhaps their luck was about to change.

So far, at least, it has not.  Months after the visit, Canaraan is without signs of progress or construction, and residents’ former optimism is increasingly guarded, if not abandoned outright.  The future of textile factories in Canaraan remains a question without an answer, but it is worth asking why powerful actors, both Haitian and international, continually present them as a cure-all for Haiti’s many ills.  Factory projects have been a staple of USAID projects for a generation, and enjoy the prominent and high-profile support of figures such as Bill Clinton and Ban Ki Moon.  The Factory Solution predates the earthquake, and has not been shaken by it.  It now represents the single most significant international effort to impact the economic lives of Haitian people.

One need not dig too deep to find the dark side to this proposed answer to Haiti’s problems.  To make way for construction, for example, Canaraan families would be displaced from the flatlands into uncertain housing on the same treeless hills where landslides killed 23 people just two months ago.  It is unclear how many of the residents of the sprawling camp will find employment in the proposed industrial complex, but certainly fewer than the many tens of thousands of  people who currently live there. Even for those fortunate enough to obtain work, foreign owned textile factories in Haiti have developed a notorious reputation for unsafe conditions, workplace intimidation, union-busting, and wages so shockingly low that it is virtually impossible for even a small family to rely on them for survival. (Wages amount to approximately US $3 a day for textile labor, an in depth report on labor conditions in Haiti can be found here).  In this environment of kickbacks and sexual harassment, where nearly all employees labor without benefit of union representation or health insurance, the prospects for Canaraan residents will likely remain grim even if the President’s promises come true.

This is not to condemn all factories out of hand. Factory work is not inherently a social evil.  In many societies, including our own, factory labor has provided a pathway out of poverty.  For their part, residents in Canaraan express a desire for jobs above all else, and are even willing to accept eviction from their homes for factories that everyone knows will refuse to pay a subsistence wage.

Yet Canaraan residents’ desire for factory work must be understood against a backdrop of economic and political forces which have left Haiti’s poor strikingly boxed-in on all sides by bad options.  Physically, the choice between overcrowded slums, flood-prone plains, and denuded hillsides have left Canaraan residents perilously exposed to danger, whether they decide to remain in the city or flee to its outskirts.  Likewise, decades of US-driven trade policy has left families with few meaningful economic choices except factory work, effectively selling their labor to northern businesses at bargain basement prices.

Such a narrowing of options is not an accident.  It is the intentional result of express U.S. foreign policy.  It may come as a surprise to many Americans that the weight and prestige of their nation’s diplomacy was thrown into an effort to thwart raising Haiti’s minimum wage above 31¢ an hour, but this is precisely the sort of foreign machination that Haitians have been forced to live with for decades.  U.S. diplomatic cables, recently exposed by the group Wikileaks, detail the extent of this meddling, in which US muscle was engaged to sabotage parliamentary efforts to raise wages to a level capable of supporting dignified existence.

Against this backdrop, Canaraan residents’ approval of their President’s message emerges as a rational response to a set of artificially constrained options.  A house on a landslide-prone hill is preferable to a tarp on a flood-prone plain; likewise, a factory’s starvation wages are preferable to none at all.  And what other options are there?  Flooded with highly subsidized foreign food products, Haitians have watched the decimation of their agricultural sector.  Forced to open borders to ravenous (and sometimes predatory) foreign competitors, Haiti has seen its domestic enterprises left stunted.  As a result, the economic policies of the world’s powerful have effectively pushed Haiti’s poor into an ever narrowing chute — the only escape being into the arms of US, Canadian, or Korean textile corporations and their cut-rate sub-contractors in Haiti.  And with the wage increase successfully neutralized, it’s now impossible to earn a living even at that.

Yet beneath that surface enthusiasm, Canaraan residents voice a complex mix of hope and resignation, stoicism and anger, which is every bit as complicated as the geopolitical forces presently at work upon them.  Derided by the powerful as opportunists and squatters, Canaraan residents’ most simple acts of daily life — planting seeds for a dozen stalks of corn on a small plot of land, rebuilding the tarp roof of a Lutheran church, selling goods at market to send children to school — seem like acts of defiance against a global economic order determined to reduce people to a state of dependence.

No one, perhaps not even President Martelly himself, really knows whether the factory project will ever actually materialize, whether its promised employment will allow an escape from poverty, or if, instead, it will prove as illusory as countless other promises made to camp residents by politicians, diplomats, NGOs, and the international community.  But one thing is clear, until the powerful actors presuming to decide Haiti’s future put the autonomy, dignity, and well-being of Haiti’s poor majority at the center of reconstruction efforts, instead of simply instrumentalizing them as a pool of cheap labor, Canaraan families will not be able to break out of the trap of poverty, foreign factories or not.

The earthquake made Mathias homeless when it crushed his apartment and killed his cousin and younger brother. He and his wife first stayed in a park next to St. Anne’s Catholic Church. Then the family moved to what they thought was a safer place, Sylvio Cator stadium. They put up a tent on the lawn inside the stadium and stayed there for several months. The authorities then moved them just outside of the stadium so the soccer team could practice. They lived in a tent outside the stadium with 514 other families for over a year until they were ordered to leave in July 2011. Each family was told they had to leave and were given 10,000 Goudes (about $250 in US dollars) to assist in their relocation. Where did the 514 families go? No one knows for sure. About 150 families stayed together and live under tarps beside Mathias. Some used the money to build new tarp shelters elsewhere and some used it for food. The rest? No one knows. No one is keeping track.

When I asked what Mathias would like to say to the human rights community, he said:

The life of the people living in the tents is not a human life. Our human rights are not respected. No institutions are taking care of us, we are the forgotten. We want people to remember us and help us to have the human life we should have. It’s not our choice to live this way. The situation of life bring us here. We hope to have a normal life. But the hope is very far from us.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported August 19, 2011 that there are about 594,800 people living in about 1000 displacement camps in Haiti. Most want to leave but have nowhere to go. Nearly 8000 people have been evicted in the last three months. Their report concludes by saying “With nearly 600,000 internally displaced persons still in camps, the scale of Haiti’s homeless problem remains daunting.”

Complicating the problem is the increasing wave of forced evictions happening in Haiti. These are evictions without any legal process, often by police, frequently accompanied by violence.

Landowners use armed police and private security to carry out evictions and scare people away. They rarely go to court because they usually cannot prove they own the land. So they resort to brute force to overwhelm the families. Police and private security use guns, machetes, batons and bulldozers to push people out.

The administration of President Michel Martelly has apparently given a green light to widespread violent demolition of camps without any legal process. Though the administration announced plans to relocate families from six camps, nothing has happened.

The Haitian human rights law firm Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) reports that before June they were receiving several threats of forced evictions per month. Since June, the threats increased to several per week. Now they are receiving several reports of forced evictions every day.

Dozens of human rights activists called on the United Nations to condemn these illegal evictions and to make Haiti impose a moratorium on illegal evictions until there are realistic plans to house the families being uprooted.

These evictions are in defiance of a ruling by the Inter American Commission on Human Rights which issued precautionary measures asking Haiti to cease illegal evictions. On November 18, 2010, the IACHR expressed concern over forced evictions of the displaced and sexual violence against women and girls. Specifically, the IACHR wrote Haiti asking the government to “offer those who have been illegally expelled from the camps a transfer to places that have minimum health and security conditions, and then transfer them if they so agree; guarantee that internally displaced persons have access to effective recourse before a court and before other competent authorities; implement effective security measures to safeguard the physical integrity of the inhabitants of the camps, guaranteeing especially the protection of women and children; train the security forces in the rights of displaced persons, especially their right not to be forcibly expelled from the camps; and ensure that international cooperation agencies have access to the camps.”

Residents recently surveyed by BAI and the University of San Francisco said money given them upon eviction was insufficient to relocate or pay rent anywhere. Small grants worth about $250 are not enough to build even the most basic 12×10 shack with plywood walls, a corrugated metal roof and concrete floor – leaving many of those evicted without any shelter except to go put up a tarp in another displacement camp. No wonder that 35 percent of them reported being the victims of physical harm or threats of physical harm.

The following are recent examples of illegal forced evictions, all have occurred since Martelly became President.

On May 27, 2011, at 6am, Haitian National Police wielding machetes and knives stormed a camp in the Delmas 3 neighborhood destroying about 200 makeshift tents, and forcing people to flee, according to Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald. There was no court order of eviction.

In early June, Haitian National Police showed up and began destroying tarps and tents of hundreds of families camped at the intersection of Delmas and Airport Roads. The police fired shots and swung batons as people protested in front of their camp. This was done without legal authority.

Later in June, at another camp in Delmas 3, truckloads of agents armed with machetes descended on another camp and dismantled it. After the tents were destroyed a bulldozer showed up and leveled what was left. This too was without any legal process.

In a midnight raid on July 3, 2011, police and private security forces completely destroyed tents of about 30 families in Camp Eric Jean-Baptiste in the Port au Prince suburb of Carrefour.

On July 18, 2011, Haitian National Police entered the displacement camp in the parking lot of Sylvio Cator sports stadium and destroyed the tents and belongings of 514 families. There was no lawful process. People were given about $250 to pay for new shelters. Many told human rights monitors that they did not want the money, they wanted to stay but accepted the money as they had no other options. These illegal evictions were condemned by the UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights.

On July 27, 2011, members of the Haitian National Police arrested, assaulted and ransacked tents of internally displaced people protesting against the illegal eviction of dozens of families at Camp Django. Camp residents were given about $125 for their destroyed shelters.

So, what should be happening?

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by former US President Bill Clinton, just pledged $78 million to fund a housing plan for 16 districts in Haiti. But, as Haiti Grassroots Watch reports, even if all the planned repairs and construction of 68,025 units takes place, that is only 22 percent of what is needed since there are over 300,000 families and 600,000 people living in camps.

It is time for the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the UN, The US and the international community to stand up for the human rights of the hundreds of thousands of people like Mathias. Housing is a human right. Using force to evict homeless survivors of Haiti’s earthquake from one spot to make them homeless in another place is illegal, senseless and violent. Mathias and his family deserve much more.

• Vladimir Laguerre helped with this article.

The people calling for justice are residents of a make shift tent camp called Camp Django in the Delmas 17 neighborhood of Port au Prince.  They are up in arms over injuries to Marie, one of their young mothers, and repeated government threats to demolish their homes.  Despite the 100 degree heat, over a hundred residents, mostly mothers, trekked across town to demand the government protect their human right to housing.

At their invitation, we followed them back to the place they have made lived since the January 12, 2010 earthquake that left hundreds of thousands homeless.  In a sloping lot smaller than a football field, two hundred fifty families live in handmade shelters made out of grey and blue plastic tarps/tents, scraps of wood and mismatched pieces of tin.  The tarps under which they live are faded from a year-and-a-half of sun but still show brands of USAID, World Vision, Rotary International, UNICEF, UNFAM, Republic of China and others.  Outside the camp, big green trees with flame orange flowers provide color and shade.

Inside, babies and little children peek out of tent openings that reveal mats on the ground and beds and boxes.  Families live inches from their neighbors.  They buy water outside and carry it back to their tents.  Four topless wooden boxes with blue plastic UN tarps are the showers where people can wash themselves if they bring their own water and soap.  Hole in the dirt toilets are few, full and pungent in the 100 degree heat.  They are surrounded by razzing flies.  When it rains, rainwater flows into tents and the mess from the toilets spreads all over.

A teenage boy clad only in his underwear soap washes himself in between tents.  A middle age woman sits under a banana tree nursing a dollar bill size patch of open wound on her foot, a quake injury that demands a skin graft she cannot afford.  A family has an aluminum pan filled with grey water and skinned bananas.  Camp leaders tell us their community contains over 375 little children including 20 children whose parents died in the earthquake.

“We are earthquake victims,” the women and men of the camp tell us as they show us around.  “We have a human right to live somewhere. We do not want to fight for the right to stay in these camps.  It is very hot here and we cannot stay in the tents in the middle of the day.  But we all search and search and there is no other place to go.  Until we get housing, these homes are everything we have.”

There are nearly a thousand such camps of people across Port au Prince.  Some house thousands, many like Camp Django, housed hundreds.

A government myth says people gather in the camps only to receive food and water and medical services.  The truth is that many, many camps, including Camp Django, get no water, food or medical services. They are there, they tell us, because they have no other place to go.

We visited Marie (not her real name for her protection) in her boxlike tent.  She lies on a bed writhing in pain.  She has been vomiting and bleeding and was surrounded by other residents of the camp.  They were taking turns propping her up and drying her forehead.   They explained to us that she had been assaulted by men who entered their camp at the order of the Mayor of the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas.

Last Saturday, a group of five men, some armed with guns, stormed into the camp and threatened the residents.  Four of the men were wearing green t-shirts that read “Mairie de Delmas” (The Office of the Mayor of Delmas).

The Mayor’s men told the people that they would soon destroy their tents.  They bragged they would mistreat people in a manner worse than “what happened at Carrefour Aero port,” referring to the violent unlawful eviction of a displacement camp at that location by the same mayor and police less than a month ago.

The Mayor’s men pushed their way through the camp, collecting the names and identification numbers of heads of household and marking tents with red spray painted numbers.

When the men pounded on the wooden door of the tarp covered shelter where 25-year-old pregnant Marie lived with her husband, she tried to stop them from entering.  Marie tried to explain that her husband was not home.  But the leader of the group, JL, violently slammed open the wooden door of her tent into her stomach, causing her to fall hard against the floor on her back.

Three days later, Marie remained in severe pain and bed ridden, worried sick about her baby.

When one of Marie’s neighbors protested JL’s brutality, JL became enraged and threatened to kill him. Onlookers in the camp feared his words, particularly when they noticed a pistol tucked into his belt.

When the government pushed their way into the camp, residents called human rights advocates from Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and asked them to come at once.

Jeena Shah, a BAI attorney, arrived at Camp Django while government agents were still there.  Jeena asked JL who had sent his group to Camp Django and why they had marked the tents with numbers. JL was evasive, repeating over and over that “the government” had sent him. Finally he stated that “the National Palace,” a reference to current President Michel Martelly, had sent him.  As of the writing of this article, the President had neither confirmed nor denied authorization or participation in the threatened eviction.

Camp Django residents rightfully feared that their camp faced the same fate that so many displaced persons had since the earthquake more than 18 months ago—violent eviction, exacerbation of their already vulnerable situations and homelessness.

Camp Django is but a small example of what is going on in Haiti.  The International Organization on Migration estimated that as of April 2011, 166,000 homeless earthquake survivors were facing imminent threats of eviction, one fourth of the displaced population.  The evictions have been carried out by the government or with the government’s tacit approval despite rulings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ directing to the Haitian government to place a moratorium on evictions and create adequate measures to protect the displaced population from unlawful forced evictions.

It is still unclear whether the Mayor of Delmas encouraged or condoned these specific acts of violence against the residents of Camp Django, but the Mayor’s stand on forced evictions is well known.  After leading a rampage of violent unlawful evictions last month, he recently stated on Haitian television that he will continue forcing displaced communities out of their tent camps, even though they still have nowhere else to go.

President Martelly, who has refused to publicly condemn the violent forced evictions perpetrated by the Mayor of Delmas, is responsible for any threats and harm that befall the community of Camp Django and Haiti’s thousand other displacement camps.

The women sing out for justice.  “The rich,” they tell us, “use force against the poor in Haiti.”  They demand justice for Marie.  And they insist their human right to housing be protected.  They are organizing.  Their voices are strong.  Their passion is pure.  Their cause is just.  They inspire us to join them.

According to internal documents examined by the Canadian Press last week, Canadian officials feared a post-earthquake power vacuum could lead to a “popular uprising”. Obtained through access-to-information legislation, one briefing note marked “Secret” explains, “Political fragility has increased the risks of a popular uprising, and has fed the rumour that ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently in exile in South Africa, wants to organize a return to power.” The documents also explain the importance of strengthening the Haitian authorities ability “to contain the risks of a popular uprising.”

To police Haiti’s traumatized and suffering population 2,000 Canadian troops were deployed (alongside 10,000 American soldiers). At the same time several Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Teams in cities across the country were readied but never sent because, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon noted, “the government had opted to send Canadian Armed Forces instead.”

The files uncovered by the Canadian Press go to the heart (or lack there of) of Canadian foreign-policy decision-making. Almost always strategic thinking, not compassion, motivates policy. One is hard-pressed to find an instance where compassion was more warranted than post-earthquake Haiti.

The files also tell us a great deal about Ottawa’s relationship to the hemisphere’s most impoverished nation: Canadian officials think they run the place. And they are right.

Since hosting the January 2003 roundtable meeting dubbed the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti, Canada has been a dominant player in Haitian life. At that meeting high level US, Canadian and French officials discussed overthrowing elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, putting the country under international trusteeship and resurrecting Haiti’s dreaded military. Thirteen months after the Ottawa Initiative meeting Aristide had been pushed out and a quasi UN trusteeship had begun.

Since that time the Haitian National Police has been heavily militarized and the winner of the recent presidential elections, Michel Martelly, plans to divert scarce state resources to re-creating the military.

Canada helped the right-wing Martelly rise to office (with about 16% of voters support, since the election was largely boycotted). Canada put up $6 million for elections that excluded Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating. After the first round, our representatives on an Organization of American States Mission helped force the candidate the electoral council had in second place, Jude Celestin, out of the runoff. The Center for Economic and Policy Research explained, “The international community, led by the U.S., France, and Canada, has been intensifying the pressure on the Haitian government to allow presidential candidate Michel Martelly to proceed to the second round of elections instead of [ruling party candidate] Jude Celestin.” Some Haitian officials had their U.S. visas revoked and there were threats that aid would be cut off if Martelly’s vote total wasn’t increased as per the OAS recommendation.

Half of the electoral council agreed to the OAS changes, but half didn’t. The second round was unconstitutional, noted Haïti Liberté, as “only four of the eight-member Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) have voted to proceed with the second round, one short of the five necessary. Furthermore, the first round results have not been published in the journal of record, Le Moniteur, and President Préval has not officially convoked Haitians to vote, both constitutional requirements.”

The absurdity of the whole affair did not stop the Canadian government from supporting the elections and official election monitors from this country gave a thumbs-up to this farcical exercise in “democracy”. Describing the fraudulent nature of the elections, Haiti Progrès explained “the form of democracy that Washington, Paris and Ottawa want to impose on us is becoming a reality.”

One reason for this intense political interest in Haiti is the interest of Canadian investors. Canadian banks are among the very few foreign operators in Port-au-Prince and Montreal-based Gildan, one of the world’s biggest blank t-shirt makers, was the second largest employer (after the state) before the earthquake. The mining sector is almost entirely Canadian with many companies entering the country over the past few years. One Vancouver-based company, Eurasian Minerals, acquired prospecting licenses that cover approximately 10 percent of Haiti’s land mass.

To protect these foreign investors and the one percent of Haitians who own half of the country’s wealth, a 10,000-strong UN military force has been occupying the country for seven years. In a bitter irony, soldiers from one of the poorest countries in Asia, Nepal, gave Haiti a disease that thrives in impoverished societies, which lack adequate public sanitation and health systems. In October a new deployment of Nepalese troops brought a strain of cholera to Haiti that has left 5,000 dead and hundreds of thousands more ill. According to the British medical journal the Lancet, up to 800,000 Haitians will contract cholera this year.

The back story to this affair has gone largely unreported. The waste company managing the UN base, Sanco Enterprises S.A., disposed the fecal matter from the Nepalese troops into pits that seeped into the Artibonite River. Locals drank from the river, which is how the first Haitians got infected with cholera.

It’s hard to imagine a company working for the UN in Canada disposing of sewage in such a manner. But, then again the UN occupation force doesn’t much value Haitian life. The same could be said for the Canadian government.

As the beautiful sleek looking but deadly French Mirage fighter bombers fire missiles to impose an innocuous sounding “No-fly zone” Arabs remember the French use of murderous aircraft against the civilian population of French ‘Protectorate’ of Arab Syria,

As the French proudly bombard ‘protectively’ in a North Africa it once owned and exploited, we remember the triple genocide in French Indochina. First, during the brutal racist occupation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; second, as the Vichy French Colonial Army running its colonies for the Japanese Imperial Army aided the confiscation of rice for export to Japan while a million Vietnamese starved to death; third, as fresh French troops, brought back into Vietnam in U.S. ships, murdered Vietnamese for eight years, beginning almost immediately after the joyous street celebrations in Paris as it was liberated from Nazi occupation.

We can also appreciate the past inhumanity of France thinking of the sad history of French genocide in Haiti five times over. Firstly, by the enslavement of Africans; secondly, by working them to death in Haiti to make France rich; thirdly, for the genocidal punishment of the Haitian slave revolution; fourthly, for the cruel life-costing reparations forced on Haiti; lastly, for French refusal to return that huge sum of extorted money even now as Haitians suffer earthquake devastation, poverty, U.S. exploitation and foreign occupation

Opportunist France, CNN and CIA have encouraged and aided rebellion in  eastern Libya, which, until 1951, had a separate history as Cyrenaica*, France has led other paragons of virtuous political hegemony in hailing democracy as the right of those  rebelling in Libya.

But democracy and even more important, freedom, was for centuries denied the non-white population of the world.

The once colonially occupied and still neo-colonially exploited billions of non-white human beings remember that while French and English people proudly practiced parliamentary democracy they denied freedom and democracy to all their millions of colonial subjects at gun point.

It is obvious to just about everyone that It is the petroleum deposits in Libya which are crying for freedom from African control. To free Africa of its wealth has always brought military intervention from  industrialized and dehumanized nations.

Having control of their own oil wealth has enabled Libyans, along with neighboring Algerians, to enjoy the highest standard of living in Africa (South Africa has a wealthier but unevenly available standard),

Few are fooled by the French or any other of today’s now neocolonialist powers (which just happen to be basically white).

It is the oil in Libya which must be free — free from African control. Ergo the pretext of humanitarian goals.

*  In 1934, Italy adopted the name “Libya” (used by the ancient Greeks for all of North Africa, except Egypt) for its colonies of Italian Cyrenaica and Italian Tripolitania, both having been run separately by Italian governors. Italy had conquered both from the Ottoman Turks in 1911. From 1943 to 1951, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were under British administration, while the French controlled Fezzan and the United States maintained the large Wheelus Air Base.

He “headed back to his country on Friday after ignoring US opposition to a homecoming some fear could disrupt Haiti’s presidential election runoff on Sunday.”

For months, State Department officials obstructed him, wanting him permanently excluded, especially during Sunday’s illegitimate elections, featuring two unpopular presidential candidates most Haitians spurn. Most, in fact, won’t participate, knowing either winner represents Washington, not them.

First round November 28 elections and Sunday’s runoff were rigged to defraud. Haitians want democracy, what’s absent in Sunday’s vote.

Earlier, Obama and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked South African President Jacob Zuma to prevent his return. He delayed but didn’t stop him. In fact, Aristide’s charismatic presence runs counter to America’s imperial plans – to solidify colonization, resource theft, and exploitation of poor Haitians, what legitimate democrats oppose, including Aristide.

He’s wanted to return any time, “to contribute to serving my Haitian sisters and brothers as a simple citizen in the field of education.” He has no further political interests. Believe him. It’s true. He wants only to aid Haiti’s recovery, doing what he knows and loves best.

On March 17, AP said “South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane was on hand to see (him) off,” accompanied by his wife Mildred and daughters Michaela, aged 12 and Christine, aged 14.

In Zulu, Aristide said, “The great day has arrived! The day to say goodbye before returning home. We are delighted to return home after seven years. In Haiti also they are very happy,” adding that “their dream will be fulfilled,” shared by millions of supporters worldwide.

Anticipatory joy awaits him. Supporters prepared a warm welcome, including Port-au-Prince banners displaying “Titide,” as he’s affectionately known.

According to Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

Aristide’s return marks an end to the era when the United States gets to choose the political leaders of other countries. It is a historic victory for democracy and self-determination.

Weisbrot is a distinguished analyst. Perhaps his conclusion is somewhat premature, but others agree that decades of destructive US power left America weaker, not stronger. Its influence is ebbing. One day, world leaders will reject it. Why not! It’s counter to their own self-interest.

On March 18, AP headlined, “En route to Haiti, Aristide plane refuels in Dakar,” saying:

“The plane landed in (Dakar, Senegal) Friday, and is expected to arrive in Haiti” Friday afternoon local time. For millions of Haitians who love him, they’ve awaited this moment for over seven years. A joyous welcome is planned.

Regardless of what the landowner might like, international law concerning the treatment of internally displaced people does not permit him to effectuate (or the Haitian government to permit) forced evictions of this population. The Inter-American Commission said as much in the precautionary measures it issued to Haiti as a result of a petition CCR worked on with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and other Haitian and US human rights partners. But the people of Barbancourt II need help. Now.

Barbancourt II is not a place that these families want to settle into. To make matters worse, there is a several foot deep, fetid pool of human and other waste that has taken over a large area of the back portion of the camp. Residents told us that the people whose tents abut the pool are breaking out in nasty rashes and constantly fight off disease-carrying mosquitoes. The residents are disgusted that, solely as a result of their displacement, they are being forced to live in such conditions. The camp residents were very clear that they want to move into safe, long-term housing. The problem is that they have no place to go and if they are evicted, they will be out on the streets.

The residents told us that they are even more disgusted by the hostility of the landowner and the lack of response from the government officials who are charged with ensuring that they live in a safe environment. Based upon the landowner’s zeal to evict these people, one can only deduce that he allows the pool of waste to remain in the camp as a further incentive to get the families to leave. When the residents took matters into their own hands and attempted to dig a drainage ditch to have the water flow into an external waste canal located adjacent to a neighbor’s property, they told us that a man on the neighboring property waived a .38 caliber pistol and threatened to shoot any resident who tried to drain the water from the camp. When the residents complained about the pool to the Ministry of the Interior, the entity charged with dealing with these camp issues, they were completely ignored.

So, after we left the camp, the delegation raised the issues facing the Barbancourt II residents with the Ministry of Interior official who’s in charge of the camp. Not surprisingly, he denied even hearing of the camp, never mind acknowledging that he received a complaint from the residents. But once we showed him the pictures of the waste pool, he committed to take action.

In what was the most bizarre irony of the day, Barbancourt II is literally right across the street from an enormous, security-laden, religious charity called “Food for the Poor.” Well, guess what? The poor folks in the camp across the street got zero food from Food for the Poor. They described their anger at watching truck after truck laden with food come out of the heavy metal gates and then turn to deliver the food to other locations. They’d written their neighbor a letter telling them they are starving and need some of this food and had not gotten a response. We thought this was ridiculous too. So we went right across the street to ask them to explain how they don’t supply food to the hungry people in the camp across the street. They told us they don’t do direct service and that they didn’t know this camp right across the street was starving in the shadows of their Food for the Poor building. They said they’d talk to a neighborhood priest about it, and CCR will follow up on this.

In many ways, the stakes for Haiti are higher now than they were just after the earthquake. We keep hearing that the international community is pulling its operations out of Haiti. In fact, Barbancourt II told us that the Spanish Red Cross will soon stop delivering water to their camp, as their contract has run out. Many of the large NGOs that made themselves indispensable for people’s survival failed to properly link up with, help strengthen, and build the capacity of the Haitian government. Now the money is drying up and they are readying to move on to the next disaster zone.

After a year of inaction on any kind of a resettlement plan or reconstruction, the landowners and the Haitian government are anxious to remove displaced persons from private property first and then get around to finding somewhere decent for them to live at some undisclosed date in the future. But that’s not what the people in the camps want and it’s not what international law allows.

Since forcibly abducted, “the people of Haiti have never stopped calling for my return….Despite the enormous (post-quake) challenges that they face….their determination to make the return happen has increased.”

“As far as I am concerned, I am ready….today, tomorrow, at any time. The purpose is very clear: To contribute to serving my Haitian sisters and brothers as a simple citizen in the field of education.”

Returning is also vital “for medical reasons: It is strongly recommended that I not spend the coming winter in South Africa because in 6 years I have undergone 6 eye surgeries. The surgeons are excellent and very well skilled, but the unbearable pain experienced in the winter must be avoided in order to reduce any risk of further complications and blindness.”

Aristide is ready to come any time, and hopes Haitian and South African officials let him. Of course, Washington controls all Haitian affairs. The Bush administration ousted him in 2004, militarily occupied the country with proxy Blue Helmet paramilitaries, banished him abroad, and thus far Obama won’t let him back. One word from him changes everything. So far it’s not forthcoming.

He’s been treated maliciously, victimized by Washington’s intolerance to democracy, abroad and at home. It’s time public outrage demanded better, including in Haiti, the region’s poorest, most oppressed nation, the rights of their people entirely denied, including having their beloved leader back home with them.

New York Times Coverage of Haiti under Aristide

After Washington’s February 29, 2004 middle-of-the-night coup ousted him, a Times March 1 editorial lied, saying:

– he resigned;

– letting marines abduct him “was the right thing to do;”

– they only came after “Mr. Aristide yielded power;”

– he “contributed significantly to his own downfall (because of his) increasingly autocratic and lawless rule;” and

– he manipulated the 2000 legislative elections and didn’t “deliver the democracy he promised.”

Malaciously false on all counts. Under Aristide, Haiti had its only freedom since successfully liberated in 1804, turning slaves into citizens for the first time.

On January 19, Times writer Ginger Thompson headlined, “Aristide Says He Is Ready to Return to Haiti, Too,” saying:

Days after Duvalier’s return, he “issued a statement on Wednesday that fueled rumors that he, too, was angling to return.”

“Angling?” He explained clearly why, and as a Haitian citizen, he’s entitled under international law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, giving everyone the right to leave and return to their countries.

Unwittingly in part, Thompson exposed the malicious Times 2004 editorial claiming he resigned and yielded power, saying he “was ousted in 2004 in the midst of growing unrest and under intense pressure from the United States.”

In fact, Washington instigated unrest and “pressure(d)” Aristide at gunpoint by trained marine killers.

Aristide’s statement, said Thompson, “threatened to fuel tensions already stirred by” Duvalier’s return. Of course, one event has nothing to do with another, except to explain that if a former despot comes freely, letting a beloved democrat is imperative.

She also said as President, Aristide “became notorious for his violent crackdowns of political dissent” when, if fact, he did nothing of the kind. Flippantly, she claimed he’s “been hopscotching across Central America and the Caribbean in anticipation of making his own surprise re-entry.”

In fact, in March 2004, he returned briefly to Jamaica. Activist lawyer and TransAfrica founder, Randall Robinson, accompanied him, telling Democracy Now on March 25:

I have learned from a White House source that Condoleezza Rice has pointedly threatened the Jamaican government, telling it to expel President Aristide or face the consequences. The (Bush) administration wants (him) out of the region. (It) views his mere presence in Jamaica as a threat to their (hegemonic) control along with the thugs and the installed (Haitian) government.

Aristide arrived in Jamaica on March 14, 2004. On March 25, the Jamaican government said he’d take “permanent asylum” in South Africa after its April 14 elections. He’s been there since, “hopscotch(ing)” nowhere.

Further, Thompson claimed he has no valid Haitian passport, saying the Preval government won’t issue him one so he can’t return, despite knowing (or should know) that citizens don’t need passports to their own countries.

At issue is one unnamed analyst’s opinion, saying:

Aristide could have 15 passports and he’s still not going to come back to Haiti (because) France and the United States are standing in the way.

In fact, Washington has full control as colonial occupier, denying Haitians all rights, including sovereignty, democratic elections with all legitimate parties participating, and the right of their beloved leader to return in any capacity. He only wishes to as a private citizen for health reasons and to provide whatever help he can. No longer should he be denied.

Let Aristide return!

On January 18, New York Times writer, Ginger Thompson, headlined, “Former Haitian Dictator to Face Charges,” saying:

Haitian prosecutors presented formal charges of corruption and embezzlement against the former dictator Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier on Tuesday, raising the level of uncertainty surrounding his abrupt emergence from exile this week.

Haiti’s Chief Magistrate, Marycidas Auguste, announced charges of “government corruption, embezzlement of funds, money laundering, and assassination.”

Calling the day’s events a “political show,” his lawyer, Gervais Charles, said only corruption and embezzlement were involved, adding that “Jean-Claude came into this country at the wrong time. That’s what this is about, not the law.”

A judge will decide if enough evidence warrants trial, he explained, adding that most charges stem from $4.6 million in Swiss accounts, a small fraction of what he stole, believed to be hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Haitian lawyer, Salim Succar, involved in negotiations with Switzerland.

Statute of limitations also matter, having expired in 2006. Duvalier was never prosecuted despite past charges brought, including a 1988 US District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruling (in Jean-Juste v. Duvalier) that he was liable for $500 million in misappropriated public funds, taken for personal use.

His traveling companion, Veronique Roy, was asked if he was arrested. By phone inside court she said, “Absolutely not. We are very relaxed, drinking coffee and water.”

Besides stealing millions as dictator, his Tonton Macoute (praetorian guard) killers abducted and murdered tens of thousands of Haitians, many tortured to death in prison. Haitians revile him, except for cronies and elitists who profited. Even Thompson admitted that:

The charges filed on Tuesday seemed to be a modest list for a man who is widely blamed for one of the darkest chapters in (Haiti’s) history – and whose government has been accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering thousands of political opponents.

She’s mistaken, however, saying “the case against Mr. Duvalier represents a bold step by a country with a long history of impunity….” In fact, it’s theater, not boldness.

Baby Doc spent several hours in court, then returned to his luxury hotel, not jail where criminals belong unless released on bail. Given Baby Doc’s obvious flight risk, legitimate proceedings wouldn’t allow it, besides including charges of grievous crimes against humanity for which conviction should mean life in prison without parole.

Expect none for Baby Doc. According to Rupert Colville, spokesman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Haiti’s fragile judicial system makes effective prosecution unlikely. Brian Concannon, Director of Haiti’s Institute for Justice & Democracy, said:

It could be a very good step in the right direction if the Haitian justice system pursues this case. It could also be a whitewash if they don’t pursue him and find a reason to let him go.

Odds tilt heavily toward the latter resolution given Duvalier’s friends in high places, especially in Haiti, France, Canada and Washington. In 1986, the Reagan administration airlifted him to sanctuary in France, without official asylum. Charges at the time weren’t filed nor threat of extradition. He got virtual amnesty for 25 years, so why sudden change now. He spent his first full day back visiting with secret police friends.

Besides foreign allies, influential Haitians support him. Putting him in the dock exposes them for years of criminal complicity and profiteering. Chances of that are virtually nil, so expect smoke but no fire, except perhaps a quiet settlement for a small fraction of what he stole, whitewashing his kidnappings, torture, and mass killings.

On arrival, State Department spokesman, PJ Crowley, merely said:

His presence “adds unpredictability at an uncertain time in Haiti’s election process. We don’t believe at this point Haiti needs any more distractions. Our focus right now is to help Haiti through this delicate period, have a new government emerge that is credible enough and legitimate enough and viewed positively in the eyes of the Haitian people so that the country….can move ahead” and rebuild.

Not a word of how Washington supported his reign of terror and massive theft. Nor about Haiti’s sham elections. Rerunning a credible process is essential, with all wrongfully excluded parties participating, especially Fanmi Lavalas, by far the most popular.

Like his father, Papa Doc, Washington, other countries, and international lending agencies supported him generously. In fact, for decades, America allied with the worst of world tyrants, the list comprising a scandalous rogue’s gallery, including:

– father and son Duvalier;
– pre-WW II Adolph Hitler;
– Spain’s Francisco Franco;
– Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista;
– Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, Sr., a man Franklin Roosevelt called “a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch;” so aren’t all others Washington supports;
– China, then Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-Shek;
– Indonesia’s Suharto;
– Zaire’s Sese Seko Mobutu;
– Uganda’s Idi Amin;
– South Africa’s PW Botha;
– the Saudi dynasty;
– other Middle East despots, including Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali for 23 years until forced out;
– Israeli despite decades of slow-motion genocide against Occupied Palestinians;
– Iraq’s Saddam Hussein before falling out of favor;
– Iran’s Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi;
– Cambodia’s Pol Pot;
– the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos;
– Chile’s Augusto Pinochet;
– decades of Mexican and South American despots;
– Panama’s Manuel Noriega before falling out of favor; and dozens more.

A Final Comment

On January 18, Haiti Libre.com headlined, “Haiti – Duvalier: Can we really stop ‘Baby Doc,’ ” saying:

“Experts on Human Rights UN” say, “It is not clear yet, if Haiti is in a position to arrest or prosecute Jean-Claude Duvalier….Everyone knows that very serious things have happened in Haiti, but we need evidence for prosecution,” adding that UN and other officials benefited during his exile. Despite past complaints and charges, he was never arrested or prosecuted. Now statute of limitations have expired, no doubt affecting the timing of his trip.

Expecting prosecutorial justice and stolen millions recovered is practically nil. Whitewash is more likely, except for minor slaps on the wrist, keeping Baby Doc’s dirty linen safely hidden with most of his loot.

The details of a recent lawsuit, as reported by Business Week, highlights the ways in which contractors – including some of the same players who profited from Hurricane Katrina-related reconstruction – have continued to use their political connections to gain profits from others’ suffering, receiving contacts worth tens of millions of dollars while the Haitian people receive pennies at best. It also demonstrates ways in which charity and development efforts have mirrored and contributed to corporate abuses.

Lewis Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the US Agency for International Development (US AID) was named US special coordinator for relief and reconstruction after the earthquake. He worked this job for a few months, then immediately moved to the private sector, where he could sell his contacts and connections to the highest bidder. He quickly got a $30,000-a-month (plus bonuses) contract with the Haiti Recovery Group (HRG).

HRG had been founded by Ashbritt, Inc., a Florida-based contractor who had received acres of bad press for their post-Katrina contracting. Ashbritt’s partner in HRG is Gilbert Bigio, a wealthy Haitian businessman with close ties to the Israeli military. Bigio made a fortune during the corrupt Duvalier regime, and was a supporter of the right wing coup against Haitian president Aristide.

Although Lucke received $60,000 for two months work, he is suing because he says he is owed an additional $500,000 for the more than 20-million dollars in contracts he helped HRG obtain during that time.

As Corpwatch has reported, AshBritt “has enjoyed meteoric growth since it won its first big debris removal subcontract from none other than Halliburton, to help clean up after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.” In 1999, the company also faced allegations of double billing for $765,000 from the Broward County, Florida school board for clean-up done in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma.

Ashbritt CEO Randal Perkins is a major donor to Republican causes, and hired Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s firm, as well as former US Army Corp Of Engineers official Mike Parker, as lobbyists. As a reward for his political connections, Ashbritt won 900 million dollars in Post-Katrina contracts, helping them to become the poster child for political corruption in the world of disaster profiteering, even triggering a congressional investigation focusing on their buying of influence. MSNBC reported in early 2006 that criticism of Ashbritt “can be heard in virtually every coastal community between Alabama and Texas.”

The contracts given to Bush cronies like Ashbritt resulted in local and minority-owned companies losing out on reconstruction work. As Multinational Monitor noted shortly after Katrina, “by turning the contracting process over to prime contractors like Ashbritt, the Corps and FEMA have effectively privatized the enforcement of Federal Acquisition Regulations and disaster relief laws such as the Stafford Act, which require contracting officials to prioritize local businesses and give 5 percent of contracts to minority-owned businesses. As a result…early reports suggest that over 90 percent of the $2 billion in initial contracts was awarded to companies based outside of the three primary affected states, and that minority businesses received just 1.5 percent of the first $1.6 billion.”

Alex Dupuy, writing in The Washington Post, reported a similar pattern in Haiti, noting that “of the more than 1,500 US contracts doled out worth $267 million, only 20, worth $4.3 million, have gone to Haitian firms. The rest have gone to US firms, which almost exclusively use US suppliers. Although these foreign contractors employ Haitians, mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and profits are reinvested in the United States.” The same article notes that “less than 10 percent of the $9 billion pledged by foreign donors has been delivered, and not all of that money has been spent. Other than rebuilding the international airport and clearing the principal urban arteries of rubble, no major infrastructure rebuilding – roads, ports, housing, communications – has begun.”

The disaster profiteering exemplified by Ashbritt is not just the result of quick decision-making in the midst of a crisis. These contracts are awarded as part of a corporate agenda that sees disaster as an opportunity, and as a tool for furthering policies that would not be possible in other times. Naomi Klein exposed evidence that within 24 hours of the earthquake, the influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation was already laying plans to use the disaster as an attempt at further privatization of the country’s economy.

Relief and recovery efforts, led by the US military, have also brought a further militarization of relief and criminalization of survivors. Haiti and Katrina also served as staging grounds for increased involvement of mercenaries in reconstruction efforts. As one Blackwater mercenary told Scahill when he visited New Orleans in the days after Katrina, “This is a trend. You’re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.”

And it’s not just corporations who have been guilty of profiting from Haitian suffering. A recent report from the Disaster Accountability Project (DAP) describes a “significant lack of transparency in the disaster-relief/aid community,” and finds that many relief organizations have left donations for Haiti in their bank accounts, earning interest rather than helping the people of Haiti. DAP director, Ben Smilowitz, notes that “the fact that nearly half of the donated dollars still sit in the bank accounts of relief and aid groups does not match the urgency of their own fundraising and marketing efforts and donors’ intentions, nor does it covey the urgency of the situation on the ground.”

Haitian poet and human rights lawyer, Ezili Dantò, has written:

Haiti’s poverty began with a US/Euro trade embargo after its independence, continued with the Independence Debt to France and ecclesiastical and financial colonialism. Moreover, in more recent times, the uses of US foreign aid, as administered through USAID in Haiti, basically serves to fuel conflicts and covertly promote US corporate interests to the detriment of democracy and Haitian health, liberty, sovereignty, social justice and political freedoms. USAID projects have been at the frontlines of orchestrating undemocratic behavior, bringing underdevelopment, coup d’etat, impunity of the Haitian Oligarchy, indefinite incarceration of dissenters, and destroying Haiti’s food sovereignty essentially promoting famine.

Since before the earthquake, Haiti has been a victim of many of those who have claimed they are there to help. Until we address this fundamental issue of corporate profiteering masquerading as aid and development, the nation will remain mired in poverty. And future disasters, wherever they occur, will lead to similar injustices.

A year ago, people wandered the streets dazed, searching for loved ones. Lost power cut communications except by satellite phone. Haiti’s quake vulnerability was well known but little reported, and no advance precautions were taken.

The inevitable finally happened, harming the majority poor population most. Earlier storms wiped out public housing and erased communities, letting developers build upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice Port-au-Prince land. After the quake, the Red Cross estimated at least three million Haitians needed emergency aid — everything, including food, clean water, makeshift shelters, blankets, other provisions, medical care, sanitation, and funds for relief, rubble clearance, and rebuilding as soon as possible.

A year later, 95% of the rubble remains. Up to 1.5 million Haitians remain homeless. Most promised aid never came. Haitians were left stranded in squalid tent camps on their own. Twelve months later, the crisis festers, a monstrous crime of indifference, neglect, exploitation, and persecution by imperial Washington and world capitalism, valuing Haiti and its people solely as commodities.

Observers like former Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson expressed dismay, saying:

The mountains of rubble still exist. The plight of the victims without any sign of acceptable temporary shelter is worsening the conditions for the spread of cholera, and the threat of new epidemics becomes more frightening with each passing day. In short, there has been no abatement of the trauma and misery which the Haitian populace has suffered.

According to Oxfam’s Roland Van Hauwermeiren:

2010 was “year of indecision (that) put Haiti’s recovery on hold. Nearly one million people are still living in tents or under tarpaulins and hundreds of thousands of others who are living in the city’s ruins still do not know when they will be able to return home.” They have none.

Bodies are still being recovered, yet President Preval declared search and rescue operations over 11 days after the quake, and did virtually nothing to find them or provide aid from the time disaster struck. Nor was he visible to show concern.

Washington deployed 22,000 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen to obstruct, not deliver, incoming aid, control the airport, other strategic facilities, coastal areas to turn back fleeing Haitians, and secure the country for capital. Desperate Haitians were largely ignored. A year later, they still are.

World support yielded billions of dollars mainly from private donations. According to a Chronicle of Philanthropy survey, an estimated 38% reached Haitians, but the true figure is likely far less, most of it stolen by predatory NGOs or allocated for commercial development. A March 2010 donors conference secured over $5.3 billion pledged by governments. Pathetically little was delivered, least of all from Washington.

The Obama administration promised $1.15 billion. It delivered nothing, its response as contemptuous as shown needy Americans, left mostly on their own during a devastating economic crisis with austerity, not aid, planned going forward.

Compounding unmet needs, Nepalese Blue Helmets introduced cholera in Haiti’s main rice-growing area. Now raging, it caused thousands of deaths, hospitalizing many more, and leaving up to a million or more vulnerable to infection. Yet the disease is easily treated if done properly on time. Despite heroic efforts by hundreds of Cuban and other volunteer doctors and medical professionals, including Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), cholera remains out of control, the death toll rising daily.

Last October in frustration, a homeless mother lamented that “If it gets any worse, we’re not going to survive.” It did as cholera rages. Reconstruction is absent. Rubble is uncollected. Aid is absent, and Haiti’s November 28 elections were engineered for more of the same, a sham awaiting an unscheduled runoff with two candidates most Haitians reject.

As a result, the combination of devastation, exposure, overwhelming need, disease, neglect, electoral theft, repression, exploitation, and rapists ravaging thousands of women and young girls left millions of Haitians slowly expiring out of sight and mind to world audiences. It’s especially true in America where television news lost interest shortly after the quake and never reported it accurately. Nor have print stories that occasionally continue.

Major Media Misinformation

On January 10, Time magazine asked “Who Failed on Haiti’s Recovery,” saying:

The combination of “rapacious foreign aid workers (and) feckless politicians” lost Haiti, ignoring Washington’s iron grip on the country for generations, the root of Haiti’s problems. Yet Time stressed that “numerous formerly poor, underperforming countries….achieved a degree of stability and prosperity that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.”

False, with few exceptions as throughout the developing world imperial America and predatory capitalism institutionalized exploitation and poverty for the vast majority. Local officials and elites, business leaders, and a small professional class alone profited. South Africa is a case in point where conditions for the Black majority are worse now than under apartheid, an unreported story in the West.

Yet Time insisted that America’s “moral obligation isn’t to solve the world’s most intractable problems. It’s to act where we can do the most good.” That, of course, required freeing developing countries from its imperial grip, the core issue Time and other Western media ignore.

On January 3, New York Times writer, Deborah Sontag, headlined, “A Year Later, Haiti Struggles Back,” saying:

Despite Haiti’s “gloomy backdrop, many Haitians (have) started to find some equilibrium – to heal, to rebuild or simply to readjust their sights….haunting and hopeful.” Relating some of their stories, Sontag showed exceptions obscuring the overwhelming misery most Haitians face, ones she and other mainstream journalists ignore, pretending conditions are improving. Daily, in fact, they worsen.

The White House, World Bank, USAID, UN and Predatory NGOs One Year Later

On January 12, a shameless White House press release said it’s:

an important time for us to reflect on the important progress that’s been made, and the many players who have made it possible, while reaffirming the American commitment to Haiti and looking forward ahead to the work that remains to be done in cooperation with the Haitian people and international partners.

In fact, Washington remains Haiti’s main problem, responsible for colonizing, plundering, exploiting, and brutalizing Haitians for generations. Real sovereignty depends on liberation from America’s yoke, what most Haitians want most along with removing paramilitary UN Blue Helmets (MINUSTAH), letting Aristide return, and being able to have free and open elections with majority party Fanmi Lavalas participating so Haitians can have leaders they trust.

On January 12, World Bank.org called Haiti’s “disaster response/development community (in) reflective mood” despite the continuing human tragedy “compounded by the ongoing political standoff….Still, there are some glimmers of success that provide some motivation for those of us working to transform and modernize Haiti.”

The World Bank, IMF and other international lending agencies, of course, exploit nations for capital, leaving most people impoverished and ignored.

NGOs as well are notorious for exploiting nations wherever they show up. Thousands of them now ravage Haiti. Yet the Red Cross said:

Because of the generosity of our donors, Haitians are receiving immediate relief and longer-term support and training to help them recover and rebuild. And in the coming years, the American Red Cross will continue to responsibly invest the money entrusted to us by the American people into essential programs and projects until every donated dollar is spent.

In fact, precious little goes for Haitian needs, leaving them worse off today than a year earlier. On January 7, Huffington Post writer, Marcus Baram, headlined, “Haiti Earthquake Anniversary: Little Progress, Broken Promises,” saying:

“This week (an unnamed) leading international charity slammed the relief effort as a ‘quagmire,’ sharply criticizing the recovery mission (co-)chaired by (Bill Clinton), saying that the much-praised panel ‘failed to live up to its mandate.’ ” In fact, “some problems have worsened.” World attention turned elsewhere and predatory NGOs freely plunder Haiti for profit.

Washington plans it on a grander scale, yet on January 12, USAID said:

From the first moments after the earthquake until today, the US Government has mounted an unprecedented humanitarian effort, led by USAID (in fact, a notorious predator) and through the hard work of many people across multiple agencies and departments. All of this work is supported by the tremendous generosity and compassion of the American people….The US Government is committed to helping the people and Government of Haiti build back better.

Paramilitary UN Blue Helmets (MINUSTAH) noted the one year anniversary, saying:

“To celebrate (the) lives (of those lost) and honour all our friends and colleagues who perished….the one year anniversary is being marked by a formal commemoration at MINUSTAH.” The mission remains committed to “restoring a secure and stable environment.” In fact, it’s a repressive occupier Haitians despise, reject and want removed.

On January 12 at UN headquarters in New York, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon participated in a deceitful 4:53PM wreath-laying ceremony, coinciding with the time Haiti was struck. A servant of power, his complicity and indifference worsened Haiti’s problems. So have predatory NGOs, Western nations, international lending agencies, USAID, and other exploitive missions.

On January 7, the Washington Post gave rare responsible op-ed space to Professor Alex Dupuy (a Haitian native) for his article headlined, “One year after the earthquake, foreign help is actually hurting Haiti,” saying:

The international community, notably “the United States, Canada, France, the United Nations, and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (have been) significantly….problematic. Their objectives and their policies first and foremost aim to benefit their own investors, farmers, manufacturers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).”

As a result, “a dramatic power imbalance (exists) between the international community, under US leadership, and Haiti. (It) monopolizes economic and political affairs and calls the shots.” Haiti’s oligarchs “also bear great responsibility for the abysmal conditions of the country before the earthquake,” created “in close partnership with foreign governments,” notably America and international lending agencies.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), co-chaired by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, effectively displaced Preval’s government by setting reconstruction priorities, favoring corporate America, not displaced Haitians.

This far, IHRC has done little, dispensing less than 10% of the small amount of pledged aid delivered, rebuilding the international airport and clearing major urban arteries. Moreover, of over 1,500 contracts let worth $267 million, Haitian firms got only 20 worth $4.3 million. American companies got the rest, almost exclusively using US suppliers.

More is planned to make Haiti more than ever a colonized sweatshop, its people, the region’s poorest and lowest paid, exploited as near-slave labor. As a result, said Dupuy:

Whatever new government emerges from the recent, though flawed, elections will not change that basic reality.

In fact, Haiti’s new government is being chosen, not elected, to assure it, institutionalizing Haitian impoverishment, depravation, exploitation, and repression of resisters. A year later, Haitians find little to celebrate, knowing worse likely lies ahead, courtesy of US corporate predators and complicit Washington officials, plundering Haiti ruthlessly.

UNICEF estimates that more than 1 million people – 380,000 of them children – still live in displacement camps.

“The recovery process” as UNICEF says, “is just beginning.”

One of the critical questions is how many people remain without adequate housing.   While there are fewer big camps of homeless and displaced people, there has been extremely little rebuilding.  The UN reported that 97,000 tents have been provided since the quake.   Tents are an improvement over living under a sheet but they are not homes.  Many families have lived many places in the last year circulating from rough shelters to tents to camps to other camps to living alongside other families.

It is important to understand that families may leave the huge unsupervised camps and still be homeless someplace else – like a tent in another part of the city or country.   Moving from one type of homelessness to another cannot be allowed to be declared progress against homelessness and displacement.

The key human rights goal is housing, not moving out of the displacement camps.

One illustration of the housing challenge facing the Haitian people can be found in a recent report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).  The IOM December report announced a reduction in the number of persons remaining in displacement camps.  The IOM then wrongly concluded that the number of people displaced and homeless was reduced accordingly. Why is this conclusion wrong?  Because the IOM report does not even try to track where displaced persons go after they leave a particular camp.   They equate homeless families moving out of displacement camps as families finding housing.

These types of erroneous conclusions are not only misleading but threaten to hinder badly needed relief efforts one year after Haiti’s devastating earthquake.

Careful consideration of the IOM report provides an opportunity to examine some of the many important housing challenges still facing Haitians.

IOM Assertion: “We finally start to see light at the end of the tunnel for the earthquake-affected population…these are hopeful signs that many victims of the quake are getting on with their lives.”  IOM reported there has been a 31% decrease in the number of internally displaced people living on IDP sites in Haiti since July.

Fact:  Getting on with their lives?  Of an estimated 1,268 displacement camps, at least 29% have been forcibly closed – meaning tens of thousands of people have been evicted, often through violent means.  Many who are forcibly evicted from one site move on to set up camp for their families in another location, which is often more dangerous.   This is not getting on with life; this is searching for less dangerous places for the family tent.

IOM Assertion: People with houses labeled red (uninhabitable or extremely dangerous) or yellow (in need of repair) have “chosen to return to the place of origin or nearby to establish a shelter.”

Fact:  As of December 16, 2010, only 2,074 of the estimated 180,000 destroyed houses had been repaired and a small percentage of rubble had been cleared.  Decisions by desperate homeowners to move back into still destroyed homes is hardly progress.

It is also not even possible for large numbers of people who were renters to return to their destroyed homes.  The destruction of more than 180,000 private residences coupled with influx of international aid workers has made Haiti’s rental market soar.  An estimated 80% of those rendered homeless by the earthquake were renters or occupiers of homes without any formal land title. Current rents are unreachable by the majority of displaced Haitians, many of whom lost their means of livelihood during the earthquake.  The IOM admits “The lack of land tenure and the destruction of many houses in already congested slums left many of those displaced with few options but to remain in shelters.”

IOM Assertion: “Some households rendered homeless after the earthquake left congested Port au Prince all-together going home to the regions.  Others sent their children to the countryside for a better life.”

Fact: Rural Haiti before the earthquake was home to 52% of the population, 88% of which was poor and 67% was extremely poor.  Rural residents had a per capita income one third of the income of people living in urban areas and extremely limited access to basic services.  Disaster response following the earthquake has not tackled the extreme structural violence that exists in rural areas, and Hurricane Tomas further destroyed livelihoods of rural communities.  People moving from displacement camps in the city to living in a tent in the countryside have not really moved out of homelessness, they have just moved.

IOM Assertion: “Surviving in poor living conditions during the long hurricane season has persuaded many to seek alternative housing solutions.”

Fact: Homeless people are always seeking “alternative housing solutions.”  Camp conditions even before Hurricane Tomas and the cholera outbreak revealed that displaced Haitians were in camps because they had no “alternative housing solutions.”  According to a study conducted by CUNY Professor Mark Schuller before both Hurricane Tomas and the outbreak of cholera, 40% of displacement camps did not have access to water, and 30% did not have toilets of any kind.  Only 10% of families even had a tent, many of which were ripped beyond repair during the hurricane season; the rest were sleeping under tarps or even bed sheets.  A study conducted even earlier by the Institute of Justice & Democracy in Haiti found that 78% of families lived without enclosed shelter; 44% of families primarily drank untreated water; 27% of families defecated in a container, a plastic bag, or on open ground in the camps; and 75% of families had someone go an entire day without eating during one week and over 50% had children who did not eat for an entire day.

Human rights promise housing, not just forcing people away from displacement camps.  Haiti needs practical and sustainable solutions for re-housing along with services and protections for the people still homeless.

One year later, it is critically important for the international community to assist Haitians to secure real housing.   The million homeless Haitians and the hundreds of thousands who have moved out of the large homeless camps into other areas are our sisters and brothers and still need our solidarity and help.

For most of us, the Iraqi people’s resolve cannot be witnessed, but rather deduced. Eight years of military strikes, raids, imprisonments, torture, humiliation and unimaginable suffering were still not enough to force the Iraqis into accepting injustice as a status quo.

In August 2010, the United States declared the end of its combat mission in Iraq, promising complete withdrawal by the end of 2011. However, US military action has continued, only under different designations. The occupation of Iraq carries on, despite the tactical shifts of commands and the rebranding effort.

However, were it not for the tenacity of the Iraqi people, who manage to cross-sectarian, political and ideological divides, there would be no talk of withdrawals or deadlines. There would be nothing but cheap oil, which could have ushered in a new golden age of imperialism – not in Iraq, but throughout the so-called Third World. The Iraqi people have managed to stop what could have become a dangerous trend.

2010 was another year where Iraqis held strong, and civil societies throughout the world stood with them in solidarity, a solidarity that will continue until full sovereignty is attained.

Palestine provides another example of international solidarity, one that is unsurpassed in modern times. Civil society has finally crossed the line between words and sentiments of solidarity into actual and direct action. The Israeli siege on Gaza, which was supported by the United States and few other Western powers, resembled more than a humanitarian crisis. It was a moral crisis as well, especially as the besieged population of Gaza was subjected to a most brutal war at the end of 2008, followed by successive lethal military strikes. The four year long siege has devastated a population whose main crime was exercising its democratic right to vote, and refusing to submit to the military and political diktats of Israel.

Gaza remains a shining example of human strength in our time. This is a fact the Israeli government refuses to accept. Israeli and other media reported that the Israeli army will be deploying new tanks to quell the resistance of the strip, with the justification that Palestinians fighters managed to penetrate the supposedly impenetrable Israeli Merkava tank. Israeli military chief Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, who made the revelation in a recent parliamentary session, may never comprehend that neither a Mekava (or whatever new model he will be shipping to Gaza soon) nor the best military hardware anywhere could penetrate the will of the unwavering Palestinians.

Gaza is not alone. Civil society leaders representing every religion, nationality and ideology have tirelessly led a campaign of solidarity with the Palestinian people. The breadth and magnitude of this solidarity has been unmatched in recent times, at least since the anti-fascist International Brigades units resolutely defended the Second Spanish Republic between 1936-1939.

The solidarity has come at a cost. Many activists from Turkey and various other countries were killed in the high seas as they attempted to extend a hand of camaraderie to the people of Gaza and Palestine. Now, knowing the dangers that await them, many activists the world over are still hoping to set sail to Gaza in 2011.

Indeed, 2010 was a year that human will proved more effective than military hardware. It was the year human solidarity crossed over like never before into new realms, bringing with it much hope and many new possibilities.

But the celebration of hope doesn’t end in Palestine and Iraq. It merely begins there. Champions of human rights come from every color and creed. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, The Most Rev. Dr. Desmond Tutu of South Africa, former US President Jimmy Carter and other luminaries and civil society heroes and heroines from across the world will continue their mission of peace and justice, as they have for many years.

These well-known names are only part of the story. There are literary millions of unsung heroes that make the hardship of the years more tolerable, and who will continue to guide us through new years and unknown challenges.

Haiti was one country that was hit hardest in 2010.  The small nation was greeted on January 12, 2010 with a most catastrophic earthquake, followed by 52 aftershocks. Over half a million people were estimated killed and injured, and many more became homeless. The year ended on a similarly devastating note, as over 2,000 people died and 105,000 fell ill (according to estimates by the Pan American Health Organization) after a cholera outbreak ravished an already overwhelmed country.

It is rather strange how leading powers can be so immaculate and efficient in their preparations for war, and yet so scandalously slow in their responses to human need when there is no political or economic price to be exacted. But this discrepancy will hardly deter doctors and nurses at the St. Nicholas Hospital in Haiti, who, despite the dangerous lack of resources, managed to save 90 percent of their patients

Our hearts go out to Haiti and its people during these hard times. But Haiti needs more than good wishes and solemn prayers. It also needs courageous stances by civil society to offset the half-hearted commitments made by some governments and publicity-seeking leaders.

It must be said that hope is not a random word aimed at summoning a fuzzy, temporary feeling of positive expectations for the future. To achieve its intended meaning, it must be predicated on real, foreseeable values. It must be followed by action. Civil society needs to continue to step up and fill the gaps created or left wide open by self-seeking world powers.

Words don’t end wars, confront greed or slow down the devastation caused by natural disasters. People do. Let 2011 be a year of action, hope, and the uninterrupted triumph of civil society.

Post-quake, their aid was some of the first to arrive. After cholera struck, Chavez sent a Ministry of Health team with medications, intravenous drips and rehydration tablets. He promised more as needed for “our Haitian brothers and sisters (exploited) by savage capitalism and imperialism.”

Since 1998, Cuba’s had hundreds of doctors, nurses, and other medical specialists in Haiti to help. Post-quake, it sent more, and after cholera struck, more still with supplies to set up new facilities and deliver heroic services under the most adverse conditions, including in hard to reach rural areas.

Dr. Lorenzo Somarriba, Cuba’s Medical Brigade (BMC) coordinator, said the team numbers 908, including Cuban-trained professionals from 19 other countries, mostly Latin American, Carribbean and African ones, serving with its own staff. Included are doctors, nurses, technicians and logistics experts. They speak Creole, know the terrain, provide more aid than other nations by far, and stand ready to send more as needed.

On December 16, Granma International’s Juan Diego Nusa Penalver headlined, “Cuban volunteers establish important cholera treatment center,” saying:

“In record time,” Cuba’s BMC established a 100-bed treatment center in Carrefour for its 400,000 residents, 20 km from Port-au-Prince. Its “comprehensive cholera treatment areas” have 32 doctors and staff. In tents, 38 units are operating. “(H)ospitals adapted to confront the disease….which through December 12 had treated 34,309 patients” with a mortality rate of 0.75%.

In total, Cuba plans 20 Treatment Centers throughout the country, including in Mirebalais, Hinche, Saut-d’eau, L’Estere, Plateau-du-Nord, Belladere, Plaisance and Carrefour. “Work is (also) underway to find space and mount an additional 11 facilities of this type….The philosophy of unity (is committed) to defeat an enemy as powerful as cholera….”

On December 19, Granma said additional medical team members arrived, increasing the total to 1,160, including 62 from the Henry Reeve International Contingent for Emergency Situations in Disasters and Epidemics.

Official reports say over 2,500 died. Another 115,000 are ill. According to Operational Biosurveillance, these figures way understate the problem by a factor of four. A recent update said:

In many areas of Haiti, we are documenting outbreaks that are not being accounted for in the official statistics. We therefore estimate the upper bound of estimated total (subclinical and clinically apparent) case counts to be one million. From a practical operations point of view, these estimates are academic, and we….believe (a more accurate total is) closer to 500,000….The bottom line is the epidemic continues to spread without restraint.

In addition, infected health care workers have been reported, and “more cases (are expected) in the United States. We (already) believe it likely (that) more cases are inside the US unreported. Implications for the United States are non-significant,” given the ability to treat them.

On December 15, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its 4,000 Haitian staff and 315 international employees treated 62,000 patients, continues to treat another 2,000 daily, and increased its mission in Northern and Southern areas. While some locations have stabilized, others show continued spread, including in Northern cities and rural locations. “Despite the significant logistical challenges involved in reaching isolated parts of both departments, MSF teams are expanding the number of units, treatment centers, and rehydration points in both areas.”

“Meanwhile, the epidemic has (also) increased sharply in the South.” New facilities were set up in Pignon, St. Raphael, Ranquitte (Nord), Gaspard (Nord Ouest), and Jeremie (Grande Anse). “However, as the epidemic continues to spread, the response by local and international organizations remains inadequate.”

Resolving Haiti’s Electoral Fraud Delayed

On December 18, AP reporter Jonathan Katz headlined, “Haiti election results could be delayed for weeks,” saying:

OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza “asked (Preval) to delay announcing election results until an international panel of experts can review the vote, officials said Saturday.” However, “the panel of up to five electoral, legal and information-technology experts has not even been formed, and waiting for its review could drag into the new year….Preval’s office could not be reached for comment….”

On December 20, Al Jazeera headlined, “Haiti poll results delay rued,” saying:

“The proposed delay….has been met with fierce criticism from some of the candidates. (Haiti’s electoral commission) plans a recount of tally sheets in the presence of the three main candidates, although” first place winner Mirlande Manigat and third place one Marcel Martelly won’t participate.

Final results were due out December 20. Most candidates, including Martelly, want the fraudulent election re-held with all 19 candidates participating. Washington, Preval and the OAS may be delaying to “run out the clock,” defuse public anger, and show only token recount changes to legitimize a bogus process.

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) said disputed results will be rapidly reviewed. Rapidity is now delay. In addition, disgruntled candidates got until December 15 to appeal. Verification of preliminary results hasn’t happened. On December 14, the OAS/CARICOM (MOEC) Joint Electoral Observation Mission learned that establishing the commission was postponed.

On December 19, a CEP statement said:

Until the end of the litigation stage of the electoral process, the arrival and the completion of the work of an expert mission to the OAS….the PRC has decided to postpone the publication of final results of the first round. No new date (was) specified. However, depending on what we have learned, Opont Pierre Louis, the Director General of the PRC, reportedly (said) ‘we gather on (December 20) to fix a new date. A date that is safe and good for the country.’

Perhaps so for its oligarchy, Obama officials and complicit OAS/UN functionaries. Not at all for ordinary Haitians to be exploited, left out, betrayed, and bludgeoned if they complain.

Obama Orders Diaspora Haitians Deported

Announced earlier in December, The New York Times noticed on December 19 in Kirk Semple’s article headlined, “Haitians in US Brace for Deportations to Resume,” saying:

“The Obama administration has been quietly moving to resume deportations of Haitians for the first time since” the January quake. US diaspora ones aren’t amused, saying “an influx of deportees will only add to the country’s woes,” never mind the injustice.

After Congress established Temporary Protection Status (TPS) in 1990, Washington granted 260,000 Salvadorans, 82,000 Hondurans, and 5,000 Nicaraguans protection, then extended it on October 1, 2008. It lets the Attorney General grant TPS to undocumented residents unable to return home because of armed conflict, natural disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

Past recipients also included Kuwait, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Montserrat, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Angola. Haitians never got it, yet granting it is the simplest, least expensive form of aid so Port-au-Prince can concentrate on its crisis, while diaspora Hatians help through remittances back home.

No matter. In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began rounding up Haitian immigrants ahead of resuming deportations in mid-January. According to ICE spokeswoman, Barbara Gonzales, only those convicted of felonies or two or more misdemeanors, who’ve served their sentences, will be affected, “consistent with our domestic immigration enforcement priorities.”

Founded in 1996 in Haiti, Alternative Chance is “a self-help peer counseling program….challeng(ing) the injustice of US immigration policies and assist(ing) immigration attorneys in fighting against deportation.”

On December 16, it expressed shock about announced deportations. Pre-quake, it saw firsthand how criminal deportees are treated “in Haiti’s DCPJ police administrative building and in other police stations or prisons in and around” Port-au-Prince. Uncharged in Haiti, “their detention is illegal under Haitian law and international standards.”

Yet, in grossly overcrowded conditions, they’re denied “due process, a release date or an attorney.” Many may face indefinite detention for months, in 24-hour lockups, without “food, treated drinking water, medical or mental health care.” They have no toilets, sinks, lighting, or room to lie down. Instead, they “must lay directly on insect, rat infested cement floors” in sweltering heat.

Post-quake, conditions are even worse. No matter. Washington-ordered deportations will resume. In a December 16 letter to Obama, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) also objected after 100 Haitians got final orders, were rounded up, and transferred to Louisiana. Outraged, CCR said:

“Sending people to Haiti under these circumstances will end up being a death sentence for many. Sending additional people from the US into the Haitian prison system will also further stress the resources available to the impoverished” already there.

CCR wants deportations halted on humanitarian grounds. Since taking office in January 2009, Obama officials showed Haitians no compassion, in spite of dire post-quake conditions, raging cholera, and the aftermath of the fraudulent election they engineered.

Contemptuously, they now want minor offenders returned to hellish conditions so bad it may kill them. It’s a shocking indictment of a criminally unjust administration, planning anguish, human misery and exploitation, not aid, for desperately needy people. Mass outrage is needed to stop them. The lives and welfare of everyone sent back are at stake.

On December 7, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) announced “that Mirlande Manigat, a former Haitian first lady, and Jude Celestin, (Preval’s man), had won the first round of voting.”

Correction: stole the first round. Neither candidate was the people’s choice. For them, none of the above ranked first, followed by Jean-Henry Ceant, a Haitian businessman, community leader and philanthropist.

He campaigned on Aristide’s slogan: “All people are people/Everyone is equal (tou moun se moun).” Like so many previous times, it may have been campaign hyperbole. Now eliminated, we’ll never know. What is clear is that Haitians again were defrauded, an old story they never accept.

In a mid-November interview, Aristide’s spokeswoman Maryse Narcisse said:

Fanmi Lavalas supporters (the vast majority) “are not participating in an illegal election. The November 28 elections are not elections. It’s a selection process. What we’re doing now is mobilizing people, sensitizing people against the selection. With this selection process, we are not going anywhere. We are moving towards instability that will last for many years.”

America controls everything in Haiti, orchestrating coup d’etat rule. Its iron fist is always ready to prevent democratic elections for populist governance, an anathema notion Washington rejects everywhere, including at home.

Sontag described a “long, tense day,” then the 9PM electoral results announcement, followed by “rock-throwing, tire-burning and shooting in several urban neighborhoods and outside (Port-au-Prince). Toward midnight, smoke curled into the sky….protesters’ chants and drums filled the air.”

The US Embassy issued a boilerplate statement, saying:

The United States, together with Haiti’s international community partners, stands ready to support efforts to thoroughly review irregularities in support of electoral results that are consistent with the will of the Haitian people expressed in their votes.

In fact, Washington and its puppet, Preval, orchestrated the fraud, banned 15 parties, including by far the most popular – Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas that easily would have won overwhelmingly. As a result, the process was shamelessly tainted, an election in name only.

Voter disenfranchisement was widespread. Polls opened late and closed early. Ballot box stuffing was rampant. Voters faced intimidation and violence, and the electoral lineup had no legitimacy, excluding peoples’ choice candidates, except for perhaps Ceant.

On December 8, Al Jazeera headlined, “Haiti set for election run-off,” saying:

According to (CEP’s announced) results, Manigiat won 31 per cent of the vote and Celestin 22 per cent.

Protests and sporadic gunfire erupted. “Much of the concern centered around conflicts between the announced results and those reported (earlier) by the National Observation Council, a local election monitoring group financed by the European Union, which said that Celestin would be eliminated.”

Haitians despise him. In a free and fair process, he’d have gotten well below 10%, not the announced 22%, possible only by widespread ballot box stuffing. As a result, daily street protests followed the November vote. Thousands of Haitians clashed with police, denouncing the sham process, demanding new elections, yelling “Arrest Preval,” and accusing him and Celestin of electoral theft.

On December 20, final results will be announced. A presidential runoff is provisionally scheduled on January 16, confirmation awaiting CEP word.

A Final Comment

Following CEP’s announced results, a US embassy press release said the following:

As Haiti enters the period of electoral contestation, it is essential that all political actors remain calm and encourage their supporters to do the same…. Haiti’s transition to democracy over the past 24 years has seen many successes, overcoming major challenges. The 2010 elections represent a critical test of whether the Haitian people will determine their destiny through their vote. The United States is committed to the consolidation of democracy in Haiti and calls on the Government of Haiti, the CEP and all political forces to ensure that the will of the people is fully reflected in the outcome of this election.

The statement is self-explanatory, an imperial master’s words to its subjects, establishing despotism masquerading as “democracy.” As a result, Haitians get theater, not real elections, imperial rule, not of, by, and for the people, hardline take-it-or-leave it tyranny. Its master’s voice has spoken. It remains now how they’ll react longer term for government representing them, no longer for wealth and power.