Gélin Buteau (Haiti), Guede with Drum, ca. 1995. At the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September 2022, Haiti’s Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus admitted that his country faces a serious crisis, which he said ‘can only be solved with the effective support of our partners’. To many close observers of the situation unfolding in […]
At a clinic at La Fossette Health Center in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, nurses vaccinate babies, among other health care services. The pandemic could further erode Haiti’s stability, experts say, given its precarious economic and political state. DANIEL LANARI/USAID
In 2017, a contingent of UN peacekeepers in Haiti holding a closing ceremony to their operations and the start of peacekeepers’ overall withdrawal from the country that year. New research focusing on how sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers in Haiti has affected women and girls there has revealed a nuanced situation linked to extreme, pervasive poverty. LOGAN ABASSI/UN PHOTO
It is bittersweet to be right about my prediction that the occupation of Haiti by Brazil would destroy its democracy. The real power behind the far-right congressman and former army captain, Jair Bolsonaro, who will take office on January 1, 2019 as Brazil’s president, is his mentor, the retired General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira. Mr. Ribeiro Pereira will likely become the most powerful man in Brazil and the next defense minister.
In Chile, as in every other country that has historically embraced slavery, there are numerous racists. It is equally fair to say that, like all countries with a similar history, the fraction of those who are appalled by the persistence of slavery in their lifetimes well exceeds the proportion of racists. And when well-meaning people, who seek to expose what they perceive to be human trafficking, are accused of racism by those who do not understand a situation or want to sow confusion, this is a grave injustice.
One would think that, now that the despised 14-year long United Nations Mission for the (de)Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH) has been forced to shut down, Haiti would be on the road to some modest, sustained, recovery from the devastating January 12, 2010 earthquake. It is not. The Republic of Haiti has never been in greater danger than it is now.
The notion of a colonist as cannibal in Haiti is widespread. This idea, called manje moun (eating people), could hardly qualify as superstition, given the experience of colonialism. It is daunting to find a better description for those who grab control of water and food, and then calculate the minimum caloric intake a population needs so that a maximum of labor may be extracted from its emaciated and zombified workers without killing them. The neo-colonists may call themselves humanitarians, but their victims know exactly what they are.
There is no shortage of water in Haiti. Yet, everywhere on the island, Haitians travel for miles to get water, pay dearly for it if they can find it, and sometimes die on their journey to collect it, like so many antelopes snatched by predators on their way to drink. How does a thing like that happen in a country that gets reliably drenched with more than 50 inches (130 cm) of naturally distilled rainwater per year?
Haiti’s incarceration rate of roughly 100 prisoners per 100,000 citizens in 2016 was the lowest in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, there is a systematic campaign underway for more prisons. Canada and Norway have each given one prison to Haiti. Thanks to prison aid from the United States, three additional prisons have been inaugurated since 2016, and another is under construction.
Despite the polls in the run up to November 8, 2016, and the post-election shenanigans that continue to this day, the United States has a new President, and it is not Hillary Clinton. There are many reasons for this, and Charles Ortel’s dogged, two-year investigation of the Clintons’ predatory humanitarianism is a major one. He is not yet done.
