Original Pigeon Town Steppers

A Note on the Passing of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros

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

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

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

Dusk, Jackson Square

Illegality and immorality of Guatemala´s election process

(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

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

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

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Huffington’s Plunder

(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

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

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.

(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

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

(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

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

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

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