Haiti’s poor remembered the anniversary of the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28, 1994 in small solemn ceremonies at his grave site in Port au Prince and the small town of Jean Rabel in northwest Haiti where he founded a peasant rights organization Tet Kole Ti Peyizan. They remembered him for challenging Haiti’s wealthy elite by starting literacy projects and planning an alternative bank dedicated to the poor. They remembered his courage and the beatings he took at the hands of dictators for his incessant call that Haiti’s dispossessed had every right to take control of the destiny of the nation. While members of Haiti’s moneyed class looked down upon the poor illiterate souls they ruled through corruption and violence, Vincent made it clear that the poor were not victims and they harbored a strength and wisdom that the rich would never allow themselves to understand. Vincent once said, “While the rich are concerned with going to heaven the poor are concerned with feeding themselves. We must tend to the needs of the poor to feed themselves before we can talk about the spiritual salvation of those who can already eat.”

In the other Haiti, the anniversary of Vincent’s assassination was overshadowed by all the hoopla of rehabilitating Reagan’s trickle-down economic theory in the form of bringing Haiti back into the camp of the neoliberal-sweatshop development model. The media-hype of a “new Haiti” being born from the promise of new sweatshops and a recent attempt to raise the minimum wage to a paltry $3.73 per day from a scandalous $1.75 per day, once again served to hide the simmering reality of the poor lurking beneath the surface in this island nation of 9 million inhabitants.

Father Jean-Marie Vincent fought against what has now become the reality of the US/UN sweatshop development model being imposed upon Haiti today. This solution to Haiti’s economic woes rewards the predatory and monopolistic wealthy elite at the expense of the masses of the poor in Haiti and has long been referred to as the “Plan Lanmò” or the Death Plan. Father Jean-Marie Vincent opposed this development model when Ronald Reagan first foisted it upon the Haitian masses in the 80s when it was called the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) and he would have certainly been vocal in opposing its recycling today. Pretending that 70% of Haiti’s population are not still considered peasants who live in the countryside and that attracting them to low paid jobs in the capital would not exacerbate the already meager human resources in Port au Prince was a major factor of his opposition to the sweatshop development model.

Fifteen years ago, Father Jean-Marie Vincent was felled in a hail of bullets in front of his rectory at Montfortain in the Port au Prince neighborhood of Christ-Roi. Witnesses described two vehicles carrying members of Haiti’s dreaded Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army who opened fire on his vehicle. He was reportedly still alive as the Haitian army purposely led the ambulance slowly to the hospital allowing him to bleed to death before he could reach doctors. His death was slow and torturous only fitting to the profile of the accused such as Capt. Jackson Joanis, Lt. Youri Latortue, and Sgt. Jodel Chamblain all leading members of the Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army at the time of his assassination in 1994.

Joanis and Chamblain were judged guilty in absentia in 1995 for the assassination of Antoine Izmery, an Aristide supporter and businessman condemned by his own class as a traitor. Izmery and Vincent were counted among the victims of the Cedras regime that the US State Department once described as “one of the world’s worst human rights violators.” Joanis and Chamblain were ultimately released under the Latortue regime installed by the Bush administration in 2004 after a sham trial that Amnesty International called an “insult to justice.” They were also absolved in the murder of Father Jean-Marie Vincent.

Youri Latortue, a blood relative and security chief for the US-installed Prime Minister Gerard Latortue in 2004, is now the powerful head of the Haitian parliament’s Justice and Security Commission. He was also accused of complicity in Vincent’s assassination. According to a report released by a delegation of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in 2004, “A former high-ranking police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard Guerriere…claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder of democracy activist Antoine Izmery. From 1991 to 1993, Latortue was an officer in FADH’s [Haitian army] Anti-Gang Unit, the army’s most notorious unit for human rights violations.”

The administration of former president Bill Clinton, who current serves as UN Special Envoy to Haiti while former First Lady Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State for the Obama administration, instructed the CIA and the State Department to conduct an independent investigation into the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent and supporters of president Aristide in 1994. Leon Panetta, who currently heads the CIA was Clinton’s Chief of Staff at the time the investigation was commissioned by the Office of the President. Their spokesman at the time, Roger Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs referred to their conclusions in a press conference on Sept. 13, 1994 when he stated unequivocally, “The gunman who killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent, an Aristide ally, on August 28 was connected to the [Cedras] regime.” Yet none of the details of the investigation have ever been made public to this day.

In the end, what is clear is that UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA chief Leon Panetta now hold the power under the Obama administration to provide the truth behind the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent. They are now in a position to demand that the files of the CIA and the State Department be re-opened. Unfortunately, whether they have the political will to do so may be like much everything else going on in Haiti today. Justice is inconvenient in their “new Haiti” if it gets in the way of “the country moving forward.” Unfortunately for them, history has proven that it is a foundation of sand to build a new future based on lies and impunity in a country like Haiti whose people have shown time and time again they have a long memory.

While providing the truth about Vincent’s assassination may be inconvenient for those who believe they currently hold the destiny of Haiti in their hands, they should understand more than others that the poor will never forget the legacy of Father Jean-Marie Vincent. They will always remember his selfless example of courage and expressions of love for them because he lived, worked and died in their Haiti.

As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.

We wrote that: “It is in the best interest of the United States to directly support Haitian democracy, good governance, development, self-reliance and self-sufficiency. This cannot be done if the Haitian government has to compete with foreign funded NGOs and charities who are not elected or accountable to the people of Haiti, but are predatory and promoting
dependency and their own organizations “interests for self-perpetuation in Haiti.”

All of these points, were replicas of the seven-points made in HLLN’s Haiti Policy Statement for the Obama Team, with added emphasis on demands, now that Clinton is the UN Special Envoy to Haiti that are already made in our FreeHaitiMovement Demands, particularly asking for the release of Haiti’s political prisoners, return of President Aristide and investigation of the Bush 2004 kidnapping and coup d’etat in Haiti.

Subsequent to Ezili’s HLLN issuing the 7-point statement on What Special UN Envoy Bill Clinton may do to help Haiti, we posted an article, from the Nouvelliste paper in Haiti, that reported that 600 checks being given out at the Ministry of Public Health in Haiti were given to folks who never worked there. We posted the article (which is in French) and noted that NO ARRESTS were made or being contemplated by the puppet Preval/Pierre Louis government.

These criminals are getting paid every day; these “zombi” employers get away scott-free with this crime. Meanwhile, our poor people are dying on the open seas, being eaten alive by sharks, rammed by Turk and Cacaos Coast Guards for just trying to find a better life elsewhere. Or, our 9 million are starving in Haiti in intense hunger where they are so hungry their stomachs burn as if they’ve swallowed Clorox or battery acid. Thus, the post pointed out how in Haiti the educated and well connected commit crimes with impunity and are not sent to jail.

We contrasted that, in particular, with the over 6,440 very poor Haitians in jails, many since 2004, most for no crimes at all, never, ever, seeing a judge or having a trial and pushed, again, for speedy trial and immediate release. We referred to our statement — The slavery in Haiti the mainstream press won’t expose — about how the rich get away with murder in Haiti while the poor suffer mercilessly, die and get imprisonment, setting forth the following example taken directly from the Free Haiti Demands’s resolution.

Release of all political prisoners

Many Haitians from poor neighborhoods were summarily rounded up into preventive or indefinite detention during the 2004 Bush/Bicentennial coup d’etat without ever being charged, tried or convicted of any crime. As of 2008, it is reported that there are 8,204 prisoners in Haiti and of this only 1,764 have been convicted of a crime. Before the 2004 coup d’etat, Haiti barely had 3,000 prisoners throughout the country. [During the coup, the military and their militias emptied the jails, killed police and guards to recruit members to bolster up their small ranks. So, most of the 3,000 were freed by the US-financed coupnappers and Boca Raton regime imposed on Haiti, first with US firepower then through this UN proxy military power for the Western powers].

Today in UN-occupied Haiti, more than 6,440 still await trial, remain in jail, some going on for five years of prolonged detention, without ever having been charged, tried or convicted of any crime. These prison population statistics come from the 2008 US State Department Human Rights Report on Haiti and do “not include the large number of persons held in police stations around the country in ‘preventive detention’ (without a hearing or filed charges).” Also, many Haitians were summarily disappeared post the 2004 coup d’etat. There must be a complete investigation of such disappearances and political kidnappings, including the disappearance of Lovinsky Pierre Antoine.

Release Haiti’s children

At end of 2008, approximately 88 percent of the country’s 316 incarcerated minors were in prolonged detention, not charged, or having seen a judge, or been tried or convicted on any crime, some “since 2005.” This figure does not account for children confined with adults or held in indefinite detention at police stations around the country. (See, State Department 2008 Human Rights Report: Haiti).”

We noted, as a preamble to the posting, our consternation. I wrote:

600 “zombi” checks and no arrest? But if this included some ti malere – poor guy or gal – from Site Soley, he/she would be vilified and the jail keys thrown away as so many are experiencing right now for never having committed a crime – just put in jail, post coup detat 2004, for being poor and suspected of having voted for Aristide. But the suited criminals ak kravat e bon rad – the “good,” literate, well-connected and (educated?) folks enjoy complete impunity as they fleece the poorest… and the beat goes on.

An HLLN reader sent us an email giving us more examples of such injustices, expounding more on the vile systemic corruption in Haiti supported by the UN occupation and US coup d’etat authorities and implemented by the “schooled” and suit-wearing bourgeois Haitian. The reader suggested we should have translated the piece I was referring to where 600 checks were being paid out to educated and connected folks who never worked at the Ministry of Health, yet no arrests. (See: 600 chèques ”zombi” récupérés, aucune arrestation.)

This detailed HLLN comment by one of our members (who prefers to remain anonymous out of fear of being marginalized, or worse) gives a good picture of the impunity raging in Haiti that is carried out just by the tiny few, emboldened by US policies favoring dictatorship and military rule. The majority are just turned into restaveks — servants — by the ruling Haitian oligarchy. That’s the real slavery in Haiti, and the mainstream won’t ever expose it!

But their time is ending. Haiti’s majority will, one day soon, be able to vote in a President who will not be ousted by the US because he looked out for the interests of the people of Haiti, not foreigners, not the oligarchy nor the corrupt and greedy charitable NGOs maintaining the status-quo. That time is at hand and we who help give voice to the voiceless in Haiti and denounce these injustices claim it for those who can’t.

The corruption of the ruling Haitian oligarchy, their UN/US/Euro military back-up and all of their rank greed, terror and tyranny simply reinforces our commitment to un-tethering the voiceless 9-million Blacks from the cruelties and greed of the 13 “white Haitian” families – Haiti’s ruling oligarchy and their sycophants and wannabees. The 600 Haitians who were fleecing the Ministry of Public Health ought to be arrested and tried. Money, power and profit ought not be the measure for guaranteeing liberty, health , shelter, freedom and justice to human beings. The lives of the materially poor, no matter their skin tone, are valuable.

The impoverished and imprisoned in Haiti, the more than 6,440 wasting in Haiti’s overcrowded jails, sleeping in shifts, being abused by guards, catching diseases that go untreated, starving to death, some in jail going on five years in UN/US-occupied Haiti, without ever being charged, tried or convicted of any crime, MUST BE RELEASED. Bill Clinton and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, ought to stand for this and stop giving interviews and going to meetings with well-to-do Haitians, many uncaring about the plight of their brethrens, just talking about the “success” of the UN mission in Haiti.

Such Haitians are only interested in US/USAID/Clinton Global Initiative dollars that will maintain the status quo in Haiti. They do not care that the US kidnapped a Constitutionally elected president, presided over the anarchy and slaughter, and then sent in the UN to maintain their bicentennial “gains” in Haiti. They cringe at the mention of the name Aristide and want to forget the gross bicentennial injustice that took place on the 200th anniversary year of Haiti’s independence. They want US approval, US dollars, US invitations, not justice. They’ve settled for the path of least resistance and paternalism.

There’s hardly any mention in these pat-ourselves-on-our-own-backs feel-good sessions that only the very, very poor in Haiti and those who reject this vile global system of wealth distribution and voted against the ruling oligarchy and its agents end up in jail. None of those convicted thugs and drug dealers whom the US financed to help with the ouster of Haiti’s democratically elected government have spent time in jail. We won’t mention Louis Jodel Chanblain. Lame Timanchet, the Gran Ravine assassins and death squads still roam free in UN-occupied Haiti. It’s mostly folks who stood against the second unconstitutional ouster of the Aristide government who are in jail today, very poor Haitians.

In fact, US authorities keeps saying they are looking to arrest Guy Philippe, the military leader of the coup against president Aristide, for drug dealing. Yet Guy Philippe, accused by Human Rights Watch of being a death squad leader, roams free in UN-occupied Haiti, still at large, last seen, I’m told, a few weeks ago, being interviewed on CNN! I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true. I vividly remember, sitting in my dying mother’s hospital bed, during the 2004 coup d’etat rape and rampage, watching Wolf Blitzer interviewing this Special Forces’ trainee and Haiti assassin, calm as you please asking him if he planned to run for President!

It’s been a long, endless, bloody trek to here from then and the suffering and humiliation continues for us pro-democracy and justice Haitians.

The US and poverty pimping-”International friends of Haiti,” create the circumstances and allows thugs and drug dealers to roam free, prohibits President Aristide from returning from exile in South Africa, deports Haitians back to storm-ravaged and coup d’etat destabilized Haiti, presides over the UN occupation, saying nothing about the UN and foreign forces’ raping and molesting Haitians, trafficking in children, killing of civilians and the unfair imprisonments. President Preval chauffeurs Special UN Envoy Bill Clinton around, all smiles, as the people flee on rickety boats, die of starvation, curable diseases, or wrongful imprisonment. He never mentions the UN rapes, coup d’etat killings or indefinite detentions. In fact, the Haitian Parliament, in a rare moment, raised the minimum wage from 70 gourdes (or $1.75 per day) to 200 gourdes (about $5 a day or .63 cents per hour) for an eight-hour workday. President Preval, citing the US-HOPE II Act, vetoed it. The act allows for duty-free exports of clothing to the U.S.

Although labor costs are a tiny fraction of the prices of goods, it seems the President of Haiti is worried that if he raises the minimum wage to the equivalent of 0.63 cents an hour for desperately poor Haitian workers, US businesses would no longer be able to sell US consumers clothes and shoes produced in Haiti, but from somewhere else where labor is cheaper. Now, the proposed $5 raise still keeps Haiti at the lowest minimum wage in the Western Hemisphere, and less than half the industrial minimum wage in the neighboring Dominican Republic. But big business are outraged, OUTRAGED, by the very notion of paying Black Haitians the increase to about 0.63 cents per hour! They basically, as per usual, want to use the historically low Haitian wage to bargain with globally and further drive down wages or keep them from rising elsewhere. This private sector — enslavement sector — depends on Haiti’s impoverishment. That’s the truth of the matter.

In fact, President Jean Bertrand Aristide raising the minimum wage from 36 gourdes to 70 gourdes (about 0.22 U.S. cents an hour!) six-years ago was part of the reason the Bush Administration and Haitian oligarchy got angry enough to violently overthrow him in 2004, just as the Honduran elite with Washington have done, in part, to President Manuel Zelaya because he raised the Honduran minimum wage.

It seems clear that Wall Street can get angry not Main Street and that their profit interests are valued above human life, health and liberty.

So, if a Latin American president raises the minimum wage or some such no no that hinders Messrs.-Let’s-Hoard-It-All’s profit margins, it’s perfectly alright for the corporate, corrupt and greedy elites to get angry enough to turn to financing coup d’etat, war, indefinite detentions and torture.

Apparently a minimum wage of 0.63 cents per hour to desperately impoverished Haitians will hurt US consumers and big business, according to Haitian President Preval. But 0.38 cents per hour (or $3 per day) is enough according to Preval, although poor Haitians have to pay high US-prices to the mercenary families (Haitian oligarchy) for imported US goods in Haiti: rice, soap, oil, clothes, food, toothpaste, shampoo, all supplies, etc.

Here’s what a young Haitian from Site Soley, who is probably dead now or rotting in prison for his dissent to the ouster and occupation, had to say right before the 2004 coup d’etat in a demonstration to stop the ouster:

… it’s this tiny group of folks who want to continue monopolizing everything in Haiti. Because for 200 years everything has been in their hands. They sell us our food, what we drink, all that we must have to live. They are the ones selling it to us…” (Go to the transcript of the video, When Haiti Was Free — video evidence that media lies led to occupation not only in Iraq but in Haiti).

Ultimately, pressure from Preval and the Oligarchy serving foreign business interests in Haiti, pushed the Haitian parliament to rescind the $5 per day and vote in a mere $3.75 per day (47 cents per hour) minimum wage.

Last year, gasoline in Haiti was $6 U.S. dollars per gallon at the pumps. The monopoly families who control all imports, many times charge Haitians higher prices than goods and staples would cost to buy in the US. 70% of the population is unemployed. Many work in the informal sector (street vendors, market women, peasant farmers, et al) or depend only on Diaspora remittances. Only some 250,000 people of Haiti’s 9 million Blacks have jobs covered by the minimum salary law. But the 0.47 cent an hour won’t cover much more than food and transportation to work and is more about guaranteeing huge profits for foreign multi-national corporations such as Levi’s, Disney, Wal-Mart and Hanes.

Bill Clinton’s commitment to bringing more of such “investors” into Haiti isn’t investment and certainly not about raising Haitian standard of living or long term development. The majority’s access to health care, political freedom, food, clean water, schooling, social justice and security from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention is worst than before the 2004 Bush coup d’etat and UN/US occupation. The UN mission makes more than $600million per year in Haiti, their soldiers live in hotels, have turned Haiti into a brothel, a penal colony and may be seen in their shorts at the beach on the weekends. With no living wage and the odds so stacked against them, it’s no wonder hopeless Haitians are fleeing to shark-infested waters on rickety, overcrowded boats.

And imagine the millions of dollars being siphoned out of Haiti by the schooled Haitians — the coup d’etat Haitians, who don’t pay taxes and whom this US-puppet government supports with UN/US firepower, diplomatic and media power, at the ready. In fact, the Oligarchy and foreigners are making so much money in Haiti, since the 2004 coup d’etat, Haiti is no longer the “poorest in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaragua is! (See also “Haiti’s Riches“).

Meanwhile human rights and advocacy networks, like Ezili’s HLLN, are marginalized by the International friends of Haiti, by Haiti’s ruling oligarchy and their wanabees, for urging justice be done in Haiti and for the poor and speaking against the indefinite incarceration of poor people without voices. The danger to us who denounce the reality and tell the truth that is hidden behind the headlines on Haiti is not imagined.

Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, one of ours, was disappeared in UN-occupied Haiti on August 12, 2007, not long after he gave an interview denouncing the coup d’etat, the UN and the Haitian oligarchy.

The US government must stay out of our affairs and let us run our country. Each time they organize a coup d’état in Haiti – we have already 35 or 36 coups d’état in our history – we have to start over. This US policy of wanting to control everything in Haiti is blocking development as well as political, social or sociopolitical progress… (–Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, from an interview entitled “Sovereignty and Justice in Haiti.”)

There has been no investigation into the disappearance of Lovinsky Pierre Antoine. Nothing. But it is par for the course and also very telling about the reprehensible Haitian economic elite’s and their wannabees’ mentality of wanting to be on the “winning team” no matter how criminal, unjust and stank that is!

Have these retards (bafyòti) ever heard of “Do the right thing” or, “Fight the Power-that-be!” Should we send them the soundtrack? Oh yeah, I forgot, Bill Clinton just told them yesterday at that Miami Conference “not to be hostile” when pointing out injustice and demanding justice and/or TPS! Yup, it’s that Louis Gates no, no. Can’t be Angry-While-Black thing! Besides, Clinton’s gonna bring foreign investments (Ndòki) to Haiti!

President Preval has outsourced the Haitian presidency to Bill Clinton to go begging for aid charity not justice and to bring more folks from the enslavement sector to Haiti. The plan for Haiti’s development is for Bill Clinton, per the dreams of Paul Collier/Ban Ki Moon, to entice more transnational companies, particularly big textile companies, perhaps like Coteminas from Brazil, to Haiti that shall feed off Haiti’s impoverishment and slave wages. (See also “Obama’s offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery“).

Uhmmm, the Haitians we know at HLLN wanna know, when is Santa Claus-Clinton and the US coup d’etat instigators going to respect the $2 billion REAL AND DIRECT INVESTMENT of Haitians from the Diaspora to Haiti that’s destroyed by the wannabees and Franco-PHONIES — moun ak kravat e bel ròb yo — and their corrupt Oligarchy in Haiti, and in the US.

To explore some tentative hypotheses of why there is little organized protest, we need to examine the historical-structural antecedents to the world economic depression. More specifically, we will focus on the social and political organizations and leadership of the working class, the transformation of the structure of labor and its relationship to the state and market. These social changes have to be located in the context of the successful ruling class socio-political struggles from the 1980’s, the destruction of the Communist welfare state, and the subsequent uncontested penetration of imperial capital in the former Communist countries. The conversion of Western Social Democratic parties to neo-liberalism, and the subordination of the trade unions to the neo-liberal state are seen as powerful contributing factors in diminishing working class representation and influence.

We will proceed by outlining the decline of labor organization, class struggle and class ideology in the context of the larger political-economic defeat and co-optation of anti-capitalist alternatives. The period of capitalist boom and bust leading up to the current world depression sets the stage for identifying the strategic structural and subjective determinants of working class passivity and impotence. The final section will bring into sharp focus the depth and scope of the problem of trade union and social movement weakness and their political consequences.

History of Economic Depression and Worker Revolts: US, Europe, Asia and Latin America

The social history of the 20th and early 21st Century’s economic crises and breakdowns is written large with working class and popular revolts, from the left and right. During the 1930’s the combined effects of the world depression and imperialist-colonial wars set in motion major uprisings in Spain (the Civil War), France (general strikes, Popular Front government), the US (factory occupations, industrial unionization), El Salvador, Mexico and Chile (insurrections, national-popular regimes) and in China (communist/nationalist, anti-colonial armed movements). Numerous other mass and armed uprising took place in response to the Depression in a great number of countries, far beyond the scope of this paper to cover.

The post-World War II period witnessed major working class and anti-colonial movements in the aftermath of the breakdown of European empires and in response to the great human and national sacrifices caused by the imperial wars. Throughout Europe, social upheavals, mass direct actions and resounding electoral advances of working class parties were the norm in the face of a ‘broken’ capitalist system. In Asia, mass socialist revolutions in China, Indo-China and North Korea ousted colonial powers and defeated their collaborators in a period of hyper-inflation and mass unemployment.

The cycle of recessions from the 1960’s to the early 1980’s witnessed a large number of major successful working class and popular struggles for greater control over the work place and higher living standards and against employer-led counter-offensives.
Economic Crises and Social Revolts in Latin America

Latin America experienced similar patterns of crises and revolts as the rest of the world during the World Economic Depression and the Second World War. During the 1930-40’s, aborted revolutionary upheavals and revolts took place in Cuba, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia. At the same time ‘popular front’ alliances of Communists, Socialists and Radicals governed in Chile and populist-nationalist regimes took power in Brazil (Vargas), Argentina (Peron) and Mexico (Cardenas).

As in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America also witnessed the rise of mass right-wing movements in opposition to the center-left and populist regimes in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and elsewhere – a recurrent phenomenon overlooked by most students of ‘social movements’.

The phenomenon of ‘crisis’ in Latin America is chronic, punctuated by ‘boom and bust’ cycles typical of volatile agro-mineral export economies and by long periods of chronic stagnation. Following the end of the Korean War and Washington’s launch of its global empire building project (mistakenly called ‘The Cold War’), the US engaged in a series of ‘hot wars’, (Korea- 1950-1953 and Indo-China- 1955-1975) and overt and clandestine coups d’etat (Iran and Guatemala – both in 1954); and military invasions (Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada and Cuba); all the while backing a series of brutal military dictatorships in Cuba (Batista), Dominican Republic (Trujillo), Haiti (Duvalier),Venezuela (Perez-Jimenez), Peru (Odria) among others.

Under the combined impact of dictatorial rule, blatant US intervention, chronic stagnation, deepening inequalities, mass poverty and the pillage of the public treasury, a series of popular uprisings, guerrilla revolts and general strikes toppled several US-backed dictatorships culminating in the victory of the social revolution in Cuba. In Brazil (1962-64), Bolivia (1952), Peru (1968-74), Nicaragua(1979-89) and elsewhere, nationalist presidents took power nationalizing strategic economic sectors, re-distributing land and challenging US dominance. Parallel guerrilla, peasant and workers movements spread throughout the continent from the 1960’s to the early1970’s. The high point of this ‘revolt against economic stagnation, imperialism, militarism and social exploitation/exclusion’ was the victory of the socialist government in Chile (1970-73).

The advance of the popular movements and the electoral gains however did not lead to a definitive victory (the taking of state power) except in Cuba, Grenada and Nicaragua nor did it resolve the crisis of capitalism (the key problem of chronic economic stagnation and dependence). Key economic levers remained in the hands of the domestic and foreign economic elites and the US retained decisive control over Latin America’s military and intelligence agencies.

The US backed military coups (1964/1971-76),US military invasions(Dominican Republic 1965 ,Grenada1983,Panama 1990,Haiti 1994,2005),surrogate mercenaries Nicaragua 1980-89 and right-wing civilian regimes (1982-2000/2005), reversed the advances of the social movements, overthrew nationalist/populist and socialist regimes and restored the predominance of the oligarchic troika: agro-mineral elite, the ‘Generals’ and the multinational corporations. US corporate dominance, oligarchic political successes and pervasive private pillage of national wealth accelerated and deepened the boom and bust process. However the savage repression, which accompanied the US-led counter-revolution and restoration of oligarch rule ensured that few large-scale popular revolts would occur, between the mid 1970’s to the beginning of the 1990’s – with the notable exception of Central America.

Civilian Rule, Neo-liberalism, Economic Stagnation and the New Social Movements

Prolonged stagnation, popular struggles and the willingness of conservative civilian politicians to conserve the reactionary structural changes implanted by the dictatorships, hastened the retreat of the military rulers. The advent of civilian rulers in Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina in the late 1980’s was accompanied by the rapid intensification of neo-liberal policies. This was spelled out in the ‘Washington Consensus’ and was integral to the President George H.W. Bush’s New World Order. While the new neo-liberal order failed to end stagnation it did facilitate the pillage of thousands of public enterprises, their privatization and de-nationalization. At the same time the massive outflow of profits, interest payments and royalties and the growing exploitation and impoverishment of the working people led to the growth of ‘new social movements’ throughout the 1990’s.

During the ascendancy of the military dictatorships and continuing under the neo-liberal regimes, while social movements and trade unions were suppressed, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) flourished. Billions of dollars flowed into the accounts of the NGOs from ‘private’ foundations. Later the World Bank and US and EU overseas agencies viewed the NGOs as integral to their counter-insurgency strategy.

The theorists embedded in the NGO-funded feminist, ecology, self-help groups and micro-industry organizations eschewed the question of structural changes, class and anti-imperialist struggles in favor of collaboration with existing state power structures. The NGO operatives referred to their organizations as the ‘new social movements’, which, in practice, worked hard to undermine the emerging class-based movements of anti-imperialists, Indians, peasants, landless workers and unemployed workers. These class-based mass movements had emerged in response to the imperial pillage of their natural resources and naked land grabs by powerful elites in the agro-mineral-export sectors with the full support of voracious neo-liberal regimes.

Toward the end of the 1990’s, neo-liberal pillage throughout Latin American had reached its paroxysm: Tens of billions of dollars were literally siphoned off and transferred, especially out of Ecuador, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina, to overseas banks. Over five thousand lucrative, successful state-owned enterprises were ‘privatized’ by the corrupt regimes at prices set far below their real value and into the hands of select private US and EU corporations and local regime cronies. The predictable economic collapse and crisis following the blatant looting of the major economies in Latin America provoked a wave of popular uprisings, which overthrew incumbent elected neo-liberal officials and administrations in Ecuador (three times), Argentina (three successful times) and Bolivia (twice). In addition, a mass popular uprising, in alliance with a constitutionalist sector of the military, restored President Chavez to power. During this period mass movements flourished and numerous center-left politicians, who claimed allegiance to these movements and denounced ‘neo-liberalism’, were elected president.

The deep economic crisis and repudiation of neo-liberalism marked the emergence of the social movements as major players in shaping the contours of Latin American politics. The principal emerging movements included a series of new social actors and the declining influence of the trade unions as the leading protagonist of structural change.

The Crisis of 1999-2003: Major Social Movements at the ‘End of Neo-liberalism’

Major social movements emerged in most of Latin America in response to the economic crisis of the 1990’s and early 2000’s and challenged neo-liberal ruling class control. The most successful were found in Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia.

Brazil: The Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST), with over 300,000 active members and over 350,000 peasant families settled in co-operatives throughout the country, represented the biggest and best organized social movement in Latin America. The MST built a broad network of supporters and allies in other social movements, like the urban Homeless Movement, the Catholic Pastoral Rural (Rural Pastoral Agency) and sectors of the trade union movement (CUT), as well as the left-wing of the Workers Party (PT) and progressive academic faculty and students. The MST succeeded through ‘direct action’ tactics, such as organizing mass ‘land occupations’, which settled hundreds of thousands of landless rural workers and their families on the fallow lands of giant latifundistas. They successfully put agrarian reform on the national agenda and contributed to the electoral victory of the putative center-left Workers Party presidential candidate Ignacio ‘Lula’ Da Silva in the 2002 elections.

Ecuador: The National Confederation of Indian and Nationalities in Ecuador (CONAIE) played a central role in the overthrow of two neo-liberal Presidents, Abdala Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in January 2000, implicated in massive fraud and responsible for Ecuador’s economic crisis of the 1990’s. In fact, during the January 2000 uprising, the leaders of CONAIE briefly occupied the Presidential Palace. Beginning in the late 1990’s CONAIE had resolved to form an electoral party ‘Pachacuti’, which would act as the ‘political arm’ of the movement. Pachacuti, in alliance with the rightist populist former military officer Lucio Gutierrez in the 2002 elections, briefly held several cabinet posts, including Foreign Relations and Agriculture. CONAIE’s and Pachacuti’s short-lived experience as a government movement and party was a political disaster. By the end of the first year, the Gutierrez regime allied with multi-national oil companies, the US State Department and the big agro-business firms, promoted a virulent form of neo-liberalism and forced the resignation of most CONAIE-backed officials. By the end of 2003, widespread discontent and internal divisions were exacerbated by an army of US and EU-funded NGOs, which infiltrated the Indian communities.

Venezuela: Major popular revolts in 1989 and 1992 culminated in the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999. Chavez proceeded to encourage mass popular mobilizations in support of referendums for constitutional reform. A US-backed alliance between the oligarchy and sectors of the military mounted a palace coup in April 2002, which lasted only 48 hours before being reversed by a spontaneous outpouring of over a million Venezuelans supported by constitutionalist soldiers in the armed forces. Subsequently, between December 2002 and February 2003, a ‘bosses’ lockout’ of the petroleum industry, designed to cripple the national economy, supported by the Venezuelan elite and led by senior officials in the PDVSA (state oil company), was defeated by the combined efforts of the rank and file oil workers with support from the urban popular classes. The failed US-backed assaults on Venezuelan democracy and President-elect Chavez radicalized the process of structural changes: Mass community-based organizations, new class-based trade union confederations and national peasant movements sprang up and the million-member Venezuelan Socialist Party was formed. Social movement activity and membership flourished, as the government extended its social welfare programs to include free universal public health programs via thousands of clinics, state-sponsored food markets selling essential food at subsidized prices in poor neighborhoods and the development of universal free public education including higher education. At the same time numerous enterprises in strategic economic sectors, such as steel, telecommunications, petroleum, food processing and landed estates, were nationalized.

While the ruling class continues to control certain key economic sectors and highly-paid officials in the state sector retain powerful levers over the economy, the Chavez government and the mass popular movements have maintained the initiative in advancing the struggle throughout the decade from the late 1990’s into the first decade of the new millennium.

The Venezuelan social movements retain their vigor in part because of the encouragement of Chavez’ leadership, but the movements are also held back by powerful reformist currents in the regime, which seek to convert the movements into transmission belts of state policy. The movement-state relationship is fluid and reflects the ebb and flow of the conflict and the threats emanating from the US-backed rightist organizations.

The regime-movement relationship deepened during the crisis period of 1999-2003 and was further strengthened by the rise in oil prices during the world commodity boom of 2003-2008. With the unfolding of the world economic crisis in late 2008-2009, the positive relationship between the state and the movements will be tested.

Bolivia: Bolivia has the highest density of militant social movements of any country in Latin America, including high levels of mine and factory worker participation, community and informal market vender organizations, Indian and peasant movements and public employee unions. The long years of military repression from the early 1970’s to the mid 1980’s weakened the trade unions and was followed by intense application of neo-liberal policies.

By the end of the 1990’s, new large-scale social movements emerged but the locus of activity shifted from the historically militant mining districts and factories to the ‘sub-proletariat’ or ‘popular classes’ engaged in informal, ‘marginal’ occupations, especially in cities like ‘El Alto’. ‘El Alto’, located on the outskirts of La Paz, is densely populated by recent migrants, displaced miners and impoverished Indians and peasants, and received few public services. The new nexus for direct action challenging the neo-liberal regimes emerged from the coca farmers and Indian communities in response to the brutal implementation of US-mandated programs suppressing coca cultivation and the displacement of small farmers in favor of large-scale, agro-business plantations. In the cities, public sector employees, led by teachers, students and factory health worker unions fought neo-liberal measures privatizing services, like water, and cutting the public budgets for education and health care.

The economic crises of the late 1990-2000’s led to major public confrontation in January 2003, followed by a popular revolt in October and insurrection centered in ‘El Alto’ and spread to La Paz and throughout the country. Before being driven from power, the Sanchez de Losada regime murdered nearly seventy community activists and leaders. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished Bolivians stormed the capital, La Paz, threatening to take state power. Only the intervention of the coca farmer leader and presidential hopeful, Evo Morales, prevented the mass seizure of the Presidential palace. Morales brokered a ‘compromise’ in which the neo-liberal Vice President Carlos Mesa was allowed to succeed to the Presidency in exchange for a vaguely agreed promise to discontinue the hated neo-liberal policies of his predecessor, Sanchez de Losada. The tenuous agreement between the social movements and the ‘new’ neo-liberal President survived for two years due to the moderating influence of Evo Morales.

In May-June 2005, a new wave of mass demonstrations filled the streets of La Paz with workers, peasants, Indians and miners forcing Carlos Mesa to resign. Once again, Evo Morales intervened and signed a pact with the Congress calling for national elections in December 2005 in exchange for calling off the protests and appointing a senior Supreme Court judge (Rodriguez) to act as interim President.

Morales diverted the mass social movements into his party’s campaign machinery, undercutting the autonomous direct action strategies, which had been so effective in overthrowing the two previous neo-liberal regimes. This resulted in his election as President in December 2005.

While the economic crisis abated with the boom in commodity prices, President Evo Morales’ social-liberal policies did little to reduce the gross income inequalities, the vast concentration of fertile land in a handful of plantation elite and the dispossession of a majority of Indian communities from their lands. Morales’ policies of forming joint ventures with foreign multinational gas, oil and mining companies did little to end the massive transfer of profits from Bolivia’s natural resources back to the ‘home offices’ of the MNCs. Nevertheless the Morales’ tepid ‘nationalist gestures led to a ‘political-economic’ confrontation with the US-backed Bolivian oligarchy, which was funded by their enormous private profits gained during the ‘commodity boom’.

Argentina: The strongest relationship between a severe economic crisis and a mass popular rebellion took place in Argentina in December 19-20, 2001 and continued throughout 2002.

The conditions for the economic collapse were building up in the 1990s during the two terms of President Carlos Menem. His neo-liberal regime was marked by the corrupt ‘bargain basement’ sale of the most lucrative and strategic public enterprises in all sectors of the economy. The entire financial sector of Argentina was de-regulated, de-nationalized, dollarized and opened up to the worst speculative abuses. The national economic edifice, weakened by the massive privatization policies, was further undermined by rampant corruption and gross pillage of the public treasury. Menem’s policies continued under his successor, President De la Rua, who presided over the banking crisis and the subsequent collapse of the entire national economy, the loss of billions of dollars of private savings and pension funds, a thirty percent unemployment rate and the most rapid descent into profound poverty among the working and middle classes in Argentine history.

In December 2001, the people of Buenos Aires staged a massive popular uprising in front of the Presidential palace with the demonstrators taking over the Congress. They ousted President De la Rua and subsequently three of his would-be presidential successors in a matter of weeks. Hundreds of thousands of organized, unemployed workers blocked the highways and formed community-based councils. Impoverished, downwardly mobile middle class employees and bankrupt shopkeepers, professionals and pensioners formed a vast array of neighborhood assemblies and communal councils to debate proposals and tactics. Banks throughout the country were stormed by millions of irate depositors demanding the restitution of their savings. Over 200 factories, which had been shut down by their owners, were taken over by their workers and returned to production. The entire political class was discredited and the popular slogan throughout the country was: ‘!Que se vayan todos!’ (‘Out with all politicians!’). While the popular classes controlled the street in semi-spontaneous movements, the fragmented radical-left organizations were unable to coalesce to formulate a coherent organization and strategy for state power.

After two years of mass mobilizations and confrontation, the movements, facing an impasse in resolving the crisis, turned toward electoral politics and elected center-left Peronist Kirchner in the 2003 Presidential campaign.

Low Intensity Social Movements: Peru, Paraguay, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Central America, Haiti and Mexico

The entire Latin American continent and the neighboring regions witnessed the significant growth of social movement activity of greater or lesser scope. What differentiated these movements from their counterparts in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela was the absence of political challenges and regime change and the limited scope of their social action.

Nevertheless significant outbreaks of mass popular movements raised fundamental challenges to the reigning neo-liberal hegemony.

In Haiti, a mass popular rebellion to reinstate the democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been taken hostage and flown into exile by a joint US-EU-Canadian military operation, was brutally repressed by a multinational mercenary force led by a Brazilian general. Subsequent massacres in crowded slums by the occupying troops aborted the resurgence of the popular ‘Lavelas’ movement protesting the foreign imposition of neo-liberal ‘privatization’ and austerity measures.

Mexico witnessed a series of localized rebellions and mass uprisings against the neo-liberal regimes dominating Mexico. In 1994, the Zapatista National Liberal Army (EZLN), based in the Indian communities of rural Chiapas, rose and temporarily succeeded in gaining control of several towns and cities. With the entry of many thousands of Mexican Federal troops, and in the absence of a wider network of support, the Zapatistas withdrew to their jungle and mountain bases. An unstable truce was declared, frequently violated by the government, in which an isolated EZLN continued to exist confined to a remote area in the state of Chiapas. In Oaxaca, an urban rebellion, backed by trade unions, teachers and popular classes in the capital city and surrounding countryside, organized a popular assembly (comuna) and briefly created a situation of ‘dual power’ before being suppressed by the reactionary neo-liberal governor of the state using ‘death squads’ and Mexican troops. Faced with the repressive power of the state, the insurgent popular movements shifted toward the electoral process and succeeded in electing center-left Andres Manual Lopez Obrador in 2006 in the midst of the neo-liberal economic debacle. Their victory was short-lived, with the election results, overturned through massive fraud in the final tally of the votes. Subsequent peaceful protests involving millions of Mexicans eventually lost steam and the movement dissipated.

In Colombia, mass peasant, trade union and Indian protests challenged the neo-liberal Pastrana regime (1998-2002) while the major guerrilla movements (FARC/ELN) advanced toward the capital city. Fruitless peace negotiations, broken off under US pressure and a $5 billion dollar US counter-insurgency program, dubbed ‘Plan Colombia’, heightened political polarization and intensified paramilitary death-squad activity. With the election of Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian regime decimated peasant, trade union and human rights movements as it advanced its neo-liberal policies.

The political effects of the economic crisis at the end of the 1990’s, which had precipitated social movement activity throughout the hemisphere, led to brutal repression in Haiti, Mexico and Colombia in order for the neo-liberal regimes to continue their policies.

In several other Latin American countries, namely Peru and Paraguay, as well as in Central America, powerful rural-based peasant and Indian movements engaged in rural road blockages and land occupations against their governments’ neo-liberal ‘free trade’ agreements with the US. Since these rural movements lacked nation-wide support, especially from the urban centers, their struggles failed to make a significant impact even as their economies crumbled under neo-liberal policies.

Social Movements in the Time of the Commodity Boom

The sharp rise of agricultural and mineral commodity prices between 2003-2008, along with the election of center-left politicians, had a major impact on the most active and dynamic social movements.

In Brazil the election of Lula De Silva (2002-2006) from the putatively center-left Workers Party was backed by all the major social movements, including the MST (Landless Rural Workers Movement) under the mistaken assumption that he would accelerate progressive structural changes like land re-distribution. Instead, Da Silva embraced the entire neo-liberal agenda of his predecessor, President Cardoso, including widespread privatization and tight fiscal policies, which, with the rise of agro-mineral prices, led to a narrowly focused agro-mineral export strategy centered exclusively on large agro-business and mineral extractive elites to the detriment of small businesses and rural producers. The MST’s efforts to influence Da Silva over the past decade(2003-2009) were futile – as state, local and federal governments criminalized the movement’s direct action tactics of land occupation. Lula’s policy of granting subsistence federal food allowances to the extremely poor and his success at co-opting movement leaders, especially from the huge trade union federations, neutralized the landless peasants and organized workers’ capacity to protest and strike. Lula’s policies isolated the MST from its ‘natural’ urban allies in the labor movement.

Lula’s right-turn and the vast increase in export revenues from high commodity prices led to increased social expenditures and reduced the level of activity and support for the MST in its struggle for agrarian reform. While retaining its mass base and continuing its land occupations, the MST no longer had a strategic political ally in its quest for social transformation. Subsequently it pursued more moderate reforms to avoid confrontation with the Lula regime, to which it still offered ‘critical support’.

In Argentina, the massive wave of direct action social movements subsided with the election of Kirchner (2003-2008) and the 7% economic growth rate stimulated by the commodity boom and the recovery from the dramatic economic melt-down of 2001-2002. With the recovery of employment and the return of their savings, the middle class assemblies rapidly disappeared. Kirchner offered subsidies to the unemployed and co-opted their leaders, which led to a sharp reduction of road blockages and membership in the militant unemployed workers organizations. Kirchner won over part of the human rights movement with his policies, which included his public purge of some of the more notorious military and police officials and the granting of subsidies to certain sectors of the human rights movement, including the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. With the decline of the radicalized movements of 1999-2002, the economic recovery of 2003-2008 led to a partial recovery of trade union activism, whose demands were mostly economic, focusing on the recovery of the workers’ wages and benefits lost during the systemic crisis.

In Bolivia, the economic boom, which began under the neo-liberal regime of Carlos Mesa continued under ‘leftist’ populist Evo Morales. He quickly moderated movement demands as he moved to the center-left. As an alternative to the social movement platform calling for the nationalization of the principal resource sectors exploited by multi-national corporations, Morales promoted ‘joint ventures’ which he demagogically claimed were ‘nationalization without expropriation’. Likewise he answered peasant and Indian demands for agrarian reform by opening up mostly uncultivatable public lands in the Amazon to the landless peasants. By the same token, he protected the most fertile land in the largest privately owned plantations from expropriation by exempting private land, which was classified as performing a ‘social function’. Avoiding structural change, Morales was able to use the windfall of state revenues from the high prices of Bolivian minerals and gas to co-opt movement leaders, provide incremental increases in the minimum wage, finance subsidies to Indian communities, encourage legal, political rights and recognize indigenous jurisdiction over their local communities.

Morales retained his leadership of the coca farmers union and, through his Movement to Socialist Party (MAS), exercised hegemony over the major community-based movements. His close ties with Presidents Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela set him in radical opposition to Washington’s interventionist policies and its supporters among the five rightist-controlled provinces centered in Santa Cruz. The extreme right gained ascendancy in the latter region and launched a violent racist frontal assault on the Morales government, polarizing the countryside while guaranteeing Morales the continued mass support among the popular classes and movements throughout the country.

In Ecuador, the powerful Indian movement (CONAIE) and its allies in the trade unions supported the neo-liberal regime of Lucio Gutierrez and suffered a severe decline in their power, support and organizational cohesion. The recovery has been slow, hindered by interventions of numerous US/EU funded NGOs.

With the demise of the established social movements, a new urban-based ‘citizens’ movement’ led by Rafael Correa overthrew the venal, corrupt, neo-liberal Gutierrez regime and led the electorate to vote Correa into power in both 2006 and 2009. Correa adapted center-left political positions, financing incremental wage and salary increases and state subsidized cheap credit to small and medium size businesses. He adopted a nationalist position on foreign debt payments and the termination of US military basing rights in Manta. The boom in mining and petroleum prices and ties with oil-rich Venezuela facilitated President Correa’s capacity to fund programs to secure support among the Andean bourgeoisie and the popular classes.

In Venezuela, the economic boom, namely the tripling of world oil prices, facilitated Venezuela’s economic recovery after the crisis caused by the opposition coup and the bosses’ lockout (2002-2003). As a result, from 2004 to 2008 Venezuela grew by nearly 9% a year. The Chavez government was able to generously fund a whole series of progressive socio-economic changes that enhanced the strength and attraction of pro-government social movements. The social movements played an enormous role in defeating opposition referendums, which had called for the impeachment of the President. Peasant organizations were prominent in pressuring recalcitrant bureaucrats in the Chavez government to implement the new agrarian laws calling for land distribution. Trade union militants organized strikes and demonstrations and played a major role in the nationalization of the steel industry. Given the vast increase in state resources, the Chavez government was able to both compensate the owners of the expropriated firms and meet workers’ demands for social ownership.

Summary

The economic boom and the ascendancy of center-left governments led to incremental increases in living standards, a decline of unemployment and the co-optation of some movement leaders — resulting in the decline of radical movement activity and the revival of traditional ‘pragmatic’ trade union moderates. During the economic boom and the rise of the center-left, the only major mass mobilization took the form of right wing movements determined to destabilize the center-left governments in Bolivia and Venezuela.

A comparison of the social movements in countries where they played a major role in political and social change (Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil and Bolivia) and movements in countries where they were marginalized reveals several crucial differences. First of all, the differences are not found in terms of the quantity of public protests, militant direct actions or number of participants. For example, if one adds up the number of social movement protests in Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Central America, they might equal or even surpass the social actions in Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia. What was different and most politically significant was the quality of the mass action. Wherever they were of marginal significance, the organizations were fragmented, dispersed and without significant national leadership or structure and without any political leverage on the institutions of national power. In contrast, influential social movements operated as national organizations, which coordinated social and political action, centralized and capable of reaching the nerve centers of political power – the capital cities (La Paz, Buenos Aires, Quito and to a lesser degree Sao Paolo). To one degree or another, the high impact social movements combined rural and urban movements, had political allies in the party system and bridged cultural barriers (linking indigenous and mestizo popular classes).

World Economic Crisis and Social Movements – 2008 Onward

Beginning in late 2008 and continuing in 2009 the world economic crisis spread across Latin America. The crisis came later to Latin America and with less initial severity than in the US or EU. Because it is an ongoing process, the full socio-political implications and economic impact is still far from clear. What we can observe is that, at least initially, the current crisis has not provoked anything like the mass upheavals and the surge of radical social movements that we witnessed during the crisis beginning in 2001.

Gross Domestic Product
($ Millions of dollars, constant 2000 prices)
Annual growth rates
Country	2007	2008	2009*
Argentina	8.7	7.0	1.5
Bolivia	4.6	6.1	2.5
Brazil	5.7	5.1	-0.8
Chile	4.7	3.2	1.0
Colombia	7.5	2.6	0.6
Costa Rica	7.8	2.6	3.0
Cuba	7.3	4.3	1.0
Ecuador	2.5	6.5	1.0
El Salvador	4.7	2.5	-2.0
Guatemala	6.3	4.0	1.0
Haiti	3.4	1.3	2.0
Honduras	6.3	4.0	2.5
Mexico	3.3	1.3	-7.0
Nicaragua	3.2	3.2	1.0
Panama	11.5	9.2	2.5
Paraguay	6.8	5.8	3.0
Peru	8.9	9.8	2.0
Dominican Republic	8.5	5.3	1.0
Uruguay	7.6	8.9	1.0
Venezuela	8.9	4.8	0.3
Sub-total Latin America	5.8	4.2	-1.9
Caribbean	3.4	1.5	-1.2
Latin American and the Caribbean	5.8	4.2	-1.9

* Projections
Source: ECLAC

If anything, we have seen a surge of right-wing movements and electoral organizations in countries, like Argentina, and a US-backed right-wing military coup backed by the rightist business associations in Honduras, and the continued ‘pragmatic’ behavior of mass social movements in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador.

The only exception is in Peru where the organized Indian communities in the Amazonian region have engaged in armed mass confrontations with the US-backed, right-wing regime of Alan Garcia. The Amazonian Indians responded to a series of Government decrees, which handed mineral and gas exploitation rights on Indian lands to foreign mining and energy corporations. From a historical perspective, the struggle was ‘conservative’, in so far as it pitted indigenous communities defending traditional use and ownership of lands and resources against the modern economic predators and the the neo-liberal state.

The Lumpen-Bourgeoisie: The Triple Alliance of the Neo-Liberal State, Narco-traffickers and the Unemployed Poor

The least studied, but most dynamic, and, possibly best organized social movement in Latin America today is the right-wing drug trafficking movement. Headed by a powerful narco-bourgeoisie, with strong ties to the military and neo-liberal state apparatus and with armed lumpen-cadres drawn from the urban unemployed and landless peasantry, the ‘Lumpen’ Movement has created a powerful geographic and social presence in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere.

It was the agrarian neo-liberal policies that prepared the ground for the ‘mass base’ of the rightist narco-movement. The promotion of mechanized agro-export agriculture in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Central America uprooted millions. State terror and paramilitary death squads drove millions of peasant families from the land and into urban slums. The large-scale importation of cheap, subsidized agricultural produce from the US wiped out many thousands of small-scale family farms. The stagnant of manufacturing sector was unable to absorb the migrants into labor-intensive work. This created massive numbers of young rural unemployed landless and urban workers, who could be either recruits for progressive social movements or recruits for the narco-industry. Cultivating coca and opium, refining and smuggling the drugs and soldiering for the drug lords provided a livelihood for these desperate young men and women. The deep economic crisis and stagnation of the 1990’s and early 2000’s created a large mass of young unemployed and under-employed workers in the cities ripe for employment by the narco-gangs who paid a living wage for an often deadly occupation.

The links between right-wing political parties, banking, business and landowner associations has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout Latin America. In Colombia, drug traffickers have become large landowners after their death squads devastated peasant communities suspected of supporting leftists or progressive organizations. ‘Sicarios’ or ‘hit-men’ are mostly young men from working or peasant class background who ‘work’ for business leaders and multi-national corporations as assassins. They have killed hundreds of trade union and peasant and Indian leaders each year in Colombia alone. Over a third of the members of the Colombian Congress, the principle backers of President Uribe, have been financed by the drug cartels. Uribe has long-term ties with prominent narco-traffickers and death-squad militia leaders.

In Mexico, drug traffickers have recruited widely among the impoverished peasants. In many Mexican states the narcos have purchased the services of thousands of government officials from top to bottom. In the absence of employment and a social safety-net, many of the poor find work in the narco-trade. Narco-traffickers have established alliances and business associations with upper class financial groups engaging in joint ‘philanthropic’ activities, such as handing out cash and delivering needed services to the poor. Narco-traffickers eventually wash their illegal earnings through major banks in the US, Canada and Europe and then invest in real estate, tourist complexes and landed properties.

Narco-trafficker organizations and death squads have worked closely with rightwing movements in Sta. Cruz (Bolivia), with rightist political parties in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as in Mexico and Colombia.

The ‘lumpenization’ process operates via two routes: In some cases, young unemployed males are directly recruited via neighborhood organizations; in other cases the dispossessed, bankrupt and downwardly mobile farmers and long-term unemployed workers are gradually forced into the ‘illegal’ labor market.

The long-term, large-scale process of stagnation, despite the periods of export growth, marginalize the rural poor and accelerate their impoverishment without generating compensatory stable, urban employment paying a living wages. The ‘lumpenization’ of these displaced, marginalized peasants and workers, produced by the crisis and class polarization, is accompanied by the rise of a ‘lumpen culture’ with its own hierarchical structures, where the few at the ‘top’ develop ties to the economic and state elite and the masses at the ‘bottom’ aspire to a degenerate kind of middle-class consumerist life-style.

By the first decade of the new millennium, the rightist lumpen-narco movement far exceeded the progressive popular movements in terms of power and influence in Mexico, Colombia, Central America and some countries in the Caribbean, like Jamaica. The relationship between the ‘legal’ rightist and the ‘narco’ rightist movements is one of collaboration and conflict: They join forces to oppose powerful rural and trade union movements and progressive electoral regimes. The lumpen-narcos provide the ‘shock troops’ to assassinate progressive leaders, including elected officials and to terrorize supporters among the peasantry and urban poor. On the other hand, violent conflict between the rightists can break out at any time, especially when the lumpen-elite encroach on the state prerogatives, business interests, ties with imperial drug enforcement agencies and raise questions about the legitimacy of the bourgeois class.

Latin America’s Social Movements and the Economic Recession/Depression

Economic crises have multiple and diverse impacts on the popular classes and social movements.

The profound economic crisis of the 1990’s and first years of 2000 radicalized the popular classes and led to widespread ‘high impact’ protests and national rebellions, which overthrew incumbent neo-liberal regimes and replaced them with ‘center-left’ regimes. At the same time the social changes, implicit in the neo-liberal crisis, led to a downwardly mobile urban and rural sector. This formed the basis for the growth of dynamic leftist social movement led by popular mass-based leaders and rightist movements led by lumpen-narco chiefs and supported by the economic elites. The conservative, far-right confronted popular social movements from positions in the state and through the military and para-military death squads.

The commodity boom and the ascendancy of the ‘center-left’ regimes led to the ‘moderation’ of demands from below in the face of cooptation from above. Large-scale job creation and poverty programs, cheap credit and incremental wage and salary increases all contributed to moderating mass politics. The trade unions re-emerged as central actors and collective bargaining replaced mass direct action. Rural movements engaged in militant struggle were relatively isolated. The key political factor in this period was the demobilization of the popular classes, the decline of the direct action movements and the restoration of the power of the business, land-owning and mining elite based on their strengthened economic position. The rejuvenated Right took the lead in directing their own ‘direct action’ movements in Bolivia, Argentina and Central America.

As the crisis of 2008-2009 unfolded, the progressive movements were slow to respond, having been ‘under the tent’ of the center-left electoral regimes. Since these regimes were now being held responsible for the fallout of the commodity crash, the left social movements were in a weak position and unable to pose any radical alternatives.

It is important to remember that the world economic crisis had hit the ‘North’ (US/EU) earlier and harder than in Latin America. In Latin American, the social impact was weaker – at first. Unemployment grew mainly during the last months of 2008. The gradual unfolding of the crisis contrasted with the system-wide crash of the late 1990’s-2002, which precipitated mass rebellions. In addition, as a consequence of the earlier crisis, capital and finance controls had been imposed that limited the spread of the toxic assets and financial crisis from the US to Latin America.

Moreover, Latin American countries are diversifying their trade, especially toward Asia including China, which continues to grow at 8% a year. Diversification and financial controls limited the impact of the US financial melt-down on the Latin American economies. In addition, the early ‘stimulus’ measures, taken in response to the first signs of the crisis, had the effect of temporarily ameliorating the impact of the global recession/depression on Latin America.

Nevertheless as the depression deepens in the North, Latin America’s trade has plunged, and the region has fallen into negative growth. As a result, unemployment is growing in both the export sectors as well as in production for the domestic economy. In response, the right-wing parties and leaders blame the center-left regimes. Moves are underway in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador to oust these regimes through elections or through coups, backed by US President Obama’s ‘rollback’ global strategy. The July 2009 coup in Honduras, covertly backed from the strategic US military base in the country, is the first sign that Washington is moving its military client to overthrow the new independent ‘center-left’ regimes in the region. This is particularly true among the Central American and Caribbean countries linked with Venezuela in the new integration programs, such as ALBA and PetroCaribe.

The first manifestations of progressive mass popular protests in the current economic recession are not directly related to the economic decline. In Peru, the indigenous Amazonian communities organized militant road blockages and confrontations with the military resulting in over one hundred dead and wounded. This mass movement developed in response to the Peruvian government’s granting concessions of mining exploitation rights to foreign multi-nationals, an infringement of the rights of the indigenous people to their lands in the Amazonian region. Demonstrations in solidarity with the Amazonian Indians occurred in most cities, including Lima. The Congress, fearing a mass uprising, temporarily canceled the concessions. This was a major victory for the indigenous communities. Moreover, the success of the Amazonian Indian communities has detonated widespread sustained strikes and protests in most of the major cities of Peru, in response to economic decline resulting from falling commodity prices.

The sustained popular struggle in Honduras is in response to the military coup overthrowing President Zelaya, a moderate reformer pursuing an independent foreign policy. Led by the urban public sector trade unions and peasant movements, the struggle has combined democratic, nationalist and populist demands.

Apart from these two mass popular movements, the economic crisis has yet to evoke mass radical rebellions, like those which took place during earlier crises between 2000-2003. We can posit several possible explanations or hypotheses for the contrasting responses of the mass movements to economic crises.

Hypotheses

1. The full impact of the world crisis has yet to hit the popular classes – it began late in

2008 and only began to register increased unemployment in the first quarter of 2009.

2. The current crisis, at first, did not hit the lower middle classes, public employees and skilled workers. It has been highly segmented, thus weakening cross class solidarity and alliances present in earlier crises.

3. Unlike the previous period, the crisis takes place in many countries, which are ruled by ‘center left’ regimes with an organized social base backed by the social movements. These regime-movement linkages neutralize mass protests, out of fear of a return to the hard right.

4. The mass movements on the left have responded to the crisis with relative passivity – in part because the governments have intervened with economic stimulus measures and some social ameliorative policies. The continuation and deepening of the crisis and the inadequate coverage of moderate public interventions could eventually lead to the resurgence of mass struggles.

5. The increasing economic vulnerability of the incumbent center-left regimes and the relative passivity of the progressive social movements has opened political space and opportunities for rightwing mass mobilizations, combining electoral and street politics to build a base for a return to power.

6. The crisis will likely accelerate the lumpenization process, as long-term unemployment sets in and if alternate movements fail to organize the chronically unemployed in consequential struggles.

7. As the bourgeoisie and its political supporters find few legitimate sources for profiteering available, they will likely serve as intermediaries and ‘protectors’ of the narco-traffickers and other criminal syndicates and rely on them to eliminate left social movement leaders and activists.

8. The rise of the ‘lumpen-Right’ may lead to a virtual ‘dual power’ situation in which legitimate and illegitimate power configurations cooperate in repressing social movements and compete for influence.

9. The relative passivity of the social movements is likely a transitory phenomenon, influenced by the convergence of circumstances. If the crisis deepens and extends over time and rightist regimes return to power, recent past historical experience strongly suggests that the massive increase in poverty and unemployment, combined with repressive rightist regimes, could lead to mass rebellions on the part of the previously ‘passive’ popular classes.

Also in June, a military coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and deported to Costa Rica on June 28. Initial clashes between troops loyal to the coup plotters and Zelaya supporters left at least one person dead and 30 injured. On July 30, as many as 150 people were arrested, with dozens injured, when soldiers and police attacked demonstrators with tear gas, water cannon, clubs and gunfire. One of the wounded, a 38-year-old teacher, was left fighting for his life after being shot in the head. Journalists reporting from the scene were also attacked.¹

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, describes how the Honduran people have been “risking their lives, confronting the army’s bullets, beatings, and arbitrary arrests and detentions”. And yet the US media has reported this repression “only minimally, with the major print media sometimes failing even to mention the censorship there.”²

Our own media database search (August 3) of national UK press editorials mentioning the word ’Iran’ over the previous five weeks delivered 26 results. A search for editorials containing the word ’Honduras’ delivered 2 results. In fact, there has been a single leading article on the Honduran crisis (in the Independent on June 30 — see below). Over the same period, a search for UK national press articles mentioning ‘Iran’ gave 848 results; for ‘Honduras’ 96 results. This is not hard science, but it does indicate comparative levels of UK media coverage of the two issues.

Weisbrot notes that the Honduran coup is “a recurrent story” in Latin America, pitting “a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, but also the president.”³

Mainstream outlets claim the coup marks a worrying return to earlier regional trends. A July 23 BBC “Q&A“ on Honduras commented:

“Coups and political upheaval were common in Central America for much of the 20th Century, and until the mid-1980s the military dominated political life in Honduras. Mr Zelaya’s removal is the first in the region since 1993…”⁴

This is false. In April 2002, a US-backed military coup briefly ousted Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez until mass protests returned him to power. A Guardian article that month reported that the “US ‘gave the nod’ to Venezuelan coup.” Several weeks prior to the coup attempt, US government officials had met the business leaders who assumed power after Chávez was arrested. General Rincon, the Venezuelan army’s chief of staff, had visited the Pentagon the previous December and met senior officials.⁵

A 2004 military coup forced Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to flee to Central Africa. Aristide told the Associated Press that he was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces.⁶ Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote:

“Haiti, again, is ablaze… Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly.”⁷

The BBC Q&A noted: “The role of the US is key, as it is Honduras’s biggest trading partner.”

Curiously, the article failed to mention that the US has its only Central American military base in Honduras. In fact the Honduran military is armed, trained and advised by Washington in a relationship that is deep and enduring. The two generals who led the coup were both trained at the US School of the Americas (SOA) based in Georgia (SOA is now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC). Commander-in-chief Romeo Vasquez, head of the Honduran military, received training at SOA between 1976 and 1984. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the air force, studied there in 1996. Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, a Honduran army lawyer who also trained at SOA, has admitted the illegality of the military’s kidnapping of Zelaya. He told the Miami Herald: “It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That’s impossible.”²

Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of the Americas Watch, described SOA last month as “this school of assassins, this school of coups, this school with so much blood on its hands.”⁸

Weisbrot notes that Washington’s response to the Honduran coup is guided by conflicting interests: “powerful lobbyists such as Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff, who are close to [Hillary] Clinton and are leading the coup government’s strategy; the Republican right, including members of Congress who openly support the coup; and new cold warriors of both parties in the Congress, the state department and White House who see Zelaya as a threat because of his co-operation with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and other left governments.”⁹

This explains Washington’s ambiguous reaction. The Obama administration’s first statement did not criticise the coup, and the state department continues to refuse to describe it as a coup. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly refused to say that ‘restoring the democratic order’ in Honduras requires the return of Zelaya. It took three weeks for the White House to threaten to cut off aid.

Roger Burbach, Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas, writes:

U.S. efforts to restore Zelaya have been quite tepid compared to other countries. While many ambassadors have been withdrawn, the US head diplomat Hugo Llorens, appointed by George W. Bush, remains in place. There are reports that he may have even given the green light to the coup plotters, or at least did nothing to stop them. And while the World Bank has suspended assistance, the State Department merely warns that $180 million in US economic aid may be in jeopardy. Most importantly the United States refuses to freeze the bank accounts and cancel the visas of the coup leaders, measures that Zelaya and other Latin American governments have urged Washington to do.¹⁰

Recently, US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley, commented:

We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.¹¹

The Independent: Doing Democracy A Service

In their June 30 leading article, the Independent’s editors, led by pro-Iraq war editor Roger Alton (formerly editor of the Observer), opened with this extraordinary paragraph:

The ousting of the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya by the country’s military at the weekend has been condemned by many members of the international community as an affront to democracy. But despite a natural distaste for any military coup, it is possible that the army might have actually done Honduran democracy a service.¹²

By contrast, many experienced observers have warned that the coup represents an extreme threat to prospects for democracy in Honduras and the region. The Independent explained its reasoning:

President Zelaya was planning a referendum to give him power to alter the constitution. But the proposed alterations were perilously vague, with opponents accusing Mr Zelaya of wanting to scrap the four-year presidential term limit. The country’s courts and congress had called the vote illegal.

This is an increasingly familiar turn of events in emerging democracies: an elected leader, facing the end of his time in office, decides that the country cannot do without him and resorts to dubious measures to retain power. The Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, won a referendum in February altering his country’s constitution and abolishing term limits. He now talks about ruling beyond 2030.

On the same day, in the same newspaper, Heather Berkman, a Latin America associate at the global political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, wrote:

Manuel Zelaya has taken a few unexpected turns to the left during his tenure as President of Honduras, deviating from its political norms. This time, it looks like he may have gone too far… Mr Zelaya can be blamed for staging a coup that, in turn, provoked a counter-coup.”¹³

Recall that these articles appeared in the Independent, widely considered to be at the left of the mainstream media spectrum.

Weisbrot argues that in fact there was no way for Zelaya to extend his rule even if the referendum had been held and passed:

The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country’s constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis – although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.²

Nikolas Kozloff, journalist and author of Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left, traces the deeper sources of opposition to the Honduran president. Around 2007-2008, the initially conservative Zelaya began to embrace “the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas.” Kozloff explains:

It’s Chávez’s answer to the US-imposed free trade agreements in the region. And Zelaya had come out in support of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. And so, this set him at odds with the United States, and there was a history of friction between the US and Zelaya leading up to the coup.”¹⁴

As the Independent editorial makes clear, the mainstream offers a different version of events. Kozloff comments:

I think if you were just reading the reports in the mainstream media, you might get the impression that this coup is just about term limits in Honduras and it’s just a conflict over whether Zelaya will be able to extend his constitutional mandate of one four-year term.

The BBC, for example, reported: “Zelaya was sent into exile on 28 June amid a power struggle over his plans for constitutional change.”⁴

The Times wrote: “His opponents say that he wanted to overturn term limits and extend his power like leftist regional allies such as President Chávez of Venezuela…”¹⁵

Kozloff comments: “And my point is that there is an ideological component to this coup… the first salvo against the Honduran elite was his moves to raise the minimum wage by 60 percent… I mean, this is a country where you have these maquiladora assembly plants, and the Honduran elite were, to say the least, displeased by the moves.”

In a rare exception to his newspaper’s wretched performance, Johann Hari wrote in the Independent of how Zelaya had “increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and ‘the rich must pay their share’.

“The tiny elite at the top – who own 45 per cent of the country’s wealth – are horrified. They are used to having Honduras run by them, for them.”¹⁶

As Hari noted: “It was always inevitable that the people at the top would fight back to preserve their unearned privilege.”

Prior to the coup, US multinational Chiquita expressed its concern at Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, which they said would reduce profits and increase export costs. Chiquita appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage policy. Kozloff told the website Democracy Now!: “what I find really interesting is that Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte…”¹⁷

Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, when he played a key role in coordinating US terror attacks on Nicaragua by means of “the Contras”, a mercenary army. Negroponte is complicit in massive human rights abuses committed by the Honduran military.

Throughout the twentieth century, Chiquita, then known as United Fruit Company, was associated with “some of the most backward, retrograde political and economic forces in Central America and indeed outside of Central America in such countries as Colombia”, Kozloff notes. In 1954, United Fruit played a leading role in the US-backed coup that ousted Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala.

Kozloff reports that the current US Attorney General, Eric Holder, was Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton. Holder defended Chiquita and its actions in Colombia when Chiquita was allied to right-wing paramilitary death squads in the 1990s and was found guilty of paying off paramilitaries. Holder was Chiquita’s lead counsel.

We searched national UK newspapers (August 3) for articles containing the words ‘Honduras’ and (separately) ‘Chiquita,’ ‘John Negroponte’ and ’Eric Holder’ since June 28; all searches produced zero results.

1. Bill Van Auken, ‘Honduran coup regime launches brutal crackdown,’ August 1, 2009, World Socialist Web Site.
2. Weisbrot, ‘Hondurans Resist Coup, Will Need Help From Other Countries,’ ZNet, July 9, 2009.
3. Weisbrot, ‘Does the US back the Honduran coup?’ The Guardian, July 1, 2009.
4. ‘Q&A: Crisis in Honduras,’ BBC website, July 23, 2009.
5. Julian Borger and Alex Bellos, ‘US “gave the nod” to Venezuelan coup,’ The Guardian, April 17, 2002.
6. Eliott C. McLaughlin, Associated Press, March 1, 2004.
7. Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti,’ The Nation, February 28, 2004.
8. ’Generals Who Led Honduras Military Coup Trained at the School of the Americas,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009.
9. Weisbrot, ‘U.S.- Brokered Mediation Has Failed – It’s Time for Latin America to Take Charge,’ ZNet, August 1, 2009.
10. Burbach, ‘Obama and Hillary Nix Change in Honduras,’ ZNet, July 27, 2009.
11. James Suggett, ‘Honduras Coup,’ ZNet, July 28, 2009.
12. Leading article, ‘Guns and democracy,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009.
13. Berkman, ‘Zelaya pushed,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009.
14. ‘What’s Behind the Honduras Coup? Tracing Zelaya’s Trajectory,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009.
15. Hannah Strange, ‘Deposed President “can never return”,’ The Times, July 3, 2009.
16. Hari, ‘The other 9/11 returns to haunt Latin America,’ The Independent, July 3, 2009.
17. ‘From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America,’ Democracy Now!, July 21, 2009.

Pere Jean-Juste was a Jesus-like revolutionary. In jail and out, he preached liberation of the poor, release of prisoners, human rights for all, and a fair distribution of wealth. A big muscular man with a booming voice and a frequent deep laugh, he wore a brightly colored plastic rosary around his neck and carried another in his pocket. Jailed for nearly a year in Haiti by the U.S. supported coup government which was trying to silence him, Amnesty International called him a Prisoner of Conscience.

Jean-Juste was a scourge to the unelected coup governments of Haiti, who served at the pleasure, and usually the direction, of the U.S. government. He constantly challenged both the powers of Haiti and the U.S. to stop killing and starving and imprisoning the poor. In the U.S. he fought against government actions which deported black Haitians while welcoming Cubans and Nicaraguans and others. In Haiti he called for democracy and respect and human rights for the poor.

Pere Jean-Juste was sometimes called the most dangerous man in Haiti. That was because he was not afraid to die. His computer screen saver was a big blue picture of Mary, the mother of Jesus. “Every day I am ready to meet her.” He once told me, when death threats came again: “I will not stop working for justice because of their threats. I am looking forward to heaven.”

Jean-Juste was a literally a holy terror to the unelected powers of Haiti and the elected but unaccountable powers of the U.S. Every single day, in jail or out, he said Mass, read the psalms and jubilantly prayed the rosary. In Port au Prince he slept on the floor of his church, St. Claire, which provided meals to thousands of starving children and adults every week. In prison, he organized local nuns to bring him hundreds of plastic rosaries which he gave to fellow prisoners and then led them in daily prayer.

When Pere Jean-Juste began to speak, to preach, about justice for the poor and the wrongfully imprisoned, restless crowds drew silent. Listening to him preach was like feeling the air change before a thunderstorm sweeps in. He slowly raised his arms. He spread his powerful hands to punctuate his intensifying words. Minutes passed as the Bible and the Declaration of Human Rights and today’s news were interspersed. Justice for the poor. Freedom for those in prison. Comfort for those who mourn. The thunder was rolling now. Crowds were cheering now. Human rights for everyone. Justice for Haiti. Justice for Haiti. Justice for Haiti.

To the rich, Jean-Juste preached that the man with two coats should give one to the woman with none. But, unlike most preachers, he did not stop there. Because there were many people with no coats, Pere Jean-Juste said, no one could justly claim ownership of a second coat. In fact, those who held onto second coats were actually thieves who stole from those who had no coats. In Haiti and the U.S., where there is such a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots, there was much stealing by the rich from the poor. This was revolutionary preaching.

During the day, people streamed to his church to ask for help. Mothers walked miles from Cite de Soleil to his parish to beg him to help them bury their children. Widows sought help. Families with sons in prison asked for a private word. Small packets of money and food were quietly given away. Visitors from rural Haiti, people seeking jobs, many looking for food, police officers who warned of new threats, political organizers with ideas how to challenge the unelected government, reporters and people seeking special prayers – all came all the time.

Every single night when he was home at his church in Port au Prince Pere Jean-Juste led a half hour public rosary for anyone who showed up. Most of the crowd was children and older women who came in part because the church was the only place in the neighborhood which had electricity. He walked the length of the church booming out the first part of the Hail Mary while children held his hand or trailed him calling out their part of the rosary. The children and the women came night after night to pray in Kreyol with Mon Pere.

Pere Jean-Juste lived the preferential option for the poor of liberation theology. Because he was always in trouble with the management of the church, who he also freely criticized, he was usually not allowed regular church parish work. In Florida, he lay down in his clerical blacks on the road in front of busses stopping them from taking Haitians to be deported from the U.S. For years he lived on the run in Haiti, moving from house to house. When he was arrested on trumped up charges, he refused to allow people with money to bribe his way out of jail, he would stay with the poor and share their treatment.

He dedicated his entire adult life to the revolutionary proposition that every single person is entitled to a life of human dignity. No matter the color of skin. No matter what country they were from. No matter how poor or rich. No matter woman or man.

His last time in court in Haiti, when the judge questioned him about a bogus weapons charge against him, Pere Jean-Juste dug into his pocket, pulled out his plastic prayer beads, thrust them high in the air and bellowed, to the delight of the hundreds in attendance, “My rosary is my only weapon!” The crowd roared and all charges were dropped.

Gerard Jean-Juste lived with, fought for and with widows, orphans, those in jail, those being deported, the hungry, the mourning, the sick, and the persecuted. Our world is better for his time among us.

Mon Pere, our brother, your spirit, like those of all who struggle for justice for others, lives on. Presente!

Fanmi Lavalas

In the mid 1980s a priest serving the slum of Cite Soliel began preaching the tenets of liberation theology to his parishioners. Unlike its other Christian counterparts, which espouse passive theological frameworks (such as resignation to unjust social conditions), liberation theology empowers people to seize control of their own political and economic lives. The people of Cite Soliel were so empowered by this message that that they came together like individual drops of water, mobilizing into a torrential flood (in Creole, lavalas) to vote Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide into office in 1990.

As president, Aristide quickly institutionalized tenets of empowerment by building hospitals and schools to serve poor people. He sought ways to develop a system apart from the US-sponsored model of free trade, which had privatized much of the country into misery. By the time he reached his second term, Aristide’s revolutionary reforms and tremendous popular support had made him a threat in the eyes of the Western establishment. Though some disaffected (and often U.S.-funded) former allies criticized Aristide for compromising, filmmaker Kevin Pina and author Peter Hallward have meticulously documented how much Aristide refused to go along with “Washington consensus” economics.

In 1991 the U.S. launched its first military disruption of Aristide’s government, sponsoring a bloody military coup under which CIA-backed death squads killed thousands of Aristide supporters.

In 2004 the U.S. backed a second coup, removing Aristide from office and banishing him from the Western hemisphere. The United Nations supported an illegal “interim” government led by former World Bank employee Gerard Latortue, and later established a “peacekeeping” mission (called MINUSTAH), to legitimize the coup regime. For two years Haitians lived under an unelected, non-representative government. During this period, as the outside world turned a blind eye, thousands upon thousands of Haitians—particularly those suspected of being members of Fanmi Lavalas— were imprisoned, driven into internal or external exile, or murdered.

Selection 2009

April 19’s selection of an unelected, non-representative senate, where almost every seat is available, but not every voice represented. The Electoral Commission has banned Fanmi Lavalas from the ballot, contending that F.L. failed to submit the proper paperwork for Aristide’s endorsements of candidates. Such paperwork wasn’t a requirement for any previous elections.

Not only has the majority party been banned by the current administration, but voting locations are hard to locate. Under Aristide, churches, schools, hospitals, and community centers in all neighborhoods were polling places, but as of Saturday, polling locations were not publicly known. In fact, Haitians reported having to call a number to find out where to vote. In a country where over 50% of the population is illiterate, the simple step of forcing voters to read a document to find the correct phone number effectively disenfranchises much of the population. Furthermore, MINUSTAH made voting even more difficult by banning downtown Port-au-Prince traffic as of 9pm Friday night.

Some suggest this exclusion is a power grab by Preval’s party Lespwa to create a parliament favorable to the US-backed neoliberal reforms – such as the privatization of industries. Once a member of Lavalas, Preval now opposes many of their political tenets. This distance began under his first administration as an elected Lavalas President. In 1997, Preval agreed to privatize the flour and cement industries, outsourcing Haitian jobs to international companies. For a country with over 66% unemployment rate this type of policy-making doesn’t help the people. Since Preval’s re-election in 2006, he has authorized the privatization of the telecommunications industry as well as the port. Not only did 1411 employees (out of 1800) lose their jobs, but the agreed upon severance packages were never delivered. The public dissatisfaction reached a tipping point last April when the poor took to the streets in protest of the rising food prices. Food staples such as rice and corn, which once flourished in Haiti, are now imported from the US. It’s thus perhaps ironic that Lespwa means “hope” in English. Preval has been widely criticized for vigorously implementing US-backed neoliberal “reforms”—such as the privatization of the ports– that are punishing the poor majority.

As of Monday, April 20, 2009, reports from Haiti suggest a 10% voter turn out (with estimates as low as 3%) for these elections. Compared to the 89% that voted for Aristide in 1990, the message is clear: this “selection” is not representative of the popular sectors.

But the popular sector remains vocal, even in the face of violent opposition. Historically, those who critiqued the interim government of 2004-2005 found themselves disappeared, murdered, or imprisoned. Even after Preval’s 2006 election, such tactics were still used against dissidents, and continue through this most recent election. A progressive Haitian journalist, whose name has been omitted for security reasons, planned and organized a city-wide demonstration protesting of the election. On April 17, he received two anonymous phone calls threatening his life if the protests occurred. According to the journalist, these threats were made from members of Lespwa. Furthermore, arrest warrants were issued against vocal F.L. leaders like Rene Civil.

Meanwhile, political prisoners continue to languish without much hope of seeing a judge (in violation of Haiti’s constitution), despite claims to the contrary by the ruling government. On Thursday, April 16th, a U.S. human rights and labor delegation visited political prisoner Ronald Dauphin in the national penitentiary. Aristide supporter Dauphin has been incarcerated for five years now without charges or trial. The delegation included two U.S. medical professionals—one of whom was a nurse for thirty-five years. These professionals concluded that Dauphin is gravely ill and is in imminent danger of dying in prison unless he obtains outside medical treatment.

While Dauphin fought for his life in the prison, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participated in a three-hour visit of Haiti, driving to and from her airplane in an air-conditioned limo. She had nothing to say about the elections, the political prisoners, and the lack of substantial democracy in a country long dominated by machinations of U.S. elites.

Regardless of Sunday’s results our delegation makes four observations: 1) the majority political party will have been excluded based upon an invented pretext; 2) polling methods appeal to the literate, educated minority; 3) threats of violence against those speaking out against the election exist; and, 4) by not intervening or addressing these flagrant attacks against democracy, MINUSTAH has done nothing to uphold the UN agreement for human rights and democracy This passivity suggests MINUSTAH operates in Haiti as a stabilizing force, thus allowing a non-representative government to rule the people.

That this perversion of justice has been carried out with the collusion of the UN helps confuse the advocate for justice residing in us all. As American readers, we are unfamiliar with the plot. That we cannot distinguish the protagonists from the antagonists does not make this situation any less real for the poor majority of Haitians. The reality of this allegedly democratic election is that a coup continues in Haiti. A coup continues as Haiti operates under the illusion of democracy, under the illusion of representation. The poor remain silenced, the land privatized, the people stateless, and we, the international community, unequipped or unwilling to act justly—that is until we wake up and see clearly that a coup is not a singular act, but a cruel process, one that is unfortunately ongoing in the case of Haiti.

According to Rene Civil, one of the spokespersons for Operation Closed Door, “What we are seeing is the non-violent resistance of the Haitian people to undemocratic elections. There is no way they will be able to call the Senators elected in this process legitimate. You cannot hold elections without the majority political party.” Ronald Fareau, another representative of the campaign stated, “We want to congratulate the international community for their hypocrisy in these elections. They spent over 17 million dollars on another electoral fraud in Haiti while our people continue to suffer from malnutrition and illiteracy.”

The controversy over the election began when factions of the Fanmi Lavalas party originally presented two slates of candidates to the Conseil Electoral Provisoire or CEP. In an apparent attempt to wrest control from Aristide, one faction led by former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune questioned the legitimacy of the slate presented by the former president’s appointed representative Dr. Maryse Narcisse. Neptune’s faction presented a second slate but in the end the Fanmi Lavalas party’s leadership managed to hammer out a compromise list of candidates in time to meet the deadline.

The CEP finally refused to accept the Fanmi Lavalas applications on the grounds they did not have former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s personal signature from exile in South Africa. The CEP reportedly would not allow for a facsimile copy of his signature on the documents when they were presented on the final day of the application deadline. This effectively excluded all Fanmi Lavalas candidates from participating in the election and led to the boycott of the Senate elections on Sunday.

Neptune and other members of his faction within the Fanmi Lavalas party called for participation in the election despite the nationwide boycott. Early Sunday morning Neptune said publicly on a local radio program, “We must vote today if we are to keep the integrity of the democratic process.” When asked on Radio Caraibe’s Ranmase program if he had a message for voters Neptune responded, “Vote well.” The success of yesterday’s boycott was taken as a referendum of support for Aristide by the base of the Lavalas movement in the much-touted internal party conflict.

Although there were some reports of sporadic violence in yesterday’s elections between supporters of current president Rene Preval’s Lespwa party and its rival L’Union, the disruptions were isolated to a single city, Mirebalais in the country’s Central Plateau region.

There were largely no reports of violence or voting irregularities in the capital where streets and polling stations remained deserted throughout the day. The only incident occurred in the seaside shantytown of Cite Soleil after a member of the L’Union party was accused of handing out money and food to bribe voters.

Private vehicles and motorcycles were banned during the election as they were during the presidential election in Feb. 2006. Where long lines formed at the polls early in the day on Feb. 7, 2006, polling stations remained virtually empty on Sunday due to the Lavalas boycott.

Five Lavalas hunger strikers continued to occupy Haiti’ s parliament building in an effort to draw attention to their party’s exclusion from the election. They vowed to continue until the election is nullified and demanded that they be held over again during upcoming national elections scheduled for November.

As of 2:00 PM in Haiti today, thousands of demonstrators were gathering in front of the parliament to support the hunger strikers as SWAT teams with the Haitian National Police, backed by UN military personnel, were seen surrounding the building.

From then to now, nothing has been the same. UN paramilitaries occupy the country. Washington effectively controls it. President Rene Preval got a choice: go along or pay the price. He submitted knowing what awaits him if he resists. Nonetheless, he’s disappointed bitterly.

Haitians suffered dearly as a result, deeply impoverished, at times starving, denied the most basic essentials, plagued by violence, a brutal occupier, police repression, an odious and onerous debt, and exploitive sweatshop conditions for those lucky enough to have a job in a country plagued by unemployment and deprivation.

Elections, however, are regularly scheduled and held, the latest for April 19 — democratic in name only, this time for Haiti’s senate. Here’s the problem. On February 7, AP headlined: “Aristide Allies, Ex-Rebel Barred from Haiti Vote.” It refers to Haiti’s Provisional Election Council’s (CEP) February 6 disqualification of Fanmi Lavalas candidates on procedural grounds. At stake are 12 open seats in the 30-member body, ones vacant since early last year after 2007 elections were postponed when Preval dissolved the CEP because of infighting. Delays persisted after food riots, a prime ministerial ouster, parliamentary wrangles, and last summer’s catastrophic hurricanes from which the country has yet to recover.

Radio Metropole reported that “at least 40 of the 105 (registered) candidates…were rejected” with CEP officials unavailable for comment. Expecting protests, it barricaded its headquarters in anticipation.

On March 9, a Haitian judge ruled the CEP’s action invalid at the same time thousands of FL supporters demonstrated in Port-au-Prince during Bill Clinton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit. They demanded reinstatement of FL candidates and reintegration of the party overall, the one Haitians support overwhelmingly and want elected to serve them.

A week earlier, FL sued the CEP for excluding its candidates on grounds that their registration papers lacked Aristide’s signature, a first-time ever technicality. Judge Jean-Claude Douyon agreed in stating: “The political rights of the Lavalas have been violated” and ordered their “reintegration,” provided “each individually meets legal standards.”

They had, and according to one of their lawyers, Camille Leblanc: The CEP “had no justification for its arbitrary decision of exclusion, since the Lavalas political organization had fulfilled all the requirements to participate.” At the time, it was unclear if CEP would yield. Constitutionally, it’s the “final arbiter” on all election matters and in the past ignored court orders.

At the same time, huge crowds massed in front of the National Palace awaiting a Clinton, Ban Ki-moon, Preval press conference. They had signs, banners, and T-shirts displaying Aristide’s image, and from a sound truck asked Clinton to tell Obama that since the “kidnapping of our president…(our) situation has only worsened.” One demonstrator told Haiti Liberte: “We are waiting for the soonest possible return of the president…and if Lavalas is not part of the elections, free and fair (ones) will not take place.” In addition, Preval was denounced as a traitor, and repeated chants were “Down with the MINUSTAH,” the UN paramilitary occupiers.

Clinton and Ban Ki-moon were there for a purpose — to bolster Washington’s control, support the military occupation, encourage local sweatshop industry, boost Rene Preval, keep him weak and subservient, diffuse popular anger, put a friendly face on a repressive MINUSTAH, and convince Haitians that jobs and aid are coming, repeatedly promised in the past, then reneged on so Haitians expect nothing this time. It’s why they support Lavalas, denounce Preval, and demand Aristide’s return.

On April 3, they were reminded again when Preval’s Justice Minister, Jean-Joseph Exume, fired Judge Douyon, accusing him of corruption in an unrelated case in retribution and as an excuse to ignore his decision. However, Douyon responded that Exume threatened him not to hear the case saying that Haitian courts have no authority to overrule the CEP. As a result, Preval’s handpicked Council is “final arbiter,” meaning Lavalas is excluded and Haiti’s democracy is an illusion.

Earlier, the coup-installed Latortue regime tried a similar stunt to prevent Preval’s 2006 election and almost succeeded. Only massive street protests forced it’s hand to let Preval’s victory stand — a very dubious one considering how impotent he’s been ever since, enough to arouse Haitians openly to denounce him with just cause.

Sham elections will be held on April 19, shamefully with Preval’s approval. Once again, Haitians will lose out. Their long overdue rights will be denied, the result of Obama continuing the same hard line policies as George Bush.

On December 9, ICE resumed deportations after halting them in September following summer storms that battered the country leaving 800,000 people without food, clean water, other essentials, and for around 70,000 their homes.

ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas announced: “We fully expected to resume deportation flights when it was safe. And we made a determination that it was appropriate to (do it now) based on the conditions on the ground….The individuals being returned have final orders of removal and the necessary travel documents” — even though advocates say things are worse in Haiti, not better.

BBC called the situation “eye-popping,” and the Miami Herald said it was “the worst humanitarian disaster (for) Haiti in 100 years” leaving:

• Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city, uninhabitable;
• most of the nation’s livestock and food crops destroyed as well as farm tools and seeds for replanting;
• irrigation systems demolished;
• collapsed buildings throughout the country; 23,000 houses destroyed; another 85,000 damaged; 964 schools destroyed or damaged;
• conservatively about $1 billion in storm damage;
• the threat of famine, especially for children and the elderly;
• 2.3 million Haitians facing “food insecurity,” according to USAID, reeling under 40% higher prices than in January;
• inadequate sanitation and clean water;
• the widespread threat of disease; and
• overall millions lacking everything needed to survive who in normal times struggle to get by.

In December, Director Randy McGorty of Catholic Legal Services for the Archdiocese of Miami said:

After dealing with this administration on Haitian issues for eight years, I’m forced to conclude that its policy toward Haiti is based on racism. It’s shocking. People (lack everything and) are starving. This callous disregard for human life is inexplicable. Many deported Haitians simply have no communities to return to. It is disappointing that the Bush administration would even consider sending people back to this incredibly fragile nation…(Haiti’s) humanitarian crisis…continues and worsens.

(South) Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center’s (FIAC) executive director, Cheryl Little, said: “We are attempting to do whatever we can to convince government officials to change their minds on this. It’s an outrageously inhumane act.”

On January 26, FIAC urged new DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to “immediately stay the inhumane deportations and to seriously consider granting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians already in the United States.” On December 19, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff denied the Preval government’s TPS request. As a result, Haiti won’t cooperate, so ICE is making Haitians get their own travel documents (including passports) and assist in their own deportations.

Throughout 2008, around 1000 occurred in total. After a near-three month suspension (from September 19 – December 9), they resumed slowly, but picked up noticeably after Obama’s inauguration. According to FIAC, men like Louiness Petit-Frere are affected, deported on January 23: “Here ten years with no criminal record, he leaves his US-citizen wife behind along with his mother and four siblings, all (with) legal status…One of his brothers, US Marine Sgt Nikenson Peirreloui, served and was injured in Iraq.”

In 2008, Obama campaigned vigorously for South Florida’s Haitian vote. Now he’s betrayed it the way he’s abandoning millions of distressed households by providing little in real relief compared to trillions in handouts to Wall Street and the rich.

After Congress established TPS in 1990, Washington granted 260,000 Salvadorans, 82,000 Hondurans, and 5000 Nicaraguans protection, then extended it on October 1, 2008. It lets the Attorney General grant temporary immigration status to undocumented residents unable to return home due to armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” Besides El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, past recipients included Kuwait, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Montserrat, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and Angola. Six nations still have TPS, but all face expiration in 2009 unless extended.

Haitians never got it, yet granting it is the simplest, least expensive form of aid so Port-au-Prince can concentrate on redevelopment while Haitians in America help through remittances back to families. In 2006, they sent $1.65 billion, the highest income percentage from any foreign national group in the world.

In 1997, the Clinton administration granted Haitians Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for one year. Currently about 20,000 Haitians qualify for TPS, a much smaller number than for other recipient countries.

Nonetheless, deportations are proceeding with 30,299 on “final order of removal” status, meaning an immigration judge ordered them out. About 600 are in detention, 243 others are electronically monitored, and all 30,000 will be removed by an administration as callous to the poor as previous hard-liners under George Bush. In America, everything changes, yet stays the same, even under the first black president.

Some Background on Haitian Immigration to America

Haitians began arriving in South Florida about 50 years ago, but were denied the same rights and treatment as more favored immigrants like Europeans. Fleeing repressive dictatorships hardly mattered during years under “Papa” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier or when military dictatorships ran the country.

In September 1963, the first boatload claiming persecution arrived but were denied asylum and deported. Decades later, it’s the same. After a 1991 coup deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, thousands of Haitians fled to America. Most were intercepted at sea and sent home while around 300 were detained at Guantanamo because tests showed they were HIV positive.

Conditions at the camp were deplorable. Treated like prisoners, they were held behind razor wire in leaky barracks with bad sanitation, poor food, and little medical care even for the sick and pregnant women. After protests and a hunger strike, crackdowns were severe, many were imprisoned, and Clinton White House justification was no different than today. The DOJ claimed Haitians had no legal rights under the Constitution, federal statutes, or international law. Wrong.

International law protects asylum seekers, Haitians as much as others.

Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines one as:

A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country.

Refugee-seeking persons are “asylum seekers.” Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to help them. To gain legal protection, individuals must:

• be outside their country of origin;
• be afraid of persecution;
• be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
• fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
• pose no danger to others.

In the 1980s, Haitians fared no better than earlier. From 1981-1990, 22,940 Haitians were interdicted at sea, yet only 11 qualified for asylum compared to tens of thousands of Cubans who automatically get it if they reach South Florida.

After the September 1991 coup against Aristide, the OAS’s strong condemnation forced the first Bush administration to soften its policy slightly, but not much. By November 11, about 450 Haitians were in detention while the State Department sought a regional solution, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees arranged for several Latin countries (including Belize, Honduras, Trinidad, Tobago, and Venezuela) to provide temporary safe havens. Still hundreds were forcibly returned and thousands more interned at Guantanamo.

By May 1992, citing an inflow surge that month, president Bush ordered all Haitian boats interdicted and peremptorily returned without determining if their occupants were at risk of persecution. Repatriation continued until Bill Clinton offered to process arrivals at a regional location, but only as it turned out for three weeks because the flow was much greater than expected. Thereafter, refugee processing was suspended with arrivals offered regional “safe havens” but no option for US refugee status.

In October 1998, under the newly enacted Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (HRIFA), eligible Haitians (who filed asylum claims or entered the US before December 31, 1995) were allowed to live and work in America permanently without applying for an immigrant visa in advance from overseas.

However, under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), aliens arriving in America without proper immigration documents are immediately processed for removal. If they fear persecution, they’re kept in detention until an asylum officer determines the threat’s credibility. In 2005, 1850 interdicted Haitians were sent to Guantanamo. Only nine got hearings and of those, one man got refugee status.

Under the 2002 Homeland Security Act, at least five separate agencies handle Haitian migrants:

• the Coast Guard for interdictions;
• Customs and Border Protection for apprehensions and inspections;
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for detentions; and
• DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) for asylum and removal hearings.

Earlier and more recent policies highlight how Haitians are mistreated. On October 29, 2002, fleeing poverty, not repression, 212 Haitians arrived in South Florida, hoping for asylum and safety. Instead, they were rounded up, handcuffed, held in detention, and treated like criminals in gross violation of international law. Families were separated from children, husbands from wives, and siblings from each other, but it wasn’t an isolated incident.

Unknown to most Americans, the Bush administration had a secret Haitian policy that took affect in late 2001. It authorized the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), now DHS/ICE, to detain all South Florida arrivals regardless of their asylum eligibility.

The result was dramatic, insensitive, and immediate. The Haitian release rate for those passing interviews dropped from 96% in November to 6% between mid-December and mid-March 2002. Even Haitians granted asylum weren’t immediately released.

On February 25, 2004, days before the second February 29 coup, the US State Department urged US citizens in Haiti to leave. In addition, George Bush said all interdicted Haitians would be returned and those reaching shore would be held prior to deportation, regardless of their protected status.

Detention conditions then and since are appalling and for women dangerous with reports of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape. Men and women both are subjected to frequent strip searches, lockdowns, nightly sleep interruptions, and often denial of needed medical care.

Official Haitian policy under George Bush and currently under Obama is:

• deny asylum seeker status;
• summarily return arrivals without screening their claims;
• detain others under harsh conditions prior to deportation;
• deny Haitians their rights under international law; and
• now expeditiously deport over 30,000 refugees to desperate poverty and storm-ravaged conditions in a country under repressive military occupation.

Haitian and Cuban Policies Contrasted

Except for the Aristide and first Preval administration years, Haiti has a history of some of the worst regional repression. So did Cuba until Castro overthrew Batista and transformed the country politically and economically. For decades, refugees from both countries sought asylum in America. Yet Cubans and Haitians get vastly different treatment.

Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (as amended), a “wet foot/dry foot” policy applies under which interdicted asylum seekers are returned home, but those reaching shore are inspected for entry, then nearly always allowed to stay — in contrast to Haitians getting no equivalent treatment even after “the worst humanitarian disaster in 100 years” leaving the government unable to handle the overwhelming environmental and human fallout. TPS would help, but neither the Bush or Obama administration offered it, so Haitians are left on their own.

It’s an old story in America. White Anglo-Saxons and most Europeans are welcome. For poor blacks, Latinos (except for Cubans) and most Asians, far different standards apply, none harsher than for Haitians despite dangers, poverty, and devastation at home, risks they take at sea, and rights international law grants them — ones America disdains or observes as it wishes.

In its 1996 Annual Report, the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that America’s Haitian interdiction and repatriation policy violated the following provisions of the American Declaration of the the Rights and Duties of Man:

• the right to life;
• liberty;
• security of person;
• equality under the law;
• resort to the courts; and
• to seek and receive asylum.

Conditions worsened under George Bush, especially after the February 2004 coup. Since January 20, the Obama administration is continuing the worst of his predecessor’s policies. This from America’s first black president who governs the same as white ones. Around 30,000 Haitians will be among first to learn how harshly firsthand.

I’ve said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away — Barack Obama’s first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we’ll never know the names of all the victims — It’s doubtful that even Pakistan knows — or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying, “I’m not going to get into these matters.”¹ Where have we heard that before?

After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: “We regret the loss of life.” These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called “terrorist”.

I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the “changes we can believe in” in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me.

Iran

Just leave them alone. There is no “Iranian problem.” They are a threat to no one. Iran hasn’t invaded any other country in centuries. No, President Ahmadinejad did not threaten Israel with any violence. Stop patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with American warships. Stop halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas. (That’s generally regarded as an act of war.) Stop using Iranian dissident groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. Stop kidnapping Iranian diplomats. Stop the continual spying and recruiting within Iran. And yet, with all that, you can still bring yourself to say: “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”²

Iran has as much right to arm Hamas as the US has to arm Israel. And there is no international law that says that the United States, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. Will you continue to provide nuclear technology to India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while threatening Iran, an NPT signatory, with sanctions and warfare?

Russia

Stop surrounding the country with new NATO members. Stop looking to instigate new “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and satellites. Stop arming and supporting Georgia in its attempts to block the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the breakaway regions on the border of Russia. And stop the placement of anti-missile systems in Russia’s neighbors, the Czech Republic and Poland, on the absurd grounds that it’s to ward off an Iranian missile attack. It was Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Germans also used to defend their imperialist ambitions — The two countries were being invaded on the grounds that Germans there were being maltreated. The world was told.

“The U.S. government made a big mistake from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” said former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year. “At that time the Russian people were really euphoric about America and the U.S. was really number one in the minds of many Russians.” But, he added, the United States moved aggressively to expand NATO and appeared gleeful at Russia’s weakness.³

Cuba

Making it easier to travel there and send remittances is very nice (if, as expected, you do that), but these things are dwarfed by the need to end the US embargo. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the almost forty years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. We can now add ten more years to all three figures. The negative, often crippling, effects of the embargo extend into every aspect of Cuban life.

In addition to closing Guantanamo prison, the adjacent US military base established in 1903 by American military force should be closed and the land returned to Cuba.

The Cuban Five, held prisoner in the United States for over 10 years, guilty only of trying to prevent American-based terrorism against Cuba, should be released. Actually there were 10 Cubans arrested; five knew that they could expect no justice in an American court and pled guilty to get shorter sentences.

Iraq

Freeing the Iraqi people to death … Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of all US forces, military and contracted, and the closure of all US military bases and detention and torture centers, can promise a genuine end to US involvement and the beginning of meaningful Iraqi sovereignty. To begin immediately. Anything less is just politics and imperialism as usual. In six years of war, the Iraqi people have lost everything of value in their lives. As the Washington Post reported in 2007: “It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”⁴ The good news is that the Iraqi people have 5,000 years experience in crafting a society to live in. They should be given the opportunity.

Saudi Arabia

Demand before the world that this government enter the 21st century (or at least the 20th), or the United States has to stop pretending that it gives a damn about human rights, women, homosexuals, religious liberty, and civil liberties. The Bush family had long-standing financial ties to members of the Saudi ruling class. What will be your explanation if you maintain the status quo?

Haiti

Reinstate the exiled Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, which he lost when the United States overthrew him in 2004. To seek forgiveness for our sins, give the people of Haiti lots and lots of money and assistance.

Colombia

Stop giving major military support to a government that for years has been intimately tied to death squads, torture, and drug trafficking; in no other country in the world have so many progressive candidates for public office, unionists, and human-rights activists been murdered. Are you concerned that this is the closest ally the United States has in all of Latin America?

Venezuela

Hugo Chavez may talk too much but he’s no threat except to the capitalist system of Venezuela and, by inspiration, elsewhere in Latin America. He has every good historical reason to bad-mouth American foreign policy, including Washington’s role in the coup that overthrew him in 2002. If you can’t understand why Chavez is not in love with what the United States does all over the world, I can give you a long reading list.

Put an end to support for Chavez’s opposition by the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other US government agencies. US diplomats should not be meeting with Venezuelans plotting coups against Chavez, nor should they be interfering in elections.

Send Luis Posada from Florida to Venezuela, which has asked for his extradition for his masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives. Extradite the man, or try him in the US, or stop talking about the war on terrorism.

And please try not to repeat the nonsense about Venezuela being a dictatorship. It’s a freer society than the United States. It has, for example, a genuine opposition daily media, non-existent in the United States. If you doubt that, try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against two of them? How about one? Is there a single one that supports Hamas and/or Hezbollah? A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story concerning a possible Israeli attack upon Iran, and stated: “Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.”⁵

Alas, Mr. President, among other disparaging remarks, you’ve already accused Chavez of being “a force that has interrupted progress in the region.”⁶ This is a statement so contrary to the facts, even to plain common sense, so hypocritical given Washington’s history in Latin America, that I despair of you ever freeing yourself from the ideological shackles that have bound every American president of the past century. It may as well be inscribed in their oath of office — that a president must be antagonistic toward any country that has expressly rejected Washington as the world’s savior. You made this remark in an interview with Univision, Venezuela’s leading, implacable media critic of the Chavez government. What regional progress could you be referring to, the police state of Colombia?

Bolivia

Stop American diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright scholars, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from spying and fomenting subversion inside Bolivia. As the first black president of the United States, you could try to cultivate empathy toward, and from, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Congratulate Bolivian president Evo Morales on winning a decisive victory on a recent referendum to approve a new constitution which enshrines the rights of the indigenous people and, for the first time, institutes separation of church and state.

Afghanistan

Perhaps the most miserable people on the planet, with no hope in sight as long as the world’s powers continue to bomb, invade, overthrow, occupy, and slaughter in their land. The US Army is planning on throwing 30,000 more young American bodies into the killing fields and is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan. Is that not insane? If it makes sense to you I suggest that you start the practice of the president accompanying the military people when they inform American parents that their child has died in a place called Afghanistan.

If you pull out from this nightmare, you could also stop bombing Pakistan. Leave even if it results in the awful Taliban returning to power. They at least offer security to the country’s wretched, and indications are that the current Taliban are not all fundamentalists.

But first, close Bagram prison and other detention camps, which are worse than Guantanamo.

And stop pretending that the United States gives a damn about the Afghan people and not oil and gas pipelines which can bypass Russia and Iran. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution in order to assert Washington’s domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. Is Afghanistan going to be your Iraq?

Israel

The most difficult task for you, but the one that would earn for you the most points. To declare that Israel is no longer the 51st state of the union would bring down upon your head the wrath of the most powerful lobby in the world and its many wealthy followers, as well as the Christian-fundamentalist Right and much of the media. But if you really want to see peace between Israel and Palestine you must cut off all military aid to Israel, in any form: hardware, software, personnel, money. And stop telling Hamas it has to recognize Israel and renounce violence until you tell Israel that it has to recognize Hamas and renounce violence.

North Korea

Bush called the country part of “the axis of evil”, and Kim Jong Il a “pygmy” and “a spoiled child at a dinner table.”⁷ But you might try to understand where Kim Jong Il is coming from. He sees that UN agencies went into Iraq and disarmed it, and then the United States invaded. The logical conclusion is not to disarm, but to go nuclear.
Central America

Stop interfering in the elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, year after year. The Cold War has ended. And though you can’t undo the horror perpetrated by the United States in the region in the 1980s, you can at least be kind to the immigrants in the US who came here trying to escape the long-term consequences of that terrible decade.
Vietnam

In your inauguration speech you spoke proudly of those “who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom … For us, they fought and died, in places like … Khe Sanh.” So it is your studied and sincere opinion that the 58,000 American sevicemembers who died in Vietnam, while helping to kill over a million Vietnamese, gave their life for our prosperity and freedom? Would you care to defend that proposition without resort to any platitudes?

You might also consider this: In all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the three million Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical attention, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology.

Kosovo

Stop supporting the most gangster government in the world, which has specialized in kidnaping, removing human body parts for sale, heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs. This government would not be in power if the Bush administration had not seen them as America’s natural allies. Do you share that view? UN Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia is now the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Why do we have a huge and permanent military base in that tiny self-declared country?

NATO

From protecting Europe against a [mythical] Soviet invasion to becoming an occupation army in Afghanistan. Put an end to this historical anachronism, what Russian leader Vladimir called “the stinking corpse of the cold war.”⁸ You can accomplish this simply by leaving the organization. Without the United States and its never-ending military actions and officially-designated enemies, the organization would not even have the pretense of a purpose, which is all it has left. Members have had to be bullied, threatened and bribed to send armed forces to Afghanistan.

School of the Americas

Latin American countries almost never engage in war with each other, or any other countries. So for what kind of warfare are its military officers being trained by the United States? To suppress their own people. Close this school (the name has now been changed to protect the guilty) at Ft. Benning, Georgia that the United States has used to prepare two generations of Latin American military officers for careers in overthrowing progressive governments, death squads, torture, holding down dissent, and other charming activities. The British are fond of saying that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. Americans can say that the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram began in the classrooms of the School of the Americas.

Torture

Your executive orders concerning this matter of utmost importance are great to see, but they still leave something to be desired. They state that the new standards ostensibly putting an end to torture apply to any “armed conflict”. But what if your administration chooses to view future counterterrorism and other operations as not part of an “armed conflict”? And no mention is made of “rendition” — kidnaping a man off the street, throwing him in a car, throwing a hood over his head, stripping off his clothes, placing him in a diaper, shackling him from every angle, and flying him to a foreign torture dungeon. Why can’t you just say that this and all other American use of proxy torturers is banned? Forever.

It’s not enough to say that you’re against torture or that the United States “does not torture” or “will not torture”. George W. Bush said the same on a regular basis. To show that you’re not George W. Bush you need to investigate those responsible for the use of torture, even if this means prosecuting a small army of Bush administration war criminals.

You aren’t off to a good start by appointing former CIA official John O. Brennan as your top adviser on counterterrorism. Brennan has called “rendition” a “vital tool” and praised the CIA’s interrogation techniques for providing “lifesaving” intelligence.⁹ Whatever were you thinking, Barack?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi

Free this Libyan man from his prison in Scotland, where he is serving a life sentence after being framed by the United States for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, which took the lives of 270 people over Scotland. Iran was actually behind the bombing — as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July, killing 290 — not Libya, which the US accused for political reasons. Nations do not behave any more cynical than that. Megrahi lies in prison now dying of cancer, but still the US and the UK will not free him. It would be too embarrassing to admit to 20 years of shameless lying.

Mr. President, there’s a lot more to be undone in our foreign policy if you wish to be taken seriously as a moral leader like Martin Luther King, Jr.: banning the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and other dreadful weapons; joining the International Criminal Court instead of trying to sabotage it; making a number of other long-overdue apologies in addition to the one mentioned re Vietnam; and much more. You’ve got your work cut out for you if you really want to bring some happiness to this sad old world, make America credible and beloved again, stop creating armies of anti-American terrorists, and win over people like me.

And do you realize that you can eliminate all state and federal budget deficits in the United States, provide free health care and free university education to every American, pay for an unending array of worthwhile social and cultural programs, all just by ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting any new ones, and closing down the Pentagon’s 700+ military bases? Think of it as the peace dividend Americans were promised when the Cold War would end some day, but never received. How about you delivering it, Mr. President? It’s not too late.

But you are committed to the empire; and the empire is committed to war. Too bad.

1. Washington Post, January 24, 2009.
2. Interview with al Arabiya TV, January 27, 2009.
3. Gorbachev speaking in Florida, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 17, 2008.
4. Washington Post, May 5, 2007, p.1.
5. New York Times, January 11, 2009.
6. Washington Post, January 19, 2009.
7. Newsweek, May 27, 2002.
8. Press Trust of India (news agency), December 21, 2007.
9. Washington Post, November 26, 2008.

In 2004, a US-led invasion force overthrew the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide and subsequently promoted and organized an occupation army. This colonial military force has repeatedly violently repressed popular demonstrations, violently raided the neighborhoods of the poor and killed, wounded and arrested Haitians who were affirming their rights of self-determination and an end to foreign occupation.

Since the United States bears major responsibility for the invasion, occupation and subsequent pillage and privatization of essential public services, we have a special responsibility to speak out clearly and forcefully to the United Nations (UN) in support of Haiti’s Five Freedoms:

1. The UN must end its military presence of Haiti through its occupation army (MINUSTAH), action contrary to the very founding principles of the organization. Haiti must recover the right of self-determination and the freedom to govern itself.

2. The Haitian people demand the end of the pillage of its national treasury by official and private banks extracting payments of $1 million USD a week for illegitimate debts contracted by past corrupt dictatorial regimes. Haitians demand freedom from illegitimate elite debts in order to finance basic life-sustaining programs for the 80% of the population living in extreme poverty.

3. Every country, which has suffered massive natural disasters, as the hurricanes that recently devastated Haiti, is entitled to large-scale, long-term humanitarian aid with no strings attached. Haitians demand the immediate fulfilling of aid pledged and its allocation according to needs without MINUSTAH manipulation to perpetuate its occupation.

4. The collapse of the free market model today highlights the disastrous consequences of the IMF-World Bank policies of privatization of public services in Haiti, where ‘private health and education’ effectively excludes the vast majority of Haitians. Haitians must regain the right to re-nationalize public services and all other strategic economic sectors necessary for their well-being.

5. Free elections means the return of deposed, exiled and persecuted political leaders and the end of foreign military occupation and repression of anti-colonial movements. Elections with occupation guns pointed at the heads of the electors and candidates have no legitimacy. We, the American people in North, South and Central America, have a responsibility to demand the end of MINUSTAH and the return national sovereignty to the Haitian people. No government no matter what its political claims and rhetoric can justify its democratic credentials when it acts as a colonial gendarme.

The piece quoted Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad of the United States, who charged that the Russian foreign minister had told Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice “that the democratically elected president of Georgia ‘must go.’” Khalizad described the Russian’s comment as “completely unacceptable.”

Of course, Washington’s posturing as a beacon of peace and freedom has become increasingly more ludicrous as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight and Bush explains that we do not torture while testimony to the contrary accumulates around the globe. But the U.S. role in supporting the February 29, 2004 rightist coup in Haiti makes the hypocrisy of Khalizad’s statement especially galling.

The Bush Administration made it clear that Haiti’s democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had to go, then flew him to the Central African Republic under U.S. Marine Guard (as detailed in Randall Robinson’s excellent book An Unbroken Agony) as a brutal right-wing military takeover seized Aristide’s homeland. The coup government, UN forces, and anti-Aristide paramilitaries killed around 4,000 people in the next two years, according to a study published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.

Among the many pro-Aristide activists who were forced into exile was the grassroots leader Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine. Lovinsky, a key figure in the Port-au-Prince base of Aristide’s Lavalas movement, returned to Haiti during the apparent democratic opening after the 2006 election of President Rene Preval.

I saw Lovinsky speak in July 2007 at a demonstration across from the headquarters of MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti. The occasion was the anniversary of the 1915 U.S. marine takeover of the island nation. Lovinsky led a spirited crowd of around 50 Haitians, many elderly. The psychologist-turned-activist forcefully read out a bill of indictment against the UN: MINUSTAH’s legitimizing the 2004 coup by replacing the initial wave of U.S., French, and Canadian troops, and propping up an illegal government; UN troops engaging in massacres of unarmed civilians; and carrying out a modern-day colonial occupation of Haiti. As a few reporters and activists taped audio or shot video of this fiery speech, across Ave. John Brown at the UN entrance a mix of uniformed and plainclothes military representing a handful of the countries participating in MINUSTAH clicked away on digital cameras pointed at Lovinsky. This seemed a tactic of intimidation, given the close operations the UN has conducted with the notoriously brutal Haitian police (as documented in reports from Harvard Law School and the University of Miami Law School). A few weeks later, Lovinsky was abducted after meeting with a human rights delegation from the U.S. He hasn’t been heard from since.

August 12 was the one year anniversary of Lovinsky’s disappearance. I walked with a sinking feeling to the demonstration commemorating the sad day. It was hard to believe such an impressive, committed figure had been missing for an entire year. Between 150 and 200 demonstrators, many wearing t-shirts bearing Lovinsky’s likeness, marched in a circle around the statue of a man holding aloft a dove in the center of the Plaza of the Martyrs. Aristide built the monument in memory of the thousands killed in the first (U.S.-backed) coup against him of 1991-1994.

Lavalas activist Rene Civil, imprisoned on trumped-up charges in 2006 but freed under a conditional release after an international campaign on his behalf, addressed the crowd. He said that Lovinsky’s disappearance was a threat to Lavalas supporters, intended to stop them from struggling for Aristide’s return.

As the demonstration wound through downtown Port-au-Prince, several police vehicles followed. Police had already blocked off streets near the Plaza of Martyrs, which protest organizers claimed was done to discourage more people from participating. The police presence as the march ended in front of the National Palace was low-key, but a jeep with six heavily armed Brazilian troops was a bit more hostile. I took photos of them as one of them photographed me.

The next day I returned to the Palace of the Martyrs, where the September 30th Foundation, a group co-founded by Lovinsky to support reparations and justice for victims of the 1991 coup, holds a protest at 11am every Wednesday. Since their leader (one member told me, “we see Lovinsky as a father and a brother”) has been abducted the primary focus of the weekly action has been calling for the safe return of Lovinsky.

Edwidge (for her safety, a pseudonym), a woman participating in the protest, told me “Lovinsky used to help us. All the time we’re hungry, now we have no one.” She continued, “Lovinsky was not a criminal. We know when the wealthy are kidnapped the government does everything it can to recover the victim. Lovinsky is not a dog, not an animal. He deserves the same treatment as the wealthy people. Give us a report. If he’s dead, give us the bones and we’ll bury him.”

Many of his supporters hold out hope that their sorely-missed friend is alive. The forty present at the Wednesday protest sang political lyrics set to traditional evangelical tunes (and, in at least one instance, a vodou song). One roughly translated as “The victims are asking for the key/ give us the key so we can open the door of justice/ who are we asking for? Lovinsky!”

In an interview later that day, human rights lawyer Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) told me that in some ways the current Preval Administration is “worse than the interim [coup] government.” Joseph said he told the Haitian ambassador in Washington, “your government needs to launch an investigation … [but] on Lovinsky, they don’t want to do anything.” Joseph argues, “The Preval government continues the policies of the Latortue [coup] government,” and says most of those now in power are holdovers from the illegal 2004-2006 government.

(A Lavalas activist who has worked with Aristide since 1984 and who was diplomatic about Preval, told me, “on the social and economic plane, we can work with him.” But this member of the National Cell for the Reflection of the Grassroots, who was beaten so badly he had to be hospitalized in prison under the 2004-2006 regime, said all “ministers, ambassadors, and delegates” left over from the coup period are “criminals” who should be fired.)

Joseph’s family has had to relocate to Miami because of death threats. Noting that human rights abusers he helped put behind bars under Aristide had escaped prison after 2004, the lawyer said, “They need to arrest people escaped from jail. My life is in danger.”

Meanwhile, Joseph remains extremely busy defending prisoners, some of whom have been moved to outlying regions he has a hard time getting to. Of the political prisoners still behind bars, he said, “I have too much work to do, it’s hard to keep track,” but that there “were more than 100.” Most high profile Lavalas figures have been freed but many less well-known progressive activists remain locked down. Joseph explained, they “had contact with the Lavalas movement, that’s why they’re in jail.” Some think the number of political prisoners is higher, given the many poor people picked up in sweeps of “popular,” or pro-Lavalas, neighborhoods. (The majority of inmates in the country’s overcrowded prisons have still not seen a judge, though the Haitian constitution stipulates that all prisoners must have access to a judge within 48 hours of their arrest.) Joseph stressed the “really vague” nature of charges made in such sweeps. “They accused kids of being gang members, bandits, and of ‘association with malefactors,’ the same techniques as under [former dictator] Duvalier.”

Joseph filed a rape complaint against Sri Lankan soldiers accused of sexually abusing Haitian girls, but there was no prosecution. The Sri Lankans were shipped home. To add insult to injury, the UN presence has had a harshly inflationary effect on rents and other basic expenses. UN SUVs are in evidence throughout exclusive Port-au-Prince gated communities, but UN money doesn’t trickle down to many of the country’s poor majority, who are having a harder and harder time surviving. Several street vendors perched in a heavily flooded corner of an outdoor market in the city’s Lasaline neighborhood told me the cost of a cup of rice had doubled since the capital’s food riots of April. The vendors could no longer save anything, and had no idea how they were going to scrape together enough to pay school fees for their kids in September. In the stagnant water at their feet parasites were visible. A health care worker later confirmed a huge number of kids have worms in their bodies.

The IRI: A History

In 1982, Ronald Reagan delivered a spirited speech that would lead to the founding of the controversial “research group.” In that speech, Reagan said, “Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best — a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.” The IRI nostalgically identifies Reagan’s words as the “historic speech” in which the vision of the IRI first took shape. Not coincidentally, the years that followed became known as the “lost decade” in Latin America, something many have attributed in part to the Reagan Administration’s misguided policies toward the region. During this period, structural adjustment loans plunged regional economies and living standards into a downward spiral from which many countries have yet to recover. The 1980s were plagued by violence; US funded government security forces in Guatemala and El Salvador prosecuted dirty wars which resulted in the disappearance, torture, and massacre of thousands of the countries’ own citizens. In 1984, US became embroiled in one of the region’s most public and profound political scandals. The Iran Contra Affair was an attempt by the Reagan administration to overthrow Nicaragua’s democratically elected Sandinista government by providing funds to the “Contras,” a group of anti-communist rebels notorious for their appalling human rights record. These are the dubious auspices under which the International Republican Institute was founded, fitting when considering what the organization was to become – a covert operation to advance right-wing policy under the guise of promoting freedom.

The International Republican Institute claims to be a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to “advance freedom worldwide by developing political parties, civic institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law.” Unfortunately, the magnanimous goals of the IRI have been distorted by a quest to advance rightist US initiatives. Ghassan Atiyyah, Director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy (a beneficiary of a $116,448 donation from the IRI) commented on the inconsistency of the organization’s policy: “Instead of promoting impartial, better understanding of certain ideas and concepts, they are actually trying to further the cause of the Republican administration.” Though Atiyyah here refers to the current Bush Administration, the McCain administration promises to be equally compatible with the strong armed methods advocated by the IRI and practiced in Latin America in the past.

Furthermore, during the years that the presumptive candidate chaired the IRI, the organization has chosen ironic means to “advance freedom:” training corrupt opposition leaders and providing funds to groups that effectively undermine often democratically-elected officials that the US government views unfavorably. In addition to running training camps, the IRI also conducts polls in high-stakes elections; the organization has been known to conduct “secret polls” with the intention of skewing public opinion in order to yield a desired outcome. The problem with such secret polls is that they cannot be verified and often contradict the findings of other, similar studies.

The IRI: Breaking the Bank

The IRI currently operates with a robust budget of $79 million. Though one of John McCain’s goals as chairman of the organization has been to increase private funding for the IRI, the overwhelming majority of funds for the organization comes from two public sources, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Founded in 1983, the NED is an organization that has come under significant scrutiny, much like the IRI. Critics claim that it illegally privatizes US foreign affairs that are supposed to be overseen exclusively by the legislative and executive branches of the government. Additionally, the NED is publicly funded but lacks the transparency of a public organization. The organization allegedly has funded far right parties in Eastern Europe, even working with convicted Nazi collaborators such as Lazslo Pasztor of the Free Congress Foundation. In Nicaragua, the NED spent what equated to more than $20 on each voter, considerably more than the combined expenditures of the candidates in the 1988 US Presidential election. Not only does the NED represent a misuse of taxpayers’ dollars, but its interference in the affairs of supposedly sovereign nations is illegal and its lack of transparency should disqualify it from receiving public funds. However, the opposite has happened and NED funding has risen from $59 million in 2005 to $74 million in 2006, in addition to $10 to $15 million in operation-specific funds mandated by Congress.

USAID is the other major donor to the IRI. Established in 1961, the organization has the “two-fold purpose of furthering America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets while improving the lives of the citizens of the developing world.” It is important to note that the ultimate goal of USAID is to advance US interests, with the secondary goal being to benefit the citizens of the world. This technicality explains why USAID sponsors the IRI, an organization that sometimes foregoes the latter goal in its pursuit of the former. USAID had a $176 million budget for operations in Latin America in 2006, a significant portion of which went to the IRI.

Big business, lobbyist groups and foundations annually donate $1.4 million to the IRI, a small fraction of the organization’s $79 million budget. Such donors to the IRI include UPS, AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, Bell-South, Lockheed Martin, Blackwater, Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP. It is worth noting that several of these donors regularly lobby regarding issues under the jurisdiction of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation where McCain is the second-highest ranked Republican. Private donations account for only $200,000, significantly less than one percent of the IRI’s total income.

In a speech regarding his presidential goals, McCain foresaw a future in which “Congress has not sent [him] an appropriations bill containing earmarks for the last three years. A top to bottom review of every federal bureaucracy has yielded great reductions in government spending . . . and [he has instigated] far reaching reforms of procurement and operating policies that have for too long extravagantly wasted money. . .” Will the IRI, which is a likely beneficiary of such “earmarks” and bureaucracy, be exempt from these “bottom to top” investigations? Will McCain fulfill his campaign promises or will he suffer from the conflict of interest resulting from his involvement with the IRI?

The IRI in Haiti

Founded in 1983, the IRI’s website reminisces about how it “planted seeds of democracy in Latin America.” Several of these so-called “seeds” were sown during John McCain’s tenure as the IRI’s Chairman. The main IRI project in Haiti involved the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. A former Roman Catholic priest, Aristide rose to power in the wake of the brutal Duvalier family dictatorship and was immensely popular with the poverty-stricken and oppressed masses of Haiti. Aristide was overthrown in 1991 (supposedly with the financial support from the outgoing elder Bush administration) but returned to power in 1994 with the help of the Clinton administration. Aristide was re-elected by a landslide vote in 2000 but once again ousted in a 2004 coup.

In the years immediately preceding the most recent overthrow of President Aristide, the IRI sponsored several “political training” clinics for Haitian leaders in the Dominican Republic and Miami. Though the IRI claims to be an unbiased group that provides funding across the political spectrum, recent research has exposed the fact that the IRI leaders specifically chose virulently anti-Aristide Haitians, including members of the business elite and former military and paramilitary personnel to attend these clinics. The IRI also generously funded the anti-Aristide resistance efforts, the main benefactor of its practices being the Haitian opposition group known as the Democratic Convergence, a unified collection of the previously splintered anti-Aristide factions.

Stanley Lucas, the head of the IRI effort in Haiti, was instrumental in the creation of the Democratic Convergence and, thus, the eventual fall of the Aristide government. Lucas has been described by Mother Jones Magazine as “the scion of a powerful Haitian family with long-standing animosity toward Aristide. . .” Lucas’ family had close ties to the ruthless Duvalier regime that preceded Aristide and has similarly close ties to the Haitian military, which was an important element of the 2004 coup. Two of Lucas’s cousins allegedly were responsible for organizing a massacre of 250 peasants protesting for land reform. Journalist Max Blumenthal has claimed that he had a source who lived and worked with Lucas in Haiti and who “saw documents indicating that while Lucas was working for IRI, he was being paid by Michelle Francois, who was a notorious FRAPH [paramilitary] leader…” The choice of a program leader with an allegiance to groups that opposed the democratically elected government is strange considering the IRI claims its goal was to promote democracy.

Lucas’ involvement with opposition groups directly opposed the US government’s official policy of supporting all democratically elected governments. There is every indication that Stanley Lucas’ involvement undermined the goal of Haitian democratization. US Ambassador Brian Dean Curran discovered that Lucas was encouraging the Democratic Convergence not to negotiate with Aristide to resolve the political conflict that lead to the coup, essentially encouraging the disruption of the democratic process. Yet when Curran reported Lucas’ apparent infractions to USAID, the result was an incredibly lenient four-month suspension followed by an eventual return by Lucas to his old ways. In addition to originally being a scandalous choice to lead the Haitian program, Lucas’ behavior while holding the position and the subsequent failure of both USAID and the IRI to sufficiently punish Lucas and remedy the situation is a telling example of the mixed messages surrounding the IRI’s supposed “pursuit of freedom.”

When the coup finally occurred, Washington made very little effort to protect democracy and the rule of law, placing Aristide under great pressure to leave the country. Thus, a leader who was not once, but twice elected democratically, was evicted from his own country with the help of the IRI. While President Aristide’s record was not without real achievements — he dismantled the Haitian military, built more schools than had been constructed in the previous century, and doubled the minimum wage — his clearly promising social program was not the type of change the IRI was looking for.

In a 2005 speech, President George W. Bush congratulated the IRI on its accomplishments, saying, “The world is safer and freer and more peaceful because of the International Republican Institute.” This statement is far from the truth in the case of the IRI’s activities in Haiti. The year following Aristide’s overthrow — notably by IRI-supported opposition groups — was one of the most politically tumultuous times in recent Haitian history. Violence and corruption were at a high, with frequent kidnappings and a crooked police force crippling the justice system and Haitian society. The elections to choose a leader to replace Aristide had to be delayed on four separate occasions. The irony of the IRI’s involvement in bringing about this situation should not be missed. The organization’s activities in Haiti helped to cast a shadow over US foreign policy initiatives throughout Latin America. Yet Haiti is not the only victim of IRI policy.

The IRI in Venezuela

After a failed coup attempt against Venezuela’s democratically elected but left-leaning President Hugo Chávez in 2002, the Bush Administration faced accusations of being involved in the attempted overthrow. Despite Washington’s energetic denials, it became apparent that the Bush administration had tentatively interfered in Venezuela by providing opposition groups with considerable donations through the IRI. The US government has encouraged sensationalizing the negative aspects of the Venezuelan government and demonized its President more aggressively than might be warranted. Though Chávez has become more confrontational and his popularity has fluctuated since coming to power in 1999, he took office with and maintains considerable public support. Since 1998, the poverty rate has dropped from 54 percent to 38.5 percent (30 percent if food and health subsidies are considered). The people of Venezuela gained free health care and more than half the population was enrolled in free, public education. Yet, on April 11, 2002 Venezuelan military leaders briefly removed Chávez from power and replaced him with a pro-US businessman named Pedro Carmona. Despite the objections of almost all Latin American nations, the US hailed the overthrow of Chávez as a victory for democracy and the Venezuelan people. Before the coup had even been completed, the IRI president at the time, George Folsom, claimed, “The Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy.” However, Chávez was reinstalled just two days later after his supporters took to the streets and Carmona was deposed. Upon his return to power, Chávez condemned the United States for its quick recognition of the new and illegitimate government.

Between 2000 and 2001, the National Endowment for Democracy (one of the main sponsors of the IRI) tripled its funding in Venezuela from $257,831 to $877,435. This allocation was granted to anti-Chávez groups, including two that participated in the protests that resulted in his brief overthrow in 2002. The IRI office in Caracas received $339,998 in 2001, a seven-fold increase from its meager $50,000 grant in 2000. Though the IRI claims to have used these funds in its work with the Youth Participation Foundation (FPJ), the organization ostensibly no longer existed at that time. Instead, funds were used to sponsor political party-building workshops, which conceivably could have been a legitimate use of funds had the participants not have been handpicked solely from opposition groups. During the month before the coup, the IRI flew a group of anti-Chávez politicians, union leaders and activists to Washington to meet with US officials.3 While it is possible that the meeting was perfectly innocent, the timing and secrecy delegitimize any explanation of coincidence. If the IRI is indeed guilty of intervening in Venezuelan politics, one must wonder which of its professed high moral standards it was pursuing at the time.

The IRI and John McCain

The aforementioned events in Haiti and Venezuela are significant, not only because they reflect gross abuses of power and the misuse of taxpayers’ dollars, but also because they received McCain’s stamp of approval during his tenure as chairman. McCain held that position for nearly a decade, so he cannot claim to have inherited these policies, nor can he argue that he did not know they were taking place. In fact, McCain has boasted that he has been a very involved chairman, informing the press, “All board members are involved in determining where IRI will work and in overseeing those activities.” Further evidence of the overlap in IRI policy and McCain’s foreign policy is his “rogue state rollback” plan, first mentioned during his 2000 presidential campaign. When questioned about his policy plans regarding “rogue states,” McCain responded that he would “arm, train, equip, both from without and from within, forces that would eventually overthrow the governments…” Though McCain goes on to say that he would then install democratically elected governments, the IRI’s tactics have, in the past, been directed towards governments that could already claim that mark of legitimacy. The prospect of IRI-influenced policies like “rogue state rollback” applied by the White House is a frightening one that shows a disregard for true democracy, which can not be achieved by outside intervention as McCain proposes, but only through the desire and efforts of a country’s own citizens.

The IRI has not only provided Senator McCain with certain detrimental policy tendencies, but has also heightened the superiority complex necessary to be comfortable with intervening in the affairs of other nations. Those who see McCain as a different kind of Republican point to his broad-minded stance on immigration. He had, after all, reminded Americans that illegal Mexican immigrants “are God’s children as well.” One of McCain’s favorite rhetorical phrases “boots on the ground,” is a telling implication of McCain’s predilection for intervening in the affairs of other nations, and a warning about the nature of his potential foreign policy. Even conservative-minded voters should have reason to be concerned, exhibited by a statement taken from American Conservative Magazine: “Such narcissism, unseemly in anyone, is especially unbefitting in a president, yet it is key to understanding McCain’s evolution from conventional Republican realist to relentless interventionist.” McCain’s campaign website also illustrates the bias the Arizona Senator may have inherited from the IRI. On it, McCain promises to build strong alliances with those governments “who reject the siren call of authoritarians like Hugo Chávez.” This unfounded statement neglects to acknowledge that not only was Chávez democratically elected, but that Venezuela’s popularly elected Asamblea Nacional is responsible for all legislation and can over-rule any presidential decree or veto with a simple majority vote. McCain has affirmed, “There is such thing as good international citizenship,” but it unfortunately seems as though the model upon which he has based his own regional policies is on the same misguided model as the IRI.

In a March 2008 speech, McCain said, “We must also lead by attracting others to our cause, by demonstrating once again the virtues of freedom and democracy, by defending the rules of international civilized society and by creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish.” The IRI is undoubtedly an example of such a “necessary” institution in McCain’s mind, but the organization has undermined democracy, setting an example that favors government subversion and illegal interference in the affairs of sovereign nations rather than true promotion of democracy. McCain’s IRI does not set a model for democracy, it is a model for bureaucracy and an abuse of power that has no place in the White House.

Big Business and Big Bucks for the IRI Chairman

McCain and his presidential campaign have benefited financially from the Arizona senator’s connection with the IRI. During his time in the Senate, McCain became a champion of big oil, proposing a tax plan that will give the top five oil companies $3.8 billion a year in tax breaks. One oil company that has benefited from a friendship with McCain is Chevron, which also happens to be a contributor to the IRI. Chevron has its own murky past in Latin America and is currently being sued by Ecuador as part of a $16 billion lawsuit for allegedly exposing tens of thousands of native peoples living in the rainforest to fatal levels of pollution. The IRI’s connection to Chevron is almost as suspicious as the one it has to Blackwater, the private security firm that has played a controversial role in the Iraq War, or to Lockheed Martin, the world’s number one military contractor.

The overlap in funding between the IRI and the John McCain’s political career is worrisome: McCain received $392,000 in donations from IRI donor companies and their employees since January 2005 and his presidential campaign has received $670,000 from institute donors. Senator McCain has over 100 lobbyists working for his campaign and his connection to big business through the IRI contradicts his promise that if elected, “the United States will not bow to special interests seeking to block progress.”

McCain’s IRI and the Presidential Campaign

The most disturbing problem with the credibility of McCain’s foreign policy background is that much of his experience in international relations has come from his time with a very compromised IRI. The policies the IRI has pursued, if reinforced by the full might of the White House, could have a devastating impact on an already deeply fractured relationship between the US and Latin America.

As more Latin American governments shift to the left, they become almost too numerous to extinguish by either brute force or financial might, which could be described as the IRI’s modus operandi since its inception. Now is the time for a US administration to be willing to negotiate with our southern neighbors in a spirit of constructive engagement and compromise. A new president could spearhead such progress. This feat will be difficult to accomplish for a politician who “grew up” in the shadow of a cloak-and-dagger operation like the IRI.

Last year, the IRI presented Antonio Saca, president of El Salvador, with its “Freedom Award” for what McCain called a transformation of El Salvador’s politics and economy. Yet in 2006, just two years after Saca was elected President, crime had reached an all time high in El Salvador. In response, death squads unofficially linked to Saca’s ruling ARENA Party emerged to supposedly suppress the surge in crime. What resulted was rampant corruption, which remains a problem for the Salvadoran government to this day. Despite a questionable record, McCain has praised Saca, claiming, “Advocates of freedom have no better ally in the region than President Saca.” This is a worrisome statement considering Saca has publicly praised people like Colonel Monterrosa, leader of the massacre at El Mazote, stating, “Colonel Monterrosa knew how to defend the nation, with nobility…” Though Saca has been championed as a Latin American success story and a friend of the IRI, slipping popularity ratings and alleged ties to brutal disciplinary groups would appear to make his friendship a contradiction to the ideals of both the IRI and John McCain.

McCain’s Future in Latin America

The IRI has a long and infamous history in Latin America. Should he reach office, McCain will have to deal with foes like Hugo Chávez and other left-leaning leaders of governments that are typically targeted by the IRI. In a campaign speech, McCain claimed, “Relations with our southern neighbors must be governed by mutual respect, not by an imperial impulse or byanti-American demagoguery.” Yet the policies McCain has endorsed during his time with the IRI have in no way implied a respect for the democratically elected leaders of the region or the sovereign rights of other nations. In order to salvage his reputation with our southern neighbors, McCain will need to sever his ties to the right-wing organization or have his Latin American policy suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that he will embrace such a change in favor of a policy of constructive engagement. In an interview with the Arizona Republic, McCain said, “Given my decades of involvement in promoting democratic values, it is safe to assume that I will remain a supporter of legitimate democracy-building.” This statement implies that McCain will continue to support policy much like that which he has advocated during his time as the IRI’s chairman, a prospect for US-Latin American relations that is about as “safe” as the IRI is “legitimate.”

Haiti has never had a period without interference in its sovereignty. Indeed Haiti’s history could be seen as one long, heroic struggle against such interference: first to overthrow the slavers and colonizers of France (and the rest of Europe), and then to fight for sovereignty against the US, which viewed Haiti as part of its domain, to dispose of according to its own whims.

Those whims included a brutal invasion and occupation by the US Marines from 1919-34, during which Haiti’s government, military, and financial sector were re-organized in the US interest. US policy included support for the Duvalier dictatorships for decades after the occupation, and support for military governments since the end of the Duvalier era in 1986. In the 1980s, a social and political force emerged in Haiti to overthrow the dictatorship and give expression to a popular desire for sovereignty and democracy. The force called itself ‘Lavalas’, which translates as “the flood”, and its most visible leader, Jean Bertrand Aristide, became the country’s first democratically elected President. At its core, Peter Hallward’s remarkable book, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment, is the detailed story of the struggle between the Lavalas movement and the forces arrayed against Haitian sovereignty and democracy.

Damming the Flood (DTF) focuses on a recent chapter in that struggle, the second administration of President Aristide beginning in 2000 and ending with his overthrow in a coup/invasion in 2004. Hallward takes a forensic approach, investigating the crime of the coup, its motives, the actors involved, and how it was done. Since the coup in 2004, Hallward has probably been the most lucid non-Haitian analyst writing on Haiti in English (some of the indispensable Haitians have been Patrick Elie, Marguerite Laurent, and Jean St. Vil). For myself, trying to make sense of what was occurring in the midst of disinformation, including from those who should have known better, like Grassroots International and later 7 Stories Press – Hallward’s New Left Review article “Option Zero in Haiti” (May-June 2004) was the single most useful piece in the months after the coup (Thomas Griffin’s report from the University of Miami and Kevin Pina’s reports in the Black Commentator before the coup were also indispensable).

What was this disinformation? There were several stories about Aristide and Lavalas that were circulated during the time he was overthrown that Hallward deals with at length. Aristide was accused of arming gangsters to terrorize political opponents (this argument is made in propaganda form in Asgar Leth’s film Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a disgusting exploitation of two impoverished young men, Billy and 2Pac, who are used as sexual objects in the film while wealthy members of the opposition like Andy Apaid provide the film’s narrative). He was accused of ruling autocratically. On the other side, he was also accused of betraying the movement by capitulating to neoliberalism, by allowing the US to enter Haiti in 1995 to remove the military regime that had overthrown him, by being unsupportive of armed struggle, and by accepting violent traitors (like Dany Toussaint) into his entourage. Hallward’s book deals with each of these accusations, to which we will return. In a remarkable interview with Aristide, provided as an appendix, Hallward puts each of these questions to the ousted President himself, allowing a man who was kidnapped and flown across the world that he might be silenced to finally respond to the accusations against him.

Hallward is a Canadian-born professor specializing in French philosophy working in the UK. He brings an unusual set of credentials to writing DTF, and these set it apart from many other books on Haiti. This is best said in his own words, and so worth quoting at length:

“This is not a book motivated by any personal association with Haiti, its government or its people, and nor has it emerged from a long familiarity with its history or culture. A philosopher and literary critic by training, I have visited Haiti only twice, and make no claim to the sort of insider or anthropological knowledge that authorizes much published work on the country. I have no special interest in the peculiarities of Haitian society, of its (remarkable) language or (even more remarkable) religions. I have assumed the reader would have still less interest in an account of my own (altogether unremarkable) travels or experience.

“Instead this is purely and simply a political book. In what follows I will assume that politics doesn’t concern things that make people different but things that they hold in common. I will assume that true political action is animated by collective principles that concern everyone by definition — principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, justice… I will assume that the collective action required to apply such a principle requires the self-emancipation of the oppressed… I will assume that such self-emancipation requires forceful engagement with the dominant forms of institutional and coercive power, and that it is this engagement – more than its social motivation or economic determination — that makes politics a matter of divisive rather than consensual universality. I will also assume that the persistence of emancipatory politics demands discipline and unity, and that it depends on a capacity to resist the various kinds of fragmentation and betrayal that its very existence is bound to provoke.” (from the Introduction, pg. xxxiv).

Hallward’s “purely and simply political book” thus sets out its fundamental assumptions and principles explicitly. Hallward’s influences and sources are no less transparent. Haitian activist Patrick Elie anchors much of the analysis and recurs throughout the book. So, too, does American lawyer Brian Concannon. The list of acknowledgements at the beginning of the book consists of a community of people, Haitian and non-Haitian, who emphasized the importance of foreign interference and imperial agendas in explaining what happened in 2004 and beyond.

Because Hallward was a part of this community (as was I), he could be accused of simply cherry-picking his evidence to prove a thesis based on his stated principles and assumptions. But all books are partisan. Two such books on the same period that Hallward mentions, for example (Notes from the Last Testament, by Michael Deibert, which I reviewed, and The Prophet and Power by Alex Dupuy, which Hallward reviewed), also make political points. Hallward does not ignore counter-arguments or evidence, however, nor does he smear those who disagree with him. A good part of the book is devoted to dealing with some of the controversies and debates that occurred before and after the 2004 coup. To Hallward, it was simply Lavalas’s, and Aristide’s, challenge to “the dominant forms of institutional and coercive power” that provoked “fragmentation and betrayal” within their movement, not necessarily flaws or errors on their part. Many people who supported the 2004 coup made much of their credentials as supporters of Lavalas and Aristide in the 1990s. They were with Aristide back then, but things had changed, they said, and he had to go. This narrative of betrayal, offered by many long-time Haiti experts, including Amy Wilentz, Jane Regan, Raul Peck, and many others, was one of the most powerful arguments in trying to mobilize supporters of Haiti to support the destruction of the movement that represented the country’s best hope.

But had things changed? By pointing out that any political movement will be smeared and attacked in vicious ways, DTF returns the debate to political and human terms, not anthropological particularities about Haitians and racist assumptions about Haitian culture. What happened in Haiti in 2004 is an instance of a more general phenomenon of destabilization, invasion, and occupation. Some aspects of what happened there were developed in tandem with destabilization attempts in Venezuela, notably the coup against Chavez in 2002, and have served as a model for current destabilizations, including the partly successful coup against Hamas in Palestine in 2006, and the one that is occurring in Bolivia today.

In each of these cases (Venezuela, Palestine, Bolivia), economic sabotage was used. In Palestine and Haiti, this took the form of particularly brutal blockage of aid to societies and infrastructures whose independent economies had long since been destroyed (in Haiti over centuries but rapidly by the Duvaliers and the military dictators of the 1980s and 1990s; in Palestine by Israeli missiles and bulldozers). In Venezuela and Bolivia, it took the form of “capital strikes” and actual sabotage. Political organs of imperial states, like the US-based International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and aid agencies like USAID and Canada’s CIDA, provided funding to partisan political groups in opposition to the regime (again, in Palestine, refusing to deal with the elected regime was a prerequisite for receiving any aid monies, as became the case in Haiti as well). These foreign political organs intervened in electoral processes (in Venezuela in 2004, in Palestine in 2006, in Bolivia this year in the May 4 illegal, unmonitored “referendum” on “autonomy” held in a region carefully selected by the opposition that, like the opposition in these other countries, is in direct communication with the US). The US and its proxies also invested very heavily in the media, a very important part of the political process. Finally, armed action has been constantly threatened and was pursued more than once. In Venezuela (and also in Bolivia and Ecuador) this has happened repeatedly through the US ally, Colombia, and through local military and paramilitary groups that were co-opted by the US; In Palestine, through Israel and also through some factions of Fatah.

Every political activist, in power or opposition, trying to challenge “the dominant forms of institutional and coercive power” in the “free world” has had to contend with this array of subversive and ruthless forces. In each case, the supposed depravities of the victims, their culture, and their particular character can be cited as the cause of their problems. Chavez is a dictator, Hamas refuses to give up violence and recognize Israel, Morales lacks majority support, and Aristide armed gangsters to fight his opponents. These charges usually lack any merit. Even if they were true, though (and one has to look very carefully at the evidence to determine this), cases against the victims by journalists or writers of the reactions to the destabilization model in different countries and contexts drown out the incredible consistency of the model, the interests behind it, and the effects on peoples and their aspirations. Hallward’s great strength is his ability to present the details of how the model played out in Haiti without ever losing sight of that consistency.

I will not re-tell the story of Haiti that Hallward tells so well in his book. I do wish to note that Hallward explores several very important debates about Lavalas and comes to interesting and novel conclusions.

First, DTF explores the question, raised by the peasant NGO PAPDA, the Trotskyist NGO Batay Ouvriye and others, of Aristide and Lavalas’s capitulation to neoliberalism. Aristide allowed the opening of free trade zones. He acquiesced in some privatizations (and his Lavalas successor, Rene Preval, also did so). Batay Ouvriye presents this as a betrayal. To Hallward, however, this is a misreading of how much power Lavalas and Aristide had. Political action has to be developed and understood in a context of the overall balance of forces. Ignoring that balance can have perverse effects, as DTF argues about Batay Ouvriye’s position on the coup: “It is one thing to criticize and protest against a government elected by the great majority of the people, it is another to denounce it as an evil to be destroyed at all costs. Although it is easier to make certain criticisms when you have none of the responsibilities of power, leftwing labor groups are clearly entitled to pressure any government to adopt more progressive policies… But BO not only attacked Lavalas, they attacked it in ways that played straight into the hands of their own worst enemies, and they did so with a bitterness that can only be understood in terms of a distorted sense of betrayal and resentment.” (pg. 188)

This theme, of the constraints and opportunities for political action, emerges repeatedly in DTF, and in Hallward’s view, Aristide and Lavalas emerge as very shrewd strategists, winning successes against overwhelming odds. This leads to Hallward’s view of Aristide’s decision to return to Haiti in 1994 with the support of the US military. Aristide justified this as the only way to stop the ongoing torture and massacre under the military dictatorship that had overthrown him in 1991. Some of his left-wing detractors argued that he returned in order to subvert and co-opt an armed struggle against the dictatorship that could have succeeded. A similar argument was made about Aristide’s refusal to use arms to destroy the insurgent movement that ended up overthrowing him in 2003-4 (since despite the claims about his arming gangsters, Aristide in fact counted on political mobilization to stop the coup attempts and, arguably, underestimated the military threat). DTF suggests that armed struggle was never a feasible option for Haiti, and that Aristide probably made the best choice under the impossible circumstances he faced. He quotes Aristide: “Who wants to be proved right by the blood of the people? You’re kidding yourself if you think that the people can wage an armed struggle. We need to look the situation in the eye: the people have no weapons, and they will never have as many weapons as their enemies. It’s pointless to wage a struggle on your enemies’ terrain, or play by their rules. You will lose.” (pg. 47)

Finally, DTF presents a very interesting, and cautiously optimistic, perspective on Haiti’s future. The 2004 coup did not show that the empire is invincible. Instead, the lengths to which the empire had to go to oust the regime, the length of time that it took to do so, and the fact that it had to return the country to some semblance of democratic governance just two years later in 2006 (when Preval was elected again), suggests that Haiti’s people cannot be counted out. Nor can Lavalas. To quote DTF’s conclusion at length:

“… this era, in spite of the astonishing levels of repression it aroused, has indeed opened the door to a new political future. There is little to be gained from judging this opening by the standards of either armed liberation movements on the one hand or entrenched parliamentary democracies on the other. Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some of the ways that political mobilization can proceed under the pressure of exceptionally powerful constraints…

“…Members of Lavalas organizations populaires have for many years worked alongside representatives of the more militant PPN [National Popular Party]; in spite of many obstacles, a stronger version of such a collaboration may well manage to mount and win an anti-imperialist campaign for the presidency in 2010. Damaged by its wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, the capacity of the US to deter such collaboration is perhaps weaker today than at any time over the preceding century. Just as importantly, the capacity of the US or its allies France and Canada to pose as friends of the Haitian people is for the forseeable future damaged beyond repair…

“Over the last couple of years the Lavalas organization has also begun to confront some of its own internal limitations, by becoming less dependent on Aristide’s personal charisma and influence, and by purging itself of many of the opportunists who manipulated this influence in the late 1990s… younger grassroots leaders are more prominent now than when their organization was in office. They have learned from Aristide’s example as well as from his mistakes. The combination of disciplined resilience and strategic flexibility that won the election of 2006 suggests that parts of this organization may have emerged from the crucible of repression stronger than before.” (pp. 315-316)

Just over 200 years ago Haitians gave the world an unprecedented gift: they showed it was possible to overthrow slavery and colonialism, by doing it. DTF’s gift, much more humble, is to point out something perhaps as important: that Haitians are still nobody’s hard-luck case, but a place to look to to learn about what can and should be done to make the world a more decent place.

These valiant black slaves, although tired from the painful yoke of slavery, quickly understood that if “Divide and Conquer” succeeded so well for the slave owners, it became imperative for the revolted slaves to unite, blacks and mulattos, poor and rich in order to win the battle for independence. “Union is Strength” enabled them to win the fight against slavery — as Haiti became the first black independent republic in the world.

Tribute to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who after two hundred years of independence, no one has been able to match his vision of cohesion for the daughters and sons of Haiti, irrespective of their social status or clan. He envisioned a Haiti fair for all. After two hundred years of structural ills, we have no choice but to educate our people to the concept of the Haitian nation, citizenship and patriotism.

The Dessalinienne — written by the famous Justin Lhérisson — contains exactly the words we needed to trigger national awareness that is necessary for a better Haiti. One which respects the right of its people, a strong and fair justice system, and an economy linked to the needs of the poor for inclusion, ensuring their economic security for a Haiti free, happy, and prosperous in the 21st century, capable of sprinting feverishly towards a modern economy capable of taking care of its citizens.

For the country and for our fathers, train our sons, train our daughters. Free, strong and prosperous, we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. Train our sons, train our daughters for the country and for our father’s legacy. Train, train, train our sons, for the country and for our fathers legacy.

Being Haitian, free Negroes on Haitian soil are sacred rights bequeathed to us by our parents. Under no circumstances should we put these privileges to compromise, because our ancestor’s souls will revolt in their graves.

Helping Haitians find and understand the country’s history and its legacy are key issues for the renewal of the Haitian nation. Very often, the intelligentsia believe that to be a patriot or a nationalist coincide with the notion of hatred for other people in order to promote your own ideals, however, the notion that we’re promoting today on May 18, 2008 has nothing to do with this definition of patriotism or nationalism.

The concept for us is to put the interest of our country Haiti above personal interests in order to achieve a Haiti as it was meant to be based on its history. Our ancestors did not have so many opportunities that are offered to us today in the era of globalization, our responsibility is to advocate and promote our ideals in order to enhance the understanding and shed light on our struggle. Having for a compass-freedom and human rights as sacred instruments for the renewal of the country and our environment.

At the dawn of the celebration of the Centennial of our independence, a mental giant like Lhérisson was able to highlight our duty as citizens in the national anthem for us to analyze or think about our duty towards our motherland. But our disbelief and lack of vision we have stopped us from having a common vision for our people, which resulted in a U.S. invasion. That is the result of our lack of vision and cohesiveness: the return of France on the Haitian political scene by demanding and collecting a ransom from Haiti for over a hundred years, the American occupation, the occupation of the United Nations and its members from the third world that we had helped gain their own independence. The Préval government has the responsibility to declare its national plan for regaining our sovereignty specifying the date of departure for Minustha from our territory.

Haitian Priorities Project calls upon all Haitians and the French government, to think about the possibility for France to prove that it is really an ally for its former colony, which despite its setbacks and calamities, still remains an example of bravery and endurance.

The annual budget of Haiti stood at 77.6 billion gourdes/38.56gdes, or about $2,012,448,133.00. If we capitalize the amount of the ransom of independence that France forced the Haitian government to pay, we end up with a sum of $21,685,136,000.00 capitalized for fiscal year end 2003. If you take this value divided by the current annual budget of Haiti ($21,685,136,000.00 / $2,012,448,133.00), we get a value equal to the total financing of the program of René Préval’s government for a period of 11 years.

The most important step that France could make would be to demonstrate its humanitarianism and its respect for human rights and settle the debt that France owed to Haiti, accepted by former President Jacques Chirac and the French parliament. While celebrating the creation of the Haitian flag, it would be a great gesture on the part of the French Government to repay all of this unjustified ransom collected by the French Government, which would allow the Haitian government to equip the country with the infrastructure needed, in addition, this will allow the Haitian government from reaching out to the rest of the world in order to complete its annual budget for at least a period of 11 years. This would certainly bring economic stability in the country; a prerequisite condition for revitalizing the economy and sustainable development for the reconstruction of the Haitian society.

On this day while we celebrate the creation of the Haitian flag, let us unite friends of Haiti, let’s re-light the torch of bravery which motivated the warriors for the independence of Haiti and give value to their slogan “Union is Strength”

Haitian Priorities Project calls upon all Haitians and friends of Haiti to unite in order to demand from France the handing over of the ransom of independence extorted from Haiti. More than ever, we need the support of 8.5 million Haitians to demonstrate to France and the world that we are united in a single voice fighting for Restitution of over 23 billion dollars and the time has come for France to return to Haiti this ransom collected unfairly.

On Saturday, April 11th, a little past 3 p.m., a MINUSTAH (UN) soldier, Nigerian Cpl. Nagya Aminu, was shot and killed in downtown Port-au-Prince. While this killing was widely reported in the international media, what followed the killing was not.

In the immediate aftermath of the killing, at approximately 3:30 p.m. that same afternoon, MINUSTAH troops launched a massive assault on Haitian vendors at the open-air sidewalk market near the main Cathedral in downtown Port-au-Prince — the area where the soldier had been killed.

According to many different street vendors who directly witnessed the MINUSTAH assault, four or five MINUSTAH soldiers emerged from parked trucks near the market and began smashing up the property of street vendors, setting the market on fire, setting off tear gas, and shooting directly at unarmed vendors.

According to one vendor, MINUSTAH soldiers used flame throwers to torch the stalls. He said the soldiers also grabbed hammers and began destroying property. This vendor was hit in the head by MINUSTAH soldiers with these hammers. On April 17th, he showed a member of the Haiti Action Committee and other US human rights observers a massive wound to his head and a blood soaked shirt. He lost consciousness and was taken by a friend to the St. Joseph Hospital nearby.

Another vendor reported that he was shot in the leg by MINUSTAH soldiers and showed his wound to the delegation. He also showed his medical records from the hospital where he had gone to be treated.

Vendors spoke of people killed by MINUSTAH gun fire. According to an officer of the National Association of Vendors, at least three people were shot and killed by MINUSTAH soldiers, who allegedly zipped bodies into bags and took them away. Reportedly, the families could not locate the bodies in the local morgue. A different source indicated that more people may have been killed. The Vendors Association officer also stated that several hundred vendors may have lost their property in the raid.

The National Association for the Defense of Haitian Vendors and Consumers has filed a formal complaint asking the Haitian President to take action and secure compensation for the 263 Haitian vendors whose property was reportedly destroyed by the MINUSTAH troops. Members of the association provided our human rights delegation with a full listing of the names of these vendors, what property they lost, and how much it was valued. For many of these vendors, who live in dire poverty, the loss in property is truly devastating. Additionally, the Association provided us with a list naming seven people who were injured and two killed — Amonese Pierre and Anna Ainsi Connu — by the MINUSTAH troops.

This kind of massive assault by MINUSTAH troops on the civilian population has happened many times before, such as the notorious attack on the people of Cite Soleil on July 6th, 2005. I was part of a small human rights delegation that visited Cite Soleil approximately 24 hours after this attack. We saw firsthand the bodies of murdered civilians, including a mother and her two young children, who community members told us were gunned down by MINUSTAH soldiers. Our delegation later interviewed the military high command of MINUSTAH who reported that the command was unaware of any civilian casualties during the assault.

It is time for the international human rights community to face squarely what has happened in Haiti: a US-backed coup in 2004 that ousted a popular, democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and a subsequent UN occupation (MINUSTAH) authorized by the rich nations on the Security Council. Under this occupation, some 9,000 military and police officers from different countries — ranging from Jordan and Sri Lanka to China and Brazil — are charged with keeping the “peace”. These forces have been accused by many in Haiti of targeting Aristide supporters. Indeed, the occupation serves to consolidate the anti-democratic qualities of the coup. Until the international human rights community starts to pay attention to what is happening in Haiti and join in solidarity with the Haitian people, more egregious human rights violations will be perpetrated in the name of “peacekeeping” operations.

Take action to demand that the MINUSTAH soldiers involved in this latest outrage are prosecuted for crimes against civilians!

Take action to demand that the street vendors receive full compensation for what they lost!

Contact:
UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)
Tel: 011-509-244- 0650/0660
FAX: 011-509-244- 9366/67
Or, Fax Office of Secretary General (New York): 212-963-4879

President Rene Preval
Send a fax to 206-350-7986 (a US number) or email to avokahaiti@aol.com.
Your letter will be hand-delivered to the Presidential Palace in Haiti.

Haitian Ministry of Justice
Tel: 011-509-245- 0474

The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77 percent and rice 16 percent, but since January rice prices have risen 141 percent. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, and the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.

Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port-au-Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks — they’re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had $1.25, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With $1.25, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”

The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, serves 1,000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children — five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cité-Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The costs of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil and propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise, and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.

The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.” Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages: the fact that the US and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for heavily subsidized rice from US farmers. This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?

In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries, to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The US has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.

Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, US subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence . . . ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”

“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

The Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”

Still, the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for US assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the US, the IMF and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.

But Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere; what reason could the US have for destroying the rice market of this tiny country?

Haiti is definitely poor. The US Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.

Yet, Haiti has become one of the top importers of rice from the United States. The US Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third-largest importer of US rice — at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2,200 pounds).

Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the US. Rice subsidies in the US totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods of Stuttgart, Arkansas, received over $500 million in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.

The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the US — with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the US, there are also direct tariff barriers of three to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute — the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the US and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.

US protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.

And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.

Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world’s largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar — from US-controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this speeded up the downward spiral that led to this month’s food riots.”

After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110-pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one-month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.

Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases.

Thirty-three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival.”

In the US, people are feeling the worldwide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle-class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.

In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.

What can be done in the medium term? The US provides much of the world’s food aid, but does it in such a way that only half of the dollars spent actually reach hungry people. US law requires that food aid be purchased from US farmers, processed and bagged in the US and shipped on US vessels – which cost 50 percent of the money allocated. A simple change in US law to allow some local purchase of commodities would feed many more people and support local farm markets.

In the long run, what is to be done? The president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who visited Haiti last week, said “Rich countries need to reduce farm subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports. Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or every time there’s unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger.”

Citizens of the US know very little about the role of their government in helping create the hunger problems in Haiti or other countries. But there is much that individuals can do. People can donate to help feed individual hungry people and participate with advocacy organizations such as Bread for the World or Oxfam to help change the US and global rules which favor the rich countries. This advocacy can help countries have a better chance to feed themselves.

Meanwhile, Merisma Jean-Claudel, a young high school graduate in Port-au-Prince, told journalist Wadner Pierre ” . . . people can’t buy food. Gasoline prices are going up. It is very hard for us over here. The cost of living is the biggest worry for us; no peace in stomach means no peace in the mind…. I wonder if others will be able to survive the days ahead, because things are very, very hard.”

“On the ground, people are very hungry,” reported Father Jean-Juste. “Our country must immediately open emergency canteens to feed the hungry until we can get them jobs. For the long run, we need to invest in irrigation, transportation, and other assistance for our farmers and workers.”

In Port-au-Prince, some rice arrived in the last few days. A school in Father Jean-Juste’s parish received several bags of rice. They had raw rice for 1,000 children, but the principal still had to come to Father Jean-Juste asking for help. There was no money for charcoal or oil.

Jervais Rodman, an unemployed carpenter with three children, stood in a long line Saturday in Port-au-Prince to get UN-donated rice and beans. When Rodman got the small bags, he told Ben Fox of the Associated Press, “The beans might last four days. The rice will be gone as soon as I get home.”

The broader context of years of heartless U.S. policies toward Haiti and the ongoing UN military presence in the island nation were missing from most coverage.

MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti, was put in place to defend the U.S.-backed coup regime which ousted the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. After the coup, thousands of pro-Aristide dissidents were killed, raped or forced into exile, thousands more jailed without charge.

Last August, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon visited the sprawling seaside slum of Cite Soleil and boasted, “In an operation lasting six weeks, amid fierce firefights, UN forces took control of the slum.” He told reporters, “I am convinced that Haiti is at a turning point. Long the poorest country in the western hemisphere, seemingly forever mired in political turmoil, it at long last has a golden chance to begin to rebuild itself. With the help of the international community — and the UN in particular — it can.” Ban Ki Moon went on to warn against the UN leaving “too soon” and pushed for a renewed mandate for MINUSTAH.

But Brazilian soldier Tailon Ruppenthal is less starry eyed about MINUSTAH. In a recent memoir of his tour of duty, Rupenthal writes, “After a few months even getting out of bed is hard. You remember that you will cross paths with all those people who are starving but there’s nothing you can do.” The Brazilian, who now suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, concludes, “we are losing the real war: against poverty … Only the fight against poverty will bring peace. When will they see that?”

“We are hungry and have given up on the UN and the Preval government to help us,” Sonia Jeanty, 32, told the Haiti Information Project in early April. “After all the money they have spent here most of us are eating only one meal a day. It’s unacceptable especially as we hear the UN trying to tell us everyday on the radio that things have gotten better. It’s a lie!” Rene Preval was elected president in 2006 with broad popular support, but observers note that most ministries in his government remain dominated by coup figures installed with U.S. backing. Those pro-coup officials were approved by a parliament also dominated by pro-coup individuals. Repression and illegal imprisonment kept progressives who might have been elected to parliament from effectively running.

The Haiti Information Project also reports that information officer with the 1000-strong Chinese force in Haiti Zhang Jin said in 2007, “We have the firepower and technology to control any situation that may arise here. What we gain from this experience is a real life situation where we can practice strategic and tactical deployment. That is invaluable to any fighting force.”

Mark Schuller, an anthropologist at Vassar College who writes about the political economy of Haiti, told me that “Washington consensus” economics are at the root of the current situation in Haiti. He points out that the country has “the greatest inequality in the hemisphere, with more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the Caribbean.” Schuller referred to anthropologist and medical doctor Paul Farmer’s writings about “structural violence” – long-standing foreign control and underdevelopment – which has kept the majority of Haitians in misery, and notes that the “interim” coup government of Gerard Latortue promoted local and multinational capitalist interest at the expense of the poor majority. Schuller points to the three year tax holiday which Latortue gave large companies, while doling out millions in “back pay” to the notoriously brutal former military (which Aristide had disbanded), all of which contributed to an increase in the cost of living for the poor.

Schuller told me, “It behooves us not to think of it as a ‘failed state.’ Rather, it is best understood as a successfully failed state. As of last estimate, 65% of Haiti’s government revenue comes from international agencies, 84% of its rice grown abroad. This is because of U.S. and other Northern countries’ economic policies wherein Haiti’s ability to feed itself with domestic rice production was wiped out by Washington-subsidized imports that U.S. agribusiness has profited from. At Ronald Reagan’s behest, Haiti initiated a series of neoliberal measures in the 1980s, including trade liberalization, privatization and decreasing investment in agriculture, that led to the disappearance of Haiti’s cotton and sugar export industries. During the 1990s, the U.S. conditioned its food aid – sent to alleviate a hunger crisis – with demands that Haiti lower its tariffs and open its markets to U.S. imports. This subsidized U.S. rice was much cheaper than Haitian rice, forcing local farmers out of business. Over the same period, Haiti became increasingly more reliant on the International Financial Institutions, which imposed more neoliberal conditions on its help. Since 1980, when Haiti started receiving the Banks’ help in earnest, its per capita Gross Domestic Product has shrunk by 38.3%. Haiti is left with a 1.4 billion dollar multinational debt, with a debt service next year of almost 80 million. In addition to draining resources from needed sectors – such as health, education, or developing national production, this debt has served as leverage for the IMF and World Bank to impose even more neoliberal measures.”

In an email to me earlier this week, Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a popular liberation theologian who works closely with Aristide’s Lavalas movement, wrote, “Some Haitians and foreigners are swimming in wealth while the poor ones are down deep in the pit of misery. A near famine situation reduces many people in skin and bone. As thousands of needy ones could not take it anymore they took the streets and let out their anger. I wish the wealthy ones in Haiti could accept to share and stop looking down at the lowly ones. We are all God’s children. Exclusion of a majority in dire need is not the answer. A policy of inclusion and sharing is the answer.”

There is some good news. The Jubilee USA Network-backed Jubilee Act, which advances debt cancellation for Haiti and extends it to 23 other poor countries, passed in the House of Representatives on April 16 by a vote of 285 – 132. Additionally, Rep. Alcee Hastings’ (D-FL) amendment to the bill, calling for complete and immediate cancellation of Haiti’s debts to all IFIs, passed unanimously by voice vote.

The Jubilee Act now moves to the Senate. Voters in the U.S. still have time to urge their Senators to help give Haiti a long-overdue break.

Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush Administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s democratically-elected government. Even human rights groups and left-leaning press that stood up against the Iraq war gave, and still give, Bush a pass on the horror he unleashed on Haiti by kidnapping President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Peter Hallward’s new book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment is a welcome corrective to the false impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it, “A brilliant politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece of very recent history that the U.S. press has either distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book I’ve read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in the world.”

Hallward, a UK-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in 2003 which involved daily reading of Le Monde and other French newspapers when he noted a systematic demonization of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas movement. He subsequently wrote one of the best long articles about the 2004 coup (”Option Zero in Haiti,” New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting information for a bill of indictment against the U.S., France and Canada, the coup’s principle backers, ever since. In the process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and self-described radicals who either through intellectual laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.

In his research, Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the past ten years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles ranging from Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures, buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country’s recent violence in the context of 200 years of “great power” hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.

Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti’s ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for “regime change” that even Iraq war opponents could embrace. After the first U.S.-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the U.S. was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, “Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide as a ‘psychopath and grave human rights abuser.’” But “neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would resurface at every turn.”

As Hallward painstakingly shows, left of center and liberal NGOs were all too willing to accept Washington’s destabilization program for Haiti. The smears and propaganda were well-funded and carried out in concert with “Democracy Enhancement” and similar programs of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other U.S. government agencies. The project recalled what the U.S. did to Nicaragua in the 1980s, as documented by political scientist William Robinson in his excellent study A Faustian Bargain.

Hallward notes that when it comes to “the supervision of human rights in the most heavily exploited parts of the planet … most of the ‘neutral,’ affluent and well-connected supervisors live at an immeasurable distance from the world endured by the people they supervise, and at a still greater distance from the sort of militant, unabashedly political mobilization that can alone offer any meaningful protection for truly universal rights.” The helps explain the ease with which Human Rights Watch took anti-Aristide propaganda at face value, then dragged their feet interminably (as did Amnesty International) when Aristide’s government was ousted and the rightist bloodbath began in earnest.

Hallward carefully wades through the accusations of human rights violations leveled at Aristide’s government. After an exhaustive examination, he can find no evidence that holds up. In many cases, he finds that the supposed abuses themselves were greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated.

Damming the Flood (lavalas means “flood” in Haitian Kreyol) is brilliantly written and extremely thorough in examining the players behind the 2004 assault on Haitian popular democracy and its horrific aftermath.

In the wake of the thousands killed and countless more tortured and raped, it is inevitable that many readers not versed in Haiti’s past would ask: Why? Hallward does a fine job of answering that question, addressing fundamental structural injustices enforced by U.S. foreign policy.

Aristide emerged as a priest in the tradition of liberation theology, which promotes a “preferential option for the poor.” In Hallward’s words: “All through the 1980s and early 90s [U.S. army intelligence officers] recognized that ‘the most serious threat to U.S. interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation theology.’ Nowhere did the counter-insurgency measures that the US and its allies devised in order to deal with liberation theology in the 1980s and early 90s fall more heavily than they did on the Haiti of Lavalas and the ti legliz (“little church” movement). It’s no coincidence that the most notorious assassin hired to terrorize Lavalas from 1990 to 1994, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, first began working for the CIA on a course designed to explain and contain the “extreme left-wing” implications of “The Theology of Liberation,” which Constant understood as an attempt ‘to convince the people that in the name of God everything is possible” and that, therefore, it was right for the people to kill soldiers and the rich.’”

Hallward continues, “Haiti is the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president — twice. If Aristide still remains the defining political figure in Haiti to this day it’s not because he represents a utopian alternative to the economic status quo, or because he embodies a demagogic charisma that threatens to stifle the development of democracy, or because his followers believe that he made no strategic mistakes. It’s because in the eyes of most people he is not a politician, precisely, but an organizer and an activist who remains dedicated to working within what he famously affirmed as ‘the parish of the poor.’ It was as such an activist that Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, and it was as such an organizer that he dedicated the rest of his political life to helping the popular mobilization deal with the new threats and the old antagonisms that soon emerged as a result.”

The priest turned president threatened to help Haiti’s poor enough to earn the eternal enmity of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats. His government was denied much-needed international funds (which in a more sane world would be reparations for past injustices, not loans or aid-with-strings-attached), and his poor followers demonized as chimeres, or “devils.” Instead of looking at the structural roots of the exploitation and ecological devastation to which the country has been subjected, foreign journalists took their sound bites from English or French speaking elites at odds with Lavalas’s commendable, and only moderately leftist, goal to raise the poor “from misery to poverty with dignity.”

The scant media coverage of Haiti that exists tends to continue centuries-old patterns of ignoring the perspectives of the poor majority. In Hallward’s words, what most English speakers get instead is repetition of “perhaps the most consistent theme of the profoundly racist first-world commentary on the island: that poor non-white people remain incapable of governing themselves.”

Though the UN “peacekeeping” mission, put in place in 2004 to legitimize the most recent coup, remains in Haiti, Hallward points to ongoing resistance from the poorest neighborhoods as evidence that the story is not over. While coup forces continue to dominate most ministries of the current government, the 2006 presidential election resulting in Haiti’s rulers conceding victory to Aristide’s former Prime Minster Rene Preval shows the unavoidability of some concessions to pressure from the poor majority.

For those who feel a debt to the people of Haiti for inspiring resistance to U.S. slavery, and for setting an example of the true potential of declarations of liberty espoused by the French Revolution, this book is an essential resource. Damming the Flood will inspire international activists to support the struggles of those Haitians who continue to stand up for their fundamental human rights. It should be widely read.