A Story of Coincidence and Chance

Dear the_siobhan,

There's a rooster, here, and he's been asking for your phone number.

A former official of Haiti's state-owned national telecommunications company was sentenced to 48 months in prison for his role in a money-laundering conspiracy in connection with a foreign bribery scheme, the U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors said Robert Antoine, 62, of Miami and Haiti, was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez to serve three years of supervised release after he leaves prison. Martinez ordered Antoine to pay $1,852,209 in restitution and to forfeit $1,580,771. Antoine pleaded guilty on March 12 to conspiracy to commit money laundering.

According to his indictment, Antoine was director of international affairs for Haiti's state-owned Telecommunications D'Haiti, also known as Haiti Teleco, from May 2001 to April 2003. Antoine previously admitted that he accepted bribes from three U.S. telecommunications companies and thereby defrauded Haiti Teleco.

— Haiti Telecom exec sentenced to 4 years, Miami Herald

It's very common to make the charge that officials in Haiti are "corrupt". Why does no one ask, "who is doing the corrupting?"

Here is a video about two Haitian organizations: Father Jean-Juste's food programme (funded by the What If Foundation), and the Partners in Health-associated Zanmi Agrikol. I got to visit the food programme six months ago. It's pretty impressive.

Toward the end of the video, as the reporters are talking to an agronomist, you can see a guy translating. That's Daniel, who worked as our translator back in January.

This video makes the argument (which I agree with) that really successful programmes have Haitian people as key decision-makers.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is helping the impoverished Caribbean country prepare for upcoming legislative elections, providing secondary support in logistics, security and raising public awareness while leaving the primary organizing role to the national authorities.

“It is the responsibility of the Haitian authorities to organize good elections,” Marco Donati, the senor UN official in the southern region told a recent meeting in Les Cayes to encourage the local youth to participate in the polls. “MINUSTAH is merely playing a secondary role in the elections.”

The mission is also helping the authorities to maintain a stable political atmosphere conducive to electing the country’s legislators, he added.

— "Haiti: UN helps in preparations for legislative elections"

Also! Also!

I smuggled a camera into a federal prison and took a picture of a political prisoner!

Today was a bit of a quiet day. ( Only one protest )

I wish I had more fun things to talk about. Today was a bit of a downer, in many ways.

( Being heard... )

The political party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide will be barred from legislative elections scheduled for February 28, Haitian elections officials said on Wednesday.

[...]

"The Lavalas Family party will not be allowed to participate in the next election because the electoral council's legal counsel said the party did not meet all legal requirements," electoral council president Gaillot Dorsainvil told local radio stations.

He did not specify which requirements the party failed to meet.

Ninety-eight of the 99 seats in the legislature's Chamber of Deputies will be at stake in the February election, along with one-third of the 30-member Senate. The vote for the remaining lower house seat will be held at a later date.

[...]

In a rare interview, Aristide confirmed on local Radio Solidarity on Wednesday that he had given authority to Narcisse to register the party, and questioned whether Haitian officials wanted to hold fair and democratic elections.

"That will depend on whether the electoral council wants to organize an election or to make a selection," Aristide said by phone from South Africa. "If they want to organize elections, I encourage them. But if they want to make a selection I urge them not to take that path because it will not serve the country's interests."

— Reuters

Last spring, Lavalas was also banned from Senate elections.

It's such a strange thing: the official narrative (of, say, the Bush administration or the Martin government) is that Aristide lost the support of the people and the people rose up against him (and the US helped give him a ride out of the country for his own protection). One would think that, with that kind of environment, Lavalas would have no chance of winning an election. But it seems clear that there are forces trying to keep Lavalas out of elections. And it's so freakin' transparent.

I saw a really good panel on ALBA the other night. Great speakers. Great conversation afterward. My sense is that a number of Latin American activists have really become engaged because of the Honduran coup.

Some interesting elements of discussion:

Brazil: We talked a bit about the ambivalent role of Brazil. In Haiti, most of MINUSTAH is made up of Brazilian and Jordanian troops, and the mission has been headed by Brazilian generals. In Honduras, the Brazilian embassy has been housing Zelaya. Are they pro-popular movement, or what? There was some talk about Brazil jockeying for a permanent place on the UN security council, and how it's now one of the G20, which seems to be affecting the character of their economic and foreign policy.

Bolivarianism: The moderator made a good point that the legacy of Bolivar -- the dream of a united Latin America is very much alive and Bolivar's inspiration cannot be underscored. But Haiti's influence on Bolivar should not be forgotten. It was the Haitian leader Pétion, who gave Bolivar sanctuary and soldiers (and a printing press! Essential for a revolutionary) on the condition that Bolivar abolish slavery. I know that Venezuela has never forgotten Haiti's role, there.

TeleSUR: We had a few people at the meeting who had been in Honduras at the time of the coup. One fellow talked about the media blackout and cutting of the power. He said that in the immediate post-coup days, the only source available for information about what was happening was TeleSUR. TeleSUR was explicitly created as part of the ALBA plan.

The Honduras Coup: Two thoughts about the coup came up. One was a discussion about the extent to which the Honduras coup was motivated by the fact that Zelaya signed on to ALBA. Honduras and Haiti both mark out the lowest point for wages in the Western hemisphere, and some of the same corporate names come up in both cases: Gildan Activewear, Goldcorp. But also, there was talk about the differences between the Honduras and Haitian coups. The western countries made half-hearted objections to the coup in Honduras, partially because Honduras has historically been a "good ally" of the US and the developed countries. It's historically had good governance, and so forth. Haiti, on the other hand, is a "failed state". The official story there is that the government is incompetent and it only made sense for Canada and the US to applaud the removal of Aristide. The moderator pointed out that the label of "failed state" is not unrelated to the race demographics of Haiti.

One element that seems similar in both cases is the degree to which the media is providing little more than superficial coverage of the events.

Now that Zelaya is back in Honduras, the US has become much more openly anti-Zelaya. Someone suggested that there's an international "peace keeping" mission being planned. It looks likely that Canada, Panama and Colombia will comprise the force (I've not been able to find a confirmation of that suggestion, however).

Subsidies: One of the speakers raised the point about how intimately tied we are to Latin America. If we go to the store and buy a bunch of bananas for a coupl'a dollars -- that low price is directly related to the poor wages in Latin America. The speaker talked about a wage struggle that was going on in one country. The issue was an attempt to raise wages to 8 dollars a day. In Toronto, we've had a campaign for $10 an hour minimum wage. Why shouldn't Latin American countries be entitled to the same kind of minimum wages? (I think a lot of people on the left are wishy-washy about this, in ways I disagree with. "Oh, you have to think about the regional buying power of a dollar." Shut up.)

Now, the speaker was very clear about what that kind of wage shift will mean for countries like ours. If food or T-shirts or other goods suddenly become much more expensive, we won't be able to consume the same way that we have historically, and that's gonna have profound effects on our society. Another speaker chimed in, here, and said that basically, the low wages in Latin America were a form of subsidy that those countries gave to us, so that we could enjoy a high standard of living. I thought that was a nice way of articulating the idea.

All in all, an excellent panel.

I'm reading this interesting book -- The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community and Haiti by Alex Dupuy. It's interesting, in the sense that it's articulating a position somewhat different than most of the Haiti books I read, but I still find myself sceptical of its thesis.

Most of the stuff I've read on Haiti falls neatly into three camps. In one camp are the books that assert that Aristide was forced out of power in 2004 by Canada, the US and France because he resisted efforts to implement neo-liberal policies in Haiti.

The second camp suggests that Aristide was forced out of the country by a group of plucky Haitian revolutionaries who went from town to town, taking over the country slowly, and eventually when it was clear that they were going to defeat all of Haiti, Aristide fled (and the US gave him a ride out of the country). In any event, this camp tells us, the people were glad to see Aristide go.

The third camp suggests that Aristide was a terrible human being, engaged in human rights abuses and anti-democratic policies, and the US justly took steps to push him out of the country. This third camp seldom discusses the details about what those steps were. As above, this third camp tells us that the people were relieved that Aristide left.

Dupuy's book is interesting in that it clearly understands how globalization and neo-liberalism operate in a place like Haiti. He suggests that the US bristles at countries that go beyond what he calls "minimalist democracies" -- which he defines as a pro-capitalist, vaguely libertarian state that does little else other than ensure that the country supports business interests. And he seems clear that Aristide supported a form of democracy that believed, for instance, that in order to ensure that everyone's rights -- including their economic rights -- were supported, that you kinda had to have things like limited forms of wealth re-distribution.

But he still goes on to suggest that Aristide, by his second term, had given up on liberation theology, had stopped promoting the interests of the poor majority, and was taking steps to entrench Lavalas' leadership of the country.

I'm finding the book interesting reading, even though I'm disagreeing with its arguments. I'm tempted to blog the individual assertions and why I think that they're wrong.

I'm also pleased to see Peter Hallward has reviewed the book in his Peter-Hallward-y way (fangrrl squee!).