from the page: "..With the help of the Haitian elite, the "international community" has imposed a series of neoliberal economic policies on the country since the 1970s. ..86 percent of the houses destroyed by the quake had been built since 1990... Chavannes Jean-Baptiste aptly summed up the foreign powers' view of post-earthquake Haiti. "Haiti is essentially roadkill.. Companies like Monsanto are devouring what is left of us at this point." Most Haitians are of course excluded from discussion... We want houses that respect our local architectural style and that use as much local materials as possible… We want beautiful houses that represent our culture, houses that give the community life, and that help us maintain dialogue between ourselves; houses that have yards and gardens where we can grow vegetables and medicinal plants…houses that provide space for us to live as families with neighbors in the lakou [traditional communal courtyard], where we can share food and daily activities.

from the page: "..At the end of the summit's first day, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that member countries had agreed to contribute 1% of their international reserves toward the bloc's main bank in order to create a reserve fund. The Bank of the Alba was established in 2008 with the intention of providing economic support to people-centred regional projects and to contribute to sustainable social and economic development across the region. The Bank is also cited as acting as a continental alternative to the International Monetary Fund... The heads of state also discussed the possibility of increasing the commercial use of the sucre, the bloc's virtual currency. The sucre is currently used for direct trading between the ALBA countries, allowing them to circumvent the U.S dollar and minimise the foreign-exchange risk.

from the page: "..Fully 33 cents of each US dollar for Haiti was used to reimburse the US itself for sending 5,000 soldiers... In addition to funding its own soldiers in Haiti under the guise of earthquake recovery, the US government has contributed 40% of the 1.5 billion spent by the UN to maintain another force of 12,000 soldiers and police, known as MINUSTAH. While the name MINUSTAH is a French acronym for stabilization force, most Haitians view them as an occupation force... Unfortunately, impunity rules and no troops have been prosecuted for the widespread sexual abuse of Haitian women and children. Only days ago the UN Peacekeepers caught on tape raping a Haitian teenager last summer were freed... Last Thursday Theresa Cusimano took the SOA to trial and will be spending 6 months in prison for speaking truth about US militarization. The people of Haiti are standing up to the enormous power of the UN to demand respect for their rights.

from the page: "..From the time of the assassination of Lumumba, almost every African leader who sought to chart a course for genuine independence was assassinated... In February 2002, the government of Belgium accepted moral responsibility for the assassination of Lumumba... Belgian and European scholars continue to represent their work in the Congo as that of civilising Africans. More significant, has been the fact that this killing and the subsequent traditions left by Mobutu has poisoned the political culture and political life of the society. Mobutu’s government carried out extra judicial killings and murdered students and trade union leaders for thirty years... The genocidal wars in the Central Africa region and the deaths of over five million since the removal of Mobutu attest to the fact that once the politics of impunity are embedded in a society it takes generations to heal...

from the page: "..Cesaire argues that colonialism works to "decivilize" the colonizer: Torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. The instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, brutal violence and intimidation, and the end result is the degradation of Europe itself... Racism..cannot be subordinate to the class struggle... His 1969 adaptation of The Tempest (Une Tempête) explored the relationship between Prospero the colonizer and his colonial subjects..

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
that's the way you have forced me to see myself.
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well."

from the page: "...Many [adopted children] are going to have PTSD; many are going to have issues with blunt-force displacement; many adopted into American homes..are going to be sudden minorities in their own bedrooms... It turns out that "orphaned" children in third-world institutions often have living parents... Orphanages are rarely staffed by vetted professionals, and thus orphans are fair game for all number of predators. Even more horrifying, orphanages are a ripe locus of activity for all manner of fundamentalists from wealthy nations to go impose their firebrand of discipline onto children who cannot protect themselves and are not counted under the hand of US or European law... Orphanages are not a neutral thing of good in the world. They contribute to the displacement of children, and detract from real family-building programs. They are a convenient target for charity, the kind of charity that conveniently caters to first-world aesthetics while devaluing real families.

from the page: "..Listen US Embassy: it's the will of the people to annul the November 28 farce, end the UN occupation, prioritize investing Haiti’s life-force and resources and any reconstruction funds in water treatment plants, sanitation treatment plants, sustainable housing, domestic agriculture and manufacturing, public works jobs, indigenous schooling... If this had been done in the first place, cholera would not have erupted. Instead, you foreigners prioritized your own interests in Haiti. Discounted the will of the people. Forced upon Haiti as "development" and "for our own good" your elections, your promises of aid that never, ever gets to Haiti, your self-serving US sweatshops, your UN soldiers replacing the traditional role of the bloody Haitian army and policies like privatization... Now we must also stop the outbreak and clearly get UN accountability as the source of the cholera, get an apology of substance with wrongful death justice and restitution made...

from the page: "Haiti remains tense in the wake of Monday’s violent clashes between protesters and United Nations troops that left at least two dead and 16 wounded in Cap-Haitien, the country’s second largest city... Violence erupted on Monday after thousands of demonstrators took to the city’s streets to protest against the UN occupation force.., which many blame for the cholera epidemic that has now claimed more than 1,000 lives, and to denounce the government of Prime Minister Rene Preval... according to the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, Nigel Fisher, the outbreak has been seen thus far more in the city’s slums, like Cite Soleil, which have even less access to clean water and sanitation than the tent cities... The report [by Partners in Health] indicted the United States and the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton for sabotaging Inter-American Development Bank loans destined for the country’s water infrastructure and distribution systems.

from the page: "..a coalition of grassroots and political opposition groups took to the streets to call for an end to the six-year military occupation which cost $612 million last year but undermined, rather than ensured, the general population's security, the protesters said... At one point a UN security officer waded into the crowd sparking pushing and shoving. Blows were traded, followed by shots fired in the air by the Jordanian soldiers forming a cordon around the base. The reckless and possibly vindictive driver of a UN vehicle pushed a handful of journalists.. As UN security chiefs made calls asking for tear gas, reinforcements arrived in full riot gear and dispersed the crowd. Both chiefs covered up their UN identification and refused to call in the UN press officer... Everywhere you go in this city there's evidence of the animosity many feel towards the UN presence. The ubiquitous graffiti slogans of "Down with the Occupation" or "Down with UN Thieves" reflect the population..

from the page: "...Haitians have been taking to the streets with increasing frequency... about 200 people were marching in front of the U.N. logistics base when MINUSTAH forces fired two bullets in the air and leveled their guns at demonstrators. A MINUSTAH vehicle and a second UN car pushed three foreign journalists and at least two Haitian demonstrators into a ditch. Haitian police then began striking... "There was no provocation at all. The Haitian police and the private UN security guards were so aggressive. They were just looking to do violence,"... Their shelters, usually made of plastic or nylon, are variously sweltering in the daytime heat and wet and muddy in the torrential night rains. Protection against thieves and rapists is non-existent. According to an extensive new study, 40% of camps have no water, 30% have no toilets, and only 20% have access to education, medical care, or psychological support. With near-total unemployment; with food aid suspended since April...

from the page: "..It was not a small isolated group within the police trying to carry out a coup, but rather a group of social and political actors at the service of the local oligarchy and imperialism, who will never forgive Correa for having ordered the removal of the US military base at Manta and the audit of Ecuador's foreign debt and its incorporation into ALBA, among many other actions. Incidentally, the Ecuadoran police have for many years, like other forces in the region, been trained and supported by their US counterpart.. Could it happen again? Yes, because the foundations of coups have deep roots in Latin American societies and in the foreign policy of the United States... the rapidity of popular democratic reaction is essential to deactivate the sequence of actions and processes of the coup makers, a sequence which is rarely anything more than the unleashing of initiatives which, in the absence of obstacles placed in their path, are mutually reinforcing...

from the page: "..A major principle of Canadian aid has been that where the USA wields its big stick, Canada carries its police baton and offers a carrot. To put it more clearly, where the U.S. kills Canada provides aid... Three months after the invasion of Iraq Andrew Natsios, head of USAID.., bluntly declared "NGOs are an arm of the U.S. government." Natsios threatened to "personally tear up their contracts and find new partners" if an NGO refused to play by Washington’s rules in Iraq... Richard Holbrooke, told..that most of their information about Afghanistan and Pakistan comes from aid organizations... Some Canadian NGOs even participated in the military’s pre- Afghanistan deployment training facility... Canadian military personnel have repeatedly linked development work to the counterinsurgency effort. "It’s a useful counterinsurgency tool," is how Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Doucette, commander of Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, described CIDA’s work in Afghanistan."

from the page: " ..the US and Canada came militarily. Notably, 20,000 US soldiers arrived without any authorization, either through the U.N. or the OAS or CARICOM [Caribbean Community]. We didn't need that; we weren't at war. We didn't need tanks; we needed engineers, tractors, nurses, doctors, architects, and psychologists... Now they've developed the CIRH, which has moved the military occupation we had to a new level of economic and political occupation, though we already had an economic occupation... The CIRH only gives power to the Haitian executive branch and the international community. This doesn't respond to constitutional norms; it's illegal... This has made Haiti a rèstavak [child slave] and opens the doors for the dictatorial powers... This is not the path to democracy. The CIRH has no accountability to anyone... The CIRH is only for the rich. All it takes to belong is to give $100 million in cash. It's the commercialization of the country; we've become merchandise...

from the page: "Deep within the labyrinthine complex of huts at the UN logistics base in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince is a small office where staff sign up to stay on a cruise ship called the Ola Esmeralda. For some this is smart, out-of-the-box thinking to accommodate aid workers in a hazardous post-quake environment, for others it is a blazing symbol of excess that shows just how out of touch the United Nations is from the task at hand... Sarah Muscroft, the deputy head of mission for the UN...said the reason ships were being used was because member states insisted on safe housing for staff... Megan B, a medical officer on the Sea Voyager described on her blog... "15 UN people came aboard for the night. They were so excited just to be able to take a shower, and have water that stayed warm. The following Sunday she wrote: "Most of the people spend time in the bar, and do that each night. After working all day in Haiti, so would I. These people like to party. That is for sure.""

from the page: "..According to witnesses, during the [food] distribution U.N. peacekeeping troops sprayed tear gas on the crowd. "Haitians know that's the way they act with us. They treat us like animals," said Lourette Elris, as she divided the rice amongst the women. "They gave us the food, we were on our way home, then the troops threw tear gas at us. We finished receiving the food, we weren't disorderly. " Some 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers, known by the acronym MINUSTAH, have occupied Haiti since 2004, including 7,000 soldiers of which the majority are Brazilian. The mission has been dogged by accusations of human rights violations... "The U.N. is a big, huge, heavy bureaucracy. And bureaucracies do not work well in places that need flexibility and adaptation. Haiti is one of those places," said Jean Luc "Djaloki" Dessables, co-coordinator of the Haiti Response Coalition, a group that includes small Haitian organisations."

from the page: "A recent report in Stars and Stripes reveals the nature of the US military operation in Haiti. Combat units from Iraq and Afghanistan have been deployed in Haiti under the banner of a humanitarian operation. Conversely, Haiti is also being used as a military training ground for forces without in-theater combat experience. According to the Stars and Stripes report (March 14, 2010): "Marines deployed to Haiti to render emergency aid following January’s devastating earthquake are already training for the fight in Afghanistan." Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit who were dispatched to Haiti in the immediate wake of the earthquake are now being deployed in Afghanistan. In fact, the decision to send them to Afghanistan was taken prior to their deployment in Haiti.. The Canadian military has adopted a similar pattern. Haiti is used as a launchpad for redeploying combat troops to the Middle East war theater... "

from the page: "THE U.S. policy of bypassing the Haitian state to fund NGOs is nothing new--this has been U.S. practice in the Third World since the turn to neoliberalism... the U.S. and corporate donors started funding NGOs to address the social crisis created by neoliberal policies... In some instances, this has helped accelerate further state withdrawal from social provision... They are not accountable to the local populations they supposedly serve, but instead to the international donors that fund them--most often, corporate-backed formations like George Soros's Open Society Institute and capitalist governments. Moreover, given that NGOs can pay local leaders more than either the government or social movements, they often recruit people who would traditionally lead leftist movements... as Hallward argues, "the bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly designed to pursue interests--the promotion of a secure investment climate..."

from the page: "...Canada deployed 2,000 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel and two navy battleships to Haiti in the days immediately following, the earthquake—one of the largest overseas CAF deployments since World War II. And on January 25, the Canadian government hosted an international conference in Montreal on rebuilding Haiti... Following the 2004 anti-Aristide coup, the Canadian government sponsored the creation of a Haitian-Canadian Chamber of Commerce and eliminated tariffs and quotas on Haitian exports of textile and apparel goods, so as to promote Canadian companies’ efforts to use Haiti as a source of sweatshop labor. Gildan, a Montreal-based garment manufacturer, now has three Haitian suppliers, helping it to become, according to a business commentator, “among the most cost-competitive in the industry.” Canadian mining companies, meanwhile, are exploring the possibility of exploiting the island country’s mineral and cheap-labor resources."

from the page: "Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S.-led World Bank tightened its grip on Haitian economic policy. Essentially, it decided that the dysfunctional Haitian elite should encourage international investment in export-oriented assembly sweatshops. This was called a "structural adjustment program." Haiti’s trade tariffs on foreign goods were to be removed, public utilities privatized, and all state subsidies removed—including on essential items like gasoline, subject to sharp price fluctuations that can greatly increase transportation costs for workers and street vendors.. Another key goal of the World Bank plan was to redirect food production away from satisfying the nutritional needs of Haitians to producing food for the export market. A 1982 document of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal "aid" agency often linked to the CIA, proposed the "gradual but systematic removal" of domestic crops from 30% of all tilled land, whose products can then be exporte

from the page: "...Somehow, Americans’ hearts can go out to the victims of a natural disaster, and we’ll rush to our cell phones to make donations to charities... But when the disaster is of our own making, when the death and misery are the result of weapons financed by our own taxes, and the killing is being done not by politically indifferent heavy winds, torrential rains or shifting tectonic plates, but by men and women in uniform who are sometimes our own neighbors or relatives, who are acting on the orders of politicians we elected to office, we aren’t so quick to provide assistance. In fact, we really don’t even want to know about what is being done to those people in our names... It really should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? Then again, it would be better still if we took a good, hard look at the monstrous horrors that our military inflicts on innocent peoples around the globe, and decided to act to make sure that such things are no longer done..."

from the page: "...There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up... There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti's deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or depots where crude oil could be stored and later transferred to small tankers to serve U.S. and Caribbean ports. This is detailed in a paper about the Dunn Plantation at Fort Liberte in Haiti... We have also consistently maintained that the UN/US invasion and occupation of Haiti is not about protecting Haitian rights, security, stability or long-term domestic development but about returning the Washington Chimeres/[gangsters] - the traditional Haitian Oligarchs..."

from the page: "..The "security" operation, meanwhile, proceeds apace. As well as U.S. troops, thousands more UN police have been sent to Haiti. Already, UN troops, alongside the Haitian police, have been responsible for several killings, as they have opened fire on starving earthquake survivors who dared to try to retrieve the means of survival from shops and other locations... The Haitian police have justified their brutal massacres of "looters"--those securing their right to life in desperate circumstances--by telling the media that thousands of prisoners have escaped from the country's jails... Police have been attempting to whip up fear among earthquake survivors, organising them into vigilantes to attack the escaped prisoners. However, as many as 80 percent of Haiti's prisoners have never been charged with a crime. "Gangs"--in the vernacular of Washington, the White House press corps and Haiti's business lobby, the Group of 184--happens to be a synonym for Lavalas activists.."

from the page: "The Italian government official who led the country's response to the L'Aquila earthquake has condemned relief efforts in Haiti as a disorganised "vanity parade", ahead of an international conference on rebuilding the devastated country. Guido Bertolaso, the head of Italy's civil protection service, said there had been a fundamental lack of leadership thus far in foreign aid missions to Haiti, warning also that the large US military mission in the country was not entirely helpful. "The Americans are extraordinary, but when you are facing a situation in chaos they tend to confuse military intervention with emergency aid, which cannot be entrusted to the armed forces," Reuters reported him as telling Italy's RAI television."

from the page: "..in 2003 "Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million." In the midst of the suffering and anguish following the earthquake, many Haitians came together to console and help each other. Journalist David Wilson...wrote of the singing that followed the disaster. "Several hundred people had gathered to sing, clap, and pray.." A young Haitian American commented to Wilson on the singing..."People in other countries wouldn't do this. It's a sense of community." If these elements of the "relief" efforts continue in this exploitative vein, it is this community that will likely be crushed even further by disaster capitalism and imperialism... what Haiti needs is doctors not soldiers, grants not loans, a stronger public sector rather than a wholesale privatization, and critical solidarity with grassroots organizations and people to support the self-determination of the country

from the page: "Tent cities are popping up all over town. You guys probably know more than us about where those tents came from, but everywhere we go we see them. Lots of them are Coleman "real" camping tents. Our neighborhood has mostly standing houses, probably mostly safe to sleep in, but still the soccer field has a tent city. The reports of violence - we don't get those. Have not seen it. Have not experienced it. Nothing even remotely close. People are helping each other and are warm and kind and humble. People are seeking each other out and checking to see how friends/acquaintances are recovering..."

from the page: "Haiti is a country under military occupation since the US instigated Coup d'Etat of February 2004. The entry of ten thousand heavily armed US troops, coupled with the activities of local militia could potentially precipitate the country into social chaos. These foreign forces have entered the country to reinforce MINUSTAH "peacekeepers" and Haitian police forces (integrated by former Tonton Macoute), which since 2004, have been responsible for war crimes directed against the Haitian people, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians. These troups reinforce the existing occupation forces under UN mandate... The militarization of relief operations will weaken the organizational capabilities of Haitians to rebuild and reinstate the institutions of civilian government which have been destroyed. It will also encroach upon the efforts of the international medical teams... There can be no real reconstruction or development under foreign military occupation.”

from the page: "... On Friday, Brazil’s Defense Minister Nelson Jobin had warned that the peacekeepers “could struggle” if there was large-scale protests: “We are concerned about security.” The Times of London commented, “Haiti’s capital could quickly descend into rioting if three million hungry, thirsty, and traumatised earthquake survivors don’t receive emergency aid soon.”... The US military has taken control of Port-au-Prince airport as a key hub of its military buildup, blocking access by humanitarian flights. Humanitarian flights from France, Brazil, and Italy were refused permission to land, and the Red Cross reported one of its planes was diverted to Santo Domingo, the capital of the neighboring Dominican Republic... US officials have made clear that treating Haitian victims of the earthquake is not a US priority... Lieutenant Commander Jim Krohne, a spokesman for the Vinson’s captain, explained that the carrier’s mission was “sea-based.”..."

from the page:"The relentlessly maintained, deliberately inflicted political and economic ruin of Haiti has a direct bearing on the amount of death and devastation that the country is suffering today after the earthquake. It will also greatly cripple any recovery from this natural disaster... Washington's rapacious economic policies have destroyed all attempts to build a sustainable economy in Haiti, driving people off the land and from small communities into packed, dangerous, unhealthy shantytowns, to try to eke out a meager existence in the sweatshops owned by Western elites and their local cronies. All attempts at changing a manifestly unjust society have been ruthlessly suppressed by the direct or collateral hand of Western elites... there will now be a great outpouring of immediate aid... But unless there is a sea-change in American policy, ...this flurry of caring and attention will soon give way again...to callous disregard, brutal repression and inhumane exploitation..."