[News] Haiti Liberté to Begin Releasing Secret US Embassy Cables Provided by WikiLeaks

[Anti-Imperialist News]

For Immediate Release:
May 31, 2011 Contact:
USA: Kim Ives, 718-421-0162
Haiti: Yves Pierre-Louis, 3407-0761


Haiti Liberté  to Begin Releasing This Week
Secret U.S. Embassy Cables Provided by WikiLeaks


The weekly Haïti Liberté begins publishing a 
series of exclusive articles which will draw from 
1,918 secret diplomatic cables about Haiti from 
U.S. Embassies around the world in its June 1 
edition. The cables were obtained by the 
transparency-advocacy group WikiLeaks and made available to Haïti Liberté.

The articles will be published in print and on 
the web at: <http://www.haitiliberte.com/>http://www.haitiliberte.com .

The cables cover an almost seven-year period from 
Apr. 17, 2003, ten months before the Feb. 29, 
2004 coup d’état which ousted President 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to Feb. 28, 2010, just 
after the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated the 
capital, Port-au-Prince, and surrounding cities.

“Haïti Liberté is publishing these cables because 
they offer unparalleled insight into how the 
United States government has tried to manipulate 
Haitian affairs in its own interests, not in the 
interests of the Haitian people,” said Berthony 
Dupont, Haïti Liberté’s director. “We hope that 
the release of the cables will help bring about 
some transparency and accountability for the Haitian people.”

The cables range from “Secret” and “Confidential” 
classification to “Unclassified.” Cables of the 
latter classification are not public, and many 
remain marked “For Official Use Only” or “Sensitive.”

The cables cover official U.S. strategies and 
maneuvering in Haiti during the coup years 
(2004-2006) and the period after President René 
Préval’s election (2006-2010). We see 
Washington’s obsession with keeping Aristide out 
of Haiti and the hemisphere, the microscope it 
trained on the democratic Lavalas movement, the 
relentless focus on rebellious shanty towns like 
Cité Soleil and Bel Air, and Washington’s tight 
supervision of Haiti’s police leadership and of 
the United Nation’s 9,000-man military occupation 
known as the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH).

In November 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing the 
251,287 leaked U.S. embassy cables it obtained 
last year by providing them to large newspapers 
like the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Now, WikiLeaks is selecting media in many other 
countries to provide them with the U.S. Embassy 
cables relative to their specific country. “Haiti 
Liberté is honored that WikiLeaks has entrusted 
it with releasing the cables relative to Haiti,” 
Dupont said. “Haiti Liberté is also pleased to 
partner with The Nation, the oldest continuously 
published magazine in the U.S., in publishing and 
distributing English-language articles based on those WikiLeaks cables.”

This coming week’s article will examine how 
Washington tried to torpedo implementation of the 
PetroCaribe oil agreement between Venezuela and 
Haiti, a struggle which frayed the U.S. 
relationship with President Préval. Future 
articles will deal with Washington’s backing of 
assembly industry owners in their fight against 
raising the minimum wage and how it militarized 
aid to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

The cables offer many clues as to how Washington 
brought Haiti from the paramilitary and Special 
Forces coup of 2004 to the electoral coup that 
installed the neo-Duvalierist Michel Martelly in 2011.




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