Haitians protest against occupation. One shot while police just looks

Batay Ouvriye (Workers' Struggle in Kreyòl) reports from Haiti, via La Haine[es], of the demonstration against the occupation on July 28th, called by them and other organizations. Simultaneously NGOs from the USA and Brazil protested in New York, Brasilia, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.


The demonstration, which consisted on some 100 activists, split in three groups: a picket before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, another picket blocking traffic and yet another dedicated to information via pamphlets and graffiti.

The demo culminated with the burning of a Brazilian flag which enveloped a US banner (photo above).

When the demo was ending, a government paramilitary arrived and shot one of the demonstrators without the police doing anything about it.

Another demo of Batay Ouvriye with some 150 participants and similar slogans went through Cap Haitïen.

More photos HERE (PDF document).

Haiti has been under "international" occupation since 2004, when a joint US-French operation kidnapped the legal and highly popular President Bertrand Aristide, of socialist tendency, and deported him to Africa. In 2010, a mysterious and devastating earthquake destroyed the capital precisely when the US Navy was making a drill for an invasion of Haiti in case of a natural disaster (what a coincidence!). Immediately the USA sent a whole army to re-occupy the country in what was possibly a maneuver to displace Brazil from the area (related to the protectorate treaty with Colombia, the coup in Honduras and the more recent de facto occupation of Costa Rica).

The popular Fanmi Lavalas party of the legitimate President Aristide has been illegal ever since the 2004 invasion, what has caused widespread abstention in elections and a total delegitimization of the current puppet government of René Preval.

Haití kidnapped (again)

A very complex subject but full of evil. That's surely why I haven't felt like writing much on it yet. But also felt I had to... so I'm finally on it.


A brief historical review

As A. Montero mentioned the other day at La otra economía, based on E. Galeano's historian work, the Western powers never forgave Haití that it dared to break its chains. Then France imposed a debt for such pride and Haití swallowed in exchange of recognition. The debt soon ended in US hands that used it to squeeze further the country that first abolished slavery. But the USA took 60 years to recognize the second independent country of America: slavery and racism were too high in its agenda, as well as its own form of imperialism.

It took Haití 124 years to pay off that debt that never contracted. By then the whole country belonged to the US banks.

But, even Simón Bolívar, who owed so much to the Caribbean nation, where he found refuge in the low times of his rebellion, where he was given weapons, ships and even soldiers, the very blood of the country. When he succeeded he didn't recognize Haití either. He formally abolished slavery as promised but no other sign of recognition to Haití.

Racism was incredibly powerful these days, it seems.


The last decades

But well, let's get to a more recent Haití. Some 20 years ago I was on holiday in New York and had the opportunity of taking part in a huge demonstration in support of democracy for Haití, which had been suppressed by a violent coup promoted by George Bush Sr. I still have over there a pin with the Haitian banner and the simple slogan: Free Haití.

Per the promise of Bill Clinton, Aristide went back to power... only to be forced to give the presidential band a few months later. But he was elected again four years later and George Bush Jr. meddled, in agreement with France, to cause a pretext of violence and propaganda of corruption, to invade the country with the UN blessings.

Aristide, the only popular president in a century or so, was kidnapped by the blue berets and sent to Central Africa. He's now in South Africa and has shown desire to return.

For many years now, Haití has been an odd international protectorate, as if the country could not rule itself. It could of course but not to the like of Washington nor Paris.


Earthquake and invasion

A few weeks ago we were all shaken by the tragic news of an earthquake in Haití. Not anywhere in Haití but right near the capital, destroying suddenly all the state's and UN's central infrastructure. Not the US embassy though: newly built with the most modern anti-sysmic technology.

But lucky Haitians... the US Southern Command was precisely at that moment making a drill on a hypothetical hurricane devastating Haití. The American friend was ready and in a few days they invaded the country again. All for the good of the Haitians, of course.

Since then everything is under control... or so we are told. We know little of what is really going on anymore, as journalists are not able to report properly. For security reasons, of course. Just like in Iraq... or in Gaza... The cold and totalitarian militarist logic has replaced the warm and frank logic of solidarity.

Just that nobody has reported feeling threatened... before the marines landed. So what the heck?!

Why is the USA invading Haití again? Guess that there are many reasons...


Economic reasons

Haití is practically owned by multinational corporations, mostly based on the USA, as well as by a tiny oligarchy that owns most of the land. The country has many mineral but ill-exploited resources and, crucially, there seems to be a huge oil reserve between Haití and Cuba, only recently discovered, and particularly extending under the soil of Port-au-Prince.

Hmmm... curious. How handy that the capital has been devastated providing an excuse to deport all or most of its inhabitants.

Maybe Thierry Meyssan is correct when claiming that the earthquake was not natural but the product of an ill-known but way too real type of weapons that cause earthquakes he may be onto something. Yah, "conspiration theories" sure... but you being paranoid doesn't mean that they are not after you anyhow. And such weapons do exist and the circumstances are too suggestive of criminal action.


Geostrategic reasons

It is well known that the Caribbean Sea is the gate of America. All European powers but Portugal accessed that way, the pirate wars, the US-Spain war of 1898 and the several military interventions of the USA in the area since then are clear signs of the importance of this sea and its islands. The largest of them, Cuba, has managed to stay independent, not without a fight that continues nowadays... but the rest barely so. Some are still in fact colonies of European powers or the USA.

And Haití is the most battered of all, maybe because it's just east of Cuba and the infamous Guantanamo base, too close to some key straits that have been central since the age of piracy. The infamous Tortuga island is of course in Haití, not far from the Windward Passage, which was one of the main sceneries of the piratical actions sponsored by France, Britain and the Netherlands against the Spanish Empire and particularly Cuba. Today the same cold strategic logic applies but the enemy is not a powerful colonial empire but some of its former colonies, Cuba of course but also Venezuela and others.

But there may be more. The only country that can dream of shadowing the USA some day in America is Brazil, a power of growing international importance, which has been playing very diplomatically but has been recently pushed to some confrontation by the US actions in Honduras and Colombia. Brazil was in charge of the UN force in Haití... until the earthquake.

And even more. Anybody who has been a minimally serious Diplomacy player can easily recognize that in the increasing global polarization centered in Washington and Beijing, Brazil is a natural ally of China, as it's not easy that the two will compete, while the competition between the USA and Brazil is almost a given. Of course diplomatists would contest that nothing is set on stone and that's why the game is called Diplomacy. But I'd say that the current scenery has been one of increased confrontation.

This is maybe because the Bush presidency was so extremely focused on the Middle East and Central Asia that ignored Latin America to some extent. Instead the Obama term seems to be more and more focused on a global aggressive policy in all fronts, with a clear focus on Latin America and also, it seems now, in increasing tensions with China.

As per above, the two things may not be really detached. But neither was the focus on Central and West Asia, though China has managed to land on its four on the very countries that the US aimed to control (see my previous post on this issue), while Bush was not too interested in directly increasing tensions with the Asian giant, that he perceived as too important for the US economy. Some say that the influece of Zbigniew Brzezinski's thought is too strong in the Democrat aparatchkik for anything else than pursuit of total global domination.

And Haití happens to be in the middle, to want to improve their situation democratically after many decades of brutal dictatorship by US-sponsored tyrants, to have oil, and to be so lucky, as to have the US Navy ready to invade it, for humanitarian reasons, of course, when the earthquake happened.

But there are other natural forces in Haiti, like the force of the water that in Creole is called Lavalas, avalanche.

Yankees, go home!


Further reading:
- Rebelión on Haití (in Spanish).
- Voltaire Net on Haití.
- Global Research on Haití.

US military intervention effectively blocks aid in Haití

It was bad already and then the marines arrived.

They do not only do zero humanitarian work but severely hamper that of those who want and can help.

Yesterday I watched in TV returning Spanish rescue specialists that complained that they were forced by the invaders to stop their work at 5pm and severely restricted their activities on "security grounds", when they say that they never felt any threat at all.

Some propaganda images of the marines distributing aid have been spread by the media but RNE journalist Fran Sevilla absolutely denies that they are doing anything at all, not even patrolling much. They have taken indeed control of of the Port-au-Prince airport and give absolute priority to their own deployment and the evacuation of US nationals, in practice blockading the the aid distribution.

France and Brazil have joined the chore of complaints by many Latin American countries against the ugly reality of US unilateral intervention. Bolivian President Evo Morales is even organizing a UN meeting to demand the retreat of US troops on light of their harmful activity.

Physicians without Borders and Intermon OXFAM have complained that their aid is stuck at Santo Domingo unable to reach Port-au-Prince because the marines don't give them authorization. .

The maybe feeble but anyhow real, aid organizatiod by the Haitian government, that had moved its headquarters to a police station near the airport, has been totally overruled without legal authority by the disproportionate, meaningless and useless US military invasion, which seems more designed to promote obscure imperialist interests than to help in any meaningful way.

Source: Rebelión.

Haitians massively join election boycott

Only 8% of electors casted their votes in the Senatorial polls in occupied Haití. This happened after Fanmi Lavalas, the party of the popular President Bertrand Aristide, ousted by a Franco-US invasion, was forbidden to take part in the polls.

Five years after the imperialist coup of 2004, Aristide and his Lavalas (avalanche) party remain the only popular choice in the impoverished Caribbean country and with good reason. Hopefully one day the imperialist troops (and shame on Brazil for participating in the occupation, by the way) will have to leave and the people's choice will be respected regardless of what the Gringos think about it.
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More on the food crisis

Al Jazeera has a couple of interesting articles on the food crisis. One is specifically on Haiti, where last week's food riots triggered the alarms on the crisis somewhat, the other is more focused in India but it deals with some reasons behind the crisis that can be extrapolated to the whole planet, it is a very interesting interview with an Indian ecologist: Dr. Vandana Shiva.

Haiti has seen rice prices double in the last few months. Rice is not a local produce but it became staple food in the Caribbean country when import taxes were lowered after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship: this allowed everybody to buy rice then but destroyed the local agricultural economy, making the poor country even more dependent from the exterior.

Aristide, 'Titid', was again claimed as the legitimate Haitian president in the food riots last week.

India is not yet at the levels of food stress of Haiti, Philippines or Egypt. But it's builiding up, with many people going hungry for hours or days, and the reasons are largely the same: agriculture has become a globalized industry, where benefits are more important than feeding the people. This doesn't happen in the rich developed countries, by the way: in the USA, EU, Japan... agriculture is protected by the state, making sure that local farmers, or at least some of them, get much more than just market price for their produce.

Dr. Shiva says:

There is a huge agrarian crisis but it's not from the beginning of our freedom, it's not a leftover of feudalism. The agrarian crisis is a result of globalisation. The farmers who are committing suicide in India are precisely in those areas where genetically engineered cotton is being grown by Monsanto.

He points out that, at the same time that India and the USA signed a nuclear treaty, they also signed an agricultural one, almost ignored by the media that leaves India exposed to foreign food imports, specially from the USA.

With the price rise, I can see about 70 to 80 per cent of India will be pushed into hunger and starvation.

Asked for a short term solution, Dr. Shiva says:

There is a very short term solution: give up the industrial agriculture using fossil fuels, high cost imports. Give up the forced linking with an international commodity market. Allow farmers to grow and give them a just price.

We can solve the problem tomorrow. I work with 400,000 farmers in India growing organic food. We have doubled yields and doubled output on farms. Nobody is dying of starvation in the villages where there is organic farming.

He warns that, if the government does not adress the problem of having the people fed, riots will increase and can even overthrow governments. After all it's a matter of life or death.

Bread and rice revolutions have started.

Hungry masses have attempted to seize the Presidential palace in Haiti (read more). They have failed by the moment but the situation is untenable anyhow.

Ironically, Haiti is occupied by a multinational force since the USA and France decided that they did not want popular (and rather socialist) premier Aristide to stay in power anymore, in 2004. They sold it as a "peackeeping mission" but was the typical colonialist intervention in the line of those of Roosevelt one hundred years before. These forces have done nothing to alleviate the poverty and lack of prospects of the most impoverished country of America and to that it's been added the brutally rising staple food prices everywhere, fuelled by speculation basically.

The rioters, that have been demonstrating and plundering around Haitian cities these last days at the cry of "We are hungry!"

Revolters retreated only under heavy fire from UN troops.

Haiti's wealth is concentrated in some 1% of affluent families while the vast majority of people lives in the most abject poverty. In 1990 the last brutal dictatorship was ousted by a popular revolution that placed fromer priest Bertrand Aristide as new President. The revolution was soon followed by another coup. Aristide returned in 1994 supported by US President Bill Clinton who had vowed to do so in his campaign. But as soon as the conservatives took power in Washington again, they started plotting against him, causing some obscure conflicts with mafious bands that were used as pretext for the joint US-French intervention: they kidnapped Aristide and sent him to Central Africa.

Since then the country has been under an occupation force under the pretext of the UN. The 2006 elections gave massive victory to a former Aristide ally: René Preval. While this helped somewhat to restore political stability after the colonialist coup, the real deep socio-economical problems of the country have been unadressed for these last years and now they seem to come back as surge that may oust not just the President but also the UN force, that has already become a target of the rioters.

Haiti is not the only nation that is suffering major unrest related to food prices but the tension is still building up. In the next months and years, as the deep structural global economic crisis becomes more and more evident everywhere we will see more and more conflicts caused by such matters and many governments toppled by the revolters one way or another, while agricultural lands are seized and companies nationalized in an effort to save something from the market-generated chaos.

As someone I know used to sign with: it has already begun.