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Haiti

The OAS, Or The ‘Ministry Of Colonies’

April 27, 2022 Jemima Pierre, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
On April 24, 2022, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government officially booted the Organization of American States (OAS) out of their country. Foreign minister Denis Moncada called the OAS a “deceitful agency of the State Department of yankee imperialism” and in an official statement, the Nicaraguans proclaimed that they “will not recognize this Instrument of Colonial Administration, which does not represent at any time, the Sovereign Union of Our Latin and Caribbean America, and that…violate[s] Rights and Independences, sponsoring and promoting interventions and invasions, [and] legitimizing coups.” In response to Nicaragua’s break with the OAS, many in the imperialist west will undoubtedly speak self-righteously about the Central American republic’s lack of “democracy.”

Deterioration Of Rights Sparks Month-Long Actions Among Health Workers

April 3, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , , ,
Health workers in major public hospitals in Haiti have reasserted their intention to continue striking on 28 March, citing lack of action by the Ministry of Health (MoH) on their earlier demands. Nurses, physicians, lab workers and other health professionals at the Haitian State University Hospital and Justinien Hospital among other places, began to strike near the end of February. They intend to continue the action until demands are met. The workers are asking for salary adjustments, improvements to working conditions, and payment of arrears in the form of debit cards, but remain dissatisfied by the approach taken by the Ministry since they first stopped working. While emergency care services have remained operational throughout the duration of the strike, delivery of other forms of care has significantly slowed down, increasing pressure on the MoH.

In Solidarity With Haitian Workers And Migrants

March 16, 2022 Black Alliance for Peace. , , ,
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) declares its support for garment workers in Haiti and stands with the Haitian people who, migrating from the country for economic or political reasons, have faced racism, hostility, and terror abroad. We also condemn the neo-colonial political economic policies of the U.S. government, its international allies, and the multinational corporations who have created Haiti’s imperial crisis by continuing to undermine the sovereignty and independence of the Haitian people. Early in the year, garment workers launched protests at the Caracol Industrial Park in Haiti’s northeast region. These protests have since spread to Port-au-Prince. The workers—mostly women—have demanded wage increases and decried the dehumanizing and demeaning sweatshops in which they are employed.

A Different ‘Fight For 15’: Haiti Garment Industry Workers Strike

March 7, 2022 Mamyrah Prosper, Orinoco Tribune. , , ,
This was the second week a consortium of unions led garment industry workers to strike for two consecutive days in Port-au-Prince, less than one month after organizing demonstrations in the northeast of the country at the Caracol Industrial Park, to demand approximately $15 per day to produce apparel for brands and stores such as Hanes, New Balance, Champion, Gildan Activewear, Gap, and Walmart. This struggle for higher wages dates back to the establishment of the first industrial parks (garment manufacturing parks) under the dictatorship of François Duvalier during the Cold War. But it has to be situated within a larger context of struggle for living wages by (agricultural) workers since the first US occupation (1915-1934) that led to the institution of the minimum wage in Haiti after the removal of the troops.

Reaction To Haitian Strike Exposes Liberal Lie On ‘Feminist Foreign Policy’

February 24, 2022 Yves Engler. , , ,
A government truly committed to a “feminist foreign policy” would support Haitians striking to boost their 70-cents-per-hour wage. But thus far Canadian officials have responded to the workers’ action by paying a celebratory visit to a sweatshop and ignoring protests repressed by Canadian-funded police. At the start of last week thousands of Haitian apparel workers launched a strike for a higher minimum wage. Thousand have taken to the streets in Port-au-Prince calling for a tripling of their 500 gourdes daily salary (CDN $6.20). The largely female workforce stitches shirts and other apparel for brands like Gap, Walmart, Target, JCPenney as well as Canadian apparel giant Gildan. The Canadian government has a long history of promoting Haiti’s export processing zones as a means of “development”.

The Pendulum Swing Of Black Liberation

December 23, 2021 Bedour Alagraa, ROAR Magazine. , , ,
In June of last year, I wrote a piece about the call-and-response between movements for Black liberation in the United States and elsewhere, focusing on the upheavals that happened in Sudan in late 2018, and of course the protests that erupted in Minnesota and spread across the country after the murder of George Floyd in May of last year. In this piece, I encouraged all of us to refuse the enclosures of hemisphere, market, nation and language, to embrace urgency and refuse to concede to the divisions presented by nation, market and geography. This piece focused on the activation of struggles, and less so on the reality that each movement for liberation was met with a deepening repression and political conservatism.

The Fierce Determination Of Ordinary People To Build An Extraordinary World

December 10, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
United States President Joe Biden has suborned 111 countries to attend his Summit for Democracy on December 9–10, ending on Human Rights Day. ‘We welcome all countries, organizations, and individuals to support the goals of the Summit’, the US State Department wrote. However, there are 82 countries that have not been invited, including two large countries that are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the People’s Republic of China and Russia) and two small countries from the Caribbean (Cuba and Haiti). In the name of democracy, the US government is pushing its own agenda to consolidate power and further its national interests.

The UN’s Criminal Enterprise And Ecological Catastrophe In Haiti

November 21, 2021 Jemima Pierre, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
When we consider the current ecological threat to the earth and its inhabitants, we cannot forget the outsized place of war and empire in exacerbating climate change and enabling environmental catastrophe. The ongoing United Nations occupation of Haiti provides an example. As does the introduction of a cholera epidemic by UN soldiers. Cholera is an extension of the totality of violence - material, political, and ecological – enacted by a presumably humanitarian peacekeeping mission.

Coup Regime Sought To Assassinate Luis Arce

October 19, 2021 Kawsachun News. , ,
Bolivia’s Interior Ministry has revealed that Colombian mercenaries, who participated in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in Haiti, entered Bolivia days before the 2020 election. Fernando Lopez, Defense Minister under Jeanine Añez, was in contact with mercenary groups, with whom he intended to carry out a second coup.

Haiti Aided Latinx Independence; Latinxs Return The Favor With Silence

October 9, 2021 France François, Afro Resistance. , , ,
In 1815, Spain’s defeat of Simón Bolívar’s revolutionary army in Venezuela nearly extinguished the dream of independence in South America. After the loss, Bolívar sought political asylum in the only free republic in Latin America: Haiti. At the time, Haiti was a safe harbor for revolutionaries and formerly enslaved Africans. Although the republic made promises to colonial powers that it would not intervene in freedom and independence struggles, Haiti continued to support rebellions, intercepted ships carrying enslaved people, and freed its human cargo. For Haiti, colonialism and slavery anywhere posed a threat to the republic’s own independence and humanity. Thus, when a defeated Bolívar landed in Port-au-Prince, President Alexandre Pétion understood the significance of the man who led the liberation movement.

Why Is The GEO Group Getting Paid To Fly Deportation Flights To Haiti?

October 9, 2021 Tom Ricker, Quixote Center. , , ,
Deportation flights are a big business. Typically these flights are managed by ICE Air Operations – yes, ICE has its own airline. The chain of responsibility runs like this: Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) office of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) is the entity responsible for deporting people. ERO oversees ICE Air Operations. ICE Air Operations owns none of its own planes. So, ICE signs a contract with a private vendor to coordinate removal flights. The company that has the current contract is Classic Air Charter. For managing ICE Air Operations from October 2017 through the end of September 2022, CAC’s contract is potentially worth $739 million. Classic Air Charters doesn’t actually fly the planes either – that would be too easy.

Let Haiti Breathe – CORE Group Out Of Haiti

October 8, 2021 Kevin Edmonds, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
On a hot August afternoon, members from Solidarité Québec-Haïti, a group rooted in Canada’s Haitian diaspora community, gathered In front of the Canadian parliament buildings in the capital city of Ottawa. They chanted and waved placards displaying a straightforward but powerful request: “Let Haiti Breathe.” Haiti could breathe, they argued, if the CORE Group was disbanded, taking its collective boot off of Haiti’s neck, and thus giving the Haitian people a chance to get out of an extended state of crisis. Canada and the United States are central members of the CORE Group, a group of unelected, unaccountable power brokers in Haiti, that also include representatives from the European Union and Organization of American States.

Haitian Rights Are Migrant Rights

September 25, 2021 Janvieve Williams Comrie, Afro Resistance. , ,
The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly resolution in December 1990, took the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a step further, and other human rights conventions and treaties by the UN (United Nations) and the ILO (International Labor Organization), as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and was intentional to include migrants, both as they actively migrated and as they settled as immigrants, and categorized them as economic migrants, migrant workers, women, children who are particularly discriminated against, and therefore need their own targeted protection instruments that go beyond regions and intra and trans borders.

Black Alliance For Peace Condemns Biden Administration’s Order To Deport Haitians

September 24, 2021 Black Alliance For Peace, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
When a white Fox News reporter used a drone to film the thousands of Haitian and other Black asylum seekers camped beneath a bridge spanning the Rio Grande and linking Del Rio, Texas to Ciudad Acuña, in the Coahuila state of Mexico, he immediately (and deliberately) brought a stereotypical image of Black migration: That of the teeming, African hordes, ready to burst the borders and invade the United States. Such images are as cheap as they are racist. And, typically, they erase the larger question: Why are so many Haitians at the U.S. border? But before that question could be addressed, the Biden administration struck with a decisiveness not seen throughout its 9-month tenure in office in ordering Haitian refugees—many of them with legitimate asylum claims—to be summarily deported to Haiti.

US Envoy To Haiti Resigns

September 23, 2021 Jake Johnston, CEPR. , ,
Exactly two months after his appointment, Dan Foote has submitted his resignation as United States Special Envoy to Haiti, citing a “deeply flawed” US policy toward the nation that includes continued political intervention and the administration’s recent decision to ramp up deportations. “I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees,” Foote wrote in his resignation letter, which was sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on September 22. The resignation comes as the Biden administration pushes forward with one of the largest mass expulsions of asylum seekers in decades. At least 12 flights have transported an estimated 1,400 individuals from Texas to Haiti in the past four days, and such flights are expected to nearly double throughout the week.
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