[News] Haiti: The ransom is still being paid

[Anti-Imperialist News]

sfbayview.com
<https://sfbayview.com/2022/06/haiti-the-ransom-is-still-being-paid-2/>
Haiti: The ransom is still being paid
June 30, 2022
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[image:
Garment-workers-protest-021722-in-Port-au-Prince-Haiti-win-54-wage-increase-1400x781,
Haiti: The ransom is still being paid, News & Views World News & Views]
<https://sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Garment-workers-protest-021722-in-Port-au-Prince-Haiti-win-54-wage-increase-1400x781.jpg>The
mass protest by garment workers on Feb. 17, 2022, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti,
won a 54% wage increase.

*by Robert Roth, Haiti Action Committee*

On May 20th,* The New York Times* published a meticulously documented
series entitled, “The Ransom,” detailing the devastating impact of the
so-called “Independence Tax” enforced by France in 1825 on the world’s
first Black republic. As *The Times* reported, Haiti became the only place
where the descendants of enslaved people were forced to pay compensation to
the descendants of slave owners. With the first payment to France, Haiti
had to shut down its nascent public school system. As the billions of
dollars paid to France and then to U.S banks like Citicorp multiplied,
Haiti’s economy disintegrated.

*The Times* series comes nearly 20 years after the administration of
then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide formally demanded $21.7 billion from
France as restitution for the funds extorted from Haiti
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8ywg8YOJhE>. Aristide’s initiative was a
key factor in France’s cooperation and support for the U.S.-orchestrated
coup that overthrew his democratically elected government. Mainstream media
at the time, including *The New York Times* and *The Washington Post*,
treated the demand as “quixotic” and a publicity stunt, as their reporters
wrote one article after another demonizing the democratically elected
Aristide administration, thus helping to lay the ideological justifications
for the 2004 coup d’etat.

We do not anticipate self-criticism from *The Times* for its past
reporting. Hardly. But as *Times* readers study the new series, they will
hopefully demand to know more about the ways in which the U.S. and France
continue to exploit Haiti’s resources, dominate its political life and prop
up the tiny, violent and corrupt Haitian elite that now rules the country.
And they will hopefully call for an accurate accounting of the powerful
Haitian grassroots movement that continues to fight for democracy and true
sovereignty.

Take for example the recent uprising of Haiti’s factory workers. On Feb.
17, 2022, thousands of Haitian garment workers, their families and
supporters, filled the streets of Port-au-Prince to demand an end to
starvation wages and horrific working conditions. The workers demanded a
wage increase from 500 gourdes per 9-hour work day (approximately $4.80) to
1,500 gourdes per day (approximately $14.40). As the demonstrations
continued throughout the next week, Haitian police fired on the crowds with
tear gas canisters and live ammunition, killing a journalist and wounding
many other protesters.
[image:
Haitian-factory-workers-strike-demand-salary-increase-0222-by-Odelyn-Joseph-AP-1400x935,
Haiti: The ransom is still being paid, News & Views World News & Views]Factory
workers in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, chant anti-government slogans during a
protest demanding a salary increase. – Photo: Odelyn Joseph, AP

The garment strike came in the midst of double-digit inflation in Haiti,
with the prices of food, fuel and other commodities soaring. To make
matters worse, the government of de facto prime minister Ariel Henry
recently announced that it would end fuel subsidies, leading to even higher
prices. Workers chanted, “You raised the gas but didn’t raise our
salaries.”

The strategy of the Henry government was classic counterinsurgency:
Denounce the militancy of the protests, unleash police repression to
terrorize the demonstrators, and offer a modest wage increase (to 770
gourdes a day) to quell the uprising. In numerous interviews, workers
expressed their outrage over the government response, pointing out that the
cost of traveling to and from their factory jobs alone took up 40% of their
daily wage. Add to that the cost of food and housing and you have a daily
fight to survive.
<https://apnews.com/article/business-port-au-prince-haiti-strikes-40a6e603513287f63bd2228885a9a5f3>


Who benefits from this sweatshop labor? Garment factories in Haiti supply
T-shirts and other apparel to corporate giants like Target, the Gap, H&H
Textiles, Under Armour and Walmart. Check out the label on your T-shirt. It
may very well read, “Made in Haiti.”

None of this is new. During the dictatorial reign of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”
Duvalier in the 1970s and 1980s, garment factories supplying U.S. companies
set up shop throughout Port-au-Prince, while the government unleashed
terror campaigns against labor organizers and any grassroots opposition.

In 1991, during Aristide’s first term as president, he was set to raise the
minimum wage, when a U.S.-organized coup toppled his government only seven
months into his presidency. In February of 2003, during his second
administration, Aristide doubled the minimum wage, impacting the more than
20,000 people who worked in the Port-au-Prince assembly sector.
<https://haitisolidarity.net/pamphlets/> The Aristide government provided
school buses to take these workers’ children to school as well as subsidies
for their school books and uniforms. In addition, his government launched a
campaign to collect unpaid taxes and utility bills from Haiti’s wealthy
elite. None of this sat well with Haiti’s factory owners, who played a key
role in the U.S.-orchestrated 2004 coup d’etat.

*The coup fast-tracked the implementation of the U.S.-imposed structural
adjustment program, known in Haiti as the “Death Plan.”*

Haiti is still living with the grim effects of that coup and the subsequent
foreign occupation that enforced it. The coup fast-tracked the
implementation of the U.S.-imposed structural adjustment program, known in
Haiti as the “Death Plan.” Nowhere was this more apparent than during the
aftermath of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, which killed over 300,000
Haitians and left millions more under tarps and tents.

Shortly after the earthquake, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
traveled to northern Haiti, declaring that “Haiti is now open for
business,” as she hailed the inauguration of the Caracol Northern
Industrial Park, now a key center of the garment industry and a target of
the current labor protests and strikes. State Department cables obtained by
*Wikileaks* revealed that Clinton and the State Department, along with
USAID, were pressuring Haiti’s government to block any hike in the minimum
wage, arguing that this would be detrimental to the development of the
export sector. A series of compliant and corrupt Haitian regimes, selected
and propped up by the U.S., have facilitated this plan, taking their cut
along the way.

The ongoing battle of Haiti’s garment workers for survival and dignity is
part of the broader popular movement in Haiti. The workers who are in the
streets of Port-au-Prince return home at night to communities like Belair,
Cite Soleil and Lasalin that have been targeted by Haitian police and
paramilitary death squads, who have besieged them with massacres,
kidnappings and gang rapes aimed at silencing their opposition to the
current government.
<https://www.nlg.org/report-the-lasalin-massacre-and-the-human-rights-crisis-in-haiti/>

The garment strike came just days after the term of de facto prime minister
Ariel Henry officially ended on Feb. 7. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians
demonstrated for months their opposition to the continuation of this
regime, which they rightly classify as illegitimate, a creation of the
so-called Core Group (the United States, France, Spain, Brazil, Germany,
Canada, the EU, the UN and the OAS) that controls Haiti’s politics.

Numerous grassroots organizations, including Aristide’s *Fanmi Lavalas
Political Organization* – the people’s party of Haiti – have called for a
transitional government to end corruption, stop the repression, respect the
rights of workers, stabilize the economy, and set the stage for free and
fair elections. <https://haitisolidarity.net/crisis-and-resolution/> Yet
the State Department has doubled down on its support for the Henry regime
and has insisted that it supervise new elections. This would simply lead to
one more stolen election designed to keep the ultra-right-wing PHTK
(Skinhead) party in power.
[image:
Border-Patrol-agents-whipping-Haitian-migrants-with-horse-reins-092021-by-Paul-Ratje-AFP-1400x867,
Haiti: The ransom is still being paid, News & Views World News & Views]These
images from last September of US Border Patrol agents whipping Haitians
have been memorialized in racist “challenge coins” being passed around by
the agents, proudly depicting those same attacks. – Photo: Paul Ratje, AFP

I
<https://pressley.house.gov/media/press-releases/pressley-jones-demand-biden-administration-end-title-42-cease-deportations>n
the midst of the disaster that the U.S. has helped to foster in Haiti, the
Biden administration continues its unconscionable mass deportation of
Haitians, with the numbers now exceeding 25,000 since Biden’s
inauguration. Remember
those horrifying images of border patrol agents whipping Haitian migrants
last September? Now comes the news that those images have been memorialized
in racist “challenge coins” being passed around by border patrol agents,
proudly depicting those same attacks
<https://atlantablackstar.com/2022/06/20/its-strictly-business-border-patrol-officers-were-captured-whipping-haitians-near-u-s-mexico-border-then-someone-created-a-coin-to-commercialize-the-controversial-incident/>
.

In the month of May alone, the Biden administration loaded up 36 planes to
deport 4,000 Haitians. They return to the worst spate of kidnappings in
Haiti’s history, where paramilitary groups have targeted with impunity
everyone from market vendors to medical workers and teachers.

Only a fundamental change in Haiti of the kind envisioned, articulated and
fought for by Haiti’s powerful grassroots movement, can reverse any of
this. And the U.S. government, as it has been so often, is the biggest
obstacle that stands in the way.

The ransom is still being paid. And reparations are long overdue.

*Robert Roth is an educator and was co-founder of the Haiti Action
Committee. He can be reached at **rhroth3633 at gmail.com**. *
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