FLASHBACK | The American Plan: How to Destroy an Agricultural Economy in Haiti

Back to the Future: Food Aid in Haiti

Open Salon Timothy Schwartz

June 3, 2011

“From Idealism to Imperialism”: Canada’s Dark History of NGO Funding

Interview with the co-author of “Paved with Good Intentions”

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words … | Haitians Want to Know: “Where’s the Money?”

Photo courtesy of Ezili Danto, Haitian News

WATCH: Canadian Aid to Haiti Tied to Mining Interests

 

January 13, 2013

Real News

 

Yves Engler: Strategic objectives of Canadian aid are to strengthen a pro-elite police and advance Canadian commercial interests.

Watch full multipart The Ugly Canadian

WATCH: U.N. Troops Slaughter Haitian Civilians | Amnesty & HRW Complicit in Covering Up the Crimes

We Must Kill the Bandits

 

Kevin Pina Documentary on MINUSTAH, Reviewed By Dady Chery

Haiti Chery

 

“Since terror is the sole resource left me, I employ it…. We must destroy all the mountain negroes, men and women, sparing only children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half the negroes of the plains….” – French General Charles Leclerc referring to his battle against Haitians in 1803.

 

“We must kill the bandits, but it will have to be the bandits only, not everybody.” – Brazilian General Heleno Ribera, UN Military Commander in Haiti, 2004-2005.

 

Kevin Pina’s documentary is the definitive account of Haiti’s most recent anti-imperialist revolt. The new gambit for Haiti began in 2000 with the surprise election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as President, but it suffered a setback with Aristide’s February 29, 2004 kidnapping and the installment of a foreign military occupation.

Larceny and lust for gold were certainly key motivators for the new occupation of Haiti. For about 20 years, the United Nations Development Program, the French Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minière (BRGM), a German group, and Canadian junior companies quietly surveyed Haiti’s Massif du Nord for its minerals and stuck to the story that only copper was to be found there. On the other hand, as early as May 2005, the coup government of Boniface Alexandre (President) and Gerard Latortue (Prime Minister) began to sign away Haiti’s mineral rights for 15-year terms to foreign concerns. Now the story is that an abundance of copper had obscured the silver and gold. This would hardly be the first invasion of Haiti for its gold since the 16th-century conquistadors. As recently as 1914, about 24,000 ounces of Haiti’s gold reserves were carried off to Citibank by U.S. kingmaker and banker Roger L. Farnham.

The documentary gives excellent historical context to the new occupation, which followed the letter of the 1915-1934 US invasion of Haiti in the main, with some variations. This time the U.S. and its loyal Haitian paramilitaries teamed up with Canada and France into a Multinational Interim Force (MIF) to purge the country of Fanmi Lavalas (Aristide’s Party) officials and partisans. Haitian patriots were called “bandits,” as they had been 89 years earlier.

When the jobs of killing, imprisoning and torturing Lavalas partisans proved too burdensome for the MIF, a “peacekeeping” force — the so-called United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) — was quickly arranged by the UN Security Council, despite Haiti not being at war. The troops arrived on June 1, 2004.

It is in the roles of “peacekeepers” that emerging powers like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina came to embrace the western imperialist mission. Despite the pretext that the Latin American troops had come “to stabilize Haiti for elections,” the soldiers functioned as the private army of Haiti’s elite. Unarmed Haitians were enthusiastically killed with the same kinds of head shots the racist 1910’s US-occupation marines used to call “popping off Cacos.” Such thirst for Haitian blood from Latin Americans would have been disputable without this brave documentary.

The hard-hitting video also does the great service of exposing the participation of human rights organizations in the persecution of Lavalas officials and highlighting the silence of international NGOs about the large-scale human rights violations that took place in Haiti between 2004 and 2006.

Even without the more than 7000 killed by the UN-introduced cholera and the numerous documented rapes of Haitians by UN troops, the bloodshed that immediately followed Aristide’s removal should have been enough to recommend the non-renewal of the UN mandate in Haiti after MINUSTAH’s first year. Yet year after, (s)election after (s)election, this criminal force has been renewed and expanded.

Current countries represented in MINUSTAH are:

Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Nepal, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, United States, and Uruguay.

As you watch this important documentary, keep an eye on the shoulder patches of the troops for their countries’ flags. Notwithstanding the pretty talk about repaying Bolivar’s debt to Petion, it is quite easy to tell Latin American friend from foe.

VIDEO: Full-length documentary “We Must Kill the Bandits” (1 hour 7 min). Click “CC” for Portuguese subtitles.

 

Source: Haiti Chery | You Tube

© Copyright 2011, 2012. This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article in its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite Kevin Pina as the author of the documentary, and Dady Chery and Haiti Chery as the original source for the review, including a “live link” to the article.

FLASHBACK: Reporters Without Democracy

Media Watchdog as Democracy Manipulator (Part 4 of 4)

December 16, 2007

[The first two parts of this article firstly investigated Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ‘democratic’ funding ties, and then went on to look at the ‘democratic’ credentials of some of their current and former staff.  The third installment of this article extended this investigation and examined the ‘democratic’ ties of some of the earlier recipients of RSF’s annual Fondation de France Prize, and this concluding part of the article will now continue in this vein and examine the ‘democratic’ ties of some of RSF’s more recent prize winners. Finally, the article will conclude by offering some suggestions for how the issues raised within this article may be acted upon by progressive activists.]

Reporting on ETA

In 2000, Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto, a political reporter for El Mundo, a Madrid-based daily newspaper won the RSF award. Her biography notes that she “writes frequently about the Basque separatist group, ETA.” However, it goes on to note that because “Gurruchaga’s stories have so threatened the terrorist group… since 1984 it has waged a campaign against her, hoping to intimidate her into stopping reporting on their activities.” In 2001, Gurruchaga received awards from two ‘democratically’ connected organizations, Human Rights Watch (from whom she obtained a Hellman/Hammett Grant), and the International Women’s Media Foundation (from whom she was awarded their annual Courage Award).

Regime Change in Iran?

In 2001, Reza Alijani, the editor of Iran-e-Farda – an Iranian newspaper that was banned in 2000 – received RSF’s press freedom award. Although I cannot demonstrate that Alijani has any ‘democratic’ ties, one of his former Iran-e-Farda colleagues, Hojjatoleslam Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, “was arrested on August 5, 2000 in connection with his participation at an academic and cultural conference held at the Heinrich Boll Institute in Berlin on April 7-9 [2000] entitled ‘Iran after the elections,’ at which political and social reform in Iran were publicly debated”. This is significant because the German political foundations (Stiftungen) are according to Stefan Mair (2000) “without a doubt among the oldest, most experienced and biggest actors in international democracy assistance”. Indeed NED historian David Lowe writes that these Stiftungen provided an “important model for democracy assistance” which helped catalyse the creation of the US’s own democracy promoting organ, the NED.[1]

Armed with this knowledge it is perhaps not so astonishing that the Iranian government would choose to imprison many of the activists who participated in the aforementioned Heinrich Boll conference. Furthermore, it is also predicable that some of the other conference attendees would have ties to the NED and the democracy manipulators: these activists included Akbar Ganji (who in 2000 received an International Press Freedom Award from the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, that is, the group that manages the ‘democratically’ linked IFEX network, and after spending six years in prison – after attending the conference – Ganji was awarded Rights and Democracy’s 2007 John Humphrey Freedom Award), Ali Afshari (who was a visiting fellow at the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies from October 2006 to February 2007), and Mehrangiz Kar (who from 2000 to 2001 held a senior fellowship with the Toda Institute for Global Policy and Peace Research, from October 2001 to August 2002 was a NED Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow, in late 2002 served as a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and between September 2005 and June 2006 was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy).

A number of other Iranian journalists – who did not attend the Berlin conference – were also arrested in April 2000, and the two who can be linked to the ‘democracy’ community are Mashallah Shamsolvaezin (who in 2000 then received the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award), [2] and Emadeddin Baqi (who in 2004 was awarded the Civil Courage Prize, and in 1999 co-wrote a series of articles with Akbar Ganji criticizing the government which “galvanized the public and, within one year of their publication, forced the closing by the government of nearly every reform newspaper in the country”).

Environmental ‘Democracy’ for Russia

The 2002 RSF Fondation de France Prize was awarded to Russian journalist Grigory Pasko, who at the time of receiving the award was serving a prison sentence for exposing the dumping of radioactive waste by the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan, “expos[ing] corruption inside the fleet” and pass[ing] on public information about both issues to Japanese journalists”. Pasko was eventually set free in 2003, and in 2004 he became the editor-in-chief of the Environmental Rights Center’s (otherwise known as Bellona) Environment and Rights Journal – which has been published since February 2002 and is supported by the NED.

Bringing Human Rights to Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Morocco

In 2003 RSF Fondation de France Prize was given to the following individuals and groups, exiled Haitian journalist, Michèle Montas, to the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Daily News, and to the Moroccan journalist, Ali Lmrabet.

In addition, to being a former director of Radio Haiti Inter, the first RSF winner, Michèle Montas, is also a director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights – a group that was initially known as the National Emergency Coalition for Haitian Refugees when it was created in 1982. Two of the better known (now deceased) ‘democracy promoting’ founders of the NCHR are Lane Kirkland (who is a former Rockefeller Foundation trustee, and from 1979 to 1995 served as the president of the AFL-CIO – which is a core NED grantee) and Bayard Rustin (who was a former chairman of the executive committee of Freedom House, and former president of the NED-funded A. Philip Randolph Institute). [3] Other notable former directors of NCHR include Michael H. Posner (who is the president of Human Rights First), Michele D. Pierre-Louis (who is the Executive Director of FOKAL which “is the Open Society Institute foundation in Haiti”), and Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. (who is a former director of the Rockefeller Foundation).

The current executive director of NCHR is Jocelyn McCalla, who has held this position since 1988 (except for a one year break in 2002) and presently serves on Human Right Watch’s ‘democratically’ connected Americas Advisory Board. Other current NCHR directors with ‘democratic’ ties include Mark Handelman (who is a director of the NED-funded International Campaign for Tibet), Max J. Blanchet (who is a director of the Lambi Fund of Haiti which although progressive is a chapter of USAID-funded Partners of the Americas), Muzaffar A. Chishti, (who is the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University School of Law), and Herold Dasque (who is the executive director of the progressive Haitian American United for Progress, but is also connected to Dwa Fanm – a group which has two directors who have previously worked with George Soros’ Open Society Institute).

The second recipient of the 2003 RSF Fondation de France Prize was the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Daily News. This paper was launched by Geoffrey Nyarota in 1999, and it “quickly became the largest selling and most influential newspaper” in Zimbabwe. Therefore, it is significant to note that Nyarota – who “now lives in exile in the United States from where he publishes thezimbabwetimes.com” –was awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award in 2001. In addition, the following year he received the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom award, from 2004 to 2005 he served as a fellow at the US-based Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and he is presently a director of the World Press Freedom Committee. [4] (The Daily News closed operations in 2004 after “constant harassment by state monitors” and is now being published by the Amnesty International’s Irish Section.)

The third RSF prize for 2003 was awarded to the Moroccan journalist and editor of Demain magazine, Ali Lmrabet, while he was “serving a three-year jail sentence, in part for publishing cartoons critical of King Mohammed VI”. However, while Lmrabet was sentenced in May that year he was released from prison one month after he received the RSF award (which he obtained in December 2003). Here it is perhaps relevant to note that he is presently a member of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, although he does not appear to hold any leadership role. This is significant because this association is a member of a broader network known as the International Federation for Human Rights – a group whose work is supported by Rights and Democracy, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Ford Foundation, and the Heinrich Boll Foundation.

Promoting ‘Democracy’ in Algeria, China, and Mexico

Three RSF awards were distributed in 2004. The first recipient of the RSF prize was Algerian journalist Hafnaoui Ghoul, who at the time was a correspondent for the daily paper El Youm and was head of the regional office of the Algerian Human Rights League (LADDH). Ghoul’s affiliation to the latter group is noteworthy because LADDH received their first grant from the NED in 2002, and then received further NED grants in both 2004 and 2005.

The second person to receive a RSF award in 2004 was the “former Beijing University philosophy teacher Liu Xiaobo, who heads the Independent Writers’ Association”. At the time of receiving the award Xiaobo was also the chair of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), whose members include two members of the editorial board of the NED-funded magazine, Beijing Spring, Kuide Chen and Zheng Yi. It is also significant that Louisa Coan Greve (who is the senior program officer for Asia for the NED) congratulated Xiaobo on receiving his RSF prize, and noted that the award “also honors the ICPC itself, and NED is gratified and humbled to be a supporter of those efforts.” [5]

Finally, the third winner of the RSF’s 2004 award was the weekly newspaper Zeta – a Mexican paper which was cofounded by the 1998 RSF award nominiee J. Jesus Blancornelas. Blancornelas is currently Zeta’s editor in chief, and his previous nomination for the RSF prize is no accident, as throughout his career he has been showered with numerous journalism awards, the earliest of which appears to be the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award which he received in 1995. Zeta appears to have quite an affinity with the Committee to Protect Journalists, because in 2007, Zeta’s director, Navarro Bello, was also awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award.

A Helping Hand for Somali, Afghanistan, and China

In 2005, Omar Faruk Osman received the RSF award on behalf of National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ). This is significant because in 2002 Osman was elected as the secretary-general of the Somali Journalists Network (SOJON), which under his guidance was transformed into NUSOJ. This group is linked to the NED in a number of ways. In 2005 they obtained a grant from the NED to train journalists and “nominate journalists as National Press Freedom Protectors to monitor free press abuses”, while in the same year the International Federation of Journalists received a separate grant from the NED to work with them to organize a journalism conference. More recently, in 2006, Osman “was chosen to be a member of the international jury of the RSF Press Freedom Award”.

Other winners of the RSF’s 2005 Fondation de France Press Freedom Award include the Afghanistan-based Tolo TV (which was launched in 2004 with starter funds provided by USAID, and is reported to be the “most popular station in Kabul” boasting of a “81 percent share of the market”), and New York Times contributor, Zhao Yan.

Zhao Yan is a journalist who worked for China Reform Magazine (from 2002 to March 2004), and has also written for the NED-funded Human Rights in China. Yan stopped working for the China Reform Magazine in March 2004 and “the magazine was subsequently shut down by the government in December 2004”. However, just before the magazine closed down Yan was arrested by the Chinese government for allegedly disclosing state secrets, and then kept in prison until September 2007.

Note that the China Reform Magazine is linked, albeit tenuously, to a NED-supported organization through Professor Tiejun Wen, who is based at the Renmin University of China and was formerly the editor-in-chief for China Reform Magazine. The NED link arises through Professor Wen’s employment as the chief-economist of the China Macroeconomics Network, where he is also a member of their expert group of “more than 130 renowned Chinese macroeconomists” known as The Macrochina Economists 100. It is significant that three other members of this elite group of macroeconomists currently work for the Beijing-based Unirule Institute of Economics – an organization that has received four grants from the NED (which were channelled via the Center for International Private Enterprise in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999): these three macroeconomists are the Unirule’s president and co-founder Mao Yushi, their director Sheng Hong, and the Institute’s director-general Zhang Shuguang. [6]

Democracy for Four: Burma, Cuba, Russian, the and Democratic Republic of Congo

In 2006 there were four RSF laureates, the Burmese journalist U Win Tin, the Cuban writer Guillermo Farinas Hernandez, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (Russia), and the group Journaliste En Danger (Democratic Republic of Congo).

U Win Tin, a former member of the central executive committee of the National League for Democracy (where he acted as their secretary), and a close friend of former RSF awardee San San Nweh, received the 2006 RSF press freedom prize. He has been in prison since 1989 because of his affiliation to Burma’s main opposition party, and while San San Nweh was released from prison in 2001, he still languishes behind bars today. As mentioned previously, in 2001 the World Association of Newspapers awarded U Win Tin its annual press freedom prize.

Another recipient of RSF’s 2006 award was the Cuban cyber-dissident Guillermo Farinas Hernandez, who heads the small Cubanacán Press news agency. As before, RSF support of Cuban dissidents is hardly surprising given the financial support they receive from the NED-funded Center for a Free Cuba, thus it is also not so astonishing that the NED-funded CubaNet media project would publish Guillermo’s work.

The Russian biweekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta is now most famous for formerly being home to Anna Politkovskaya (the journalist who was murdered in October 2006), a journalist whose work was recently recognized by the NED who awarded her one of their 2007 Democracy Awards. [7] In addition, in September 2007 Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, was given the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award.

RSF’s “partner organization” Journaliste En Danger (JED), is a member of the IFEX network, was founded in 1997, and is headed by journalists Donat M’Baya Tshimanga and Tshivis Tshivuadi. In what might be considered a conflict of interest, Tshimanga – who is presently JED’s president – also serves on the RSF’s international jury for their Press Freedom Award (and has done so since at least 2002). Also in 2004, Tshivuadi, who is the secretary general of JED, attended an inter-regional workshop that was convened by the NED-linked Panos Institute. [8]

Ending Media Interference Now

“It is very dangerous when press freedom organizations get themselves politically compromised by accepting payment from any government. It is really vital that all such organizations are truly independent.” UK National Union of Journalists

While this article had not demonstrated that RSF receives funding from any government, it has shown how RSF has received funding from the Congressionally funded NED, and it has illustrated how RSF’s work is highly integrated with that of the ‘democracy promoting’ community, much of which is linked to the activities of the NED. Whether RSF is being manipulated to serve as a useful tool of the ‘democracy promoters’, or whether it is itself guiding the media-related priorities of the global ‘democratic’ community is beside the point. What is certain is that RSF’s activities are intimately entwined with those of the NED. The revelations in this article alone therefore provide more than enough reasons for disbanding RSF immediately. However, this is unlikely to happen in the near future given the useful role that RSF currently provides for elite interests determined on promoting low-intensity neoliberal forms of democracy globally.

Undoubtedly future studies will furnish further details concerning RSF’s less than noble ‘democratic’ liaisons, but the question to ask is, will this be enough to close it down permanently, or to even delegitimize their work in the corporate media? Unfortunately, it is all too obvious that such information, without determined action (in the form of grassroots activism) to back it up, will probably not affect the conduct of RSF’s work one iota. This can explained to a large extent by the bipartisan nature (but nonetheless highly political and regressive work) of most ‘democracy promoting’ efforts, which acts to shield their work from critical enquiry. We only have to look to the work of the core NED grantee, the AFL-CIO, to see that ongoing critical reports filed over the past few decades [27] – that have comprehensively documented the AFL-CIO’s involvement in implementing the US’s antidemocratic foreign policies – have had little visible effect on their practices. Indeed, a number of unionists and other activists joined together in the Worker to Worker Solidarity Committee (www.workertoworker.net) have been continuing to campaign to get the AFL-CIO to break any ties it has with the NED. To date, they have been unsuccessful, even though getting the California AFL-CIO State Convention – one-sixth of the entire membership at the time – to unanimously repudiate the AFL-CIO foreign policy program in 2004. At the 2005 National AFL-CIO Convention in Chicago, the AFL-CIO leadership first changed the California resolution to praising their Solidarity Center’s work, and then actively refused to allow anyone to speak on the convention floor in favour of the actual California resolution condemning AFL-CIO foreign policy.

On a more positive note, ideally, the results of this paper will help initiate further critical inquiries into the democracy manipulators colonization of journalism organizations. Yet it is surely an indictment of media scholars and journalists that similar studies have not been conducted years ago. That said, perhaps this judgement is overly harsh, as ignorance concerning antidemocratic funding seems to be a problem of progressive groups’ more generally. Indeed, progressive activists’ seem to have become so fixated on critiquing their ideological opponents that they have neglected to watch the right-ward slide of their would-be-allies. This tactical lapse appears to have left democratic media organizations open to the insidious cooptive assaults waged by those intent on promoting a polyarchal public sphere.

One way to counter the democracy manipulators cynical use of journalism against democracy is for progressive groups to thoroughly investigate the activities of each and every media group working to strengthen the public sphere. This would be a simple project if journalists and media scholars across the world critically examined the work of their local journalism organizations. In this way, a global database might be built up which would enable progressive scholars, activists, and journalists, to lift the rhetorical veil that has so far shielded many media groups’ from criticism. Completion of such studies will then enable keen media reformers to support (and where necessary create new) truly participatory journalism organizations that can effectively challenge the corporate medias’ global hegemony.

 

[Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University, Australia. He can be reached at Michael.J.Barker [at] griffith.edu.au. All four parts of this article and some of his other recent articles can be found right here.[

 

Endnotes

[1] By the 1990s Germany’s Stiftungen or party foundations, “had resident representatives in more than 100 countries and field offices in some of them for well over 30 years. Between 1962 and 1997 they handled in total over DM4.5 billion reaching around DM290 million annually by the 1990s. Although in the period before 1990 it is debatable how much can be called democracy support rather than activities primarily intended to meet other purposes  In Pinto-Duschinsky’s words they were ‘powerful instruments not only for promoting democracy, but also for furthering German interests and contacts’.” Stefan Mair, Germany’s Stiftungen and Democracy Assistance: Comparative Advantages, New Challenges, In: Peter J. Burnell (ed.) Democracy assistance: International Co-operation for Democratization (London, Frank Cass: 2000), pp.128-149.

Heinrich Boll representative, Sascha Müller-Kraenner, was also a signatory to a recent letter (dated November 11, 2004) which was sent by the NED to Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez to urge him “to reconsider the prosecution of the leadership of Sumate, as well as the proposal to criminalize democracy assistance from abroad”. Sumate is the Venezuelan group that received assistance from the NED to facilitate the unsuccessful ouster of Chavez in 2002.

[2] Another recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award in 2000 was Steven Gan who at the time was the co-founder and editor of the online publication Malaysiakini, a publication which was launched in 1999 by the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (a group that since their founding in 1999 has received annual grants from the NED to support their work in Malaysia).

[3] Also see Tom Barry, ‘The New Crusade of the Democratic Globalists’, International Relations Center, August 3, 2005; Other NCHR leaders in the early 1980s included Father Antoine Adrien, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua, Ira Gollobin, Vernon Jordan, Rev. Benjamin Hooks, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, and Bishop Paul Moore.

[4] In 2006 Geoffrey Nyaro published the book Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman, and in 2006 he also attended the 7^th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees – a conference that was also attended by the NED’s president Carl Gershman.

[5] http://www.cicus.org/news/newsdetail.php?id=3514 Accessed December 2006.

[6] The Unirule Institute president, Mao Yushi, while based at the Unirule Institute between 1996 and 1997 was also an executive officer for the NED-linked Chinese Economists Society, and “[i]n November 2004, Mao was elected by the International Business Review as one of the ten most influential economists in China”. Other well-known ‘democratic’ funders of Unirule’s work include the major liberal philanthropist the Ford Foundation, the Institute for International Economics (whose most ‘democratic’ directors are David Rockefeller and George Soros), “many foreign embassies in Beijing”, and “international public institutions, such as World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and African Development Bank”. For further analysis of the Unirule Institute’s ‘democratic’ ties see, Michael Barker, Promoting a Low Intensity Public Sphere: American Led Efforts to Promote a ‘Democratic Media’ Environment in China. A paper to presented at the China Media Centre Conference (Brisbane, Australia: Creative Industries Precinct, 5-6 July 2007).

[7] Novaya Gazeta: “The privately-owned newspaper in which the staff holds 51% of the shares, saw two political figures take over 49% of its capital in June 2006. They were the former Soviet president and originator of glasnost (openness), Mikhail Gorbachev, and Alexander Lebedev, wealthy businessman and member of the Duma.”

[8] The Panos Institute received one grant from the NED in 1997, while more recently in September 2007, the NED’s “Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and Panos London launched the Panos Institute’s report entitled At the Heart of Change: The Role of Communication in Sustainable Development.”

THE SLOW AND SILENT GENOCIDE THE US IS CONDUCTING IN HAITI

This writing reviews, in two parts, the consequences of US investment in Haiti. It looks at the New York Times investigation into the Caracol industrial park, its anchor tenant, the South Korea’s Sae-A Trading, giving Haiti context with the Bitter Cane documentary on industrial parks in Haiti 40-years ago. The piece illustrates that Washington’s bait and switch use of donation dollars and US taxpayer aid for private profit is a colonial blueprint in Haiti. US intervention is not intended, even when called “Haiti reconstruction” to provide sustainable jobs and infrastructure for Haitians. Caracol itself is window dressing covering the infrastructure the US is building for the mineral and vast oil reserves the US occupies Haiti to exploit.

Ezili Dantò

PART I

July 2012 – A Factory Grows in Haiti
***
The showcase project for Haiti’s earthquake reconstruction is being built far outside the disaster zone, in a location that could jeopardize the country’s key conservation effort.
***
Haiti: Bitter Cane Documentary

Haiti, 35, 40years ago:
“Notice how long ago it’s been since Haitians knew there was gold in Haiti. It’s the same for Haiti’s vast oil, which the US strategically denies. But now that the one-percenters have de-legitimized elections and lined up their puppet government, perhaps sometime soon the New York Times shall suddenly “discover” Haiti oil reserves and what Ezili HLLN has been pointing out for a decade now. Haiti’s mineral riches and oil in Haiti are the economic reasons the US took down Haiti’s democratically elected government in 2004, installed the US occupation behind UN guns with the humanitarian invasion.”

– Ezili Dantò

The constant US bait and switch in Haiti: A Historical Perspective

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The uninformed, reading the New York times on Haiti two years ago, not the New York Times of Earthquake Relief Where Haiti Wasn’t Broken (July 5, 2012), vilified and marginalized Ezili’s HLLN, said we exaggerated when we pointed out that Western foreign investment in Haiti has mostly meant more Haiti suffering, death, pain and inhuman tribulations. (See, Bitter Cane pt. 6/7.)

The Deborah Sontag’s New York Times investigative report maintains that in the rush to show reconstruction progress the international stakeholders and US State Department building the Caracol industrial park have ignored labor and environmental concerns.

But Haitians who die a thousand deaths for Haiti renewal know there is a hidden war of attrition going on against the Haiti masses. The tyranny is not inadvertent. (US justice for the Haiti cholera victims would be collectively awarding $40million to Paul Farmer pharmaceuticals for cholera vaccines.)

Historically for Haiti, what is called foreign “investment” has always meant the unscrupulous extraction of profits without regards to its consequences on the people or environment and leaving no useful gain in Haiti whatsoever. More malicious, the conditions for US-style (one-percenter) investment requires the Haiti government not to subsidize its own people’s critical public service needs but to leave this to the so-called free market.

Hurting the peasant and poor Haitian to the point of collapse so to force these masses to accept any wage, any pie-in-the sky-promise of jobs and infrastructure, any political condition imposed by the humanitarian invasion is the central focus of US policy in Haiti, not a corrosive side effect, unintended, haphazard, incidental or misguided as the critics of the Caracol industrial project seem to diplomatically say. The failure of US foreign aid in Haiti is structural and ugly. Racism and paranoia inexorably reigns. In the mindless fury the corporatocracy views Haiti as a time bomb which must be defused immediately.

Foreign investment has thus equaled more Haiti suffering – that is, the taking of Haiti peasant lands for building factories, foreign compounds, for mining, other resource extractions and agribusiness that pollutes, contaminates water supplies, crops, and fails to bring sufficient local economic benefits. (More than 15% of Haiti’s territory is under license to North American mining firms and their partners.)

Foreign investment doesn’t ignite ?Haiti development when all capital is flown overseas, the companies pay no taxes and there’s no living wage.

BITTER CANE

Songtag writes:

“the showcase project of the reconstruction effort is this: an industrial park that will create jobs and housing in an area undamaged by the temblor, a venture that risks benefiting foreign companies more than Haiti itself.”

Sontag explains that the Caracol site contains Haiti’s:

“most extensive mangrove reserve and a large strip of coral reef. Before the earthquake, the bay had been picked from 1,100 miles of coastline to become the first marine protected area in Haiti, the only Caribbean country without one. “The fact of having chosen this site, I’d call it heresy,” said Arnaud Dupuy, head of Haiti’s Audubon Society.”

Assembly plant factories caused great damage to Haiti back 40years ago when Papa Doc Duvalier, before his death, allowed their entry. That damage created the slum of Site Soley (although slum hotbeds started with the first US occupation), the primary “unstable” Haiti area given as a pretext for the endless 2004 UN MINUSTAH mission into Haiti. So what troop surge, Blackwater-like private military security or additional military deployment is the US searching a pretext for in the oil and gold-rich North of Haiti?

See-A closed flagship Guatemalan factory against backdrop of antiunion repression, rape, worker abuse, goes to ?Haiti. Having laid the eugenics groundwork, there is no way the United States is not fully aware of the labor and environmental damage projects like the Caracol industrial park will cause. And, combine with the $2obillion worth in gold mining activities also in that area -the tipping point impact, deadly ruptures, further economic and social quakes to come.

Deborah Sontag writes that before “the Haiti deal was sealed, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. urged American and international officials to reconsider.” Her report explains how Sae-A’s labor practices were consistently brought to the attention of officials:

“The A.F.L.-C.I.O. summarized what it called Sae-A’s “worst labor and criminal law violations” in Guatemala, accusing Sae-A of using bribes, death threats and imprisonment to prevent and break up unions and said a local union suspected company officials of involvement in a union leader’s rape never investigated by Guatemalan authorities…labor advocates worry, too, that Caracol will undermine the nearby Codevi industrial park, the only unionized garment operation in the country. Fernando Capellán, the owner of Codevi, said, “They’re going to destroy my jobs to create cheaper jobs in Caracol.”

With this toxic cocktail of conflicts and intentional malice, the only question is: why wouldn’t US officials expect the coming ?bloody showdown and Haiti? battle to clear this Charlemagne Peralte area of foreign dominance?

This Caracol “foreign investment/development” and “opening Haiti for business” US spiel is a REPEAT of the sugar plantation failures and foreign capital promises used to pillage Haiti, exploit, make foreigners rich. Failed sweatshops zones being sold as “development” is too transparent an idiocy for the supporters of the Caracol park to couch and excuse their lack of a moral compass, greed, cluelessness or sheer malevolence with protestations about “a rush to make reconstruction progress!” Wasting millions on ineffective cholera vaccines, instead of  immediately spending the donation dollars on permanent clean water and sanitation infrastructure, was also justified by Washington as “a rush to make progress!”

The damage and death of the old industrial parks are well documented in the Bitter Cane documentary film made clandestinely under the Duvalier dictatorship.

For Ezili’s HLLN, the indigenous revolutionary model and lexicon to end despotism, dependency, the humanitarian invasion and US occupation in Haiti was set long ago by the African Ancestors at the beginning of the Haiti revolution with the Bwa Kayiman call: “stop the imperialist, their Black collaborator and all their evil forces.”

Haitians peasants have no problem with private property ownership, the lakou/konbit and a mix-economy with public controls exercised on critical sectors to the common good, like infrastructure, clean water, sanitation, roads, health care, basic education, food production, adequate housing not being subject to profit as the sole barometer for these  basic needs to sustain life, not luxuries. The documentary uses a Marxist lexicon which may not resonate for this age.  Nevertheless Bitter Cane is a worthy reference point. It provides direct historical context, illustrates the Haiti struggle and how such US industrial parks, racist and neoliberal economic policies in Haiti meant more suffering for Haiti’s masses. →

Haiti: A Time Bomb Which Must Be Defused Immediately

Addicted to power and white privilege in poor countries, the large NGOs are funded mostly to make way for the imperialist and global corporatocracy stealing natural resources, destroying , for instance, Haiti’s food sovereignty, water, public health, democratic governance. All, the better to make a market and jobs for foreigners, their vaccines, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals behind the mask of “development.”

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” — Lily Watson

 

There’s a reason to recall the efforts responsible Haitians make to survive the Western rabid rage hidden behind the do-gooders’ benevolence.

Few in power want to hear that  the World bank and the International Monetary Fund  contain the poor in war, poverty, disease so to save them with Paul Farmer pharmaceuticals, USAID tied-aid, the Clintons’ subsidized Arkansas rice and Monsanto GMOs-hybrid seeds.  Not when this is the age where Barrack Obama nominates Paul Farmer’s partner, Jim Yom Kim, co-founder of what some from Haiti call  “Partners in Death”, to head the World Bankers fleecing Black and poor countries worldwide.

It’s not news that the post-World War II alliance, use the World Bank, the IMF, the IFIs and the UN to pillage poor countries and continue the old colonial lines of domination.

Addicted to power and white privilege in poor countries, the large NGOs are funded mostly to make way for the imperialist and global corporatocracy stealing natural resources, destroying , for instance, Haiti’s food sovereignty, water, public health, democratic governance. All, the better to make a market and jobs for foreigners, their vaccines, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals behind the mask of “development.”

Certainly in this age, the Nobel Laureates won’t be lining up to honor and give prizes to the homeless street boys in Haiti who dug up the earthquake victims, lifting steel and concrete, saving lives with bare, bleeding hands. Won’t be lining up to honor Haitians battling to end the US occupation. Won’t be lining up to honor  and give those, like Rea Dol, Jean Ristil Jean Baptise, Jean Jafrikayiti Saint-Vil, Yves Point Du Jou, Dahoud Andre, Pierre Labossiere or Ezili Dantò a peace prize for saving lives, battling tyranny. The neocolonial narrative on Haiti won’t allow it.

We don’t exist. Whitemen speak for us. Mr-lets-hoard-it-all wants everything.

He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Walk with honor.

Sean Penn is saving us along with Paul Farmer and his acolytes. We who have made no dishonorable alliances and stood, from the beginning, against the return to dictatorship, oppression, re-colonization of Haiti, don’t exist. In fact, they say they treat Haitians well.  You know, as well as the godly Thomas Jefferson was treating 14-year old Sally Hemings nightly at Monticello. As well as the slaveholders who provided food and shelter to their slaves and only really beat them senseless when they were not working hard enough on the plantation, or were so ungrateful as to speak for themselves, or escape.

He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Die with honor. Suffer humiliating pains, defeats. Endure.

Constantly under fire. But made of fire. Unborn. Never burn. We roll with it. Handling seismic shifts.  Freestyling to murder Tarzan, Jane and their Uncle Toms.

Acid and Clorox hunger we know. Stigmas we know. World Bank structural adjustment policies we know. IFM death plans we know. We’re never filled with the humiliating defeats. Our sorrows run deep. Yet and still, Ibo granmoun lakay Ibo.

We don’t exist. We’re the Haitians who save ourselves. We keep honor. We reMEMBER, always. The Ancestors. Don’t forget their traditional enemies. Never.  Bay kou bliye pote mak sonje.

“Cut your chains and you are free. Cut your roots and you die” –Haitian Proverb

What is the Ottawa Initiative?

Haitians and those still blind or in denial and who are participating in the International crime and travesty going on in Haiti right now are urged to recall the Ottawa Initiative .

What is the Ottawa Initiative?  Why is there a UN, Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in Haiti for 8 years? A country not at war, without a peace agreement to enforce and with less violence than most countries in the Western Hemisphere?  (See the UN’s own Global Study on Homicide at page 93 ).

Why is Haiti the only place in the world where the UN has a Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission without a peace agreement amongst warring parties to enforce? Why is the third largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world really in Haiti?

What’s the secret behind the rush of the international mining and oil companies to Haiti?

Why the amazing strings of catastrophes in tiny Haiti these last 8-years of occupation? During the period since US regime change in 2004, the US managed to build, in “corrupt” and “resource-less” Haiti, the largest US Embassy in the Western Hemisphere and the 5th largest US Embassy in the world after Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Germany. (See Haiti’s Riches, and Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the US occupation.)

The majority in Haiti have not been allowed to vote in elections since the US occupation began. Haitians suffer Clorox hunger, yearly floods and drownings, no development. The US military closed schools when they landed in 2004, which still have not reopened. The UN’s personnel sodomize a Haiti child daily. The UN mission in Haiti is getting paid nearly one billion dollars per year by the Western powers.

Haitians abroad have not been spared either. A puppet government is in place doing what an authentic government would never be able to get cooperation from the world bankers and financing houses to do.

The powerful  bankers and global politicians have finally found a way to tax the poor majority by unilaterally, without accountability, authorizing taxing Diaspora phone calls and remittances. The  $2billion,360million per year in Diaspora remittances is the only real direct and aid-with-dignity the people actually get.

But the world turns away, marginalizes Haiti and other voices who tell the truth.

Paul Farmer and his UN and World Bankers continue to “heal” Haitians from the “threat” we pose to ourselves they advertise, not to the white predatory system.  They’ve brought us “healing” with UN guns, (37,000?) NGOs , foreign diseases, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, pedophiles, priests, charity workers and such.

What is the Ottawa Initiative? In 2002, high level Western officials secretly got together in Ottawa, Canada and made plans for Haiti because Haiti with popular democracy was a “threat to North American countries. “

The expressed and reported concern was that “Haiti might have, by some estimates, a population of 20 million by 2019…It is a time bomb, the high level Canadian diplomat said, ‘which must be defused immediately.’” (The Ottawa Initiative; and Transcending the 2002 Ottawa Initiative.)

We are the Haitians

We shall overcome this latest US occupation and subjugation. We are the Haitians. The first to put liberty into application in the Western Hemisphere. The first to help liberate five “Latin” American countries.

The first to bring the music now called Jazz into being in the West. The first to beat all the European powers and their white settle derivatives in combat and end slavery, direct colonialism, the slave trade, forced assimilation. The first to defeat the Western bankers attempts at taxing the labor of the peasants through control of the foreign-backed Bank of Haiti.

The first, in the 1946 Haiti Revolution, to successful overthrow a U.S.-backed regime in the Americas. The first to reject bourgeois democracy. The first to refuse to make taxable income for the bankers, mulatto elites and politicians to enrich themselves, preferring a peasant ownership economy pursuing balance, Viv, family stability, Lakou sufficiency, not wealth, not profit to become taxable income. Haitians work to live, not live to work.

Haiti was the first to reject wage-slavery – the Western serf-like system of valuing and turning the human body/soul into a commodity useful solely for its labor for making profit for some bigmen’s enterprise, or to improve someone else’s land and life. Haitians prefer to be small business entrepreneurs on their own plot of land, living the sunny ocean, small farmers Island life without government interference or taxation without representation.

Haitians suffer the agony of endless debt, domination, starvation, imported diseases and all sorts of other deprivation to deny the Western inhuman economic and value systems.

In 1990 with the election of Aristide, the Haitians were the first to thwart US imperialism hidden behind the pretense of bringing democracy through sham elections and the false promises of tied aid.

The Haitians see through the current US occupation behind UN guns and shall again successfully overcome all US-backed puppet regimes, until the subjugation of the voice of the Haitian peasant and patriot stops, sovereignty regained, the foreigners, white saviors and their NGOs and World Bank bankers are gone.

He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Live with honor. The Haitian union forged at Bwa Kayiman has never wavered. Nou se Ginen, nou fè yon sèl kò.

The Bwa Kayiman call is still our call.

Ezili Dantò,
Li led, li la
March, 2012

*********

“Si nou fè silans,
Y’ap fè l pou nou,
Y’ap fè l sans nou
Y’ap fè l kont nou…Ki vle di, pran peyi Ayiti lan men nou…”–Alina Sixto , Sept. 2007

Haïti: Les ONG sont-elles un outil de domination néocoloniale? | Un État faible face à une invasion d’ONG

Colloque international sur le rôle des ONG en Haïti

Mondialisation.ca, Le 17 juin 2012

Ceci est la première partie d’une série sur le colloque du 15 juin qui s’est tenu à Montréal, Les ONG en Haïti: entre le bien et le mal.

Paternalisme, néocolonialisme, outil de domination de l’ordre mondial, voilà seulement quelques-uns des attributs et concepts accolés aux organisations non gouvernementales (ONG) lors du colloque sur le rôle controversé des ONG en Haïti, lequel a soulevé des passions le 15 juin à Montréal. L’organisatrice Nancy Roc d’Incas Productions, a admis que ce colloque intitulé « Les ONG en Haïti : entre le bien et le mal », est « un colloque qui dérange ». Elle a salué la présence de plusieurs ministres haïtiens : « Ce sont eux qu’on accuse mais ils sont là aujourd’hui, ils nous prennent au sérieux », dit-elle avant de déplorer l’absence d’un grand nombre d’ONG québécoises.

Nancy Roc au colloque « Les ONG en Haïti : entre le bien et le mal » 15 juin 2012.

« Les Québécois ont été les plus généreux donateurs et ils sont en droit de se demander où sont les fonds. J’ai contacté toutes les ONG, l’Association québécoise des organismes de coopération internationale (AQOCI), et la plupart n’ont même pas pris la peine de me répondre. J’ai appris la semaine dernière que l’AQOCI tenait son assemblée générale aujourd’hui même. J’étais prête à payer pour que le programme du colloque soit affiché sur le site de l’AQOCI. On m’a répondu que ce n’était pas possible pour le technicien web…

 « Lorsqu’une étude a été menée auprès des ONG par le Disaster Accountability Project (États-Unis), 80% des ONG ont refusé de rendre des comptes. On accuse souvent le gouvernement haïtien mais seulement 1% de l’aide s’est rendue au gouvernement. Pour chaque dollar canadien donné à Haïti, 6 sous seulement sont allés aux Haïtiens. Voici la vérité qu’on ne vous dit pas.

 « La plupart des rôles de l’État ont été refilés aux ONG, les fonds sont dirigés vers d’autres gouvernements, vers des compagnies privées étrangères. Comment s’étonner que l’on qualifie Haïti de Far West des ONG! Il s’est développé en Haïti une forme de colonialisme humanitaire. Depuis 1986, Haïti est le pays qui a reçu le plus d’aide mais s’est appauvri. Et on accuse les victimes! Par ailleurs, les ONG haïtiennes ne reçoivent pas d’aide et pourtant ce sont elles qui connaissent le pays et les besoins de la situation. »

Mme Roc se défend de vouloir faire le procès des ONG. Le but de ce colloque est de « chercher des solutions et mettre en œuvre une coordination entre les acteurs, d’amorcer un dialogue, un nouveau virage ».

La faiblesse de l’État haïtien et la propagande voulant qu’il soit trop corrompu pour se voir allouer des fonds profite grandement aux ONG étrangères qui récoltent l’aide financière qui autrement irait à l’État. Ce dernier est davantage affaibli par cette pratique et les intervenants ont dans une grande majorité mis l’accent sur la nécessité du renforcement de l’État. S’il faut avoir les moyens de ses ambitions, le renforcement de l’État haïtien passe d’abord et avant tout par les moyens financiers.

« Est-ce la faiblesse de l’État qui a causé cette invasion d’ONG dans les compétences gouvernementales ou l’invasion d’ONG qui a contribué à affaiblir l’État? » Sans amener de réponse à la question que plusieurs se posent, le directeur exécutif de l’Observatoire canadien sur les crises et l’aide humanitaire, François Audet, conclut qu’il « faut revoir les paradigmes de l’intervention en Haïti ».

Daniel Supplice, ministre des Haïtiens vivant à l’étranger accuse plutôt l’instabilité politique d’être responsable de la faiblesse de l’État. Il n’a toutefois pas mentionné le rôle prépondérant des pays donateurs dans l’instabilité politique haïtienne.

Ce rôle antidémocratique des grandes puissances est également passé sous silence dans les grands médias qui n’osent même pas parler du coup d’État concocté par le Canada, les États-Unis et la France contre Jean-Bertrand Aristide en 2004 et préfèrent le qualifier de « départ » du président. Ce dernier, élu démocratiquement avec un pourcentage des suffrages à faire rougir n’importe quel dirigeant des pays qui l’ont chassé du pouvoir, faisait face à une insurrection armée et financée entre autres par le CIA. Quant à l’opposition politique, le gouvernement canadien a largement contribué à son financement :

Le gouvernement canadien a été fortement impliqué sur tous les plans dans le coup d’État. Le Canada, l’Union européenne et les États-Unis avaient supprimé toute aide au gouvernement Fanmi Lavalas tout en finançant ses opposants. Pire, le Canada a participé à la planification et à l’exécution du renversement du gouvernement et au kidnapping d’Aristide. La nuit du coup, 125 troupes canadiennes étaient sur le terrain à Port-au-Prince, assurant la sécurité de l’aéroport à partir duquel les soldats étasuniens forceraient Aristide à prendre un avion pour l’exil. Le Canada a aidé à installer le nouveau régime non élu et lui a fourni des millions de dollars d’aide. L’aspect probablement le plus honteux est que les troupes canadiennes et les policiers envoyés en Haïti ont activement appuyé la répression. (Nikolas Barry-Shaw, Dru Oja Jay, Paved with Good Intentions, 2012, p. xi. Traduction libre.) →

USAID Grants $3 Million to Solidarity Center’s Bogotá Office – Unionists Want to Know Why

by James Jordan (Alliance for Global Justice)

The Solidarity Center office in Bogotá has received an unusually large two-year grant of $3 million for its operations in the Andean Region. The scope and dimensions of the grant are not fully known, nor the exact programs to which it will be applied. However, given the history of the Bogotá office and the Solidarity Center’s Andean representatives, observers expect the grant to have major implications for the countries of Colombia and Venezuela, where the office’s work is usually concentrated. The Andean region also covers Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. The Solidarity Center has offices both in Colombia and Peru.

The grant comes from USAID (the United States Agency for International Development). The office receives notice of this funding at the same time that three key developments are underway–in Venezuela, the coming October elections, and in Colombia, the implementation of the new Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US, coinciding with a massive popular mobilization to demand a political solution to the armed and social conflict. Little information is available concerning the details of the grant. Because of the documented history of the AFL-CIO intervention in Venezuela through its Solidarity Center, activists must analyze past history and current circumstances in order to be able to discuss intelligently what we may anticipate from these augmented activities.

The Solidarity Center is one of four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a creation of the United States’ largest union center, the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Unions). Along with the Solidarity Center, the four core institutes of the NED are: the International Republican Institute (associated with the Republican Party), the National Democratic Institute (associated with the Democratic Party), and the International Center for Private Enterprise (associated with the Chambers of Commerce).The NED was established by the US government in 1983, during the Reagan administration.

The NED exists for one reason–to manipulate governments, social movements and elections in other countries in order to advance the international policies of the US which, in turn, are designed to accommodate private access to natural resources and increase transnational corporate profits. In an interview with the New York Times in 1991, Allen Weinstein, one of the NED’s founders, said that, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly by the CIA.”

Marc Plattner, an NED Vice President, explains the role of the organization in the context of the Imperial strategy that brings together in one fabric the threads of politics, business and the military: “Liberal democracy clearly favors the economic arrangements that foster globalization ….The international order that sustains globalization is underpinned by American military predominance.”

The Solidarity Center receives over 90% of its funding from the public coffers by means of the Department of State, USAID and the NED. Union contributions are typically around two to three percent. Thus, the Solidarity Center has little to do with union locals and rank and file unionists, although it has the full cooperation of the highest officials of the AFL-CIO. Local unions have no input or say in the establishment of international relations or program development. The Solidarity Center has some good and helpful programs and some that are at least more or less benign. But these good programs can act to hide a more fundamental purpose to infiltrate and influence the labor movements of other countries and to provide a channel of interference in their electoral processes.

The NED’s first “success” in Latin America was the defeat of Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista candidate for President, in the Nicaraguan elections of 1990. The US government, via the NED and other channels, spent more than $20 per voter and effectively bought the victory for Violeta Chamorra, its favored candidate. The US spent more per Nicaraguan voter in 1990 than both parties did in the US presidential elections in 1988. It is notable that at the time, Nicaragua sustained a population of only 3 million persons.

Haiti provides another example of how the Solidarity Center operates. in 2004, the Solidarity Center’s partner, the International Republican Institute, not only funded, but convened and trained the coup plotters against the elected government of Pres. Bertrand Aristide. During 2004 and 2005, beginning before the coup and extending into the months afterward there was a bloodbath against the supporters of Aristide that included among its victims members of the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH). Rather than helping this most targeted union, the Solidarity Center channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a small labor organization that before and during the coup did nothing to defend the elected government and, in fact, called for Pres. Aristide to step down. →