Haiti: Occasional Musings – 14, “the wasps have been knocked out of the nest”*

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UPDATE President Aristide today held a press conference in which he announced that Lavalas’s participation in the next elections – mobilization begins! Two years after his March 2011 return to Haiti, former President and Fanmi Lavalas leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide made his first appearance in public. President Aristide had been called to court by the investigative [...]

Haiti: Occasional Musings – 13,

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A second article in the Guardian [2009] by Paul Collier [Clinton's economic policy bag man] is even worse as he advocates Haiti seize the ‘window of opportunity’ by mirroring Bangladesh’s garment industry. Haiti should be running as far away as possible from the Bangladesh model which has resulted in the deaths of over 1000 garment workers over the past few years including the so far 640 people killed when a building collapsed last week – imagine the uproar if 640 US workers had died as a result of negligence. The whole point of factories in Bangladesh and Haiti is to robotize people and bleed the workers to death. That is the cost of cheap food, cheap clothes, and expensive iPhones, workers are bled. In Caracol, farmers sold their land for $1200 and this is one of the problems in the new ‘open for business’ Haiti. Poor farmers and displaced people are being offered meagre sums of money to sell land or to move from camps. Its hard to resist and consider the long terms when you have nothing. I attended a May day protest by some of the women workers who make t-shirts for yes, you guessed it, Walmart.

Haiti: April 26th 1963, Testimonies of Duvalier Massacre

Testimonies The April 26, 1986 commemmorative march on Fort Dimanche [also known as Fort Death] was a huge march by the people of Haiti marking the overthrow of Duvalier on February 7th 1986. One of the organisers of that march was a young parish priest,Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Below are a few testimonies from survivors of the [...]

Haiti: April 26th, Memories of a Duvalier Massacre

From [The Progressive](http://www.progressive.org/). Memories of a Duvalier Massacre, 50 Years Later” by Edwidge Danticat “Recently, Francois Duvalier’s grandson, Jean Claude’s son, François-Nicolas Duvalier, an adviser to Haiti’s current president Michel Martelly, wrote an opinion piece praising his grandfather’s “republican values” and calling him a “great nationalist.” + This is the legacy of Duvalier openly supported [...]

Occasional Musings – 12, tap taps, okada and guns

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I’m visiting Florida for a couple of weeks, and if I am to be honest, I needed a break to get my bearings and to refresh my energy.  PAP is sapping of energy:  heat, noise, people, market – here its difficult to know who occupies the greater number, buyers or sellers.   Every few yards [...]

Haiti: Caracol, Cholera and Dignity

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Evel Fanfan is a Haitian human rights lawyer and activist.  He is the co-founder of AUMOHD [Action des Unités Motivées pour une Haiti de Droits) or Action for Human Rights in Haiti founded in 2002.   Despite constant intimidation of Fanfan he continues to speak out against the worker exploitation and human rights abuses of [...]

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