Haiti: Where Demolition and Exploitation Pass for Reconstruction and Development. Par Dady Chery

How does one drag a people with a sense of enough into the capitalist enterprise? The answer to this question contains the history of capitalism: a process that has traditionally required the outright enslavement of groups of people, or at the least, the appropriation of their commons.

The Earthquake

Like any major trauma suffered jointly by a people, for most Haitians, the ripples through the ground on the afternoon of January 12, 2010 will forever bisect time into pre and post-Earthquake. The magnitude-seven tremblor, which would have been deadly in any case because of its shallow depth of eight miles, had an epicenter coincident with Leogane, a town of 134,000, and 15 miles from Port-au-Prince: the country’s capital city of 1.9 million. In a country of 10 million souls, more than one million were made homeless and over 300,000 killed. Everybody lost someone. The casualties would have been two thirds fewer if the policies of agencies such as USAID, the World Bank, and IDB, had not been deliberately designed to overpopulate this urban center. In a calculated set of policy decisions, foreign-aid agencies lavished money on Haiti’s big landowners to facilitate their switch from a cultivation of traditional food crops for domestic consumption to the cultivation of crops such as mangoes and corn for the U.S. market. Impoverished small farmers were then herded into Port-au-Prince to provide the baseball, t-shirt and blue-jean producing sweatshops of the city’s free-trade zones with an infinite supply of needy unemployed.

Disaster predation

Instead of bringing relief to Haitians, the world’s generosity in response to the Earthquake merely brought the country to the attention of its most rapacious disaster predators. Almost immediately, and despite a ban on adoptions, numerous plane loads of children were transported to the U.S., France, and Holland. The removal of a group’s youngest citizens has traditionally been the way to undermine a culture; this continues at a rate of about 2,000 children per year from Haiti. In the political sphere, by Spring 2010, former U.S. President Clinton had managed a coup that forced an 18-month State of Emergency onto the country and brought it under the rule of a group of wealthy investors called the Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (CIRH). This group has been dismantled, but only because it became incorporated into the government after the fraudulent elections of 2010-2011. For example, CIRH member Laurent Lamothe became Haiti’s Prime Minister; other members Gregory Mevs (of Haiti’s wealthy family) and Bill Clinton are the co-chairs of the so-called Presidential Advisory Council for Economic Growth and Investment. Thus far, the crowning achievement of this group has been the inauguration, on October 22, 2012 of Haiti’s Caracol Industrial Park: a massive sweatshop zone that employ workers for a maximum of $0.87 per hour. The toxic dyes from the park and the influx of population into this previously rural area are expected to destroy a river and the neighboring coast. Despite the Haitian Constitution’s clear statements that “coasts, springs, rivers, water courses, mines, and quarries” are a commons, the CIRH veterans have set about to sell all of them. Many farmers who opposed the landgrabs have paid for it with their lives.

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Cet article de Dady Chery est très dur. Sa façon d'exposer les faits pourrait être considérée comme un exemple de ce que devrait être le boulot des journalistes haïtiens sur place- travail d'investigation, d'analyse et de vulgarisation- qui donnerait accès aux citoyens à l'information et leur permettrait de  faire pression sur le gouvernement - quel qu'il soit- quand  sa politique ne respecte pas les intérêts des citoyens et met en danger la souveraineté du pays.

La participation des citoyens à la vie politique de leur pays est à la base du système dit démocratique (très peu en pratique par ailleurs). Pour qu'il puisse y avoir participation, il faut une information correcte.

Or, la presse haïtienne écrite et les radios, pour un tas de raisons, ne sont pas capables d'informer correctement. Intentionnellement ou pas, elles dirigents leurs auditeurs vers les zen, les polémiques stériles et toutes sortes de messages qui distraient des réalités socio-politiques et économiques auxquelles  le pays doit faire face.

Ce manque de presse crédible - dans l'incapacité d'analyser les enjeux géopolitiques correctement- est à l'origine du boycott de la commémoration des 200 ans d'indépendance en 2004 et du saccage systématique du pays, en action à partir de cette date, de l'occupation du territoire par les forces de l'ONU- joyeux cadeau d'anniversaire des 200 ans d'indépendance .

Sur la presse haïtienne, voir :Rappel à la presse écrite haïtienne: les noms de peuple s'écrivent avec une majuscule