Michael Deibert, Writer

A note of thanks to the International Peace Research Association

2012-01-21T16:30:00.003+01:00

The International Peace Research Association has been generous enough to award me a modest grant to aid in the completion of my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published later this year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa. As the recipient of a Small Peace Research Grant, which seeks to support systemic observation or study of conflict phenomena and peace strategies, I am humbled and honored to receive this support and, as such, wanted to take a moment to publicly thank the Association here. Merci mingi.

In Memoriam: Jann Marie Deibert, December 2, 1952 - January 9, 2012

2012-01-10T17:02:00.003+01:00

To the woman who first read to me on her knee many years ago, who first introduced me to Civil War history and history in general, who first took me to the state of Florida, who encouraged me to write, who supported me in every endeavour and who was always a comforting and reassuring voice at the other end of the phone no matter how far away I was, thank you for all you did for me. You made me the man I am today. Goodbye. Mom. I'll always love you.

2011: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

2012-01-02T17:50:00.004+01:00

A little later posting this than usual, but nevertheless hopefully a useful review of the subjects that I wrote about over the past year. Welcome 2012, out with the old and in with the new, onward and upward.

MD

Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’ for the Miami Herald (11 December 2011)

Notes on Matthew J. Smith's Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 for Small Axe (November 2011)

Concern Grows Over Plan to Drill for Oil Near Florida Keys for the Huffington Post and Panos Caribbean (4 October 2011)

Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala for the Huffington Post (10 September 2011)

Michael Deibert interview on the United Nations mission in Haiti on CBC's The Current (7 September 2011)

The U.N. in Haiti: Time to Adapt or Time to Go for Truthdig (1 September 2011)

New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary for the Huffington Post (29 August 2011)

Notes from Haiti's Long Hot Summer for the Huffington Post (23 August 2011)

What James Craig Anderson's Killing Means to America for the Huffington Post (9 August 2011)

On the passing of Jean-Claude Bajeux for AlterPresse (8 August 2011)

Old Habits Die Hard in New Orleans for Truthdig (20 June 2011)

Michael Deibert on drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico and Guatemala for You Tube (31 May 2011)

Mladic, Chomsky and Srebrenica: Time for an apology for Michael Deibert’s Blog (26 May 2011)

Mexico’s Cartel Wars for Truthdig (16 May 2011)

Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war for Agence France Presse (12 May 2011)

Note on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti for Michael Deibert’s Blog (18 March 2011)

Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise for AlterPresse (17 February 2011)

A Nightmare Returns to Haiti for CNN (19 January 2011)

Guatemala: Caught in the crossfire for the Miami Herald (18 January 2011)

Words from the Casa Azul

2011-12-30T14:23:00.003+01:00

“Often I feel more sympathy for carpenters, shoe repairmen, etc., than for all that herd of fools who think they are civilized, loquacious, so-called scholarly people.” Frida Kahlo

Angry Syrians crowd Arab League monitors

2011-12-28T15:56:00.000+01:00

Books in 2011: A Personal Selection

2011-12-20T17:50:00.008+01:00

During 2011, a year of pretty much unending rough waters, a number of interesting books nevertheless came into my life and. As I have done in years past, I wanted to share my thoughts about some of the more notable ones here.

Best regards and hopes for a 2012 with more love, peace, prosperity and life.

Ayibobo.

MD

A Palace in the Old Village By Tahar Ben Jelloun

A moving and perceptive chronicle of the lives of a Moroccan immigrant and his family in modern France, Ben Jelloun's novel descends into surrealistic absurdity in its final pages but before doing so nevertheless gives us an important glimpse into the experience of the “new” French in their adopted country.

Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983 by Virginia Garrard-Burnett

An important and exquisitely researched book that sheds light on one of the most violent periods of Guatemala’s violent history, this work by University of Texas professor Virginia Garrard-Burnett examines the March 1982 to August 1983 rule of Efraín Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt, a former general, candidate in the 1974 Guatemalan elections (which he likely won but had stolen from him by the same military he had once served) and subsequent founder of Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, seized power from another military man, General Romeo Lucas García, who had presided over what Garrard-Burnett characterizes as “a rapid downward spiral of capricious violence and death.” Those hoping for a break in the country’s civil war, however, - which would only end with 1996 peace accords - were in for a rude awakening. Ríos Montt’s anti-guerrilla campaign, centred largely on indigenous peasant communities, was “more methodical and less chaotic than Lucas García counterinsurgency, but it was also more deadly.”

Ríos Montt’s idiosyncratic populism at the time, propelled forward by his evangelical Christianity, revealed the general to be “anything but a puppet of the far right,” notes Garrard-Burnett. “(He) believed himself to be a prophetic leader, brought by Providence to power at a particular moment in history in which he could lead the people of Guatemala against the forces of evil that besieged them on every side.”

The result was cataclysm, and Garrard-Burnett expertly documents it in great detail here.

Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill

A book about the often racially-charged origins of some of the major krewes of New Orleans' storied Mardi Gras (such as Comus, Rex and Momus), this book by a British-transplant living in New Orleans masterfully draws back the curtain on an aspect of the city's carnival revelry that many in its still-ossified economic structure would likely just as soon forget.

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman

A gripping account of the investigation into the April 1998 murder of Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, this book (written by the Guatemalan-American novelist Francisco Goldman) reads like a detective novel and reveals the corrupt linkages of Guatemala’s criminal and military elements. A compelling picture of the struggles of committed individuals against a diffuse and often lethal enemy, it also contains disturbing suggestions about the activities of Guatemala’s incoming president, former General Otto Pérez Molina.

Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 by William Ivy Hair

More a pogrom against the Africa-American population of New Orleans than a riot, this account by Ivy Hair tells the story of Robert Charles and, along with the work of historians like John Hope Franklin, serves as an important reminder to Americans of the brutal injustices inflicted on African-Americans after the Civil War, all in the name of scuttling the aims of Reconstruction in the American South.

The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge by Paul Preston

Another example of how a military leader viewed a civil war as a moral-religious crusade, this book by one of the best historians of Span’s recent history makes one wonder how Spain’s Francisco Franco escaped his proper place in the annals of history’s great monsters alongside Hitler and Stalin.

The scale of the slaughter by Franco’s forces - 3,000 killed in Zamora, 3,000 in Valladolid, 2,789 in Navarra, and on and on - still shocks, and Preston lays blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of such largely forgotten Francoist chieftains as General Juan Yague. Preston’s deft exposure of Franc’s “notion of a war of moral redemption by terror,” makes one look forward with expectation to his forthcoming book, author of the much-anticipated forthcoming The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain.

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier

An expansive yet nuanced view of the first and second Congo wars, this book is an essential addition to scholarship on the region. Prunier, a longtime observer, analyst and resident of Central Africa, is also an unusually honest and self-critical academic, a fact that adds gravitas to his criticisms of African governments and the international community when dealing with the region’s severe, but by no means intractable, problems.

Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth by Erin Siegal

This debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb? But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited? I reviewed it for the Miami Herald.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns

An interesting book that very laudably seeks to bring the experiences of the Congolese themselves in their own voices to the forefront of an account of that country’s ongoing conflicts. Perhaps a little soft for my taste in its assessments of the failings of the international community and non-governmental organizations operating in Central Africa, but all in all a highly worthwhile read that brings the reality of the conflict home via the eloquent voices of the Congolese who suffered its consequences

Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll

A serious and groundbreaking scholarly work that was unfortunately subject to rather vehemently libelous calumny when it first appeared in 1999, this book sees Stoll - probably the best American anthropologist working on Guatemala - examining both the specifics and broader historical context of the autobiography of perhaps the most famous living Guatemalan. On the way, much as he did with his excellent previous volume, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, Stoll gives the reader of nuanced picture of the torturous position that Guatemala’s indigenous population found itself in during that country’s long civil war and raises some troubling questions about the veracity of Menchu’s famous autobiography.

Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson

A relic from the days when American cultural and political commentators actually had a brain, this collection of loosely-connected short stories casts a witty and darkly jaundiced eye on the upper-middle classes of a fictional bedroom community outside of New York, and within the city itself during the years between the great wars. Wilson, who had previously made his mark with his history of revolutionary thought in Europe, To the Finland Station, was as original and probing a mind as American letters has produced.

Life Dances On: Lady Rollers Second Line in New Orleans

2011-12-17T22:32:00.009+01:00

All photos © Michael Deibert

In Memoriam: Sebastian Quezada

2011-12-16T08:00:00.005+01:00

Sebastian Quezada, one of my best and dearest friends. Thank you for your friendship, I learned so much from you, see you on the other side, hermano. Cuídate.

The stories of the times that Sebastian and I have had together since our first meeting in 1992 could fill a book, although likely one of the transgressive literature variety. Even when we had gone without seeing one another or speaking on the phone for months, I always counted Sebastian as one of my best friends, the kind of person with whom, when you meet up again, you pick up as if no time at all had passed, the kind of person who would open their door, their wallet and their heart to friends in need without a moment's hesitation and without having to be asked twice. If it wasn't for Sebastian, I would never have been able to even begin living in New York for the seven years I was there, as he was the one who opened up his door to me until I found a job and a place to live just after we had both graduated from college. Given how long that took, most people would have been standing by the door drumming their fingers and waiting for me to leave, but with Sebastian one always felt like a welcomed guest.

But, perhaps ironically, two of the most vivid memories of I have of Sebastian are also among the most wholesome.

One dates back to our days at Bard College. I believe it was the autumn of 1995. Sebastian and I had for some reason ventured down to a set of dorms known as the Ravines, built, as the name would suggest, between a deep ravine and a field that would become a soggy lake at the slightest hint of rain. The weather was overcast and moody, the kind of fall-bleeding-into-winter weather that one so often encounters in the Catskills around that time of the year. We were standing by my car, which was a green 1976 Plymouth Valiant at the time, just enjoying the pensive atmosphere, the wind on our faces, the hint of precipitation in the air. At once the sky was full of several, then dozens, then what looked like hundreds of migrating birds, flooding the grey sky in search of a path to warmer climes.

I don't recall Sebastian and I saying much to one another at that moment - perhaps just an "Oh wow" or something like that - but I think it was a sight that affected us both powerfully. Here we were both nearing graduation and entry into another facet of life and the sight of those birds flying loose and free into the unknown somehow evoked the journey that we both were about to commence on, away from an environment that had become familiar for four years - if only as a point of reference - and into the as-yet-unwritten future of our new lives, with no telling where they would take us. As I write these words that was 16 years ago.

My second vivid memory is from the spring of 2003 when I was living in a nice-and-too-expensive loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn just south of the bridge. You could stand at the window during the cold months and watch the boats go up and down the river, carefully navigating their way past chunks of floating ice. As the weather got warmer, it was decided that a house-warming party was in order and when there was a party to be had, there was no better person to ask cook for it than Sebastian.

We decided to make feijoada, that delicious Brazilian beef and pork stew (Sebastian is probably more responsible than any other single person for my first trip to Brasil in 1999, a country I have since been back to several times and count as one of my favorites). We then went out to buy a suitable pot, which is looking down upon me from my mantle here in New Orleans right now as I write these words. Our system was that I would do the chopping and dicing and Sebastian would do the cooking. We bought the white rice, the black beans, the farofa and Sebastian - who I never tire of telling people was the single best cook that I have ever met - blended it all together perfectly. There was more than enough when we were done to feed the 20 or so people in attendance and suffice to say that I was eating feijoada for many days afterwards.

This memory is for me one that evokes a lot of elements of Sebastian, someone who was as excessive in his generosity as he was in anything else, someone who always wanted to make sure that everyone was fed, everyone was happy, everyone was included. That desire for community is one of the nicest traits anyone can have and on that day my friend Sebastian displayed, as always, that he possessed it in multitudes.

The sound of his laugh - booming, boisterous, all-encompassing - was one of the great things to experience in this life. I still hear it in my ears and with it comes the memory of my strange, generous, extraordinary friend.

Cuídate, Sebastian. Wherever you are, I hope that you are cooking a big pot of feijoada and listening to Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 in the sun right now.

NOLA Evolution

2011-12-14T13:59:00.001+01:00

(With full credit given to Dirty Coast, whose terrific shop on Magazine Street I found only yesterday. MD)

Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’

2011-12-11T14:33:00.004+01:00

Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2011

Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’

By Michael Deibert

The Miami Herald

Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth.

Erin Siegal.

Cathexis.

300 pages.

$14.95.

(Read the original review here)

The debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb?

But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited?

Siegal does a compelling job of sketching out the drumbeat of poverty and fear, born of economic and criminal violence, that makes up the daily lives of so many Guatemalans today, 15 years after a peace agreement ended a 30-year civil war in which some 200,000 people died. Siegal also delves with considerable expertise into Guatemala’s labyrinthine and often corrupt legal system, painstakingly outlining its connections with U.S. organizations, some legitimate and some not.

Early on in the book, then-U.S. ambassador to Guatemala Prudence Bushnell — a diplomat who flits in and out of history from Rwanda to Kenya to Guatemala — warns in a prescient February 2002 memo that if the United States did not “come up with resources to investigate the suspicious (adoption) cases in a timely manner . . . [the U.S. could be] accused of abetting baby trafficking.”

The advice was largely ignored, with the behavior of U.S. embassy staff in Guatemala appearing alternately ham-handed and heartless as Alvarado tries to recover her children. Lax oversight by the Florida Department of Children and Families of the overseas adoption practices of companies operating in the state completes a picture of indifference to the children at the center of the adoption industry. Some practices were allowed to function long after red flags had been raised about criminal conduct.

This pattern continues even in the face of a report by the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigating criminal organizations, that between 2008 and 2010 only 10 percent of children who left Guatemala for adoption were legal orphans.

Some of the details of the dark side of the industry in Guatemala — houses where pregnant women are kept while waiting to give birth, nurseries where children waiting to be adopted are given borderline-starvation levels of sustenance — are Dickensian in their cruelty. But the tone of the book is, perhaps surprisingly, not despairing. Siegal brings welcome attention to the work of the Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivor’s Foundation), a women’s rights organization founded by an ex-guerrilla, Norma Cruz, that has grown into one of the most important pillars of the country’s fragile civil society.

Upon finishing Finding Fernanda, one realizes that supporting of that very civil society, along with the work of bodies such as CICIG, will advance the cause of justice for victims such as Alvarado. Along with its moving personal story of a family torn asunder, Finding Fernanda can also be read as a call to action.

Michael Deibert is the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).

Sonia Pierre 1963-2011

2011-12-05T05:33:00.003+01:00

Sonia Pierre, you were the greatest patriot that the Dominican Republic could ask for, one of the greatest advocates for human rights in the Americas and a hero to us all. Your work and your example live on. Domi byen, fanm vanyan.

We made it! Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair reaches funding goal on Kickstarter

2011-11-27T21:19:00.004+01:00

We made it!

Thanks to a pledge from Jean R. Laraque and increase in the pledge of my old friend Matthew Moran, today - Sunday morning - we reached and exceeded our Kickstarter goal of $3,500 for a grand total of $3,512. This means that now - as pre-election violence has claimed at least for lives in Kinshasa in the run-up to today's contest between President Joseph Kabila and challenger Etienne Tshisekedi - I will be able to return to Central Africa in February to conduct a final round of interviews and research for my upcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published next year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa.

All of us who have spent time in Congo have not failed to be moved by it: By the incredible resourcefulness of the people, by the varied and dramatic landscapes covering the heart of the African continent, and by the terrible violence with which its citizens have been forced to contend, buffeted back and forth by political and economic currents that are often far beyond their control.

Thank you to everyone who chose to back this project, with a special thanks to Hilary Wallis for the use of her evocative photograph on the fundraising page. In the writing of Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, I will do my best to earn your support and to do justice to this very complex story that has continued to progress largely out of the international community's field of vision for so many years.

I thank you all again.

With sincere gratitude from New Orleans,

MD

Carlos Castresana responds to the Economist

2011-11-19T00:20:00.003+01:00

Carlos Castresana, the former head of the United Nations-mandated Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) - the body charged with investigating clandestine organisations and exposing their relation to the Guatemalan state - responded this week to what I thought was a fairly awful article in the Economist about Guatemala last month.

The Economist piece, titled "Parachuting in the prosecutors," repeated pretty much every slur and innuendo against Castresana that the UN bureaucrats who served as nearly as great a hurdle to CICIG's success as Guatemala's criminals have ever whispered about the Spanish prosecutor in their sleek halls along the East River.

Given what I believe is the important role that CICIG may still play in the fight against the criminal oligarchy whose power is pointed like a dagger at the heart of Guatemala democracy, I thought it worth re-printing Castresana's response in full here.

For my views on that oligarchy, readers can look at my 2008 piece, "Drugs Vs. Democracy in Guatemala," first published in the World Policy Jounal, or my Op-Ed last year in the Guardian, "Guatemala's lonely battle against corruption."

MD

Carlos Castresana

SIR – I want to express my surprise and disappointment at the remarks you made about me in your article on the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which I headed until June 2010 (“Parachuting in the prosecutors”, October 15th). Your description of me as a “clever, cavalier and publicity-seeking Spanish prosecutor” was unfair to say the least. My team and I did our best during three years, risking our families, lives and careers.

I was also offended by your statement that I left CICIG in June 2010 after allegations about my private life. I refer you to a complete and balanced explanation of the circumstances of my resignation in your own pages from an article at the time (“Kamikaze mission”, June 19th 2010).

But more disturbing was your observation that “there was little oversight of Mr Castresana, causing discomfort in New York about how CICIG was operating”. In fact, CICIG was permanently supervised and its accounts audited by the United Nations Development Programme, as that was the agency which managed the donor countries’ trust fund. All substantive matters were exhaustively controlled by the UN Department of Political Affairs and supervised by the secretary-general himself. I sent 314 cables to the UN and reported daily by telephone, and in person in New York every couple of months, as well as filing ten quarterly reports to the secretary-general throughout the three years of my mandate.

Furthermore, while you were publishing your biased report a selection process was under way for an international judicial position for which I was included as a candidate. You might not have been aware of that ongoing process, but surely some of your sources were. I am persuaded that those who made the decision were not influenced at all by your publication, but the fact is that your article appeared just after the interviews, when a decision was being made.

I made many enemies in Guatemala. I am not worried about that, it comes with the job of prosecutor. But on future occasions, before you publish such disinformation, please call me and give me the opportunity to defend my name and my professional work in advance. That way you might get a better and complete story.

Carlos Castresana
Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Spain
Madrid

On Kristallnacht and the DRC

2011-11-09T21:34:00.003+01:00

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, as the series of Nazi attacks against businesses owned by Germany's Jews are called, regardless of one's native language. I notice that this grim signpost is receiving a respectable amount of coverage and attention but, deep as I am into the writing of my new book on the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I must confess that I have one strong feeling today.

Over the last decade and a half, as many people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as died during the Holocaust, many as the result of ethnically-based slaughter, all while the West at best largely stood by and at worst actively colluded with the killers. There are places in eastern Congo where as one writer noted one would feels they have stepped into a scene out of the Old Testament. Is it because the Congolese were black and African that so few people know the names of places like Mbandaka, Tingi-Tingi or Kasika? Are we as news writers and news consumers that myopic and that blinded by our own stereotypes of Africa and Africans?

I fear not a whole lot has changed.

Support Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair on Kickstarter

2011-11-06T19:59:00.005+01:00

Photo © Hilary Wallis

Dear all,

I am attempting to raise funds via Kickstarter to enable me to complete a final round of research interviews in Central Africa for my book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, to be published by Zed Books next year. The goal to be reached over the next 30 days is $3,500, which will cover airfare and accommodation between the United States and Africa. Nearly $1,000 has been raised thus far.

Published in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa, the book will closely examine the Congolese state as it exists now under the rule of President Joseph Kabila, and how that state was shaped by the long-term involvement of the United States and Europe in supporting and arming many of the belligerents in Congo’s conflicts, the ongoing murky role played by foreign interests in exporting mineral resources linked to the country’s continuing instability and Congo’s own tortuous political and ethnic legacies.

Please consider donating what you can on the project's page on Kickstarter here, and please consider spreading the news of it to those who you feel might support this important new look at recent events in Central Africa.

Many thanks for your time and your support.

Best regards,

Michael Deibert

Meanwhile, in Syria today...

2011-11-05T05:10:00.000+01:00

Concern Grows Over Plan to Drill for Oil Near Florida Keys

2011-10-04T22:09:00.002+02:00

Posted: 10/4/11 12:19 PM ET

Concern Grows Over Plan to Drill for Oil Near Florida Keys

By Michael Deibert

Huffington Post

(Please read the original article here)

This article was first published in slightly different form in collaboration with Panos Caribbean.

The news that the Spanish oil giant, Repsol, intends to begin exploratory drilling in the waters directly north of Cuba, has set off a chorus of criticism in Cuba's neighbor to the north: the United States.

Repsol, which has a presence in more than 35 countries, has announced that an immense, semi-submersible oil rig constructed by the Italian company Saipem, is currently speeding its way from Singapore to the Florida Straits between Key West and Cuba, with a goal of beginning exploratory drilling sometime in December.

With analysts believing that Cuba's coastal waters may contain up to 20 billion barrels of oil, Repsol -- which also drilled offshore in Cuba in 2004 -- is set to partner with Norway's Statoil and India's ONGC in the drilling of a pair of wells as per an agreement with the Cuban government.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, with memories throughout the region still fresh with images of the April 2010 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf Of Mexico, there has been an outcry at Repsol's plans.

The Deepwater Horizon incident killed 11 workers and loosed a gusher of oil that leaked an estimated 53,000 barrels a day into the Gulf for three months, fouling beaches in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and killing fish and wildlife.

Following a 17-month investigation, a report last month on the disaster issued by the the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement leveled withering criticism at well owner and operator BP, rig owner Transocean Ltd. and cementing operator Halliburton Co.

"From the Deepwater Horizon incident, we have seen clearly that deepwater offshore drilling is inherently risky," says Dr. Susan D. Shaw, director of the Maine-based Marine Environmental Research Institute. "Even in U.S. waters with the resources, infrastructure and equipment that we have, we watched a massive failure on many counts."

In a rare moment of bipartisanship in the rancorous U.S. political landscape, a Sept. 28 letter to Repsol by 34 members of the U.S. Congress -- including the Cuban-born Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- wrote that the "oil drilling scheme endangers the environment, and enriches the Cuban tyranny" and urged the company to "walk away from the project."

The U.S. maintains a trade embargo with Cuba, and Cuban-Americans make up a powerful voting bloc in the state of Florida, which counts for 27 electoral votes in the U.S.'s electoral college system.

Political considerations aside, however, it is the patch of sea where Repsol proposes to work that has caused the most concern.

The location of the proposed drilling is only 65 miles from the Marquesas Keys, an uninhabited group of islands near Key West, in an area of strong 4-6 mile per hour currents that come from the Gulf of Mexico, shoot through the Florida Straits and then churn northwards up the Atlantic Coast of the continental U.S.

A wide swath of protected areas could be threatened, including the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary -- which spans some 2,800-square-nautical-miles and includes important repositories of coral reefs, seagrass and 1,600 miles of mangrove shoreline -- and Biscayne National Park, an area that contains the beginning of the third-largest coral reef in the world and mangrove areas along its shore. The million-plus acre Everglades National Park -- a subtropical wilderness that has famously been described as a "river of grass" -- is also nearby.

"It's such an ecologically rich area that any oil in the marine environment could seriously impact the entire ecosystem," asserts Daniel O. Suman, professor of marine affairs and policy at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Repsol's safety record could best be described as mixed.

In February 2008, a spill by the company let free an estimated 100 barrels of crude near the 2.4 million-acre Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. The park, home to populations of jaguars, harpy eagles and other fauna, is also the ancestral home of the Huaorani people, the region's native inhabitants. This was followed by another spill in Ecuador in February 2009. In December 2010, a Repsol petrol platform in Nigeria's Ebro Delta region spilled 180,000 litres of crude into the ocean off that country's coast.

On its website, Repsol -- which did not respond to requests for comment -- states that the drilling equipment to be used "complies with all the technical requirements and all the limitations established by the US administration for drilling operations in Cuba."

Residents of the Florida Keys -- one of the more beguiling corners of the United States with its vistas of blue-green ocean water and endless sky -- remain apprehensive.

"We're very concerned," says Key West mayor Craig Cates. "And because of the embargo (with Cuba) we can't even send any equipment over if anything starts leaking. We just have to wait until it gets into our waters. "

Follow Michael Deibert on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelcdeibert

Autumn in New York City During Dark Times

2011-09-27T22:30:00.004+02:00

In the dark autumn of two years later we saw New York again. We passed through curiously polite customs agents, and then with bowed head and hat in hand I walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretence that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade. Cocktail parties, a last hollow survival from the days of carnival, echoed to the plaints of the wounded: 'Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!', and the groans and wails of the dying: 'Did you see that United States Steel is down three more points?' My barber was back at work in his shop; again the head waiters bowed people to their tables, if there were people to be bowed. From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood — everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits - from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith to the citizens of New York.

- From F. Scott Fitzgerald's "My Lost City"

Young Men Olympian Junior Benevolent Association Inc. 127th Annual Anniversary Parade

2011-09-26T00:36:00.003+02:00

Photo © Michael Deibert

Haunted Latin America, Black Tuesday and a crumbling empire: New books of note

2011-09-12T17:08:00.002+02:00

From time to time on this blog, I like to direct readers’ attention to noteworthy endeavors by my colleagues and peers and, fortuitously, this month three new books have crossed my radar that I can wholeheartedly recommend.

I covered Haiti alongside former National Public Radio Latin America corespondent and now Public Radio International Europe corespondent Gerry Hadden from 2000 to 2004. Though based in Mexico City, Gerry’s reportage took him to Haiti many times as well as many other locales throughout the region. Gerry’s new memoir, Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti, (in which, full disclosure, I make a small cameo) is a compelling picture of a tumultuous time in the region while the world’s attention was focused elsewhere after 9/11.

Reading the book as a fellow international journalist, in addition to recounting the political trajectories of countries such as Mexico, Guatemala and the aforementioned Haiti, I think it does a masterful job of illuminating some of the attractions and pitfalls of the journalist’s life - the feeling of on-the-road exhaustion, the mental state of constantly having to negotiate other cultures, the pangs of romance on the run - and it does so while bringing the reader front and centre to some of the most tumultuous events in the first few years of our violent new century.

My dear friend Nomi Prins - a journalist and Senior Fellow at the public policy research and advocacy organization Demos - has authored a trio of excellent books on cooperate malfeasance in the United States: It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (whether you voted for them or not) and the highly prescient Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America. This fall she expands her range into fiction with Black Tuesday, a tale of fraud, obsession and economic devastation set amid the backdrop of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. Vividly recreating the immigrant and ethnic potpourri of 1920s New York, the book is a gripping read and a very atmospheric one, as well. Somehow I feel that the music of John Zorn circa The Circle Maker - to me redolent of the immigrant Jewish experience on the Lower East Side - would make the perfect soundtrack to reading this finely-tuned novel with its echoes of our present grim economic state.

A longtime observer and analyst of Russia and the Caucasus, Lawrence Scott Sheets has penned what promises to be a most interesting account of 20 plus years spent there. I have just started reading Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse, but if the initial chapters are anything to go on, it will be a most compelling ride. Characters such as the Chechen terrorist leader Shamil Basayev flit in and out of a story of hope and despair as the exuberance of liberation gives way to something far tougher and darker throughout the region, an area that I have promised myself to visit for the first time during 2012.

All in all, three excellent additions to any bookshelf this fall.

Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala

2011-09-10T22:16:00.001+02:00

Posted: 9/10/11 03:57 PM ET

Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala

By Michael Deibert

(This article was also cross-posted on the Huffington Post and can be read here)

Guatemalans will go to the polls in the fourth presidential election since 1996 peace accords ended that country's 30-year civil war, a conflict that claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, mostly indigenous campesinos caught in the struggle between a militarily-weak leftist insurgency and the ruthless scorched-earth tactics of a national army.

The likely winner of the election will be the man who represented that army during those accords, 60 year-old retired general Otto Pérez Molina. A recent poll by the Guatemala firm Borge y Asociados gave Pérez Molina 48.9 percent of the vote, nearly enough to avoid a November runoff ballot.

Pérez Molina's rise in Guatemalan politics says much about the unfulfilled promise of those 15 year-old accords, and about the vexing problems that still confront Central America's most populous country.

A 1973 graduate of Guatemala's military academy, Pérez Molina came of age in a country ruled by military dictators and where the military itself was divided between those who advocated a take-no-prisoners approach to prosecuting Guatemala's civil war and others who others who advocated a strategy of pacification and stabilization, combining development projects and military objectives while killing only as many rebels and suspected sympathizers as "needed" to be killed.

This is what passed for enlightenment during the civil war, and, though Pérez Molina allied himself with the latter camp, enlightenment proved to be a relative term.

By the summer of 1982, the country was under the rule of Efraín Ríos Montt, a former general turned born-again evangelical Christian who had seized power after the chaotic four-year reign of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García.

Pérez Molina was serving as a military commander in El Quiché, one of Guatemala's most heavily indigenous and war-wracked provinces, when Ríos Montt launched what was dubbed Victoria (Victory) 82, a military offensive that the historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett has written led to "the period of most extreme violence committed in the name of counterinsurgency" during the war, and which was particularly furious in El Quiché's northern region.

By 1993, Pérez Molina had risen to become chief of staff of the army's intelligence wing, known as D-2, and it was in this capacity that he led a faction of the military that successfully opposed then-president Jorge Serrano Elías' attempt to seize dictatorial powers that same year. Another sector of the military, led by Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo, supported Serrano's self-coup.

The conflict caused deep enmity between the two groups which continues to color Guatemalan political life even today, as one side or the other vies for positions of power and influence within the Guatemalan state.

Pérez Molina subsequently served as the chief of the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP or presidential general staff) of Serrano's successor, Ramiro de León Carpio, until 1995.

A kind of state within the state, the EMP was disbanded in 2003 due to its links to appalling human rights abuses, including the 1994 killing of Constitutional Court President Eduardo Epaminondas González Dubón while Pérez Molina was at its helm.

The group has also been linked to the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack and the 1998 beating death of Bishop Juan Gerardi two days after a group he headed published a report laying the vast majority of deaths during the country's civil war at the feet of the Guatemalan military.

Selected as head the of the Guatemalan delegation to the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington, DC in 1998, Pérez Molina retired from the military in 2000 before forming the Partido Patriota (Patriot Party) in February 2001.

An important backer of the 2004-2008 presidency of Óscar Berger, Pérez Molina narrowly lost the 2007 presidential elections to Álvaro Colom of the left-wing Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza.

As a politician whose symbol is a closed fist and whose slogan is mano dura (strong hand), Pérez Molina has sought, with success, to portray himself as a law-and-order candidate in a country that is threatening to drown in violence as at no time since the civil war. While to the north Mexico's homicide rate has been estimated at 26 per 100,000 by the Latin American academic body Flacso, Guatemala's numbers a staggering 53 per 100,000.

In addition to a long-standing problem with local maras (street gangs), Mexican cartels pushed south by President Felipe Calderón's militarized campaign against drug traffickers there now do battle with Guatemala's own criminal groups, some of whom have their roots in a military intelligence apparatus set up with U.S. aid during the country's internal armed conflict.

None of the former have made as much of an impression in Guatemala as Los Zetas.

Originally members of a Mexican army unit designed to combat drug trafficking, Los Zetas (named after a radio code for high-ranking officers) defected from the military in the late 1990s to become enforcers for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel. They later abandoned their employers to become an international organized-crime entity in their own right, and in recent years have been reinforced by members of Los Kabiles, a special-operations unit of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics.

Los Zetas announced their presence in Guatemala in spectacular fashion with the March 2008 killing of kingpin Juan "Juancho" José León Ardón and 10 other people in the eastern state of Zacapa.

They subsequently established a strong foothold in the country, but especially in the departments of El Petén and Alta Verapaz in the north, and Izabal in the east.

This past May, 27 farm workers were found massacred in El Petén, a crime blamed on Los Zetas. Subsequently the dismembered body of the prosecutor investigating the case was found in Alta Verapaz, Both departments have been subject to state of siege orders during the Colom presidency. Mass casualty shootouts in various parts of the country have become commonplace.

It is perhaps little wonder then that Guatemalans long for a commanding figure to take over the reins of this troubled land.

Pérez Molina has been helped along by the disqualification of his main opponent, Sandra Torres. Guatemala's First Lady and wife of the current president until her divorce in April, Torres' candidacy was ruled illegal by the country's Constitutional Court under Article 186 of Guatemala's constitution, which forbids family members of the president or vice-president from running for either of those positions.

The law, which also prohibits those who have seized power in a coup d'état from running, was ignored during the 2003 presidential candidacy of Efraín Ríos Montt.

The slickness and professionalism of Pérez Molina's campaign, along with those of protégées such as Guatemala City mayoral candidate Alejandro Sinibaldi, has stood in marked contrast to the hapless efforts of the Torres camp. The struggle of other candidates to make themselves heard in the face of conservative media empires that often refuse to even air their advertisements has also been an asset.

Despite his reinvention of himself as a political leader, though, allegations of human rights abuses during his time in the military - and connections to organized crime both during and since - have continued to dog Pérez Molina

In July of this year, the indigenous Guatemalan organization Waqib Kej sent a letter to the United Nationas accusing Pérez Molina of involvement in torture and genocide during his time in the army, while accusations of his alleged involvement in the disappearance of rebel commander Efraín Bámaca Velásquez in 1992 have never been satisfactorily explained.

Rubén Chanax Sontay, one of the chief witnesses for the investigation of the Bishop Gerardi killing, placed Pérez Molina in the company of Colonel Byron Lima Estrada on the night of Gerardi's slaying. Lima Estrada was subsequently convicted along with three other men of Gerardi's murder.

In addition, Pérez Molina has often been mentioned as one of the alleged more prominent members of El Sindicato, a clandestine network of current and former military officers often at odds with a similar entity, La Cofradia, originally domintaed by Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo. In March 2002, the U.S. government revoked the latter's travel visa under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing action against people who have allowed or conspired in drug trafficking.

For his part, Pérez Molina has always vigorously denied all these charges.

[Pérez Molina's nearest competitor in the presidential contest, Manuel Baldizón, a congressmen form El Petén, is also trailed by accusations of corruption and abuse of power.]

In the background of Pérez Molina's political ambitions, there has been Guatemala's own struggle to move on from its tortured past.

Many key provisions of Guatemala's peace accords were implemented half-heartedly, if at all.

A civilian intelligence office mandated to combat organized crime was not established until 2007, by which point criminal networks had spent a decade successfully inserting themselves into virtually every manifestation of the state. The national police force remains ineffectual and numerically small, currently numbering around 26,000 officers, while Guatemala's private security sector has swelled to 120,000. According to UNICEF, despite its lush and varied topography, malnutrition affects one in two Guatemalan children under five, the sixth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world.

Since 2007, the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigating criminal organizations and exposing their relation to the state, has been operating with varying degrees of success. Until June 2010, CICIG was under the direction of Carlos Castresana, a Spanish magistrate experienced at prosecuting drug-related cases in Mexico. Castresana resigned last year, charging the Colom government was undermining CICIG's work, and the mantle of leadership was passed to Francisco Dall'Anese Ruiz, the former attorney general of Costa Rica.

After a string of successes, over the last year CICIG appeared to stumble, recently losing high-profile cases against former president Alfonso Portillo and former prison director and presidential candidate Alejandro Giammattei.

Working alongside CICIG, however, Guatemala currently has perhaps its most capable and activist Attorney General in recent memory, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey.

A specialist in criminal law who helped to found the Instituto de Estudios Comparados de en Ciencias Penales de Guatemala, Paz y Paz replaced a lawyer accused of having links to organized crime (his appointment was later annulled).

If, as seems likely, Pérez Molina is inaugurated as president next year, what kind of Guatemala will he work to build?

Will he, as he has stated, work for law and order, an end to corruption and an economically vibrant nation? Or will the questions from his past prove a mere foreshadowing of a nation even more violent and corrupt than the one that now exists?

Only time will tell, of course, in this land that Pablo Neruda once called "the sweet waist of the Americas" and which Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo once referred to as "my sweet storm."

Guatemala is the land of eternal spring, and its people are still waiting for that spring to come.

Follow Michael Deibert on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelcdeibert

CBC's The Current on the UN in Haiti

2011-09-07T17:55:00.002+02:00

My interview this morning about the United Nations presence in Haiti on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti can be heard here. MINUSTAH's Nigel Fisher speaks directly following.

NOLA Politician Pony Show

2011-09-04T21:59:00.002+02:00

What kind of city do you live in the when the city assessor, the city's former railroad chief and the head of a well-known nonprofit all show up at the same court on the same day for unrelated criminal trials? And one of them isn't even sentenced to jail time for stealing $1 million in government grants intended for poor people? Why, you live in New Orleans, of course.

The U.N. in Haiti: Time to Adapt or Time to Go

2011-09-01T23:35:00.002+02:00

The U.N. in Haiti: Time to Adapt or Time to Go

Sep 1 , 2011

By Michael Deibert

Truthdig

(Read the original article here)

In the summer of 2009, visiting Haiti for the first time after an absence of three years, I found the country in better shape than at any time since I started visiting there in 1997.

Three years after the inauguration of René Préval as Haiti’s president (after the two-year tenure of an unelected interim government), the population of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, again felt safe enough to patronize downtown bars and kerosene-lit roadside stands late into the evening, where once armed gangs controlled entire neighborhoods. Billboards that once praised the infallibility of a succession of maximum leaders instead carried messages about the importance of respect between the population and the police, or decrying discrimination against the disabled.

A police-reform program was in its third year, providing the country with a level of professional law enforcement not often seen in a place where political patronage, not expertise, swelled the ranks of security forces with party loyalists. Investment was beginning to pick up and, by the end of the year, Haiti’s delicious signature rum, Barbancourt, had even won the bronze and silver medals at the International Wine and Spirit Competition.

Presiding over all this was the (at the time) 9,000-member United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH. When I sat that summer in the office of the head of the mission, veteran Tunisian diplomat Hédi Annabi, he seemed to be justified in his pride at the country’s progress, telling me that “the level of respect for basic freedoms, such as freedom of the press, is at a historically remarkable level.”

Of course, all of this changed at 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12, 2010, when the country was struck by an apocalyptic earthquake that leveled much of the capital and surrounding towns and killed an estimated 200,000 people. Annabi, his deputy and nearly 100 other MINUSTAH personnel died as the structures they were in collapsed on them, and the peacekeeping mission itself became one of the many strata of Haitian society that needed rescuing.

A year and a half after the quake, with a new president (popular singer Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly) and a contentious parliament locked in a bitter struggle for power, MINUSTAH, having picked itself up and dusted itself off, remains in Haiti, its force now increased to 12,000 under the leadership of Chile’s former minister of foreign affairs, Mariano Fernández.

Though an estimated 634,000 survivors of the quake still live in makeshift settlements in and around the capital, and Haiti remains without a government (two of Martelly’s nominees for prime minister have been rejected), it is my conclusion after a visit to Haiti last month that it is now time, after seven years in the country, for MINUSTAH to either significantly refocus its mission or close its operation in Haiti and leave the business of governing and reconstruction to the Haitians themselves.

* * *

Haitians have a keen sense of their own history as the site of the world’s first successful slave revolt (in 1804) and the second independent republic in the Americas (after the United States), a nation that has produced guerrilla leaders of the magnitude of Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batravill when faced with a two-decade U.S. occupation of the country in the early 20th century.

If you ask the average Haitian on the street what the purpose of MINUSTAH in Haiti is now, as I did in a vast tent encampment of displaced earthquake survivors in front of Haiti’s still-collapsed National Palace, they will answer you succinctly: MINUSTAH is in Haiti to protect the interests of the foreigners.

True or not, such a perspective has become conventional wisdom in Haiti, and it was a refrain that I heard time and again as I traveled this country that, though still stricken, is by no means beaten or defeated.

At this point, for the first time since I have been observing the mission, the sentiment on the street among a majority of Haitians appears to be a desire to see MINUSTAH in its current incarnation gone from Haiti.

For several reasons, MINUSTAH’s reputation with the Haitian people has reached its lowest level since it arrived in 2004.

A cholera epidemic that has killed more than 5,800 people since October has been linked convincingly to the mission. A June report by a group of epidemiologists and physicians in the journal of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that evidence “strongly suggests” that the cholera strain had been brought to Haiti by U.N. peacekeepers and spread through a faulty waste disposal system along the Artibonite River, a conclusion supported by other studies.

Rightly or wrongly, the perception of MINUSTAH’s response to the crisis within Haiti itself has been of the mission stonewalling and obfuscating. This perception was reinforced in August when some residents of the country’s Plateau Central region accused the mission of dumping raw sewage near the Guayamouc River there, something MINUSTAH has denied.

In a far cry from the largely congenial relations I saw between U.N. peacekeepers and the local population in 2009, something of a bunker mentality has also appeared to have developed. On several instances—particularly at the intersection of the busy Route de Delmas and the road that eventually leads to the country’s international airport—I witnessed peacekeepers patrolling with their mounted machine guns pointed down at crowds of people who appeared to pose no threat at all and were merely going about the business of trying to secure the basic necessities of survival on any given day.

Staying in a hotel only feet away from a tent encampment where thousands of Haitians sat in darkness throughout long evenings of pounding rain, an American filmmaker and I watched as a group of rather surly, well-fed men identifying themselves as police advisers with MINUSTAH literally drank themselves into oblivion over the course of two days. This took place under the gaze of local Haitian staff and other guests. Speaking to others in the capital, I discovered that such behavior is evidently not an uncommon occurrence, and it creates the unfortunate perception of a fraternity party amid an apocalypse, and makes the mission appear very removed from the daily struggles of the Haitians it is ostensibly there to protect.

* * *

By any estimation, MINUSTAH has done many things for Haiti during its years in the country. During a 2004-06 campaign of violence in the capital by various armed groups dubbed Operation Baghdad, a ghastly wave of kidnapping, arson and murder affected all levels of society, and at one point an average of one police officer was being killed every five days. The security forces of the interim government then in power often responded to this by broadly targeting the impoverished male population of the capital’s slums with extrajudicial executions. In tandem with Haiti’s police after Préval’s 2006 inauguration, MINUSTAH largely brought this period to an end, something for which Haitians should be grateful to it.

Likewise, when elements linked to political actors used the population’s legitimate anger over the rise of food prices as a cover for violent attacks against government installations and figures in 2008, it was likely only the presence of MINUSTAH that saved Préval from being toppled by a coup organized by these same elements.

MINUSTAH has built roads and worked hard to create a space where nonviolent political debate can take place. Haiti, however, ultimately needs to be governed and administered by Haitians, not as some eternal international protectorate. Having stood with Haitians through some of their worst days, the United Nations is now being seen more and more as an occupying force despite the fact that it has been in Haiti at the invitation of two democratically elected heads of state for five of its seven years there.

If Haiti is ever to change, it is Haitians who are going to have to change it, and MINUSTAH must now give them the space in which to do so. Haiti’s security force—the Police Nationale d’Haiti—has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of professionalism and accountability under the leadership of Mario Andresol, and now must be entrusted with more responsibility in terms of safeguarding the country’s fragile democratic gains.

Simultaneously, with so much hostility building up toward the mission in the country’s agricultural areas and elsewhere due to the cholera epidemic, the mission might do well to engage with Haitian peasant organizations in an effort to help revitalize the country’s ailing rural economy. Though peasant groups such as Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan and the 200,000-member Mouvman Peyizan Nasyonal Kongre Papay (the latter led by veteran peasant leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, winner of the 2005 Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots environmentalists) have been largely hostile to MINUSTAH’s presence, a détente between the groups could help foster the transition from strict peacekeeping to development, which is needed if the mission is to succeed.

Neither the United Nations, the United States nor any other foreign body can fix all of Haiti’s ills. Ultimately, the Haitians have to do it for themselves. Among Haiti’s political class, Haitians have to stop killing one another, Haitians have to stop being corrupt, Haitians have to stop paying and accepting bribes, and politics must no longer be viewed as a blood sport of winner take all where one side celebrates total victory and one side weeps in abject defeat and marginalization.

This has been the tradition of Haitian politics for more than 200 years, but it has not been the tradition of the majority of Haitians who have historically been excluded from the political process, and whose generosity, industry and fundamental decency impress all those who meet them.

The Haitian people understand this better than anyone else. In its current incarnation in Haiti, the United Nations mission has become an obstacle, rather than an asset, to the country taking ownership of the issues that confront it.

It is time for the mission to refocus on new tasks, or to leave while the Haitians can still see it off as a friend.

New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary

2011-08-29T17:17:00.001+02:00

New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary

By Michael Deibert

Huffington Post

Posted: 8/29/11 10:53 AM ET

(This article was cross-posted on the Huffington Post, where it can be read here)

When five New Orleans police officers were found guilty earlier this month of a series of murders, shootings and a subsequent cover-up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it seemed a symbolic coda to a catastrophic act of nature that descended upon the Crescent City six years ago today, abetted in its destruction by human failings both at the time and since.

The officers were convicted of killing two people and wounding four others on September 4, 2005 on the Danziger Bridge, an expanse that spans the city's industrial canal, in the chaos of a city largely left to fend for itself after being deluged by a Category 5 hurricane that the entire federal and state government saw coming but did little to prepare for.

Seventeen-year-old James Brissette and forty-year-old Ronald Madison were killed that day, though the conditions that set the stage for their killings had been in place long before and, despite progress in many areas since the storm, a number of them of them remain today.

But despite the city's population having been cut nearly in half since the hurricane, and though large sections of neighborhoods and landmarks such as the former Six Flags amusement part sit eerily abandoned, the heart of the city where jazz was born is still beating.

There is probably no city in the United States that possesses greater physical beauty than New Orleans. From the great mansions of the Garden District, to the latticed-balconies fronting the former pirate haunts of the French Quarter, to the creole cottages in the Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods existing in various states of dilapidation, for much of its compact central area New Orleans represents a perfect merging of architectural ideas, similar to the aesthetic wholeness one finds in a place like Paris.

Likewise, its music and cuisine, unique and defiantly redolent of the city's individual flavour and history, make it a fascinating cultural quirk in a national landscape that is increasingly bland and homogenized.

But the revelry and indulgence take place to a backbeat of violence and urban dysfunction so severe that last year the city's homicide rate clocked in at 10 times above the national average, on par with those of violence-racked locales such as Guatemala, where warring street gangs and drug cartels do daily battle.

The prevalence of violent crime in the city would be a challenge for any police force, no matter how well-trained and equipped, but it has proved especially taxing for the 1,395-member New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), whose own struggles have often mirrored the city's larger ills.

An investigation of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) published in March by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded that "basic elements of effective policing--clear policies, training, accountability and confidence of the citizenry--have been absent for years" and that "constitutional violations span the operation of the entire Department."

The city's mayor Mitch Landrieu, the scion of a Louisiana political dynasty that includes a former mayor (Moon Landrieu) and a current United States senator (Mary Landrieu), came into office in May 2010 with a wave of optimism. He promptly appointed as the city's new police chief Ronal Serpas, who had previously served as police chief of Nashville but a sea of crises, some of them rooted in Katrina and beyond, awaited them.

On Sept. 2, 2005, four days after Katrina made landfall. Henry Glover, an African-American resident of the Algiers section of the city, was shot by an NOPD officer.

When bystanders took the grievously wounded Glover to an improvised police station, they were surrounded by policeman who handcuffed them along with Glover, who bled to death. Glover's body was then driven in a car commandeered by a policeman who burned both the vehicle and Glover's body after setting it aflame with a traffic flare.

Serpas' second in command, Assistant Superintendent Marlon Defillo, retired last month after criticism about his actions in the Glover case grew to a crescendo. A 33 page report from State of Louisiana's Department of Public Safety and Correction concluded that Defillo "repeatedly failed to acknowledge that the circumstances as presented to him were sufficiently suspicious as to require follow up" and that his actions "were neither reasonable or responsible."

This March, two NOPD officers received stiff sentences in connection with the case.

Further complicating matters, wealthy New Orleaneans have institutionalized the peeling off of active-duty police officers into what here are known as "paid details," whereby officers are allowed to work for private companies or individuals while in NOPD uniforms.

The DOJ report called the system an "entrenched and unregulated" phenomenon that facilitated corruption within the department. But the city's elite have been loathe to change it, no matter how much it undermines the capability of law enforcement over the urban landscape as a whole.

To his credit, Serpas in May announced that the NOPD was creating a civilian-administered Office of Police Detail Services that would set restrictions on how many hours officers could work and how they would be paid.

And amid the struggles, there are signs of hope.

The NOPD is currently in the process of negotiating a consent decree with the DOJ, a measure by which a federal judge would mandate and oversee that the report's dozens of recommendations be implemented. A newly invigorated body, the New Orleans Office of the Independent Police Monitor, is also now charged with overseeing the behavior of the NOPD and allegations of police misconduct.

This year, standardized test scores for students in the Recovery School District (RSD), a special state-wide school district administered by the Louisiana Department of Education and which took over most of the city's schools after Katrina, improved for the fourth year in a row.

Students from schools still within the Orleans Parish School Board - whose institutions mostly now fall within the mandate of the RSD - also improved.

This marks a dramatic change in momentum for a city that for decades had failed to provide even the rudiments of a good education to its youth, and one in which early interventions are the key to reducing the appalling homicide rate the now stalks its streets.

For much of its history, the aura of New Orleans has been informed by the interplay of light and shadow, comedy and pathos. A city at least partly built of the legacy of slavery nevertheless helped produced the most ebullient and expressive of African-American idioms, and continues today to hold a mirror up to the country at large of some of its best and worst qualities.

The struggle to rebuild New Orleans - and the debate about what kind of New Orleans that will be - continues six years on, as the winds and rain of a once-mighty storm grow ever more distant, but never fully disappear.

Notes from Haiti's Long Hot Summer

2011-08-24T01:45:00.002+02:00

Notes from Haiti's Long Hot Summer

Posted: 8/23/11 07:00 PM ET

By Michael Deibert

(This article was cross-posted on the Huffington Post, where it can be read here)

I.

Throughout what has been a dolorous summer in the Haitian capital, the image of the Caribbean nation's new president has gazed out at passersby from billboards and murals affixed to walls that did not topple during the country's apocalyptic January 2010 earthquake.

Depicting a man with a bald pate and broad smile, with messages such as "Nouvelle Haiti" and "Bienvenue au pouvoir" stenciled painstakingly next to them, the murals' optimism belies the intense political struggles of the first three months of the rule of Michel Martelly, a well-known singer who performed under the moniker Sweet Micky.

"I love President Martelly, I voted for President Martelly, so did my mother and my sister," says Carlos Jean Charles, who resides in Camp Toussaint, a 2,800 person collection of fragile tents set up in front of Haiti's once-grand National Palace, which still lies in ruins 18 months after the tremor.

"I think Martelly has a good heart," Charles says, echoing the statements of others in the camp. "But the problem is the parliament. Those people have been doing this shit for 25 years, fighting for power. They don't give him a chance."

A day after he was sworn in this May, Martelly announced that he was submitting the name of Daniel Rouzier, a businessman and devout Catholic, to serve as his Prime Minister, only to have the nomination rejected by parliament a month later.

On July 6th, Martelly announced that his new pick for Prime Minister would be attorney and former Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse, at which point 16 of Haiti's 30 senators announced, before the nomination had even been considered, that Gousse was also to be rejected, which he was earlier this month.

So the country, where an estimated 634,000 survivors of the quake still live in makeshift settlements in and around the capital, remains without a government.

II.

The situation is reminiscent of the the first mandate of the man that Martelly replaced as president, René Préval, in the late 1990s. During that era, following the resignation of Préval's Prime Minister, the post remained vacant for nearly two years as an opposition-dominated parliament rejected successive nominees in an effort to deprive the Préval government of oxygen.

It is a modus operandi that is being repeated today in Haiti, but under much worse conditions and this time with the parliament dominated by members of Préval's own coalition (several of them elected in highly disputed circumstances), though the amount of control the former president still exerts over the disparate group of legislators is a matter of some debate.

"The population who voted for Martelly perceived the change he offered as drastic change, a complete rupture from the way things were done in the past," says Marilyn Allien, the director of La Fondation Héritage pour Haïti, the Haitian chapter of the anti-corruption organization Transparency International.

"But the way things were done in the past was very good for some people. There are people who thrive when corruption and impunity prevail, and it doesn't serve them at all if a new leader comes in and tries to institute the rule of law."

A political novice who ran on an education platform and whose very distance from Haiti's rancid political class was a large part of his appeal, Martelly has relied on a close circle of advisors, some of questionable reputation, to give him counsel when dealing with parliament.

Lurking in the background to all of this are Haiti's two recently-returned former leaders, Jean-Claude Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Duvalier, the scion of a family dictatorship started by his father François that ruled Haiti for 29 years, was chased out of the country in 1986 amidst an uprising that has yet to fulfill its promise of democracy, social and economic justice. He returned to Haiti from his long exile in France in January to the outrage of those who suffered at the hands of his regime.

Aristide, a former Catholic priest, was at the forefront of the anti-Duvalier movement and became Haiti's president in 1991, only to be ousted in a military coup seven months later.

Restored to the presidency by a US-led military intervention in 1994, Aristide turned over the reins of government to Préval in 1996. He was returned to power during a violence-wracked ballot in 2000, with his second mandate marked by high levels of official corruption and political violence before he too was overthrown by an armed insurrection after months of large-scale street protests against his rule.

Since his return to Haiti from exile in South Africa in March, Aristide has been largely silent, though some in the camps and elsewhere have darkly suggested they see his hand in the parliamentary maneuvers currently underway.

Further complicating the mix, the 12,000 person United Nations mission in Haiti, in place since June 2004 and known by the acronym MINUSTAH, has probably reached the nadir of its reputation during its time in the country.

Once welcomed as a bulwark against political chaos, the mission has seemed adrift since the earthquake, which killed nearly 100 of its personnel including the head and deputy head of the mission.

A cholera epidemic which has killed more than 5,800 people since last October, has been linked to the mission, with a June report by a group of of epidemiologists and physicians in the journal of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said that evidence "strongly suggests" that the cholera strain had been brought to Haiti by UN peacekeepers.

Often unfairly derided as "turista" (tourists) by Haitians, the mission now appears to be largely living up to the scathing sobriquet, with some of its members a feature in some of the capital's more expensive hotels, getting loudly intoxicated and carousing often only feet away from the meager encampments of those made homeless by January 2010's tremor.

III.

Shortly before I visited Haiti this month, I had made plans to visit with an old friend.

Jean-Claude Bajeux, the co-founder of the Centre Oecuménique des Droits de l'Homme (CEDH), was also a former Minister of Culture, a militant for human rights and democracy and a great Haitian patriot.

Virtually his entire family had been killed by François Duvalier, sending him into a long exile during which he received a PhD from Princeton University in the United States, and lived and taught in both Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

He fought against both the Duvalier family dictatorship and the military juntas that followed and, in more recent times, against the violent anarcho-populism with which Aristide attempted to rule the country. Well into his twilight years, when most men of his age would be playing with their grandchildren, I would see Bajeux bravely march in demonstrations at times when it was physically dangerous to do. Lately he had provided an important analytical voice to Haiti, critiquing not only Haiti's political machinations but those of outsiders involved in the country, as well.

Bajeux passed away, if not exactly unexpectedly, then rather suddenly, earlier this month at the age of 79, before I had a chance to see him. His goal of an inclusive, transparent and just political system in Haiti is still an unrealized dream.

Shortly before he died, in a conversation with a friend, Bajeux had time enough to deliver a simple charge.

"My generation is passing away," Bajeux said. "We did all we could. Now it is up to you."

IV.

There can be a sense of tragic timelessness in Haiti, an impression that one gets when driving northwards from the capital along Route Nationale 1, where tent camps now ring either side of the road, and which meanders along the Côte des Arcadins and into the agricultural heartland of the Artibonite Valley.

As one drives, to the left the Caribbean Sea glitters blue-green, and resorts from when Haiti was once a tourist destination - now largely empty save for Haiti's wealthy and the moneyed foreigners in the country - front the ocean. Skiffs with canvass sails ply the channel between the mainland and the immense, isolated Île de la Gonâve in the bay.

Back in the capital, ebullient Creole evangelical hymns still reverberate in the mornings from the mountainsides and ravines that crisscross the city, and radios still pump out a non-stop diet of sinuous konpa music of the kind that first brought Michel Martelly to prominence along with the driving racine rhythms of vodou and endless political chatter.

Given the long odds he faces, there is something moving about the faith of ordinary Haitians that Martelly is the figure who will transform their immensely difficult lives. And, despite what one may read, the Haitians, even in the wake of the extraordinary amount of suffering that has been foisted on them in recent years, are not a defeated people.

The mood in Haiti today reminds one of the wanly flickering orange glow of the kerosene lamps that Haiti's market women - known as ti machann - use to illuminate their wares as they work late into the night. One can see them by the roadside, hoping for one more customer, one more sale, one more ray of life.

Haiti is like that, too, persevering ever onward as long as the slenderest flicker of hope remains.

What James Craig Anderson's Killing Means to America

2011-08-09T23:36:00.002+02:00

What James Craig Anderson's Killing Means to America

By Michael Deibert

Posted: 8/9/11 05:19 PM ET

(This article was cross-posted on the Huffington Post, where it can be read here)

Where in the world do at least seven people participate in a brutal and fatal sectarian attack against an innocent working man whose only crime is to be part of a targeted minority? And where in the world would only one of those people then be charged with murder, and only one other charged with "simple assault," despite ample evidence that those involved set out to commit extreme violence that evening? 

Syria? Libya? The Democratic Republic of Congo?

Welcome to 21st century Mississippi.

According to police, early on the morning of June 26th, James Craig Anderson, a 49 year-old African-American auto plant worker in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, was set upon by a group of white teenagers who beat him while screaming "White Power." Then one of them got behind the wheel of a Ford F250 green pickup and ran Anderson over, killing him.

The teenagers, seven in all, are alleged to have been led by 18 year-old Deryl Dedmon, and, according to police, they had left an all-night party in the neighboring upper-class white enclave of Rankin County with the sole intention of finding an African-American to attack.

The horrifying security camera footage of the murder -- showing Anderson repeatedly attacked by multiple teens before being run down - is matched only by the blithe disregard of the alleged killers themselves. After the attack, police say that Dedmon drove along with his two female passengers to a McDonald's to meet with the rest the group and, according to witnesses, bragged "I ran that nigger over."

Far from being the quiet loner type, it seems there were plenty of signs that Dedmon was a menace.

Brian Richardson, the white pastor at Rankin County's Castlewoods Baptist Church, told reporters after the Anderson slaying that he had told police and school officials that his own son had been the victim of violent bullying by Dedmon for a period of two years, and that Dedmon and his friends frequently targeted people in the community with homophobic and racial slurs.

Most chillingly, Richardson said that he told police that it was "painfully clear that [Dedmon] was going to injure someone severely or possibly kill someone." Richardson also added that if Dedmon was not taken off the streets "it's going to happen again."

The "taken off the streets" part is important because, almost unbelievably, after being freed on a $50,000 dollar bond, Dedmon is now subject to house arrest under an $800,000 bond. In other words, he is not yet in prison despite being accused of taking part in a grotesque and premeditated racial assault that Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith has called a hate crime.

Judge William Barnett, the Mississippi magistrate who decided that Dedmon, despite Brian Richardson's prescient previous warnings, posed no danger if sent back home from prison, also saw fit to reduce the charges against John Aaron Rice, also 18, the only other person charged in the case, from murder to simple assault. Rice is now free on $5,000 bond.

How can this be? How can more than half a dozen teenagers take part in such a fatal racist attack in a region and a nation with a history of racial violence and most of them just be allowed to walk away from it?

For some time now, there has been a dangerous historical amnesia developing in the United States, and nowhere has this appeared to be more concentrated than in the South, where I make my home. In Mississippi, it's a historical revisionism that starts at the top.

Mississippi's current governor, former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour, opined as recently as last year that the omission of any mention of slavery from a proclamation on Confederate History Month by Virginia Republican Governor Bob McDonnell was "just a nit...not significant." and, in a memorable turn of phrase, didn't "matter for diddly."

Later that same year, when interviewed by the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, Barbour said that, during his youth, the segregationist White Citizens' Council in his native Yazoo City "was an organization of town leaders" that in his view kept the peace.

[Barbour's statement now seem particularly ill-advised as, on June 12, 1963, civil rights activist and U.S. army veteran Medgar Evers was gunned down in Jackson, Mississippi - the same town where James Craig Anderson was beaten to death - by White Citizens' Council member Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith was tried three times before finally being convicted for Evers' murder in 1994. He would later die in prison. Evers himself is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.]

In November of last year, a "secession ball" in the South Carolina city of Charleston celebrated that state's exit from the union 150 years ago - an exit that heralded the beginning of a civl war in which over 600,000 Americans lost their lives - and was mirrored by similar events in Montgomery, Alabama and elsewhere.

In perhaps a more famous incident from April 2009, Texas governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, speaking to a rally of Tea Party supporters in Austin, said
that Texas had entered the United States with the understanding that "we would be able to leave if we decided to do that." Perry forgot, perhaps that, against the advice of its wise founding father, Sam Houston, Texas did leave the Union to join the Confederacy in 1861/ Everyone saw how well that worked out.

The South is not alone in this historical revisionism. Minnesota Congresswoman and Republican Senatorial candidate Michele Bachmann recently signed a pledge from an Iowa-based group called The Family Value which proclaimed that "a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President."

All of which is perhaps a roundabout way of saying this: If in this context and all these years later James Craig Anderson's murder counts for so little that his alleged killers -- at least one of whom has been accused of presenting a credible and ongoing threat to the community -- are allowed to savour their freedom even as Anderson's family mourns his loss, then justice in Mississippi doesn't count for much more now than it did in Medgar Evers' time, and the grotesque romanticizing of an era of racial hatred and enslavement still has far deeper roots among some in our country than we are willing to admit.

In some ways, Mississippi remains the most misunderstood of American states. It has proven to be one of the great producers and repositories of American culture, producing writers such as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright and Eudora Welty (who spent most of her life in the country where the Anderson killing took place), and musicians of the caliber of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Elvis Presley. Indeed, much of what the rest of the world understands as American creativity can be traced back to the delta and hill country of the state.

I write these lines in New Orleans, a city which was at least partially built on slavery and where, in July 1864, a mob opposed to giving African-Americans the vote, aided by New Orleans police, attacked a political meeting in a riot that killed at least 37 people, all but three of them black.

Almost exactly one hundred years later - following the murder of of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner by members of the Ku Klux Klan - the folk singer Phil Ochs (frequently lambasted as a northern interloper though he was in fact born in Texas) wrote one of his best songs, "Here's to the State of Mississippi." In it, Ochs sang that, in Mississippi, "the calender is lying when it reads the present time."

That may or may not still hold true. The course of the trial of those accused of murdering James Craig Anderson will tell us a great deal, though, about how much work we still have to do.

On the passing of Jean-Claude Bajeux

2011-08-06T16:57:00.002+02:00

On the passing of Jean-Claude Bajeux

By Michael Deibert

I was sitting in my study in New Orleans working on a book about the Democratic Republic of Congo when I heard the news that Jean-Claude Bajeux had passed. Bajeux, co-founder of the Centre Oecuménique des Droits de l'Homme (CEDH), former Minister of Culture, militant for human rights and democracy and great Haitian patriot, was 79.

Since I started visiting Haiti in 1997, I got to know Bajeux and his wife, Sylvie, over the years, both of a generation that fought hard against the 1957-1986 Duvalier family (father François and son Jean-Claude) dictatorship and the military juntas that followed. Subsequently supportive of the candidacy of Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the head of a broad democratic movement, Bajeux endured Haiti’s 1991 coup until Aristide’s return by a United States-led multinational military force in 1994, at which point he served as Minister of Culture. At one point, like Aristide himself, Bajeux was a priest who later left his role in the church, and he would become among Aristide’s foremost critics as the latter veered towards a particular brand of corrupt and violent anarcho-populism that reminded many like Bajeux of the elder Duvalier.

Bajeux, who received a PhD from Princeton University in the United States, lived and taught in both Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in the past, and in recent years, the CEDH did important work in helping to draw attention to the plight of Haitians deported from the United States, often for very minor infractions, back to Haiti.

Well into his later years, I would see Bajeux bravely march in demonstrations at times when it was physically dangerous to do so in cities like Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and Cap-Haïtien in the country’s north.

Both the younger Duvalier and Aristide are now back living freely in Haiti, having never been held to account for the terrible suffering that they subjected the Haitian people to. I imagine that it must have been a difficult pill to swallow for someone such as Bajeux, who worked all his life to try and make Haiti’s political system more responsive and accountable to its people.

Likewise, the game-playing and politicking of Haiti’s political class, which recently rejected the second nominee of Haiti’s president, Michel Martelly, for the post of Prime Minister, has never seemed more irresponsible or indifferent to the lives of the country’s citizens, who lived in dire poverty and dislocation even before Haiti’s devastating January 2010 earthquake.

In Haitian Creole there is an expression upon the passing of a great figure that “a great mapou has fallen.” Mapous are the massive, sturdy trees that one finds in the Haitian countryside, and great spiritual signifiers to the country’s vodou faithful, as well.

In recent years, the older generation of Haiti’s democratic activists that opposed the Duvalier regime, like those they once opposed, have begun to pass away, secure in their energies and convictions but unable to outrun what Andrew Marvell called “time’s winged chariot.”

One must remain hopeful that a younger generation will now pick up the legacy of collective struggles and personal sacrifices that men like Jean-Claude Bajeux left them and try and forge a more equitable and just future for Bajeux’s beloved country. There could be no better tribute.

Domi byen, JC.

Michael Deibert
New Orleans, August 2011

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Voting rights and voter suppression in perspective

2011-07-26T21:04:00.000+02:00

La marcha imparable de las mafias: El intimidante despojo de propiedades

2011-07-18T18:35:00.003+02:00

An important editorial on recent developments in organized crime in Guatemala by El Periódico's Jose Rubén Zamora. MD

País

La marcha imparable de las mafias: El intimidante despojo de propiedades

Jose Rubén Zamora

El Periódico

(Read the original article here)

Ante nuestra mirada estupefacta e irremediable impotencia, las mafias se siguen apoderando de Guatemala. Las estructuras ilegales han diversificado sus negocios, además de mover droga, contrabandear mercaderías y tesoros, traficar y esclavizar personas (sobre todo mujeres y niños) y blanquear sus ilícitas ganancias, ahora despojan propiedades a sus legítimos dueños.
 
Ya no son simples abogaditos mañosos y sin escrúpulos, especializados en identificar tierras no registradas y que de un plumazo las traspasan a sociedades anónimas de gaveta, ni ladrones de poca monta, que a hurtadillas llegan a arrancar las anotaciones al Registro de la Propiedad.

Ahora son verdaderas redes criminales que le echan el ojo a la propiedad que se les antoja, sea por su posición estratégica o por sus buenas instalaciones para almacenar mercadería ilícita y las roban por las buenas o por las malas.
 
Esta práctica echa raíces en la historia del país, pero dio un salto brutal en tiempos del Mono de Oro, cuando sus asesores corruptos de cuello blanco descubrieron que, desde el poder, el Estado de Derecho se podía retorcer también para favorecer intereses particulares. Ese es un buen punto de comparación, pues Arzú y sus testaferros garantizaron la impunidad de estafadores financieros, en buena medida estatizando las pérdidas de las financieras privadas a través del CHN, institución que utilizó como banco central de esos estafadores. Mientras, también estos estafadores financieros se robaron Q2.8 millardos a costa de miles de ahorrantes de clase media y media alta, que dolorosamente vieron esfumar su patrimonio, sin encontrar respuesta judicial, pues el régimen de turno fue su tapadera. Además, despojaron con lujo de fuerza e impunidad a empresarios decentes que impulsaban proyectos inmobiliarios. Estos no solo sufrieron el despojo ingrato de sus terrenos y maquinarias, sino que debieron huir del país para no perder lo último: la vida.
 
Una nueva estructura criminal, conocida en el bajo mundo como la Mafia Itemm, que se ha robustecido blanqueando el dinero del narco, hace su aparición en la carretera a El Salvador, en Las Cañas, Milpas Altas, y en la CA-9, jurisdicción de Palín, Escuintla.
 
Hace dos años, a unas bonitas bodegas en Fraijanes, carretera a El Salvador, llegaron unas personas en carros de lujo, ropa de boutique y cadenas de oro de muy mal gusto.
 
Preguntaron por el propietario, un hombre de avanzada edad, quien había invertido en esas instalaciones su jubilación.

Los invasores le gritaron: “Esto es nuestro.” “¡Cómo va a ser!”, replicó el dueño, encolerizado. Los usurpadores llevaban supuestos títulos de propiedad, y el viejo, confiado, los desafío: “Nos veremos en los tribunales”.
 
Nunca llegaron con el juez. Días más tarde, entrando en sus bodegas, el anciano fue acribillado. Aprovechando la congoja familiar, los truhanes se hicieron de la propiedad con papeles falsos y bajo el amparo de autoridades judiciales.
 
En otro territorio, en Las Cañas, robaron 4 manzanas de terreno, matando al propietario. El capo juega monopoly al mejor estilo de las mafias de Chicago y de Sicilia de hace un siglo. Mata a quienes despoja, y a sus competidores, pero también a sus socios. Fue el caso, a finales del 2007, de Estuardo Ortiz y del peruano Ricardo Segura, con quienes compartía el negocio de la chatarra, y de Juan Manuel Paiz, también su exsocio en una financiera. Y además le gusta el cobre ajeno: Telgua y la Empresa Eléctrica han enfrentado problemas de transmisión debido a que les hurta el metal.

Otro caso, de la misma banda, ocurrió en diciembre pasado. La táctica, esta vez, fue más sofisticada, aunque también sangrienta. Primero enviaron a Blanca Juárez (foto 1), una mujer de condición humilde, a reclamar la propiedad de una franja de 2 kilómetros de frente por 200 metros de fondo, sobre la CA-9, en Palín. Se trata de una fracción desmembrada de la finca La Compañía, donde ya hay una lotificación desde hace varios años. Por cierto, esta finca la conocí de patojo, pues era propiedad de Tere y Arturo Altolaguirre, los padres de Martita y, junto a la familia, la disfrutamos mientras transcurrían placenteros algunos domingos.

A la señora Juárez le siguió un grupo, encabezado por Paola Flores García, una supuesta Jackie (foto 2), haciéndose acompañar de Víctor Manuel López y José Pelón, lugartenientes del Capo, y media docena de gente armada. Ellos se transportan en una Cherokee P 190 DDH, una camioneta BMW X3 P 547DNH, una Mitsubishi Lance gris P 320 DDP y un picop blanco Chevrolet P 146 DWN.

Paola Flores, una mujer robusta de mediana edad, se identificó como heredera de las tierras. “Yo vivo en Miami y me avisaron que mi papi me dejó esas tierras, que eran de él, y las puso a nombre de algunos de sus empleados, y ahora unos invasores me las están robando”.
El modus operandi de la banda fue así: compraron legalmente unas tierras sobre la CA-9, luego usaron los planos, falsificaron títulos de 1957 y superpusieron la propiedad sobre otra que es legal y legítima. Aunque no cazaban los linderos ni correspondían las vecindades, y sin citar a las partes, la jueza Liliana Joaquín Castillo, del Juzgado 13o. de Primera Instancia Civil, les dio posesión, haciéndoles acompañar fuerzas de la PNC.

De hecho, la banda tiene a sueldo un agente policial, Manuel Rey (foto 3), quien se moviliza en un picop blanco Mitsubishi P 857 DMP e intimida a los legítimos propietarios.

Pero más que intimidar, como ya se vio, esta mafia también asesina. Munir Masis Masis fue otra de sus víctimas. Él poseía una bodega, también comprada de los desmembramientos de la finca La Compañía, y como se resistió al despojo, lo mataron.

No es casualidad que frente a la propiedad invadida por la mafia, está el negocio de chatarra del Capo, a quien la DEA y la CICIG le vienen pisando los talones. Su nombre es Ítem y su fortuna reciente crece a un ritmo exponencial. Lleva una vida digna del jet set, al mismo estilo del Cartel de los Sapos. Pero él sigue campante: sus testaferros ya comenzaron a llamar a los dueños de un tercer terreno, contiguo al que acaban de robar. Dentro de poco sus 2 kilómetros de carretera serán 6. Todo, a ciencia y paciencia de jueces y policías corruptos.

Guatemala, lunes 18 de julio de 2011

A few notes on Dominica

2011-07-13T16:31:00.007+02:00

Often, my reportage takes place in some of the world’s harsher countries, so it is nice, for a change, to be able to share with readers a bit about the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, wherefrom I have just returned after a brief visit and where I enjoyed my first days off a regular intensive work schedule since January. Thank the heavens for cashing in frequent flyer miles.

Referred to as the Nature Island of the Caribbean, flying into Melville Hall Airport one can easily see why: Vaulting mountains covered in thick green vegetation before they disappear into rolling banks of white and grey clouds. A country whose vigorous topography shelters some wonderfully hidden surprises and where the impact of tourism thus far seems to be minimal, Dominica reminds one of what other Caribbean nations must have looked like 150 years ago, before rampant deforestation took its toll.

I began my stay with a drive from the airport to Portsmouth, on the northwest coast, where I stayed at the newly-opened Secret Bay villas. Secret Bay is run by the very charming and welcoming Gregor Nassief and Sandra Vivas, with a very personable and professional staff and a fantastic location above two sheltered and semi-hidden beaches. I found the rhythmic surf ideal for reading (at that moment Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village, Aldous Huxley’s Beyond the Mexique Bay and Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder) and writing.

But I did not come to Dominica for work, and so I set about exploring a bit of the country, as well, venturing through Carib territory - which hosts the Caribbean's last surviving indigenous ethnic group, the Caribs, who speak their own language, Kalinago - and to the Emerald Pool, a lovely green waterfall set among the midst of jungle greenery in the Morne Trois Pitons National Park.

A boat trip up the Indian River and a hike through Cabrits National Park to Fort Shirley were also highly enjoyable. Lunches by the beach at the Purple Turtle in the company of two very friendly stray dogs and dips in the Caribbean rounded out the picture nicely.

As I love to do, I hailed a bus along the main road out of town and, traveling among local folk, headed south along the west coast of the island. Just outside of the capital city of Roseau, I stayed at my friend and fellow Haiti-enthusiast Robert Maguire’s vacant cottage in Gomier, nestled deep in the woods and with a commanding view of the Caribbean a mile below. There, a cacophony of insect and animal noise emanated from the tropical night, which some might find deafening but which I have always found very soothing.

Roseau itself proved to be an interesting, very colourful town with lots of brightly-coloured buildings and a pleasant Caribbean hustle and bustle about. I found Coco Rico a good place for breakfast and the Fort Young Hotel an enjoyable place for a later afternoon cocktail as the sun sank into the Caribbean. I was even able to meet my colleague from the Association of Caribbean Media, Thalia Remy, for breakfast.

An interesting cultural wrinkle: Though I was able to converse freely in Haitian Creole with two nice women from Haiti’s Artibonite Valley selling vegetables by the roadside in Roseau, I also found that the Dominican variation of Creole - though my no means an exact replica - was mutually comprehensible with the Creole I learned during the my years in Haiti. I can certainly see the cultural and linguistic connections that lead the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot to do some of his earliest and most important work in Dominica.

Returning to New Orleans by way of San Juan, Puerto Rico, I even had the chance to explore a bit of Old San Juan and the vibrant neighborhood of Santurce during my overnight in the city.

I should do this vacation thing more often.

Photo © Michael Deibert

"Pobre de mi Patrón" by Facundo Cabral

2011-07-11T19:49:00.001+02:00

Secret Bay, Dominica

2011-07-05T15:25:00.003+02:00

Photo © Michael Deibert

Survive by Jacques Roche

2011-06-24T20:10:00.011+02:00

Please consider buying CD's of Jacques Roche reading his own work here. Jacques was a fine journalist, poet and activist who was murdered in Port-au-Prince in July 2005. MD

Survive

By Jacques Roche

You can destroy my house
Steal my money
My clothes
And my shoes
Leave me naked in the middle of winter
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can shut my mouth
Throw me in prison
Keep my friends far from me
And sully my reputation
Leave me naked in the middle of the desert
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can put out my eyes
And burst my eardrums
Cut off my arms and legs
Leave me naked in the middle of the road
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can cover me with open sores
Poke an iron into the wounds
Take pleasure in torturing me
Make me piss blood
You can shut me away without pen or paper
Treat me like a madman
Drive me mad
Humiliate me
Crush me
Give me no food or water
Make me sign my surrender
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope
You can kill my children
Kill my wife
Kill all those I hold dear
Kill me
But you cannot kill my dream
You cannot kill hope

Old Habits Die Hard in New Orleans

2011-06-20T23:24:00.002+02:00

Old Habits Die Hard in New Orleans

By Michael Deibert

Truthdig

(Read the original article here)

NEW ORLEANS—One balmy night in late April, Floyd Moore, a 31-year-old with a history of drugs and weapons violations, was riding his bicycle past the B.W. Cooper Housing Development in the impoverished Central City neighborhood of this port city hemmed between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.

He never made it to his destination.

The slaying was highly symbolic of the tide of violence washing over New Orleans. At the site of a public housing development that for several years has been in the process of being torn down in part and re-envisioned as a mixed-income area, police recovered more than 100 shell casings—including some from an assault rifle—around Moore’s lifeless body. A 21-year-old man from the neighborhood of Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi, is being sought for the killing.

* * *

Things were not supposed to turn out like this.

This city of nearly 344,000 boasts a unique, enticing cultural bouillabaisse in which optimistic “NOLA Rising” bumper stickers are common. An always eclectic and rollicking music scene has been joined by a vibrant artistic renaissance spurred both by local artists and hundreds of transplants from other parts of the United States who have moved here in recent years to take part in the hoped-for rebuilding following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Last May, the city welcomed as its mayor Mitch Landrieu, the scion of a Louisiana political dynasty that includes a former mayor (Moon Landrieu) and a current United States senator (Mary Landrieu).

With Landrieu, the city also got a new police chief, Ronal Serpas, who had previously been police chief of Nashville, Tenn., and who said at his swearing-in ceremony that, under his watch, the 1,395-member New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) would focus on violent crime “like a dog on a bone.”

However, last year New Orleans witnessed 175 murders, or roughly 52 per 100,000 residents -- 10 times above the national average and a level that puts the city’s homicide rate just behind that of violence-racked Guatemala (at 53 per 100,000), a country beset by warring street gangs and drug cartels. In a fairly typical 24-hour period this month, four people ranging in age from 20 to 52 were slain in different parts of the city.

Far from making a dent in the shocking homicide rate, the NOPD has instead been nearly consumed by a series of scandals, with many residents wondering aloud whether Serpas will survive as chief.

“We have a thriving drug trade, a lack of legitimate employment that creates a labor force for drug dealers, and a compromised criminal justice system,” says Peter Scharf, a professor at the Department of International Health and Development at the city’s Tulane University.

An investigation of the NOPD published in March by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that “basic elements of effective policing -- clear policies, training, accountability and confidence of the citizenry -- have been absent for years" and that "constitutional violations span the operation of the entire Department."

The report went on to detail the "severely deficient" training of officers and a worrying system of what are known as "paid details" whereby officers are allowed to work for private companies or individuals while in NOPD uniforms. The report called the system an "entrenched and unregulated" phenomenon that facilitated corruption within the department.

For weeks, Serpas himself has been mired in a mini-scandal of his own, one focusing on the outsourcing of traffic camera reviews to a company owned by a close friend. A police investigator has said that he has thus far found no evidence of wrongdoing on the chief’s part.

“The problem is when it comes to the police department, we have an endemic layer of corruption,” says Simone Levine, deputy for the New Orleans Office of the Independent Police Monitor, where a staff of four is charged with overseeing the behavior of the NOPD.

“You have good officers but then you have a culture that really hasn't had much input from the outside world,” Levine says.
* * *

Rather than welcoming the Justice Department’s report, several neighborhood associations from more affluent areas of the city have attacked the proposed changes in the paid detail system and in their ability to hire individual NOPD officers to provide security. Last month, Serpas announced that the NOPD was creating a civilian-administered Office of Police Detail Services that would set restrictions on how many hours officers could work and how they would be paid.

A May 25 letter to Serpas co-signed by leaders of the Hurstville Security District and Garden District Security District asked “how the citizens can be assured that the appropriate base level of police protection will be provided,” while a May 31 missive to Serpas from the Upper Hurstville Security District complained that residents would no longer be able to select the police officers who patrol their neighborhood.

“If we weren’t hiring them, what would they be doing?” says Karen Duncan, the chair of the Upper Hurstville district’s board of commissioners. “They wouldn’t be out patrolling less affluent neighborhoods. We’re not taking them away from something else.”

Also taking aim at crucial city services is a poisonous political battle in Louisiana’s state Senate, up the river in Baton Rouge. Some legislators have been rushing to patch a $1.6 billion gap in the state’s budget by proposing, in part, $11.7 million in cuts from the state’s Department of Children and Family Services. In addition, $58 million in cuts are proposed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican. The reductions would affect precisely the kind of early-interception programs so needed in high-crime city neighborhoods such as Central City, Pigeon Town and Gert Town.
* * *

Quite apart from the concrete grimness of districts blighted by unemployment and crime elsewhere in the United States, many of the more impoverished parts of New Orleans have a ramshackle, semi-rural ambiance more reminiscent of Kingston or Belize City than anywhere else, a curious cultural and aesthetic echo in a place that is often called the northernmost city in the Caribbean.

It was an aura visible in Central City recently, at the dedication of a Head Start training center named after late longtime community activist Peter W. Dangerfield.

With a brass band gliding along this city’s distinctive “second line”rhythms and a feast of Crescent City cuisine underneath a tent, members of neighborhood groups such as the Central City Economic Opportunity Corp. (EOC) reflected on their struggle against often great odds to help redefine the experience of so many who live on the downside of advantage here.

“People need decent housing, they need jobs, they need child care,” says Priscilla Edwards, the EOC’s executive director and a 40-year Central City resident.

Among other services, the group has provided senior care in the neighborhood since 1970 and child care since 1980. With state funds, the EOC provided a multimedia after-school program for school-age children from 1970 until 2005, when the building housing the program was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“We’ve been affected greatly by the cuts in human services,” Edwards says. “They cut services on the backs of the poor, the most vulnerable.”

Indeed, to the visitor New Orleans, despite its great charm, can often seem like a city out of place and time, where the fortress-like class dynamic one sees in economically stratified societies such as those of Central America has somehow set down pernicious roots and remains obstinate and far more resilient than the delicate oleander blossoms that perfume the city’s streets in springtime.

New Orleans is a place where old habits die hard. It is a place where the city’s disenfranchised majority waits, like tourists gathered for the St. Charles Avenue streetcar as it approaches, clattering through the night and illuminated by lights from within. Like the city itself, trying to at long last reach its safe destination.

Today in Syria...

2011-06-09T23:27:00.000+02:00

Bahrain Violent Attack on Funeral 05.06 الإعتداء على الحرية الدينية

2011-06-09T16:32:00.001+02:00

Syrian soldiers planting ammunition on bodies of dead protesters in Dara’a

2011-06-07T06:06:00.004+02:00

This highly disturbing and highly graphic video - with English subtitles provided in another version by Libyan blogger Tasnim Qutait - appears to show Syrian soldiers in the city of Dara’a mocking the corpses of dead protesters and planting ammunition on them in an an attempt to stage a scene for an "official" recording. The dead men appear to have been shot in the head at close range.

The New York Times is reporting that the Syrian Revolution Coordinators Union "purchased the video, which appears to have been shot on two different cameraphones, from a member of the security forces for 200 Syrian pounds (about $40)."

I generally refrain from posting graphic content on this blog, but what is currently befalling the people of Syrian is too big to ignore. I cannot help but think that any government that is doing this to its citizens is not long for this world.

Again, the content is extremely graphic so I strongly advise discretion if viewing.

Tripoli Street, Misrata

2011-06-04T20:19:00.002+02:00

In this photo taken Wednesday, May 25, 2011, a girl poses for the picture next to a military tank on Tripoli Street, the center of fighting between forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and rebels in downtown Misrata, Libya. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Lettre ouverte au Chef de l'Etat et comuniqué du CERJI

2011-06-03T01:25:00.001+02:00

Lettre ouverte au Chef de l'Etat et comuniqué du CERJI

URGENT

POUR DIFFUSION IMMEDIATE

COMMUNIQUE DE PRESSE

KINSHASA, le 01 juin 2011

Dans sa lettre ouverte au Président de la République le 01 juin 2011, le Centre d’Echanges pour des Reformes Juridiques et Institutionnelles (CERJI) a demandé:

1. La désignation et l’installation rapides des animateurs du Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel et de la Communication (CSAC), organe de régulation des médias institué par la Constitution

2. L’observation du caractère indépendant et non partisan de cet organe de régulation

3. L’octroi au CSAC des moyens nécessaires pour son fonctionnement harmonieux et efficace

4. L’examen et l’adoption rapides du texte modifiant et complétant la loi de 1996 relative aux modalités d’exercice de la liberté de la presse

5. La consécration de l’Observatoire des Médias Congolais (OMEC) comme « tribunal de paires » dans la loi à intervenir

6. La reconnaissance du caractère officiel de ses décisions, actes et recommandations ; avec pour conséquence que ceux-ci seront revêtus d’un caractère coercitif, gage de la protection des droits des personnes victimes des violations de la déontologie et de l’éthique des journalistes

7. L’appropriation rapide par le gouvernement de la stratégie de développement de la radiodiffusion sonore élaborée à l’issue d’un long processus piloté par le Secrétariat général près le Ministère de l’Information et des Médias, avec l’appui des agences des Nations Unies au nombre desquelles l’UNICEF.

La loi relative à l’exercice de la liberté de la presse promulguée en 1996, sous le régime dictatorial du feu le Président Mobutu, est liberticide et dépassée par rapport au contexte congolais actuel.

Pourtant depuis 1996, plusieurs tentatives de réformes de cette loi ont eu lieu dans notre pays. La plus déterminante de ces tentatives est celle de juin 2007 initiée par le Ministère de l’information, presse et communication nationale. Elle a réuni toutes les tendances majeures de la profession, y compris des experts nationaux et internationaux au « Centre catholique Bondeko » de Kinshasa. Elle a abouti à la production de deux avants propositions de lois dont l’une complétant et modifiant la loi de 1996 qui régit la liberté de la presse et l’autre portant organisation, fonctionnement et attributions du CSAC.

Après plusieurs revisitassions de ces deux textes par des commissions d’experts, seul le texte sur le CSAC a été examiné, voté par le Parlement, promulgué par le Chef de l’Etat et publié au Journal officiel depuis janvier 2011.

Le CERJI considère que rien n’explique qu’à ce jour le CSAC ne soit effectivement installé, cinq mois après la publication de sa loi organique au Journal officiel.

L’absence d’une instance de régulation des médias en cette période cruciale de la démocratie congolaise n’est pas de nature à crédibiliser les élections à venir.

La faible qualité de la presse est aussi due à l’absence de l’appui gouvernemental à l’« Observatoire des médias Congolais » (OMEC), instance d’autorégulation de la presse congolaise.

Et le caractère privé qui continue à affecter le fonctionnement de l’OMEC, n’est pas non plus de nature à conforter les droits des personnes victimes des infractions commises par voie de presse.

Le CERJI estime que toutes ces tares corroient lentement mais sûrement le crédit moral et les bienfaits du renouveau inauguré avec l’organisation, la tenue des élections et l’installation de nouveaux animateurs des institutions issues des urnes en 2006, à l’issue d’une transition politique qui a duré trois ans et qui a été gérée par les membres des composantes et entités qui avaient pris part au Dialogue Inter Congolais en Afrique du Sud.

Fait à Kinshasa, le 01 juin 2011

Michael Deibert on drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico and Guatemala

2011-05-31T21:19:00.001+02:00

My friend, the filmmaker and photographer Francesca Romeo, recorded me here in New Orleans this week talking about some of the challenges facing Mexico and Guatemala. In this short clip, I discuss drug trafficking, organized crime and some of the steps that the I think the United States could take to help lessen the violence in both countries.

Michael Deibert on KPFK Pacifica Radio

2011-05-28T15:05:00.003+02:00

My interview yesterday with Suzi Weissman on KPFK Pacifica Radio about the violence currently affecting Mexico and Guatemala can be heard here. My segment starts around the 28 minute mark after the segment about Palestine. Also got to throw in my two cents about the arrest of Ratko Mladic.

Mladic, Chomsky and Srebrenica: Time for an apology

2011-05-26T14:40:00.006+02:00

By now the word that wanted war criminal Ratko Mladic has been arrested in Serbia has traveled around the globe. On the run for nearly 15 years, the former Bosnian Serb general accused of overseeing that massacre 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 will face justice. But will the apologists for the violent Serbian expansion of the 1990s in the international community - the linguist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky chief among them - finally apologize to his many victims for seeking to scuttle their calls for justice all these years?

I first became aware of Chomsky's, shall we say rather unorthodox, views of the Bosnian conflict in connection with a campaign he and his supporters launched against the talented young British journalist Emma Brockes, whose October 2005 interview with Mr. Chomsky in The Guardian caused a great deal of controversy. Among other tough questions, it asked about Chomsky’s relationship with what The Times (UK) columnist Oliver Kamm quite accurately described as “some rather unsavoury elements who wrote about the Balkan wars in the 1990s.”

The furor at the time centered around Ms. Brockes confronting Chomky with the fact that he had lent his name to a letter praising the “outstanding” (Chomsky’s own words) work of a journalist called Diana Johnstone. Johnstone’s 2002 book Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto Press), argues that the July 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica was, in essence (directly quoting from her book), not a “part of a plan of genocide” and that “there is no evidence whatsoever” for such a charge. This despite the November 1995 indictment of Bosnian Serb leaders Mladic and Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for “genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war” stemming from that very episode and the later conviction by the same tribunal of a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica.

Johnstone also states that no evidence exists that much more than 199 men and boys were killed there and that Srebrenica and other unfortunately misnamed 'safe areas' had in fact “served as Muslim military bases under UN protection.” In 2003, the Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone where she reiterated these views. Chomsky was also among those who supported a campaign defending the right of a fringe magazine called Living Marxism to publish claims that footage the British television station ITN took in August 1992 at the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp in Bosnia was faked. ITN sued the magazine for libel and won, putting the magazine out of business, as Living Marxism could not produce a single witness who had seen the camps at first hand, whereas others who had - such as the journalist Ed Vulliamy - testified as to their horror.

In fact, as recently as April 25, 2006, in an interview with Radio Television of Serbia (a station formerly aligned with the murderous and now-deceased Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic), Chomsky stated, of the iconic, emaciated image of a Bosnian Muslim man named Fikret Alic, the following:

Chomsky: [I]f you look at the coverage [i.e. media coverage of earlier phases of the Balkan wars], for example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man behind the barb-wire.

Interviewer: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out.

Chomsky: You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and 'we can't have Auschwitz again.'

In taking this position, Chomsky seemingly attempts to discredit the on-the-ground reporting of not only Mr. Vulliamy - whose reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994 - but of other journalists such as Penny Marshall, Ian Williams and Roy Gutman. In fact, Vulliamy , who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp and was there that day the ITN footage was filmed, wrote as follows in The Guardian in March 2000:

Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathized with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.

In his interview with Brockes, Chomsky stated that "Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."

In a November 2005 column, Marko Attila Hoare, a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Kingston (London), wrote thusly:

An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: 'I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.' Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone's massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'

Pretty astounding stuff, huh? But, faced with a relentless campaign by Mr. Chomsky and his supporters The Guardian, to its eternal shame, pulled Brockes’ interview from its website and issued what can only be described as a groveling apology that did a great disservice not only to Ms Brockes herself, but also to former Guardian correspondent Vulliamy and all those journalists who actually risked their lives covering the Bosnian conflict, to say nothing of the victims of the conflict themselves.

The caving-in focused on three points, the chief of which appeared to be the headline used on the interview, which read: “Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough.”

Though this was a paraphrase rather than a literal quotation, the fact of the matter was that it did seem to accurately sum up the state of affairs: Chomsky had actively supported Johnstone, who in turn had claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated and not part of a campaign of genocide. The Guardian brouhaha prompted, Kemal Pervanic, author of The Killing Days: My Journey Through the Bosnia War, and a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp, to write that “If Srebrenica has been a lie, then all the other Bosnian-Serb nationalists' crimes in the three years before Srebrenica must be false too. Mr Chomsky has the audacity to claim that Living Marxism was "probably right" to claim the pictures ITN took on that fateful August afternoon in 1992 - a visit which has made it possible for me to be writing this letter 13 years later - were false. This is an insult not only to those who saved my life, but to survivors like myself.”

Chomsky complained about that, too, forcing The Guardian to write in its apology that, ignoring the fact that it was Chomsky’s characterization of the Serb-run camps that seemed to outrage Pervanic the most, “Prof Chomsky believes that publication (of Pervanic’s letter) was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false…With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky's complaint and that is regretted.”

So Emma Brockes (whom I have never met), in this instance, at least, was silenced.

But the history of what happened in the Balkan wars should not be so easily silenced and re-written. With Ratko Mladic, predator and killer, now in custody, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and the others who have sought to deny justice to the victims of Bosnia's killing fields should apologize to those victims for working so long to make the justice they sought less, not more, likely.

The Struggle for Kashmir

2011-05-21T15:27:00.003+02:00

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the Hurriyat Conference in Indian-administered Kashmir, was placed under house arrest today in India's latest move in its long colonial adventure there. I interviewed him in 2007 while reporting from the region and, at the request of a Kashmiri friend, repost my article from that time here today. To anyone who may read this, Kashmir remains the most beautiful place I have seen on this earth, and the story there is not at all what we have been lead to believe. Visit it soon, if you can. MD

The Struggle for Kashmir

By Michael Deibert

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the World Policy Journal.

In the bloody annals of the struggle for the Kashmir Valley, few chapters are as wrenching as that of the “disappeared.” Some 8,000 persons have been arrested or seized, the majority by Indian army and police units, never to be seen again. The conflict has thus far claimed at least 40,000 lives (local human rights groups put the number much higher), left tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands displaced, and pitted the Indian state against Islamist militants, historically aided by India’s nuclear rival Pakistan. Amid this bitter conflict, another dark chapter has begun to surface, after nearly two decades of international silence and official denial.

In Ganderbal, a town in the heart of India’s Kashmir Valley, a visitor superficially encounters a winter idyll: rushing mountain streams ringed with snow-covered hills. But the sensation is fleeting.

“We have so many cases of people who have been disappeared, who have been killed, whose names are never known,” says Abdul Aziz, a 26 year-old merchant, standing with a group of men under a gray sky, garbed like the rest, in the region’s distinctive gown-like shirt, called a pheran. As he speaks, a horse-drawn cart pulls fire wood and produce down the road. “They are killed as militants, but they were not militants.” Steps away from the storefront where Aziz and a dozen others are gathered, there are three rises of freshly turned earth. These graves hold the bodies of three unknown men, say Aziz and the villagers, buried there by Indian security forces.

“Police or military arrest an innocent person and they label him as a Pakistani militant, as a foreign militant, as a local militant, and then they kill him,” says Gulam Hassan, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, as he observes the scene. “This is against the constitution, against the law, and against all humanity.”

When India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, vowed “zero tolerance” for the killing of suspected rebels in government custody while attending a May 2006 conference with local political leaders in Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, many hoped a new day had dawned for human rights in the region. India has engaged in intermittent peace talks with Pakistan since 2003, and Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late 2006 proposed a four-point formula which, he said, could form the basis of a solution of the Kashmir dispute. (Most salient among them, for the first time there would be no Pakistani claim to Indian-controlled Kashmir or a demand for full independence for the region.) These moves seemed to augur a more peaceful future.

This January, in what many interpreted as another hopeful sign, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the spiritual leader of Kashmir’s Sunni Muslims and chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, which has historically advocated autonomy for the region, told a crowd in Islamabad, Pakistan, that he was calling for an end to armed struggle as a means of ending Indian rule of the region. “We are not prepared to sacrifice any more of our loved ones,” he announced

After a similar declaration five years ago, Abdul Ghani Lone, then leader of the Hurriyat Conference, was gunned down by unknown assailants. Mr. Farooq’s own father, Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq, was slain in a similar manner in May 1990. But the politicians’ words have yet to filter to ground-level. A special investigating team sent by the Indian government has thus far arrested 11 policemen from Ganderbal—including the senior superintendent and deputy superintendent—for the alleged killings of civilians in staged gun battles with the security forces, here described as “encounters.” At least four bodies have been exhumed from graves as part of the investigation.

Police officers in Ganderbal said that they thought the stories of disappearances were exaggerated. “That’s not the entire police force, only one or two people may have done it,” said A. M. Reshi, the on-duty Ganderbal police station house officer. “I am of the opinion that the police, on the whole, are working on a good way, as per procedure, as per of the law of the land, as per the constitution.” A. R. Khan, the new police superintendent of Ganderbal, declined to be interviewed for this report.

How It Began

The roots of the Kashmir crisis stretch back to the twilight of Great Britain’s colonial rule and partition of India and Pakistan, when a Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, pleaded for Indian assistance to fend off an invasion of Pakistan-backed tribesmen entering Kashmir in 1947. He allowed Indian troops to rush to his aid, and signed a document agreeing to become part of the Indian state. Kashmiris, 12 million of whom make up the only Muslim-majority state in India, where a promised a referendum on the status of the region which was never held. A 1948 United Nations Security Council resolution posited that in a plebiscite, Kashmiris should only have the option to accede to either India or Pakistan, denying Kashmiris a vote for independence, the long-cherished goal of many. Despite later wars, the 1947 armistice border between Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir has remained largely along the contours one sees today, and is know as the Line of Control.

Though demarcating separate sections controlled by two separate armies, the Line of Control has never been recognized as an international border. India and Pakistan have fought successive wars along the frontier, the most recent in 1999. The Indian government refers to its portion of the territory as Jammu and Kashmir, referring as well to neighboring Jammu state, which falls within Indian territory, while the other side of the Line of Control is dubbed Pakistani Occupied Kashmir (POK ). The Pakistani government refers to its portion of the captured territory as Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir.

When 1987 legislative elections seemed likely to result in a victory for a coalition of Islamic and secessionist parties under the umbrella of the Muslim United Front (MUF), the Indian authorities responded with mass arrests of MUF candidates and party workers. This was followed by credible and pervasive allegations of vote rigging, and the awarding of the election to a rival, less radical, coalition. Many Kashmiri youths who had previously sought to change the status quo through electoral means felt they had no alternative but to turn to the gun, with Pakistan’s intelligence services—particularly the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency—more than happy to provide training and weapons. The dispute flared into open insurrection.

The Indian government faced large-scale protests and a sustained campaign of terrorism, including the murder of political leaders and mass-casualty civilian attacks, on a scale not seen before. In two incidents in 1990 alone, Indian police shot and killed at least 35 demonstrators attempting to cross Srinagar’s Gawakadal Bridge, and then opened fire and killed at least 21 at the funeral of Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq. Three years later, 37 people were killed when India’s 74th Battalion Border Security Force opened fire on a crowd estimated at 10,000 marching to protest extrajudicial killings in the town of Beijbehara. For their part, Kashmiri militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), which India has long accused Pakistan of supporting, retaliated with the December 2000 attack on the 17th century Red Fort in India’s capital, New Delhi, in which three died; a 2001 suicide attack on India’s parliament which left 14 dead; and, the Indian government charges, last summer’s bomb attacks on commuter trains in India’s economic capital, Mumbai, in which 187 people were killed. Fatal attacks by Islamic militants against members of the local Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and National Conference Party (NCP) because of their participation in Indian electoral politics are now routine. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, called Pandits, have been driven from their homes.

Many fear that if the opportunity for a lasting settlement to the Kashmir problem is not seized during the present era of relative détente, the region will have lost its last, best chance for peace. “This is a golden opportunity which needs to be taken now, it should not take years,” says Mehbooba Mufti, president of the PDP. Mufti’s party came to power as part of an elected coalition government in Kashmir in 2002. The post of chief minister (the Indian equivalent of governor) currently resides with Ghulam Nabi Azad, of the ruling national Congress party, which favors resolving the crisis in Kashmir within the Indian constitutional framework. “So many people have been martyred, so many people have lost their lives, so many homes have been destroyed, they would like to have something out of it,” Mufti contends. “If we don’t give the Kashmiris something today, this problem is going...to manifest again into some type of
gangrene.”

Though India, a dynamic, hopeful country, is undergoing an economic boom that is the envy of other emergent nations, Kashmir remains a shaming stain. “The Indian government has ended some practices such as indiscriminate firing upon unarmed protesters,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But they have begun this system where soldiers just kill suspected militants, completely against the laws of war.”

In a September 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report condemning what it called “patterns of impunity” in Kashmir and neighboring Jammu state, and called for a “credible and independent” investigation into all disappearances and staged killings since the conflict began. Part of the problem, according to Ganguly, is a system of payouts and promotions whereby soldiers are rewarded for killing suspected insurgents.

Likewise, human rights monitors have pointed to Section 45 of India’s criminal procedure code, which protects any member of the armed forces from arrest for “anything done or purported to be done by him in the discharge of his official duties except after obtaining the consent of the Central government.“ Section 197(2) of the same code makes it mandatory for prosecutors to obtain permission from the federal government to initiate criminal proceedings against any public servant, including armed forces personnel.

The fate of Kashmir remains an intensely divisive issue in modernizing India. Facile political definitions become blurred as Indians talk about the fate of the restive region. “Kashmir could be solved tomorrow. If the Kashmiris wanted to join the Indian union, they would prosper like never before,” says Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian and author of the just-published
India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. “Independence or joining Pakistan are no solutions...and chasing this fantasy of independence will lead to the sacrifice of another generation of young men.”

Many Kashmiris, however, find such arguments unpersuasive. “For me, that’s a colonial way of looking at things,” says Idrees Kanth, a 28-year-old Kashmiri graduate student in New Delhi. “That was precisely how the British rationalized their rule in India.” Ideas like nationalism are “very penetrative,” Kanth believes, even to the Left and the intellectual class. “But, watching them during an India-Pakistan cricket match, you should see how they cheer.”

The Voices Seldom Heard

This past February, in the Lal Chowk neighborhood of Srinagar, a once-lovely city on Dal Lake now ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers, hundreds of Kashmiris stage a sit-in protest for three days against the human rights situation in the region. Beneath a tent, festooned with images of the dead and Urdu script quoting the Koran, is Yasin Malik, a secessionist rebel who underwent a transformation while in prison and now leads a non-violent, Ghandian movement called the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF ). He lies on a mat during the second day of a hunger strike.

He threatens to fast “unto death” if the human rights situation in Kashmir does not improve. “The mothers and sisters want to know where their children are," said Malik. "If they have been killed, give us their bodies.” Nearby, sit relatives of the disappeared, many holding photos.

“I joined this organization because my son, Javid Ahmed Ahanger, was taken by national security personnel in August 1990,” says Parmina Ahanger, the 47-year-old head of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, a Srinagar-based organization. “I sent a complaint into the court and to the police. They established that he had been taken, but they pleaded their inability to act as the officers involved in my son’s abduction were of very high- ranking positions.”

Another woman, 50-year-old Rahti Razak, speaking through her tears, held up a photo of a young man with an impressive mane of black locks. “My son was taken from his bedroom when he was sleeping with his one-year-old son and wife in 1997. They came into his room, dragged him out by his hair and took him away,” she says. “He was abducted by the Special Operations Group (army and local police). I have been going all over this valley, to Uttar Pradesh and other places, but I have not been able to locate him.”

There are many such stories. Safiya Azad, whose haunting dark eyes are visible beneath her black burqa, tells the story of her husband, Himaynu Azad. “My husband was about 29 when he was arrested by Special Battalion 137 in 1993,” she says. “He was a political activist, and was connected with the militants. But even if he was a militant, they have punished the whole family. We’ve gone everywhere, to all authorities, we have put in reports with several police stations. They say that he escaped from their custody. We have a right to know what happened to him.”

As another family member of one of Kashmir's disappeared takes to the microphone and begins yet another impassioned appeal for justice, Yasin Malik rises wearily from beneath his blanket to say some final words to a visitor. "In Kashmir, there is no democracy," said Malik. "The government of India in Kashmir is existing in bunkers, and they're running their democracy through the barrel of a gun."

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).

Estado de Sitio Petén

2011-05-17T16:12:00.000+02:00

Cartel Wars

2011-05-17T01:48:00.002+02:00

Cartel Wars

May 16, 2011

By Michael Deibert

Truthdig

(Read the original article here)

MATAMOROS, Mexico—Of all the iconography that one encounters when traversing the border regions between the United States and Mexico—a land informed by the exploits of Mexican and American bandits and smugglers and which was part of a single country until 1836—two images stand out to a visitor.

Gazing out at passersby from clothing shops and discount stores on both sides of the border, the first is a visage of dapper, mustachioed solemnity: The face of Jesús Malverde. Often depicted today on T-shirts and baseball caps with marijuana leafs wreathing his face, Malverde was said to have been an outlaw from the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. The main shrine dedicated to Malverde—allegedly executed by authorities in about 1909 and revered as a quasi-saint by many in Mexico’s criminal underworld—is in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, birthplace of the eponymous Cartel de Sinaloa, headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, perhaps Mexico’s most famous drug trafficker.

The other image is that of a hooded, scythe-wielding skeleton, Santa Muerte (Saint Death). Like Jesús Malverde, Santa Muerte—whose main shrine in the rough-and-ready Mexican city barrio of Tepito sees visitors greeted by the skeletal lady in a white wedding dress—has become an object of veneration among Mexico’s criminals.

Here in Matamoros, a community of about 500,000 that gave birth to the criminal organization known as the Cartel del Golfo (Gulf Cartel) and which sits just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, these figures, culled from the rich imagery of religion and crime, have now been joined by new depictions of transgression and loss.

At the Matamoros morgue, plastered to its glass doors amid a stench of human decay, the faces of dozens of people who have disappeared in this Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year gaze out onto the world. Relatives believe that they may be among the 183 bodies exhumed from 40 separate pits by Mexican authorities over the last month or so, likely victims of the Gulf Cartel’s erstwhile allies-turned-enemies, Los Zetas.

In the annals of a conflict that has killed more than 34,600 since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country’s battle against drug traffickers in December 2006, the conflict in Tamaulipas is writing a new and bloody chapter.

Cartel Recruited Elite Army Unit’s Members

What would grow into the present-day Cartel del Golfo had its genesis in Matamoros and the enterprising diversification of a Mexican smuggler and bootlegger named Juan Nepomuceno Guerra. Born in 1915, Guerra and his nephew, Juan Garcia Abrego, had decided by the 1970s to expand the criminal band’s connections with Colombia’s Cali Cartel, and had developed an extensive web of corruption of local, state and federal government officials in Tamaulipas.

Garcia Abrego was arrested at a ranch in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon in January 1996 and subsequently sentenced to 11 life terms in the United States for drug trafficking. Guerra died in 2001 of natural causes. Control of the cartel fell into the hands of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, a former mechanic who promptly earned the sobriquet El Mata Amigos (Friend Killer) by dispatching a potential rival, a close personal acquaintance.

When Cardenas recruited as his lieutenants his two brothers—Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (aka Tony Tormenta, or Tony the Storm) and Mario Cardenas Guillen—as well as Jorge Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sanchez, a former Matamoros police officer, the modern-day Gulf Cartel was born.

Feeling under pressure from his rivals after his ascension to the head of the cartel, in the late 1990s Cardenas began to recruit active members of an elite Mexican army unit, the Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), to become the organization’s military wing. Trained originally in counterinsurgency and counternarcotics tactics, the GAFE deserters were also skilled in such tactics as rapid deployment, intelligence collection, countersurveillance and ambush.

Initially led by Arturo Guzman Decena, known as Z1 (“Zeta” in Spanish) after a Mexican radio code for high-ranking officers. Guzman Decena was killed in November 2002, and his successor, Rogelio Gonzalez Pizaña (Z2), was scooped up by authorities less than two years later. The leadership of Los Zetas then coalesced around Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (Z3), a man whose violence caused him to become known as El Verdugo (The Executioner).

For a time, the arrangement worked. Los Zetas proved themselves to be so adept at killing and terrorizing the cartel’s enemies that they were even recruited to train members of La Familia, Gulf Cartel allies based in the western state of Michoacan and at the time led by Nazario Moreno Gonzalez. Known as El Mas Loco (The Craziest One), Moreno invested La Familia with quasi-religious overtones, even giving the group’s foot soldiers a book of his aphorisms to carry along as they committed such acts as hurling five decapitated heads across the floor of the Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shadow) nightclub in September 2006. Moreno would be killed in a gun battle with Mexican security forces in December 2010.

La Familia was outrageous and bizarre, but it proved to be only the smallest foreshadowing of what was to come. Shortly after the Sol y Sombra incident, Felipe Calderon was elected Mexico’s president and declared war on the country’s drug trade. In an equally significant corollary, although hardly commented upon at the time, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who had been running the Gulf Cartel from a Mexican prison cell since his arrest in March 2003, was extradited to the United States.

The glue that had held together one of Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking operations for a decade was becoming unstuck. The center would not hold.

Pits Filled With the Dead at San Fernando

Following the extradition of Cardenas, relations between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas grew ever more strained. Members of the latter, high on their own sense of power and fortified by copious amounts of cocaine and Buchanan whisky (the cartel libation of choice), had little use for their former bosses, diminished as they were by the Cardenas arrest and a decentralized system that saw Cardenas’ brother Tony Tormenta and the former cop El Coss acting as co-heads of the organization.

The January 2010 slaying of Victor Mendoza, a Zeta lieutenant killed by a Gulf Cartel gunman in circumstances that are not entirely clear, proved to be the match that lit the bonfire of violence that now threatens to consume Tamaulipas.

Following pitched battles in the city of Reynosa, about 50 miles west of Matamoros, the Gulf Cartel claimed control of those two cities, with the Zetas ruling in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, and in Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican counterpart of Laredo, Texas. The space between these population centers consists of little-patrolled rough countryside, and became the scene of the most ruthless kind of war as each side tried to eliminate the other.

“The current levels of violence are indeed changing the entire culture of the border region,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the conflict extensively. “The levels of violence have escalated to unprecedented levels, and the new practices by killers are extreme and had never been observed in the past.”

Correa-Cabrera is referring to the 183 confirmed dead recovered thus far from the San Fernando pits, roughly 80 miles to the south, but her observations are anything but distant and academic. The university campus where she works, just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, has been struck on three separate occasions by bullets fired during confrontations on the Mexican side.

Almost unbelievably, before this latest outrage, San Fernando, surrounded by rural roads and ranches, had been the scene of a similar mass killing less than a year earlier, when a group believed to be the Zetas killed 72 Central American migrants outside the town in August 2010 after holding them for ransom. Since the most recent killings, 16 local police officers have been detained under suspicion of involvement.

“They recruit boys from 13 to 17 years old,” says a 19-year-old university student from Matamoros, speaking in hushed tones about the cartels. “The police are also involved in this.”

Since the February 2010 mutiny by the Zetas, two loose and broad-based cartel alliances have seemed to coalesce. One configuration consists of the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel and the now greatly diminished La Familia; the Zetas have aligned themselves with the Cartel de Juarez (based in the eponymous city in the state of Chihuahua in western Mexico) and the Beltran-Leyva Carte, which became famous for its use of 12-year-old hit men and has suffered the loss of its top leaders through killings and imprisonment at the Calderon government’s hands. The Zetas have also reinforced themselves by recruiting members of Los Kabiles, a special-operations unit of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics and that had a particularly ghastly record in that country’s civil war.

In Tamaulipas, at least, the federal government has often seemed little more than a hapless referee as the two sides have battled each other for control of lucrative drug trafficking routes with ever-increasing levels of savagery. The dumping of dismembered bodies in the state has become almost routine, while gruesome videos of the foot soldiers of various factions being beheaded or otherwise killed are posted to websites such as the anonymously run Blog del Narco as a way to send messages and spread fear among opponents.

Though several midlevel Zeta operatives have been killed or captured, perhaps the Calderon government’s most notable victory in the region was the killing of Tony Tormenta during an hours-long gun battle in Matamoros last November. Although the official reports said that four cartel gunmen, three marines and a reporter perished during a series of gun battles throughout the city, Matamoros residents put the number of dead that day at closer to 100.

In February of this year, banners addressed to the Zetas were hung from bridges in Tamaulipas and three other Mexican states. They contained the claim, among others, that the state “had already witnessed the killing and massacre of innocent people by the Zetas” and a demand that the group “fight like men.” The banners were signed Carteles Unidos (United Cartels), an apparent reference to the Gulf-Sinaloa-La Familia alliance.

An entire new vocabulary of neologisms—from narcocorridos (songs) and narcomantas (banners) to narcobloqueos (blockades)—has taken root in Mexican culture as the society at large seeks ways to label the pervasive influence of drug traffickers and their signifiers.

“People are tired,” says Mauricio Meschoulam, a professor at the department of international studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in the capital of Mexico City, where an estimated 150,000 people marched against the violence this month. “They feel that the government’s fight is unsuccessful and that the government is not in control of the situation. This perception increased sharply in 2010, especially in the second half of the year.”

Endless Violence Fueled by U.S. Firearms

Though the violence in Tamaulipas is shocking, it is not isolated.

In Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city of 1.3 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, 3,000 people were killed last year during a power struggle between the Cartel de Juarez and the Cartel de Sinaloa and a general breakdown in law and order not lessened by the presence of the Mexican army. This past February, Jaime Zapata, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was shot to death and his partner was wounded as they drove in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. A known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.

On May 19, a gun battle between suspected Zetas and Mexican marines patrolling Falcon Lake, which sits on the border between Texas and Tamaulipas, left 12 gang members and one marine dead. Last September, U.S. boater David Hartley disappeared after being chased and shot by gunmen on the Mexican side of the lake’s border. The severed head of the Mexican police commander in charge of investigating the case was subsequently left outside a Mexican army post.

The policies of the United States, involved in a perversely symbiotic relationship with Mexico in which drugs flow north and weapons flow south, have not been helpful.

A recent report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime concluded that the U.S., with a population of 310 million, consumed $37 billion in cocaine in 2008, while Europe as a whole, with a population of 830 million, consumed $34 billion. Over the past four years, as The Washington Post has reported, more than 60,000 U.S. guns have been found in Mexico, largely coming from gun dealers in states with conspicuously liberal gun laws such as Texas and Arizona. The AK-47 used to kill agent Jaime Zapata was traced to a legal purchase at a Texas gun store.

In the meantime, the brazen and highly ritualized drumbeat of violence continues, leading observers on both sides of the border to wonder just how deeply it is permanently changing Mexico.

“How can you justify these extreme new practices and massacres?” asks professor Correa-Cabrera. “How can someone justify to himself assassinating dozens of men, women and children?”

“The economic explanation is definitely an important one,” she continues. “But there must be more elements in these new and extreme forms of violence. A new culture and new beliefs are taking hold.”

Michael Deibert's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de Sao Paulo and the World Policy Journal, among other publications. He has been a featured commentator on international affairs for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, National Public Radio, and WNYC New York Public Radio.

In his role as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University, which promotes processes of reconciliation by non-violent means at all levels throughout the world, he aids the Centre in its mission to increase and sustain dialogue on international peacebuliding and development issues, with a particular focus on Africa and Latin America.

A recognized authority on the Caribbean nation of Haiti, which he first visited in 1997, Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His reporting currently focuses on drug trafficking, organized crime and insurgency in the Americas.

His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/michaelcdeibert.

Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war

2011-05-12T17:11:00.001+02:00

Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war

By Michael Deibert

Thu May 12 2011, 1:12 am ET

MATAMOROS, Mexico (AFP) – Plastered to the front of the morgue in this border city, where only hours before a battle raged between Mexican security forces and gunmen believed to belong to a local drug cartel, the faces stare back, haunting in their silence and mystery.

Carlos Alberto Sanchez, 17 years old. Fernando Tejeda Loya, 39 years old. Kelvin Alvin Palomo Nava, 22 years old. Dozens of photos and names belonging to people who have disappeared in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year.

From inside the squat, gray structure, a sickly whiff of human decay is unmistakable.

Since Mexican authorities exhumed a total of 183 bodies from 40 separate pits in the state over the last month, the families of hundreds of missing people have offered DNA samples to Mexican authorities.

At this point, only three of the bodies have been identified.

This part of Mexico was once a booming hub for cross-border trade between the country and the United States -- which operates hundreds of low-wage factories on the Mexican side.

Today, it finds itself in the midst of a terrifying war of attrition between the city's indigenous Gulf Cartel, their former partners known as Los Zetas and the elements of government power that have not been bought or bullied into the drug traffickers' service.

Near the morgue, black-clad policemen, their identities hidden under ski masks, set up check points, their assault rifles at the ready, while convoys of Mexican marines speed down broad boulevards.

"There is practically an anarchy here," says a businessman from the nearby city of Reynosa. "Many people have abandoned their homes."

The Gulf Cartel, which came into force under the wing of a Matamoros crime boss who had made his money bootlegging, by the late 1990s was being led by former mechanic Osiel Cardenas Guillen.

It was Cardenas Guillen who recruited the group of 30 Mexican special forces soldiers that would become Los Zetas to act as the cartel's military shock troops.

The group has since changed and expanded through the killing or arrest of most of its founding members and the addition of elements such as rogue soldiers from the Kabiles, a feared special forces branch of the Guatemalan military with an abysmal human rights record.

With Cardenas Guillen in jail in the United States and the leadership of the Gulf Cartel having shifted to his two brothers and a former Matamoros police officer, tensions between the two organizations grew until they exploded into open conflict in early 2010, each seeking to control lucrative drug shipment routes heading north.

Though a substantial portion of the the Zetas membership appears to be drawn from around the state of Veracruz, the group as a whole lacks the deep regional roots connect to many Mexican drug trafficking organizations whose very names -- Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Tijuana, La Familia Michoacana -- speak of their histories in the regions that gave birth to them.

"The introduction of the Zetas changed the whole panorama of drug trafficking in Mexico," says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the region extensively.

"Because of these new paramilitary practices, other groups have been made to raise their standards of violence, as well."

In August 2010, the Zetas were blamed for the slaying of 72 Central American migrants whose bodies were found at a ranch in Tamaulipas.

In June of that year, the leading candidate for the governorship of the state -- brother of the its current governor -- was slain along with four others.

This past February, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was shot to death while driving in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi and a known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country's battle against Mexico's drug traffickers in December 2006, more than 34,600 have died in drug-related violence.

Along with the violence has grown a pervasive culture of corruption and fear. After the discovery of the most recent mass graves, 16 police officers were detained under suspicion of involvement.

Many newspapers on the Tamaulipas side of the border have almost stopped covering drug-related violence entirely.

Now, with one of Cardenas Guillen's brothers having perished in a wild firefight with Mexican security forces in Matamoros last year and the command of the Zetas having passed to Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (known as El Verdugo, or The Executioner), Tamaulipas remains hotly contested and divided.

The Gulf Cartel controls the northeastern part of the state that encompasses the cities of Reynosa and Matamoros itself, while the Zetas maintain power bases in the state capital Ciudad Victoria and Nuevo Laredo.

Despite the government's promises of security and increased aid, many local residents remain unconvinced, and say that governmental control in the region is visible little, if at all.

"The president says that here are many federal forces between here and Ciudad Victoria," says a cab driver in Matamoros who frequents the road. "But it's just not true."

A few thoughts on the killing of Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-03T06:42:00.001+02:00

Human emotions are complicated things. As someone who was in Manhattan on 9/11, I didn't exactly rejoice at Osama Bin Laden's death - thinking of all those lost on that day and since - but I didn't exactly feel bad, either. More like felt as if a murderous, deluded rich kid - which was all that Bin Laden ever was - got what he deserved. I'll definitely direct my compassion to more deserving recipients. From Tamaulipas, MD.

Original Pigeon Town Steppers

2011-04-25T04:49:00.003+02:00

A Note on the Passing of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros

2011-04-21T12:45:00.005+02:00

By now, the news of the killing of journalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros by the forces Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in the besieged city of Misrata has spread around the world. Hetherington was the co-director of the film Restrepo, which chronicled a year spent embedded with the Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the Korengal valley in Afghanistan, and Hondros was a photographer of great distinction whose work I had long admired.

I didn't know either man personally, though, the world of international reportage being as small as it is in these days of shrinking new coverage, we had quite a number of friends in common.

But, although journalists covering this ground quickly make their peace with the idea that one day they would go out and it might be their last, and though I am relatively sure that both men would point out the irony that their passing should attract so much attention after the world has sat back for weeks and let the people of Misrata get slaughtered, it is appropriate to take a moment and reflect on their loss.

Without the work of reporters like Hetherington, who provided us with one of the most important portraits of the Afghanistan conflict, and Hondros, whose 2003 photos of the civil war in Liberia remain some of the best war photography I have ever seen, the rest of the "developed" world would be able to suck its collective thumbs, stuff its face and drive its SUVs with nary a thought for people in the kinds of desperate circumstances both men documented.

A moment of mourning, both for the men themselves and for all the important stories that will not be told because of one more deluded dictator. Perhaps, if there is any silver lining, this terrible incident will help wake the world and its leaders up to the reality of what is happening to the people of Misrata, which has been laid siege to by Gaddafi's forces for nearly two months and witnessed hundreds of people being killed.

Rest in peace, colleagues.

Of Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire

2011-04-11T19:41:00.005+02:00

Reading the novelist Venance Konan's excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times the other day - about how he watched his friend and colleugue Laurent Gbagbo go from the kind of person who went to jail for fighting for democracy to a man who, as much as anyone, undermined it and fanned the flames of ethnic hatred in post-Félix Houphouët-Boigny Côte d'Ivoire - I found the similarities with Haiti, and another leader who went from being a champion of democracy to the nastiest sort of despot, inescapable.

Apropos of Konan’s article, a fellow journalist wrote to me that “[Gbagbo’s] resisting the international community would be almost heroic, if one did not suspect that he's a very bad man. And [Alassane] Ouattara seems typical of the kind of person who wins elections organized by the UN and US: a technocrat, Western-trained, etc. with international banking creds, like Ellen Sirleaf in Liberia.”

My view is this: As in Haiti with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, anyone who has visited Côte d'Ivoire with their eyes open knows quite well and has seen ample evidence that Gbagbo is a bad man, they don't just suspect it. And they just a certainly they know that, like Gbagbo's forces, Ouattara's supporters in the Forces Nouvelles have committed gross human rights abuses.

Given Côte d'Ivoire's particular history, though, I would not only refer to Ouattara as "the kind of person who wins elections organized by the UN and US," but also as the kind of person who wins elections in a country where the 1960 to 1993 government of Houphouët-Boigny encouraged massive migration into Côte d'Ivoire from neighboring countries such as Mali, Burkina-Faso and Guinea, only to spur a venomous backlash to that policy in terms of the discriminatory ivoirité rhetoric of Henri Konan Bédié and Gbagbo himself following Houphouët-Boigny's death. Given the ethnic and religious make-up of present-day Côte d'Ivoire, and Gbagbo's wretched record as president, it is not at all surprising that Ouattara would win a presidential election there, UN organized or not.

I think the interesting thing is how, like Aristide, Gbagbo was once perceived by those who know him best as exactly the kind of person his country needed to leave the dark days of despotism and oppression behind and start on a new, more just and correct course, and how he eventually became the epitome of everything he claimed to have been fighting against all along.

Of course, with the exception of the nutters of the Christian right in the United States, Gbagbo really doesn't have the PR machine of greased-palm attorneys, former and future lobbyists, armchair academics, ignorant or ideologically-blinded journalists and professional "activists" working to whitewash his ghastly history that Aristide still does. At least those years in exile in DC taught him to do something right, I guess, even if governing Haiti wasn’t it.

Despite their great challenges, though, I hope that 2011 marks a brighter year for Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire under the leadership of their new presidents, Alassane Ouattara and Michel Martelly. May they somehow resist the temptations that proved so irresistible to those who came before them.

Refugees tell of Côte d'Ivoire violence after fleeing to Liberia

2011-04-09T15:13:00.001+02:00

Message à la Nation: la Déclaration du Président de la République SEM Alassane Ouattara

2011-04-08T00:32:00.001+02:00

Dusk, Jackson Square

2011-03-29T21:47:00.002+02:00

Illegality and immorality of Guatemala´s election process

2011-03-22T19:02:00.006+01:00

(This is an important commentary on an upcoming election in a country that has virtually been forgotten by the international media, but where I have watched a fragile civil society struggle against organized crime and drug traffickers since my first visit there in 2003. Some of my own articles on Guatemala can be read here, here and here. MD)

Illegality and immorality of Guatemala´s election process

By Barbara Schieber in the Guatemala Times

March 2011

(Read the original article here)

The long expected and for some dreaded announcement of the divorce proceedings of the Guatemalan Presidential couple came today. The divorce is a strategy to legalize the candidacy of First Lady Sandra Torres de Colom according to the Guatemalan constitution. For many months now, there have been constant violations of the constitutional laws of Guatemalan by the political parties. All parties have violated the law in one way or another; there are no innocent politicians in this election year. Our question is what is illegal and what is immoral or is it all the same in politics?

Today in Guatemala, the most frequently used description for the divorce strategy is that it is immoral. The churches, catholic and evangelical mega-churches (both a very powerful influences in Guatemalan politics) have already declared that the divorce is to be condemned and immoral. It is unacceptable before the Catholic Church.

Since last year there have been constant violations of the constitutional laws of Guatemalan by the political parties. All parties have violated the law in several ways, illegalities and disrespect for the law has been the main signature of the election year so far. It is feared it will only get worse. There are no “innocent” politicians in this election year.

The gravest violation of the laws have been:

1. Promoting anti- constitutional candidates, or promoting changes to the constitution to change the laws stipulating the presidential candidate’s requirements, which is a crime according to the Guatemalan constitution.

2. Election propaganda before the commencement of the legally established election period (May 2011).

3. Refusal of political parties to disclose their financial records.

There are and have been several “illegal” candidates this election year

1. Mayor of Guatemala City, Alvaro Arzu, ex-president of Guatemala. Article 186 of the Guatemalan Constitution states that the person who has been president by democratic elections or coup d'état, can not be eligible as presidential candidate. His decision to run for the presidency caused alarm in the right wing sectors of Guatemala. After a “no” answer to his inquiries at the Guatemalan Congress to legitimize his candidacy, Alvaro Arzu has now decided to promote his wife Patricia de Arzu as the presidential candidate of his party. The PR campaign is up and running, the picture shows Patricia de Arzu alone now (a week before it was the couple) with a slogan of kindness and order.

She is still the wife of Alvaro Arzu, meaning a relative of a Guatemalan ex-president, maybe they will decide to get a divorce too? Patricia de Arzu is a prominent member of Opus Dei (Catholic Church sect); they have a very powerful and rich constituency.

2. Parliamentarian, Zury Mayté Ríos Montt Sosa de Weller is the daughter of ex- military dictator Efrain Rios Montt. Se was proclaimed the official candidate for president of the FRG party in October 2010. She is legally barred as a candidate according to the Guatemalan Constitution that bars presidential family members from running. Her brother, ex-military Enrique Rios Sosa has been found guilty of serious crimes and is currently in jail. She has very powerful friends in AIPAC, Washington. D.C.

The decision to determine the legality of a candidate rests in the hands of Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, a court that once ruled that Efrain Rios Mont had no legal impediment to run for presidency. A decision that later was overturned. General Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a coup d'état in 1982.

Illegal Propaganda Activities

Basically all the legally registered political parties are guilty of early promotion of their political parties and presidential candidates. The official date to start election propaganda by law, according to the Supreme Electoral Court of Guatemala, is in May 2011. Several parties have been fined because they infringed the law. Some candidates publish paid pages of informative messages in the printed press and spots on national TV, cable and radio stations. The printed press, Cable, TV and radio stations accept these payments. The Guatemalan Supreme Electoral Court claims that their budget is far too small to monitor and detect all the illegal political propaganda activities.

The political propaganda issue shows that none of the political parties or candidates have respect for the law. It is a mayor issue of show of character and probable future attitudes towards respecting any law of the country. Every party accuses the others of infringing the law that includes the official party UNE.

Is this illegal or immoral?

Lack of transparency in the financing of the political parties

The law of political parties in Guatemala is obsolete; it has a series of flaws that impede the possibility to seriously audit the parties’ sources of income. Since large amounts of cash transactions are possible, the books that the parties keep to comply with the law of political parties can in theory exclude the cash transactions and therefore may not be a reflection of the reality of financing. The date to present the most recent financial statement of the political parties came and went without any of them presenting the required information, including the ruling party UNE.

In our perspective, this is the most serious and ominous infringement of the law. Money is the determining factor in this election as in most elections. The persistent lack of disclosure of the origins of the financial support to the political parties is the greatest danger to Guatemalan democracy.

Is this illegal or immoral?

The Narco scenario

It is no secret that 60 % or more of Guatemalan territory is in the hands of the narco business. Guatemala has been invaded by narco - gangs and drug lords, also drug money, a consequence of the drug war strategy of the US, not noticing that Guatemala and Central America have to exist between Colombia’s and Mexico’s war on drugs. As an exact replica of the cold war period, now the superpowers realize that if Guatemala goes, all Central America goes as a narco - region. Such was the saying during the cold war such is the saying now in the “war on drugs”.

From our perspective all political parties in Guatemala have committed numerous, repeated illegal and immoral acts. There is no “better” political party, there is only “worse”. The political parties have no ideology except power. Left and right does not exist anymore, it is power for power sake. This is a struggle for the economic resources of the country. The elections are a pretext to see who will keep what is left over from Guatemala, which is not much. Democratic principles have nothing to do with it.

Note on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti

2011-03-18T16:29:00.006+01:00

As questionable friends of Haiti such as Amy Goodman, Danny Glover and others celebrate the return to Haiti of a man as politically and personally corrupt and ruthless as any that I have ever reported on, it seems only fitting that, if they don't have the dignity or respect to do so, some foreigner should write a note of apology to the many Haitians who fell opposing the man's rancid and despotic regime, or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So here it goes.

On behalf of all the misguided and ignorant foreigners who still act as apologists for a man who did as much to impoverish Haiti and destroy its fragile institutions as any ruler in its history (and this is by no means a complete list), I would like to apologize

To Marie Christine Jeune, the courageous young female Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH) officer who had publicly criticized Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s attempts to link the police force with armed gangs and was found, raped and mutilated in March 1995

To Yvon Toussaint, opposition senator for the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte (OPL) party, gunned down in March 1999

To the thirteen people murdered in the Fort Mercredi slum in June 2001 by the forces of gang leader Felix “Don Fefe” Bien-Aimé, whom Jean-Bertrand Aristide had appointed as director of the Port-au-Prince cemetery as a reward for his loyalty

To Brignol Lindor, the journalist murdered by the pro-Aristide Domi Nan Bwa gang in Petit-Goâve on 3 December 2001

To Ramy Daran, assistant to the Mouvement Chrétien Pour une Nouvelle Haiti's Luc Mesadieu, burned alive by a pro-Aristide gang in Gonaives on 17 December 2001

To Eric Pierre, the 27-year-old medical student from Jacmel, was was shot and killed while leaving the Haiti’s Faculté de Medicine in January 2003 on a day of planned anti- government demonstrations, with witnesses saying attackers fled the scene in a car with official TELECO plates and even providing license numbers

To 25-year-old Saurel Volny, shot and killed by police during an anti-government demonstration in Gonaives in January 2003.

To Ronald Cadet, a student activist who was shot and killed in Haiti's capital in February 2003 after being forced to live in hiding since November 2002

To the eleven people, including Michelet Lozier, mother of five, killed by Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s security forces as they raided the Gonaives slum of Raboteau in the early morning hours of 2 October 2003

To the fourteen people, including seventeen-year-old Josline Michel and the month old baby girl of Micheline Limay, also killed by Jean-Betrand Aristide’s security forces when they again raided Raboteau on 27 October 2003

To Danielle Lustin, the university professor, feminist activist and expert in microfinancing murdered on 22 October 2003 and whose memorial mass at Sacre-Coeur was interrupted by a gang of young mean descending from a white pickup bearing “Officielle” license plates, who pummeled them with rocks and bottles, crying “Viv Aristide” and threatening them in the most base, misogynistic terms

To Maxime Desulmond, the well-known student leader from Jacmel, killed when pro-Aristide gangs fired upon an anti-government demonstration in Port-au-Prince on 7 January 2004

To Leroy Joseph, Kenol St. Gilles, Yveto Morancy and the rest of the at least 27 people who were murdered and the women raped by a combination of PNH, Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d’Haiti and Bale Wouze forces in Saint Marc between 11 February and 29 February 2004.

To my dear friend James "Billy" Petit-Frere, and his brother Winston "Tupac" Jean-Bart, and all the other young men used as cannon fodder by Aristide and then abandoned to their fates or their lives extinguished (such as Roland François) when they were no longer of use

Also on behalf of we foreigners, I would like to apologize to the Haitian constitution, shredded like Lyonel Trouillot's "faded piece of cloth fought over by dogs" by Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the following manner:

By a demobilization of the Haitian army in April 1995, which was illegal without a constitutional amendment, as the army was still enshrined in Article 263 of the Haitian constitution.

By his violation of Article 7 of Haiti's constitution, which states that "the cult of personality is categorically forbidden. Effigies and names of living personages may not appear on the currency, stamps, seals, public buildings, streets or works of art." Jean-Bertrand Aristide placed hagiographic billboards bearing his image throughout the country, and the state television station TNH showed ceaseless homages to the president.

By personally and directly blocking the investigation into the murder of Haiti's foremost journalist, Radio Haiti Inter owner Jean Dominique and Jean-Claude Louissaint - as attested to by the staff of Radio Haiti Inter, investigating magistrate Claudy Gassant and now-PNH chief Mario Andresol - and and by pressuring Justice Henry Kesner Noel, to sign a re-arrest warrant for Prosper Avril in April 2002, among other acts, Jean-Bertrand Aristide violated Article 60 of Haiti's constitution, which delegated firmly the independence of the executive and judicial branches of government.

By attempting in September 2003 revive a presidential decree passed by Jean-Claude Duvalier on October 12, 1977 ("broadcast information must be precise, objective and impartial, and must come from authorized sources which are to be mentioned when broadcasting. Those who are responsible for the broadcasts have to control the programs to ensure that the information "even when it is correct ”cannot harm or alarm the population by its form, presentation or timing. The broadcast stations will provide a channel for the broadcasting of official programs, if so required by the public powers .") which was a naked assault on articles 28-1, 28-2 and 245 of Haiti's constitution, which forbids censorship and protects free speech and journalistic practices.

To say nothing of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's arming of a generation of desperately poor street children which violated Article 268 of the Haitian constitution whereby the PNH were to be the only body with the right to distribute and circulate weapons in the country.

Haitian people, you deserve better foreign friends than those who touch your soil today with the man who victimized you so. Perhaps some day you will have the foreign friends that you deserve. Until then, I know you will persevere. You are the children of heroes, after all.

Kenbe fem,

MD

Note to the Corbett List

2011-03-14T22:13:00.002+01:00

I confess some surprise that a single article of mine on Haiti’s former president has sparked such debate as the country confronts its first presidential vote in five years, a vote during which neither Mr. Aristide or any member of the interim government that followed him are candidates. But perhaps in the long run it is useful as it seems to be sparking a needed re-examination on some important aspects of Haiti’s recent history. If such examination would help even in the smallest way for the people of St. Marc who still wait for justice to achieve their aim, then it will have been mightily worth it.

1. Further on St. Marc

It is easy for those who were not in Haiti at the time to mock and dismiss the wrenching first-hand accounts of the survivors of the February 2004 Aristide government assault on St. Marc, or the first-hand accounts of journalists such as myself and the Miami Herald’s Marika Lynch who visited the town shortly thereafter. But one is reminded one of the sage words of the British academic Stephen Ellis who, when describing the incredulity that some ascribed to accounts of Liberia's civil war, wrote that "while descriptions (of the civil war) are routinely dismissed as sensational journalism by high-minded academics, it would be foolish simply to scoff at the opinions of correspondents who glean their impressions at first hand. Journalists acquire detailed knowledge, and an appreciation for the flavor of events, which can escape distant observers."

Simply put, the hypothesis that the reporting of many journalists, local and foreign, in Haiti at the time, the testimony of dozens of witnesses, the research of both Human Rights Watch and the Reseau National de Defense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), all working autonomously, is all part of a seamless, coordinated conspiracy is not a hypothesis that can be accepted by any rational person.

The best quote I’ve ever heard about Haiti’s justice system came from RNDDH’s director Pierre Esperance, who said to me, in connection that the to St. Marc case, that “in our system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work.” That is what we saw with relation to the St. Marc massacre. Rather than having a transparent trial to hold the perpetrators accountable, they were sent to sit in jail without any conclusion to the official investigation, like almost every other high-profile case in the country’s history.

A word in defense of the RNDDH, an organization that I have seen do the most important human rights advocacy in Haiti, both in its present incarnation and as the Haiti-branch of the NCHR, since I first began visiting Haiti now nearly 15 years ago.

Though their critics like to bray about RNDDH’s 2004 award of C$100,000 (US$85,382) from the Canadian International Development Agency, most of the group’s funding in fact comes from organizations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran World Federation. As part of its vitally important work, since that grant, RNDDH has consistently advocated for justice on behalf of a number of Fanmi Lavalas members who it says were victimized under Haiti’s 2004-2006 interim government, including Jean Maxon Guerrier, Yvon Feuille, Gerald Gilles, and Rudy Heriveaux.

RNDDH has shown a commitment to a non-political defense of human rights that a group like the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), under the sway as it is of Mr. Aristide's Miami attorney Ira Kurzban (one of the IJDH’s founders and chairman of its board of directors), or the IJDH’s Haiti partner, the the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), which receives “most of its support from the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti,” have never risen to.

[With the IJDH’s 2005 annual report listing Mr. Kurzban’s law firm in the category reserved for those having contributed more than $5000 to the organization, the group’s 2006 report lists the firm under “Donations of Time and Talent,” and the American Immigration Lawyers Association South Florida Chapter (for which Mr. Kurzban served as past national president and former general council) in a section reserved for those having donated $10,000 or more. Simply put, the IJDH is a creature of Mr. Aristide’s attorney, a man who has a financial stake in rehabilitating the former president. Their work in Haiti should be seen in this context.]

I would like to give the last word on the St. Marc killings to Charlienor Thompson, the coordinator of the Association des Victimes du Genocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), whose feelings of abandonment by the international community in general and the United Nations in particular were summed-up in a heart-rending 2007 open letter to Louis Joinet, the United Nations' independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti at the time. In that letter, Thompson wrote of how “we, the victims, who live in Haiti and who have lodged a complaint with the judicial system of our country for more than three years, remain confused and ask ourselves who cares about our case?"

Thompson goes on to ask:

How can we expect justice? Who can testify freely while murderers are free and move with impunity? The majority of people in Saint Marc are afraid. Even those who were direct victims of the acts mentioned above are frightened. The victims are eager to flee the city and witnesses to hide. When will we enjoy the benefits of justice that we demand? In the present circumstances, in what form will it come?

2. Further on Martissant

As happened with regards to the killing of St. Marc, a handful of advocates for Haiti’s former president living in North America have made it their goal to attempt to deceive people that violence in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant came only from one side, that of forces hostile to Haiti’s former president. They seek to convince people, despite the evidence gathered by Haiti’s own journalists and foreign reporters such as myself, that gangs formerly allied to Haiti’s former president did not play an enthusiastic and blood-soaked role in the killings there. Put simply, this is false.

Consider the following:

- A 23 August 2005 broadcast from the capital’s Radio Kiskeya stated "inhabitants of various districts of Martissant (a southern slum of Port-au-Prince) launched an S.O.S to the authorities on Monday so that they would forcefully intervene in a zone infested with heavily-armed gangsters. These inhabitants, the majority of them young people coming from 4th and the 5th Avenue Bolosse, describe the reactivation in the district of groups armed under the regime of Jean Bertrand Aristide which have made their residence in the Grand Ravine zone of Martissant."

- The 19 November 2005 article "Nouvelle montee de tension a Martissant" from the Haitian media outlet AlterPresse stated "The tension went up of a notch these last days within Martissant, in the southern sector of the capital, where confrontations have occurred between rival bands, residents told AlterPresse. Clashes have occurred on several occasions during the last 8 days between the armed bands from Grande Ravine and the Lame Ti Manchet, leaving at least 2 dead and several casualties by bullets."

- A 6 November 2006 statement by the president of Haiti’s senate, Joseph Lambert, himself a member of the Lespwa party of Haitian president Rene Preval, where Lambert directly referred to the violence in Martissant as being part of "Operation Baghdad II," in reference to a fall 2004 explosion of violence by Aristide partisans, and went on to say that "Operation Baghdad 2 takes the form of a means for a sector to politically pressure the executive (branch) in order to find employment." [Note: Despite statements to the contrary, Operation Baghdad was called just that by those carrying it out, as can be heard in this 2004 report from National Public Radio's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro]

- A 4 December 2006 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya which stated that "according to residents (of Martissant) a local gang called Base Pilate was responsible for four murders. The leaders of this armed group are insane with rage after the death of a police officer considered to be one of their allies...The Base Pilate is committed, under the umbrella of the armed gangs of Grand Ravine, to fight without mercy against the Lame Ti Manchet, another rival band based within Sainte-Bernadette lane."

- An 8 December 2006 broadcast, again recorded on the ground in Martissant, from Radio Metropole, stated "Heavy shooting was recorded in the zone of Martissant yesterday ; witnesses confirm that gangsters of Grand Ravine associated with the gang Base Pilate tried to launch an attack against the districts of Descartes and Martissant 1. Residents of Descartes and Martissant 1 affirm that 2 people were killed and several others wounded yesterday evening. "

- A 19 January 2007 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya, which stated that "A wild war has been underway for several months among gangs called Base Pilate and Lame Ti Manchet, which imposes the law of the jungle on Bolosse, Grand Ravine and Ste-Bernadette."

3. Further on Nanoune Myrthil’s infant

Like any other observer, I do not feel that I yet know the full story of the fate of Nanoune Myrthil’s infant, nor have I ever stated otherwise. However, given the statements of Nanoune Myrthil herself, the focus on the case by Radio Haiti Inter (arguably Haiti’s most independent and respected radio station when it was still broadcasting) and Radio Metropole during 2000/2001, and the separate (yet highly similar) declarations of Johnny Occilius, Jean-Michard Mercier and Sonia Desrosiers, it certainly, to me, seems a case worth investigating and by any standard rises to the level of something that is newsworthy. Can one imagine such a case in the United States or Europe, with individuals similarly close to the seat of power making such declarations and the charges not receiving media attention or a thorough investigation? I certainly cannot.

4. Reporting ethically from Haiti

Most journalists I know, whatever other criticisms I may have of them, would never knowingly print information that they knew to be false. This cannot be said for those seeking to deny justice to the victims of St. Marc and Martissant today.

In 2006, Jeb Sprague and Diana Barhona attacked the press solidarity group Reporters sans frontières (RSF), for supposedly receiving money from the International Republican Institute (IRI). When Sprague and Barhona were unable to produce proof of this claim, RSF News Editor Jean-François Julliard responded succinctly "We do not receive any funding from the International Republican Institute. This is a pure figment of the authors' imagination. Your readers can check our certified accounts on our website, rsf.org. "  

Also, in 2006, Jeb Sprague attacked the Haiti Support Group, a London-based solidarity organization that has been working at a grassroots level in Haiti since 1992. In an article co-authored with Joe Emersberger and which appeared in the magazine Counterpunch, Sprague claimed that Haiti Support Group head Charles Arthur encouraged people to harass a researcher who had published highly controversial human rights study in the British medical journal, The Lancet (link). Arthur later wrote that "The statements about me in the Counterpunch piece are pure fiction. " Arthur’s full response to Sprague’s allegations can be read here.

In his 2009 article, “Calls Mount to Free Lavalas Activist," Wadner Pierre (along with Sprague one of the co-editors of the Haiti Analysis website) described Ronald “Black Ronald” Dauphin - a man identified by survivors of the February 2004 pogrom as one of the chief members of the group that carried out the massacre - as “a Haitian political prisoner,” attacked the RNDDH and quoted the IJDH which also, curiously, described Ronald Dauphin in a June 2009 press release as “a Haitian grassroots activist, customs worker and political prisoner,” language mimicked closely in the Sprague/Pierre article.

Wadner Pierre, who recently wrote a rather un-gentlemanly piece mocking Haitian presidential candidate Mirlande Manigat on the basis of here age wrote his laudatory article about those accused in the St. Marc killings having never mentioned that he had been described as working for the IJDH’s Haiti affiliated, the BAI , or that he had previously contributed text and photographs to the IJDH website lauding the April 2007 release of Amanus Mayette, another suspect of the St. Marc massacre, a photo essay that since appears to have been removed from the IJDH site.

Given such a record, I am not surprised that Sprague, Pierre, etc would continue their rather fevered attacks against reporters against myself (which I largely responded to in a blog posting here) and against the victims in Martissant and St. Marc.

Our first and only duty as reporters is not to those abroad who have profited from Haiti’s ongoing misery, it is to the suffering in Haiti themselves. Whatever discomfort that causes in powerful circles beyond Haiti is not only deserved, but welcome and necessary if the cycle of impunity that is killing the country is ever to be ended.

With my best regards and hopes for a peaceful election,

MD

Follow Michael Deibert on Twitter

2011-03-12T03:05:00.002+01:00

You can now follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/michaelcdeibert. Happy Reading!

Huffington’s Plunder

2011-02-23T00:34:00.003+01:00

(This piece by journalist and author Chris Hedges is perhaps the best article that I have yet read on the scandalous and rapacious practices that are killing real journalism these days. As Hedges writes, "this latest form of 'liberal' exploitation exposes yet again the liberal class for who they really are—opportunists whose operating methods are as callous as those used in running the textile mills in southern China." Well said, Mr. Hedges. MD)

Huffington’s Plunder

Please read the original article here.

Posted on Feb 21, 2011

By Chris Hedges

I was in New York City on Thursday night at the Brecht Forum to discuss with the photographer Eugene Richards his powerful new book “War Is Personal” when I was approached for an interview by a blogger for The Huffington Post. I had just finished speaking with another blogger who had recently graduated from UC Berkeley.

These encounters, which are frequent at public events, break my heart. I see myself in the older bloggers, many of whom worked for newspapers until they took buyouts or were laid off, as well as in the aspiring reporters. These men and women love the trade. They want to make a difference. They have the integrity not to sell themselves to public relations firms or corporate-funded propaganda outlets. And they keep at it, the way true artists, musicians or actors do, although there are dimmer and dimmer hopes of compensation. They are victims of a dying culture, one that no longer values the talents that would keep it healthy and humane. The corporate state remunerates corporate management and public relations. It lavishes money on the celebrities who provide the fodder for our national mini-dramas. But those who deal with the bedrock virtues of truth, justice and beauty, who seek not to entertain but to transform, are discarded. They must struggle on their own.

The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit of reportedly at least several million dollars made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of this new paradigm of American journalism. The Huffington Post, as Stephen Colbert pointed out when he stole the entire content of The Huffington Post and rechristened it The Colbuffington Re-post, produces little itself. The highly successful site, like most Internet sites, is largely pirated from other sources, especially traditional news organizations, or is the product of unpaid writers who are rechristened “citizen journalists.” It is driven by the celebrity gossip that dominates cheap tabloids, with one or two stories that come from The New York Times or one of the wire services to give it a veneer of journalistic integrity. Hollywood celebrities, or at least their publicists, write windy and vapid commentaries. And this, I fear, is what news is going to look like in the future. The daily reporting and monitoring of city halls, courts, neighborhoods and government, along with investigations into corporate fraud and abuse, will be replaced by sensational garbage and Web packages that are made to look like news but contain little real news.

The terminal decline of newspapers has destroyed thousands of jobs that once were dedicated to reporting, verifying fact and giving a voice to those who without these news organizations would not be heard. Newspapers, although they were too embedded among the power elite and blunted their effectiveness in the name of a faux objectivity, at least stopped things from getting worse. This last and imperfect bulwark has been removed. It has been replaced by Internet creations that mimic journalism. Good reporters, like good copy editors or good photographers, who must be paid and trained for years while they learn the trade, are becoming as rare as blacksmiths. Stories on popular sites are judged not by the traditional standards of journalism but by how many hits they receive, how much Internet traffic they generate, and how much advertising they can attract. News is irrelevant. Facts mean little. Reporting is largely nonexistent. No one seems to have heard of the common good. Our television screens are filled with these new chattering celebrity journalists. They pop up one day as government spokespeople and appear the next as hosts on morning news shows. They deal in the currency of emotion, not truth. They speak in empty clichés, not ideas. They hyperventilate, with a spin from the left or the right, over every bit of gossip. And their corporate sponsors make these court jesters millionaires. We are entertained by these clowns as corporate predators ruthlessly strip us of our capacity to sustain a living, kill our ecosystem because of greed, gut civil liberties and turn us into serfs.

Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the lifeblood out of a trade I care deeply about. It was bad enough that Huffington used her site for flagrant self-promotion, although the cult of the self has reached such dizzying proportions in American society that such behavior is almost expected. But there is an even sadder irony that this was carried out in the name of journalism.

“Something is happening here,” Bob Dylan sang in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “but you don’t know what it is. Do you Mr. Jones?”

This latest form of “liberal” exploitation exposes yet again the liberal class for who they really are—opportunists whose operating methods are as callous as those used in running the textile mills in southern China. Is it any wonder that working men and women, who have been abandoned and betrayed by these self-identified liberals, hate the liberal class and its transparent hypocrisy? Is it any wonder that the some 40 million Americans who live in poverty are invisible to the wider culture? Is it any wonder that the tea party and all the lunatics on the fringe of our political spectrum put their cross hairs on the liberal class and its purported values? Let’s not forget the title of Huffington’s latest book: “Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream.”

Liberals like these deserve the rage they engender.

The argument made to defend this exploitation is that the writers had a choice. It is an argument I also heard made by the managers of sweatshops in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, the coal companies in West Virginia or Kentucky and huge poultry farms in Maine. It is the argument made by the comfortable, by those who do not know what it is to be hard up, desperate or driven by a passion to express one’s self and the world through journalism or art. It is the argument the wealthy elite, who have cemented in place an oligarchic system under which there are no real choices, use to justify their oppression.

Who would not want to be able to carry out his or her trade and make enough to pay the bills? What worker would decline the possibility of job protection, health care and a pension? Why do these people think tens of millions of Americans endure substandard employment?

If Huffington has a conscience, she will sit down when the AOL check arrives and make sure every cent of it is paid out to those who worked free or at minimal wages for her over the last six years, starting with Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the “clinging to guns and religion” story about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and spent two years writing and reporting without a salary.

“She strung me along for two years while I repeatedly asked for funding for three projects, and then I quit,” Fowler told me from Oakland, Calif., as I spoke with her by phone. When Fowler, whom the site nominated twice for a Pulitzer, finally resigned last year in disgust, Mario Ruiz, the spokesperson for The Huffington Post, acidly told Yahoo News: “Mayhill Fowler says that she is ‘resigning’ from The Huffington Post. How do you resign from a job you never had?”

That comment says it all. It exposes the callousness of our oligarchic class and their belief that they have a right to use anyone who can contribute to the monuments they spend their lives erecting to themselves.

Chris Hedges is a fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly Truthdig columnist. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

Dear Muammar

2011-02-21T18:13:00.005+01:00

Dear Muammar: A Note to Muammar Gaddafi

On behalf of the 270 people killed aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988,

On behalf of all of those killed and victimized by Charles Taylor and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, for whom you served as one of the key initial backers,

On behalf of all of those killed and victimized in Sierra Leone by Revolutionary United Front forces who attended guerrilla training camps in Libya,

On behalf of all those killed, victimized and displaced by the propagation of Arab supramacism in the Sudanese region of Darfur, which you helped create by aiding in the formation the Arab supremacist organisation Tajamu al-Arabi,

And on behalf of your own people, who you continue to victimize,

I sincerely hope, failing the proper processes against you by the International Criminal Court, that you soon come to the Benito Mussolini-like end that you so richly deserve.

Regards,

MD

Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise

2011-02-17T20:18:00.007+01:00

Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise

By Michael Deibert

The indictment late last year by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of six prominent Kenyans for their roles in violence following that country’s disputed 2007 elections was a welcome sign for those seeking to hold politicians accountable for their crimes. Though the ICC has badly bungled what should have been its showpiece case - against the ruthless Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga - the Kenya indictments nevertheless represented a welcome extension of its continuing mission.

To those of us who have seen Haiti’s political convulsions first-hand over the years, that Caribbean nation makes a compelling case for attention by the ICC as perpetrators of human rights abuses often go unpunished or are even rehabilitated in subsequent governments. With one despotic former ruler (Jean-Claude Duvalier) having recently returned and another (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) announcing his intention to do so, one Haitian case, in particular, would seem tailor-made for the ICC’s attention.

In February 2004, in the midst of a chaotic rebellion against Mr. Aristide's government, the photojournalist Alex Smailes and I found ourselves in the central Haitian city of Saint Marc, at the time the last barrier between Aristide and a motley collection of once-loyal street gangs and former soldiers who were sweeping down from the country's north seeking to oust him.

Several days earlier, on 7 February, an armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighborhood of La Scierie, had attempted to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they set on fire.

On 9 February, the combined forces of the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) - a unit directly responsible for the president’s personal security - and a local paramilitary organisation named Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) retook much of the city. By 11 February, a few days before our arrival, Bale Wouze - headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette - had commenced the battle to retake La Scierie. Often at Mayette’s side was a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald,”often garbed in a police uniform even though he was in no way officially employed by the police.

When Alex and I arrived in the town, we found the USGPN and Bale Wouze patrolling Saint Marc as a single armed unit. Speaking to residents there - amidst a surreal backdrop of burned buildings, the stench of human decay, drunken gang members threatening our lives with firearms and a terrified population - we soon realized that something awful had happened in Saint Marc.

According to multiple residents interviewed during that visit and a subsequent visit that I made to the town in June 2009, after government forces retook the town - and after a press conference there by Yvon Neptune, at the time Aristide’s Prime Minister and also the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti - a textbook series of war crimes took place.

Residents spoke of how Kenol St. Gilles, a carpenter with no political affiliation, was shot in each thigh, beaten unconscious by Bale Wouze members and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died. Unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph was decapitated, while Ramicos second-in-command Nixon François was simply shot. In the ruins of the burned-out commissariat, Bale Wouze members gang raped a 21-year-old woman, while other residents were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain. A local priest told me matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that “these people don't make arrests, they kill."

According to a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited Saint Marc a month after the killings, at least 27 people were murdered there between Feb. 11 and Aristide’s flight into exile at the end of the month. Her conclusion supported by the research of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, a Haitian human rights organization.

Following Aristide's overthrow, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched, while Yvon Neptune turned himself over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of President René Préval in May 2006.

Held in prison without trial until his May 2006 release on humanitarian grounds, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressed that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined.” Neptune ran unsuccessfully for president in Haiti’s recent elections.

After being jailed for three years without trial, Amanus Mayette was freed from prison in April 2007. Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, and was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial. At the time of writing, Mr. Aristide himself continues to enjoy a gilded exile in South Africa, his luxurious lifestyle and protection package bankrolled by South African taxpayers.

Frustratingly for the people of St. Marc, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the events they experienced have become a political football among international political actors.

The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet, in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterization that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimized had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition.

The Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH), a U.S.-based organization, has lauded Mr. Dauphin as “a Haitian grassroots activist.” The IJDH itself maintains close links with Mr. Aristide’s U.S. attorney, Ira Kurzban, who is listed as one of the group’s founders, serves on the chairman of board of directors and whose law firm, according to U.S. Department of Justice filings, earned nearly $5 million for its lobbying work alone representing the Aristide government during the era of its worst excesses. By comparison, the firm of former U.S. congressmen Ron Dellums received the relatively modest sum of $989,323 over the same period.

When I returned to St. Marc in June of 2009, I found its residents still wondering when someone would be held accountable for the terrible crimes they had been subjected to. Amazil Jean-Baptiste, the mother of Kenol St. Gilles, said simply "I just want justice for my son.” A local victim’s rights group of survivors of the pogrom, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), formed to help advocate on residents’ behalf, but have had precious little success in what passes for Haiti’s justice system, broken and dysfunctional long before January 2010's devastating earthquake.

Though Mr. Aristide remains something of a fading star for a handful of commentators outside of Haiti- most of whom have not spent significant time in the country, cannot speak its language and have never bothered to sit down with the victims of the Aristide government's crimes there - to those of us who have seen a bit of its recent history firsthand, the words of veteran Trinidadian diplomat Reginald Dumas - a man who does know Haiti - seem apt, that Mr. Aristide "[acquired] for himself a reputation at home which did not match the great respect with which he was held abroad.''

The ICC has sometimes been criticized for acting as if war crimes and crimes against humanity are simply African problems, taking place in distant lands. The people of St. Marc, only a 90 minute flight from Miami, know differently. As Mr. Aristide currently loudly voices his desire to return to Haiti from his exile in South Africa, doubtlessly transiting several ICC signatory countries (including South Africa itself) in the process, the case of the victims of St. Marc is one admirably deserving of the ICC’s attention.

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He has been visiting and writing about Haiti since 1997.

Photo © Michael Deibert

WikiLeaks, US Embassy Cable 2009: UNDER NARCO THREAT, RULE OF LAW COLLAPSING IN COBAN.

2011-02-13T21:55:00.004+01:00

(Note: Readers might also be interested in two recent articles of mine from Guatemala, Guatemala: Caught in the crossfire, The Miami Herald 18 January 2011, and Guatemala's lonely battle against corruption, The Guardian 12 November 2010. Also see my 2008 article, Drugs vs. Democracy in Guatemala, World Policy Journal Winter 2008/09. MD)

VZCZCXRO5114
PP RUEHLA
DE RUEHGT #0106/01 0371015
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 061015Z FEB 09
FM AMEMBASSY GUATEMALA
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 6898
INFO RUEHZA/WHA CENTRAL AMERICAN COLLECTIVE
RUEHME/AMEMBASSY MEXICO 5071
RUEHLA/AMCONSUL BARCELONA 0007
RHEFDIA/DIA WASHINGTON DC
RHEFHLC/DEPT OF HOMELAND SECURITY WASHINGTON DC
RHMFISS/DEPT OF JUSTICE WASHINGTON DC
RUEABND/DEA HQS WASHDC

(Read the original cable here)

RHMCSUU/FBI WASHINGC O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 GUATEMALA 000106

SIPDIS

DEPT PLS PASS TO AID FOR LAC/CAM - SEIFERT

E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/04/2019
TAGS: PGOV SNAR EAID KCRM ASEC PHUM PINR MX GT
SUBJECT: UNDER NARCO THREAT, RULE OF LAW COLLAPSING IN COBAN

REF: A. 2008 GUATEMALA 387
¶B. 2008 GUATEMALA 1593

Classified By: Pol/Econ Counselor Drew Blakeney for reasons 1.4 (b&d).

Introduction
------------
¶1. (C) Confronted by the threat from three narcotrafficking
groups, including recently arrived "Zetas" from Mexico, the
local Rule of Law (ROL) apparatus in the northern city of
Coban is no longer capable of dealing with the most serious
kinds of crime. What is happening there is typical of many
rural areas of Guatemala. Sources tell us that Coban's
police are corrupt and allied with traffickers, and sometimes
even provide them escort. Some judges and prosecutors are
too frightened to do their jobs properly; others are in
league with the traffickers. Asserting that security is not
his job, the mayor is turning a blind eye to the
narco-violence in Coban's streets. Wholesale restructuring
of the ROL apparatus -- not mere personnel changes -- would
be required for the state to adequately reassert its
authority. End Introduction.

Mexican Zetas Settling Down in Coban...
---------------------------------------
¶2. (C) Prompted by accounts that more than 100 Mexican
"Zetas" (the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, members of which
are former soldiers) have taken up residence, Pol/Econ
Counselor visited the northern city of Coban, Guatemala,
January 11-13. AID officer made a follow-on trip to the
region Jan. 20-22. Coban, which is the capital of Alta
Verapaz Department, and its surrounding areas have a
population of approximately 150,000. Most inhabitants are
from the Q'Eqchi' and Poqomchi' indigenous groups, though the
area has many Spanish-speaking Ladinos as well. A September
2, 2008 shoot-out in front of the shopping mall involving
Mexican and Guatemalan traffickers armed with military
weapons brought Coban's growing narcotrafficking problem to
national attention. Coban is no longer the peaceful place it
was just a year and a half ago, although some interlocutors
reported that the Zetas are now trying to keep a lower
profile in order to avoid national and international
attention.

...with Help from Local Authorities
-----------------------------------
¶3. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXX, a ten-year resident of Coban, said there were
three main narcotrafficking groups/leaders in Coban: Walter
Overdic Mejia, the local representative of the Guatemalan
Lorenzana Family of Zacapa; "El Loco" Turcios, the local
representative of the Mendoza drug trafficking family of
Izabal; and most recently, more than 100 Mexican Zetas.
Overdic had invited the Zetas in, thinking he could arrange a
lucrative partnership, but now the Zetas are taking over,
XXXXXXXXXXXX said. They are buying land forming a corridor to
the Mexican border, and have met with local African palm
growers to tell them which land they can buy and which they
cannot. They kidnapped some of the growers, employees to
underline their point.

¶4. (C) According to XXXXXXXXXXXX, scores of mid- and
lower-ranking Zetas have taken up residence in "El Esfuerzo
1" and "El Esfuerzo 2," two poor neighborhoods in Coban,s
western Zone 12, adjacent to the airport. (Comment: During
a visit to the two impoverished neighborhoods, Pol/Econ
Qa visit to the two impoverished neighborhoods, Pol/Econ
Counselor observed many idle youths. It appeared that they
could easily be manipulated by outsiders with money.)
XXXXXXXXXXXX said immigration authorities are helping the Zetas
obtain Guatemalan passports and other documents to normalize
their status in the country. The Zetas also are believed to
operate a training camp in the area. In separate
conversations with AID officer, XXXXXXXXXXXX, native of Coban, said Zetas freely use the
airport, even during daylight hours.

¶5. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXX said he had seen police XXXXXXXXXXXX personally
escorting the Zetas. In addition to assisting the Zetas,
XXXXXXXXXXXX has been in the employ of both of the main
Guatemalan rival traffickers, Turcios and Overdic, and has
betrayed both, according to XXXXXXXXXXXX. One or the other may

GUATEMALA 00000106 002 OF 004


assassinate him soon, XXXXXXXXXXXX speculated. He noted that
the September firefight with military weapons occurred in
front of the shopping mall, 500 meters from the police
station. The PNC did not respond. The genesis of the
firefight, according to XXXXXXXXXXXX, was Overdic had sent
Jorge Flores to ambush the Zetas in retaliation for their
March 25 murder of Juan Leon in Zacapa (ref b). When the
SAIA (Counternarcotics Analysis and Information Service)
briefly detained Overdic,s wife and son, Overdic announced
on local radio that if they were not immediately freed, he
would "blow up the shopping mall, and the commercial center
of town." Storekeepers duly closed for the day, and the mall
was evacuated. Mrs. Overdic was released. (Note: During a
search of the Overdics' bodyguards' quarters, investigators
allegedly found three checks to Army Colonel Carlos Adolfo
Mancilla, according to the International Commission Against
Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Mancilla has since been
promoted to Brigadier General and made Deputy Chief of Staff,
ref b.)

Mayor, Police Chief Don't See a Problem
---------------------------------------
¶6. (C) From Coban but not having lived there since
childhood, Mayor Leonel Chacon of the FRG left the textile
business in Guatemala City to return home to run for mayor.
He was eager to discuss his economic development plans with
Pol/Econ Counselor, but was visibly nervous when asked to
discuss security and narcotics trafficking. He said that
narcotraffickers could at times be seen in Coban, but had no
negative impact on local life. He dismissed reports of Zetas
in Coban as "rumors," and did not react to mention of the
September shoot-out, Walter Overdic, and Overdic,s alleged
murder of an appellate court judge two years ago. "I don't
have a problem with anybody," Chacon said. He mentioned that
common crime has long remained at a constant, low level.
Despite the mayor's assurances, XXXXXXXXXXXX told AID
officer that local cocaine consumption was growing, and that
the narcotraffickers' local transportation network now
includes many taxi drivers and small farmers.

¶7. (C) Police XXXXXXXXXXXX told Pol/Econ Counselor that narcotraffickers
occasionally use the Coban area as a transportation corridor,
but do not disrupt local life. He said the September
shoot-out was Juan Leon's supporters ambushing Mexican Zetas.
"It doesn't worry me if they want to kill each other,"
XXXXXXXXXXXX said. Key to interrupting narcotraffickers'
operations is more patrolling, he asserted, but with just 280
PNC officers to cover the whole of Alta Verapaz Department,
that was not possible. XXXXXXXXXXXX said he personally had
transported Walter "The Tiger" Overdic to jail on several
occasions during his previous assignment to the area, but
since judges freed him each time, there was little point in
going after him or other narcotraffickers again. Common
crime has long remained at a constant, low level. Youths
from impoverished Zone 12, at the western end of Coban, are
trying to imitate Guatemala City gang members, but so far
haven't been much of a problem, XXXXXXXXXXXX said. (Note: Mayor
XXXXXXXXXXXX and Mayor XXXXXXXXXXXX and Mayor of XXXXXXXXXXXX
separately told AID officer that Alta Verapaz residents tend
to report drug crimes to municipal authorities rather than to
the police because they are convinced that Chief Sandoval and
his officers are in league with traffickers. End Note.)

Judicial Workers Intimidated
----------------------------
¶8. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXX said his conscience was
clear, and that he was doing the best job he could while
bearing in mind Coban,s "new realities." (Note: XXXXXXXXXXXX is
one of three judges who may have made decisions helpful to
Overdic, according to CICIG.) "I do not wish to become a
martyr," XXXXXXXXXXXX said, noting that he drives himself to work,
has no security, and his family lives nearby. Local police
are corrupt, XXXXXXXXXXXX said, and he did not know whom to trust
within local rule of law institutions. XXXXXXXXXXXX acknowledged the
local presence of Zetas and other traffickers, but would not
go into details. He said it was time to consider a new,
extraordinary arrangement that would provide protection for
judicial workers and their families. Anonymity would have to
be part of the arrangement, which would need to include far

GUATEMALA 00000106 003 OF 004


more robust investigative and policing capabilities.

¶9. (C) Criminal Prosecutor XXXXXXXXXXXX of the
Public Ministry (MP, the Attorney General's Office) told
Pol/Econ Counselor that she "had never intended to join the
army, or do any other job likely to get (her) killed" when
she became a prosecutor decades ago. XXXXXXXXXXXX.
When she drives herself to work each morning, she goes past a
line of inmates, family members, who are awaiting access to
their loved ones inside, she said. "I put some of those
inmates in that prison. Do you think their family members
notice me when I drive by? Do you think they point at me?
They do," she said. Mentioning that she regularly rides
public busses alone, XXXXXXXXXXXX said she would like to vigorously
pursue cases against narcotraffickers, but feels too
vulnerable to do so. Furthermore, she said, local police
were not trustworthy. Her workload is on the rise: the Coban
MP's common criminal case load had increased from
300-400/month two years ago to 600-800 now, and was
distributed among three prosecutors and four assistants. "We
cannot go on like this ... something has got to change," she
concluded. There was consensus among AID officer's
interlocutors that judges and prosecutors are turning a blind
eye to narcotraffickers because they fear for their lives,
and those of their family members.

Better Leadership in Neighboring Tactic
---------------------------------------
¶10. (C) Pol/Econ Counselor also traveled to three ethnic
Poqomchi, towns immediately south of Coban -- Santa Cruz,
San Cristobal Verapaz, and Tactic. Unsatisfied with the
usual mayors, answer that they do not deal with security
issues, Hugo Rolando Caal Co, the newly-elected Mayor of
Tactic, decided he would. He organized neighborhood
"intelligence committees" to gather information on outsiders
and criminals, which report information to the Mayor's
Office, which then reports it to ROL authorities. He is also
installing street cameras that will be monitored from a
central site at the municipality building. Caal said he is
considering joint security initiatives with the mayors of the
other three ethnic Poqomchi' towns -- Tamahu, Santa Cruz
Verapaz, and San Cristobal Verapaz. He noted that it is easy
for residents of the four Poqomchi' towns to spot outsiders
because they generally do not speak Poqomchi'. Caal Co hoped
to capitalize on the Poqomchis' unique linguistic identity
for the community's security benefit.

¶11. (C) Caal said a recent, gruesome murder made him think
for the first time that perhaps narcotraffickers had come to
Tactic. Hundreds of townspeople had attempted to lynch the
suspected perpetrators on the morning of January 13 (during
Pol/Econ Counselor's visit), but PNC Chief Sandoval and his
men arrived to take the suspects into custody. Caal was
critical of ROL authorities, saying they needed to be more
efficient and vigilant. He and other municipal leaders told
AID officer that the PNC's living and working conditions are
not such as to inspire loyalty to the state, and that the GOG
needs to do more for its police, starting with better
Qneeds to do more for its police, starting with better
salaries. In the meantime, Caal Co told AID officer, the
army, which is a stronger institution, should do more joint
patrolling with the police. This would serve to strengthen
the state's law enforcement presence and might encourage
better police comportment.

¶12. (C) Judge XXXXXXXXXXXX opined that the ROL
apparatus is broken. The PNC and MP often accuse judges of
freeing criminals, but the Penal Code was written in such as
a way as to make that the likeliest outcome. Guatemala
desperately needs to reform its Penal Code, he said. In
cases in which laws, sentencing provisions conflict, such as
in the case of the Femicide Law (a copy of which he had on
his desk) and the Penal Code, judges were forced to apply the
lesser sentence. Despairing of the status quo, XXXXXXXXXXXX said,
"Soon there will be no choice but to resort to martial law."
While Tactic had remained relatively quiet, XXXXXXXXXXXX said Coban
was out of control. He related that three truckloads of
Zetas recently stopped a police patrol to inform the two PNC
officers that a narcotrafficking operation was imminent. The
PNC officers should remain silent and go on their way,
"unless either of you are dissatisfied with your salaries, in
which case you should come with us," the Zetas had told the

GUATEMALA 00000106 004 OF 004


police.

Comment
-------
¶13. (C) Coban's ROL infrastructure was never intended to
deal with the kind of threats to public order that it now
faces, and is collapsing. The process of loss of state
control now underway in Coban has already occurred in other
parts of the country, including Zacapa and Izabal
Departments, as well as parts of Jutiapa, Chiquimula, San
Marcos, and Peten Departments. Without outside intervention,
Coban will join the growing list of areas lost to
narcotraffickers.
McFarland

Egypt

2011-02-11T17:15:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to the heroes and martyrs of Egypt. You got rid of the old pharaoh! You are real heroes, people of October.

Haiti Stories / Istwa Ayiti

2011-01-26T18:09:00.001+01:00

(Please come hear myself and others discuss Haiti at the Haiti Stories/Istwa Ayiti conference at UCLA this week. MD)

Conference: Haiti Stories / Istwa Ayiti

Saturday, January 29, 2011

1-6 pm

Free program

In a series of discussions moderated by author and journalist Amy Wilentz, scholars across several disciplines examine how Haiti is narrated and presented in the world, and how storytelling, in the broadest as well as narrowest senses, affects the country in general and in the aftermath of the earthquake. Speakers, from 1-4 pm, include:

Donald Cosentino, scholar of Haitian art, professor of world arts and cultures

Mark Danner, writer, journalist, and professor of journalism

Michael Deibert, writer and journalist

Jonathan Demme, filmmaker

Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health

Axelle Liautaud, designer and art collector

Bob Maguire, professor of international affairs and director of the Trinity Haiti Program

Michele Voltaire Marcelin, poet and artist

Catherine Maternowska, anthropologist, co-founder of Lambi Fund of Haiti

Jocelyn McCalla, senior advisor to Haiti's Special Envoy to the United Nations

Claudine Michel, professor of black studies

Joe Mozingo, writer, Los Angeles Times

Madison Smartt Bell, novelist and writer

Deborah Sontag, investigative reporter, New York Times

Maggie Steber, photojournalist

Loune Viaud, director of Strategic Planning and Operations, Zanmi Lasante

Damon Winter, photojournalist, New York Times

A reception from 4-6 pm closes the program.

Please note: seating for this conference is first-come, first-served.

A monster returns to Haiti

2011-01-19T20:16:00.001+01:00

19 January 2011

A monster returns to Haiti

By Michael Deibert, Special to CNN

(Read the original article here)

Editor's note: Michael Deibert is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of "Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti" (Seven Stories Press).

(CNN) -- The return to Haiti this week of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the scion of a family dictatorship that misruled that Caribbean nation for 29 years, is a sharp reminder of how impunity remains a significant stumbling block as Haitians try to construct a more just and equitable society.

Returning to the same airport from which he fled in 1986, Duvalier (popularly known as "Baby Doc" to distinguish him from his more unhinged dictator father, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier), looked stunned and confused, as if the Port-au-Prince to which he returned -- still leveled from a 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people -- had changed beyond recognition.

Unfortunately for Haiti's people, however, some things about the nation -- which produces sinuous music, acidly brilliant novelists and stunning art, along with grinding poverty and political unrest -- have yet to change.

Though Duvalier presided over his sputtering police state without the gleeful ruthlessness of his father, his tenure in Haiti's presidential palace was nevertheless perhaps best summed up by a prison on the outskirts of the Haitian capital called Fort Dimanche, where enemies of the state were sent to die by execution, torture or to simply waste away amidst conditions that were an affront to humanity.

The figure of the rotund Duvalier -- who was questioned yesterday by a Haitian judge about a few of his government's many transgressions -- and his spendthrift wife presiding over such a desperately poor country might have been farcical were the results not so grim.

Haitians' great hopes after Duvalier's flight were sobered considerably amidst ever-greater bloodletting, as pressure groups such as the Duvalier's former paramilitary henchmen, the army, the country's rapacious elite and others vied for the spoils of power.

The election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the head of a broad-based coalition in 1990 was followed by a coup only seven months after his inauguration. Three long years of paramilitary terror followed before Aristide was returned by a U.S.-led military mission to Haiti in 1994. The leaders of the regime that oversaw the terror, again, fled to their comfortable repasts abroad.

But happy endings are hard to come by in Haiti. As Duvalier whiled away his time, using his ill-gotten fortune in Europe, the newly returned Aristide set about creating a thuggish style of governance that the younger Duvalier's father would have found very familiar.

Corrupted elections in 1997 and 2000 favored Aristide's loyalists, and important statutes of Haiti's 1987 constitution -- such as those forbidding the cult of personality and protecting the independence of the judiciary -- were trampled.

By the time Aristide returned to Haiti's national palace in 2001, a network of armed partisans reminded many Haitians of the ruthless methods of rulers past. Then, 18 years after Duvalier's flight, Aristide followed him into exile in February 2004, amid street protests and a rebellion spearhead by formerly loyal gang members.

The grotesque excesses of Duvalier are perhaps the most well known, but to date, none of these men have seen the inside of a prison cell for the actions of their respective regimes. Victims of the Duvaliers' network of enforcers -- the Tontons Macoutes -- have waited in vain for justice and even seen former Duvalierist officials recycled in succeeding, supposedly "democratic," governments.

Nor has anyone yet been held accountable for several large-scale killings by government security forces -- or the slaying of at least 27 people in the town of St. Marc in February 2004 that occurred as the Aristide government drew to its inevitable denouement .

Frustratingly for the people of Haiti, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the abuses they have experienced have more often than not become a political football among international actors.

During the height of the excesses of Duvalier fils, Ron Brown, then acting as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee and later serving as Bill Clinton's secretary of Commerce, lobbied the U.S. Congress on behalf of the dictator, pocketing more than half a million dollars for his efforts.

In the present day, a U.S.-based organization called the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, linked at the hip with Aristide's U.S. attorney, Ira Kurzban, has worked to discredit the calls for justice of the survivors of the massacre in St. Marc. Kurzban's law firm made millions representing the Aristide government.

Like Duvalier before him, Aristide continues to enjoy a gilded exile, this time in South Africa, where his comfortable lifestyle is bankrolled by South African taxpayers.

And now Duvalier, one of Haiti's waking nightmares, is back in his native land. Will he face justice? What will that justice look like in a place where recently political actors saw fit to rig an election amidst the ruins of a country that has yet to even begin to recover from last year's apocalyptic tremor?

The aforementioned great writers of Haiti no doubt find it all bitterly symbolic.

Out of the ruins of the Duvalier torture prison, Fort Dimanche, now abandoned, grew a slum. Its residents called it Village Demokrasi. Democracy Village.

It is here where, as Duvalier returns from 25 years of exile and Haiti marks as many years of the international community's questionable ministrations, that residents try to stave off hunger pangs with cakes made out of clay and seasoned with cubes of chicken or beef bouillon.

There is symbolism in that, too.

Guatemala: Caught in the crossfire

2011-01-18T16:39:00.001+01:00

18 January 2011

GUATEMALA

Caught in the crossfire

BY MICHAEL DEIBERT

The Miami Herald

(Read the original article here)

My friend -- from an eastern region of Guatemala that empties into the Gulf of Honduras -- spoke in hushed tones as we met in a coffee shop in that Central American country recently.

One of the region's wealthiest families, whose interests run to transportation and construction endeavors but also to more illicit forms of entrepreneurship, had recently received an offer that they couldn't refuse.

Called to a meeting in the jungle-covered department of El Petén, the family's scions found themselves face to face with members of Los Zetas.

Originally members of a Mexican army unit, the Zetas (named after a radio code for high-ranking officers) defected from the military to become enforcers for the Cártel del Golfo in the late 1990s. Subsequently jettisoning their new employers to become an international organized-crime entity in their own right, in recent months the two groups have waged a brutal battle for control of drug-smuggling routes in the Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León.

The Zetas' message to their erstwhile Guatemalan competitors was clear and chilling: Join forces with the Mexican cartel or make a $1.5 million down payment and deliver monthly payments in the sum of $700,000. There would be no negotiation.

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on that country's drug cartels in late 2006, two of Mexico's largest cartels, Joaquín ``Chapo'' Guzmán's Cartel de Sinaloa and the Zetas themselves, have sought the path of least resistance, filtering through the 541-mile border that Guatemala shares with its northern neighbor.

Though the presence of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in Guatemala is nothing new -- Guzmán was arrested there in 1993, and Guatemalan soldiers have joined the Zetas in the past -- the intensity of the groups' invasion of the country over the past two years has been unparalleled.

In Guatemala, the cartels have found a country with a state designed to be weak and ineffective by a rapacious oligarchy. Only 15,000 solders and 26,000 police patrol its rugged terrain, though there are more than 100,000 active private security personnel. Scaled down after the country's 1996 peace accords following decades of atrocities, today's numerically small and poorly trained Guatemalan security forces have made way for the armed enforcers of the country's various criminal monarchies.

This past November, the government of Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom declared a state of siege in the department of Alta Verapaz, a stronghold of the Zetas. In response, men claiming to be from the cartel took to the airwaves of three radio stations and threatened to attack shopping centers, schools and police stations if government pressure did not cease.

Further afield, the region between the border town of Tecún Umán and the Pacific coast municipality of Ocos has become a no-man's land, the redoubt of Juan Alberto ``Chamalé'' Ortiz López, an alleged Guatemalan drug kingpin who is said to have been the first person to bring the Zetas into Guatemala in 2007.

Unexplained assassinations, such as that of former government deputy Obdulio Solórzano this past July, have once again become the norm, and a United Nations-mandated commission tasked with looking into criminal entities and their links to the state can barely keep up with its ever-expanding caseload.

With multiple-casualty shootouts occurring throughout the country, Guatemalans could be forgiven for looking to their politicians for protection. However, the wide perception in Guatemala is that the major political parties have been so deeply penetrated by organized crime that they themselves are part of the problem.

``You have no idea what kind of power they have,'' a former Guatemalan official told me recently, speaking of organized crime's influence on the upper echelons of the Guatemalan political establishment. Faced with such violence, a social movement to demand effective, capable law-enforcement and a transparent, non-corrupt judiciary has yet to emerge from Guatemala's fragile civil society.

Fourteen years after the end of Guatemala's civil war, successive governments have failed to break the stranglehold of corruption and impunity on the country. For many poor Guatemalans who survived that conflict, the very concept of Guatemala as a country at all was mostly a theoretical one until the army came calling.

It is an equal tragedy to see them once again victimized by today's conflict, a war in all but name.

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Douze janvier

2011-01-10T23:59:00.002+01:00

As we approach a day when I am sure every do-gooder, opportunist, crank, cynic and other assorted character will be weighing in with verbose and sanctimonious tomes on this melancholy anniversary, I just wanted to keep things brief.

Haitians, to the many of you that toil everyday for the necessities of life with so little reward to show for your efforts, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that you have been dealt such a cruel hand by nature and fate, and I am sorry that your own leaders and ours have failed you so miserably time and time again. Thank you for the kindnesses, small and large, that you have shown me during the long time I have spent traversing your city lanes and your country roads. I really do hope, to the bottom of my soul, that 2011 is a bit kinder to you, and I will do my best to contribute what I can.

With love,

MD

Books in 2010 : A Personal Selection

2010-12-24T23:40:00.004+01:00

Despite what at times seemed like an endless schedule of travel (a situation to be remedied by settling down to write my third book in 2011), I still found time over the past year to get quite a bit of reading done. Some of the more notable examples appear below.

Feliz Año Nuevo,

MD

The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shadid Ali

I was first made aware of the writing of Kashmiri poet Agha Shadid Ali by the Indian journalist Dilip D’Souza when I was living in Mumbai (née Bombay) in early 2007. This was the same era I paid my first visit to the disputed yet achingly beautiful swathe of Kashmir currently administered by India. It was a trip that left of deep impression on me, as I was welcomed with great hospitality by the Kashmiris whom I met and saw first-hand how, in the words of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front’s Yasin Malik “the government of India in Kashmir is existing in bunkers, and running their democracy through the barrel of a gun." When protests swirled throughout Kashmir this past year, I purchased this 1997 collection of poems by Ali, who passed away prematurely in 2001. The book is a moving meditation on the costs of Kashmir’s ongoing conflict and the pain of dislocation and exile, musing on “blood sheer rubies in Himalayan snow.” In doing so, it rises to the level of Irish Civil War-era Yeats in its blending of the personal and political.

Alice Lakwena & Holy Spirits: War In Northern Uganda 1986-97 by Heike Behrend

A fascinating and disturbing book that looks at the roots of one of Africa’s most destructive and frightening rebel groups, Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and the strange milieu, part military organization, part ethno-regional cult, from which it sprang. Details definitively how the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, emerged as a rival to, rather than a disciple of, the mystic Alice Lakwena and her Holy Spirit Mobile Forces movement.

Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden

An unflinching account of the violence currently ravaging the eponymous Mexican city across the border from El Paso (which I myself wrote about here), Murder City is written in impressionistic, minimalist vignettes. Bowden writes that he wants “to explain the violence as if it were a flat tire and I am searching the surface for a nail. But what if the violence is not a kind of breakdown, but more like a flower springing from the rot of the forest floor?” A sobering subtext to the war on drugs.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa by Peter Godwin

Not the world’s most effective writer or perceptive analyst, but still has a relatively interesting story to tell of the disintegration of what was one of Africa’s post-colonial success stories: Zimbabwe, under the delusional, tyrannical grip of Robert Mugabe and a small cadre of corrupt party loyalists. Godwin’s memoir would have been better served by a greater willingness to actually spend more time in Zimbabwe during the period in question, and to expand his view beyond the relatively insular world of white Zimbabweans that serves as his focus, but the brief, strobe-light flashes of a country imploding are useful case-studies nevertheless.

Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Set amidst the chaotic, violent scramble for post-colonial Angola, Kapuscinski, taking a different tack from his elegantly restrained portrait of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie in The Emperor, brings about in this book the feeling of what it is to be a journalist covering armed conflict in one of the forgotten corners of the world as well as any writer I have ever read.

Parentheses of Blood by Sony Labou Tansi

This scathingly brilliant dramatic satire of tyranny follows a group of soldiers searching for a rebel leader who is already dead, and was penned by perhaps Africa’s most under-appreciated writer. Favorite passage:

Rama: What’s a deserter?

Mark: A deserter is a uniformed soldier who says Libertashio is dead.

Rama: But it’s true. Papa is dead.

Mark: That’s merely civilian truth.

Between Terror and Democracy: Algeria Since 1989 by James D. Le Sueur

An important chronology of events before, during and beyond what the author at one point calls “an endless season of hell on earth,” this book by University of Nebraska history professor Le Sueur examines the political, cultural and religious elements that sent Algeria spiraling into civil war in the 1990s, a conflict from which it has not yet fully extracted itself. Though relying heavily on an authoritative and even-handed marshaling of secondary source material more than original first-hand interviews, the book nevertheless should prove to be an important work for those seeking to understand the internal politics of North Africa’s most tumultuous country.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

One of the best and least-romanticizing chronicles every written about war, examining in minute detail the mud, blood, propagandizing and naked political chicanery that accompanies armed conflict, this book chronicles the ideological disillusionment of its author into the liberal humanist who would later write Animal Farm and 1984.

Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 by Matthew J. Smith

In this book by a young Jamaican historian, Haiti, which has often been the literary and intellectual playground of a host of pampered foreign arrivistes, poseurs and pseudo-radicals, receives what it deserves: Genuine scholarship. Covering the period between the departure of the U.S. Marines after a 20-year military occupation of the country and the coming to power of François Duvalier, Smith’s book demonstrates how the dysfunctional nature of Haiti’s politics cannot be blamed on a single source, but is rather the product of decades of political and economic miscalculation and ill-intention on the part of both Haiti’s leaders and the international community.

Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala by David Stoll

In this revelatory book about the experiences of indigenous Guatemalans during the height of that country’s civil war, noted anthropologist David Stoll examines in detail the effects of insurgency and counter-insurgency in the pueblos in and around the Triángulo Ixil of the department of Quiché. We see a population defenseless against a brutal government but also against rebel pressure, and watch as a power struggle between Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism underscores the military struggle on the ground. A must read for anyone who wants to understand Guatemala’s present-day situation.

Children of Heroes by Lyonel Trouillot

First published in French as Les enfants des héros, this 2002 book by the man who is probably Haiti’s greatest living author traces the paths of two children fleeing a Port-au-Prince slum after murdering their abusive father. Unflinching and stunning.

U.S. must act to curb violence in Mexico

2010-12-22T14:55:00.003+01:00

Posted on Wednesday, 12.22.10

U.S. must act to curb violence in Mexico

BY MICHAEL DEIBERT

The Miami Herald

(Read the original article here)

There are few places where the failure of America's drug policy is more visible than in Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city of 1.3 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

This month passing the grim milestone of having had 3,000 people murdered within the municipality over the last year -- 10 times the figure of only three years ago -- Ciudad Juárez is the scene of a brutal struggle for control of lucrative drug transportation routes between the local Cartel de Juárez and the Cartel de Sinaloa, a group with its roots in the city of Culiacán.

Visitors to Juárez, previously best known for its maquiladoras, are now greeted by an altogether different picture. Masked gunmen, some federal police and Mexican army, some affiliated with the cartels, set up roadblocks seemingly at will as impoverished neighborhoods stretching out into the Chihuahuan desert have largely been depopulated by drug violence. A micro-industry of contract killing -- doled out to street gangs such as the Aztecas, Mexicles and Artistas Asesinos (Murder Artists) -- has resulted in once-unthinkable acts of violence becoming commonplace.

During my recent visit to Juárez, three federal policemen were killed. The same month, 14 people died when gunmen attacked a party for young people in the city, a grim echo of a similar massacre in January, during which 15 young people died. A casual drive through the city reveals cartel graffiti with the name of Mexico's President, Felipe Calderón, inside a rifle sight along with the words ``in the line of fire.''

Shortly after taking office in December 2006, after one of the most closely-contested elections in Mexico's history, Calderón declared war on Mexico's ever-more powerful drug cartels, which in addition to those operating in Juárez include the Cartel del Golfo and Los Zetas, the latter originally spawned by defectors from an elite U.S.-trained military unit designed to combat drug traffickers.

Calderón's decision to bring in the Mexican military to Juárez and other areas of the country to buttress poorly paid and trained local and federal police helped set in motion a violent clash with cartels that has claimed more than 30,000 lives in the last four years. The decision was not without controversy, as a recently released report from the Washington Office on Latin America concluded that ``the Mexican government's reliance on the Mexican military . . . has subjected the civilian population to numerous human rights abuses.''

However, far from being a uniquely Mexican problem, the violence currently tearing apart cities such as Ciudad Juárez comes in no small part from Mexico's tangled relationship with its neighbor to the north, the United States.

According to a recent report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the United States, with a population of 310 million, consumed $37 billion of cocaine in 2008, while Europe as a whole, with a population of 830 million, consumed $34 billion. Over the past four years, as The Washington Post has reported, more than 60,000 U.S. guns have been found in Mexico, largely coming for gun dealers in states with conspicuously liberal gun laws such as Texas and Arizona.

The dual failure of prohibition -- which despite its stated aims in no way curtails one's ability to get any drug they want in any major U.S. city after about 30 minutes of looking -- and the hypocrisy of the United States flooding Mexico with cheap firearms combined to make Mexico, and by extension, the entire border region, less, rather than more, secure.

The price being paid by the citizens of the border regions of Mexico and now, increasingly, to the south in Guatemala, where an even-more fragile state has been overrun by Mexican cartels and their affiliates, calls for a renewed look at the broken policy of drug prohibition and a search for reasonable, responsible alternatives.

During the 1919-33 U.S. prohibition of alcohol, criminal monarchies whose wealth was largely based on supplying the forbidden substance to interested consumers tore a violent swath through the country, with the misplaced puritanism of federal officials providing the atmosphere in which their activities could flourish.

As the largest consumer of narcotics coming from and largest provider of firearms going to Mexico, it is time, in the name of sanity and practicality, that the United States revisit both its drug control and firearms policies to guarantee that the violence ravaging Ciudad Juárez will not be repeated throughout the region and, eventually, in the United States itself.

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.