Through his administration’s recent policies towards Haiti and Haitian migrants, President Joe Biden is carrying out a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, this represents continuity in a decades-long, bi-partisan policy toward Haiti.

Biden recently ordered the breakup of a camp of 15,000 mainly Black Haitian migrants under a border bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The migrants—many of whom had traveled thousands of miles—had fled to the U.S. in the hopes of being granted asylum from the horrific oppression and exploitation they face in Haiti, Chile, Brazil, and other states in the region.

In scenes that evoked the history of U.S. slave catchers, Border Patrol agents on horseback used their reins as whips to beat the refugees they chased down and captured. Eager to join the racist frenzy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the National Guard and Texas police to form a miles-long “steel wall” of patrol cars and military vehicles to block migrants from escaping Biden’s dragnet.

When these horrific scenes were caught on camera, Biden had the gall to condemn the Border Patrol for carrying out the orders he had given. But he did not rescind his policy to expel and deport the encamped Haitians based on Title 42, which Trump had previously invoked to close U.S. borders to all migrants during the pandemic. In fact, this was another in a series of actions that exposed the lies of Biden’s pre-election promises to establish a “humane migration system” and combat “systemic racism.”

From the Del Rio encampment, Biden expelled 8,000 migrants to Mexico, deported 7,000 to Haiti (many of whom had not been in the country for a decade), and admitted about 12,000 from the camp and Mexico into the U.S. Many migrants remain detained and others have been chained with tracking devices while they apply for asylum.

They will likely be denied for being so-called economic migrants, not political refugees, or for having residence in a third country, and then face deportation. Once the camp was cleared of human beings, the bridge was reopened for commerce.

Biden carried out this racist repression to send a signal to tens of thousands of Haitians, who are making their way north through the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, that the border is closed to migrants. The Mexican state collaborated every step of the way, clearing out the encampment on its side of the border in Ciudad Acuña, deporting many to Haiti, shipping others back to southern Mexico, and promising to stop Haitians from reaching the U.S.

The manifold crises driving Haitians from their country are not natural or some quirk of history; they were caused in large part by U.S. imperialism. Instead of helping Haitians overcome those crises, the Biden administration is compounding them, shoring up the morally repugnant elite that runs Haiti, and blocking migrants’ escape routes with Washington’s racist, regional border regime.

The Imperialist Origins of Haiti’s Crises

The mainstream media present the crises in Haiti that are driving migration—its poverty, so-called natural disasters, political corruption, and gangsterism—in sensationalized fashion with ritualistically repeated and neutered phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” They pathologize the country as if there is something inherently wrong with it.

In fact, blame for most of these crises lies with the U.S. and other imperialist powers’ intervention in the country. From the Haitian Revolution right down to today, these powers have waged an unrelenting attack on the Haitian people’s struggle for liberation, democracy, and equality.

When the enslaved Africans overthrew their French oppressors in 1791 and declared Haiti’s independence in 1804, the great slave-holding powers of the time—France, Spain, England, and the newly independent U.S.—did everything in their powers to destroy the new Black republic. France, Spain, and England all deployed armies in a vain attempt to prevent the revolution’s victory.

After their defeat, they moved to isolate Haiti and stop it from becoming a precedent and inspiration for revolutionary risings of the enslaved in the region. France only recognized the country’s independence in 1825 on the condition that Haiti repays their former masters in reparations for the loss of their “property,” that is, their land and enslaved human beings.

To pay this “debt,” Haiti had to take out loans at usurious interest rates from French and U.S. banks, stunting its economic development. In today’s money, they shelled out $21 billion for recognition by the great powers. Even then, the U.S. did not acknowledge Haiti’s independence until the middle of the Civil War in 1862.

The imperialist powers of the 19th century shackled Haiti with debt until its last payment in 1947, isolated it from the world system, and blocked its independent development. They made the country pay an enormous price for its liberation—poverty and structural adjustment from its birth.

Washington: Haiti’s Twentieth Century Overlord

After the U.S. rose as a new imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century, it viewed the Caribbean as an “American lake.” It aimed to prevent its European rivals from encroaching on its fiefdom and treated the region’s states as vassals to be commanded and, when insufficiently obedient, subjected to military intervention and occupation.

Haiti was one of its prime targets, with devastating consequences for that country’s politics and economy throughout the twentieth century and to this day. Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines to occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934, seizing control of the country’s financial and economic assets as compensation for the government’s failure to make loan payments. Wilson also wanted to ensure that U.S. corporations, and not those of Germany, would control the country’s economy.

The U.S. handpicked the country’s leaders, imposed forced labor on peasants, brutally repressed the Cacos rebellion, and, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ripped up the country’s revolutionary constitution and imposed a new one that allowed foreign ownership of the country’s land. To ensure “order” when it left, the U.S. created and backed the dreaded Haitian military, the Forces Armées d’Haïti,  whose only function was to repress the country’s people.

During the Cold War, the U.S. backed the brutal dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier as an anti-communist counterweight to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The Duvaliers ruled from 1957 to 1986 through state terror carried out by its murderous paramilitary, the Tonton Macoute. With Washington’s tolerance, if not encouragement, the father-son dictatorship killed as many as 60,000 people, especially socialists and advocates of democracy and social reform.

Washington used Baby Doc’s regime to impose one of the most predatory structural adjustment programs in the region. It promised to remake the country’s economy by privatizing state-owned industry, dismantling its welfare state, opening it up to international agribusiness, and employing displaced peasants in urban sweatshops run by multinationals. This neoliberal prescription was so life-threatening that Haitian activists called it “the plan of death.”

Damning the Flood of Social Reform

In one of the first rebellions against neoliberalism, Haitians rose up in a mass movement called Lavalas (“the flood” in Haitian creole) to topple Baby Doc from power in 1986. This led to the country’s first free and democratic presidential election in 1990 won by Jean Bertrand Aristide. A liberation theologist, Aristide promised to rip up the roots of the old order and implement a program of social democratic reforms.

Threatened by these reforms, the Haitian army, backed by the country’s ruling class and Washington, carried out a coup against Aristide in 1991. The administrations of George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton stood by while the military carried out mass repression and murder.

Infamously, then-Senator Joe Biden argued that intervening to stop the bloodshed in Haiti was not a priority and that the U.S. should ignore the humanitarian catastrophe. He stated that “if Haiti quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.”

Clinton only agreed to intervene and return Aristide to power in 1994 on the condition that Aristide abandon much of his social democratic agenda and implement “neoliberalism with a human face.” He did manage to abolish the army and resist the worst of the neoliberal program, but his hand-picked successor, Rene Preval, implemented much of it between 1996 and 2001.

Aristide again ran for and was elected president in 2001 on promises of social reform and securing reparations of $21 billion from France for the debt it imposed on Haiti to be paid on the 200th anniversary of its independence in 2004. The U.S. under George Bush Jr. imposed an aid embargo on Haiti, stopping Aristide from implementing even a modest version of his program.

The blockage of reform demoralized the Lavalas movement and gave space for right-wing paramilitaries to mount increasingly violent opposition, which Aristide confronted with his own paramilitaries. With the country on the brink of a conflagration, the U.S., France, and Canada organized a second coup against Aristide, kidnapping and exiling him to the Central African Republic until he secured asylum in South Africa.

The U.S. deployed the UN to occupy the country from 2004 to 2017. While of course sold as a humanitarian mission, the UN forces proceeded to repress popular protest, rape women, and introduce cholera into Haiti, killing 10,000 people in an epidemic.

Meanwhile, the U.S. backed a succession of weak, quisling presidents from Rene Preval for a second time to Kompa band leader, Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, to the widely despised and recently assassinated, Jovenel Moïse. Each won office in elections with collapsing voter turnout, had little to no popular support, and were widely viewed as illegitimate.

Each administration introduced increasingly draconian neoliberal programs that hollowed out the Haitian state, which was so incapacitated that it barely could be said to be in control of the society, let alone regulate it and provide any services to socially reproduce it. That void of service provision has been filled by privatized services for the rich and international NGOs for everyone else.

Those NGOs were in no way beholden to the Haitian people, but to the corporations and imperialist states that bankrolled them. Indeed as Mark Schuller, Haiti became a republic of NGOs, and one under an occupation entirely controlled by foreign capitalist powers.

Neoliberal Disasters and Creation of a Dependent Aid State

U.S. imperialism’s incapacitation of the Haitian state set the country up to be devastated by so-called natural disasters. Haiti had few to no regulations to ensure that buildings were capable of withstanding earthquakes, few remaining trees to absorb winds and rain from hurricanes, and no state services ready to provide relief and reconstruction.

So, when the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port au Prince in 2010, it laid waste to the capital, flattening the presidential palace, destroying homes, killing as many as 300,000 people, and impacting millions more. Over the next decade, a succession of hurricanes and tropical storms ravaged the country’s deforested land turning rivers into torrents that flooded lands and wiped out buildings. And, to top it all off, this August another magnitude 7.2 earthquake devastated the island’s south, killing 2,200 people, injuring another 12,000, and destroying 7,000 homes.

While people of the world responded with the utmost generosity, they sent money mostly to the corrupt NGOs like the Red Cross that had collaborated in the incapacitation of the Haitian state, and much of the funds never made it to the people in need but got diverted into other projects and the salaries of bureaucrats. Meanwhile, the U.S. state and its imperial accomplices  promised billions to “build Haiti back better.”

Predictably, they launched yet another neoliberal development plan overseen by Bill Clinton. The states funneled $13 billion into building more sweatshops, setting up walled-off tourist resorts, and funding more NGOs to provide services and aid. While billions were spent, conditions only got worse for the country’s majority; 60 percent of the country lives in poverty, 46 percent of the population lives in acute food insecurity, and 217,000 children face moderate-to-severe acute malnutrition.

Haiti became what Jake Johnston has called an “aid state,” a government entirely dependent on funds from imperial states and international donors. For the people to survive, they depend increasingly on remittances sent from their relatives working in low-paid jobs in other Caribbean countries, Latin America, and the U.S.

Corruption, COVID, and Political Chaos

When the UN occupation ended in 2017, this dependent aid state descended into ever-worsening corruption and infighting between factions of the political elite over who would steal a bigger slice of the aid pie for their own enrichment. Their theft stoked mass anger in a population desperate for reforms to alleviate their plight.

The Petrocaribe Scandal is the worst example of the venal elite’s corruption. Venezuela allowed Haiti to borrow oil from it to be paid back in 25 years. That freed up over $3.2 billion that was intended for reforms to improve people’s lives. Instead, the political elite, including President Moïse,  simply pocketed more than $2 billion for themselves and their cronies. With the money gone, Haiti still is on the hook to pay Venezuela back. Revelations of this corruption sparked mass protests, calling for Moïse’s resignation.

Despite the spiraling crisis, Trump and then Biden continued to support Moïse, even after he dissolved parliament and opted to rule by decree after his term expired. With Washington’s backing, he became for all intents and purposes a dictator, who deployed cops, paramilitaries, and gangs against his opponents.

At this moment of complete political chaos, COVID-19 struck a country without a functioning healthcare system and with only 64 ventilators in a country of 11 million people. Up until this summer, the government had no plans for mass vaccinations amidst relatively low rates of infection and death.

When the delta surge struck, the U.S. and the Haitian government finally started a program of vaccinations, but they still only have half a million doses for a population of 11 million. Even worse, the global economic crisis triggered by the pandemic threw Haiti into a sharp contraction cutting Haitian living standards, a fact only compounded by drops in remittances from Haitians abroad who had lost their jobs during the recessions in Latin America and the U.S.

With the society coming apart at the seams, gangs began to emerge, some with the backing of the government. Armed with guns, mainly imported from the U.S., they built mobster-like fiefdoms, ran extortion rings, stole aid, kidnapped people demanding ransom often from relatives abroad, and carried out revenge killings against their rivals.

With Haiti spiraling into social and political chaos, Moïse was assassinated in July by a group of foreign mercenaries made up mostly of former soldiers from the Columbian military, many of whom had been trained at the School of the Americas. While it remains unclear who ordered the murder, it has all the hallmarks of a hit ordered by Moïse ’s opponents in the ruling class. To maintain some semblance of government, the U.S. has appointed Ariel Henry as president, a man who aided and abetted Washington’s second coup against Aristide.

Washington’s Border Regime Deployed Against Haitian Migrants

U.S. imperialism’s interventions and support for reactionary Haitian governments are the cause of the waves of migrants that have fled the country. The Washington-backed Duvalier dictatorship drove out hundreds of thousands of people, the first coup against Aristide sent tens of thousands out of the country, the 2010 earthquake drove tens of thousands more abroad, and now the complete social crisis in Haiti, as well as deteriorating conditions in Latin America, is triggering a new wave of tens of thousands of people fleeing to the U.S.

While U.S. imperialism was causing mass migration, it was at the very same time building an immense border regime to buttress global capitalism’s state structures, block people from entering the U.S., and criminalize those that successfully evaded the border cops as racialized cheap labor in everything from agribusiness to meatpacking. Washington has used its border regime to block most Haitian refugees, only granting partial exceptions when faced with political pressure and protest.

It has subjected Haitians to xenophobic, racist, and politically discriminatory treatment. This has led to them having the lowest rate of asylum of any nationality with high rates of application.

During the 1970s, Jimmy Carter, despite his self-proclaimed support for human rights, applied a double standard to migrants from Haiti and Cuba. Because Washington supported the Duvalier dictatorship as a Cold War ally, Carter denied Haitian migrants refugee status, arrested them when they arrived in Florida, and deported them back to Haiti, while it admitted all mostly lighter-skinned Cubans fleeing the Castro regime which the U.S. opposed.

Ronald Reagan, who pushed for the neoliberal program in Haiti in the 1980s, deployed the Coast Guard to interdict undocumented migrants at sea and applied the new policy mostly to Haitians. The U.S. intercepted boats with Haitians before they reached U.S. shores, denied them the chance to apply for asylum, and returned them to Haiti. In 1987, Reagan introduced a ban on anyone with HIV from being allowed into the U.S., even if they qualified for asylum, and used it against Haitians in particular.

Jailing and Repatriating Refugees from Washington’s Coups

After Washington’s first coup against Aristide in 1991, George Bush Sr. blocked boats filled with Haitian refugees and jailed 34,000 in vast concentration camps set up in Guantanamo, Cuba. He repatriated most of them to Haiti, some to certain death at the hands of the coup regime.

He did grant a third of them asylum, but he used Reagan’s ban on HIV-positive migrants to keep 270 Haitians in a segregated camp even though they qualified for asylum. While Bill Clinton campaigned against Bush’s policy, once in office he broke his promise and kept the concentration camp open. A court case forced him to finally admit the 270 HIV-positive asylees into the U.S.

After Washington’s second coup against Aristide in 2004, George W. Bush threatened to interdict and repatriate any migrants fleeing Haiti. He deputized the UN to lock people in place and impose “order” on the country.

The Obama administration, infamous for deporting more migrants than any in U.S. history, treated Haitians little better. While he granted 60,000 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitians in the U.S. after the 2010 earthquake and stopped deportations, it was open to review every 18 months. While he renewed TPS, Obama re-started interdictions and deportations in 2016.

Trump’s Unleashes the Border Regime’s Racism and Xenophobia

Trump’s America First agenda made explicit and more radical all the xenophobic and racist features of Washington’s border regime. He placed all migrants, including Haitians, in Washington’s crosshairs.

In a flurry of executive orders, some upheld by the courts and others struck down, Trump imposed a Muslim ban, implemented Remain in Mexico that forces those applying for asylum at a U.S. port of entry to return to Mexico while they await their hearings, and then in the wake of COVID-19 imposed Title 42, shutting down the borders to all migrants. He unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to go after migrants, restricted to 15,000 the number of refugees the U.S. would grant asylum in 2021, and gutted the asylum system to make it difficult to process even that tiny number of applicants.

Trump attacked TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans, and several African countries, raving “why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” After noting his preference for white migration from countries like Norway, Trump raved “Why do we need more Haitians. Take them out.” He ordered the termination of TPS for 400,000 people in the U.S., including 60,000 Haitians. Only court rulings blocked that attack.

Haitian migrants faced similar assaults in Latin America where they had fled after the earthquake to find jobs during the region’s China-fueled commodity boom. With that ended by the Chinese slowdown and global recession triggered by the pandemic, Haitians lost their jobs and became the objects of racist scapegoating in Brazil and Chile where they were concentrated in the largest numbers.

Facing desperate conditions, Haitians closely watched the U.S. presidential elections. When Biden won, they began the long trek by foot and bus to the U.S. in the hopes that they would now be welcomed.

Biden’s Betrayal of Migrant Justice

Tragically, they were soon betrayed. In reality, there was little basis in Biden’s record to expect him to treat Haitians or any other migrants differently than his predecessors. His fingerprints are all over the creation of Washington’s border regime and, when he was last in office under Obama, he was an accomplice to his boss as the Vice-Deporter-in-Chief.

But, under pressure from activists who had protested Trump’s unconscionable policies, and faced with liberal challengers in the Democratic primary, Biden verbally tacked left, mouthing promises to repeal the worst of his bigoted predecessor’s executive orders, replace them with a new “humane immigration policy,” pass so-called comprehensive immigration reform, and redress the causes of migration in Central America. At the same time, however, Biden made clear that he would pair such reform with border enforcement and expansion of the border regime into Central America.

Once in office, Biden did repeal some of Trump’s executive orders, but he has enforced the closure of the border under Title 42 and Remain in Mexico. He has used these to intercept 1.5 million at the border, expel 700,000, and place tens of thousands, including families with children, in what under Trump had been called concentration camps.

While Biden introduced a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, it included onerous and punitive conditions for citizenship and was paired with even more border enforcement, including plans for a new virtual border wall. It was a far cry from the movement’s call for unconditional legalization for all and abolition of the border regime.

Without even a fight, Biden let this bill die in Congress where it never even came up for a vote. And when the parliamentarian blocked an attempt to include it in the reconciliation bill, the Democrats capitulated obeying an unelected bureaucrat’s non-binding judgment.

With reform dead in the water, Biden abandoned his promise to impose a moratorium on deportations when it was blocked in the courts and started to repatriate people. He deputized his Vice President, Kamala Harris, herself a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, the new “Immigration Czar” to carry out all this border enforcement.

On her junket to Washington’s vassals in the Northern Triangle and Mexico, Harris told migrants, “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. If you come to our border, you will be turned back.” She also announced a new initiative for Central American countries that combines neoliberal development aid, support for so-called “democratization”, and assistance for them to build up their own border regimes.

Haitians Collide with Biden’s Border Regime

Haitian migrants collided directly into Biden’s border regime. Biden did extend TPS for another 18 months, but that only applied to 150,000 Haitians who had been in the U.S. before May 21st of this year, not new arrivals.

When Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas announced the administration’s decision, he declared “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.” Despite these conditions, Biden has continued to deport Haitians, the first planeloads on the first day of Black History Month.

But Haitians in Latin America observed that some were getting through the border and so continued to head north. That led 30,000 mostly Haitians at the border to try and cross into Del Rio Texas with 15,000 getting through and setting up a camp under a bridge, hoping to apply for asylum. As the world witnessed, Biden treated them with callous brutality.

To stop the next wave of Haitian migrants, he has deputized Mexico to deport Haiti from the northern border region, relocate others to Tapachula, Chiapas, and deploy its National Guard there to block Haitian and other migrants’ passage up from Latin America. The Northern Triangle states have similarly started to crack down on migrant’s passage.

Biden has also ordered the Coast Guard to intercept migrants fleeing Haiti in boats, detaining hundreds in recent days. Ominously, he has also sought out a contractor to establish a camp for migrants in Guantanamo staffed with Haitian creole speakers. Joining the quarantining of people in Haiti, the Bahamas and even Cuba has started seizing and repatriating Haitians in the Caribbean.

Time to Rebuild Protest Against the Border Regime

With Biden breaking his promises of reform, deporting Haitians and other migrants, and enforcing a closed border policy, the migrant justice movement must rebuild independent mass struggle with a program of immediate reforms and long-term border abolitionist goals.

Without protests against Biden’s attack on Haitians and all migrants, he will only face pressure from xenophobic Democrats and racist Republicans. Already, Republican Governors led by Texas’ Abbott and his Operation Lone Star have started to encroach on federal authority and implement their own rogue border policy.

The GOP plans to make immigration a central issue in the midterm elections, portraying Biden as soft on border enforcement, even though the administration is overseeing a closed border. Without protest from the migrant justice movement, Biden will double down on racist, border enforcement to neutralize Republican attacks, selling out migrants in the process.

Already there are positive signs of protests emerging, demanding justice for Haitians and all migrants. There are demonstrations calling for Biden and Senate Democrats to override the parliamentarian and include legalization in the reconciliation bill. And the Haitian Bridge Alliance has called for a national day of action on October 14th for Haitians.

In these protests it is vital that we demand justice for Haitians and all migrants, and not allow our enemies to divide us, pitting different migrant groups against one another. For Haitians, we should demand that Biden extend TPS to all in the country and grant them unconditional, permanent legalization.

For Haitians arriving at the border, we must demand that they all be let in, granted asylum, and provided any assistance they need to rebuild their lives. We must also call on Biden to stop all deportations of Haitians back to their country amidst the full-scale political, social, and economic crisis the U.S. has caused. Instead, the U.S. should pay reparations to Haiti and its people and allow them to determine their own destiny without interference from Washington or any other imperial power.

We must force Biden to scrap Title 42 and open the border immediately. If the U.S. is concerned about COVID-19, then it should end its vaccine apartheid and provide the shots and the capacity to make them to governments in Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Global South.

The border regime, capitalist patents on life-saving medicine, and hoarding of vaccines are the problem, not migrants. For all those migrants, we must demand unconditional legalization.

In the fight for these immediate reforms, we must raise the guiding goals for the whole movement—the defunding and abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol, and the entire border regime. Only when we win open borders can we establish a society where no human being is illegal.

The Tempest Magazine via counterpunch.org

By Dan COHEN

Two weeks after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, the specter of U.S. military intervention looms large over the island nation. While the Biden administration has rebuffed a request for intervention made by Claude Joseph – a longtime NED asset whom Washington briefly backed as prime minister in the immediate aftermath of the killing – it has not completely ruled out the possibility.

​In the days immediately following Moïse’s grisly machine-gun murder on July 7 by U.S.-trained Colombian mercenaries, the Washington Post editorial board published a call for a “swift and muscular intervention” — what would be the fourth U.S. military invasion of Haiti since 1915, when U.S. Marines first occupied the hemisphere’s second independent nation.

WaPo Editorial Board’s call for UN intervention in Haiti is dripping with colonial condescension and implies Haitians are incapable of running their country. It never mentions the revolutionary fervor gripping the streets, only warns of possible “anarchy.” https://t.co/lf0dKUVhXH

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) July 8, 2021

On July 13, as the Biden administration signaled its reluctance to launch a full-scale invasion of Haiti, the Post editorial board published a second call for U.S. military intervention, suggesting that it was the least bad option.

WaPo Editorial Board’s call for UN intervention in Haiti is dripping with colonial condescension and implies Haitians are incapable of running their country. It never mentions the revolutionary fervor gripping the streets, only warns of possible “anarchy.” https://t.co/lf0dKUVhXH

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) July 8, 2021

The same day, Post columnist and neoconservative writer Max Boot published an op-ed asserting that Haitians actually desire a U.S. invasion, entitled “Sorry, Haiti. The world’s policeman is officially off duty.”

WaPo Editorial Board’s call for UN intervention in Haiti is dripping with colonial condescension and implies Haitians are incapable of running their country. It never mentions the revolutionary fervor gripping the streets, only warns of possible “anarchy.” https://t.co/lf0dKUVhXH

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) July 8, 2021

Even the ostensibly progressive lawmaker Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) refused to take a clear position against an intervention, saying that she opposed it “right now” and “without any sort of plan.”

WaPo Editorial Board’s call for UN intervention in Haiti is dripping with colonial condescension and implies Haitians are incapable of running their country. It never mentions the revolutionary fervor gripping the streets, only warns of possible “anarchy.” https://t.co/lf0dKUVhXH

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) July 8, 2021

While the Washington consensus is firmly in support of U.S. military deployment in Haiti, MintPress News traveled to Port-au-Prince to ask random Haitians in the street what they thought of a possible intervention.

​“We don’t want a military intervention,” Adrien Willien told MintPress. “We are for Haitians putting their heads together.”

​“We don’t want any foreign intervention to come resolve our problems for us,” echoed Ernst C. Denoir. “On the contrary, that would be pouring gas on the fire, making the situation worse.”

Contrary to the claims of self-appointed spokesman for the Haitain people Max Boot and his fellow neoconservative ideologues at The Washington Post, not a single Haitian with whom MintPress News spoke agreed. In fact, many were outraged at the suggestion and hold the United States responsible for the current violence and dysfunction plaguing Haiti.

“The insecurity you see here is programmed by the oligarchy and the imperialists,” thundered Denoir.

Meanwhile, thousands of Haitians turned out on Friday, July 23 for Moïse’s state funeral in Cap Haïtien, the capital of the northern department where he was raised. Many hurled curses at the U.S. delegation — which included U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Michele Sison, and was headed by U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield — as it approached the funeral’s stage. The U.S. delegation fled the ceremony before it was over, when police fired warning shots and tear-gas to repel angry crowds wanting to enter the ceremony or stop it until the intellectual authors of the assassination are found.

​Despite its claims to have no plans “for now” to invade Haiti, the U.S. has appointed a Special Envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, and will begin advising the Haitian National Police (PNH) in “anti-gang fighting,” Haitilibre reported July 24.

​U.S. troops, backed by those from France and Canada, last invaded Haiti immediately following the February 29, 2004 coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. As was done after their 1994 intervention, they handed the ensuing military occupation of Haiti over to a United Nations “peace-keeping” force after three months. UN forces occupied Haiti for the next 15 years.

​The troop deployment violated Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which specifies that the Security Council can use force only “to maintain or restore international peace and security” (i.e., in a conflict between two states), not to meddle in an internal political conflict. The Haitian Constitution also forbids foreign troops on Haitian soil.

​The 2004 intervention began on February 28 when a SEAL team, led by U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Louis Moreno, surrounded Aristide’s home, then threatened and browbeat the president into boarding an unmarked jet, which whisked him away to Africa. Aristide later called the abduction a “modern kidnapping.”

​“We remember that the U.S. came and took our charismatic leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” in 2004, recalled Willien. “That coup d’état is the cause of the state we are in today.”

“The U.S. betrayed the Haitian people when it kidnapped Aristide,” Willien concluded.

The bitter taste of past military interventions and occupations informs the almost universal Haitian public opinion against another U.S. incursion.

mintpressnews.com

By Vijay PRASHAD

In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.

For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” In the opening page of the appendix, he located the twin revolutions of Haiti (1804) and Cuba (1959) in the context of the West Indian islands:

“The people who made them, the problems and the attempts to solve them, are peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history.”

Thrice James uses the word “peculiar,” which emerges from the Latin peculiaris for “private property” (pecu is the Latin word for “cattle,” the essence of ancient property).

Property is at the heart of the origin and history of the modern West Indies. By the end of the 17th century, the European conquistadors and colonialists had massacred the inhabitants of the West Indies. On St. Kitts in 1626, English and French colonialists massacred between 2,000 and 4,000 Caribs — including Chief Tegremond — in the Kalinago genocide, which Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre wrote about in 1654.

Having annihilated the island’s native people, the Europeans brought in African men and women who had been captured and enslaved. What unites the West Indian islands is not language and culture, but the wretchedness of slavery, rooted in an oppressive plantation economy. Both Haiti and Cuba are products of this “peculiarity,” the one being bold enough to break the shackles in 1804 and the other able to follow a century and a half later.

Osmond Watson, Jamaica, “City Life,” 1968.

Today, crisis is the hour in the Caribbean.

On July 7, just outside of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, gunmen broke into the home of President Jovenel Moïse, assassinated him in cold blood, and then fled. The country — already wracked by social upheaval sparked by the late president’s policies — has now plunged even deeper into crisis.

Already, Moïse had forcefully extended his presidential mandate beyond his term as the country struggled with the burdens of being dependent on international agencies, trapped by a century-long economic crisis and struck hard by the pandemic. Protests had become commonplace across Haiti as the prices of everything skyrocketed and as no effective government came to the aid of a population in despair.

But Moïse was not killed because of this proximate crisis. More mysterious forces are at work: U.S.-based Haitian religious leaders, narco-traffickers and Colombian mercenaries. This is a saga that is best written as a fictional thriller.

Four days after Moïse’s assassination, Cuba experienced a set of protests from people expressing their frustration with shortages of goods and a recent spike of Covid-19 infections. Within hours of receiving the news that the protests had emerged, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel went to the streets of San Antonio de los Baños, south of Havana, to march with the protestors.

Díaz-Canel and his government reminded the 11 million Cubans that the country has suffered greatly from the six-decade-long illegal U.S. blockade, that it is in the grip of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 243 additional “coercive measures” and that it will fight off the twin problems of Covid-19 and a debt crisis with its characteristic resolve.

Nonetheless, a malicious social media campaign attempted to use these protests as a sign that the government of Díaz-Canel and the Cuban Revolution should be overthrown.

It was clarified a few days later that this campaign was run from Miami. And from Washington, D.C., the drums of regime change sounded loudly. But they have not found find much of an echo in Cuba. Cuba has its own revolutionary rhythms.

Eduardo Abela, Cuba, “Los Guajiros,” 1938.

In 1804, the Haitian Revolution — a rebellion of the plantation proletariat who struck against the agricultural factories that produced sugar and profit — sent up a flare of freedom across the colonized world. A century and a half later, the Cubans fired their own flare.

The response to each of these revolutions from the fossilized magnates of Paris and Washington was the same: suffocate the stirrings of freedom by indemnities and blockades.

In 1825, the French demanded through force that the Haitians pay 150 million francs for the loss of property (namely human beings). Alone in the Caribbean, the Haitians felt that they had no choice but to pay up, which they did to France (until 1893) and then to the United States (until 1947). The total bill over the 122 years amounts to $21 billion. When Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide tried to recover those billions from France in 2003, he was removed from office by a coup d’état.

After the United States occupied Cuba in 1898, it ran the island like a gangster’s playground. Any attempt by the Cubans to exercise their sovereignty was squashed with terrible force, including invasions by U.S. forces in 1906-1909, 1912, 1917-1922 and 1933.

The United States backed General Fulgencio Batista (1940-1944 and 1952-1959) despite all the evidence of his brutality. After all, Batista protected U.S. interests and U.S. firms owned two-thirds of the country’s sugar industry and almost its entire service sector.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 stands against this wretched history — a history of slavery and imperial domination.

How did the U.S. react? By imposing an economic blockade on the country from Oct. 19, 1960, that lasts to this day and has targeted everything from access to medical supplies, food and financing to barring Cuban imports and coercing third-party countries to do the same. It is a vindictive attack against a people who — like the Haitians — are trying to exercise their sovereignty.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). “At current prices,” he said, “the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion.”

None of this information would be available without the presence of media outlets such as Peoples Dispatch, which celebrates its three-year anniversary this week. We send our warmest greetings to the team and hope that you will bookmark their page to visit it several times a day for world news rooted in people’s struggles.

Bernadette Persaud, Guyana, “Gentlemen Under the Sky (Gulf War),” 1991.

On July 17, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets to defend their revolution and demand an end to the U.S. blockade. President Díaz-Canel said that the Cuba of “love, peace, unity, [and] solidarity” had asserted itself.

A few weeks before the most recent attack on Cuba and the assassination in Haiti, the United States armed forces conducted a major military exercise in Guyana called Tradewinds 2021 and another exercise in Panama called Panamax 2021.

Under the authority of the United States, a set of European militaries (France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) — each with colonies in the region — joined Brazil and Canada to conduct Tradewinds with seven Caribbean countries (The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago). In a show of force, the U.S. demanded that Iran cancel the movement of its ships to Venezuela in June ahead of the U.S.-sponsored military exercise.

The United States is eager to turn the Caribbean into its sea, subordinating the sovereignty of the islands. It was curious that Guyana’s Prime Minister Mark Phillips said that these U.S.-led war games strengthen the “Caribbean regional security system.” What they do, as our recent dossier on U.S. and French military bases in Africa shows, is to subordinate the Caribbean states to U.S. interests. The U.S. is using its increased military presence in Colombia and Guyana to increase pressure on Venezuela.

Elsa Gramcko, Venezuela, “El ojo de la cerradura” or “The Keyhole,” 1964.

Sovereign regionalism is not alien to the Caribbean, which has made four attempts to build a platform: the West Indian Federation (1958-1962), Caribbean Free Trade Association (1965-1973), Caribbean Community (1973-1989), and CARICOM (1989 to the present). What began as an anti-imperialist union has now devolved into a trade association that attempts to better integrate the region into world trade. The politics of the Caribbean are increasingly being drawn into orbit of the U.S. In 2010, the U.S. created the Caribbean Basic Security Initiative, whose agenda is shaped by Washington.

In 2011, our old friend Shridath Ramphal, Guyana’s foreign minister from 1972 to 1975, repeated the words of the great Grenadian radical T. A. Marryshow: “The West Indies must be West Indian’. In his article “Is the West Indies West Indian?,” he insisted that the conscious spelling of ‘The West Indies” with a capitalized “T” in “The” aims to signify the unity of the region. Without unity, the old imperialist pressures will prevail as they often do.

In 1975, the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón published a landmark poem called “Mujer Negra” or “Black Woman.” The poem opens with the terrible trade of human beings by the European colonialists, touches on the war of independence and then settles on the remarkable Cuban Revolution of 1959:

I came down from the Sierra

to put an end to capital and usurer,
to generals and to the bourgeoisie.
Now I exist: only today do we own, do we create.
Nothing is alien to us.
The land is ours.
Ours are the sea and sky,
the magic and vision.
My fellow people, here I see you dance
around the tree we are planting for communism.
Its prodigal wood already resounds.

The land is ours. Sovereignty is ours too. Our destiny is not to live as the subordinate beings of others. That is the message of Morejón and of the Cuban people who are building their sovereign lives, and it is the message of the Haitian people who want to advance their great Revolution of 1804.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research via consortiumnews.com

By Dan COHEN

As shock grips the Caribbean island nation of Haiti following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, the Haitian government has carried out a campaign to arrest suspects it alleges are responsible for the murder.

Haitian Director of National Police Leon Charles announced at a press conference that the assassination squad that killed Moise is comprised of 28 foreigners, including two Haitian-Americans and 26 Colombian nationals. Fifteen of those Colombians have been detained while three were killed in a gun battle and eight remain fugitives. Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano has admitted that some of the Colombians are retired military personnel. Among them are at least one highly decorated soldier who received training from the United States and another who has been implicated in the murder of Colombian civilians.

Ties to oligarchs

The Haitian-Americans have been identified as James Solages, 35, and Joseph Vincent, 55. Solages lives in Fort Lauderdale where he is the CEO of EJS Maintenance & Repair and runs a nonprofit group, the website of which has since been scrubbed of information. Prior to relocating to Florida, he lived in the southern Haitian coastal city of Jacmel.

According to The Washington Post, Solages’ Facebook profile, which has since been removed, listed him as the chief commander of bodyguards for the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. The Canadaian Embassy confirmed that Solages previously worked as a security guard. While in Florida, Solages was an “avid and vocal supporter of former President Michel Martelly,” the founder of Moïse’s Haitian Baldheaded Party (PHTK), according to Tony Jean-Thénor, leader of the Veye Yo popular organization in Miami, founded by the late Father Gérard Jean-Juste.

Photos of James Solages and an armored military vehicle that he posted to his now-removed Facebook page

The Haitian Times reported Solages also used to work as a security guard for both Reginald Boulos and Dimitri Vorbe, two prominent members of Haiti’s tiny bourgeoisie. Although initially friendly to him, they both became bitter opponents of Moïse. Boulos was also a prominent supporter of previous coups in 1991 and 2004 against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The Boulos family is one of the wealthiest in Haiti and owns a pharmaceutical company that, in 1996, was responsible for poisoning scores of children with its tainted fever medicine, some fatally. Since the July 6-8, 2018 national uprising against the IMF-dictated hike of fuel prices, Boulos has attempted to recast himself as a popular and progressive figure (after one of his stores was burned and looted), heading a political party called the Third Way Movement (MTV).

Vorbe is the executive director and vice president of Société Générale d’Énergie SA, one of the largest private energy companies in Haiti which had a sweet-heart deal providing power to the energy grid that Moïse sought to renegotiate after the collapse of the PetroCaribe program, under which Venezuela provided Haiti with cheap oil and credit from 2008 to 2018.

Many believe Boulos is the intellectual author and financial backer of Moïse’s murder.

“Solage’s employment by Boulos and centrality to the operation appears to confirm the growing popular consensus in Haiti that this controversial merchant-turned-politician was the principal backer of Moïse’s assassination,” explained journalist Kim Ives, continuing:

A lot of factors have been pointing to his involvement: The arrival of the mercenaries in nine brand new Nissan Patrol vehicles without license plates suggests that they were vehicles coming from the Nissan dealership owned by Reginald Boulos. The Haitian people have already concluded that Boulous was behind the assassination and have dechoukéed [uprooted] the dealership, Automeca, that he owned.”

Colombian assassin trained by the U.S.

While the Haitian-Americans reportedly served as translators, the muscle of the assassination squad came from Colombia, the U.S.’s top regional ally, which serves as a platform for destabilization and regime change plots in the region, from Venezuela to Ecuador – and now apparently Haiti.

The most prominent member of the hit squad is Manuel Antonio Grosso Guarín, a 41-year-old former special operations commando who retired from the military as a member of the Simón Bolívar No. 1 infantry battalion on December 31, 2019. According to the Colombian newspaper La Semana, Grosso “had several special combat courses, had been a member of the special forces and anti-guerrilla squads, and was known for being a skilled paratrooper who flew through the air without fear.”

Grosso is pictured in the rear (blue jeans) being moved following a press in Port-au-Prince, July 8, 2021. Joseph Odelyn | AP

In 2013, Grosso was assigned to the Urban Anti-Terrorist Special Force group, a secretive elite military detachment dedicated to counter-terrorism operations and carrying out kidnappings and assassinations (euphemistically known as ‘high value target acquisition and elimination’). This branch of the military is also tasked with providing security to VIP figures from the Colombian president to U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush.

“He was one of the most prepared,” a source remarked to La Semana.

Among Grosso’s preparations was special command instruction from the United States military, which supplies training and weapons to the Colombia military, one of the most repressive armed forces in the region and one that works to secure international corporate interests and drug trafficking routes.

“How many false positives (see the following paragraph), how many social leaders, how many signers of the peace accord, will be on this man?” left-wing Colombian Senator Gustavo Bolivar commented on Twitter.

#VerguenzaMundial
Este es Manuel Antonio Grosso Guarín, uno de los exmilitares colombianos del equipo de mercenarios que según autoridades de Haití habría asesinado al Presidente de ese país.

Pero la mala imagen de Colombia la generan los escritores. pic.twitter.com/Cnrm85mNyS

— Gustavo Bolívar (@GustavoBolivar) July 9, 2021

Grosso was joined by Francisco Eladio Uribe Ochoa, who had retired from the Colombian Army in 2019, according to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. Eladio Uribe’s wife told the newspaper that he had been investigated for participation in the execution of civilians — a practice known as “false positives,” in which the Colombian military lured at least 6,402 civilians, murdered them, and dressed them in guerrilla fatigues in order to inflate their kill numbers. This gruesome practice helped military commanders reach lofty kill-count quotas set by the United States and was incentivized with bonus pay and vacation time for soldiers who carried out the killings.

Though Eladio Uribe’s wife said that he had been exonerated, his name has appeared in a file of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a court formed out of the 2016 peace accord, which has investigated several thousand cases of false positives that the Colombian government had not previously admitted. Eladio Uribe is one of two soldiers accused in the 2008 murder of Luis Carlos Cárdenas in the village of Chorros Blancos in Antioquia region.

Other alleged members of the hit squad alleged to have killed Moïse include:

• Duberney Capador Giraldo, a retired Deputy First Sergeant (killed in a gun battle in Haiti)
• ​​Alejandro Giraldo Zapata
• John Jairo Ramírez Gómez
• Víctor Albeiro Piñera

Of the 28 total people who allegedly participated in the assassination, four of the Colombians arrived in Haiti on June 6, 2021. Grosso arrived in the Dominican city of Punta Cana and crossed the land border into Haiti two days later. Photos show him and other suspects at popular tourist sites in the Dominican Republic.

A photo of Grosso, left, along with some of the other suspects posing in Haiti posted to Grosso’s Facebook page

Unanswered questions and a growing consensus

Questions also remain about why Moïse’s security team failed to protect him, and if any of its members were complicit in the murder. Dimitri Herard, the head of the General Security Unit of the National Palace, is under investigation by the United States government for arms trafficking, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). While there is no evidence (but many rumors) linking him to the murder, “Herard is one of the individuals most responsible for the safety of the president.”

While the Haitian government has identified what appear to be Moïse’s assassins, there is still no hard evidence — just circumstantial — linking them to Boulos and possibly even Vorbe. Nonetheless, “there is a growing consensus that Reginald Boulous, for whom an arrest warrant [was] issued last week, paid for the mercenaries,” according to Ives. “It appears to be becoming more and more evident that the sector of the Haitian bourgeois, with whom Jovenel Moïse was at war, are intimately linked to his assassination.”

As the investigation into Moïse’s murder unfolds, the U.S. appears to be preparing the groundwork to deploy troops to Haiti at the request of a figure whom it has spent decades grooming. According to The New York Times, Claude Joseph, who is in a struggle against Dr. Ariel Henry to head the Haitian state in the wake of Moïse’s assassination, requested the U.S. send military forces to guard key infrastructure, including the port, airport, and gasoline reserves. White House Spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced that the U.S. would reinforce U.S. personnel in Haiti with FBI and DHS deployments.

CIA’s NED created fake student movement GRAFNEH in #Haiti in the 2000s, which partnered with the bourgeoisie mafia to destabilize/destroy the nascent and promising democracy the poor majority fought to establish. Current de facto puppet PM Claude Joseph was one of NED’s minions. https://t.co/zgz6GCQxpU pic.twitter.com/w1Q83qIfN2

— Madame Boukman – Justice 4 Haiti (@madanboukman) July 4, 2021

Joseph is an asset of the United States and its regime-change arm, the National Endowment For Democracy. Wikileaks cables revealed that he first came to prominence in 2003 as the leader of a NED-spawned student front called GRAFNEH in the lead up to the coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He also founded another NED-funded anti-Aristide group Initiative Citoyenne (Citizens’ Initiative). He is reported by Haitian radio stations to have been, with prominent Haitian ex-Deputy Gary Bodeau, one of the principal assailants who severely beat the late Father Gérard Jean-Juste in a Pétionville church in 2005.

Jean-Juste, perhaps the most prominent supporter and surrogate of the then exiled-in-South-Africa President Aristide, had been falsely accused of involvement in the killing of his own cousin, Jacques Roche, a writer.

“Essentially, we have a U.S. puppet asking his puppeteer to invade Haiti for the fourth time in just over a century,” Ives concluded. “But both the region and, above all, the Haitian people are sick and tired of U.S. military interventions, which are largely responsible for the nation’s current debilitated, critical state both economically and politically. Much of the most oppressed neighborhoods are now heavily armed and have already announced a revolution against the likes of Boulos, so the U.S.-led invaders of 2021 are likely to face a resistance similar to that which emerged against the U.S. Marines in 1915 and UN ‘peace-keepers’ in 2004, only more ferocious.”

mintpressnews.com

Now home to thousands of limited liability corporations linked to the CIA, as well as private military contractors, sketchy airlines flying from remote Florida airports, the interventionist US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), and exiled oligarchs running destabilization operations in their native countries, Miami – or MIAMI, “Military Intervention and Mercenaries, Inc.” – serves as the nexus for current Trump administration “regime change” efforts.

The latest example of Miami being a hive of CIA operatives came after five Americans, one Serbian permanent resident of the United States, and another Serbian national, were arrested by the Haitian National Police in Port-au-Prince with weapons, advanced communications devices, drones, and other military hardware amid anti-government protests linked to CIA regime change operations. The government of Haitian President Jovenel Moise and Prime Minister Jean Henry Céant is under US pressure to sever its diplomatic and financial links with the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who the Trump administration is attempting to replace with Juan Guaido, a CIA agent-of-influence and US puppet.

The Americans and Serbs were subsequently transferred to Miami on the authorization of Haitian Justice Minister Jean Roody Aly, who was assured by the Donald Trump administration that the seven men would be criminally tried by the United States. Once in Miami, the US Attorney’s Office in Miami, which takes its orders from the CIA-friendly Attorney General, William Barr, declined prosecution of the men but “debriefed” them, a term usually applied to intelligence agents who are caught and expelled by foreign authorities. The decision by the Haitian administration to release the seven men has resulted in a political firestorm in Port-au-Prince, with the Haitian Senate demanding answers about the role Moise played in ordering the Central Bureau of the Judicial Police of Haiti to release the individuals, described by Prime Minister Céant as “mercenaries” and “terrorists.”

Two of the Americans – Christopher Michael Osman and Christopher Mark McKinley – are former US Navy SEAL officers. Another, Kent Leland Kroeker, is a former US Marine. A fourth American, Talon Ray Burton, is a former US Army military policeman and an ex-employee of the American mercenary Blackwater firm, which was founded by ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince, the brother of Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The fifth American, Dustin Porte, also ex-US military, is the president of Patriot Group Services, a subcontractor for the US Department of Homeland Security.

The two Serbians, Vlade Jankvic and Danilo Bajagic, were permitted to fly to Washington, DC after arriving in Miami from Haiti. An eighth man arrested with the Americans and Serbs, Michael Estera, a Haitian national, remains in Haiti. Curiously, Estera had earlier been deported to Haiti from the United States.

McKinley reportedly changed his name from Christopher Heben. In 2015, a jury found Heben not guilty of filing a false police report claiming an African-American man shot him outside a store in Ohio. He subsequently changed his last name to McKinley, the same name of one of the Ohio-born US presidents. Heben previously served with SEAL Team 8 in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq. Sfter leaving the Navy, Heben was found guilty of forging physician prescriptions for anabolic steroids. McKinley runs a security company called Invictvs Group. It is noteworthy that Augustus Sol Invictus, also known as Austin Gillespie, is a far-right white nationalist, who ran for the Libertarian Party’s nomination for the US Senate in Florida in 2016. He was also a speaker at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan violence against counter-protesters.

For Miami, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the 1960s, Miami and Dade County was the home to hundreds of CIA mercenaries, many with ties to criminal organizations, including the Mafia. In addition to, once again, serving as the home to CIA mercenaries, Miami International Airport has reverted to its traditional role of smuggling illegal weapons to Latin American hot spots. The latest incident involved a Boeing 767 cargo plane, belonging to 21 Air LLC of Greensboro, North Carolina, being seized by Venezuelan authorities on February 3 for transporting weapons and ammunition from Miami International Airport to Valencia, the third largest city in Venezuela.

The mercenaries arrested in Haiti appear to be unprofessional clowns. The CIA has a history of hiring such bumbling fools. In 1985, the CIA, trying to recruit American mercenaries for its Operation PEGASUS covert war against Nicaragua, held recruiting sessions in a rather seedy Miami Howard Johnson’s motel room. Other CIA case officers recruited Cubans, including known drug dealers, at bars, such as “Cherries” in Key Biscayne. Garbage in, garbage out has always been the unofficial motto bestowed by critics upon the “Black Knights of the Potomac.”

Miami has been a historical hub for right-wing Cuban exiles, most employed by the CIA, who have maintained the goal of overthrowing the government of Cuba. Even though Cuba is no longer governed by members of the family of Fidel Castro, the Trump administration has increased sanctions and the US embargo on Cuba with the avowed aim of overthrowing President Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel. The presence of SOUTHCOM in Miami provides the CIA with a base of operations to conduct regime change liaison with Miami-based oligarchs from not only Venezuela and Cuba, but Nicaragua and Bolivia. During the CIA’s heyday in Miami, Cuban exiles were recruited to fight illegal CIA wars and insurrections in the Congo, Angola, Ghana, and Mozambique. In some cases, the Miami-based covert operations involved members of Israel’s Mossad, who were able to blend into Miami’s sizable Jewish population without any suspicion. Today, the Latin American right-wing oligarchs in Miami have found comfortable allies in the city’s large expatriate Russian- and Ukrainian-Jewish population of tax evaders, embezzlers, professional assassins, weapons smugglers, drug kingpins, human sex traffickers, and multi-million- dollar investors in Trump’s condominiums.

Some of Latin America’s wealthiest oligarchs have fled, along with their money, to the Miami area. They have been joined, in some cases, by the commanders of genocidal death squads, including Gilberto Jordán of the Guatemalan “Red Berets,” the Kaibiles. Jordán’s military unit specialized in murdering helpless Guatemalan Mayan families, including infants. He found a safe haven in Delray Beach, north of Miami. Although Jordán, a US citizen – thanks to the “good offices” of the CIA – was arrested by US authorities in 2010, he was merely convicted of lying on his US immigration papers and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. The federal sentencing document stated that in November 1982, Jordán’s unit entered the village of Dos Erres where Jordán ordered his men to systematically kill the men, women and children of the village, raping the women and girls, before hitting the villagers in the head with sledgehammers and throwing them into the village well.

Bolivia’s former Defense Minister, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, another genocidal murderer of indigenous villagers, lives in a gated community in affluent Pinecrest in Miami-Dade County. He and his fellow Miami exilée, former Bolivian President Gonzalo "Goni" Sánchez de Lozada, were sued in US Court in Fort Lauderdale for $10 million in compensatory claims by family members and survivors of the 2003 “Black October” deaths of 67 indigenous protesters in the village of Sorata. In 2014, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, pursuant to the provisions of the Torture Victim Protection Act. The Bolivian genocidal duo appealed the decision and last year, US Judge James Cohn, a George W. Bush-nominee, overturned the verdict, even though there was a previous unanimous jury verdict siding with the plaintiffs. The Bolivian genocide twins are now biding their time in Miami until Trump, working with the blatantly neo-Nazi regime of President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, organizes the overthrow of Bolivian socialist President Evo Morales, that nation’s first native Aymara president. Bolsonaro and Bolivia’s fascists-in-waiting will then be free to jointly target their nations’ indigenous tribes for annihilation, without a peep from the White House.

Another one of “Miami’s finest” was Telmo Ricardo Hurtado, nicknamed the “Butcher of the Andes” for his Peruvian military unit’s massacres of Peruvian indigenous villagers. In 2009, Hurtado was found guilty of lying on his US visa application and deported back to Peru. Another South Florida war criminal was Juan Angel Hernández Lara, the commander of Honduras’s Special Forces Battalion 3-16, a death squad formed by the CIA in the 1980s. Lara specialized in torture involving fingernails and plastic bags over victims’ heads. Lara was later found living in a $250,000 home in Wellington in Palm Beach County.

Under the Trump administration, which coddles Latin America’s neo-fascist leaders of Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Argentina, is more likely to extend a hearty welcome to genocidal death squad leaders and continue to deport largely indigenous refugees at the US southern border seeking asylum from uniformed mass murderers.

Equally notorious in Miami’s “Little Havana” neighborhood of right-wing Cuban exiles were two terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, both responsible for the terrorist bombing in October 1976 of Cubana Flight 455, en route from Bridgetown, Barbados to Kingston, Jamaica. All 73 passengers and crew were killed, including children. In addition to Bosch and Posada Carriles, members of the pre-Hugo Chavez CIA-trained Venezuelan intelligence service, General Sectoral Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP) were implicated in the attack. Veterans of DISIP are behind the current CIA efforts to toppled President Maduro, many of them also having sought and received sanctuary in the Miami area, particularly Doral.

It is no surprise that Miami and South Florida, once again, buzzes with activity as Trump’s CIA launches coups in Latin America. While dodgy CIA contractors meet with one another in Miami bars that resemble Rick’s Café in the movie “Casablanca,” or for science fiction fans, the weird alien-crowded bar on the planet Tatooine in “Star Wars,” Trump regularly rubs shoulders with Latin American oligarch members of his faux-posh Palm Beach, Florida Mar-a-Lago billionaires’ and multi-millionaires’ club. Some of these wealthy members once relied upon some of Latin America’s most notorious mass murderers for security in their native countries. And, if Mr. Trump has his way, they will do so again in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and Bolivia.

In 2010, when announcing emergency help for Haiti after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, President Barack Obama noted America’s historic ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation, but few Americans understand how important Haiti’s contribution to U.S. history was.

In modern times, when Haiti does intrude on U.S. consciousness, it’s usually because of some natural disaster or a violent political upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of crushing poverty.

However, more than two centuries ago, Haiti represented one of the most important neighbors of the new American Republic and played a central role in enabling the United States to expand westward. If not for Haiti, the course of U.S. history could have been very different, with the United States possibly never expanding much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

In the 1700s, then-called St. Domingue and covering the western third of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti was a French colony that rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere. Relying on a ruthless exploitation of African slaves, French plantations there produced nearly one-half the world’s coffee and sugar.

Many of the great cities of France owe their grandeur to the wealth that was extracted from Haiti and its slaves. But the human price was unspeakably high. The French had devised a fiendishly cruel slave system that imported enslaved Africans for work in the fields with accounting procedures for their amortization. They were literally worked to death.

The American colonists may have rebelled against Great Britain over issues such as representation in Parliament and arbitrary actions by King George III. But black Haitians confronted a brutal system of slavery. An infamous French method of executing a troublesome slave was to insert a gunpowder charge into his rectum and then detonate the explosive.

So, as the American colonies fought for their freedom in the 1770s and as that inspiration against tyranny spread to France in the 1780s, the repercussions would eventually reach Haiti, where the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity” resonated with special force. Slaves demanded that the concepts of freedom be applied universally.

When the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.

Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels known as the “Black Jacobins” gained the sympathy of the American Federalist Party and particularly Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself and a fierce opponent of slavery. Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution for the new nation.

Conspiracies

But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s new freedom. Despite Hamilton’s sympathies, some Founders, including Thomas Jefferson who owned 180 slaves and owed his political strength to agrarian interests, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in St. Domingue. Jefferson feared that slave uprisings might spread northward.

“If something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.

In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States and his interests at least temporarily aligned with those of Napoleon. The French dictator was determined to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson was eager to see the slave rebellion crushed.

Through secret diplomatic channels, Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to starvation.”

But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force, Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.

In May 1801, Jefferson picked up the first inklings of Napoleon’s other agenda. Alarmed at the prospect of a major European power controlling New Orleans and thus the mouth of the strategic Mississippi River, Jefferson backpedaled on his commitment to Napoleon, retreating to a posture of neutrality. Still terrified at the prospect of a successful republic organized by freed African slaves Jefferson took no action to block Napoleon’s thrust into the New World.

In 1802, a French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure.

L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in. Napoleon, however, broke his word.

Jealous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.

Foiled Plans

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army already decimated by disease was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery.

Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign. The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon denied his foothold in the New World agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson. Ironically, the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement, had been made possible despite Jefferson’s misguided collaboration with Napoleon.

Jefferson also saw the new territory as an opportunity to expand slavery in the United States, creating a lucrative new industry of slave-breeding that would financially benefit Jefferson and his plantation-owning neighbors. But nothing would be done to help Haiti. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Thomas Jefferson: America’s Founding Sociopath.”]

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.

But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.”

The loss of L’Ouverture’s leadership dealt a severe blow to Haiti’s prospects, according to Jefferson scholar Paul Finkelman of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

“Had Toussaint lived, it’s very likely that he would have remained in power long enough to put the nation on a firm footing, to establish an order of succession,” Finkelman told me in an interview. “The entire subsequent history of Haiti might have been different.”

Instead, the island nation continued a downward spiral. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French and a counterrevolution, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island.

Though the Haitian resistance had blunted Napoleon’s planned penetration of the North American mainland, Jefferson reacted to the shocking bloodshed in Haiti by imposing a stiff economic embargo on the island nation. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.

Jefferson’s Blemish

For some scholars, Jefferson’s vengeful policy toward Haiti like his personal ownership of slaves represented an ugly blemish on his legacy as a historic advocate of freedom. Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery.

In the 1820s, the former President proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

Jefferson’s deportation scheme never was taken very seriously and American slavery would continue for another four decades until it was ended by the Civil War. The official hostility of the United States toward Haiti extended almost as long, ending in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln finally granted diplomatic recognition.

By then, however, Haiti’s destructive patterns of political violence and economic chaos had been long established continuing up to the present time. Personal and political connections between Haiti’s light-skinned elite and power centers of Washington also have lasted through today.

Recent Republican administrations have been particularly hostile to the popular will of the impoverished Haitian masses. When leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was twice elected by overwhelming margins, he was ousted both times first during the presidency of George H.W. Bush and again under President George W. Bush.

Washington’s conventional wisdom on Haiti holds that the country is a hopeless basket case that would best be governed by business-oriented technocrats who would take their marching orders from the United States.

However, the Haitian people have a different perspective. Unlike most Americans who have no idea about their historic debt to Haiti, many Haitians know this history quite well. The bitter memories of Jefferson and Napoleon still feed the distrust that Haitians of all classes feel toward the outside world.

“In Haiti, we became the first black independent country,” Aristide once told me in an interview. “We understand, as we still understand, it wasn’t easy for them American, French and others to accept our independence.”

consortiumnews.com

The second example of a world leader claiming virtual ownership of an entire country is former U.S. president Bill Clinton. While Mr. Clinton shares old King Leopold’s penchant for ladies of the evening and mistresses, it is Clinton’s overreaching domination of Haiti that makes him a political doppelganger of Clinton.

Another Haitian first round presidential election, held on October 25, has served to be another exercise in rampant vote tabulation fraud. Dr. Maryse Narcisse, the candidate of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s political party, Fanmi Lavalas, has claimed that recent election was based on massive fraud by the Haitian government. 

In 2010, current president Michel Martelly claimed that his third place finish against the government-backed candidate in the first-round was the result of fraud. Martelly’s challenge was successful and he was moved up to second place finisher and in the final round he was elected president. In the most recent first round election, Martelly’s handpicked successor, Jovenal Moise, was said to have led with 32.8 percent of the vote, followed by Jude Celestin, backed by former president Rene Preval, with 25.2 percent. Third place finisher, Moise Jean-Charles, who is very popular in Haiti, was locked out of the final round. 

Even though Mr. Clinton sent U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to restore the elected president Aristide, a Roman Catholic Marxist-oriented «liberation theology» priest who was overthrown in a September 1991 coup, Clinton’s 1994 military operation «Uphold Democracy» could be renamed «Operation Uphold the Clintons’ Wealth.» Clinton would soon double cross Aristide after it became clear that the Haitian president’s new party, Fanmi Lavalas, was heading toward the same left progressivism as Hugo Chavez’s Fifth Republic Movement, which was victorious in 1999. Clinton forced Haiti to undergo painful World Bank-imposed austerity measures, a virtual death knell for the hemisphere’s poorest country.

In 1996, Preval, to whom Clinton took an immediate liking because of his commitment to privatize Haiti’s state-owned enterprises, was elected president to succeed Aristide. Aristide supporters in parliament clashed with the Preval loyalists. In 1999, Preval dissolved the parliament and ruled by decree for the remaining year he had in office. Preval’s actions were supported by the phony «pro-democracy» Clinton who, in 1999, was busy trying to restore his political capital after his impeachment by the House of Representatives in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, backed Preval’s unconstitutional actions.

In 2000, Aristide ran again for president of Haiti. The U.S. State Department, under Clinton’s longtime consigliere Madeleine Albright, backed Haiti’s opposition in boycotting the presidential vote, which clearly showed that turnout was over 60 percent and that Aristide won with over 92 percent of the vote.

After Aristide was overthrown in a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency-inspired and planned coup in 2004, Clinton ecstatically danced on the political grave of Aristide, who was exiled first to the Central African Republic and then to South Africa. In 2009, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is owned and operated by the U.S. government, appointed Bill Clinton as the UN Special Envoy to Haiti. Clinton ensured that the populist opposition loyal to Aristide, the man he helped regain office after the 1991 military coup, remain suppressed. Aristide was anathema to Clinton’s plans to squeeze every imaginable profit from Haiti.

Clinton was able to use the «peacekeeping» United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) as personal centurions to ensure that Clinton’s political and business cronies were not threatened by the populist forces of Aristide, who returned from exile to Haiti in 2011, and his Lavalas party. MINUSTAH forces targeted, and continue to target, Aristide forces in brutal attacks. Perhaps in keeping with the spirit of the sordid sexual deviancy history of the UN Special Envoy Clinton, MINUSTAH forces in Haiti were accused of various sexual crimes, including Uruguayan forces gang raping a Haitian teenage boy, a Nepalese soldier torturing to death a 16-year old Haitian boy, Pakistani officers raping a 14-year old mentally challenged Haitian boy, and Sri Lankan troops raping Haitian children. Neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton ever mentioned these outrageous actions while the U.S. president served as UN Special Envoy. Topping off these MINUSTAH crimes was the introduction of cholera into Haiti by Nepalese troops.

In 2008, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson warned against Aristide’s return to the country in a classified cable to the U.S. State Department. She emphasized that MINUSTAH was in Haiti to protect U.S. interests, which did not include a return of Aristide to the country: «A premature departure of MINUSTAH would leave the [Haitian] government…vulnerable to…resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces—reversing gains of the last two years. MINUSTAH is an indispensable tool in realizing core USG [US government] policy interests in Haiti. Sanderson’s reference to «populist» and «anti-market economy political forces was a clear reference to Aristide and his party. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried every trick in the book to prevent Aristide’s return to Haiti, including having President Obama apply pressure on South African president Jacob Zuma. These efforts failed. Aristide and his wife made a triumphant return to Haiti on March 18, 2011.

A year before Aristide’s return, in 2010, things got much worse for Haiti and Mr. Clinton was there to strangle the nation to an even greater degree. The 2010 earthquake decimated Haiti and killed some 300,000 people and left the country’s infrastructure in tatters. President Barack Obama, in a body blow to Haiti, Obama asked Clinton and former President George W. Bush, the president responsible for the 2004 coup against Aristide, to join Bill Clinton in Haiti relief efforts. 

Mr. Clinton launched the following high-tech appeal on the web site of his William J. Clinton Foundation: "Text 'HAITI' to '20222' and $10 will be given to the Clinton Foundation's Haiti Relief Fund, charged to your cell phone bill." Clinton also solicited for donations of up to $1000 for the Clinton Foundation's Haiti Relief Fund. Most of the millions of dollars Clinton and Bush raised in Haiti relief never made their way to the Haitian people but into the pockets of the Clinton family and their cronies in Haiti and elsewhere. The Clinton aid money that did reach Haiti was siphoned off to benefit not only Haiti’s wealthy elite but also wealthy businessmen from the neighboring Dominican Republic who were moving their operations into Haiti.

The CIA-linked U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and members of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association (ARGA), the latter political cronies of the Clintons, wreaked havoc on Haiti's once thriving rice growing business. Once a net exporter of highly-nutritional rice, a combination of USAID policies and one-sided Clinton-era trade deals destroyed the Haitian rice industry and made the country dependent on expensive and non-nutritional genetically-engineered bleached white rice from Arkansas agri-businesses. In 2008, the soaring price of rice worldwide and price-fixing by U.S. agri-businesses linked to Clinton resulted in food riots breaking out in Haiti. By 2010, the time of the quake, Haiti was already an economic basket case.

Just like old King Leopold, who prized his personal country Congo because of its immense mineral wealth, particularly diamonds and gold, the Clintons became highly invested in Haiti’s emerging gold mining industry. The Clintons’ investments in Haiti, which had long been protected by MINUSTAH, would soon be guarded by an Israeli company, HLSI, the vice president of which, Eva Peled, a former officer in the Israel Defense Force, also happened to be the chief executive officer of Geomines and vice president of the Mitrelli Group. 

In October 2015, HLSI signed an agreement with Haiti’s government to provide land, air, and sea border security for Haiti. The Geomines/Mitrelli team are major investors in Haitian gold mining operations. To ensure it gained full access into Haiti, the Mitrelli Group lavished generous donations on the Clinton Foundation. One of Geomines partners in the Haiti mining operations, VCS Mining of Delaware, named Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, to its advisory board in 2013. Rodham received generous stock options in VCS that stand to make him millions of dollars if VCS strikes gold. VCS Mining’s president, Angelo Viard, has also contributed generously to the Clinton Foundation, as well as to Democratic candidates, including his advisory board’s newest member’s sister, Hillary Clinton. VCS just happened to have been awarded two gold mining permits by the Martelly government, the first issued by Haiti in more than five decades.

Haiti’s new private «army», the Israeli firm HLSI, touts its capability to find land mines. However, the same thermal imaging technology can be used to find minerals like gold and diamonds. Hence, HLSI is concentrating its «security» efforts around Haiti’s gold mining operations.

Haiti is sensitive to the presence of Israelis in the country. Some of Haiti’s earliest slave owners were Jews, such as the Gradisse family of Cap-Haitien and Gonaives and Simon Isaac Henriquez Moron of Grand’ Anse, Haiti. Israel also secretly supplied weapons to the repressive dictatorships of «Papa Doc» Francois Duvalier and his son, «Baby Doc» Jean-Clause Duvalier. One of Haiti’s richest businessmen, Gilbert Bigio, a Syrian Jew who is also Israel’s honorary consul in Haiti, is more committed to helping Israel than his native Haiti. It was the Haitian elite, individuals like Bigio, who benefited from Bill Clinton’s earthquake relief money. 

Supplementing the HLSI security protection for Clinton/Israeli business investments in Haiti are the armed guards led by Martelly’s son, Olivier Martelly. These armed thugs, reminiscent of the dreaded Duvalier-era «Tonton Macoutes», are known as the «Galil Gang» because of the Israeli Galil guns they carry. In September 2015, Olivier was reportedly arrested by federal authorities in Miami on drug smuggling charges. However, the younger Martelly was said to have been quietly released after a flurry of phone calls were made that, according to Haitian opposition sources, may have involved Bill and Hillary Clinton and pressure to release the son of their Haitian ally.

King Leopold’s tormenting control of Congo was highlighted in a book titled, «King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.» Whether they pray to God or invoke voodoo curses, many Haitians cannot wait until the ghosts of Bill Clinton and his wife join that of King Leopold.

This Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of the commencement of the U.S. Occupation of Haiti. On July 28, 1915, U.S. Marines landed on the shores of Haiti, occupying the country for 19 years. Several college campuses, professional associations, social movements, and political parties are marking the occasion with a series of reflections and demonstrations. Several have argued that the U.S. has never stopped occupying Haiti, even as military boots left in 1934. Some activists are using the word “humanitarian occupation” to describe the current situation, denouncing the loss of sovereignty, as U.N. troops have been patrolling the country for over 11 years. The phrase “humanitarian occupation” may seem distasteful and even ungrateful to some considering the generosity of the response to the January 12, 2010 earthquake, however there are several parallels between the contemporary aid regime and the U.S. Marine administration. First and foremost, foreign troops are on the ground, controlling the country; the military regimes operated with complete immunity and impunity. Second, a new constitution was installed, centralizing power in the executive. Third, both occupations involved Haiti’s gold resources.

Military Maneuvers

The U.S. Marines invaded Haiti ostensibly to restore order, disrupted by the kako, an armed peasant resistance. From 1910 to the 1915 invasion of the U.S. Marines, Haiti had 7 presidents, marked with violent clashes between two factions of Haiti’s ruling elites. The exploits of the occupying forces were well documented, including by soldiers themselves. Faustin Wirkus declared himself to be the “White King of La Gonave.” Many troops were from Jim Crow South, and they took their racism and white supremacy with them. This racism colored how they saw elements of Haitian culture and folklore, and in turn how the rest of the world was to see Haiti. “Voodoo” and “zombies” were popularized by Hollywood, as the film industry was just taking off, announced by explicitly white supremacist Birth of a Nation. Haiti continued to play “boogieman,” scaring foreigners through exotification.

This story is well-documented (see bibliography compiled by chair of Development Studies at the Faculté d’Ethnologie, Ilionor Louis). Apparently less understood is the current military occupation. On February 29, 2004, a multinational force led by the U.S. came to quell dissent following a U.S.-backed regime change. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide declared he was “kidnapped” aboard a U.S. military plane, to be dumped in the Central African Republic, which has had its share of violent coups and repressions. Less overtly imperialistic, under a U.N. banner, MINUSTAH, the International United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti, took over on June 1, authorized by U.N. resolution 1542. The polyglot that peaked at over 13,000 troops from 54 countries is led by Brazil, which has been pressing for a permanent seat on the Security Council. Simultaneously, Brazil had made much of its success in pacifying the most dangerous of itsfavelas, shantytowns, including in Rio. The U.S. backed this proposal by France; Washington insiders confirmed my suspicions that the failures of the mission would be seen as proof that only a powerful, established imperialist country such as the U.S. could lead a mission and thus deserve a permanent seat. People in Haiti also saw MINUSTAH as serving U.S. interests, as Haitian NGO worker Yvette Desrosiers declared: “the Americans hide their face, they send Brazilians, Argentines… he’s hidden but he’s the one in command!” The mandate has been renewed every year, despite the fact that Haiti has much lower rates of violent crimes (8.2 per 100,000 people) than many of its Caribbean neighbors such as Jamaica that does not have a U.N. mission (54.9), or Brazil, heading up the U.N. mission (26.4).

Why would its mandate be renewed, following the 2006 elections that brought René Préval and his ruling Lespwa party to power? Colleagues in Haiti pointed out that the keyword “stabilization” refers to keeping the leaders in office and quelling dissent. In 2008, the country erupted in protest against the high cost of living; the so-called “political class” seized this opportunity to force the Prime Minister to resign. In 2009, activists mended fences over their conflict over Aristide to call for an increase in the minimum wage, from 70 gourdes a day ($1.75) to 200 ($5). Both houses of Parliament voted unanimously to approve it. In a report for which he spent only days in the country to write, Oxford economist Paul Collier outlined a strategy of tourism, export mango production, and subcontracted apparel factories and suggested Bill Clinton as U.N. Special Envoy. Clinton and newly-named U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Préval in support of the Collier Report. Bill Clinton publicly questioned the minimum wage increase as undercutting Haiti’s “comparative advantage,” and WikiLeaked documents outlined intense pressure to keep wages low. Préval rejected the 200 gourdes increase, unconstitutionally writing in a figure of 125 gourdes (a little over $3) for workers in overseas apparel factories. Street-level demonstrations increased their intensity, and U.N. troops responded with increasing force. Certain areas of Port-au-Prince perennially smelled like tear gas at the time, more so than any period since the 2004 ouster of Aristide. MINUSTAH played a central role in suppressing dissent, taking a lead role instead of supporting the police, as their mandate dictates.

The U.N. also lost 92 troops, including its leader, Hédi Annabi, when the earthquake leveled their headquarters at the Hotel Christopher. Some argued that it was fortunate to have over 11,000 troops on the ground to assist in logistical support in the earthquake response. Indeed, many large U.S. NGOs employed them to “keep order” during distributions. The troops engaged in only minimal logistics in rebuilding. The quality of their construction work was called into question following an outbreak of cholera in October, barely nine months after the earthquake. Infected U.N. troops stationed outside of Mirebalais spread their fecal matter in leaky sewage from the base, which ran into Haiti’s major river. Within days, the outbreak spread to the entire country. In addition to this epidemiological evidence,genetic evidence pinpointed the troops from Nepal as the source. Despite this overwhelming scientific evidence, the U.N. claimed immunity for this outbreak that has killed over 8500 people in four years and continues to kill. Lawyers from the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureau des Avocats Intérnationaux sued the U.N. on behalf of the victims and their families. However, in January 2015, days before the fifth anniversary of the quake, a judgeconfirmed the U.N.’s immunity. This was the most egregious invocation of their immunity, but it was also confirmed followingseveral cases of sexual abuse brought against U.N. troops.

Constitution Maybe Paper…

A Haitian proverb declares konstitisyon se papye, bayonèt se fè: a constitution is made of paper, a bayonet of iron. In other words, the pen is not mightier than the sword. In reality during occupations, the pen is pushed by the sword. During the 1915 U.S. Marines Occupation, a young, ambitious secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt bragged to have personally written the Haitian constitution, easily scuttled through the puppet regime installed by the Marines. This constitution, formally adopted in 1918, opened up land for foreign ownership, and formalized the linguistic exclusion and hegemony of the ruling classes by naming French as only official language. This constitution paved the way for U.S. agribusiness interests such as United Fruit (Chiquita) to buy up tracts of land, and capitalist speculators such as James P. McDonald to build a railroad, asking to own the tract for 13 miles on either side, almost all of Haiti’s arable land. Needless to say this was a boon for foreign investors, and the local merchants who monopolized foreign trade, while expropriating thousands of peasant farmers. This move triggered a massive kakorebellion, of which Charlemagne Péralte was accused of being intellectual author. Marines lay his mutilated body on display on a public square, a warning to others.

Constitutional changes were also in store during the contemporary occupation. In addition to rejecting the increase in the minimum wage, Bill Clinton and the U.N. are also credited for introducing constitutional reforms. Haiti’s 1987 constitution was the culmination of what Fritz Deshommes called a re-founding of the nation. The popular movements that succeeded in forcing out the Duvalier dictatorship stood fast against the military junta and repression. Passed with over 90 percent of the vote on March 29, 1987, the constitution was based on human rights, guaranteeing both liberal political rights like freedom of press, religion, and assembly as well as social rights such as education and housing. In addition, the constitution elevated Haitian Creole as official language, shared with French. Reeling from 29 years of the Duvalier dictatorship, the public was wary of centralization of power in the executive. The office of Prime Minister, to be ratified by Parliament, was put into place. Power was also shared in the Territorial Collectivities, including 570 communal sections.

Despite advances in gender equity and dual citizenship for Haitians living abroad, many of these gains were reversed by the amendments. The amendments to the constitution lay dormant, out of public view. In fact, Parliament voted to dissolve itself to make way for the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), co-chaired by Bill Clinton, in April 2010. Importantly the IHRC was to hand over governance to Parliament and the newly elected president. When Parliament was back in session in 2011, the first task laid out for them was to ratify the amendments to the constitution. President Michel Martelly, a.k.a. “Sweet Micky,” the winner from the second round of a record low voter turnout of 22%, less than half the previous 2006 elections, pushed for the ratification. He was joined by several foreign agencies, apparently keen on naming the Permanent Electoral Council in a top-down, rushed process that gave the current government the advantage. The coverage of this was murky and confused. Like all other laws, it needed to be published in the official journal of the State, Le Moniteur. Following all this discussion, it was not clear what the final version was. Only the French version was published.

Despite this uncertainty, some sectors apparently considered the constitutional amendments a fait accompli. President Martelly faced a growing opposition, which succeeded in forcing out Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe in December 2014. It was a surprise to many university professors, NGO staff, and activists the constitutional amendments had apparently been accepted, and one of the changes included that the President name a Prime Minister and apparently without requiring a full Parliamentary ratification. The new constitution allows for the leaders of both houses to agree. These two individuals had the most stake in the prolongation of their mandate following the deal reached with Martelly. When Prime Minister Lamothe resigned, Martelly named Evans Paul, a.k.a. K. Plim, who had perennially promoted and positioned himself as “mediator.” The terms of the lower house, the Deputies, were set to expire the second Monday of January, which turned out to be January 12, the fifth anniversary of the earthquake. In addition, a third of the Senate’s terms were also set to expire, meaning that this house too would be below quorum. The sticking point in the conflict between Martelly and the opposition was following the electoral law and naming the representatives for the Electoral Council. As Parliament teetered toward collapse, President Martelly’s hand grew stronger, and the international pressure to “negotiate” to avoid a “political crisis” grew. In effect international agencies like the European Union, the U.S., the U.N., and the World Bank were lining up to support Martelly. These actors concerned with “democracy” said nothing when Martelly replaced all but a handful of the country’s mayors. They indicated that if a negotiated solution – Martelly’s position hadn’t changed – was not reached, they would continue to support the government of Haiti even though he would have to rule by decree. This same state of affairs, ruling by decree, was cited by many of these same international agencies in 1999 as the reason they suspended assistance to Haiti.

What could account for foreign agencies’ change of heart?

Gold Diggers

The first U.S. Occupation of Haiti, in 1915, occurred while the European former colonial powers were at war with one another. One particular justification for the invasion was the threat of German influence in the Western hemisphere. In 1909, German financial interests in Haiti topped the French, which had maintained a monopoly after forcing Haiti into debt since the 1825 indemnity, a condition for France to recognize Haitian independence. German financial interests were over a million gourdes (fixed in 1924, during the Occupation, until 1986 at five to the U.S. Dollar). The U.S. was second at just over 400,000 gourdes. The National City Bank attempted to control the customs houses, one of the only sources of revenue for the government. In 1911, National City Bank’s Vice President Farnham became Vice President of the National Bank of the Republic of Haiti. In December 1914, just before the U.S. occupation, U.S. warships intervened to transport half a million dollars in gold from Haiti’s national reserve.

History repeated itself in this aspect as well. While the UNDP had financed a study in the 1970s, mining activities increased exponentially after the earthquake. On May 11, 2012, reports of mining contracts were unearthed in the press. With a speculated estimated value of $20 billion, this represents a significant wealth. However, given Haiti’s infrastructure, especially after the earthquake, there is insufficient in-country capacity and even technical expertise to evaluate contracts. Significantly, the “exploitation” contracts were granted without Parliamentary approval. However, in February of 2013 Parliament responded, issuing a resolution calling for a moratorium on mining in Haiti, citing the questionable legality of the Conventions as one of their main concerns. Shortly thereafter, the Martelly administration successfully recruited the World Bank to support its effort to restructure its mining laws and obtained support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to manage mining contracts and create a national cadaster.

Communities and civil society organizations have organized topromote their interests and defend their rights. At issue was local communities’ participation and approval, given the loss of agricultural land and therefore peasant livelihood, not to mention the significant environmental damage mining causes. The contracts made no provisions for environmental review or protections. Finally, the contracts expropriated the vast majority of the profits out of the country. The campaign succeeded in a parliamentary inquiry and eventually a resolution in December 2012 with these safeguards in effect. Mining activity has been on hold in Haiti as the government rewrites the law.

The political situation in 2015, without a parliament and President Martelly ruling by decree, allowed for resumption. This – in addition to other development strategies such as high-end tourism that benefit foreign capitalist interests at the expense of local communities – is the main motivation colleagues attribute to the so-called “international community’s” support of the current status. In fact the facilitating exploratory law was on the books in 2005, during the “transition” following Aristide’s ouster. In addition to secrecy, which seems to be the modus operandi of capital advancement, companies openly cited MINUSTAH’s presence as attracting foreign investment. And so mining activities recommenced, with the World Bank not listening to local concerns, until a partisan right-wing journalist unearthed that one of these no-bid contracts went to none other than the brother of the then-Secretary of State, current Presidential Candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, this April.

Differences in Strategy

There are obviously differences as well. Killing with kindness is a more powerful strategy. With a humanitarian mask, NGO aid has made inroads in almost all corners of the country. While the results of foreign aid are mixed, with most of the benefits accruing to foreign aid workers and local elite groups, a nonstop humanitarian occupation has led to greater complacency, dependency, and division. Explicitly racist and imperialist foreign troops might succeed in pacification and building institutions, but they also tend to trigger a violent, nationalist resistance. Contemporary foreign aid is more far-reaching, and more effective at quelling, buying off, or dividing potential threats to the foreign-imposed order.

Moral Hindsight is 20/20

Today, the 1915 U.S. Occupation is denounced for being explicitly imperialistic. At the time, however, it enjoyed tacit support and occasionally active participation from segments of the U.S. population. President Hoover invited the Tuskegee Institute to participate in an exchange, helping to set up Damien, the School of Agronomy. And troops built a network of roads leading from provincial towns to the capital, which facilitated capital accumulation and centralization in Port-au-Prince. Finally U.S. Marines oversaw the completion in 1920 of a National Palace modeled after the White House. So-called “fair” assessments of the 1915 Occupation note these contributions. However these are almost always an afterthought in the collective social memory, in direct contrast to the ways in which the contemporary humanitarian occupation is being framed by many. Accounts of external efforts, the aid, often lead particular news stories. While the humanitarian effort has been critiqued in even mainstream accounts for its lack of coordination, failures in delivery, and shortcomings – notably in a June 3 exposé of the Red Cross – the discussion usually leaves intact foreigners’ good intentions, a reflection of what French medical anthropologist Didier Fassin called humanitarianism’s “moral untouchability.” One trope that has received increasing foreign attention is the impropriety of the Clintons, and occasionally the ineptitude of the U.N., however these accounts are most promoted within partisan outlets, such as Fox News.

What accounts for the difference in the understanding of the 1915 Marines Occupation and the contemporary humanitarian occupation? It must first be said that there are obviously differences of opinion, then and now. French anthropologist Michel Agier has called humanitarianism the “left hand of empire.” In the interim, sensibilities have changed; the “white man’s burden” and open expressions of white supremacy are – at least rhetorically – relegated to the fringe right, or so it seemed before the June 17 shooting in a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina and the hedging about the Confederate flag. Justifications for intervention must now be done on universal, ‘humanitarian’ grounds. Another difference is the proliferation of media forms and especially outlets. Humanitarian agencies have greater access to shape public discussions through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Their efforts and intentions are received by tens if not hundreds of thousands of followers.

In 1915, U.S. Empire was in its ascendency; the Spanish-American war granted U.S. control of Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The so-called “Dollar Diplomacy” gave way to the more erudite “mission civilatrice” of Wilson, whose delay into what he called “the war to end all war” allowed U.S. American might to be cloaked in obligation. Now, U.S. Empire is showing signs of faltering. The U.S. financial debt to China and Saudi Arabia thwarts principled human rights justifications, the European Union and Japan provide counterweights to the hegemony of the U.S. dollar, the majority of Latin American nations elected leftist governments who set up cooperative institutions challenging the U.S., and Bush’s failed 2003 invasion of Iraq was done without the blessing of the U.N. Haiti in 2004, 2010, and 2015 provided a stage for readjustment. Haiti in 2004 re-united France and the U.S. over the ouster of Aristide (recall the fever pitch to which U.S. neoconservatives’ anti-French sentiment with the renaming of “freedom fries” in the Capitol). The right-wing Heritage Foundation published a position paper a day after the earthquake about the latter being an opportunity for the U.S. to reassert dominance in the region eroded by the U.N. troops, Cuban medical assistance, and Venezuelan institutions like Petro Caribe.

What is necessary is a critical history of the present, following an “anthropology of the past,” clear enough to pierce the fog of ideology. Such a position requires moral courage, to be willing to suffer consequences for defending present-day kako such as Charlemagne Péralte or even Dessalines.

I would like to thank Alex Dupuy and Ellie Happel for their critiques and advice.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE SUR L’OCCUPATION AMÉRICAINE EN GÉNÉRAL

Dans cet ouvrage, Arthur Holly propose une réévaluation du rôle de la religion Vodou dans la société haïtienne. Écrit en pleine occupation américaine, le texte critique le comportement des « marines » à l’égard des objets religieux et soutient que les Haïtiens doivent reprendre les aspects les plus « africains » de leur propre culture afin d’affirmer la légitimité du Vodou et la dignité de leurs origines.

The second of Jon’s articles about his trip was published on April 21 and is titled, ‘Donbas endures’. The article describes one of the settlements in Russia of war refugees from eastern Ukraine. It is located across the border from southeastern Ukraine, on the road to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. It’s also on the shoreline of Sea of Azov, prompting an evocative sub-title in Jon’s article: ‘Fleeing the bombs in eastern Ukraine to a room with a sea view’. Our group visited the same settlement several weeks later.

Jon explained, “I have not visited a refugee camp before.” I have, in Haiti. There are some parallels and warning signs between the two places, notably in the calls by the regime in Kyiv for international troops called ‘peacekeepers’ to enter eastern Ukraine.

Displaced by War in Eastern Ukraine

Jon writes, “Tatyana Bolshakova and her family from Donetsk used to travel to the seaside for holidays. They had always dreamt of a house with a sea view, she said, but she would never have thought this is how they’d come by one, pointing out through the window overlooking the Sea of Azov in the room that she and her family occupies at the Primorka refugee camp in Russia’s Rostov region.”

Like Jon, I was struck by how well Primorka was organized and how well the residents were received by their Russian hosts. The settlement is located in a former youth (‘pioneers’) camp dating from the Soviet era. Hence, the camp is known as ‘Pioneer’ camp. Primorka is a small town in an area of agricultural plains. The children attend local schools.

A local woman, Svetlana, had purchased the unused pioneers’ camp just before hostilities broke out in Ukraine last year. She and her husband planned to earn income by reopening it as a summer camp for children and families. Along came a war just across the border with Ukraine, a 45 minute drive to the west.

As victims of Kyiv’s war against Donbas began to flee to Russia for safety, the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian government began to requisition facilities such as the Pioneer camp in Primorka. It received its first displaced residents on June 5, 2014.

More than one million Ukrainians have fled to Russia to escape the war during the past year. We were told that in the Rostov region alone, there are close to 50,000 displaced Ukrainians, many of whom are living in some 30 camps. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians have obtained work visas and settled permanently or semi-permanently in Russia.

Svetlana showed no sign of resentment at her life being placed on hold. Or at least, no sign of blaming it on the people who have had to flee their homes in Ukraine. In fact, she has stepped up to manage the place. An easy and friendly relationship between her and camp residents was in evidence throughout our half-day visit. Likewise between residents and medical personnel on hand.

Ah yes, the medical personnel. A jovial doctor, Yuri, from the Russian medical system is assigned to care for the camp residents. It is one of two such camps where he serves, on top of his regular patient load. He is a pediatrician by profession, which is very good because he has lots of children to look after in the two camps in Primorka. There are some 65 at Pioneer camp. They are deeply traumatized by the war conditions they have witnessed.

Last summer, Yuri told us, Ukrainian forces came uncomfortably close to the Russian border. They were advancing through Donetsk in an effort to crush resistance to the seizure of power in February in Kyiv by pro-Europe politicians and oligarchs. As the Pioneer camp began to receive those fleeing the war, a request was made to Russian authorities to stop helicopter flights from passing near the camp. (These were fisheries patrols, I later learned.) The children took terrible fright at any sound of aircraft. Russian officials agreed.

I was impressed with how the camp residents organized themselves. The kitchen facilities are communal. Residents prepare and eat their meals together. The grounds have been landscaped and planted (my, how Donbas people love to plant roses!). Repairs to the buildings are ongoing as needed.

Some residents find jobs locally. But there is not enough work for everyone, and so some of the husbands are away from their temporary home for stretches at a time. Other husbands never left Donbas—they joined self-defense forces.

Notwithstanding the safety and relative comfort in which people are living, life is hard. That’s because of the uncertainties. Will peace return to Donbas? When will residents be able to return home? No one knows for sure, and this is a great source of frustration and anger–at Kyiv for starting a war, and Western governments for supporting it.

Some anger is reserved for Western media, too. One mother and camp resident told us, “We don’t know why our story is not being told. Only the smaller, alternative media in the West comes to speak to us or tell our story. The larger media simply tells the Ukrainian government’s side of the story.”

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have moved to Russia permanently. The residents still in displaced persons camps such as Pioneer aren’t quite ready for that wrenching change in life. “We hope for peace,” one told us. “Those of us still here have hope. We have homes that we don’t want to abandon or relatives remaining in Donbas who need our support.”

Overall, there is great uncertainty over the future of the homeland they call Donbas. It turns out, this is not an entirely new story. Many residents told us that the political crisis in Ukraine which came to a head in late 2013/early 2014 involves longstanding and unresolved issues.

The Donbas region became part of Ukraine several years after the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions of 1917-18. This was an effort by VI Lenin and the other revolutionary leaders to assist the development and self-determination of Ukraine. The idea was that the industrialized region of Donbas would bring more rounded economic development to the newly independent Ukraine, which was largely agricultural and economically underdeveloped.

That part of Ukraine’s history seemed to fade over the years. But the historic memory has remained (like the memory of the decision of the Soviet Union in 1954 to transfer Crimea to Soviet Ukraine authority). The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded in 1922. Soviet Ukraine was a founding member of the union. The USSR’s economy transcended national and language borders. Donbas, that is, southeastern Ukraine, became one of the most industrialized and prosperous regions of the USSR. Ukrainian became a state language and schooling was freely available in either Ukrainian or Russian (though Ukrainians suffered language and other discrimination in the several decades surrounding WW2).

Dissatisfaction with economic and social development in the Soviet Union grew in the 1980s, to the point where much of the population was indifferent to the dismantling of the state-owned economy that began in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Upon its second independence, in 1991, Ukraine became an officially unilingual state. Pioneer resident and mother Xenia told us that ‘Ukrainianisation’ policies which followed came to infringe on the rights of people in Donbas. For example, schooling in Russian became less available and more complicated to arrange. English became more difficult for students to learn because it began to be taught via the Ukrainian language.

Measures to promote Ukrainian language services in education and state services seemed overly zealous and wasteful. A galling example was that names in official documents such as passports were ‘Ukrainianized’, leading to endless and costly confusion and bureaucratic foul-ups, Xenia said.

We heard particular resentment over how historical interpretation changed in independent Ukraine. Xenia explained, “Since 1991, there has been a rewriting of history. My children began to be taught that Russia was an enemy. This was bound to erupt in trouble one day.”

A lot of bitterness came out in our conversations with residents. We learned that many felt deeply betrayed by Ukraine. They feel they gave independent Ukraine a fair chance since 1991, but now say bitterly, “What kind of a country and government bombs its own people?”

“I am Russian,” said one woman resident. “After 1991, they came to us with their plans to make Ukrainian the only language of government services Ukrainian. Why? We speak Russian, not Ukrainian. We never had any conflicts between Russian and Ukrainian people. Why did they want to start that up?”

What of Europe? The word brings sneers. One resident told us, “What sort of values does the European Union have? It supports a government in Kyiv that despises the Russian language.”

Refugee Camps in Haiti

I made two trips to the Caribbean island of Haiti during my ten years of advocacy and solidarity work for that country and people. My first trip was in 2007. I visited the capital city, Port au Prince, and the north of the country. The second visit was in June 2011, 17 months following the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010.

The visit in 2011 confirmed our worst fears from abroad that the massive, international “aid” effort supposedly delivered on Haiti’s behalf following the earthquake was a massive failure. The aid was like a large band-aid pasted over all the existing social, economic and political inequalities and injustices that made Haiti so poor and so vulnerable to the earthquake in the first place. I described those pre-existing conditions, the results of Haiti’s exploitation by colonialism and then imperialism, in an article I co-authored in May 2011: Haiti’s humanitarian crisis: Rooted in history of military coups and occupations.

What confounded me already in 2007 and then became magnified one thousand fold upon visiting in 2011 was the glaring contrast between the incredible wealth and resources in North America and Europe which could assist Haiti’s development but which the governments there refuse to make available. The wealthy powers squander their wealth, devoting enormous resources to all manner of foreign political and military intervention. What could be more scandalous that the waste of resources devoted to military posturing and war in Ukraine and eastern Europe at a time of humanitarian and ecological emergencies?

Haiti is a rich country in human and natural resources. It has a proud history, one of the hallowed places on Earth where modern civilization, such as it is in its unfinished state, was forged through the sacrifices of its people. Haiti was the ‘Vietnam’ of its era when it won independence in 1804. It staged the first successful slave rebellion in modern history. Barefoot Haitians who barely spoke a common language rose up and defeated the largest empire of the day— Napoleon’s France. The final victory was won at Vertières (Cap Haitien) in northern Haiti in November 1803.

Yet there Haiti sits today, one of the most economically deprived countries on the planet, a mere 90 minute flight away from Florida. It is mired in the harsh and unequal world capitalist economic system. Every time the people there have tried to bring about progressive change, they have endured violent opposition from the wealthy countries of Europe and North America, including overthrows of their elected presidents and governments, economic embargos, “aid” with a million strings attached and all other manner of foreign intervention.

I was pleased to see in the Rostov region of Russia that aid to victims of human-made or natural catastrophes can be properly provided and administered. Granted, that is easier for Russia compared to countries with fewer means. But the U.S., Canada and Europe have far more resources than Russia. If they were to assist countries like Haiti and Ukraine, rather than trying to subjugate them, we would be moving towards a much better world. Instead, economically deprived countries are left to languish and eastern Europe threatens to become another theatre of permanent war, thanks to the same powers that are busily destroying the Middle East.

Among the pertinent lessons from Haiti for Ukraine today is that of the role of international ‘peacekeepers’. There is much talk from the Ukrainian government that an international ‘peacekeeping’ force should be sent into the east of the country. Maybe Ukraine’s pro-Western leaders have studied Haiti’s eleven-year experience with the United Nations Security Council peacekeeping mission (known as MINUSTAH). It is understandable that this would appeal to them.

MINUSTAH has been a mission of intervention and occupation, conceived for the express purpose of consolidating the overthrow of Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in February 2004. He was overthrow in a coup by right-wing paramilitaries with the support of the U.S. government, Canada and Europe.

Since the 2004 overthrow and the creation of MINUSTAH several months later, Haiti’s social development has stalled and gone backwards. Even the catastrophic earthquake in January 2010 could not convince the big powers to change course, loosen their tight control over the country and allow some meaningful development to take place. [See Haiti's promised rebuilding unrealized as Haitians challenge authoritarian rule, by Roger Annis and Travis Ross, Jan. 12, 2015.] The most egregious of MINUSTAH’s sins was its reckless conduct in introducing a cholera epidemic to Haiti in October 2010. More than 8,000 people have died from it. To this day, the UN Security Council refuses to acknowledge its actions and take responsibility.

I am pleased that the leaders of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics are rejecting the idea of foreign military intervention into eastern Ukraine under the guise of ‘peacekeeping’. Intervention and war cannot bring meaningful development, not for Donbas and not for Ukraine as whole. Only deepgoing political and social change in favour of the working class majority of the country can do that. That requires breaking the stranglehold which the class of billionaires hold over the economy and ending the war they are waging.

Roger Annis, counterpunch.org

According to some analytical articles published on the Internet, Pentagon stood behind the disaster: Haiti became a training area for a test of a seismic weapon (the earthquake machine). A strike of seven points on the Richter scale hit the targeted zone. That “earthquake” had no consequences in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

Almost right after the earthquake Pentagon brought its contingent on Haiti: the 82^nd airborne division, the marine infantry and engineering units. Pentagon took control over the remaining components of the infrastructure, the US flight operations officers took control over the airport of Port-au-Prince. As a consequence there was a discrimination of flights with humanitarian cargos from “populist countries”, creation of obstacles for the work of Cuban and Venezuelan rescuers and doctors. The US made it clear to the representatives of the non-friendly countries that they were not being regarded as partners in the humanitarian operation. On Haiti the US is using all means – surveillance, provocations, threats – in order to get rid of those who supplied energy resources to Haiti, helped it to improve the health care services and fight illiteracy long before the disaster.

Pentagon’s dictatorship on Haiti has completely disorganized the management system on the island making it dependant on the US. Amid the devastation the Haitian President Rene Preval put up with his role of an executor of the orders given by the US ambassador Kenneth Merten, who made it clear without hiding behind a diplomatic decorum that the US contingent would stay on Haiti for an indefinite period. The establishment of another US military base in the Caribbean Sea is explained by Pentagon’s plans on creating an overwhelming strategic superiority in the region, neutralization of the military alliance of Cuba and Venezuela, which have agreed to help each other in case of an aggression. One year after the landing of the US troops on Haiti it is obvious that a humanitarian campaign is of minor importance for the US contingent. It is not surprising that in one year the US has not achieved any significant progress in this field.

The US servicemen and USAID workers are trying to avoid direct contacts with the local population. By 90 % the local population consists of ancestors of the black slaves from Western Africa. It is hard for Americans not to show their “imperial superiority” and Haitians respond with hatred. The ruins, under which hundreds of bodies were buried, are still a predominating component of the local landscape. Tent camps stretch across the shore for many miles, lack of fresh water and food, loads of trash, domestic crimes, the increase in drug consumption – all these things keep the degree of discontent at the critical point.

Insanitary conditions caused outbreaks of different diseases – salmonellosis, swamp fever, tuberculosis, AIDS. The outbreak of cholera became another disaster on the island. Though 900 doctors from Cuba are now fighting cholera all over Haiti the mass media say nothing about them. What is behind this information blockade?

Haitians believe the outbreak of cholera is part of the occupants’ secret program on “the liberation” of the country from people.They do not believe the version saying that cholera was brought on the island by the Nepalese people from the UN supporting contingent. Over a short period of time 3,700 people died of cholera while in total more than 170,000 infected were registered. President Preval voiced an opinion that the Republic of Haiti had become a victim of a biological attack. The goal of that attack was the neutralization of the resistance and the weakening of the country turning it into politically amorphous territory fully controlled by the US.The assistance provided by Cuban doctors contradicts “cannibal” (one can hardly find another adjective) plans of the Yankee’s Empire. Thisiswheretheinformationalblockadecomesfrom.At a press conference the UN’s representative on Haiti N. Fischer praised the contribution of the Cuban doctors in fighting cholera saying that they are able to win the epidemics. But amid the hysterical news about cholera’s offense his optimism found no feedback in the Western news agencies. The rule of the Western mass media is to speak about Cubans only negative things or nothing at all.

In late November 2010, general elections were held on Haiti. The people weakened by hardships were to elect the president and the members of the parliament. After the first round was held 12 of 18 presidential candidates declared that the results had been framed. The US embassy, which was promoting its candidate Jude Célestin from the Unidad Party (the successor of Preval) was in an awkward situation. Insisting on Célestin’s candidacy it could easily get into trouble: most of the voters did not like Célestin and the results even despite numerous false votes were not impressive. The promise to “recount” votes was met with people’s indignation. The second round of the elections slated on January 16 was canceled. It was a dead-locked situation. At the same time many Haitians were demanding to bring back Jean–Bertrand Aristide, alegally elected president, who was in exile in South Africa in the result of the CIA’s conspiracy. The return of a successor of the Liberation theology who favored populist politicians, especially Chavez contradicts Washington’s plans. All the attempts by Aristide to get a Haitian passport and to return have been blocked.

However “Baby Doc”, the son of the dictator Francois Duvalier, has been given the green light by the US and France to return to Haiti. Jean-ClaudeDuvalier ruled the country with his iron hand for 15 years and was involved in the physical liquidation of 50,000 Haitians. After almost a 25-year absence and a comfortable life in Paris he decided, as he says – to take part in the revival of Haiti. Political analysts believe that it the US and France are playing with “the Baby Doc card” in order to deviate the attention of Haitians the failure of the democratic elections. The statements that Haitians are missing a firm hand and Baby Doc has the potential to bring order as a temporary political figure are emerging in the US mass media. The experiment has begun but it is too early to make conclusions.

The former associates of “Baby Doc” are showing some enthusiasm again. Resigned colonels, mayors and lieutenants are holding meetings, discussing variants and succession of their moves. The young generation does not remember the old sins of “Baby Doc”, punitive actions of tonton-macoutes. That’s the chance! It is not excluded that Duvalier will have to go though “purification” proceedings. So far he has been accused only of corruption. Repressions and reprisals against the opponents of regime are still out of this context. The lawyers insist that Jean-ClaudeDuvalier can not be prosecuted due to expiry of period of limitations. That means that there won’t be any formal obstacles for him to run for the presidency.

The Duvalier family served the US faithfully. Now "Baby Doc" gets a new opportunity to be of service to the Empire. The variants of political and economic interaction have been discussed in Paris. The most important issue is the oil reserves in the shelf near Haiti and their development.

Officials in Washington have already spoken for the cancelation of the November election results – in order to avoid further aggravation of political conflicts within the country. Jean-ClaudeDuvalier will take part in the new elections. He is confident he has chances to win.