tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312832572024-03-21T17:15:37.628+01:00Michael Deibert, WriterMichael Deibert is the author of Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books), In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press, 2014), The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books, 2013) and Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005). He can be followed at twitter.com/michaelcdeibert.Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.comBlogger734125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-15447625604522084782024-01-01T02:04:00.004+01:002024-01-01T02:04:26.059+01:00The World All Before Us Where to Choose <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR1wPQp3kP52YsZvX1dHZ85QqH8VRbj-IhImM_q1FIkRUhwu0hLET2MIz9CJ4A5_RVcyoNgkvlW9Z4TM_9szC0RiE4Ry-XK90bamyVTZ2AQw70IXeTshVhyphenhyphenumAVoqjcHgauAybChH7diL6ATDyk0LcH3SntDqzkzxcR6HWkhF0uZFO9B-i-w_z5A/s4032/IMG_8564.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR1wPQp3kP52YsZvX1dHZ85QqH8VRbj-IhImM_q1FIkRUhwu0hLET2MIz9CJ4A5_RVcyoNgkvlW9Z4TM_9szC0RiE4Ry-XK90bamyVTZ2AQw70IXeTshVhyphenhyphenumAVoqjcHgauAybChH7diL6ATDyk0LcH3SntDqzkzxcR6HWkhF0uZFO9B-i-w_z5A/s320/IMG_8564.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>And thus the embers of the candle of the year that was finally flicker out to be replaced by the brilliant light of the flame of the year that is to come, with all the hope and expectation that it brings.</p><p>For me, as for the world, 2023 has been a tumultuous year, to put it mildly. It began with a trip to Haiti, where I found a country that has practically become my second home in the nearly 30 years I’ve been visiting and writing about it held hostage by the armed gangs that control most of the capital as well of the roads in and out of it, while an illegitimate Prime Minister and an equally discredited opposition squabble over power. I traveled all over Port-au-Prince, the capital, talking to everyone I could to try and form a complete picture of a country at war and the hundred daily acts of resistance the population engages in to try to build a more decent society amid such chaos. When I returned home, I found not a single editor at the publications I usually contributed to interested in such an article, many of them content to phone in their coverage from abroad, and that led me to launch this newsletter you are reading now, and to publish my observations and conclusions <a href="https://michaeldeibert.substack.com/p/this-is-the-end" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>, so the words of all the people who paid me the honour of trusting me with their stories would not go unrecorded. Though I was doubtful that my little corner of the internet would amount to much, to my happy astonishment “Notes from the World” has steadily been building subscribers, proof, if any was needed, that people - the general public - are willing to pay for quality reporting and analysis, and are still willing to read long-form essays that defy easy ideological categorization. It has been immensely gratifying to see this.</p><p>Also this year, after three years of work, I completed and submitted for publication my new book, <em>With the Pen In One Hand and the Sword in the Other: Haiti and the United States in the Nineteenth Century</em>, a work of pure history which I hope will open peoples’ eyes to the complex intricacies of the relations between the hemisphere’s two oldest republics and the vital role that Haiti played as a beacon for liberationist thought and action in the Americas during the 1800s, despite its own internal convulsions.</p><p>And then, not to be outdone for drama, I had an unwelcome <a href="https://michaeldeibert.substack.com/p/tropic-of-cancer" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">visitor</a> in my home and in my body, which I continue to deal with and address as best as I am able. I have been touched beyond words at how many people from different eras of my life have reached out with support both moral and <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/michael-deibert-needs-our-help?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">material</a> in the last months. You have really made me feel like I had an impact in the world, which is the most moving, precious gift anyone can ask for. Thank you all so much.</p><p>Abroad, we watched the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/25/christmas-ukraine-cooking-soldiers-frontline/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">heroes</a> of Ukraine continue to defend their homeland against the imperialist, fascist Russian invaders, despite the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67724357" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">cynical</a> drip-drip of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/12/31/exp-ukraine-biden-military-aid-liptak-lklv-fst-123105aseg2-cnni-politics.cnn" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">aid</a> dangled before them by Western nations who still seem unable to fully grasp that if Ukraine falls, not only Moldova but the Batlic states and Poland will almost certainly be next. The sadism of Putin’s Russia was not confined to Ukraine, of course, as he helped the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/26/deadly-christmas-in-syrias-idlib-after-russian-attack-kills-five-in-family" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">terrorize</a>defenseless civilians there, as well. Cuba’s jails continued to groan with more than 1,000 political <a href="https://www.prisonersdefenders.org/2023/12/12/13-nuevos-presos-politicos-en-noviembre-mantienen-el-total-en-1-062-prisioneros-politicos-en-cuba/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">prisoners</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelcdeibert/status/1678730098688552962" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">including</a>some of the leading writers, musicians, artists, feminist and LGBTQ voices in the country as its creaking dictatorship <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/cuba-announces-tough-economic-measures-cubans-brace-hardship-rcna130861" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">demanded</a> “sacrifice” from anyone but its own bloated, cosseted members. Venezuela’s ruling narcokleptocracy, attempting to inject some advantage into elections it is sure to lose if they are fair (they won’t be), began issuing bellicose <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/guyana-says-it-refuses-to-bow-to-venezuela-in-dispute-over-oil-rich-territory" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">threats</a> against its neighbor, tiny, democratic Guyana, as if ruining one country utterly is apparently not enough destruction for them. Iran’s ossifying theocracy desperately attempted to silence critical voices <a href="https://charliehebdo.fr/2023/07/international/dissidents-iraniens-a-letranger-une-traque-sans-frontieres/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">abroad</a> as well as at home as a <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/iran-security-forces-used-rape-and-other-sexual-violence-to-crush-woman-life-freedom-uprising-with-impunity/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">report</a>revealed how security forces there used rape and other forms of sexual violence amounting to torture to intimidate and punish peaceful protesters during the 2022 “Woman Life Freedom” uprising. In Afghanistan, fully half of the population remained <a href="https://apnews.com/article/afghan-school-taliban-5285d6d302f7c95a584dd8018a8c5a30" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">erased</a> from public life as the violently misogynistic Taliban, whose illegal usurpation of power was <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelcdeibert/status/1523017197970685952" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">celebrated</a>by such low-dwelling fellow travelers as Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, continued their misrule. Sudan remained torn asunder in a war between its military and the Rapid Support Forces militia, living down to their pedigree as the spawn of the genocidal janjaweed - itself descended from the Muammar Gaddafi-supported Arab supremacist Tajammu al-Arabi - as it conducted horrific ethnic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/dec/30/survivors-give-harrowing-testimony-of-darfur-sudan-year-of-hell" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">cleansing</a> in Darfur. And in Israel and Gaza, the slaughter went on, provoked initially by a group of atrocious <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">rapists</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/12/hamas-planning-terror-gaza-israel/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wp_main" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">mass murderers</a> and now prolonged by a government of <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelcdeibert/status/1726628257527947665" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">fanatics</a> and cynics that will do anything to stay in power and for whom the safety of Israeli <a href="https://www.972mag.com/israel-bombing-endangered-hostages-gaza/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">hostages</a> is far down on the list of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/06/middleeast/leaked-audio-of-heated-meeting-reveals-hostages-fury-at-netanyahu/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">priorities</a>. </p><p>But there are signs of light in the darkness. In Europe, the nations that have seen firsthand the sharp end of the imperialist designs emanating from Moscow are leading the fight to defend the continent’s <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelcdeibert/status/1741205684547465588" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">democracy</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1741276688892215389" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">autonomy</a> from the Kremlin’s tyranny. Chile’s young president, Gabriel Boric, despite facing a series of setbacks at home, has proven himself to be a strong defender of democracy and human rights throughout the <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelcdeibert/status/1663639559752630278" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">region</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelcdeibert/status/1682012357323571200" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">beyond</a>. </p><p>In Guatemala, in a victory that almost no one (including me) saw coming, Bernardo Arévalo, the son of that nation’s first democratically-elected president, Juan José Arévalo, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-66569014" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">won</a> the presidency in a triumph that sent the criminal monarchy that has run the country directly or through political proxies for decades <a href="https://elpais.com/internacional/2023-09-09/adios-consuelo-la-cruzada-de-los-guatemaltecos-para-desmontar-el-pacto-de-corruptos.html" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">scrambling</a> for a Plan B that has, thus far, mercifully, failed. In Arévalo and his Movimiento Semilla party, one sees the beginning of the fruition of the long-delayed <a href="http://michaeldeibert.blogspot.com/2015/12/has-guatemala-long-awaited-spring.html" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Guatemalan Spring</a> that began in 2015. An extraordinary country with immense potential, those committed to democracy and human rights should be prepared to watch closely and assist Guatemalans however they can as the latter attempt to reclaim their nation from the <em>grupos clandestinos </em>who have plundered it for so long. </p><p>In Puerto Rico, <em>mi querida isla del encanto</em>, although many environmental problems and structural and systemic problems with the political system persist, in the <a href="https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/politica/notas/definidas-cuatro-alcaldias-en-las-que-el-pip-y-victoria-ciudadana-no-competiran-entre-si/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">alliance</a> between the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño and the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana there is an opportunity for the forces of change on the island to take advantage of the <a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/rumblings-of-change-in-puerto-rico/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">progress</a> of the 2020 elections during next year's vote to break once and for all the two-part duopoly that has ruled - and failed - the island for so long. </p><p>And, despite the dire moments it is living through, I continue to believe in the inevitable renaissance of Haiti, for a country that has done so much for the cause of human freedom cannot be and will never be extinguished. <em>Ayiti pap peri</em>.</p><p>And as for me? And for us?</p><p>On New Year’s Eve, 1917, the French novelist Marcel Proust penned a letter to his financial adviser and dear friend Lionel Hauser where he mused <em>J'ai renoncé à croire que les années soient nouvelles et puissent apporter un bonheur qui est désormais derrière moi. Mais cela ne me fait pas désirer moins vivement que soient heureux ceux que j'aime</em> (I have given up believing that years are new and can bring happiness that is now behind me. But that doesn't make me less eager for those I love to be happy).” But, <em>eh bien, ma chère,</em> even with the uncertainty that now stretches before me, I can say that there is so much to love and to value and to look forward to in this world. The caress of the tropical wind on an island in the Caribbean just before plunging into the relief of the blue-green foam of the sea; the hum of the life of the natural world in a field in the Loire Valley in the deep summer; the wonderful carefreeness of watching kids just starting out on their journey hanging out and partying and flirting along the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris; the song of the <em>coquí</em> on a starlit night outside of Aibonito; the purr of a cat or the smile of a dog that has come into your life; the sound of a beloved’s voice in the next room followed to see their face a moment later in which intense joy and endless possibility reside.</p><p>Be brave. Be free. Love and allow yourselves to be loved. I wish you all<em> jouissez sans entraves </em>(joy without limits) and the most wonderful happiness in the new year and beyond.</p><p>With love,</p><p>M</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAQ93xiUdbX3Hcg6enkykjgsOaJ7kwRjmaaS80zx_QwD8pVfJwd_weIEihn71SIjRDRJhzPWQFgRr3-fNyoLaMZhYyebNPVOqBDDMqqk3e5STFBVcXHRjxzGLOC-Tz1JYRvypA-EIw1yjRjPqRU2RWQ3VAkSSR7Gc2t2Y3kZJCZer_OGY5IxT2qw/s1024/12265673_10153860696564714_3709865072655910907_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="1024" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAQ93xiUdbX3Hcg6enkykjgsOaJ7kwRjmaaS80zx_QwD8pVfJwd_weIEihn71SIjRDRJhzPWQFgRr3-fNyoLaMZhYyebNPVOqBDDMqqk3e5STFBVcXHRjxzGLOC-Tz1JYRvypA-EIw1yjRjPqRU2RWQ3VAkSSR7Gc2t2Y3kZJCZer_OGY5IxT2qw/s320/12265673_10153860696564714_3709865072655910907_o.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><figcaption class="image-caption" data-pm-slice="1 1 ["captionedImage",null]" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jouissez sans entraves (Joy without limits) - Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, May 1968.</span></i></figcaption><p><br /></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-60825696833826870072023-12-30T18:00:00.000+01:002023-12-30T18:00:16.873+01:00Books in 2023: A Personal Selection <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgshgi69c8odgs6Aled9CLP7hH-t6perjJykDLCKXEXukUyEAx3W5hMEZhsaJ7PTs4RIGJMbmluvYf1LqZKeeh4aF0NhtDp92txI8dQC9woIDaxfVuV9l2__zkFBbiYszP8EP0ZpE12EI_38jTpnnaj6e2sGIUHy-mOu9KDPvKgasXfjbNfYRDPaw/s1377/Henri_Christophe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1377" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgshgi69c8odgs6Aled9CLP7hH-t6perjJykDLCKXEXukUyEAx3W5hMEZhsaJ7PTs4RIGJMbmluvYf1LqZKeeh4aF0NhtDp92txI8dQC9woIDaxfVuV9l2__zkFBbiYszP8EP0ZpE12EI_38jTpnnaj6e2sGIUHy-mOu9KDPvKgasXfjbNfYRDPaw/s320/Henri_Christophe.jpg" width="238" /></a></div><p></p><figcaption class="image-caption" data-pm-slice="1 1 ["captionedImage",{}]" style="text-align: center;"><i>Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, painted by English portraitist Richard Evans, 1816.</i></figcaption><p><br /></p><p><strong>Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Kingdom by Paul Clammer</strong></p><p>A great contribution to Haitian studies by the British author Paul Clammer, this book vividly brings to life the dramatic era of the complex and mercurial independence leader who would go on to become Haiti’s only king.</p><p><strong>Port-au-Prince au cours des ans: Tome II 1804-1915 by Georges Corvington</strong></p><p>Two volumes originally published by Haiti’s Éditions Henri Deschamps collected in this 2007 single volume by Montréal’s Éditions du Centre International de Documentation et d'Information Haitienne (CIDIHCA), this sweeping history of Haiti’s capital by the Haitian historian Georges Corvington is a must for any scholar of the country.</p><p><strong>Prospero's Cell by Lawrence Durrell</strong></p><p>An impressionistic and disparate memoir of the Ionian island of Corfu by the British author who lived there from 1935 to 1940, though this book has some moments of very nice prose, I still found it a little unfocused and a bit too in love with his own voice to be truly captivating. In terms of evoking Greece in all its glory and mystery, I found Henry Miller’s <em>The Colossus of Maroussi</em> a much more compelling read.</p><p><strong>The Portable Gerbasi: Selected Early and Late Poems by Vicente Gerbasi </strong></p><p>This collection of poems which bookend the career of the Venezuelan writer and diplomat Vicente Gerbasi are masterfully translated by Guillermo Parra and vibrate with the life and colour of that South American nation, which hard times and bad government may have dimmed in recent years but never fully extinguished.</p><p><strong>The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning by Roy Hattersley</strong></p><p>This is a very engaging biography by a British politician and journalist focusing on the long an dramatic life of the severe and highly idiosyncratic founder of Methodism and gives the reader a good flavour for the religious and political battles being fought in 18th century England.</p><p><strong>A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines</strong></p><p>Published in 1968, this novel recounts the story of a young working-class boy named Billy Casper from a mining area in Northern England who finds and gradually trains a kestrel (a falcon-like bird), which provides a respite from his life with a rather nasty brother and mother (his father is absent) and sadistic schoolmates and teachers. The long passages focusing on sport kind of lost me, but nevertheless it’s a book that gives the reader a feeling for the loneliness and struggles that can accompany youth as well as the moments of joy and transcendence. </p><p><strong>For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria by Cheryl Johnson-Odim</strong></p><p>This books tells the extraordinary life story of the Nigerian political activist, educator and feminist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The mother of musician Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, Ransome-Kuti had an accomplished and impressive life in her own right. Born in Nigeria’s southwestern Ogun State in southwestern Nigeria to an aristocratic family, she gained the nickname the “Lioness of Lisabi” for her leadership of the Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU). As well as telling the story of a patriot and committed internationalist, the book is also a fascinating survey of the politics, society, hierarchy, and customs of colonial and post-colonial Nigeria.</p><p><strong>Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–1948 by Zachary Lockman</strong></p><p>A fascinating and valuable look into the tensions and contradictions between the desire of early left-wing Zionists to build the Jewish state of Israel while at the same time maintaining some kind of fidelity to their ideals of an empowered and motivated working-class across national borders, this book delves deeply into complex motivations and political-religious dynamics better than mere slogans ever could.</p><p><strong>Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli</strong></p><p>The first in a trilogy of crime novels featuring Inspector De Luca, this book takes place as Italy’s fascist Repubblica di Salò sputters to its collapse and is as interesting for its depiction of a compromised and often depraved society as it is for the murder mystery at its heart.</p><p><strong>El Desterrado de París: Biografía del Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827-1898) by Félix Ojeda Reyes</strong></p><p>This is an impressive work of scholarship by the Puerto Rican historian Félix Ojeda Reyes examining the life of Ramón Emeterio Betances, physician, diplomat, intellectual and perhaps Puerto Rico’s most lucid and forward-looking patriot.</p><p><strong>Collected Poems 1950-1993 by Vernon Scannell </strong></p><p>The life’s work of a British poet whose ruling passions were the somewhat unlikely combination of literature and boxing, this is a lovely volume that continues the wonderful poem “Autumn,” which evokes a kind of London that will somehow always be with us.</p><p><strong>Race, Class, and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics by Anita M. Waters </strong></p><p>A very interesting book that delves into the complexities of Jamaica’s political battles between 1967 and 1983, this sociological work examines how the Jamaica Labour Party and People's National Party sought to come to terms with and at times co-opt the culture signifiers of Jamaica’s homegrown religion and rebel music.</p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-87157397090874729472023-12-04T13:19:00.002+01:002023-12-04T13:19:28.952+01:00Michael Deibert speaking about Haiti on The World <p><span style="background: var(--artdeco-reset-base-background-transparent); color: var(--color-text); font-size: var(--artdeco-reset-base-font-size-hundred-percent);">I</span><span style="background: var(--artdeco-reset-base-background-transparent); caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); color: var(--color-text); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: var(--artdeco-reset-base-font-size-hundred-percent);"> spoke with Marco Werman at The World about the shifting dynamics among the illegal armed groups in and around Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and what this means for the country as a whole. Please listen to the segment <a href="https://theworld.org/media/2023-11-16/increasingly-brazen-behavior-haitis-gangs">here</a>.</span></p><article class="update-components-article
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" style="align-items: center; background: var(--artdeco-reset-base-background-transparent); border: var(--artdeco-reset-base-border-zero); box-sizing: inherit; display: flex; font-size: var(--artdeco-reset-base-font-size-hundred-percent); margin: var(--artdeco-reset-base-margin-zero); padding: 1.2rem 1.6rem; position: relative; vertical-align: var(--artdeco-reset-base-vertical-align-baseline);"><div class="update-components-article__link-container" style="background: var(--artdeco-reset-base-background-transparent); border-radius: 0px; border: var(--artdeco-reset-base-border-zero); box-sizing: content-box; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: var(--artdeco-reset-base-font-size-hundred-percent); height: 72px; margin: var(--artdeco-reset-base-margin-zero); padding: var(--artdeco-reset-base-padding-zero); position: relative; vertical-align: var(--artdeco-reset-base-vertical-align-baseline); width: 138px;"><a aria-label="Open article: The increasingly brazen behavior of Haiti's gangs by theworld.org" class="app-aware-link update-components-article__image-link
tap-target" data-test-app-aware-link="" href="https://theworld.org/media/2023-11-16/increasingly-brazen-behavior-haitis-gangs" style="background: var(--artdeco-reset-base-background-transparent); border: var(--artdeco-reset-link-border-zero); box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--color-text-link-visited); cursor: pointer; font-size: var(--artdeco-reset-base-font-size-hundred-percent); height: 72px; left: 0px; margin: var(--artdeco-reset-base-margin-zero); outline-offset: -1px; padding: var(--artdeco-reset-base-padding-zero); position: absolute; text-decoration: none; top: 0px; touch-action: manipulation; vertical-align: var(--artdeco-reset-base-vertical-align-baseline); width: 138px;" target="_blank"><div class="ivm-image-view-model " style="background: var(--artdeco-reset-base-background-transparent); border: var(--artdeco-reset-base-border-zero); box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--artdeco-reset-base-font-size-hundred-percent); height: 72px; margin: var(--artdeco-reset-base-margin-zero); padding: var(--artdeco-reset-base-padding-zero); vertical-align: var(--artdeco-reset-base-vertical-align-baseline); width: 138px;"><div class="ivm-view-attr__img-wrapper display-flex" style="background: var(--artdeco-reset-base-background-transparent); border: var(--artdeco-reset-base-border-zero); box-sizing: inherit; display: flex !important; font-size: var(--artdeco-reset-base-font-size-hundred-percent); height: 72px; margin: var(--artdeco-reset-base-margin-zero); padding: var(--artdeco-reset-base-padding-zero); vertical-align: var(--artdeco-reset-base-vertical-align-baseline); width: 138px;"></div></div></a></div></div></article><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-84611365449868915702023-01-01T00:53:00.000+01:002023-01-01T00:53:32.865+01:002022: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5N74_3VEsOfysa24hapViqccB27nzjEe4ptLAPWziDm8gtJjcAwdZQwBj0izvr1jwaUiawlehNJeQA1YvzWRW87LT1Pb0qizuCgFnIzXxGomG3eXytektii4QLu2X30cKOY-eTYZ10HB-TRn2SELstMLc1pytySgU0kkkjEE0eBOKBTR6sbg/s1280/35559132_10157033711574714_4714992458776182784_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="954" data-original-width="1280" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5N74_3VEsOfysa24hapViqccB27nzjEe4ptLAPWziDm8gtJjcAwdZQwBj0izvr1jwaUiawlehNJeQA1YvzWRW87LT1Pb0qizuCgFnIzXxGomG3eXytektii4QLu2X30cKOY-eTYZ10HB-TRn2SELstMLc1pytySgU0kkkjEE0eBOKBTR6sbg/w400-h299/35559132_10157033711574714_4714992458776182784_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Though much of my year was wrapped up in working on my new book, I did publish a few articles that I thought were worthwhile during the last 12 months. <div><br /></div><div><b>My Articles</b></div><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-latin-america-backers-of-leftist-dictatorships-look-the-other-way/">In Latin America, Backers of Leftist Dictatorships Look the Other Way</a> </i>for Newlines Magazine (12 January 2022)</div><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/restoring-glory-to-a-baltimore-neighborhood/">Restoring Glory to a Baltimore Neighborhood</a></i> for Newlines Magazine (29 March 2022)</div><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/freedom-soup-and-the-liberation-of-haiti/">Freedom Soup and the Liberation of Haiti</a></i> for Newlines Magazine (31 May 2022)</div><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://www.ozy.com/pg/newsletter/sunday-magazine-email/450256/">Haiti Is At War</a></i> for Ozy (14 August 2022)</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Interviews </b></div><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-haiti-laurent-lamothe-canada-sanctions/">Former Haitian PM sanctioned by Canada denies wrongdoing </a></i>in The Globe and Mail (30 November 2022)<br /><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://youtu.be/QHMZxiUQbO0">What is causing the energy crisis in Puerto Rico?</a> </i>on TRT (27 September 2022)</div><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://youtu.be/DGtQC6Us2q0">Michael Deibert Speaking on the Anniversary of Assassination of Haiti's Jovenel Moïse</a></i> on Al Jazeera (7 July 2022)</div><div><br /></div><div>In 2023, it will be a new year and a new book, this one examining the tenure of the great U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass as U.S. ambassador to Haiti and the tangled regional politics of the Caribbean in the late 19th century.</div><div><br /></div><div>May the year 2023 leave you all feeling loved and appreciated. As the sun sets on 2022, I think the words of Pablo Neruda are apt for this moment.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Y una a una las noches </i></div><div><i>entre nuestras ciudades separadas </i></div><div><i>se agregan a la noche que nos une </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>(And one by one the nights </i></div><div><i>between our separated cities </i></div><div><i>are joined to the night that unites us)</i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Con mucho amor.</div><div><br /></div><div>xo</div><div><br /></div><div>MD</div>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-21138556016772922302023-01-01T00:24:00.007+01:002023-01-01T01:48:28.672+01:00Books in 2022: A Personal Selection <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8yKWVraVrTD9k2bS-AZNrKRaGpIMFk3l64NrsFoSRp3BLm2qEjWFmnAzjCsmNqiaAzmzULtJSaIiJxxIo3P8-IxO28dtbQ47yfoHIiD3oBL_g65FzDlRZcfXM4xlX6lKL-aMG91Lrf5oNqWaTPiS5wGpOtxitpmM6Tz3-hKmSONcpR7USPUI/s720/Henry-Miller-Hydra-GreeceMonozigote-wikimedia-commons-e1632859388664.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="700" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8yKWVraVrTD9k2bS-AZNrKRaGpIMFk3l64NrsFoSRp3BLm2qEjWFmnAzjCsmNqiaAzmzULtJSaIiJxxIo3P8-IxO28dtbQ47yfoHIiD3oBL_g65FzDlRZcfXM4xlX6lKL-aMG91Lrf5oNqWaTPiS5wGpOtxitpmM6Tz3-hKmSONcpR7USPUI/s320/Henry-Miller-Hydra-GreeceMonozigote-wikimedia-commons-e1632859388664.jpg" width="311" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Henry Miller on the Greek island of Hydra, 1939.</i></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">Athens In Poems: An Imaginative Map of the City</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">An absolutely gorgeous selection of poetry celebrating the Greek capital given to me by the manager of a cooperative bookstore in the neighborhood of Exarcheia when I was there this past autumn.</p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A picture of a vanished place and people, these stories by the great </span></span>Ukrainian<span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-Jewish writer </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Isaac Babel (who later was arrested and executed by the security services of </span>Joseph Stalin), this interlocked collection focuses on the world of a crime boss in <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Odessa called Benya Krik, known as the King, and the human</span> </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">fauna the move within it in 1920s Odessa. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">Young Skins by Colin Barrett </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">Gripping, taut and often bleak stories about mostly young people in contemporary Ireland. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span>A searing dystopian vision by an eminent Algerian writer who was slain by Islamist radicals in that country in 1993, this novel (originally written and published in French as <i>Le Dernier Été de la raison</i>) depicts a nation overtaken by intolerant religious fanatics. A </span></span>beautifully written, poignant and prescient book, the author can write lines about how "Today, everything was heralding fall, with its tender light, benevolent even in its sadness" even as he depicts a place descended into madness. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b>Insurgent Cuba Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 by Ada Ferrer</b></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">An enlightening book look at the complex racial dynamics of Cuba's long struggle to free itself from Spanish rule.</span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins</span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">A mob story depicting the underworld of then-contemporaneous early 1970s Boston, this book crackles with good and often profane dialogue as the plot heads to its inevitable dénouement.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">A book that gets to the heart of the extreme political commitment that informed Milton's life and work and chronicles in detail a life of dizzying triumphs and bitter disappointments that gave the world some of its greatest poetry.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d44aed71-7fff-f4af-3838-36a1be6e7ecb"><span style="font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia Book by Mervyn Meggitt</span></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A story of the Walbiri people scattered through Australia's Northern Territory by the </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt, I </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">found this book very interesting in its depiction of a people and culture very foreign to many readers yet still informed by great complexity and a deep bond with the land where they live.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">A book chronicling the American author Henry Miller’s travels through Greece as World War II and his own unwanted return to the United States loomed, this is a beautiful tribute to the country, its culture and its history, as Miller finds himself inspired and rhapsodizing about a new locale in way he hadn't since his early days in Paris a decade earlier. There is a poignancy to the loveliness of his descrpuitons made more so by both the impending conflict and his realization that, at nearly 50, he himself was steadily getting older:</span></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">There was the air outside and the sky full of stars. I had promised myself on leaving Paris not to do a stroke of work for a year. It was my first real vacation in 20 years and I was ready for it. Everything seemed right to me. There was no time anymore, just me drifting along and a slow boat ready to meet all commerce and take whatever it came along. Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light. I couldn’t ask for more, nor did I want anything more. I had everything a man could desire, and I knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again. I felt the war coming - it was getting closer and closer every day. For a little while yet there would be peace and men might still behave like human beings. </span></i></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers by William Palmer</b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An unsentimental look at the often destructive role that alcohol played in the lives of 11 authors, including </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> John Cheever, </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Malcolm Lowry, </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Flann O’Brien and</span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> Jean Rhys, Flann O’Brien, this book makes one all the more appreciative of the brilliance the writers that it covers produced considering the ferocious demons many of them were battling. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">A first-person account of the life of a working shepherd in Cumbia in the north of England, this book may be a little too in love with its subject (the folks up north are inevitably wily, hard-working and resourceful, everyone not from that circle rather less so), but it still manages to paint an evocative picture of a alternately harsh and abundant landscape and the people who work it and cater to their animals who live there.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;">A magnificent anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist work set in Benito Mussolini's Italy (where the author was in exile from), the novel introduces us to the memorable revolutionary character of Pietro Spina, whose own ethos can be summed up by his declaration:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i>One can be free even under a dictatorship on one simple condition, that is, if one struggles against it. A man who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is a free man. A man who struggles for what he believes to be right as a free man. You can live in the most democratic country in the world, and if you are lazy, callous, servile, you are not a freeman, in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that must be begged from others. You must take it for yourself, whatever share you can.</i></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">A finely-honed collection of short stories by a renowned Irish writer depicting people who, in a number of ways, are haunted by decisions they either took or didn't take and where those choices have led them in their lives.</span></span></span></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-15547094760762757102022-12-31T21:16:00.001+01:002022-12-31T21:16:16.856+01:00Haiti Is At War<p>Aug 14, 2022</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Haiti Is At War</span></b></p><p>By Michael Deibert</p><p>Ozy</p><p>Haiti has a long, troubled history of politicians using local gangs for political muscle and influence. But what’s happening now is strange and new — the gangs are moving into the power vacuum created by a failing state to exert more autonomy and authority in what’s quickly becoming the biggest crisis in the Americas. </p><p>(Read the original article <a href="https://www.ozy.com/pg/newsletter/sunday-magazine-email/450256/">here</a>)</p><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px solid rgb(220, 220, 213); box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(31, 31, 31); color: #1f1f1f; font-family: DINNextW01-CondensedReg, "Tw Cen MT Condensed", "Gill Sans MT Condensed", "Arial Narrow", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td align="left" class="flexible-width" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;" width="575">No safe way out <br /><br /></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td colspan="2" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;"><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The burned-out hulk of the car belonging to the former senator and his driver rested beside a bucolic mountain road that cuts through the hills above Port-au-Prince. The bodies of its former occupants, as charred and desecrated as the vehicle itself, lay inside.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">For much of the past year, motorists attempting to leave Haiti’s capital for the southern peninsula — an area dotted with undulating hills, shimmering beaches and picturesque colonial towns — would traverse the lanes though Laboule 12 in an attempt to avoid the warring gangs that operated along the other route that led through the sprawling slum of Martissant, a take-your-life-in-your-hands proposition that saw motorists kidnapped or shot dead with terrifying regularity.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">By the time Yvon Buissereth — a former senator who had been appointed head of the government’s social housing division by former President Jovenel Moïse (himself assassinated in spectacular fashion in July 2021) — opted to try his luck on the road last weekend, Haiti was in the throes of a state collapse the likes of which has rarely been experienced in the Western Hemisphere this century.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The gang that allegedly murdered Buissereth is led by a criminal known as Ti Makak (Little Monkey), one of dozens of armed groups currently operating in Port-au-Prince. The gang emerged to</span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;"> fè dezòd</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> (make disorder) in the zone just as the forces of the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), the country’s beleaguered national police force, was launching an offensive against another gang, the 400 Mawozo (400 Hillbillies), who run a kidnapping ring based in the city’s northeastern suburb of Croix-des-Bouquets, but whose territorial control extends all the way to the border with the Dominican Republic. This past spring, a failed attempt by the 400 Mawozo to seize the territory of a rival gang, the Chen Mechan (Mad Dogs), in this area, known as the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, killed at least 191 people, according to the human rights organization Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH). Thousands more were displaced.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">What links these two apparently unrelated episodes of violence on opposite sides of the capital also tells the story of state collapse in Haiti. An implosion that has rapidly accelerated since the assasination of Jovenel Moïse, the first Haitian president killed in office since 1915.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px solid rgb(220, 220, 213); box-sizing: border-box; color: #1f1f1f; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td align="left" class="flexible-width" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;" width="575">The deep roots of gang rule <br /><br /></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td colspan="2" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;"><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Though Haiti has a long history of politically motivated militias — from the </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Zinglins </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">and </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Piquets </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">of Faustin Soulouque the mid-1800s, to the Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier family dictatorship (1957- 1986) — the modern-day roots of Haiti’s gang rule can be found in a catastrophic interweaving of events in the 1990s.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">A strangling economic embargo designed to return to power Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, ousted in a coup in 1991 after only seven months in office, all but destroyed what was left of Haiti’s manufacturing sector. A subsequent IMF and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment, made with U.S. President Bill Clinton’s support, lowered Haiti’s tariffs on imported rice from 50% to 3%, turning Haiti into the world’s fifth-largest importer of U.S. rice and breaking the backbone of its peasant economy. Those who fled the countryside to the cities found few jobs waiting for them.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">It was the children of these news arrivals — as many of the capital’s poorest neighborhoods are populated largely by country people new to the city — who became the first generation of the modern youth gangs in Haiti, a phenomenon encouraged with ruthless efficiency by Aristide and his party Fanmi Lavalas (formed in 1996) to ensure their grip on power. Aristide returned to the presidency in 2001 only to be overthrown again in a 2004 rebellion that began when a formerly loyal gang in the northern city of Gonaïves, the Lame Kanibal (Cannibal Army), turned against him in retaliation for allegedly killing their leader.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I knew many of these young, first-generation gunmen personally, and spent countless hours speaking with them in Cité Soleil, the sprawling seaside slum they called home. Although they were not typical of the inhabitants of the capital’s slums — most of whom, then as now, have no connection to guns or violence — they represented an unavoidable political force. Before their early deaths (all but one died before his 30th birthday), some spoke eloquently to me about a desperate desire to blast Haiti out of its inhuman squalor and inequality. At a certain time, one could see the good they might have done for the country. But Aristide got to them first.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px solid rgb(220, 220, 213); box-sizing: border-box; color: #1f1f1f; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td align="left" class="flexible-width" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;" width="575">Politicians have long used gangs <br /><br /></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td colspan="2" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;"><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In the last two decades, the armed groups in the slums — who generally call themselves </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">baz </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">(base, in Haiti’s Creole language) — have metastasized through generations of slain leaders and opportunistic politicians of various political stripes, seeking to monopolize the forces of arms and the votes they bring come election time. The Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK), the country's dominant force since 2011 — to which both Moïse and former President Michel Martelly belonged — embraced the baz model as enthusiastically as the Lavalas party (now, like founder Aristide himself, a historical footnote) ever did.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">But over the years, something new began to happen, although it wasn’t immediately apparent. During a 2015 lull in the nearly 20-year tit-for-tat violence, two baz in the Martissant communities of Ti Bois and Grand Ravine waged war against each other. I went to interview the leader of the Ti Bois baz, a somber-face man then in his early 30s named Chéry Christ-Roi, known as Krisla, who had improbably succeeded in maintaining his grip on the neighborhood since the early 2000s— an extraordinary period of longevity for someone in his line of work. As we sat inside his hillside nightclub, in a spray of day-glo colors contrasting with the sweeping view of the Bay of Port-au-Prince, he said the gangs were sick of politicians using them as cannon fodder, and they might some day form a sort of alliance for good, or so I hoped.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Haiti’s tortured politics had different plans. In 2016, Jovenel Moïse, a businessman from Haiti’s north, was elected president after a markedly low turnout. The political opposition — consisting of opportunistic career politicians who gave themselves grand names like the</span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;"> secteur démocratique et populaire </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">despite being neither democratic nor popular — flatly refused to accept the election results. The battle lines hardened.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Though Moïse oversaw the construction of miles of roads, and a nascent effort to restructure Haiti’s faltering energy grid — lashing out at “a corrupt oligarchy” and vowing to free from their grasp a “captured state — an audit of the Venezuelan low-cost oil program, PetroCaribe, claimed that firms linked to Moïse cashed in on an embezzlement scheme. A civil society movement, under the slogan <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Kot kòb PetroCaribe a?</i> (Where is the PetroCaribe money?), demanded accountability for the funds, along with an end to corruption and other government abuses. Striking a modus vivendi with the political opposition whose first demand was that Moïse resign so they could get in (opposition lawmakers twice vandalized Haiti’s parliament in the company of their partisans to prevent Moïse’s choice for Prime Minister from going to a vote), the civil society, perhaps unwittingly, became part of a drama bigger than themselves that was unfolding.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 25px; letter-spacing: -0.5px;"><b>The Rise of "Barbecue"</b></span></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 25px; letter-spacing: -0.5px;"><b><br /></b></span></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In November 2017, a police raid in Grand Ravine ended in the deaths of at least two police officers and 10 civilians in what some called a police massacre. One of the policemen involved, Jimmy Chérizier— better known by his nickname, Barbecue — abandoned his post and returned to his power base in the capital’s Lower Delmas quarter, where he founded an illegal armed group, allegedly with ties to the Moïse government —a claim Moïse and Barbecue both denied. In 2018, Barbecue was accused of participating in a massacre in the Port-au-Prince slum of La Saline that killed 26, according to a United Nations report. Barbecue and two officials of the Moïse government were sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for their alleged roles in the killings.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">While the Moïse government negotiated with the PNH over the police department’s quest to form a union, a gang called Fantôme 509 (Haiti’s country code) emerged, claiming to be dissident police. The group wore masks and shot their guns in the air, at vehicles and into government buildings. Fantôme 509 was widely viewed as a wing of the opposition. In June 2020, Barbecue, dressed in a suit and carrying a machine gun, held a press conference to announce the formation of the </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">G9 an fanmi e alye</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">, an alliance of armed groups around the city, including Krisla’s Ti Bois baz. Though Barbecue stated that he was not “pro-government or pro-opposition,” he released several videos of himself surrounded by an armed, masked cadre and expounding on the political issues of the day. His Twitter account, which had a large following, has since been suspended. </span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px solid rgb(220, 220, 213); box-sizing: border-box; color: #1f1f1f; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td align="left" class="flexible-width" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;" width="575">Gang war goes viral on social media <br /><br /></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td colspan="2" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;"><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">But Barbecue was hardly the only boss in town, and not the only one to grasp the power of social media.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Across Route Nationale 2 from Grand Ravine and Ti Bois, in the Village de Dieu slum, Arnel Joseph, a politically connected gang leader, who reigned over the 5 Segonn (5 Seconds) gang until fleeing in an attempt to avoid arrest, was killed by police in February 2021. The following month, Haitian police tried to storm the slum in a raid that ended with six police officers dead: their final moments recorded by gloating gang members who shared the footage on social media.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Arnel Joseph's successor at the helm of the 5 Segonn (5 Seconds) gang was a different character altogether, and the footage of the slain policemen was only the beginning of his social media war. Going by the </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">nom de guerre</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> Izo, the new strongman of 5 Segonn presides over a kidnapping empire, the proceeds of which he uses to fund slick videos of himself and his gunmen as he spits rhymes while strutting through the slum and snorting copious amounts of cocaine (He is, at it happens, a lyricist of no small talent). Beyond his musical pursuits, however, Izo has used social media and apps like WhatsApp to boast of his battlefield success and terrorize his rivals. Last month, while bragging about weapons acquired during fighting with gangs from the rival G9-affiliated - slum of La Saline, 5 Segonn displayed the firearms perched on the dead body of one of their enemies. In another video, Izo dismembers the cadaver of a rival he had purchased from the gang in Grand Ravine, and then begins to cook the viscera in a pot.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The 400 Mawozo have also shown a fondness for social media. The gang’s leader, Joseph Wilson, alias </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lanmò San Jou</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> (Death Comes Unannounced), recently recorded himself and his gunmen (who appear to be in their early teens) requesting the “paperwork” of motorists traveling between Port-au-Prince and the Dominican Republic. Last month, 400 Mawozo gunmen murdered a police officer inside a church, spirited the body away and disseminated footage of themselves mulitalitng the corpse.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Wilson, believed to be a </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">houngan</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">, or vodou priest (vodou, despite its reputation in the West, is a religion like any other, combining both light and dark elements), has availed himself of the authority of such a role. I have seen videos of him and other 400 Mawozo members at </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">fêtes </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">involving coffins and other accouterments of death. The possible spiritual elements of the violence in Haiti today in some ways echo the gruesome public displays of Charles Taylor, during the 1989-1997 Liberian Civil War of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), who cannily co-opted some of the trappings of the Poro Society — a male secret society in West Africa — to add an aura of authority to his military might.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The violence has more immediate ways of revealing its interconnection. In the shantytown of Canaan, whose population exploded when thousands of Haitians displaced by the 2010 earthquake resettled there, a gang recently filmed themselves firing in the air as they referred to themselves as “the Taliban.”</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px solid rgb(220, 220, 213); box-sizing: border-box; color: #1f1f1f; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td align="left" class="flexible-width" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;" width="575">The gang state <br /><br /></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td colspan="2" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;"><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Although the government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry — who assumed power under controversial circumstances after the assasaniation of Jovenel Moïse — has frequently been accused of having ties to gangs, the gunmen are now making direct attacks on the symbols of the state. In June, 5 Segonn gunmen stormed Port-au-Prince’s Palais de Justice, seat of the highest judicial authority in the capital, and have occupied it since, chasing off judges, clerks, prosecutors, police and staff. The authorities have made no attempt to retake the building, as its armed occupants strut about its rooms destroying files. In July, 400 Mawozo gang members set fire to the Croix-des-Bouquets prosecutor's office. Government services — customs, the central bank and other entities once housed in downtown Port-au-Prince — are abandoning the center of the city to the gunmen and moving to more secure locales, such as the airport or to far-flung suburbs.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“They're trying to establish some kind of recognition as a force or a state within the state,” said a conflict resolution specialist, and friend, who works in some of the capital’s most marginalized neighborhoods. “Any talk of elections without taking care of these guys doesn't make sense.”</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">More than the politically allied “posses” of Jamaica, which the Haitian gangs once most closely resembled, the armed groups in the country look more and more like the all-demolishing whirlwinds of the Islamic State, for whom killing publicly and ritualistically is as much an affirmation of power and mission as the success of any geopolitical goals.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In a very direct way, the violence also connects Haiti to its giant neighbor to the north, the United States.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In July, a ship arriving from Florida at Haiti’s Port-de-Paix was discovered to be carrying 120,000 cartridges, three handguns, 30 magazines, 20 Ak-47s and $3,890. That same month, seven illegal pistols were confiscated from another ship from the U.S., stopped at the same port. The government responded by freeing two of the men who had been arrested for alleged involvement in the scheme and firing the government official who’d overseen seizure of the weapons. Meanwhile, several suspect containers at a wharf in Port-au-Prince were found to contain 9mm pistols, 14,646 cartridges, 140 magazines and 18 assault rifles.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px solid rgb(220, 220, 213); box-sizing: border-box; color: #1f1f1f; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td align="left" class="flexible-width" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;" width="575">The gangs are coordinating <br /><br /></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td colspan="2" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;"><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">As the country roils amid criminal anarchy, the government of President Ariel Henry has remained largely silent, apparently secure in the support of such foreign actors as the U.S., France and the U.N. Mission in Haiti. The fact that both RNDDH and a now-stalled investigation by the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire (DCPJ) into the murder of Jovenel Moïse showed that Henry had spoken twice to Joseph Félix Badio — believed to be a key link in the plot to murder the president — on the night of the assassination, appears not to phase them. The government’s detachment from the trauma of its citizens was also vividly illustrated when, during a regular bout of gang violence, the prime minister spent a glittering evening at the posh Hotel Montana to celebrate “Europe Day'' with various foreign diplomats. The elegant hotel also serves as the base for the Montana Accord, a group of civil society actors and veteran politicos who “elected” a president and prime minister last year, yet whose authority barely extends beyond the lobby.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Last month, an attempt by the G-9 to take over the Cité Soleil, under the control of baz leader Gabriel Jean-Pierre, aka Ti Gabriel, who heads a rival coalition of gangs called the G-Pèp, failed. It was foiled when 5 Segonn rushed to Gabriel’s aid ferrying gunmen in motorboats along the coast, one of at least three instances that the group has used boats in recent months. The attack failed, but not before more than 200 people — mostly civilians— were killed and many thousands displaced. The onslaught, most observers agree, was unleashed to acquire territory in order to control voting centers should Haiti’s long-delayed elections ever be held.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">It was around this time that the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince tweeted a photo of Chargé d’Affaires Eric Stromayer (the U.S. has not had an ambassador in Haiti since October 2021) grinning broadly behind a stoney faced Ariel Henry, saying the two had “discussed recent security gains.” This must have come as news to Haitians desperately trying to flee the abattoir of gang violence.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Stromayer’s meeting with Henry occurred the same week the RNDDH accused Henry of “continuing to supply the gangs with weapons and ammunition to put an end to the lives of the police, to discourage them in their work and to block justice.” And just weeks after the Episcopal Conference of Haiti demanded: “Why does the State not act?" A few days after the meeting, clashes between the G9-affiliated gang Krache Dife (Fire Spitters) and its rivals turned downtown Port-au-Prince into a war zone, with gunmen wearing police uniforms participating in the fighting and a cadre of “barefoot child soldiers” — as one local media outlet called them — firing automatic weapons. Around the same time, when a delegation of evangelical Protestants showed up one afternoon to clean the streets of the Pont-Breya section of Grand Ravine, gunmen shot the pastor's wife dead. Gang coordination seems to increase by the week. Sensing a common enemy, when police began a sustained campaign against 400 Mawozo this month, the gang sent word to Ti Makak, who helpfully distracted them with his own eruption of violence miles away — ending the life of Yvon Buissereth.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px solid rgb(220, 220, 213); box-sizing: border-box; color: #1f1f1f; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td align="left" class="flexible-width" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6f9b8b; font-family: Avenir-Heavy, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;" width="575">Foreign ‘help’ is making everything worse <br /><br /></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td colspan="2" style="border-right-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;"><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">More than 550 people were murdered in greater Port-au-Prince between January and June, according to the Commission épiscopale de l’église catholique romaine Justice et Paix. An additional 200 victims from Cité Soleil were added to that death toll last month. More than 100 police officers were slain between June 2021 and June 2022. And the bloodshed appears to be spreading. In late July, clashes between armed groups in rural Petite-Rivière-de-l’Artibonite, nearly 75 miles from Port-au-Prince, left at least 20 dead and several buildings burned. The OAS recently issued a mea culpa, saying that Haiti’s crisis was “a direct result of the actions taken by the country’s endogenous forces and by the international community,” and arguing that “the international community’s presence in Haiti has amounted to one of the worst and clearest failures implemented and executed within the framework of any international cooperation.” But it, as well, seems to have little idea how to stem the tide of violence.</span></p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"> </p><p style="border-bottom-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Avenir-Roman, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: -0.01em; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“Every day, the insecurity in Haiti grows and the population becomes more imprisoned,” Haitian sociologist Laënnec Hurbon recently told me. “The prime minister is deaf and blind and the international community does not show the slightest empathy in the face of the country's tumble toward the abyss.”</span></p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-76292536840786343582022-12-31T21:06:00.003+01:002022-12-31T21:06:37.458+01:00Michael Deibert Speaking To Al Jazeera on Anniversary of Assassination of Haiti's Jovenel Moïse<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/DGtQC6Us2q0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-10405209248565336152022-12-31T21:04:00.003+01:002022-12-31T21:04:42.293+01:00Freedom Soup and the Liberation of Haiti <p><b>Freedom Soup and the Liberation of Haiti </b></p><p>The cuisine, a combination of African and European influences, also tells the story of this complex country’s revolutionary heritage</p><p>By Michael Deibert </p><p>Newlines Magazine</p><p>(Read the original article <a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/freedom-soup-and-the-liberation-of-haiti/">here</a>)</p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px;">On the first day of the year in 1804, at the Place d’Armes in the dusty city of Gonaïves, gazing out onto the turquoise waters of the Golfe de la Gonâve off Haiti, a 46-year-old military leader who had been born into slavery on a plantation near Grande-Rivière-du-Nord unveiled a text that still cries out from across the centuries.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">“Citizens,” it began,</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px;">it is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty. … We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die.</em></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px;">Independence or death… let these sacred words unite us and be the signal of battle and of our union.</em></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">With those words, Haiti declared its independence from France after a 13-year war of liberation and abolished slavery, the first nation to do so. The military leader who had overseen this victory, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had taken up the torch of Haitian liberation after its after its most charismatic initial proponent, Toussaint Louverture, was kidnapped by the forces of the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte and died in a lonely prison cell in the Jura Mountains (a fate possibly abetted by Dessalines’ own political maneuvering). The formerly French colony of Saint-Domingue would heretofore be known as Haiti, its original Taíno name.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">Hardly alone in his campaign against what was then one of the world’s great military powers — marked by victories such as the Battle of Vertières, outside of modern-day Cap-Haïtien (known then as Cap-Français), in November 1803 — Dessalines was aided by a now-mythic cast of characters. There was Henry (often-written Henri) Christophe, an English-speaking former slave, likely born in Grenada. There was Alexandre Pétion, son of a wealthy French father, and free women of mixed African and European heritage who narrowly avoided death as an infant during a 1770 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince. And, deceased on the long road to liberty, were patriots like Suzanne Bélair, better known as Sanité Bélair, an “affranchi” (free person of color) who took an active part in combat against Napoleon’s forces and became a lieutenant in Louverture’s army. When she was executed by the French she cried “Viv libète! Aba esclavaj!” (Long live freedom! Down with slavery!)</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">Tradition has it that in celebration of their victory, the victorious Haitian forces sat down to “soup joumou,” a fortifying soup hinting at the promise of abundance that the hideousness of slavery had denied Haiti’s people and which earlier this year was given the distinction of being part of “the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO. The soup itself — an enticing and filling mélange of squash, onions, peppers, beef and pasta — not only has historical resonance but also offers a tantalizing introduction to the rich and varied cuisine of Haiti, something I was able to experience firsthand during several years of living there and a quarter century of visiting the country.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">“It is an ode to freedom, a ritual that we participate in saying we believe in a better tomorrow and coming together,” says Dominique Dupuy, Haiti’s delegate to UNESCO. “When you go through this cascade of traumas, resilience comes at a cost, but let’s recognize that we ourselves have the power to push through. We’ve had bad years, but we’re a great people.”</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">Beset by plotting from foreign powers and what the Haitian author Frédéric Marcelin would later characterize as “civil strife, fratricidal slaughters, social miseries … and idolatrous militarism,” Haiti would soon fall into violent political factionalism. After declaring himself emperor, Dessalines would be assassinated at present-day Pont-Rouge in Port-au-Prince in October 1806. Civil war would break out, with the country divided between Henry Christophe’s Kingdom of Haiti in the north (where Christophe declared himself King Henry I) and Alexandre Pétion’s Republic of Haiti in the south. Following the deaths of both Christophe and Pétion, the nation would finally be reunited under the rule of Pétion’s successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">“The revolution is often told in only a victorious narrative, but it involves a lot of bloodshed and intra-group fighting,” says Yveline Alexis, an associate professor of Africana studies at Oberlin College. “But this also not only tells us about how unity and disunity can exist while fighting oppressors but how, in the end, Haiti will be left standing.”</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">But the dream of Haiti and the singular heroism of its initial accomplishment — defeating a colonial power and eradicating an infernal system — never died, and as the heavy winds of the country’s political struggle blew forward, the people of Haiti — “les enfants des héros” (children of heroes) as the author Lyonel Trouillot called them — carried on that legacy with their food.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">When I worked as a journalist in Haiti in the early 2000s, one of my favorite things to do at the end of the week was to leave my flat in the bougainvillea-draped neighborhood of Pacot and head to the Portail Léogâne, the outdoor transit hub used for traveling south out of the city.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">There, one could easily find a tap-tap, as Haiti’s brightly colored shared passenger vans are called, heading for the neighborhoods of Martissant, Carrefour and Mariani (a journey that is now very perilous because of the nonstop fighting of politically aligned armed groups called “baz,” or base). After hopping on board, sensuous kompa music playing from the tap-tap’s sound system, one would sail past dilapidated hotels that hark back to the days when Haiti was a tourist destination with outdoor markets where vendors sold their wares under the open sky.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">When the tap-tap pauses briefly at a crossroads before continuing south through mountains often fecund after rain and dotted by rainbows, market women run up to the vehicle’s sides, offering travelers tasty snacks such as “douce macoss,” an overpoweringly sweet tricolored candy that, along with Faustin Soulouque, who ran the country first as president and then as emperor from 1847 to 1859, is perhaps the most famous product of the nearby city of Petit-Goâve, a once-beautiful city devastated by Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake. Or they would offer “tablet pistach,” Haiti’s version of peanut brittle.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">After an hour or so of the tap-tap’s negotiating serpentine mountain roads, the southern city of Jacmel, where South American liberation hero Simón Bolívar was given shelter by Haiti’s rebel leaders (no one else would take him), appears below, glittering like a jewel next to the tumbling surf.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">Once in Jacmel, I would disembark and transfer to a moto taxi to travel the 10 or so miles to the beach cottage that I was renting. There, one could splash in the surf under the gaze of the brooding inland mountains and feast on exquisite “lambi creole” (conch with a uniquely spicy Haitian sauce) and “langouste” (lobster prepared with a distinct smoky flair). In Jacmel itself, on a weekend evening, citizens and stray foreigners would go to and fro between the restaurants and music clubs, the streets lit by the flickering orange glow of the kerosene lamps of the vendors as they offered “griot” (fried pork) to passersby. As the sun set, it was customary to pour a libation of Haiti’s exquisite rum, Barbancourt Cinq étoiles (still, for my money, the best rum in the world) or, for the more adventurous, to sample the various strains of “tafia,” the highly potent raw rum sold in jerrycans at roadside stands (though the best tafia is widely considered to be consumed in the temperate climes of the mountain town of Kenscoff, above Port-au-Prince).</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">Over the two-and-a-half decades I’ve spent visiting Haiti, the majesty and ebullient tale told by Haiti’s rich cuisine has accompanied me every step. Haiti’s food evokes its sophisticated and varied roots, from the Parisian-style boulangeries that one can find in the tree-draped squares of areas like the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétionville to the unpretentious “lalo,” a spinach stew served over white rice and often bought from large pots along the road. And if you have never bought some “marinade” (a seasoned batter patty) from a woman selling them roadside, have you ever lived? The same question could be posed if you’ve never enjoyed delicious “poulet boucané” (smoked chicken) on the terrace of Kay Foun, overlooking the busy street in Saint-Marc, accompanied by a Prestige beer so cold that ice still clings to the glass of the bottle, or eaten “pintade créole” (guinea hen in a spicy sauce served with fried plantains and beans and rice) on a (relatively) cool autumn evening.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">Regional dishes also abound, from the unique use of coconut around Jacmel in the south to “poul an sòs ak nwa” (cashew chicken) in the north, where one can eat it during an evening of carousing along the Carenage Boulevard that abuts the ocean. In the morning one can take in the stirring sight of Sans-Souci and the Citadelle Laferrière, a palace and fort combination built by Christophe with views across the plains of northern Haiti. Popular in Jérémie, a lovely town on the northern shore of on the northern shore of the Grand’Anse department and known as “la cité des poètes” (the city of poets), one finds “tonmtonm,” a filling breadfruit-based dish.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">Haiti continues to struggle with its demons, systemic and structural problems greater than any one politician or political party. When Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated last July — the fifth president from the country’s north to be killed since independence — and as gang wars and narrow political infighting continue to rack the capital, it’s easy, particularly for outsiders, to forget this culinary lineage, which in a real way has freedom and a revolutionary heritage in every morsel.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Epilogue, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.10000000149011612px; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 24px;">“The Haitian kitchen is a concentration of our Afro and European influences,” says Paul Toussaint, a Haitian chef and restaurateur whose restaurant in Montreal, Canada, Kamúy, mixes traditional Haitian cooking with international elements. “When I am cooking Haitian cuisine, I feel like I am combining those heritages. It’s a love story with our history, and there’s a lot of meaning in our food.”</p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-71857540898698324942022-04-17T15:23:00.007+02:002022-04-17T15:23:49.345+02:00Restoring Glory to a Baltimore Neighborhood<p><b><span style="font-size: small;">Restoring Glory to a Baltimore Neighborhood</span></b></p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><h2><span style="font-size: small;">The
Sandtown-Winchester area burst into America’s consciousness with the
murder by police of Freddie Gray in 2015. But the struggle to recapture
its greatness predates one unhappy Sunday morning</span></h2><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"> <span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-03-29"> March 29, 2022 </time></span> </div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="single_post__shrs"> <div class="single_post__shrs_inner"> </div> </div><p><span style="font-size: small;">Michael Deibert</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">New Lines Magazine</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">(Read the original article <a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/restoring-glory-to-a-baltimore-neighborhood/">here</a>) <br /></span></p><div class="content"> <p class="has-drop-cap"><span style="font-size: small;">Humanity
pulses like blood through a vein along West Baltimore’s Pennsylvania
Avenue, a whirl of people moving beneath a cloud-dappled winter evening
sky illuminated with blazes of crimson fire from the setting sun.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">At
the Avenue Bakery, Jim Hamlin is dishing out dinner rolls, Jewish apple
cake and morsels of the history of the storied Baltimore neighborhood
of Sandtown-Winchester, whose trajectory mirrors that of many just like
it around the United States.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“I was fortunate that I grew up on
the cusp of segregation and integration,” says Hamlin, a 72-year-old who
grew up in Sandtown and opened the bakery after working for UPS for 35
years. “Pennsylvania Avenue was the business district for this
community. The Royal Theatre was still open and there was nothing but
nightclubs, restaurants, barber shops, all the staples we needed in our
community. Some were owned by African-Americans, some were owned by
Jewish folks. It was the thriving entertainment center for Baltimore
from the 1930s to the 1960s.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Recent
decades, however, have been less kind to Sandtown. The neighborhood
erupted into the national consciousness following the April 2015 murder
of Freddie Gray by officers of the Baltimore Police Department and
subsequent protests that spiraled into riots that rocked the city.
(Though Gray’s death was ruled a homicide by a medical examiner,
attempts to prosecute the six officers involved ended in acquittal and
dropping of the charges against them.)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">But the story of Sandtown’s
struggle long predates that early Sunday morning when the 25-year-old
Gray’s path crossed with the police outside The Gilmor Homes, a now
largely demolished public housing facility named after a wealthy
merchant family that included a Confederate cavalry officer. Those
struggles say much about the attitude of successive city, state and
federal governments toward some of the most disadvantaged and
marginalized people in the United States and the herculean efforts of
those in the community to rescue it from the jaws of despair.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Settled
by Europeans on what was largely a traditional Native American hunting
ground in the second half of the 1600s, Baltimore soon boomed thanks to
extensive trade with Britain’s sugar-producing Caribbean colonies in
products such as grain and tobacco, the commerce facilitated by the
extensive use of an economic model based on slavery. Decades after the
U.S. won its independence from Great Britain, in September 1814, during
the Battle of Baltimore fought during the War of 1812, a local lawyer,
Francis Scott Key, penned the words to what would later become “The
Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States. Among
its lyrics is one line, from the third verse and thus not performed
often today, that gives a hint of the flavor of society there: “No
refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or
the gloom of the grave.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Despite its northern location, Baltimore
was a city that, culturally and politically, in many ways remained part
of the slave-owning Deep South. Though it also boasted shipbuilding
yards, sawmills and other factories, an undercurrent of violence and
chaos rumbled beneath the hum of industry. In 1835, the Baltimore bank
riot saw a three-day spree of pillage and looting after the collapse of
the Bank of Maryland resulted in the overnight evaporation of millions
of dollars in depositors’ savings. In October 1849, the author Edgar
Allan Poe was plucked “in distress” from its streets wearing clothes
that were not his own and died a few days later. In April 1861, at the
very beginning of the Civil War, Confederate secessionist sympathizers
attacked members of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania state militia
regiments en route to Washington, sparking a clash that left four
soldiers and 12 rioters dead. As the war progressed, Abraham Lincoln
found it expedient to clap George William Brown, the city’s secessionist
mayor, in jail for more than a year. After the war, the city again saw
riots in 1877 when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad cut the wages and
reduced the hours of its workers, leading to a clash between civilians
and the National Guard, federal troops and local police in a melee that
left at least 10 dead.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">But the postwar period and into the first
half of the 20th century also saw a flourishing of Baltimore’s
African-American community in general and in Sandtown in particular.
Factories like the Mount Vernon Mill, a cotton textile mill in nearby
Jones Falls, provided plentiful employment and Pennsylvania Avenue
itself became a glittering mecca for Black culture, with the nearby
Royal Theatre (built in 1922) and the Penn Hotel serving as anchors for
the area’s artistic milieu. Thurgood Marshall, who as an attorney
successfully argued <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em> before the
Supreme Court (which ruled that state laws establishing racial
segregation in public schools were unconstitutional) and later became
the court’s first African-American justice, lived in Sandtown. So did
jazz musicians like Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway (whose songs such as
“Minnie the Moocher ” and “Reefer Man” in some ways encapsulated the
district’s libertine appeal) and Chick Webb. For a touch of the bucolic,
the horse-drawn carts of the arabbers, or street vendors, plied the
lanes of the neighborhood carrying vegetables, fruits, blocks of ice and
other necessities. The economic development of the city was frequently
spoken of in terms of a “black butterfly,” with its majority
African-American population spreading like a butterfly’s wings on either
side of a highly moneyed white corridor of real estate running through
Baltimore’s center.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“The community then, when it came to economic
opportunity, there were many options for young people,” says Jim Hamlin,
whose bakery features photographs of Sandtown’s notables and a mural
celebrating some of its famous figures. On the first Saturday of each
month from May to September, the bakery hosts concerts in its small
courtyard.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">When
the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was slain on the evening
of April 4, 1968, the shots that killed him may have been fired in
Memphis, Tennessee, but they were heard in many other U.S. cities,
including Baltimore. The city was marked by a week of rioting after the
assassination, unrest that hit Sandtown particularly hard (Maryland Gov.
Spiro Agnew — later Richard Nixon’s vice president — responded by
sending the National Guard to the city and then publicly lambasting
local Black leaders for their supposed “failure” in the face of the
unrest). The Pennsylvania Avenue business district was devastated, with
many businesses opting not to reopen, and by 1971 the Royal Theatre had
been demolished, a sadly symbolic act for a community rocked back on its
heels. Eventually, hundreds of homes would be abandoned and fall into
various states of disrepair.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Baltimore was not spared from the
violence associated with the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early
1990s, nor, along with it, the glaring inequality of law enforcement and
sentencing that targeted poor, urban (frequently African-American and
Latino) communities. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 led to the
notorious “100 to 1” ratio in sentencing, which meant individuals faced
far longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for
offenses involving a similar amount of powder cocaine, and leading to
African-Americans often serving an equal amount of time in prison for
nonviolent drug offenses as arrested whites did for violent offenses.
This disparity was not corrected until President Barack Obama signed the
Fair Sentencing Act into law in August 2010.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">A level of
intergenerational poverty began to afflict neighborhoods like Sandtown.
According to the 2017 Baltimore City Neighborhood Health Profile, the
median household income in the neighborhood is $24,374, a little more
than half of what it is in the city as a whole, while the poverty rate
is 50.3%, as compared with a citywide rate of is 28.8%. Progress often
seems tenuous. According to a 2015 study by Loyola University’s Peter
Rosenblatt and Johns Hopkins University’s Stefanie DeLuca, after an
uptick in home ownership at the beginning of the millennium, the 2008
housing crisis led to 350 foreclosures in the neighborhood in just a
two-year period.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“There are people who cannot take care of their
families or ever get out of their current situations, so they
participate in the street economy, and those rules are totally different
than the roles we play by, if you make a mistake, it could be your
life,” says Ashiah Parker of the No Boundaries Coalition, a resident-led
advocacy organization based in Sandtown. “There are people in this city
who are fourth or fifth generation impoverished, who have never had a
member of their family go to college or live outside of the housing
projects.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Nor has law enforcement been blameless in this dynamic.
A 2016 probe by the U.S. Department of Justice found that the Baltimore
Police Department had engaged “in a pattern or practice of conduct that
violates the Constitution or federal law” including “making
unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests; using enforcement
strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates
of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans; using excessive
force; and retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally
protected expression.” The report found that the practices were “driven
by systemic deficiencies in [the department’s] policies, training,
supervision, and accountability structures that fail to equip officers
with the tools they need to police effectively and within the bounds of
the federal law.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Many in the city believe these practices
solidified during the 1999 to 2007 mayoralty of Martin O’Malley, who
went on to become governor of Maryland and ran an unsuccessful bid for
the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Though homicides fell
during O’Malley’s tenure as mayor (and arrests increased dramatically),
the systemic, structural causes behind crime remained stubbornly
resistant to correction. In 2010, the city settled for $870,000 a
lawsuit brought against it four years earlier by the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) and National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) on behalf of 14 who said their arrests were part
of a systematic policy of arrests without cause.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“In Maryland, if
you are convicted of a felony, even as a 15-year-old, it can never be
expunged from your record,” Ashiah Parker explains. “Walmart checks
that. We’re not even talking about becoming a top tier accountant. You
can’t have a criminal background and go into senior housing, for
example. … We need to do something radical because we talk about second
chances, but we don’t really offer them.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Much of the violence,
however, comes from within the community itself. In January 2022,
Baltimore’s Child Fatality Review, which brings together various city
agencies and experts, released a report on 208 child fatality cases over
the previous five years, finding that homicides are the leading cause
of death of children in the city, with 90% of the fatalities involving
children of color (in a city in which people of color make up about
two-thirds of the population). One of the victims was 13-year-old
Maliyah Turner, who was shot and killed outside the Lillian Jones
Recreation Center in Sandtown, where she had arrived for band practice,
this past November.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“It’s painful for me to be a person who God
has selected to be a servant to the people to see the suffering of those
who God created in his likeness and his image to be a little lower than
the angels,” says lifelong Sandtown resident Elder C.W. Harris, the
founding pastor of Newborn Community of Faith Church, who, along with
jazz musician Todd Marcus, established an organization called
Intersection of Change to address and ameliorate poverty-related
challenges. “It is inhumane. God is crying because of the way we are
treating one another.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“We
are reconcilers,” says Harris. “And those who have lived here have to
receive the encouragement and belief that they can do it. The nation
should be ashamed of the way this side of central West Baltimore is
being treated. We can stop all this if we show some humanity, but we’re
not showing any.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Among those on the front lines of combating
violence are men like Wayne Brewton. A 61-year-old released from prison
in March 2017 after serving a 31-year sentence for murder, Brewton is
what is known as a “violence interrupter” with Safe Streets Baltimore, a
violence prevention program operated by Catholic Charities in
collaboration with the Baltimore City Department of Health and the
Mayor’s Office for Neighborhood Safety and Engagement.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“The nature
of civilization doesn’t change. There’s always going to be some version
of greed, jealousy and hate,” says Brewton in his spare, tidy apartment
as he reaches down to pet a cat purring around his ankles. “And I was
led down a path of total destruction.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">It
is a fate he hopes to help today’s young people avoid, along with the
lure of images of success that can confront them on a daily basis.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“Picture
yourself as a child, going to school. You probably haven’t eaten in a
couple of days. The teacher probably doesn’t care much about you. You
have to walk past nine or 10 blocks of abandoned homes, so you admire
the ones who get up and fight through that,” says Brewton. “The main
important factor when you deal with the youth of today [is that] you
have to listen and stop trying to make decisions for them and they are
going to tell you what they need. But you have to earn their trust.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">It
is not an approach that comes without risks. In January, 29-year-old
DaShawn McGrier, a Safe Streets violence interrupter, was slain as part
of a quadruple shooting in the McElderry Park neighborhood east of
Sandtown. He was the third member of the organization to be shot and
killed in the past year. Nevertheless, Brewton believes it is important
to push on.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“A lot of the kids have never been out of
Sandtown-Winchester,” Brewton notes. “We might take them to baseball
games, to basketball games, to the Museum of African American History
& Culture. … For about six hours, we’ll be saving some lives, maybe
their own. We need the richness of community back. We’re the change
we’re looking for. If you want change, you’ve got to take the initiative
to make that change.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Historically, Baltimore’s politicians
themselves have often seemed unable or unwilling to confront the great
challenges of communities like Sandtown. For more than a decade, from
1947 to 1959, Baltimore’s mayor was Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., the father
of current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. While mayor, D’Alesandro oversaw
the dedication of a large statue of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee,
seditous traitors who defended the infernal institution of slavery. The
statue stood in Wyman Park until it was ordered taken down and put in
storage by the Baltimore City Council in August 2017. Pelosi’s elder
brother, Thomas D’Alesandro III, served as mayor for a single term that
overlapped with the 1968 riots. Baltimore saw its first Black mayor,
Clarence H. Burns, ascend to the office in 1987 when he took over from
William Donald Schaefer following the latter’s resignation after being
elected governor of Maryland. Buns was succeeded by the first elected
Black mayor, Kurt Schmoke, who served from 1987 to 1999.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">In more
recent years, the city’s political class has been buffeted by a series
of scandals. Sheila Dixon, who served as Baltimore’s mayor from January
2007 until February 2010, was convicted of embezzlement in connection
with a scheme to purloin gift cards meant for Baltimore’s poorest
residents. Catherine Pugh, who served as mayor from December 2016 until
May 2019, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and tax evasion. In January,
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was indicted on charges of
perjury and making false statements on mortgage applications.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Baltimore’s
current mayor, 37-year-old Brandon Scott, previously served as
president of the city council and ran on a promise that he would lower
Baltimore’s murders to fewer than 300 a year during his first year in
office. But in Scott’s first year, 2021, the city experienced 337
homicides and 726 shootings. Scott has often seemed overwhelmed by the
violence afflicting the city, in January 2022 telling a reporter that he
was “pissed off” about the violence and that “if folks have something
to say, get your ass on the streets, walk with us, do something. Don’t
tweet, don’t talk.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">It is hard to spend any length of time in
Sandtown, though, and not come away with the impression that many in the
community are indeed doing something, although often away from the
glare of the cameras and rather in the deep, daily work in the trenches
of community-building.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“It’s rough, but I do think things can turn
the corner,” says Ashiah Parker. “And I think people are still holding
hope that a renaissance era can come back.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Some in Sandtown’s younger generation hold out that same hope.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“I
think a lot of youth aren’t fortunate enough to have the ability to see
past the obstacles that other people put in front of you,” says
23-year-old Keyarra Johnson, an artist born and raised in the
neighborhood and now a program manager with Jubilee Arts, a community
arts program based in Sandtown. “But there are a lot of people in the
neighborhood trying to reconnect the community with this rich history
and encourage the artistic and entrepreneurial side of Sandtown.”</span></p><p class="has-drop-cap"><span style="font-size: small;">Midway
between Pennsylvania Avenue and Presbury Street, where a fenced-in
mural shows Freddie Gray’s face gazing soulfully out at the neighborhood
he left seven years ago, Bryan Wright trudges an acre and a half of
Sandtown under a slate-gray sky, where neat rows of tarpaulin-wreathed
tunnels shelter an unexpected bounty.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On land that was initially
reclaimed by Intersection of Change, Wright and other members of the
Strength to Love farm cultivate a variety of mustards, kale, spinach,
lettuce, bok choy, dandelion greens, arugula, turnips, carrots, garlic,
onions, scallions and other victuals that they sell from their own stand
at the front of the property to farmer’s markets and a variety of
restaurants in the Baltimore and Washington, DC area.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">A native of
Tennessee, Wright had been traveling back and forth to Baltimore for the
better part of 20 years before he moved there permanently to become the
farm’s manager at the beginning of 2021. Built on land once occupied by
row houses that were demolished in the 1990s, Strength to Love works
both to be a place for returning citizens – formerly incarcerated people
— to come to get job training and also as a workforce development
program that provides 18-to-24-year-old Sandtown residents with
agricultural training.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“In
our community we talk about all the negatives. But food insecurity to
me is a major crisis that no one is really dealing with,” Wright says as
the “hoop houses,” as the miniature greenhouses are called, flutter in
the chill breeze. “And it affects a community on multiple levels from an
economic level to a health level to mental health to environmental
justice to mental development in kids. This is really a project of
empowerment for trying to create food security,”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">It is not an easy
task. It is not uncommon to find sex workers using the larger tunnels
as places of work or to find addicts securing their fixes inside a
tunnel. In the colder months, homeless people sometimes seek out the
tunnels to get out of the biting wind and find a warmer spot.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“I
don’t think the people sleeping in the high tunnels are being
disrespectful to us,” Wright says. “They’re homeless and they’re looking
for a warm place to sleep. But at the same time, there is a need for us
to make our footprint in the community more profound.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Across the
street from an asphalt plant, the farm uses 100% organic compost and
envisions expanding in the near future to include a meditation garden
along with its current agricultural project.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“Why wouldn’t you put
a farm here?” Wright asks rhetorically. “Doesn’t it make sense to put
food where the people are at? A library or a farm, it’s all nourishment.
Being able to be self-sustainable is a major weapon and I think there’s
a true effort to keep people from being beggars and asking for
handouts. Gardens and farms are healing places. There’s no coincidence
the majority of creation stories begin in a garden. Growing your own
food is a revolutionary act.”</span></p> </div>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-3426741350039913022022-04-17T15:20:00.002+02:002022-04-17T15:20:29.418+02:00Latin America risk outlook: emboldened criminal groups, failing states and rising climate insecurity<p>I spoke with Douglas Farah, Dr Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian, Dr Vanessa Neumann and Dr
Irene Mia under the aegis of the The International Institute for Strategic Studies to discuss the conflict outlook for Latin America, focusing on
current and emerging areas of fragility, conflict hotspots and political
risks with a special reference to those with regional repercussions. Our discussion can be viewed <a href="https://youtu.be/le1QJQikXjQ">here</a>.<br /></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-76944193149809894572022-04-17T15:16:00.004+02:002022-04-17T15:16:37.210+02:00In Latin America, Backers of Leftist Dictatorships Look the Other Way<p><b><span style="font-size: small;">In Latin America, Backers of Leftist Dictatorships Look the Other Way</span></b></p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><h2><span style="font-size: small;">As
Latin American dictators marginalize and jail protesters, the leaders
rely on backing from prominent but obtuse individuals and organizations</span></h2><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"> <span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-01-12"> January 12, 2022 </time></span></div><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"><span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-01-12"> </time></span></div><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"><span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-01-12">By Michael Deibert</time></span></div><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"><span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-01-12"> </time></span></div><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"><span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-01-12">New Lines Magazine</time></span></div><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"><span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-01-12"> </time></span></div><div class="single_post__author_date flex_start__mob"><span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2022-01-12">(Read the original article <a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-latin-america-backers-of-leftist-dictatorships-look-the-other-way/">here</a>) </time></span> </div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="content"> <p class="has-drop-cap"><span style="font-size: small;">What
a night it was for the delegation of the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA) last June as they gazed down on the Venezuelan capital of
Caracas from the five-star, luxury Gran Meliá Hotel.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“View from
the dancefloor, it’s absolutely beautiful here,” tweeted delegate Jen
McKinney, while fellow delegate Tom Wojcik contented himself with the
words “Caracas” and images of the hotel’s glittering façade, where a
room for a night costs more than 70 times the Venezuelan monthly salary.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The
attendees were ostensibly in town to participate in the Congreso
Bicentenario de los Pueblos del Mundo, set to commemorate the 1821
victory of Simón Bolívar over royalist forces at the Battle of Carabobo.
But in fact the gathering served as a kind of magnet for partisans of
the region’s various authoritarian governments. The DSA junket to
Venezuela was part of a growing trend of “anti-imperialist”
revolutionary tourism in Latin America where well-heeled outsiders come
to glory in the necrotic splendor of dead or aging revolutionary leaders
while carefully eschewing any discussion of what kind of conditions
citizens in said countries live under. It is an alliance inspired not by
loyalty to progressive and leftist ideals and values but of fealty to
rulers and power.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">In office since the 2013 death of Venezuelan
President Hugo Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro portrays himself and
the country’s ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) as
vanguards of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist nexus of regional
powers including Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">As the delegation of
the DSA proved, however, interest in Venezuela’s government does not
extend to curiosity about the country’s tumultuous history or tormented
present. Visiting Chávez’s gravesite, DSA member Sean Estelle tweeted
that former President Carlos Andrés Pérez — the mercurial populist who
nationalized the oil industry and served as vice president of the
Socialist International for 16 years — was a “right winger.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The
incuriosity was complemented by an intolerance for critique or even
discussion. Venezuela’s Partido Socialismo y Libertad, itself a left
party largely inspired by the Argentine Trotskyist leader Nahuel Moreno,
wrote that the DSA delegation “lost the opportunity to meet with worker
activists, feminists, the LGBTQ community, indigenous activists,
peasants and youth from the popular sectors and the independent left.”
As Venezuelans begged the DSA to take a more nuanced approach to the
country, DSA member Austin Gonzalez sniffed on Twitter: “Something i
would appreciate most is if people did not try to talk down to me when
it comes to Venezuela…I’m fully aware of everything going on.” Later,
after the DSA was given an opportunity to meet Maduro himself (lovingly
documented on DSA social media and by Venezuela’s state-run Telesur
network), Gonzalez gushed that “who I met was not a dictator” but “a
humble man who cares deeply about his people.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">So, if one takes
the DSA — an organization with which at least four U.S. members of
Congress (Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida
Tlaib) claim affiliation — at their word, that they were indeed “fully
aware of what was going on,” exactly what kind of regime were they
giving their full-throated endorsement to? And beyond the gates of the
Gran Meliá and the conference halls of the Congreso, what kind of
reality do Venezuelans face every day?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">According to the
International Organization for Migration, more than 5.6 million
Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, many living in
extremely precarious conditions in neighboring countries such as Brazil
and Colombia. The 2020-21 Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida
(National Survey of Living Conditions) from the Universidad Católica
Andrés Bello in Caracas found that 76.6% of Venezuela’s 28 million
residents live in extreme poverty. A 2020 World Food Program report
ranked Venezuela among the top four countries worldwide suffering from
food insecurity, just behind Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Afghanistan. In a 2020 bulletin, Caritas Venezuela noted that over the
past year there had been a 73% increase in levels of acute malnutrition
in children under 5. All this being the case, it was perhaps in
questionable taste for DSA delegation member Marvin Gonzalez to tweet
out photos of his lunch fare while bragging that he “had a dope ass
sancococo today!”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">When one points out statistics confirming the
destitution, the automatic response among DSA types — almost a catechism
at this point — is that U.S. sanctions are to blame for Venezuela’s
woes. That, simply put, is a lie, but a lie whose eternal repetition
some apparently believe will transform it into truth.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">During the
2002-03 strike at Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) — the state oil
company that Carlos Andrés Pérez had nationalized — the Chávez
government fired 19,000 career employees, replacing them with political
flunkies, reneging on deals with oil companies, stealing assets and
failing to reinvest in the industry. It was a recipe for disaster.
Nevertheless, in 2013, just before Venezuela’s economy began its
terrifying downward spiral, Center for Economic and Policy Research
(CEPR) co-director Mark Weisbrot, a longtime acolyte of the regime and
certainly a contender for worst economist in the world, wrote in The
Guardian that warnings of the country’s impending collapse were the work
of “Venezuela haters” and “the international and Venezuelan media”
responsible for peddling a false “catastrophic view” of the country’s
economy, when in fact “economic disaster was always just around the
corner but never quite happened.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Some six years later, in a 2019
report co-authored with Jeffrey Sachs (an economist whose shock therapy
created chaos in Russia in the 1990s), Weisbrot attempted to argue that
sanctions caused 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018, using the bizarre
metric of comparing Venezuelan and Colombian oil production before and
after a 2017 round of U.S. sanctions against the regime. An analysis of
CEPR’s study by the Brookings Institute published a few weeks later
concluded that “the bulk of the deterioration in living standards
occurred long before the sanctions were enacted in 2017,” with
“worsening trends across all of the socio-economic indicators … well
before the sanctions were imposed.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">A culture of robber barons,
the famous “boligarchs” who preached socialist revolution but practiced
savage capitalism, came to the fore. One official alone — Chávez’s
former energy czar Javier Alvarado — stands accused in various legal
challenges of diverting $15 million from PDVSA as he lived lavishly and
acquired homes in Madrid, Cartagena and Miami. Last year the Swiss
newspaper 24 heures reported how Zurich police have identified
questionable billions linked to the Venezuelan state in hundreds of bank
accounts in Switzerland. This past June, Spain’s El País reported on a
vast network circumventing U.S. sanctions on Venezuela traveling through
30 countries and moving money among various tax havens to create opaque
multimillion-dollar businesses.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">A Human Rights Watch report on a
series of roiling April 2017 protests against the government concluded
that “security forces and armed pro-government groups attacked
protesters in the streets, using extreme and at times lethal force,
causing dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries.” The report went on
to detail the torture that detainees were subject to: electric shocks,
severe beatings, asphyxiation and sexual abuse including rape. That same
year, pro-government thugs stormed a meeting of the
opposition-dominated Asamblea Nacional, savaging legislators and their
staff and leaving them bloodied and injured. A subsequent Human Rights
Watch report from 2019 characterized the actions of the government’s
Fuerza de Acciones Especiales (FAES) — a branch of the Policía Nacional
Bolivariana that many Venezuelans consider as little more than a death
squad — as committing “serious human rights violations [and] abusive
policing practices in low-income communities.” From 2016 to 2019 alone,
the Venezuelan police and security forces had killed nearly 18,000
people for alleged “resistance to authority.” A July 2019 statement from
the Programa Venezolano de Educación-Acción en Derechos Humanos
(PROVEA) human rights organization decried what it said had become “a
factory for executions” in poor neighborhoods where security forces
would burst in late at night, kidnap suspects (often those alleged to
have participated in political demonstrations) and then summarily kill
them. Another PROVEA report detailed how, in the state of Lara,
Venezuelan security forces committed at least 135 extrajudicial killings
in the first six months of 2020 alone. A report in Peru’s El Comercio
detailed how, in the poor Caracas barrio of José Félix Ribas (a
20-minute drive from the Gran Meliá where the DSA delegation stayed),
the FAES murdered at least 10 people in January 2019 after residents had
joined a massive protest against Maduro. A 411-page 2020 report by
United Nations investigators implicated Maduro and other high-ranking
officials in systematic human rights abuses, including killings, torture
and sexual violence, amounting to crimes against humanity.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">With
just an eight-minute drive from their hotel, the DSA delegation could
have spoken to the employees of the Hospital Clínico Universitario de
Caracas, where most employees are paid less than $1 per month by the
regime; doctors and nurses are forced to bring chlorine from home to
clean the facilities and desperately search for sutures, gloves or masks
though private donations; and employees freely admit (as they did in a
June 2021 article in the newspaper El Nacional) that the government had
“destroyed” the institution.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The DSA members were far from the
only arrivistes in town. Also in Caracas for the Congreso was Vijay
Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research
and Manolo De Los Santos, described as a “researcher” for Tricontinental
and the co-director of The People’s Forum. During their visit, Prashad
posed for a portrait with a member of the security services terrorizing
Venezuela while De Los Santos raved on Twitter about the pair’s
“unforgettable evening with a dear comrade” (Maduro). The People’s Forum
has recently begun boosting an organization called BreakThrough News,
which also had correspondents on the ground in Venezuela at the time.
BreakThrough News includes among its commentators those who previously
worked with the In the NOW and Soapbox video channels, produced by
Maffick LLC, a Los Angeles-based social media digital content company
frequently identified as “Russia state-controlled” because of its links
with the Russian state-funded news organization RT, an assessment a U.S.
court agreed with in 2020. According to the Charity Navigator website,
the address for The People’s Forum — 320 West 37th Street in New York
City — is also the registered address for BreakThrough News.</span></p><p class="has-drop-cap"><span style="font-size: small;">In
nearby Bolivia, the looking-glass perspective of much of the
international left has been similar, as it tries to erase a
well-documented authoritarian power grab that ended in calamity.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">In
a 2016 constitutional referendum, Evo Morales, who had served as
president since 2006, sought voter approval to allow the president and
vice president to run for an additional consecutive term. When the
measure was defeated by a 51.3% majority, Morales appealed to Bolivia’s
Supreme Court (stuffed with regime loyalists), which struck down the
vote — the democratic expression of the Bolivian people — claiming that
the American Convention on Human Rights, to which Bolivia is party,
guaranteed Morales the right to run as a “human right.” In response,
Luis Almagro, the secretary general of the Organization of American
States (OAS), which is responsible for enforcing the treaty, said the
document did “not mean the right to perpetual power.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">In Bolivia’s
subsequent October 2019 general election (where a substantial amount of
preelection polling showed majorities believing Morales’ reelection
would be illegal), widespread reporting of irregularities and
allegations that Morales’s ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS)
artificially inflated its tally to avoid going to a second round were
borne out by an OAS report that recommended new elections. Here, too,
the CEPR issued its own report, unsurprisingly siding with the Morales
government and failing to engage with many critiques of the
irregularities identified by the OAS, the European Union and local
observers. The election’s integrity was further eroded by the presence
of a slew of partisan elections officials as well as computer server and
chain-of-custody concerns.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">After a November 2019 uprising (during
which both pro- and anti-MAS forces committed violence) drove Morales
from power, a conspiracy theory centered on Bolivia’s reserves of
lithium took hold, much of it resting on a July 2020 tweet from
eccentric Tesla founder Elon Musk, where he bragged, “We will coup
whoever we want! Deal with it.” This theory was strongly undercut by
observations of those such as Pablo Solón Romero, who had served as
Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. under Morales. He noted that it was
Morales himself who had thrown the country open to lithium speculators
and that in the southwestern department of Potosí, for example, “the
opposition to the government radicalized before the elections due to the
signing of a 70-year contract without payment of royalties for the
production of lithium hydroxide in the salt flats of Uyuni.” Oppression
in Potosí by the MAS party party (after a year long interim presidency
by Jeanine Áñez, in 2020 MAS presidential candidate Luis Arce won with
55.1% of the vote) continues today, with members of the local Comité
Cívico Potosinista continuing to be subjects of police harassment and
extrajudicial arrests.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">But these facts are of little interest to
some foreign commentators such as the former British Labour leader
Jeremey Corbyn (whose fringe politics and taste for fanaticism managed
to hand the party its worst electoral defeat since 1935 two years ago),
who last October penned an article claiming that in the 2019 elections
“the final result would hand Morales a clear first-round victory as
votes from rural, indigenous-populated and Morales-supporting areas,” a
view by no means universal among Bolivia’s people.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“The MAS
government has been very clever in constructing a false local and
international narrative of care and protection for Mother Earth
(Pachamama) and respect for human and indigenous rights, which in
practice does not exist,” said Alex Villca Limaco, an activist with the
Coordinadora Nacional de Defensa de los Territorios Indígenas
Originarios Campesinos y Áreas Protegidas de Bolivia (National
Coordinator for the Defense of Indigenous Peasant Territories and
Protected Areas of Bolivia or CONTIOCAP). “This has only served to
distract and hide its ambition for merely extractive economic power and
hegemonic and totalitarian political power … [They have] only served to
continue a policy of looting, dispossession and destruction of
indigenous territories and protected areas.”</span></p><p class="has-drop-cap"><span style="font-size: small;">The
situation is far more dire in Nicaragua, where since 2007 Daniel Ortega
of the ostensibly left-wing Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional
(FSLN) has ruled as president. Since 2017, his wife, Rosario Murillo, a
failed poet with more than a whiff of Lady Macbeth about her, has served
as vice president. Once revered as the rebel group that helped oust
dictator Anastasio Somoza from power in 1979, the FSLN has grown
increasingly dictatorial, extractive and repressive during its current
reign.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Since 2015, settlers in the country’s heavily indigenous
northeast — whom many see as backed by the government — have killed more
than 60 indigenous people, according to the Centro por la Justicia y
Derechos Humanos de la Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN). (The
FSLN has a history of violent hostility against Nicaragua’s indigenous
communities, documented well in the 1980s by the geographer Bernard O.
Nietschmann.) A recent report by the investigative news site Divergentes
revealed that the Ortega-Murillo regime has made 60% of Nicaragua’s
surface available to large international investors for mining
concessions. A study – based on surveys of excess mortality – published
last month by the Observatorio por la Transparencia y Anticorrupción
concluded that the regime had purposely undercounted COVID-19 deaths in
the country by 6,000 to 9,000.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">In April 2018, the regime finally
ripped away its veneer of democracy after the government’s proposal to
increase taxes and cut social security benefits ignited long-standing
grievances. Protests broke out around the country. The government
responded with immense brutality that has continued in fits and starts
ever since. A May 2018 report by Amnesty International found that in
response to the protests, “the Nicaraguan government adopted a strategy
of violent repression not seen in the country for years. More than 70
people were reportedly killed by the state and hundreds were seriously
injured.” In December 2018, the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos
Independientes (GIEI), a collection of independent analysts selected by
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, published a report
concluding that the Ortega government “committed crimes against
humanity” and that Ortega used “public institutions and pro-government
armed groups to establish a repressive state apparatus, with the
intention to kill and persecute those who opposed their policies.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">But
among many self-described leftists, one hears little of this. As
Nicaragua held farcical elections last month with all major contenders
for the presidency but Ortega jailed along with over a hundred other
political prisoners (the youngest believed to be 21-year-old feminist
and student activist Samantha Jirón), the North American Congress on
Latin America (NACLA) published an article praising the regime. It was
written by John Perry, an expat Brit living in Nicaragua who, under the
pseudonym Charles Redvers, disseminated a “confession” from student
protester Valeska Sandoval made when she had a gun pointed at her head
by government agents and little choice but to comply with her captors.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">During
the elections themselves — where the abstention rate was 81.5%,
according to the Urnas Abiertas citizen watchdog organization — a
carnival sideshow of figures descended on the country to be feted by a
regime better known for killing, jailing and exiling journalists than
accrediting them. Among them was Craig “Pasta” Jardula, an American
podcaster with no experience in the country who told Business Insider
that Caleb Maupin, a political commentator at Russia’s state RT
propaganda organ, had invited him to come down. Though Jardula had paid
for his flight from the U.S., the Nicaraguan government had “covered our
rooms and food and that sort of thing” as well as the cost of his
flight from Managua to a polling station in the country’s northeast. (In
terms of government spending priorities, by contrast, in some of the
country’s regions nearly 30% of children under 5 suffer from chronic
malnutrition.) Jardula would later tweet out that Nicaragua was “a true
Democratic [sic] country.” Also ubiquitous was the U.S. journalist Ben
Norton, affiliated with the website The Grayzone, which has made
something of a cottage industry of defending dictators and their crimes.
A reliable government booster nonetheless forced to admit on state
television that there were no lines at polling booths, Norton was
lampooned by the Nicaraguan blog Bacanalnica as a “cartoon … who hangs
out with the most nefarious governments on the planet.” The site went on
to ask: “Where were you when members of 100% Noticias were imprisoned
and their offices closed? Did you ask for justice when they raided and
closed Confidencial? Did you complain when La Prensa’s paper was
detained at customs?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Unlike the visiting Americans, the charade
was too much for many regional leaders, with Peru’s left-wing government
saying the vote “did not meet the minimum criteria of free, fair and
transparent elections” and deserved “the rejection of the international
community.” Carlos Alvarado Quesada, the left-wing president of
neighboring Costa Rica, wrote that “due to their lack of democratic
conditions & guarantees, we do not recognize the elections in
Nicaragua” and called on the government to free its political prisoners.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Nicaraguans themselves believe they see the true face of the regime for what it is.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“Ortega
is more willing to sell out the national patrimony than even Somoza
was,” said Bianca Jagger, the Nicaraguan-born human rights and social
justice activist. “When we talk about what people think of this idea of a
leftist revolution, they better think twice. If anyone betrayed the
principles that inspired this revolution, it was Daniel Ortega. The left
needs to come to terms that their utopian dreams of what these
revolutions have brought to these countries are completely and totally
fictitious. These revolutions have betrayed the very ideals they began
to fight for.”</span></p><p class="has-drop-cap"><span style="font-size: small;">All of this finally brings us
to Cuba, the site of the hemisphere’s oldest dictatorship and the nation
where sanguinary tyranny marketed with a T-shirt and a beret have
seduced more people into dictatorial apologia than any other. When
protests erupted on the island this past July, many acted as if the
event was unexpected. But in fact the pressure had been increasing
heavily in recent years, propelled by both an intolerant, lily-white
political and military elite and the ever-tightening grip of sanctions
imposed by the United States, theoretically to pressure the regime but
in reality punishing ordinary citizens.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Ruled by the Castro family
and their allies since 1959 and not having seen a democratic election
since 1948, Cuba is a case study in optics versus reality. For more than
60 years, the country has been led by Fidel Castro (1959 to 2008), Raúl
Castro (2008 to 2019) and Miguel Díaz-Canel (2019 to present) — three
white men — as they have presided over a police state that in its early
era rounded up and tortured gay men in concentration camps (an
experience searingly documented in the book “Antes que anochezca” by
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas), has aided liberation struggles elsewhere
in Latin America and in Africa while denying its own citizens the
ability to choose the political or economic system by which they wished
to be governed, and has remained passionately hostile to independent
expressions of Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ identity. The government sent cadres
of doctors abroad but then used them as a source of hard currency,
gobbling up most of their salaries and imposing severe curbs on their
freedom of expression and freedom of association. To Venezuela, it sent
security personnel and torturers. Memorably described by their former
close ally Carlos Franqui as a couple of puritanical, intolerant
bumpkins from the rural backwater of Birán aghast at the “decadent”
Afro-Cuban culture they encountered in cities like Santiago de Cuba and
Havana, the Castro brothers set in motion a square, macho military
culture on the island that remains very much the ruling aesthetic today.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The
latest round of protests can arguably be traced back to 2018, when many
young artists and intellectuals began protesting against Decree 349, a
draconian edict prohibiting musicians, artists, writers and other
performers from operating in public or private without prior approval by
Cuba’s Ministry of Culture. This would eventually lead to the formation
of the Movimiento San Isidro, a collective named after a poor and
historically marginalized Havana neighborhood and encompassing a wide
range of artists, writers and musicians. Led by people such as the art
historian and gallerist Yanelys Núñez Leyva, the Afro-Cuban poet Amuary
Pacacecho and the performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the
protests would dovetail in May 2019 with what many see as Cuba’s
“Stonewall moment.” Hundreds of LGBTQ activists attempted a conga parade
through La Habana Vieja, an unauthorized event that was separate from
the regime’s “official” LGBTQ events affiliated with the Centro Nacional
de Educación Sexual (CENESEX, founded by Raúl Castro’s daughter Mariela
Castro). The march was immediately set upon by security forces, its
leaders beaten and arrested. This in turn was followed by a November
2020 demonstration in front of Cuba’s Ministry of Culture — viewed by
many as a turning point with public expression of dissatisfaction with
the regime — when hundreds of protesters (many of them young,
Afro-Cuban, queer or otherwise marginalized) called on the regime to
free imprisoned rapper Denis Solís.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
grew up in Cerro, one of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods with a rich
tradition of Afro-Cuban culture. When I spoke to him in late 2020,
before the recent upheavals and before he disappeared again into the
regime’s gulag (he had previously been arrested more than 30 times), he
told me bluntly that “the Cuban regime is weighted on the basis of white
men — macho, patriarchal, white men — with white women and wives as
well. Cuban television and all the Cuban cultural apparatus still
operate on a racist basis.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Even today, white Cubans are five
times more likely than Black Cubans to have a bank account and control
98% of the island’s private businesses.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">At the beginning of last
year, an anthemic song “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life,” itself a
refutation of the Cuban revolutionary slogan “Fatherland or Death”), a
collaboration by Yotuel of the rap group Orishas, Descemer Bueno, the
group Gente de Zona, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Maykel Osorbo and DJ
El Funky, was released and seized the popular imagination. Its lyrics
(“No more lies! / My people demand freedom! / No more doctrines! / No
longer shall we cry ‘Fatherland or death’ / But ‘Fatherland and life!’”)
seemed to articulate the boiling struggle and frustration of ordinary
Cubans (the song went on to win the Latin Grammy for song of the year
last month).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On July 11 of last year, protests over shortages of
basic goods, economic hardship and the government’s handling of the
coronavirus pandemic began in the western city of San Antonio de los
Baños. The protests soon spread all over the country in an unprecedented
display of frustration and civil disobedience. From Havana in the west
to Santiago de Cuba in the east, thousands of Cuban citizens took to the
streets chanting both “patria y vida” and “change the system.”
Initially taken by surprise, Cuban security forces responded with
brutality and mass arrests of protesters, with Díaz-Canel appearing on
state television to say, “the order to combat has been given.” Hundreds
of people (including at least 44 minors) were arrested (14 of the latter
remain in prison). The government cut off internet access around the
island, but it was too late. The images of protests and the merciless
response of state security forces quickly were seen around the world, as
were messages like that of Afro-Cuban rapper Roberto Álvarez, who said,
“The streets of Cuba belong to the Cubans. Not to the Communist Party.
Not to the Cuban military. Not to the Castro family. To the Cubans.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The
protests laid bare the often thinly disguised racism in the
paternalistic discourse of the island’s Communist elite, at this point
little more than a wretched, bloated ruling caste guarding their hotels
(the Cuban regime spends 57 times more on tourism than they do on
healthcare). At the height of last July’s protests, Aleida Guevara
March, the daughter of Che Guevara (whose own caustic racism led him to
label people of African descent as “lack[ing] an affinity with bathing”
as well as being “indolent … spending [their] meager wage on frivolity
or drink”) huffed that the protesters “showed a very low level of
culture.” When “Patria y Vida” won a Grammy in November, José Carlos
Rodríguez Ruiz, Cuba’s aging (and white) ambassador to Italy, tweeted a
link to an article clutching its pearls that the young upstarts had
“sneaked into the same space” as other artists of superior “caliber.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">In
a report published this past October, Human Rights Watch found that the
Cuban government “systematically engaged in arbitrary detention, ill
treatment of detainees, and abuse-ridden criminal prosecutions in
response to overwhelmingly peaceful antigovernment protests” in July.
Both Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Osorbo are among those in
prison and learned of “Patria y Vida” winning a Grammy from behind bars.
In November, UNICEF expressed its concern over the ongoing detention of
minors in connection with the July events.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">“The Cuban government
sells itself as a leftist, progressive government, but the reality is
just the contrary,” Abraham Jiménez Enoa, an Afro-Cuban journalist, told
me this month. “Historically, those who occupy the highest positions
here are almost always white. … It’s the same with the treatment of the
opposition. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is in jail, Maykel Osorbo is in
jail, but meanwhile with [white oppositionists] the government
negotiates exile. … [They] can get on a plane. It’s structural racism
and it’s clear how it functions in Cuba.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The Havana regime —
after more than six decades of uninterrupted, total power — still has
its apologists. University of Glasgow professor Helen Yaffe tut-tutted
in the pages of The Guardian about the “violent” protests (though the
protesters damaged some property, nearly all the physical violence came
at the hands of the regime). She argued that “US funding and
coordination” were behind the protests, as if Cubans were too ignorant
and lazy to become fed up on their own with being pauperized and beaten.
Yaffe frequently promotes pro-regime content from outlets with links to
the Russian government such as Redfish and others like MintPress News,
which in 2013 published an article falsely claiming anti-Assad rebels
had staged a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta
(which one of the authors then denied writing).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The official Black
Lives Matter organization (distinct from the ethos and movement of the
same name), which had previously praised Fidel Castro and whose
co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors owns palatial homes in Los Angeles and
Atlanta, issued a press release praising the regime, condemning the
embargo but eschewing any mention of the brave Black and brown Cubans
being brutalized and terrorized by the regime. In an absurd open letter
last November ahead of more planned protests that the regime averted by
turning virtually the entire island into an armed camp, a litany of
signatories that included both the criminal (former Ecuador President
Rafael Correa, in exile and convicted of corruption at home) and the
useless (Castro family chronicler and former Le Monde Diplomatique
editor Ignacio Ramonet) attacked the dissidents as “irrelevant within
Cuba but praised by the international press with the purpose of damaging
the image of the revolution.” The letter accused them of “civil
disobedience, anarchy and chaos, with the sole purpose of ending the
current political system.” The words were richly ironic, especially
coming from signatories like former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff,
herself once a member of the Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária guerrilla
group in Brazil.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">But in many ways the July protests marked a
serious break with the regime’s formerly good press among the left. René
Pérez, better known as Residente, a member of the Puerto Rican musical
group Calle 13 and with impeccable anti-imperialist credentials, posted
an Instagram message of support for the demonstrators “so that they
manifest themselves with all force. … Demonstrating is a human right
anywhere in the world.” He added his belief that “this demonstration was
born from a tired people … who woke up.” The Puerto Rican singer Ricky
Martin, reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee, Mexican singer Julieta Venegas
and Spanish singer Alejandro Sanz also all expressed their support for
the protesters. In December, more than 300 prominent figures — including
Isabel Allende, Paul Auster, John Lithgow and Orhan Pamuk — released an
open letter calling on Cuba’s government to immediately stop its abuses
against Cuban artists, intellectuals and others.</span></p><p class="has-drop-cap"><span style="font-size: small;">There are real-world implications for this ideological rigidity.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Last
November, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Reinforcing Nicaragua’s
Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform (RENACER) Act. It calls for
new initiatives to monitor and address corruption by Nicaragua’s
government and abuses by its security force as well as expansion of
sanctions against key officials. It also orders a formal review to
determine whether Nicaragua should be allowed continued participation in
the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). When the bill came up
for a vote in the House of Representatives earlier that month, however,
many members of the body’s left (including New York Reps. Bowman and
Ocasio-Cortez, Missouri Rep. Bush, Michigan Reps. Andy Levin and Tlaib
and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar) joined members of the extreme right such
as Florida Rep.Matt Gaetz, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and
Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie in trying to defeat it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">A more
party-line vote followed for House Resolution 760, a measure “expressing
solidarity with Cuban citizens demonstrating peacefully for fundamental
freedoms, condemning the Cuban regime’s acts of repression, and calling
for the immediate release of arbitrarily detained Cuban citizens.” It
also called for the U.S. government to “assess whether the United States
can develop methods to allow remittances, medical supplies, and other
forms of support from the United States to directly benefit the Cuban
people in ways that alleviate humanitarian suffering without providing
United States dollars to the Cuban military.” While no Republicans
opposed the measure, 40 Democrats voted no, among them all of the
aforementioned Democrats as well as California Rep. Maxine Waters, New
York Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez and Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva. When I
contacted some of the above members to explain their vote, the offices
of only two responded: Bush, who declined comment, and Grijalva, who in a
statement said, in part, “Both bills contained serious economic and
humanitarian policy concerns that were not taken into account when these
pieces of legislation were rushed to the House floor. The legislation
perpetuates a counterproductive foreign policy that would harm millions
of innocent civilians instead of the regimes in power.” How either bill,
neither of which proposed broad general economic sanctions, would have
done this is unclear.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">So what is the way forward for those in the
principled left who want to stand in solidarity with disenfranchised
people instead of regimes composed of their torturers and oppressors?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">There
is a sector of the Western left eternally enamored of flags, slogans
and ceaseless homages to dead leaders that is every bit as illiberal as
the caustic right and whose support seems to have less to do with any
kind of coherent humanitarian policy outlook and more to do with facile
anti-Americanism and an impulse for dictator worship, as if defending
the abusive practices of security forces in Venezuela is better than
defending them in Colombia, or defending the extractive policies of a
left-wing government in Bolivia is somehow more appropriate than
defending the same policies when done by the right-wing government of
Brazil.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">There needs to be an international realignment among left
forces and more willingness to listen to movements on the ground rather
than only governments. In the recent victory of left wing Gabriel Boric
in Chile’s presidential elections — a man whose solidly progressive
bonafides did not keep him from calling Nicaragua’s recent elections a
“farce” and declaring “solidarity with the people rising up in Cuba and
not the Díaz-Canel government” — we may be seeing the beginnings of a
regional third way.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Throughout Latin America, there are heroic
progressive forces laying down their lives in the service of the most
vulnerable every day, fighting to defend the environment, people of
African and indigenous descent, the marginalized and the LGBTQ
community. It is to them those of us among the international left should
extend our loyalty and support, not their jailers and executioners.</span></p> </div>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-89134106262151455302021-12-31T17:02:00.002+01:002021-12-31T17:02:55.704+01:002021: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhUNui44mZE03mCe0VGq8kNVFk5LhCPigcn_eyi4E6nmXya6LS_VBiRvi2LRZnY69N3F78B2AEDtBgFbQYyb2y2t77yelF0_aTYnPBT6oyJuTERsk4A_IBdfPT6GiQjyddQDAt7IdiLVeTDcYXtdcMJjr-B-SrDNeBO_sGBf5unFI8aOb5IJyY=s4032" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhUNui44mZE03mCe0VGq8kNVFk5LhCPigcn_eyi4E6nmXya6LS_VBiRvi2LRZnY69N3F78B2AEDtBgFbQYyb2y2t77yelF0_aTYnPBT6oyJuTERsk4A_IBdfPT6GiQjyddQDAt7IdiLVeTDcYXtdcMJjr-B-SrDNeBO_sGBf5unFI8aOb5IJyY=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>For everyone, 2021 <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">was an extremely tumultuous year, one that saw me leave Puerto Rico for a (temporary) exile in Pennsylvania, two countries dear to me, Haiti and Cuba, erupt for very different reasons and a failed </span><span>coup d'état in my home country of the United States.<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I hope that a more just, gentle and humane year awaits us in 2022. I hope that Syrians living under government and Russian bombardment in Idlib or in exile in places like Turkey remain safe. I hope that the people of Afghanistan both in the country and scattered around the world due to a disastrous decision implemented by two successive U.S. administrations are able to begin their lives anew. <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I hope Haitians are freed from the infernal political and economic machine that has oppressed them for so long and I hope that the people of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are able to at long last free themselves from their tyrants. I hope the people of Tigray see peace. <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I hope that Puerto Rico,<i> la isla del encanto</i>, is able to become just that for its people, and is protected from the various predators currently encircling it.</span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">As for me, I have a new book to write and a new life to build in a new place, which I will talk about more in the coming months.</span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Though these years of pandemic have resulted in too many of us being apart if not alone, in 2022 let's live the ethos frequently repeated by members of Cuba's Movimiento San Isidro: <i>Estamos conectados</i> (We are connected). </span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I wish you all limitless joy in the new year. </span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">xo </span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">MD</span> </span> </span> </span> </span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span></span></p><p><b><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">My articles</span></span></b></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/rumblings-of-change-in-puerto-rico/"><i>Rumblings of Change in Puerto Rico</i></a> for Newlines Magazine (22 February 2021) </span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-death-of-haiti's-president-summons-ghosts-old-and-new/"><i>The Death of Haiti’s President Summons Ghosts Old and New</i></a> for Newlines Magazine (28 July 2021)</span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="http://michaeldeibert.blogspot.com/2021/07/oracion.html"><i>"Oración" by Amaury Pacheco (Translated by Michael Deibert)</i></a> for the Washington Post (16 July 2021)</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://newlinesmag.com/review/book-examines-african-role-in-western-prosperity/"><i>Book Examines African Role in Western Prosperity f</i></a>or Newlines Magazine (26 November 2020)<br /></span></p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></span></p><p><b><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Interviews </span></span></b></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><i><a href="https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/02/25/can-haiti-rid-itself-of-jovenel-moise">Can Haiti rid itself of Jovenel Moïse?</a></i> in The Economist (25 February 2021) </span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/07/07/the-murder-of-haitis-president-will-worsen-the-countrys-chaos"><i>The murder of Haiti’s president will worsen the country’s chaos</i></a> in The Economist (7 July 2021) </span></span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/mundo/notas/jovenel-moise-el-asesinato-del-presidente-de-haiti-deja-un-tenso-vacio-de-poder-en-el-vecino-pais/"><i>Jovenel Moïse: el asesinato del presidente de Haití deja un tenso vacío de poder en el vecino país</i></a> in </span></span><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span>El Nuevo Día (7 July 2021)</span> </span> </span></span></span></p><p><span><a href="https://www.elconfidencial.com/mundo/2021-07-07/jovenel-moise-el-polemico-presidente-que-quiso-cambiar-haiti-y-al-que-haiti-devoro_3172431/?fbclid=IwAR0S-vtopW24HLii-fyUxvRkoyr3M4-2mGsjL6p7YcQaARo0HmODu2K4wM0"><i>Jovenel Moïse: el polémico presidente que quiso cambiar Haití y al que Haití devoró</i></a> in El Confidencial (7 July 2021)</span></p><p><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/es/el-washington-post-podcast/asesinado-el-presidente-de-hait-atentado-en-amsterdam-el-banco-de-desarrollo-de-amrica-latina/?fbclid=IwAR100ov0cvzQBeTpQ0hFK9PrJCNa0DbOQ14F5mwsR2jDNfNJZiNVj9hRG9U"><i>Asesinado el presidente de Haití</i></a> in The Washington Post (8 July 2021) <br /></span></span></p><p><span><a href="https://youtu.be/AETK-9-p8-E"><i>Interview on the assassination of Haiti President Jovenel Moïse </i></a>on Al Jazeera (9 July 2021)</span></p><p><span><span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://www.latercera.com/la-tercera-domingo/noticia/magnicidio-en-haiti-la-vision-de-un-exagente-de-la-cia-y-un-periodista-que-conocio-a-moise/I74H5QGMLND6LMKEX4BEZH64DE/"><i>Magnicidio en Haití: la visión de un exagente de la CIA y un periodista que conoció a Moïse</i></a> in La Tercera (10 July 2021) </span></span> <br /></span></p><p><span><a href=" https://www.elcomercio.es/internacional/america-latina/haiti-asesinato-moise-eeuu-onu-violencia-bandas-20210710221724-ntrc.html"><i>Haití deposita su futuro en el mundo</i></a> in El Comercio (10 July 2021)</span></p><p><a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/haitis-president-is-dead-but-why-did-it-take-a-hit-squad-of-28-b2jgp7xt6"><i>Haiti’s president is dead — but why did it take a hit squad of 28? </i></a>in The Times (11 July 2021)</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/L5XjRd-OXIA"><i>Haiti crisis deepens after prime minister sacks prosecutor </i></a>on Al Jazeera (15 September 2021)</p><p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1z7f?fbclid=IwAR0Uf9o86myiaaSdvR0p0yCwT7_3a_Js--Kan1XzCVz-FKPqcB8ts8b6078"><i>The History Hour: The earthquake that devastated Haiti</i></a> on the BBC (18 September 2021) <br /></p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/b-clF7XjWe8"><i>Biden's Summer of Disappointments & Haiti </i></a>on From the North (27 September 2021)</p><p><a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dossier-of-elites-links-to-drug-gangs-led-to-murder-of-haitian-president-znx9f3d8m"><i>Dossier of elite’s links to drug gangs ‘led to murder of Haitian president’</i></a> in The Times (18 December 2021)<br /></p><p><span> </span></p><p><span><br /></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-49653814622852269902021-12-29T16:45:00.003+01:002021-12-29T16:45:34.222+01:00Books in 2021: A Personal Selection<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhnW0nQmEij2yMGWK9eDQy3yEQLe1tLzu7lsgRmmWUPb1HTnLiiGTSf897EPyPIvxN424MqTyElIuqmB0rRN76xvRMwJHrB_BKAM8uVtdMJxQZKqo2Em8lZeid5b7r2MxAzuhUKX2-0KtIfzLhMCs3OdEJAdy9OA8ohQL0Z2Owl0rgUtVKHjw8=s800" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="567" data-original-width="800" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhnW0nQmEij2yMGWK9eDQy3yEQLe1tLzu7lsgRmmWUPb1HTnLiiGTSf897EPyPIvxN424MqTyElIuqmB0rRN76xvRMwJHrB_BKAM8uVtdMJxQZKqo2Em8lZeid5b7r2MxAzuhUKX2-0KtIfzLhMCs3OdEJAdy9OA8ohQL0Z2Owl0rgUtVKHjw8=s320" width="320" /></a></b></div><b><br /> </b><p></p><p><b>There Are Little Kingdoms: Stories by Kevin Barry </b></p><p>A collection of gem-like short stories, many of them focusing on life in rural Ireland. </p><p><b>The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov </b></p><p>A book I last read in late high school, this is a bracing depiction of a Soviet Russia of vodka-swilling black cats, dissolute intellectuals, inquisitive secret police and severed heads flying through the air, One of the more original novels I’ve ever read, informed by a high level of satire and black comedy. </p><p><b>The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela by Fernando Coronil </b></p><p>An essential work to understand Venezuela’s fraught decades before the 1990s that helped pave the way for the nation's current collapse and tyranny, this book provides an authoritative analysis of the strengths and failures of the country’s body politic during the era of <i>Venezuela saudita </i>with an especially illuminating examination of the controversial, contradictory figure of the late president Carlos Andrés Pérez. </p><p><b>Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard French </b></p><p>A panoramic work examining the epochal impact that early European contact with Africans produced from the 13th century onward and provides a deep and unflinching look at how the infernal machinery of slavery spread throughout the Americas, fueling a startlingly rapid industrialization in Europe and North America. </p><p><b>The Factory of Light: Tales from My Andalucian Village by Michael Jacobs </b></p><p>An optimistic and upbeat book of love for the author’s adopted home, it reminds one of some of the sublime, simple pleasures that make Spain so seductive and how some of life's greatest pleasures can be among the most simple. </p><p><b>Bitter Canaan : The Story of the Negro Republic by Charles S. Johnson </b></p><p>A well-crafted history of the West African nation of Liberia, this book is particularly useful in its highly-detailed account of the political convulsions that accompanied the first years of Africa-American arrival in this patch of Africa, from which the modern state would later emerge. A valuable primer. </p><p><b>Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King </b></p><p>An interesting book looking at the French serial killer Dr. Marcel Petiot, there are nevertheless hints at what might have been a greater book within it, one that would focus less on police and court procedures and more on the demimonde of culture and conspiracy that existed in Paris during and after the German occupation. </p><p><b>Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans by Jasmin Mujanovic </b></p><p>An important work that clearly lays out the failure of the post-war <i>pax europa</i> in the Balkans as the United States and the European Union, rather than supporting the structural and systemic changes needed in the former Yugoslavia, instead opted to deal with habitually criminal and abusive local elites to buttress a predatory system as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin waits, sinister, in the wings. I learned a lot from this book. </p><p><b>A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz </b></p><p>This memoir by one of Israel’s greatest writers (who passed away in 2018) is an often-wrenching depiction of both the birth of a nation and a family’s disintegration. A deep and thoughtful book. </p><p><b>It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo </b></p><p>A haunting book about a desperate flight from the hellscape that 20 years of <i>chavismo </i>has created in Venezuela, this book exquisitely elides the personal and political struggles of people forced to live under a creaking authoritarianism and trying against all odds to hold onto hope.<br /></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-26803884869278331512021-12-29T16:16:00.000+01:002021-12-29T16:16:03.779+01:00Michael Deibert interviewed by The Times (UK)<p dir="ltr" id="m_-4802678723385834328gmail-docs-internal-guid-01bc1a2a-7fff-779f-36d7-8b2d873815ee" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was interviewed by The Times (UK) for an article on the recent New York Times investigation into the murder of Haiti president Jovenel Moïse. I stand by every word. The original article can be read <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9e44d8ac-600d-11ec-8ca2-4e56f587e18b?shareToken=6684c8f8000bb7268d5000e92249027c&fbclid=IwAR12DAH-updJwX6GTqHIP-ykL8geO6h7bEfJPX2Pc8cRyl3MVmrrf1HOhwA">here</a>. </span></span></span></p><div class="responsive__HeaderTopContainer-cbxka9-5 hHNTxz"><div class="responsive__HeaderContainer-cbxka9-2 xtjjI responsive__HeaderContainer-cbxka9-2 xtjjI css-1dbjc4n"><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><h1 aria-level="1" class="responsive__HeadlineContainer-sc-15mjcnq-0 dnPjfe css-4rbku5 responsive__HeadlineContainer-sc-15mjcnq-0 dnPjfe css-901oao r-1yqk5fa r-iirzy8 r-1ra0lkn r-1j8sj39 r-11mo1y0" dir="auto" role="heading"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Dossier of elite’s links to drug gangs ‘led to murder of Haitian president’</span></span></h1><h2 aria-level="2" class="css-4rbku5 css-901oao r-1khnkhu r-4h8ur4 r-adyw6z r-eaezby r-1mi0q7o" data-testid="standfirst" dir="auto" role="heading"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jovenel Moïse’s killing by mercenaries may have been prompted by fears that he was about to name corrupt politicians</span></span></span></h2></div></div><div class="responsive__MetaContainer-cbxka9-3 jMYUgt responsive__MetaContainer-cbxka9-3 jMYUgt css-1dbjc4n"><div class="keylines__KeylineItem-sc-1s03wwf-0 jdhiUl"><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><div class="article-meta__MetaTextElement-sc-1iqkrjg-0 iATHMu article-meta__MetaTextElement-sc-1iqkrjg-0 iATHMu css-901oao" dir="auto"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1khp51w r-j2s0nr r-n6v787 r-fxxt2n" dir="auto"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1khp51w r-18u37iz r-j2s0nr r-n6v787 r-fxxt2n" dir="auto">Stephen Gibbs, Caracas</span></span></span></span></div></div></div><div class="keylines__KeylineItem-sc-1s03wwf-0 jdhiUl"><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><div class="article-meta__MetaTextElement-sc-1iqkrjg-0 iATHMu article-meta__MetaTextElement-sc-1iqkrjg-0 iATHMu css-901oao" dir="auto"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1khp51w r-j2s0nr r-n6v787 r-fxxt2n" dir="auto"><time datetime="2021-12-18T18:00:00.000Z">Saturday December 18 2021, 6.00pm GMT, </time><span class="date-publication__PublicationName-sc-1vdpzkx-0 brXzzz">The Sunday Times</span></span></span></span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="responsive__LeadAsset-cbxka9-6 cOWhgy responsive__LeadAsset-cbxka9-6 cOWhgy css-1dbjc4n"><figure style="margin: 0;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></figure><figure style="margin: 0;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jovenel Moïse was assassinated and his wife Martine injured at their home by mercenaries who may have been searching for a handwritten dossier detailing links between Haiti’s elite and organised crime</span></span></figure><figure style="margin: 0;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></figure><figure style="margin: 0;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Even by the grim standards of Haiti, it was a brazen, brutal crime. Last July, a group of mercenaries stormed a hilltop villa overlooking Port-au-Prince: the private residence of the president. With little resistance from the guards outside, they made their way inside the mansion seeking their target, the 53-year-old Jovenel Moïse. The softly spoken head of state was standing defenceless in his bedroom. His wife was lying on the floor. He was murdered with 12 shots to his abdomen. Five months later, no one has been charged. But last week, a possible motive for the killing e merged, following an investigation by The New York Times. The raid, it concluded, was not simply a murder mission. The hired hands, mostly Colombian ex-soldiers, had been instructed to find a dossier, handwritten by Moïse, which detailed links between Haiti’s ruling elite and organised crime. <br /></span></span></figure></div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="paywall-EAB47CFD"><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">In
the preceding months, Moïse had set about compiling the report, which
he told his inner circle would “name names”. Convinced his power was
being deliberately stifled by his enemies and that his life was in
danger, he planned to hand it over to the US Drug Enforcement
Administration, the newspaper claimed.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">The
theory fits in with previously unexplained details from the night of
his murder. Officials who went into the villa immediately after the
killing, where they discovered Moïse’s corpse, also said his office and
bedroom had been ransacked, with documents strewn across the floor.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">The
president’s wife, Martine Moïse, who said she survived by “playing
dead” after being shot in the elbow by the gunmen, has described how she
heard the killers searching for something specific on the shelves where
her husband kept his files. “That’s not it, that’s not it. Ah, that’s
it,” were the words she recalled the men saying, in Spanish, as they
rifled through Moïse’s papers. One man was apparently on the phone to
someone who appeared to be directing the search. Once they had found
what they were looking for, they fled.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">The
Haitian police have since arrested more than 40 suspects. Those being
held include 18 former Colombian soldiers and several Haitian police
officers.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">But
the investigation into who ordered and financed Moïse’s killing has
stalled. Suspicions have been cast everywhere, including in the
direction of the acting prime minister, Ariel Henry. Phone records
indicate that he spoke to one suspect on the night of the killing.
Henry, 72, has dismissed all suggestions of his involvement.</p><div id="2.6"><div class="responsive__PrimaryImg-sc-4v1r4q-5 eBxIvN responsive__PrimaryImg-sc-4v1r4q-5 eBxIvN css-1dbjc4n"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="paywall-EAB47CFD"><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Prior
to entering politics, Moïse himself reportedly had dubious business
connections with at least two men who have been directly linked with
drug trafficking. One, Charles Saint-Rémy, is the brother-in-law of
Moïse’s predecessor, Michel Martelly, who served as president from 2011
to 2016. Moïse and Martelly, a musician-turned-politician based in
Miami, were once close allies. The assumption in some circles was that
as Martelly was constitutionally barred from running for two consecutive
terms, Moïse would “keep the bench warm” before Martelly returned to
office.</p></span></span></span></div></div></span></span></span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="paywall-EAB47CFD"><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">However,
soon after Moïse was installed, relations between the two men began to
strain. “Jovenel felt he was being suffocated by Martelly,” was how one
Haitian businessman with government connections described the friction
last week.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">One
senior official Moïse inherited from his predecessor was the head of
the presidential security, Dimitri Hérard, who Moïse distrusted and
thought was spying on him. In February the unpopular president became
convinced that a coup was being plotted.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">It
was then that Moïse reportedly began compiling a dossier to expose the
murkiest side of Haitian crime and politics. A handful of aides were
asked to start listing every detail of the country’s smuggling networks.
The information was collated by Moïse, a stickler for keeping
handwritten notes. In the weeks before he died, Moïse ordered his
security forces to close an illegal airstrip that was used for drug
shipments, perhaps the decision that sealed his fate.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">On
the night of his murder, Moïse’s assassins were let in by his guards,
who were under the command of Hérard. Moïse made several frantic phone
calls to aides, including Hérard, seeking help. None arrived.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">“He
believed he would likely be killed before the end of his term,” said
the American author Michael Deibert, who interviewed the president
several times.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Deibert
doubts a Haitian president would be killed to obtain a list of drug
dealers. “Surely everyone already knows who they are?” he said.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">“Hand-in-hand
with the political and economic elite, Haiti is run by a criminal
monarchy and it has been for many years,” he said. “They control an
infernal system whereby if you are not willing to be corrupt that system
will, at best, reject you. At worst, it will destroy you.”</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">The
months since the murder have seen Haiti descend into total lawlessness.
Local security experts say 20 people are being kidnapped each day. In
October, 17 members of a missionary group — including a baby and four
children — were taken hostage after visiting an orphanage. Their
abductors had demanded a $1 million ransom for each of them. All were
eventually released, the final 12 were set free on Thursday. The
assumption is that a ransom was paid.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Since
the assassination, President Joe Biden has released an extra $50
million of support for police training. Washington is in talks with
France and Canada over the possibility of helping Haiti set up an elite
force to tackle the gangs. The international community has given about
$13 billion of aid to Haiti in the past decade.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV" id="last-paragraph">Deibert
is pessimistic the criminality can be tackled if the murder of the head
of state remains unsolved. “No Haitian in any position of power seems
interested in finding out who killed the president,” he said. “That, in
itself, is telling.”</p></span></span></span><p dir="ltr" id="m_-4802678723385834328gmail-docs-internal-guid-01bc1a2a-7fff-779f-36d7-8b2d873815ee" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></span></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-47507265053426935132021-12-29T16:07:00.000+01:002021-12-29T16:07:01.372+01:00Book Examines African Role in Western Prosperity<p><b>Book Examines African Role in Western Prosperity </b></p><p>A longtime journalist takes a sweeping, centuries-long look at the economic results of African contact with Europeans </p><p>By Michael Deibert </p><p>November 26, 2021</p><p>Newlines Magazine</p><p>(Read the original article <a href="https://newlinesmag.com/review/book-examines-african-role-in-western-prosperity/">here</a>) <br /></p><p>Howard French’s new book, “Born in Blackness:
Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second
World War” (2021), is a panoramic work examining the epochal impact
that early European contact with Africans produced from the 13th century
onward and provides a deep and unflinching look at how the infernal
machinery of slavery spread throughout the Americas, fueling a
startlingly rapid industrialization in Europe and North America.</p><p>The
book’s sweep covers such often-overlooked events as the visit to Cairo
by the Mali Empire potentate Mansa Musa in 1324 at the head of a
60,000-delegation full of “pomp and largess” to the first tentative
forays of Portuguese explorers in the 15th century.</p><p>In a
historical moment when, particularly in the United States, a vibrant
discussion is taking place about the framing and meaning of history, the
book adroitly points out that in these early years, Europe, far from
the bastion of enlightened thought and governance that it has often
liked to present itself as, had seen at least one third of its
population perish through the Black Death and predatory military classes
dominate in countries like Portugal.</p><p>As much as seminal texts of
African history such as Jan Vansina’s “Being Colonized: The Kuba
Experience in Rural Congo” and Thomas Reefe’s “The Rainbow and the
Kings: A History of the Luba Empire to 1891” depict tragedy, French’s
book also serves as a kind of elegy for the cataclysmic effect that
contact with Europeans had on African societies, many of whose monarchs
were enthusiastic participants in the slave trade before the Europeans
arrived but with considerable differences to how it later became known.
When beseeching Europeans of questionable backgrounds suddenly appeared,
the local leaders cagily tried to accommodate them while weighing their
(seemingly fantastical) promises of great wealth, protection and
salvation through Christianity, but as French writes, “in place after
place chaos soon followed.”</p><p>When the Europeans crossed the
Atlantic with their human cargo (Benguela, a port located in the west of
what is today Angola, shipped off 700,000 slaves alone, mostly to
Brazil), the results were little different. The Europeans exterminated
whole societies through brutal work regimes and disease. Once the pool
of native labor was extinguished, they institutionalized a fully
racialized slavery, dotting bucolic Barbados with the heads of
rebellious slaves rotting on pikes, in service of what French calls the
“killer apparatus of modernity,” an image that will be familiar to
scholars of this region. As industrial development leapfrogged into
modernity in the West, what often went unexamined was the human toll on
which that development was based.</p><p class="has-text-align-center">***</p><p><em>The
American journalist Howard French was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957
and since 2008 has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism. From 1990 to 2008, he served as the New York Times bureau
chief for the Caribbean and Central America, for West and Central
Africa, for Japan and the Koreas and for China.</em></p><p><em>Michael
Deibert is a journalist who has focused especially on the Caribbean
nation of Haiti and is the author of five books, most recently “When the
Sky Fell: Hurricane Maria and the United States in Puerto Rico” (2019).
He sat down to talk with Howard French about some of the larger issues
his book raises.</em></p><p><strong>Michael Deibert</strong>: When did
you first decide that this book, connecting these threads of the history
of Africa itself with the history of the African diaspora in the
Americas, needed to be written and why?</p><p><strong>Howard French</strong>:
The proximate cause of why it came together in this form at this time
was because my last book, which was about East Asia [“Everything Under
the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power,”
published in 2017], was my first book of history and not written in a
journalist’s voice at all. The effort showed me how much I like to work
in this mode and how things that might have seemed in an earlier stage
of my life unreasonable or unrealistic, with the right organization,
were actually quite accessible to me. I work at a university now, I’m
off the road as a reporter, and I have access to almost any book or
document I would want to write about. But probably this question about
how we arrived at modernity came to a head in that last book, which in
East Asia is embedded in a huge array of political conversations, and
these things all kind of pointed me down this path.</p><p><strong>MD</strong>:
I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but reading the book, one
thing that certainly foregrounded itself in my mind is the particular
cultural and political moment we’re living, certainly in the United
States and perhaps to a lesser degree in Europe, where there’s a big
discourse around Blackness and what it means and what the history of it
and the telling of it means. We’re seeing it around this so-called
discourse around critical race theory. Myself, I don’t see how saying
the United States is based on slavery and genocide is controversial at
all. That’s just basic history, it’s not a “theory.” When you rephrased
“the scramble for Africa” as “the scramble for Africans,” it seemed like
a much-needed corrective to that rosy-hued view of history we sometimes
get.</p><p><strong>HF</strong>: I definitely did not anticipate the
present moment with any great degree of precision. I began to undertake
the very deliberate, well-defined research into this book well before
“1619” had come into the world. I was aware of the term critical race
theory, and this was prior to its entry into the terminology of
political war in our society. But I think we have a problem in the
United States in first understanding and then accepting the reality that
Africans and people of African descent for the most part have been very
obviously at the center of our prosperity and at the center of our
experience of freedom. The amount of energy that has been invested in
the denial of these things I have kind of known all along. I have been
inundated by readers — I can only assume, because they don’t state their
race, that they are written by white men — that try somehow still to
contort themselves out of these facts.</p><p><strong>MD</strong>: I
always tell people that in my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I
lived about 500 feet from where the last of the Susquehannock nation
were massacred by a white mob at Christmas in 1763, which pretty much
sums up the pre-Civil War history of the United States for me and some
of the post-Civil War history as well.</p><p>Another aspect of the book I
found very interesting, having lived in Brazil and been interested in
Lusophone Africa before becoming interested in Portugal itself as a
country, is how the impact of Portugal’s early colonial endeavors in
West Africa and the Americas is addressed in the book. Would you agree
that the impact of Portugal is often overlooked on this side of the
Atlantic?</p><p><strong>HF</strong>: This is one of the main threads of
the book. The standard narratives we tell of this phenomenon of the
transatlantic slave trade are essentially, mostly wrong. In Britain, it
is dominated by a narrative of “Yes, slavery was wrong but we, the
British, were the heroes because we were responsible for getting rid of
the slave trade.” And that skates over the fact that Britain dominated
the slave trade and only relinquished its participation under very
particular political and economic circumstances that are not in fact
entirely flattering.</p><p>In the United States, and I think in Europe,
for the most part, the story of the Age of Discovery, which is the story
from which the transatlantic slave trade unfolds, is a story dominated
by a Spanish narrative that Spain “discovered” the Americas and that
modernity begins with Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, with Portugal
reduced to a kind of bit player.</p><p>I think that is the opposite of
the reality. In fact, Spain was driven to do the things that it did
largely out of envy of Portugal’s success. Portugal discovered gold in
Elmina [on the coast of what is now Ghana] in 1471, and within a decade,
gold from Africa constituted half of Portugal’s income. It renders this
heretofore fragile and very marginal player in Europe’s political
landscape into an important country, and it injects African bullion into
the European economy where it begins doing extraordinary things,
including reinforcing circuits of trade between northern and southern
Europe in powerful ways.</p><p>Spain sees all of this happening and
decides it can’t let Portugal run away with the game. Seven years later,
Spain sends a convoy of 35 ships to try to wrest this away from
Portugal, and they have a huge naval battle, which Portugal wins. … And
Spain then decides to fund Columbus.</p><p>I don’t think there’s any
question that Portugal’s creation of the slave agricultural production
model, which we now know as a plantation, is the most important
discovery/innovation/invention of the age, far more important than
Spain’s discovery of gold in places like Potosi. The plantation economy
has tentacles that go in every direction in the economy in the North
Atlantic that the purely extractive model does not. The influence of
Portugal’s breakthrough in Brazil, via this chattel model of plantation
slavery, its subsequent adoption first by the English in Barbados and
Jamaica, the French adoption of it in Saint-Domingue [later Haiti] and
the continental American adoption of it [and the subsequent] migration
of slavery from the upper south to the Mississippi River Valley, sees an
American economic revolution after the introduction of cotton in
quantities that are just breathtaking.</p><p><strong>MD</strong>: The
interaction between the colonies in New England and those in the
Caribbean also, in a way, freed the original colonies from depending on
the British homeland and indirectly helped fuel a desire for
independence for what became the United States.</p><p><strong>HF</strong>:
The original 13 colonies would not have been viable without the slave
economies of the Caribbean. They are what made the 13 colonies
prosperous. They couldn’t sell finished goods back to England, but they
could sell them to the Caribbean. The sugar plantation economies of
places like Barbados and Jamaica, the value of what was extracted from
the land — that it made no sense to grow anything else — and the
American colonial became a kind of service economy to feed, clothe and
furnish people of the Caribbean.</p><p><strong>MD</strong>: You touch on
the work of Eric Williams and C.L.R. James in terms of the role
Africans played in the creation of wealth in the West throughout the
19th century and industrialization in Europe. But in their time, the
conventional wisdom was that Europe was dragging along these places in
the Americas.</p><p><strong>HF</strong>: Eric Williams’ thesis flew in
the face of the national myth that the British had worked to establish
their own principles and their own selflessness. It was corrosive to the
comforting myths that the British have about themselves. But [part of
the resistance] was about the temerity of a Black man telling this
story. Black people don’t get to tell these stories often in history in
very prominent ways. We don’t have a very deep history in the West of
listening to versions of history told by Black people themselves. My
book enters into a very small bibliography of books written by Black
people about world history.</p><p><strong>MD</strong>: One thing that
was striking about the section on Haiti, which is something I’ve thought
about a lot, is that the Haitians clearly seemed to take the
“Déclaration des droits de l’homme” [Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen, the 1789 Enlightenment-inspired human rights
document of France’s National Constituent Assembly] much more seriously
than the French themselves did, which is an aspect that should be wider
known among the general public.</p><p><strong>HF</strong>: They not only
took them far more seriously than the French did, but the French under
Napoleon tried to reenslave the Haitians, an expedition all across the
Atlantic trying to resubject Haitians to slavery. The Haitians were
decades ahead of the Founding Fathers in embracing and fighting for and
respecting this notion of universal freedom. They took this as
self-evident from the very beginning and were willing to sacrifice
everything for it.</p><p><strong>MD</strong>: One could argue that some
in the United States still have not accepted this, if one looks at, for
example, the measures being enacted that are designed to prevent African
Americans from voting today.</p><p><strong>HW</strong>: I agree. In
fact, you have prominent historians like Sean Wilentz expounding on this
idea that the U.S. Constitution was an antislavery constitution.
There’s this denial taking place at the highest level of intellectual
life of this country — not to mention in Trumpland — that the United
States has always been about freedom. But we are trying to establish a
record based on facts. That’s all.</p><p><strong>MD</strong>: For me, in
some ways, the most perplexing and troubling character in early U.S.
history is Thomas Jefferson. Following the uprising in Haiti, he
presciently saw that revolts could take place in the United States.
There is this incredible intellectual disconnect between these evolved
ideas of rights and liberty and humanity while also supporting the
removal of Native Americans from their land, sending huge contingents of
slaves west and south as if that will somehow solve the slavery problem
and who was a slave owner himself. You wonder sometimes how these ideas
existed in the same person.</p><p><strong>HW</strong>: I would say the
prosperity, the luxury, the leisure, the education and simply the time
that allowed Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and an entire
generation of people from Virginia, to think about these noble ideas
about freedom that we so celebrate — rightly, but incompletely — were
the fruits of slavery. Jefferson would not have been known as a genius
without slavery, he would not have had the time to do the things he did.
Privilege blinds people, and Jefferson lived a life embedded in
privilege, and privilege now and privilege then makes it difficult for
people to understand [that] the way the world is isn’t simply the way
they see it.</p><p> </p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-63232669939640354722021-12-29T16:03:00.004+01:002021-12-29T16:03:47.735+01:00Michael Deibert on the BBC's The History Hour<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was interviewed by the BBC for its programme The History Hour about Haiti's 2010 earthquake, the aftermath of which is one of the contributing factor to the current surge of migrants. The episode runs from beginning to about 13:30, my part begins at 9:30. It can be heard <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1z7f?fbclid=IwAR0Uf9o86myiaaSdvR0p0yCwT7_3a_Js--Kan1XzCVz-FKPqcB8ts8b6078">here</a>.</span></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-48311106422259305582021-12-29T16:02:00.003+01:002021-12-29T16:02:31.911+01:00Michael Deibert interviewed on Al Jazeera <p>I spoke to Al Jazeera about the decision of Haiti Prime Minister Ariel Henry to fire the prosecutor investigating the murder of the country's president, <span>Jovenel Moïse. The episode can be viewed <a href="https://youtu.be/L5XjRd-OXIA">here</a>.<br /></span></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-65150476903219122792021-12-29T15:58:00.001+01:002021-12-29T15:58:11.772+01:00The Death of Haiti’s President Summons Ghosts Old and New<p><b>The Death of Haiti’s President Summons Ghosts Old and New </b></p><p>The assassination of Haiti’s Jovenel Moïse was something anyone should have seen coming. Yet few did </p><p>Michael Deibert </p><p>July 28, 2021</p><p>Newlines Magazine</p><p>(The original article can be read <a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-death-of-haitis-president-summons-ghosts-old-and-new/">here</a>) </p><p>If you are on the back of a moto taxi hurtling
down Route Canapé Vert in Port-au-Prince at dusk, you will see the sun
sinking fiery into the bay, just beyond a slew of impoverished
neighborhoods — Village de Dieu, La Saline, Cité Soleil — often written
about (if at all) because of the various armed groups that hold the
populations there under their thumbs, but which are in reality home to
hundreds of thousands of struggling, deeply disadvantaged people with no
connection to crime or violence. On your left you will see an
undulation of mountains dotted with the modest abodes of others
marginally less desperately poor, and the smell of Haiti — flowers,
citrus, burning, sewage — will dance on your nostrils. When you reach
Turgeau, the streets narrow, and you will be able to hear the melodious
lilt of Haitian Creole and sinuous ebb of <em>konpa</em> music from
radios on the street. You will pass a tall building that once housed
Haiti’s state telephone company, looted by questionable government deals
in the early 2000s. A few streets away once stood the Église
Sacré-Coeur, where the dictator François Duvalier stole the coffin
containing the body of his rival, Clement Jumelle, in 1959, and in front
of which the progressive Palestinian-Haitian businessman Antoine Izméry
was slain in 1993.</p><p>To the south, as you continue, will be the
neighborhood of Pacot, where I once lived, a formerly chic and now
decaying collection of brightly colored gingerbread houses where
bougainvilleas fall in riotous sprays over high walls. Just beyond,
covering the hills as the capital slumps further southward is the
neighborhood of Martissant, where Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister, Pauline,
and her husband, French Gen. Charles Leclerc, allegedly once lived
(their former residence now within a 42-acre park dripping with
vegetation and bright bird of paradise flowers) but that has now been
carved up to fiefdoms of warring armed groups, its people hostage to
their violence.</p><p>Eventually the buildings fall away, the sky opens
up, and you find yourself on the Champ de Mars, Port-au-Prince’s broad
main square, with the heights of Bel Air, a culturally significant
district also now blighted by violence, rising behind you. You stop in
front of a fence where, until it collapsed during the capital’s
devastating 2010 earthquake, the gleaming-white Palais National,
designed by the architect Georges Baussan and completed in 1920, once
sat glistening beneath a backdrop of mountains garlanded with clouds.</p><p>It
was in the warren of offices behind where the palace had once stood,
after night had already fallen on the Haitian capital and the lanes
around the Champ de Mars danced to the orange, incandescent glow of the
kerosene lamps that vendors used to illuminate their commerce, that I
first met Jovenel Moïse, the Haitian president slain on July 7.</p><p class="has-drop-cap">Tall,
lanky, complex, flawed, authoritarian and stubborn, Moïse was a better
communicator in person than when he addressed mass rallies in often
bellicose terms, and he spoke to me for nearly an hour without notes
about his vision for the country that night in March 2018. He talked
about his desire to pave the country’s collapsing roads, to bring
electricity to its far-flung and long-neglected communes, and the fact
that he had been born in the small town of Trou-du-Nord, in the north of
country and had served as president of the chamber of commerce in the
country’s Northwest Department. In his view, Haiti had “a kind of
cleavage. You have urban zones, rural zones, people in the town and
people in the country … We want to move Haiti beyond being the republic
of nongovernmental organizations. … They cannot replace the state.”</p><p>He
had been in office for about a year then and had come to the presidency
as the candidate of the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK), formed by his
predecessor Michel Martelly, a singer who went by the stage name Sweet
Micky and who served as Haiti’s president from 2011 to 2016. Martelly
had been elected in a controversial ballot during which some saw
outgoing president René Préval as trying to rig the vote in favor of his
chosen successor, former government official Jude Célestin, while
others saw the hand of the United States, particularly then-Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, in pushing Martelly over the top. (Ironically,
Préval’s own 2006 victory was achieved without the necessity of a second
round against former president Leslie Manigat also with the help of
outside pressure.)</p><p>The election of mulatto Martelly, a right-wing
populist in a country often riven by divides of class and color and who,
in the words of the late Haitian diplomat Guy Alexandre, was “backed by
former Duvalierists and the youth of the popular classes,” represented a
wholesale rejection of Haiti’s traditional political system, or so some
voters in the impoverished Port-au-Prince neighborhood of St. Martin
seemed to think, telling me shortly after Martelly’s election that
“everyone” in the area had voted for him. Martelly’s five years in
power, though, were marked by bitter clashes with Haiti’s opposition and
increasingly brazen examples of alleged corruption involving the PHTK
itself as well as Martelly’s family.</p><p>The first round of Moïse’s
election was derailed by allegations of fraud and an opposition that
vowed to kill voters — “machetes and stones in hand” — at the polls. He
eventually won 56% of the vote in a crowded field in a November 2016
contest marked by feeble participation and overseen by an interim
president and political rival, former Sen. Jocelerme Privert. Moïse
entered office promising an aggressive infrastructure program to help
revive Haiti’s economy, still struggling from the 2010 earthquake. Many
foreign commentators said that Moïse was “unknown” before throwing his
hat in the ring for the presidency. But what they really meant was he
was unknown to them, the people for whom Port-au-Prince is a stand-in
for a country of more than 11 million people. Involved in agribusiness
in the country’s north (and later accused of having made his fortune
through suspect means), Moïse had served as president of the region’s
chamber of commerce and had appeared on programs such as Tele
Métropole’s “Le Point” as early as 2014.</p><p>Haiti’s political
opposition — made up largely of a series of shambolic and violent
opportunists who have made their living off political instability for
two decades — never accepted his victory. Even before Moïse took office,
André Michel, an attorney and professional political agitator
affiliated with the Secteur Démocratique et Populaire (which is neither
democratic nor popular), said the opposition would “destroy the country”
if Moïse became president. Such pronouncements were typical.</p><p>Over the next four years, helped along by the PHTK and sometimes by Moïse himself, they did just that.</p><p class="has-drop-cap">A
few months after Moïse took power, a Haitian Senate commission reported
evidence of widespread fraud and misuse of funds stemming from Haiti’s
participation in the Venezuelan low-cost oil program known as
Petrocaribe, which occurred before Moïse had taken office. A subsequent
report by Haiti’s Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes claimed
that firms linked to Moïse when he was a private citizen took part in
the embezzlement scheme. For many, this was the beginning of the end of
his presidency.</p><p>“When Jovenel came along, he was a good speaker,
and his presence on the scene meant you would get to know him better
than the opponents,” said Johnson Deshommes, a young activist who
initially supported Moïse but turned against the president when he
“realized that the PHTK clan were still the ones controlling things.”
Deshommes added, “He kept promising things even when he couldn’t
deliver; no one in the Petrocaribe affair was arrested.”</p><p>By summer
2018, things began spiraling downward. Massive protests rocked the
capital as protesters demanded to know what had happened to the missing
Petrocaribe money. In November 2018, a group of gunmen raided the
capital’s slum of La Saline in an attack the United Nations said left at
least 26 people dead, while a report by the Haitian human rights group
Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH) put the death toll
at 71.</p><p>Three of those allegedly involved in the attack — former
police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, Ministry of Interior
functionary Fednel Monchery and former West Department delegate Joseph
Pierre Richard Duplan — would be sanctioned by the U.S. State Department
for their alleged roles in the killings. Chérizier would subsequently
hold a press conference announcing the formation of the <em>G9 an fanmi e alye</em>,
an alliance of armed groups around the city that many saw as the
government’s bludgeon against its rivals. Though Chérizier has
frequently been pegged as a Moïse loyalist, especially in the foreign
press, he has said himself that he had been a supporter of Jude Célestin
and even worked as a bodyguard for a parliamentary candidate from
Célestin’s political party. It was all very murky.</p><p>The use of
armed gangs, often made up of the quite young, as a political modus
operandi is perhaps the most lasting legacy of the 2001 to 2004
government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose Fanmi Lavalas party
pioneered (if that is the right word) the practice during which the
gangs were referred to as <em>chimere</em>, after a mythical
fire-breathing demon. The practice has since metastasized throughout
Haiti’s body politic so that almost every political current in the
country has its cadre of gunmen (referred to as baz, or base, in Creole)
and the gang leaders themselves have grown ever-more powerful,
gradually approaching an equilibrium with their patrons in the country’s
economic and political elite.</p><p>“For a long time we have had
different mafias here controlling economic and political life, and
presidents, senators and deputies exist in this criminal milieu,” says
Michel Soukar, a Haitian author whose works include “La dernière nuit de
Cincinnatus Leconte,” a fictionalized account of the explosion that
claimed the life of another Haitian president in 1912.</p><p>By May
2019, rather than allow a vote on Moïse’s designate for interim prime
minister, a group of opposition senators led by Antonio “Don Kato”
Cheramy, a rapper-turned-politician, destroyed the meeting room in
Haiti’s parliament. After Moïse nominated a Ministry of Finance official
for the same post four months later, opposition politicians, again led
by Don Kato, once more vandalized the parliamentary meeting hall,
leading a group of shrieking partisans into the chamber in what now
resembles the attempted putsch at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. A violent
dissident group within the police calling itself the Fantôme 509 also
began roiling armed demonstrations against the government, and,
stretching from 2018 into 2019, the opposition was enforcing <em>peyi lòk</em>
— a terrifying armed strike that brought all commerce and activity in
the capital to a halt for weeks and that, in the words of Soukar,
“failed to overthrow Jovenel Moïse but succeeded in overthrowing Haiti.”</p><p>Moïse,
meanwhile, railed against what he charged was the “capture” of Haiti’s
state by corrupt oligarchs and political operators (some of whose help
he was happy to accept during his own 2016 campaign) — many of them
mulattos — and government-aligned magistrates issued a slew of arrest
warrants, including against wealthy businessman Dimitri Vorbe, whom
Moïse accused of illicitly profiting from government energy contracts
under the Préval administration in the mid-2000s and who subsequently
fled to Miami.</p><p class="has-drop-cap">When I met Moïse for the second and last time in November 2019, his mood had darkened considerably.</p><p>“Haiti
is not divided but torn,” he said to me, as he sat on a white and gold
chair between four large Haitian flags. “We need a national agreement
where each Haitian can talk to one another, where we can talk about an
inclusive solution. … The state in Haiti is being held hostage by a
group of people [and] we have to free that captured state. What
president elected with almost 60% of the vote would decide today to
leave office without working on the promises that he has made? Now we
see the opposition asking for the president to leave, what strategy do
they bring, what future do they say they have for the country? It is a
system where it is ‘get out so that I can get in.’ ”</p><p>As the instability rolled on, Moïse lost more and more popularity and found himself more and more isolated.</p><p>“In
the beginning, he had a social project that he wanted to accomplish in
favor of the nation, for example the electrification of the country, the
construction of irrigation dams on the rivers, the insecurity that he
wanted to slow down,” said Remise Bélizaire, the co-director of the
Konbit Sant Sosyokiltirèl Thomonde, headquartered in the town of the
same name in Haiti’s largely rural Plateau Central, one of many
forgotten regions that Moïse claimed he wanted to help with his
so-called <em>caravane du changement</em> (caravan of change).</p><p>“But unfortunately, he did not produce, he did not keep promises to the people,” Bélizaire said.</p><p>And
yet, even then, Moïse still had some supporters. But they were not the
kind of people who haunt social media (especially Twitter), nor were
they the kind of people who are easily accessible as most of them speak
only Creole and not the kind of people that the foreign professional
journalist and analyst class often bother to talk to.</p><p>During a
text-messaging chat earlier this year, a friend who is a recently lapsed
member of the baz in the poor quarter of St. Martin wrote that “Jovenel
is a good president but the opposition prevents him from being able to
work and makes chaos. They are afraid to go to the polls because they
know no one will vote for them. Haitians do not need transition, we need
elections and another constitution for the country to prosper.”</p><p>The
fact that voices like this young man’s are almost uniformly absent from
the analyses that have appeared in recent weeks is maybe something
worth pondering.</p><p>In January 2020, after the terms of most of
Haiti’s elected parliament expired — the government and the opposition,
whose first demand for negotiation was that Moïse resign, couldn’t agree
on a process to hold elections — Moïse began ruling by decree, in an
almost carbon copy of how former President René Préval had dealt with a
similar impasse in 1999. When all eight members of Haiti’s <em>Conseil Electoral Provisoire</em>
(Provisional Electoral Council) resigned in July 2020, Moïse created a
new electoral council and unilaterally named its members and tasked them
with organizing local and federal elections and overseeing a commission
to rewrite Haiti’s often-criticized 1987 constitution. This was to be
approved by a plebiscite, a move that many called unconstitutional and
dictatorial. Many constitutional experts charged that the one-year term
of an interim president should be deducted from his five-year term, but
Moïse refused to step down before February 2022.</p><p>And PHTK, the
party that Moïse was ostensibly aligned with but by some accounts was
increasingly at odds with (others within the party deny this), has
become what many Haitians have described to me alternately as a “poison”
and a “cancer” on the country, and a survey of its officials provides a
rogues’ gallery of malefactors and malfeasance.</p><p>PHTK Sen. Hervé
Fourcand figured prominently in the 2019 trial of a former U.S. Marine
sergeant and Orlando gun shop owner who was found guilty of conspiring
to illegally export guns and ammunition to Haiti, with WhatsApp messages
showing Fourcand in regular contact about the shipment. In February
2021, Canada’s La Presse reported that the wife of PHTK Sen. Rony
Célestin purchased a $3.4 million waterfront villa for her and the
senator, paid off in cash. The circumstances of the purchase of the
villa are currently under investigation by Haiti’s Unité de Lutte Contre
la Corruption (ULCC), even as Rony Célestin also owns newly constructed
buildings in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Juvenat and a large
mansion in Haiti’s remote Plateau Central. Yet another PHTK politician,
Deputy Claude Luc Guillaume, is the nephew of famous Haitian drug
trafficker Jacques Ketant (who once famously told a Miami court that his
former friend Aristide was “a drug lord” who had turned Haiti “into a
narco-country”) and was involved in a July 2019 gun battle that left six
people dead in Petite-Rivière de Nippes.</p><p>By May 2021, Woodly
“Sonson La Familia” Ethéart — a feared figure in Haiti’s criminal
underworld who reputedly led the “Gang Galil” and a former business
partner of Martelly’s brother-in-law, Charles “Kiko” St. Remy — was
incautiously posting photos to social media of himself enjoying a night
of music by Martelly in the Dominican Republic before he was arrested by
police there and transferred to Haiti on what they said was an
outstanding arrest warrant dating from 2019. Moïse’s collaboration in
the arrest is said to have outraged some sectors of his own party, as
was, reportedly, his view that one of the ways to rescue his historical
legacy was to hold “legitimate” elections this coming September.</p><p>In recent months, Moïse had told several international diplomats that he believed he would be killed.</p><p>Young activists, meanwhile, felt exasperation about not only Moïse but also what they viewed as a rotten political system.</p><p>“The
cornerstone of a country is the foundation of a state where the
institutions stand and defend the constitution, whatever it takes,” says
Deshommes. “But the smartest people never got a chance to govern this
country. Aristide left us with gangs that until now cause problems.
Préval should never have been president over Manigat; he did not believe
in great projects but in small victories and a lot of people in the
private sector took a lot of advantage of that. In no other country in
the world would Michel Martelly ever run for the presidency because of
his past.”</p><p>Haitians have learned not to look abroad for a solution to their problems, either.</p><p>The
so-called Core Group (made up of the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada,
France, Germany, Spain and the U.S., and representatives of the
Organization of American States, the EU and U.N.) is widely viewed as
little more than a kind of collective proconsul, dictating to the
country the path outside powers demand it should take.</p><p>Though some
Haitians might have hoped for an improvement in the level of discourse
about their country in the U.S. since former President Donald Trump’s
“shithole countries” comment in 2018, the individuals populating the
U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee are enough to give one pause. In
February 2021, Rep. Andy Levin of Michigan mocked Moïse in a tweet for
having “no evidence to support claims of a conspiracy against his life.”
In October 2019, Levin posted a photo to his Twitter account and
described his meeting with “a brave delegation from Haiti.” In the
photo, Levin posed with Evallière Beauplan, who voiced his support for
overthrowing René Préval after the 2010 earthquake and faced accusations
of corruption during his time in parliament, and Croix-des-Bouquets
Mayor Rony Colin, who runs a radio station called Radio Zenith that more
than one Haitian has compared to Rwanda’s genocidal Radio Mille
Collines.</p><p>During a recent House hearing on Haiti, Rep. Maxine
Waters of California, whom I watched party with Aristide at Haiti’s
National Palace in 2004 as protesters whom she mocked and degraded were
being savagely repressed by his government, appeared to think it was
still 2001, declaring at a recent congressional hearing on Haiti “I am
Lavalas” out of loyalty to Aristide’s political party, which has been in
political eclipse for almost 20 years now.</p><p class="has-drop-cap">By
the time Moïse was killed in the early morning hours of July 7 — after
frantically calling to the nation’s police as his personal security had
abandoned him — the mercenaries who cut him down were adding but one
more life, no matter how grand, to Haiti’s butcher’s bill of recent
years.</p><p>In February, in an operation targeted against the <em>5 Segonn</em>
gang, believed to be one of the main movers behind the recent spate of
kidnapping, police raided the gang’s stronghold in the impoverished
quarter of Village de Dieu. The raid ended in disaster with 6 police
officers killed, their last moments shared on social media by gang
members who can be heard gloating in the footage.</p><p>Thousands have
been displaced in fighting between armed groups in the capital’s
Martissant, Bel Air, and Cite Soleil neighborhoods. In June, the leader
of the G9 coalition of armed groups, Chérizier, released a video in
which he was surrounded by dozens of armed, masked men saying a “major
revolution” was beginning in Haiti. Only days later, Haiti journalist
Diego Charles and feminist activist Antoinette Duclaire were slain in
Port-au-Prince’s Christ-Roi neighborhood, two of more than a dozen
killed that night, with Duclaire having said before her murder, “you
deal with death on a daily basis. When you leave home, there’s no
certainty that you will return. They can assassinate you, kidnap you.”</p><p>And on and on and on …</p><p>In
Jacques Roumain’s book “Gouverneurs de la rosée,” published in 1944 at
the height of the despotic rule of Élie Lescot, he wrote of “how far
things were from the good old days of the konbit, from the virile joyous
chants of the men folk, from the sparkling, swinging hoes in the sun,
from those happy years when we used to dance the minuet under the arbors
with the carefree voices of dark young girls bursting forth like a
fountain in the night.”</p><p>In Haiti, they have a saying, <em>lane pase toujou pi bon</em> (past years are always better).</p><p>Since the murder of Haiti’s president — the fifth president from Haiti’s <em>grand nord</em>
to be slain — all the actors have been playing their parts. The former
police officer known as Barbecue has been ratcheting up incitement on
social media and led an armed march in the slain president’s honor
through downtown Port-au-Prince. Haiti’s current ruling class cobbled
together a new “consensus” government that includes virtually no one
outside of their own circle and were given the helpful nod of the Core
Group. The president’s wife, wounded in the attack that killed her
husband, returned to Haiti from her convalescence in Miami, dressed all
in black, and denounced the “traitors” who had surrounded her husband at
his funeral. Even Dimitri Vorbe — who, in a broadcast a few weeks
before Moïse’s murder, rambled about an electoral timeline, called the
president a “sucker” and “ugly” and told him “you don’t have much time
left” — took a moment to post a smiling selfie of himself on his Twitter
account, ostensibly celebrating Argentina’s win over Brazil in the Copa
America, three days after the president’s murder.</p><p>The people of
Cité Soleil, Martissant, Bel Air and other marginalized neighborhoods in
the capital cling to hope within their communities to lift themselves
up, with little help from the government or anyone else. In the
countryside, in communities like Thomonde, Bombardopolis and Gros-Morne,
people do the same. Old rivalries — between city and countryside,
between black and mulatto, between north and south — once muted if not
absent, now seem reanimated.</p><p>Moïse is gone, but the system that he
was part of and ostensibly was fighting against, made of blood and
bone, both predated him and will outlast him.</p><p>“I believe the
president opened his eyes once he started understanding the system,”
says Deshommes. “He became a danger to their interests but <em>tout bèt jennen mòd</em> (a cornered animal will bite). By then it was too late, and he was fighting alone.”</p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-28196396775469157702021-12-29T15:54:00.002+01:002021-12-29T15:54:17.172+01:00Michael Deibert interviewed in Washinton Post en español <p>I spoke to the Spanish-language podcast of the Washington Post about the the assassination of Haiti's president <span>Jovenel Moïse</span>. The full episode can be listened to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/es/el-washington-post-podcast/asesinado-el-presidente-de-hait-atentado-en-amsterdam-el-banco-de-desarrollo-de-amrica-latina/?fbclid=IwAR100ov0cvzQBeTpQ0hFK9PrJCNa0DbOQ14F5mwsR2jDNfNJZiNVj9hRG9U">here</a>. <br /></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-18577217398419898282021-12-29T15:51:00.000+01:002021-12-29T15:51:04.909+01:00Michael Deibert interviewed in The Times (UK)<p> I was interviewed by The Times (UK) about the assassination of Haiti president Jovenel Moïse. The original article can be read <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/haitis-president-is-dead-but-why-did-it-take-a-hit-squad-of-28-b2jgp7xt6">here</a>.<br /></p><p><b>Haiti’s president is dead — but why did it take a hit squad of 28? </b></p><p>The ‘assassins’ had no escape plan and rumours circulate that they were scapegoats for an outlandish plot by Jovenel Moïse’s enemies<br /></p><div class="keylines__KeylineItem-sc-1s03wwf-0 keylines__ArticleKeylineItem-sc-1s03wwf-1 ktHoqV"><div class="responsive__MetaContainer-sc-3t8ix5-6 hDCxdC responsive__MetaContainer-sc-3t8ix5-6 hDCxdC css-1dbjc4n r-1777fci r-1w50u8q"><div class="responsive__Meta-sc-3t8ix5-5 bObKIi responsive__Meta-sc-3t8ix5-5 bObKIi css-1dbjc4n r-18u37iz r-1w6e6rj r-1777fci"><div class="css-901oao r-1khp51w r-18u37iz r-j2s0nr r-n6v787 r-fxxt2n" dir="auto">Stephen Gibbs, Santo Domingo</div></div><div class="responsive__Meta-sc-3t8ix5-5 bObKIi responsive__Meta-sc-3t8ix5-5 bObKIi css-1dbjc4n r-18u37iz r-1w6e6rj r-1777fci"><div class="hover-icon__HoverIcon-sc-1ge5rtz-0 jLWRBa"><time datetime="2021-07-10T23:01:00.000Z">Sunday July 11 2021, 12.01am BST, </time><span class="date-publication__PublicationName-sc-1vdpzkx-0 brXzzz">The Sunday Times</span><span class="responsive__DropCap-sc-1pktst5-1 ceCFmB" style="color: #1d1d1b;"> </span></div><div class="hover-icon__HoverIcon-sc-1ge5rtz-0 jLWRBa"><span class="responsive__DropCap-sc-1pktst5-1 ceCFmB" style="color: #1d1d1b;"> </span></div><div class="hover-icon__HoverIcon-sc-1ge5rtz-0 jLWRBa"><span class="responsive__DropCap-sc-1pktst5-1 ceCFmB" style="color: #1d1d1b;">O</span>n
the winding road leading up to the president’s mansion overlooking
Port-au-Prince, the remnants of a murderous night are still evident.
Near Jovenel Moïse’s home, several bullet-riddled cars lie abandoned in
the street. Some have been set on fire. All were left there by an army
of foreign mercenaries who, according to the Haitian police, came to
assassinate the head of state in the early hours of Wednesday.</div></div></div></div><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">A
neighbour, a man in his twenties who gave his name only as Rosemond,
said he was woken by a series of explosions as the rampage began. At
first he assumed it was an earthquake, a dread that haunts all Haitians.
“Then my mum called me to tell me that the president had been
murdered,” he said.</p><span><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Political
violence may be commonplace in Haiti, but the worst of it has long been
aimed at its people, not its leaders. Even the despised despot François
“Papa Doc” Duvalier, who commanded his own murder squad, died of
natural causes, in 1971. So too did his playboy-dictator son,
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, who once raced his Ferrari past the house where
Moïse died. No serving Haitian president has been killed since 1915.</p><div id="2.1"><div class="responsive__PrimaryImg-sc-4v1r4q-5 eBxIvN responsive__PrimaryImg-sc-4v1r4q-5 eBxIvN css-1dbjc4n"><span><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Murdering
a head of state is “the final taboo” of modern Haitian politics, said
author Michael Deibert. “And now even that line has been crossed.”</p></span></div></div></span><span><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">The
killing has led to days of chaos. For at least 24 hours, gun battles
raged around the upmarket suburb of Pétion-Ville, as police and locals
hunted the mercenaries. Two suspects were killed. A further 11 broke
into the nearby embassy of Taiwan where they were later arrested. Two
men, who had the same pale skin as the mercenaries, narrowly escaped
being lynched when they were spotted by an angry crowd. Pleading
innocence, they were dragged to the police, one with a bloodied rope
around his neck.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">On
Friday large crowds thronged the US embassy, desperate to believe
unfounded rumours that their powerful neighbour was about to hand out
visas on humanitarian grounds. The US has snubbed a request from Haiti
for military assistance.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Speculation about who arranged the assassination, who carried it out and who stands to benefit has run wild.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">The Haitian authorities say that Moïse was murdered by a <a class="link__RespLink-sc-1ocvixa-0 cccvCK" href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/haiti-names-hit-squad-of-26-colombian-veterans-accused-of-presidents-murder-36kbtz8r3">hit squad of 28 men</a>,
26 of whom were Colombian nationals, including 13 veterans of the
Colombian armed forces, whose former members are in demand around the
world as highly accomplished, cheaper alternatives to British and
American mercenaries.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Most
of the men had arrived in Haiti in early June. According to the
Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, many of them were under the impression
they were to provide protection to senior government figures on a
three-month trial, for $2,700 a month. They kept in touch with their
families. One complained to his wife about the bad food he was being
served.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">But
at about 1am on Wednesday, according to police, these men appeared by
the president’s home. Moïse, 53, is understood to have been working in
his study when they arrived.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">A
video taken by one neighbour shows armed men on the street outside,
with at least one shouting, in English: “DEA operation!”. This has
encouraged a theory that the mercenaries managed to dupe the president’s
security by pretending they were US drug enforcement agents with an
order to arrest, not kill, Moïse.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Once
inside the mansion, according to police, the assassins showed no mercy.
Moïse was shot 12 times and his left eye was gouged out. His body was
left face-up on the floor, his blue trousers and white shirt soaked in
blood. His wife Martine was also shot, but survived, and has been flown
to a Miami hospital. She may yet become a vital witness. The couple’s
daughter Jomarlie, one of their three children, escaped by hiding in a
bedroom, emerging at 4pm the next day.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">“This
was a highly co-ordinated attack by a highly trained and heavily armed
group,” said interim prime minister Claude Joseph. Days before the
attack he had been told that he was being replaced.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Some
of the captured men have since denied that they were part of any murder
plot. The two Haitian-Americans in the group claim they were recruited
as unwitting translators.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">The
suggestion, circulating in both Colombia and Haiti, is that the group
was never an elite assassination unit, and was instead duped into
appearing like one. The theory is that the former soldiers were
scapegoats for a planned killing of the president by his internal
enemies, who killed Moïse shortly before they arrived, or during the
initial mayhem.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">“Anything,
and I mean anything, is possible in Haiti,” Luis Moreno, a former US
diplomat in Port-au-Prince, and later ambassador to Jamaica, said. He
added that when he first heard about the attack he began to suspect
there was more to it than might appear.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">“There are too many guys. Why would you need 26 guys on site?” he said. ”And how do you not have an escape plan?”</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV">Rumours
as to who might have masterminded the plot to kill Moïse have focused
on shadowy oligarchs and criminals who still make fortunes in Haiti.
They may have felt that he was not a man they could deal with. “He was
not a team player,” one businessman in Port-au-Prince conceded.</p><p class="responsive__Paragraph-sc-1pktst5-0 fKDjKV" id="last-paragraph">Deibert
said that whoever stands to lose or gain from the assassination,
nothing much will change in Haiti, a country he portrays as ruled by a
tiny elite, with democracy little more than a veneer. “The system that
Jovenel Moïse sat atop of was bigger than him. It predated and will
outlast him,” he said.</p></span>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-726838658200050172021-12-27T02:18:00.002+01:002021-12-27T02:18:19.002+01:00Michael Deibert interviewed in El Confidencial <p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="gmail-d2edcug0 gmail-hpfvmrgz gmail-qv66sw1b gmail-c1et5uql gmail-lr9zc1uh gmail-a8c37x1j gmail-keod5gw0 gmail-nxhoafnm gmail-aigsh9s9 gmail-fe6kdd0r gmail-mau55g9w gmail-c8b282yb gmail-d3f4x2em gmail-iv3no6db gmail-jq4qci2q gmail-a3bd9o3v gmail-b1v8xokw gmail-oo9gr5id gmail-hzawbc8m" dir="auto"></span></span></span></p><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: small;">I spoke to Spain's El Confidencial about the the assassination of Haiti's president Jovenel Moïse. The full article is below and the original appears <a href="https://www.elconfidencial.com/mundo/2021-07-07/jovenel-moise-el-polemico-presidente-que-quiso-cambiar-haiti-y-al-que-haiti-devoro_3172431/?fbclid=IwAR0S-vtopW24HLii-fyUxvRkoyr3M4-2mGsjL6p7YcQaARo0HmODu2K4wM0">here</a>. </span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="gmail-d2edcug0 gmail-hpfvmrgz gmail-qv66sw1b gmail-c1et5uql gmail-lr9zc1uh gmail-a8c37x1j gmail-keod5gw0 gmail-nxhoafnm gmail-aigsh9s9 gmail-fe6kdd0r gmail-mau55g9w gmail-c8b282yb gmail-d3f4x2em gmail-iv3no6db gmail-jq4qci2q gmail-a3bd9o3v gmail-b1v8xokw gmail-oo9gr5id gmail-hzawbc8m" dir="auto"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><div class="innerArticle__opening landscapePhotoFull"> <header class="landscapePhotoFull__titleSide"> <div class="landscapePhotoFull__backing">Asesinado cerca del fin de su mandato</div><div class="landscapePhotoFull__backing"> </div><div class="landscapePhotoFull__backing"><b>Jovenel Moïse: el polémico presidente que quiso cambiar Haití y al que Haití devoró </b></div><div class="landscapePhotoFull__backing"> </div><div class="landscapePhotoFull__backing">Odiado por muchos haitianos que criticaban su autoritarismo, aunque alabado por otros que respetaban su intento de transformar el país, el mandatario nunca logró los cambios que buscaba <br /></div><br /></header> <div class="landscapePhotoFull__photoSide"> <figure> <div class="landscapePhotoFull__imgWrapper lqip"> <picture> <source media="(max-width: 767px)"></source> <img alt="Foto: Jovenel Moïse en octubre de 2020. (Reuters)" class="landscapePhotoFull__img lqip__original" height="270" src="https://images.ecestaticos.com/KX_0qbnjxlYaQGhRnT0kUIqvUNY=/0x0:1600x899/1338x751/filters:fill(white):format(jpg)/f.elconfidencial.com%2Foriginal%2Fc37%2F657%2Fe9f%2Fc37657e9f125f265b3ef44550c85599f.jpg" style="height: 100%; opacity: 1;" width="360" /> </picture> </div> <figcaption class="landscapePhotoFull__caption">Jovenel Moïse en octubre de 2020. (Reuters)</figcaption> </figure> </div> </div> <div class="innerArticle__body"> <div class="innerArticle__container"> <div class="innerArticle__content newsType"> <div class="articleHeaderBar innerArticle__bar"> <div class="articleHeaderBar__sectionDate"> <div class="authorSignature"> Por <div class="authorSignature__item"> <a class="authorSignature__link" href="https://www.elconfidencial.com/autores/lucas-proto-4359/">L. Proto</a></div><div class="authorSignature__item"> </div> <div class="authorSignature__item"> </div> </div> <div class="dateTime"> <time datetime="2021-07-07T18:16:18+02:00"> <span class="dateTime__created">07/07/2021 - 16:09</span> <span class="dateTime__updated">Actualizado: 07/07/2021 - 18:16</span> </time> </div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="newsType__content"> <p> <strong>Jovenel Moïse</strong> nunca estuvo destinado a una presidencia fácil. Nadie lo está en <a href="https://www.elconfidencial.com/tags/lugares/haiti-9949/2/" target="_self">Haití</a>,
la nación más pobre del hemisferio occidental con una larga historia de
dictaduras y golpes de Estado y en el que la democracia continúa siendo
muy frágil. Su mandato nació con un débil respaldo, se desarrolló en
medio de acusaciones de corrupción y autoritarismo y murió junto a él
este miércoles, a manos de asaltantes todavía no identificados que
dispararon contra el presidente de 53 años y la primera dama en su
residencia privada. </p> <p> Hijo de un mercader y de una costurera, Moïse era un empresario agrícola que <strong>nunca había ejercido ningún cargo político </strong>hasta
el momento en el que el expresidente Michel Martelly lo eligió como su
sucesor al frente del Partido haitiano Tèt Kale (PHTK) en 2015. Su
asesinato se produce a escasos dos meses de las elecciones
presidenciales y legislativas convocadas para el próximo 26 de
septiembre, unos comicios en los que no podía ser candidato y que
estaban rodeados de polémica, dado que gran parte del país consideraba
que el presidente <strong>llevaba desde febrero gobernando Haití ilegítimamente</strong>. </p> <section class="htmlWrapper"><img class="bodyCustomImage" data-height="1225" data-width="640" height="320" src="https://www.ecestaticos.com/file/d1dcfbbe42ec0c7eed066e12ae3ba835/1625674218-infografia_presidente_haiti.svg" width="167" /></section> <h2 class="bodyTitle">Un mandato en llamas</h2> <p>
Moïse llegó al poder a raíz de unas elecciones marcadas por los
retrasos continuos, por las múltiples acusaciones de fraude y, sobre
todo, por una bajísima participación. En un país de cerca de 12 millones
de habitantes,<strong> solo 600.000 respaldaron en las urnas al fallecido mandatario</strong>,
poco más de un 5% de la población. La polémica lo había perseguido
desde su primer día en el cargo, pero especialmente desde 2018, cuando, a
raíz de un escándalo de corrupción en torno a los fondos del programa
Petrocaribe, por el cual <a href="https://www.elconfidencial.com/tags/temas/noticias-de-venezuela-2572/" target="_self">Venezuela</a> suministra petróleo a varios países, comenzaron una serie de protestas populares en su contra que nunca llegaron a apagarse. </p> <section class="bodyObject inTextNews"> <figure class="inTextNews__imgWrapper"> <img alt="Foto: Un manfiestante grita frente a una barricada en llamas durante las protestas contra el presidente Jovenel Moïse en Puerto Príncipe, la capital haitiana. (Foto: Reuters)" class="inTextNews__img" height="240" src="https://images.ecestaticos.com/HBPKBa-LpDyN_UkHsNH8Mt06b6Q=/0x0:2272x1529/1200x900/filters:fill(white):format(jpg)/f.elconfidencial.com%2Foriginal%2F2d1%2F45f%2F1b1%2F2d145f1b191e7b25a671514432377cac.jpg" style="opacity: 1;" width="320" /> </figure> <div class="inTextNews__text"> <header> <span> <a class="inTextNews__title" href="https://www.elconfidencial.com/mundo/2021-02-17/coordenadas-crisis-haiti_2954191/">Coordenadas | ¿Por qué debería preocuparte esta crisis en el país de las mil crisis?</a> </span> </header> <div class="inTextNews__signature"> <span class="inTextNews__itemSignature">L. P.</span> </div> </div></section> <p>
La tensión llegó a su punto álgido a principios de febrero, provocando
la que muchos expertos consideraron como la mayor crisis política de los
últimos años en Haití. La clave de la crisis residía en dos
interpretaciones diferentes de la Constitución haitiana, que establece
que la duración de un Gobierno es de cinco años y que <strong>el cambio de poder debe efectuarse el 7 de febrero</strong>, el día del aniversario del fin de la dictadura de los Duvalier. </p> <p>
La oposición haitiana —compuesta por partidos políticos, grupos
religiosos, organizaciones de sociedad civil y activistas por los
derechos humanos, entre otros— argumentaba que el presidente debería
haber abandonado su cargo este 2021, dado que las elecciones tuvieron
lugar en 2016. Moïse, por el contrario, consideraba que su mandato debía
finalizar en 2022 porque su inauguración no se produjo hasta 2017. Esta
discrepancia podría haberse visto resuelta mediante un Tribunal
Constitucional, pero <strong>Haití carece de tal institución</strong>. </p> <p> Cuando llegó ese día 7, el presidente hizo un comunicado a la nación en el que afirmaba que <strong>se había frustrado un "golpe de Estado" para derrocar a su Gobierno y asesinarlo</strong>.
Más de una veintena de sus detractores, entre ellos un juez de la Corte
Suprema, fueron arrestados ese mismo día. Los opositores se apresuraron
a nombrar un presidente interino, pero no obtuvieron ningún respaldo
significativo por parte de la comunidad internacional y Moïse se mantuvo
en el poder. Desde entonces, las protestas se agravaron, sumando un
nuevo frente a <strong>una grave crisis de seguridad</strong>
protagonizada por luchas de bandas armadas y por una ola de secuestros
que ha forzado el desplazamiento interno de miles de haitianos. Un día
antes del asesinato del presidente, Gaston Browne, presidente de la
Comunidad del Caribe (Caricom), había calificado la situación en el país
de "insostenible". </p> <figure class="bodyObject bodyImage__wrapper bodyImage__wrapper--landscape"> <div class="lqip lqip--landscapeWide"> <img alt="placeholder" class="lqip__placeholder" src="https://images.ecestaticos.com/odY3idr_0WwdcyAHfc4cACgcLK8=/1x176:2272x1454/32x18/filters:fill(white):format(jpg)/f.elconfidencial.com%2Foriginal%2Fffc%2F68d%2Fa7f%2Fffc68da7f35fdf45701ab708ce7432f6.jpg" style="opacity: 1;" /> <img alt="Manifestantes antigubernamentales en Haití. (EFE)" class="bodyImage lqip__original" height="180" src="https://images.ecestaticos.com/sUoPWzJRQlygeWIQ-WVmc2wTPoM=/1x176:2272x1454/1440x810/filters:fill(white):format(jpg)/f.elconfidencial.com%2Foriginal%2Fffc%2F68d%2Fa7f%2Fffc68da7f35fdf45701ab708ce7432f6.jpg" style="opacity: 1;" width="320" /> </div> <figcaption class="bodyImage__caption"> Manifestantes antigubernamentales en Haití. (EFE) </figcaption></figure> <h2 class="bodyTitle">El cambio constitucional que nunca llegó</h2> <p>
Desde su llegada a la presidencia, Moïse defendió la necesidad de
reformar la Constitución, que data de 1987, para garantizar al Ejecutivo
un mayor poder que le permitiera enfrentarse a una oligarquía que,
según él, se estaba aprovechando de la debilidad del Gobierno.
“Necesitamos un sistema que funcione”, dijo este año <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/world/americas/haiti-jovenel-moise-constitution.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">en una entrevista con 'The New York Times'</a>. “El sistema actual no funciona.<strong> El presidente no puede trabajar para cumplir</strong>”. </p> <p>
Tanto la oposición haitiana como algunos analistas consideraban estos
llamados del mandatario como una simple estrategia para avivar el
sentimiento populista y camuflar los escándalos de su propio Gobierno.
Pero otros veían en las palabras del presidente como una descripción
acertada de la realidad en un país que ha encadenado una crisis política
tras otra <a href="https://www.elconfidencial.com/mundo/2010-01-14/catastrofe-humanitaria-en-haiti-hay-cientos-de-miles-de-muertos-por-el-terremoto_301267/" target="_self">desde el terremoto de 2010</a>, en el que murieron entre 100.000 y 300.000 personas y a raíz del cual más de un millón resultaron desplazadas. </p> <p>
"Jovenel Moïse era una persona complicada e imperfecta a las riendas de
un sistema letal mucho más grande que él y que, en su deseo de cambiar
Haití, se hizo enemigo de muchas personas peligrosas", relata a El
Confidencial <strong>Michael Deibert</strong>, autor y periodista con más de dos décadas de experiencia reportando sobre Haití. </p> <p>
Los esfuerzos por reformar la carta magna marcaron los últimos meses de
la presidencia de Moïse, quien había planeado la celebración de un
referéndum constitucional el pasado 27 de junio. Sin embargo,<strong> las autoridades electorales de Haití decidieron aplazar la votación</strong>
debido a la reciente oleada de contagios de covid en el país, la cual
ha ocasionado un aumento de las muertes y de las hospitalizaciones que
han sobrecargado el deficitario sistema sanitario del país. </p> <p> Tras el asesinato del presidente, el destino de la reforma constitucional queda en el aire. <strong>Ni siquiera existe una redacción completa</strong>.
Los únicos dos anteproyectos que se han dado a conocer proponían que
las elecciones presidenciales se decidieran en una sola vuelta y que el
Parlamento pase de tener dos cámaras a una, eliminando el Senado.
También, crucialmente, buscaba reemplazar el puesto del primer ministro
por el de un vicepresidente que responda a las órdenes de su superior,
una medida respaldada incluso por los críticos de Moïse para evitar la
frecuente fractura del Gobierno. </p> <p>
Ahora, Haití queda descabezado sin que ninguna de las ambiciosas
transformaciones que Moïse planeaba para el país —y que tanta
animadversión despertaron entre un importante sector de su población—
haya logrado materializarse. "Pasé horas entrevistándolo y fue difícil
reconciliar al hombre humilde que hablaba con aparente sinceridad sobre
su deseo de construir carreteras y llevar electricidad a Haití con<strong> la figura que tanto odio inspiraba entre algunos</strong>,
además de la aparente amnesia de una oposición que con frecuencia
optaba por la violencia en lugar de la negociación", narra Deibert. </p> <p> "Ahora, Jovenel Moïse se ha ido y el sistema, hecho de sangre y huesos, continuará avanzando <strong>mientras los autores de este crimen probablemente siguen beneficiándose de él</strong>", sentencia el autor. </p> </div></div></span></span></span><p></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-61580809095332857002021-12-26T14:44:00.002+01:002021-12-26T14:44:33.799+01:00Michael Deibert interviewed in La Tercera<p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">I was interviewed in Chile's La Tercera about the assassination of Haiti's president Jovenel Moïse. The full article files and the original can be read <a href="https://www.latercera.com/la-tercera-domingo/noticia/magnicidio-en-haiti-la-vision-de-un-exagente-de-la-cia-y-un-periodista-que-conocio-a-moise/I74H5QGMLND6LMKEX4BEZH64DE/">here</a>. <br /></span></span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Magnicidio en Haití: la visión de un exagente de la CIA y un periodista que conoció a Moïse</span></span></b></p><div class="author d-flex-center m-bot-10 "><div class="d-flex d-flex-center" rel="author"><div class="byline | isText width_full"><div class="name"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.latercera.com/autor/fernando-fuentes">Fernando Fuentes</a></span></span></div></div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><time class="p-left-10 " datetime="Sat Jul 10 2021 20:50:00 GMT-0400 (Bolivia Time)" title="10 jul 2021"><b>10 jul 2021</b> 08:50 PM</time></span></span><div class="time-read"> <span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="text-spam ">Tiempo de lectura: 9 minutos</span></span></span></div></div></div><figure class="mainimg"><div class="main-figure"><div class="full-image"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><img alt="" height="213" src="https://www.latercera.com/resizer/R3YqYm-IUxIOXBd20Opxl3FVy0I=/900x600/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/copesa/UBEIZSJLXZFCNL7EIEL2LOKQZI.jpg" width="320" /></span></span></div></div><figcaption><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Policías
haitianos pasan frente a un mural que representa al fallecido
Presidente Jovenel Moïse, cerca de su residencia en Puerto Príncipe.
Foto: AP.</span></span></p></figcaption></figure><p class="excerpt"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fulton
Armstrong fue el jefe de la CIA en el país caribeño durante la década de
los 90 y Michael Deibert entrevistó en dos ocasiones a Jovenel Moïse.
Ambos entregan a La Tercera su análisis sobre las consecuencias del
asesinato del presidente haitiano.</span></span></p><p> </p><div class="header | hl"><h2><div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fulton Armstrong: “Este Estado fallido se puede deslizar a una crisis de proporciones históricas”</span></span></div></h2></div><figure class="artimg"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><picture><source media="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 399px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 400px) and (max-width: 767px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 999px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1000px) and (max-width: 1299px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1300px)" type="image/webp"></source><source type="image/jpg"></source><img height="180" src="https://www.latercera.com/resizer/vJoXXYWt6dI2njE6J8mWVXmLFLw=/800x0/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/copesa/BUMVMGFEN5HFDAPLS5XTXI726A.jpg" type="image/jpg" width="320" /> <figcaption>Fulton Armstrong, exjefe de la CIA en Haití durante los 90.</figcaption></picture></span></span></figure><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sirvió
en la Sección de Intereses de EE.UU. en La Habana y fue jefe de la CIA
en Haití durante los 90. Hoy es miembro del Centro de Estudios
Latinoamericanos y Latinos de la American University.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>El
de Jovenel Moïse no es el primer magnicidio en Haití. En 1915, el
Presidente Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam fue asesinado por una turba
enfurecida después de esconderse en la embajada francesa. Pese a este
antecedente, ¿le sorprendió la muerte de Moïse?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">En
cierto sentido, el asesinato no fue sorprendente. Moïse estuvo
involucrado en un juego de poder prolongado y, como muchos otros
políticos haitianos, utilizó las pandillas para impulsar su agenda en
las calles. Es una estrategia arriesgada y, por supuesto,
antidemocrática. Un hombre que vive por la espada puede morir fácilmente
por la espada. Pero a otro nivel, es impactante que un jefe de Estado
haya sido asesinado. Es sintomático de la ruptura del orden social y, lo
que es más importante, de las instituciones. Haití ha estado en crisis
durante muchos años y ahora se dirige a una crisis aún más profunda.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>En
una entrevista en febrero, Moïse denunció que había un golpe de Estado
en marcha organizado por “un pequeño grupo de oligarcas”. ¿Quién podría
estar detrás de este asesinato? ¿Quién se beneficia con la muerte de
Moïse?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Es difícil separar la retórica
egoísta de Moïse de lo que realmente sucedió. Las acusaciones de Moïse
sobre un “pequeño grupo de oligarcas” tienen valor político para él,
pero corren el riesgo de presentarlo como un noble defensor de las masas
pobres del país, una caracterización que se contradice con algunos
hechos. Nuestros corazones tienen que estar con Moïse y su familia, pero
eligió seguir estrategias que también olían a golpe de Estado: cerrar
la Legislatura, empujar a un lado al Poder Judicial y promover una
reforma constitucional que aumentó su propio poder. Las autoridades en
Puerto Príncipe afirman que han matado a los asesinos, pero tenemos que
ser claros al respecto y reconocer que los agentes de bajo nivel que
hicieron el golpe no lo hicieron por iniciativa propia. Fuerzas
poderosas estuvieron detrás del asesinato. Los beneficiarios de la
muerte de Moïse son, si la historia es una guía, “todos” menos el
presidente fallecido. Su asesinato provocará un festín.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>¿El país puede quedar al borde del caos otra vez?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">El
caos es inevitable en este punto. De hecho, la situación ya era caótica
durante meses. La “comunidad internacional”, incluida la OEA, EE.UU. y
América Latina, optó por ignorar el caos, pero eso no significa que no
fuera caótico. Es justo preguntar cómo Haití, sin una Legislatura, sin
un Poder Judicial creíble y sin siquiera un primer ministro legítimo, se
va a gobernar a sí mismo. Entonces, sí, el país está al borde del caos
nuevamente. Si la comunidad internacional opta por ignorarlo, este
Estado ya fallido se deslizará hacia una crisis de proporciones
históricas. Para un país que ha vivido en crisis durante décadas, eso
dice mucho.</span></span></p><figure class="artimg"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><picture><source media="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 399px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 400px) and (max-width: 767px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 999px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1000px) and (max-width: 1299px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1300px)" type="image/webp"></source><source type="image/jpg"></source><img height="211" src="https://www.latercera.com/resizer/sNN18vOri0YLqsmebNGj-RHTD7o=/800x0/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/copesa/UVBHIS7XBUVTTULUTCTPVXGADQ.jpg" type="image/jpg" width="320" /> <figcaption>Ciudadanos
haitianos se reúnen frente a la Embajada de EE.UU. en Puerto Príncipe,
pidiendo asilo luego del asesinato del Presidente Jovenel Moïse. Foto:
AFP</figcaption></picture></span></span></figure><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Haití ha
luchado contra la inestabilidad política desde el fin de las dictaduras
de François y Jean-Claude Duvalier. A su juicio, ¿por qué el país ha
sido incapaz de superar esta inestabilidad que ya parece endémica?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Buena
pregunta. La historia de Haití, desde el momento de la independencia
del país, ha sido de sufrir presiones externas e internas. La mayoría de
las voces internacionales decisivas -incluidas Francia y Estados
Unidos- pusieron sus intereses políticos venales, incluido el apoyo a la
esclavitud, y trataron de asfixiar al país. Haití, que anteriormente
era la potencia dominante en la isla de La Española, descendió en
espiral y ha sido el país más pobre del hemisferio occidental durante
muchos años. La inestabilidad del país no es, estrictamente hablando,
“culpa” de la comunidad internacional, pero está claro que no hemos
ayudado. A medida que las fuerzas internas aumentan para desafiar la
estabilidad e incluso los signos ocasionales de cultura democrática en
el país, no hemos podido encontrar la manera correcta de hacerlos
retroceder.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Haití, que estuvo sujeto a una
controvertida misión de estabilización de la ONU entre 2004 y 2017,
¿podría enfrentar otra intervención de este tipo si la situación de
seguridad empeora tras el asesinato de Moïse?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Las
misiones de la ONU pueden haber sido controvertidas, pero
proporcionaron cierta influencia estabilizadora durante muchos años,
especialmente desde la restauración del Presidente Aristide en 1994. Es
natural y probablemente correcto que recurramos a la ONU una vez más
para proporcionar algo de liderazgo y asistencia en Haití. Estados
Unidos bajo Donald Trump y, desafortunadamente, incluso bajo Joe Biden
no ha logrado proporcionar algo de liderazgo. En este vacío, solo la ONU
ha demostrado liderazgo, por lo que es natural volver a buscar ese
liderazgo.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>¿Cree que están dadas las
condiciones para realizar las elecciones presidenciales, legislativas y
el referéndum constitucional programados para el próximo 26 de
septiembre?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Yo tampoco creo en Santa
Claus, el Conejo de Pascua o el Hada de los Dientes. Haití no tiene las
condiciones necesarias para unas elecciones creíbles o un referéndum. Un
gobierno interino tendrá que crear esas condiciones, un proceso que no
será rápido.</span></span></p><div class="header | hl"><h2><div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Michael Deibert: “Hay una élite política corrupta y depredadora que se beneficia del caos”</span></span></div></h2></div><figure class="artimg"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><picture><source media="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 399px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 400px) and (max-width: 767px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 999px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1000px) and (max-width: 1299px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1300px)" type="image/webp"></source><source type="image/jpg"></source><img height="240" src="https://www.latercera.com/resizer/Z5_eOiN2o0-ODqniIWZxxTUFXHQ=/800x0/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/copesa/HUUF5HQT2FATLLGZLGLVOXPJHI.jpg" type="image/jpg" width="320" /> <figcaption>Michael Deibert, periodista estadounidense que entrevistó dos veces a Jovenel Moïse.</figcaption></picture></span></span></figure><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Periodista y escritor de EE.UU. ha informado sobre Haití durante casi 25 años. Autor de <i>Haití no perecerá: una historia reciente</i> (2017) y <i>Notas del último testamento: la lucha por Haití</i> (2005).</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>El
de Jovenel Moïse no es el primer magnicidio en Haití. En 1915, el
Presidente Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam fue asesinado por una turba
enfurecida. Pese a este antecedente, ¿le sorprendió la muerte de Moïse?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Moïse
era una persona complicada e imperfecta sentada sobre un sistema letal
mucho más grande que él y, en su deseo de cambiar Haití, se hizo enemigo
de muchas personas peligrosas. Pasé horas entrevistándolo y fue difícil
reconciliar al humilde hombre que hablaba con aparente sinceridad de su
deseo de construir carreteras y llevar electricidad a Haití con la
figura que tanto odio inspiraba entre algunos y la aparente amnesia
sobre una oposición que con frecuencia, casi exclusivamente, optaba por
la violencia en lugar de la negociación. En muchos sentidos, Moïse,
quien nació en un pequeño pueblo en el norte de Haití, era más típico
del haitiano promedio que la mayoría de los políticos profesionales que
desfilaban, como gallos en un patio, en la capital. Era un hombre terco
que, a pesar de las muchas fechorías de sus propios aliados y partido
político, parecía creer genuinamente que podía transformar el país.
Claramente, había fuerzas que no permitirían que esto sucediera.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>¿Quién podría estar detrás de este asesinato? ¿Quién se beneficia con la muerte de Moïse?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">A
pesar de sus propios defectos y sus tendencias autoritarias, Moïse
ciertamente se hizo enemigo de algunos de los oligarcas corruptos y de
las élites políticas que se han beneficiado durante tanto tiempo de la
disfuncionalidad de Haití. Sus intentos de modernizar la producción de
energía y la infraestructura del país, por ejemplo, amenazaron a mucha
gente poderosa, fuerzas que no tienen alergia a la sangre. Al mismo
tiempo, ha habido rumores de que han amenazado a las fuerzas dentro de
su propio partido, el Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale. El presidente interino,
Joseph Lambert, es un producto y un beneficiario del antiguo orden
político que Moïse afirmó que estaba amenazando.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>¿El país puede quedar al borde del caos una vez más?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hay
fuerzas en Haití más grandes que el presidente, una élite política
corrupta y depredadora, que se beneficia del caos y la disfuncionalidad y
hará cualquier cosa, incluido, ahora lo vemos, el asesinato de un
presidente, para asegurar que el sistema sanguinario continúe. Ahora
Moïse se ha ido. El sistema que finalmente lo mató, hecho de sangre y
huesos, continuará avanzando y los perpetradores de este crimen
continuarán sentados encima de él, al menos por el momento. Lo que Haití
necesita con urgencia, en mi opinión, es una entidad similar a la
Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), que
existió desde 2006 hasta 2019 y que investigó el crimen organizado y
grupos armados ilegales y sus vínculos con el Estado. Esta entidad, con
respaldo internacional, haría más que cualquier fuerza de mantenimiento
de paz para enfrentar el cáncer de la corrupción y la impunidad.</span></span></p><figure class="artimg"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><picture><source media="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 399px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 400px) and (max-width: 767px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 999px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1000px) and (max-width: 1299px)" type="image/webp"></source><source media="(min-width: 1300px)" type="image/webp"></source><source type="image/jpg"></source><img height="213" src="https://www.latercera.com/resizer/cNbt_ezTij7tkMcbMnE3ven_YUk=/800x0/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/copesa/G5UJXFHDH6ESS7OKLUH34WRM4U.jpg" type="image/jpg" width="320" /> <figcaption>Un
automóvil carbonizado cerca del cuartel de policía de Petionville,
donde los sospechosos del asesinato del Presidente Jovenel Moise se
encuentran detenidos, Foto: AFP</figcaption></picture></span></span></figure><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>¿Por qué el país ha sido incapaz de superar esta inestabilidad que ya parece endémica?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Durante
varias décadas en Haití hemos sido testigos de la forma de democracia,
el proceso de elecciones, mientras que el fondo de la democracia, un
gobierno representativo que responda a la voluntad del pueblo, está en
gran parte ausente. Entre los extranjeros a menudo hay un enfoque en los
grupos armados que ejercen control sobre vastas áreas del país,
especialmente Puerto Príncipe, pero lo que a menudo se descuida es que
la mayoría de estos grupos tiene patrocinadores en la élite política y
económica que los utiliza como una especie de milicia privada. Este
sistema comenzó bajo el gobierno de Jean-Bertrand Aristide a principios
de la década de 2000 y ha hecho metástasis hasta infectar, hoy, a todo
el cuerpo político. En conjunto con la impunidad y la corrupción, está
claro que los problemas en Haití son estructurales y sistémicos y no
pueden resolverse únicamente con elecciones. El cuerpo del paciente está
enfermo y un abordaje estructural, similar a la CICIG, creo que es uno
de los antídotos.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Haití, que estuvo sujeto a
una controvertida misión de estabilización de la ONU entre 2004 y 2017,
¿podría enfrentar otra intervención de este tipo si la situación de
seguridad empeora?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cualquier misión de
este tipo sería sólo una solución temporal, cosmética e ineficaz si no
se afrontan los problemas estructurales.</span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>¿Cree
que están dadas las condiciones para realizar las elecciones
presidenciales, legislativas y el referéndum constitucional programados
para el próximo 26 de septiembre?</b></span></span></p><p class="paragraph "><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Creo que
las elecciones que se celebren en las condiciones actuales -el
asesinato de un presidente, el gobierno de bandas armadas en gran parte
de la capital, la continua pauperización y marginación de la mayoría-
solo servirían para afianzar aún más a la rancia clase política que
trajo a este abismo al país, que sigue siendo, a pesar de su imagen, un
país verdaderamente grande, con mucha sabiduría para ofrecer al mundo.</span></span></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-75316684688586555672021-12-26T14:35:00.002+01:002021-12-26T14:35:29.878+01:00Michael Deibert interviewed in El Nuevo Día<p> I was interviewed in Puerto Rico's El Nuevo Día regarding the assassination of Haiti's President Jovenel Moïse. The article can be read <a href="https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/mundo/notas/jovenel-moise-el-asesinato-del-presidente-de-haiti-deja-un-tenso-vacio-de-poder-en-el-vecino-pais/">here</a>. <br /></p>Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-6497588705919198112021-12-26T14:24:00.006+01:002021-12-26T14:25:57.635+01:00A presidential assassination<span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><a href="https://www.economist.com/the-americas/"><span style="color: blue;">The
Americas</span></a></b><a href="https://www.economist.com/printedition/2021-07-10"><span style="color: blue;">Jul 10th 2021 edition</span></a>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>A presidential
assassination</b></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br />
The murder of Haiti’s president will worsen the country’s chaos</b></span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 2;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Jovenel Moïse was unloved. But his death
leaves the country with a power vacuum</b></span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
<hr align="center" size="2" width="100%" />
</span></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jul 7th 2021</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">(Read original article <a href="https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/07/07/the-murder-of-haitis-president-will-worsen-the-countrys-chaos">here</a>) <br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">OPPONENTS OF Jovenel Moïse,
Haiti’s president since 2017, have long wanted him to leave office. Now he
has—but not in the way they were expecting. A group of unknown attackers shot
and killed Mr Moïse in the bedroom of his private residence in a gated
community on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, the capital, in the early hours
of July 7th. They also injured his wife. Claude Joseph, whom the president
appointed as interim prime minister in April, announced the killing in a
statement and said he had taken charge of the Caribbean country. Haiti was
already in turmoil—much of it due to Mr Moïse’s rule. His murder has added fuel
to the flames.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">On
the morning after the murder Port-au-Prince’s streets were unusually quiet,
without the usual roar of motorcycles and bustle of market stalls, as Haitians
tried to guess what might happen next. The city’s airport was shut, as was the
land border with the Dominican Republic.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
assassination has shocked a country which, for all its history of misrule and
criminal violence, last witnessed the killing of a president in 1915. Rumours
swirl about who was behind it. By the evening of July 7th the police chief
announced that four suspects had been killed, and two more arrested. The
assassins were probably mercenaries. The question is: who hired them? “It was
obviously somebody with a lot of money and a lot of power,” says Monique
Clesca, a former UN official.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Many
pointed the finger at opposition politicians or Haitian elites. Other Haitians,
who given the country’s history are suspicious of foreign interference, suspect
the attack came from outside, possibly from Venezuela or the United States. Mr
Joseph said some of the attackers spoke Spanish (Haitians speak Creole and
French). Another video suggested they spoke English and claimed to be agents of
the US Drug Enforcement
Administration. This is certainly not the case, but the whispers add to the
volatile situation.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
was not the first attempt on Mr Moïse’s life—at least, according to him. In
February his government arrested at least 23 people, including a top judge and
a senior police officer, who were accused of plotting an assassination and
coup. Mr Moïse, a former plantation manager who referred to himself as “Banana
Man”, had no shortage of enemies. Critics accused him of involvement in the
pilfering of millions of dollars from PetroCaribe, an aid fund from Venezuela.
Opponents said his term ended in February, five years after his predecessor
left office. He claimed his term started when he took power, a year later—a
position backed by the United States, although Joe Biden’s administration urged
new elections this year. Protests regularly broke out against his rule.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">As
the political crisis deepened, Mr Moïse became more authoritarian. Since
January 2020, when he dismissed all but ten senators in the two-chamber
legislature, the president had been ruling by decree. He used his powers to
create an intelligence agency and broadened the definition of terrorism to
include acts of dissent. Protesters were attacked by gangsters. Mr Moïse denied
asking them to intimidate and kill his opponents.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Previous
Haitian presidents have fostered violence and corruption, too. But under Mr
Moïse the situation grew worse. Critics accused him of using gangs to a greater
extent to do his bidding, while having far less control over them, than
previous presidents. In recent weeks fighting in Port-au-Prince has
intensified; thousands of people had to flee their homes in June alone. By some
estimates, kidnappings in Haiti tripled last year compared with 2019.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Although
Mr Moïse has been the focus of much discontent, his death is unlikely to
simplify things. “He was a complicated and flawed person, but the people who
made him the single focus of all that is wrong in the system of Haiti miss the
larger failures of that system,” says Michael Deibert, an American expert on
Haiti.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">Mr
Joseph has little legitimacy. Mr Moïse had nominated Ariel Henry, a doctor, as
permanent prime minister; he was due to take office on the day of the
assassination. The constitution does not provide for the lack of both a
president and a National Assembly, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court,
who could arbitrate, died two weeks ago of covid-19. The killing could also
make it harder to hold elections for a new president and legislature, which are
due in September.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">In
many ways Haiti already looks like a failed state. Men with guns have long
terrorised its people. Only last month Jimmy Chérisier, alias Barbecue, a
former policeman and leader of an alliance of gangs, announced a “revolution”
against the status quo (though many think he meant the opposition). The police
are weaker than the gangs, who may now feel they have a free hand. Now that
lawlessness has reached the country’s highest office, many Haitians fear the
worst.■</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>A
version of this article was published online on July 7th 2021</i></span></span></p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the
headline "A presidential assassination"</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31283257.post-40873522108914101262021-07-16T19:58:00.002+02:002021-07-16T19:58:18.361+02:00Oración<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oración</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By Amaury Pacheco </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(Translated by Michael Deibert)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Here we are the pilgrims. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Myrrh, incense, gold from our poetic stay, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">diamond rain we bring. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">SAN LÁZARO, I pray to your heart for each Cuban, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">materialize your goodness on the island, bathe it with your
gifts, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">beyond these edges so that prosperity </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">lights a fire in homes, in mind, body and soul. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">SAN LÁZARO of the diasporas </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">poetic chimeric kabbalistic buddhist new age christian </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">progressive put in the 17 Cosmic friend of GOD </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Give us Cubans the certainty to make our way </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">between the deceptions dangers discrepancies </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">disappointments sadness miseries and misfortunes </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of a blurred destiny. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 163%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 163%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 14.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Convert the adventure of living </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 14.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">into the joy of being reborn at every moment. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 14.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Give us Cubans today the peace of change. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 14.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 14.0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Biographical
note:</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 14.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Amaury Pacheco (born 1969) is an Afro-Cuban poet and
activist and one of the founders of the Movimiento San Isidro, a group of
activist artists that has staged protests against the restrictive measures of
the Cuban government since 2018.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 14.0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Translator’s
note: </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 14.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">San
Lázaro (Saint Lazarus), the patron saint of healing and the sick, is
represented by the orisha Babalú-Ayé in the Santería religion. His shrine, the
site of an annual pilgrimage, is located in the Havana suburb of Rincón. </span></p>
Michael Deiberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04810256309168860637noreply@blogger.com0