By: Kim Ives

About a week ago, an IPS story reported that Amnesty International called for the release of Ronald Dauphin and described his continued detention as “politically motivated”.

In response, Elizabeth Roebling accused IPS of becoming an “outlet for spin” and directed members of the corbett list to a bitter response on Michael Deibert’s blog. Deibert is the author of “Notes from the Last Testament,” an account of President Aristide’s second term, which was cut short by the February 29, 2004 coup.

Normally, I wouldn’t bother responding to a mere political difference. But Deibert makes several personal attacks on the IPS piece’s authors Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague that warrant correction.

Deibert’s allegations are irrelevant to the accuracy of the IPS article. Readers can check the facts reported (most importantly, Amnesty’s appeal on Dauphin’s behalf ). Good journalism, like good scholarship, relies to the greatest extent possible on sources that readers can check.

Deibert wrote that Sprague “…works as a teaching assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sociology Department, focusing on crime and delinquency, subjects with which his past behavior [sic] no doubt gives him a close familiarity.”

This is a baseless ad hominem attack. Sprague’s PhD studies are not focused on crime and delinquency, and, if they were, would not justify Deibert’s nasty insinuation.[1] Furthermore, teaching assistant duties are not the same thing as a graduate student’s area of study, and, much less, evidence of a criminal background.

Deibert also claims that Sprague sent him an email containing “intimations of violence against my person”. I asked Sprague to forward me the email from 2005. In it, Sprague merely questions the accuracy of Deibert’s writings. Observing that thousands of people were being killed in post-coup Haiti, Sprague attached what he called a “photo of the suffering,” which showed victims of one UN-PNH raid [2]. To say that the e-mail “intimated” a threat against Deibert is absurd.

Deibert then accuses Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre of having a “stark conflict of interest” and that “when writing about the IJDH [The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti], Wadner Pierre is quoting his former employer without acknowledging it.”

Pierre has never worked for IJDH. Pierre has provided IJDH and many other organizations in Haiti and around the world with photos taken during his time living in and visiting some of the poorest and most victimized Haitian communities. He has often done so for free or for sums barely adequate to live on in Haiti. Providing freelance photographic evidence of human rights abuses to organizations does not make him an employee or former employee.

Moreover, the ideal of an “objective” reporter or source for news does not and cannot exist. Journalism is not science. It is permeated with value judgments.

Pierre and Sprague have both been open about their sympathy for the poor’s mobilization for democracy in Haiti. The IPS article cites a number of sources, such as AUMOHD, IJDH and also well-known Lavalas opponents such as RNDDH and Haiti’s Ambassador to the US, Raymond Joseph. Moreover, the article was not “about” IJDH. It highlighted Amnesty International’s appeal on behalf of Dauphin and reported facts that are mentioned in that appeal. In contrast, Deibert’s recent IPS article on the case does not cite a single source critical of his viewpoint. [3]

Revealingly, Deibert makes no mention of Amnesty’s appeal for Ronald Dauphin, one of the most balanced accounts of the alleged “massacre” in St. Marc. Does Deibert wish to bury the Amnesty report under his spurious allegations against Pierre and Sprague? Does he wish that IPS had buried it as well?

To close, I direct readers to a few critiques of Deibert’s bias in recent years.

a) Justin Podur. 2006. “Kofi Annan’s Haiti”. New Left Review.

b) ___________. 2006. “A Dishonest Case for a Coup”. Znet.

c) Patrick Elie. 2006. “A Few Notes about ‘Notes from the Last Testament’”.

d) Mark Weisbrot. 2006. “Response to Michael Deibert”. The Nation.

e) Diana Barahona. 2007. “U.S. Reporting on the Coup in Haiti: How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal”. Counterpunch.

f) Tom Luce. 2007. “The Proxy War in Martisant and Gran Ravine”. HaitiAnalysis.

g) Peter Hallward. 2008. “Response to Michael Deibert’s Review of Damming the Flood”. Monthly Review.

Readers can weigh the bias of all sources and draw their conclusions about the facts.

Notes:

[1] Jeb Sprague University Website.

[2] The photo that Sprague attached to the e-mail had been taken by grassroots photojournalist Jean Ristil who lives in Cite Soleil and has himself been harassed and jailed illegally in the past (for taking photographs) by Haiti’s UN-trained police. See Eric Feise, Jeb Sprague. 2006. “Persecuted Haitian Photojournalist Speaks Out: Jean Ristil & Cite Solely”.

[3] Michael Deibert. 2009. “Haiti: ‘We have Never had Justice’”. IPS.

For further reading:

Hallward, Peter. 2008. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. Verso.

Macdonld, Isabel. 2007. “The Freedom of the Press Barons”. The Dominion. http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/976

Sprague, Jeb. 2006. “Invisible Violence: Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti”. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

Griffin, Thomas M. 2004. “Haiti: Human Rights Investigation: November 11-21, 2004″ University of Miami School of Law.

By: Kevin Pina – Haiti Liberte

Without question, the Lavalas political movement opposed the neo-liberal economic model of development that is unfolding in Haiti today. Lavalas militants and spokespersons called International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank dictated structural adjustment the “death plan.” It included eliminating tariffs, selling off State-owned enterprises, keeping the minimum wage low, and relying on the private sector as the motor for economic development.

The major obstacle to the plan of the international financial institutions (IFIs) for Haiti was democracy itself. It took the form of the Lavalas movement, representing the poor majority’s interests, and the president they twice elected, Jean Bertrand Aristide. His government refused to privatize key industries like TELECO, the state telephone company, and EDH, the electricity company. While the IFIs insisted that social programs be cut, Aristide’s government took profits from these State-owned companies to invest in a universal literacy program and to provide millions of subsidized meals for the poor. For the first time in history, Haiti had the beginnings of a safety net in place to insure against widespread hunger and malnutrition. Over the objections of the IFIs and Haiti’s predatory economic elite, the minimum wage for the lowest paid work force in the hemisphere was doubled twice during Aristide’s first and second terms. Not so coincidentally, both of Aristide’s terms were cut short by coups.

This challenge to the IFI program was a major factor in the Feb. 2004 coup that not only ousted the democratically elected president but also drove out more than 7,400 elected officials from municipal and parliamentary posts throughout Haiti. It was an attempt to destroy the movement of Haiti’s poor majority and their right through elections to establish their own priorities for economic development based on the pillars of national sovereignty and social justice. The Bush administration and the Republican Party backed Haiti’s elite in overthrowing the constitutional government and orchestrating the “transition.”

Far from the “popular rebellion” concocted by the corporate media’s well-paid reporters, Haitian democracy’s overthrow in 2004 was a violent affair perpetrated by former military and death-squad commanders on a killing spree. The wealthy elite’s paid minions took to the streets to give the illusion of a “popular rebellion” but they could not take down the government, so the vile dogs of war were unleashed after being nurtured in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Not unlike recent events in Honduras, this coordinated campaign resulted in a president being taken from his home against his will under the cloak of darkness and forced onto a plane as the killing began in earnest to insure the success of the plotters.

The two years following the 2004 coup in Haiti would make the intentions of the Organization of American States, the United Nations and the so-called “international community” clear as glass. They all gave their blessings to the US-installed regime that took power even as it unleashed an unprecedented campaign of summary executions, the gunning down unarmed protesters, and arbitrary arrests. All of this was done in the name of “restoring democracy.” It was a period of gross human rights violations committed under UN aegis that remains successfully cloaked and obscured to this day.

Faced with thousands killed, jailed and forced into exile, the Lavalas movement elected René Préval their new president in 2006. People hoped he would stop the repression, free the political prisoners, and allow Aristide to return to Haiti. What they could not know was that he had already signed onto the cynical project to destroy the poor’s popular movement as preparation for bringing Haiti back into the camp of neo-liberal economic development and the “death plan” they had fought so hard against.

Despite more than $4 billion of international assistance since the 2004 coup, life has only become worse for most Haitians as the predatory elite squeezes as much profit as they can out of a desperate population. With little business investment to speak of, this elite has used their monopoly on the importation of food staples to steal away the more than $1.5 billion in remittances sent annually by thousands of families and friends to their loved ones in Haiti in an effort to keep them alive. These monopolists kept filling their pockets even as protests broke out against the growing misery and hunger in April 2008.

Throughout, the Lavalas movement and the poor kept demonstrating against the coup, demanding justice and that Aristide be allowed to return to Haiti. Their leaders were disappeared as in the case of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine on August 12, 2007, forced to rot away in prison like the still-imprisoned Ronald Dauphin, or eventually succumbed to the ravages of harsh treatment as happened to Father Gérard Jean-Juste on May 27, 2009. Still others were courted by Préval and offered well-paid positions of authority within his government if they would turn their backs on their own history and the Lavalas movement.

Then came the much-delayed senatorial elections in April and June 2009, where the final blow was to be delivered to Lavalas. The Fanmi Lavalas party was excluded from participating on a cooked-up technicality. But the Lavalas waged a massively successful boycott of both rounds of the elections, a clear and collective rebuff of Préval and the international community.

Kill, imprison, exile, divide, exclude, and buy-off as many as you can: this became the strategy to destroy Lavalas and pave the way for Haiti’s re-emergence as a neo-liberal success story in the Caribbean. Still, Haiti’s poor majority are a resilient and hopeful force. They hoped that the election of Barack Obama, the first US president with African blood coursing through his veins, would change the trajectory of US-foreign policy in Haiti since 2004. It did not. They hoped that Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State would make a difference until she visited the sweatshop of coup-backer Andy Apaid to tout the neo-liberal model in June. They hoped that Bill Clinton’s appointment as UN Special Envoy to Haiti would signal a change, but he ignored their pleas at every turn during his two brief visits over the last two months. Instead he spoke of coordinating NGO aid in preparation for instituting the new “death plan” as postulated by UN economic advisor Paul Collier, which is really the same old neo-liberal “death plan” first rolled out under Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative in the 1980s.

The IFIs announced in late June that they had forgiven $1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt, most of which was racked up by former US-sponsored dictatorships.

Finally, last week, the Haitian parliament voted in closed session to double the minimum wage to a whopping $3.75 a day or about $0.46 per hour for an 8-hour day. Haiti still has the cheapest labor in the hemisphere off which US manufacturers and their Haitian elite partners can still turn a handsome profit.

This past weekend in Miami Beach we saw Haiti’s former mistress of the NGO sector and current Prime Minister, Michele Duvivier Pierre-Louis, take the stage with Bill Clinton to formally announce that the new-old “death plan” has given birth to renewed hope in Haiti. The corpses have been buried and the blood has been washed away so now Haiti can turn the page on the Lavalas movement and those upstarts in the poor majority who had the audacity to think that elections meant they could choose an alternative. Still, this struggle for Haiti’s future is not over, not by a long shot.

It’s only fitting to give Aristide, who remains in exile in South Africa, a few words here. “Pep pa achte libete ak demokrasi nan mache,” he once said. “The people do not buy liberty and democracy at the market.” Some feel that anything is possible with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress. They succeeded on a platform of “Change we can believe in.” The lesson for the world’s poor remains the same: when it comes to the Democratic Party, don’t confuse hope with change, especially if $3.75 is all you’re going to be paid for an 8-hour day.

by Kevin Pina

Without question, the Lavalas political movement opposed the neo-liberal economic model of development that is unfolding in Haiti today. Lavalas militants and spokespersons called International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank dictated structural adjustment the “death plan.” It included eliminating tariffs, selling off State-owned enterprises, keeping the minimum wage low, and relying on the private sector as the motor for economic development.

The major obstacle to the plan of the international financial institutions (IFIs) for Haiti was democracy itself. It took the form of the Lavalas movement, representing the poor majority’s interests, and the president they twice elected, Jean Bertrand Aristide. His government refused to privatize key industries like TELECO, the state telephone company, and EDH, the electricity company. While the IFIs insisted that social programs be cut, Aristide’s government took profits from these State-owned companies to invest in a universal literacy program and to provide millions of subsidized meals for the poor. For the first time in history, Haiti had the beginnings of a safety net in place to insure against widespread hunger and malnutrition. Over the objections of the IFIs and Haiti’s predatory economic elite, the minimum wage for the lowest paid work force in the hemisphere was doubled twice during Aristide’s first and second terms. Not so coincidentally, both of Aristide’s terms were cut short by coups.

This challenge to the IFI program was a major factor in the Feb. 2004 coup that not only ousted the democratically elected president but also drove out more than 7,400 elected officials from municipal and parliamentary posts throughout Haiti. It was an attempt to destroy the movement of Haiti’s poor majority and their right through elections to establish their own priorities for economic development based on the pillars of national sovereignty and social justice. The Bush administration and the Republican Party backed Haiti’s elite in overthrowing the constitutional government and orchestrating the “transition.”

Far from the “popular rebellion” concocted by the corporate media’s well-paid reporters, Haitian democracy’s overthrow in 2004 was a violent affair perpetrated by former military and death-squad commanders on a killing spree. The wealthy elite’s paid minions took to the streets to give the illusion of a “popular rebellion” but they could not take down the government, so the vile dogs of war were unleashed after being nurtured in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Not unlike recent events in Honduras, this coordinated campaign resulted in a president being taken from his home against his will under the cloak of darkness and forced onto a plane as the killing began in earnest to insure the success of the plotters.

The two years following the 2004 coup in Haiti would make the intentions of the Organization of American States, the United Nations and the so-called “international community” clear as glass. They all gave their blessings to the US-installed regime that took power even as it unleashed an unprecedented campaign of summary executions, the gunning down unarmed protesters, and arbitrary arrests. All of this was done in the name of “restoring democracy.” It was a period of gross human rights violations committed under UN aegis that remains successfully cloaked and obscured to this day.

Faced with thousands killed, jailed and forced into exile, the Lavalas movement elected René Préval their new president in 2006. People hoped he would stop the repression, free the political prisoners, and allow Aristide to return to Haiti. What they could not know was that he had already signed onto the cynical project to destroy the poor’s popular movement as preparation for bringing Haiti back into the camp of neo-liberal economic development and the “death plan” they had fought so hard against.

Despite more than $4 billion of international assistance since the 2004 coup, life has only become worse for most Haitians as the predatory elite squeezes as much profit as they can out of a desperate population. With little business investment to speak of, this elite has used their monopoly on the importation of food staples to steal away the more than $1.5 billion in remittances sent annually by thousands of families and friends to their loved ones in Haiti in an effort to keep them alive. These monopolists kept filling their pockets even as protests broke out against the growing misery and hunger in April 2008.

Throughout, the Lavalas movement and the poor kept demonstrating against the coup, demanding justice and that Aristide be allowed to return to Haiti. Their leaders were disappeared as in the case of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine on August 12, 2007, forced to rot away in prison like the still-imprisoned Ronald Dauphin, or eventually succumbed to the ravages of harsh treatment as happened to Father Gérard Jean-Juste on May 27, 2009. Still others were courted by Préval and offered well-paid positions of authority within his government if they would turn their backs on their own history and the Lavalas movement.

Then came the much-delayed senatorial elections in April and June 2009, where the final blow was to be delivered to Lavalas. The Fanmi Lavalas party was excluded from participating on a cooked-up technicality. But the Lavalas waged a massively successful boycott of both rounds of the elections, a clear and collective rebuff of Préval and the international community.

Kill, imprison, exile, divide, exclude, and buy-off as many as you can: this became the strategy to destroy Lavalas and pave the way for Haiti’s re-emergence as a neo-liberal success story in the Caribbean. Still, Haiti’s poor majority are a resilient and hopeful force. They hoped that the election of Barack Obama, the first US president with African blood coursing through his veins, would change the trajectory of US-foreign policy in Haiti since 2004. It did not. They hoped that Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State would make a difference until she visited the sweatshop of coup-backer Andy Apaid to tout the neo-liberal model in June. They hoped that Bill Clinton’s appointment as UN Special Envoy to Haiti would signal a change, but he ignored their pleas at every turn during his two brief visits over the last two months. Instead he spoke of coordinating NGO aid in preparation for instituting the new “death plan” as postulated by UN economic advisor Paul Collier, which is really the same old neo-liberal “death plan” first rolled out under Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative in the 1980s.

The IFIs announced in late June that they had forgiven $1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt, most of which was racked up by former US-sponsored dictatorships.

Finally, last week, the Haitian parliament voted in closed session to double the minimum wage to a whopping $3.75 a day or about $0.46 per hour for an 8-hour day. Haiti still has the cheapest labor in the hemisphere off which US manufacturers and their Haitian elite partners can still turn a handsome profit.

This past weekend in Miami Beach we saw Haiti’s former mistress of the NGO sector and current Prime Minister, Michele Duvivier Pierre-Louis, take the stage with Bill Clinton to formally announce that the new-old “death plan” has given birth to renewed hope in Haiti. The corpses have been buried and the blood has been washed away so now Haiti can turn the page on the Lavalas movement and those upstarts in the poor majority who had the audacity to think that elections meant they could choose an alternative. Still, this struggle for Haiti’s future is not over, not by a long shot.

It’s only fitting to give Aristide, who remains in exile in South Africa, a few words here. “Pep pa achte libete ak demokrasi nan mache,” he once said. “The people do not buy liberty and democracy at the market.” Some feel that anything is possible with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress. They succeeded on a platform of “Change we can believe in.” The lesson for the world’s poor remains the same: when it comes to the Democratic Party, don’t confuse hope with change, especially if $3.75 is all you’re going to be paid for an 8-hour day.

By JONATHAN M. KATZ
Associated Press Writer

LIMONADE, Haiti – When Alix Charles slipped out of his tin-roofed shack at night, he didn’t say where he was going, only that he would be back soon.

The 23-year-old father of two infant daughters left on a treacherous ocean voyage that turned deadly for at least 15 migrants and perhaps dozens more. His family still didn’t know Saturday, six days after the accident, whether he survived – or how they would get by if he didn’t.

“I’m not angry, he went to search for a life,” his 20-year-old wife, Dieula, said as she breast-fed one daughter beside a row of cactuses in this northern Haitian town, an hour’s walk from the sea, and waited for news. “The problem is I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, and there is no one to help me take care of the kids.”

There have been enough catastrophes for Haitian migrants that everyone is aware of the danger. Yet the perilous voyages are a familiar passage for Haitians, forced by their country’s almost medieval economy to spend more than a year’s cost of food and housing and risk their lives for a chance to work abroad.

Thousands flee this country of more than 9 million each year to reach “lot bo dlo” – Creole for the other side of the water. Many travel the same way as the migrants who were killed when their overloaded sailboat struck a coral reef at night off the island of West Caicos, launching some 200 people into the sea. Some managed to swim to land, while others clung to the jagged reef for 17 hours without food or water. Nearly 70 are still missing.

Original Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/haiti/story/1167426.html

By: Wadner Pierre – HaitiAnalysis.com

Gonaives is a port city with an estimated population of 200,000. It is the sixth largest city in Haiti and is located approximately 110 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. In 2003, it was one of first places to come under the control of armed rebels who helped oust Haiti’s democratic government on February 29, 2004. The coup was actually completed by foreign powers – primarily France, Canada and the US. Months after the coup, in September of 2004, Gonaives was hit by Hurricane Jeanne. Three thousand lives were lost. In 2008, with the damage done by Jeanne still unrepaired, fierce storms (Hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hanna) battered Gonaives yet again. At least 500 were killed, over a hundred thousand made homeless. An astounding 800,000 were victimized by the storms if crop destruction and drinking water contamination are considered.

On my way to Gonaives

It was just after mid day on June 19th, two days prior to another round of senatorial elections boycotted by most Haitians, when my bus left Port-au-Prince with 70 other passengers. Before 2004, it would have taken about 2 hours to reach the city. Now it takes almost 5 hours. The so-called good part of the road is from Port-au-Prince to Montrouis in the northern part of the capital, also the last part of West department. Travelers are usually talkative in Haiti. They often discuss religion or political, economic and social issues. On this trip, they would talk mainly about the destruction visible everywhere in Gonaives. They complained about the state of the road and blamed political leaders in the Artibonite department and at the national level for the lack of reconstruction.

Mrs. Guerda, a nurse who teaches at a private vocational school, chatted with Frantz (who also works in the health care field) about the diseases and psychological trauma she witnessed among victims of the storms. Frantz asked Guerda for advice on how to help a friend’s son who is plagued with psychological problems following the storm. Unfortunately, Guerda could only tell him that such problems are extremely common among victims.

Guerda tells me that many from Gonaives have moved to nearby cities such as Saint Marc, Cap-Haitian, and very often Port-au-Prince. She explains the General Hospital in Gonaives, La Providence, no longer exists. Its operations have been transferred north to a warehouse once used by the humanitarian group CARE. It was renamed “Hopital de Secours” (Help Hospital). She assured me that I would not recognize the city. The water and filth are everywhere she says, and it creates a fertile environment for mosquitoes, which spread disease. Her children have abandoned the city but, despite her pessimism, she cannot leave the city where she made her life and established her career.

Yves, who earns a living by using his motorcycle as a taxi, said that there is no hope for Gonaives. He will not leave and is resigned to living there in poverty. He will not vote in the upcoming elections because he feels that they are irrelevant to his life.

Gonaives

Unfortunately, Gonaives turned out to be just as Guerda described.

Upon entering the city I was overwhelmed by images of filth and destruction, of people wading through or leaping around puddles of water. For some reason, an image that lingers in my mind is one I witnessed in front of the police station. A man on a motorcycle struggled to drag a few sheep through the mud. The most galling images were of UN vehicles that quite uselessly patrolled the wreckage of Gonaives.

The city is below sea level. The area surrounding it is so deforested that the city has no natural protection from heavy rains.

Most people I talked to believe that reconstruction funds have simply been pocketed by corrupt officials. It is easy to see why given the meagre evidence of reconstruction. The Preval government recently established a state company (the CNE) to supplement the rebuilding efforts of the Ministry of Public Works and Transport and Communication (MTPTC). The CNE, run by a close friend of Preval’s, Jude Celestin, has made no obvious impact in the months that it has been operating – much like the countless foreign NGOs who have hovered around Gonaives for years.

In 2005, the Latortue dictatorship, flush with foreign funds that poured in after it seized power, initiated construction of a bridge a few kilometers south of the city that was to suppose to facilitate transportation. Latortue boasted that it would be the largest bridge in the Caribbean. It was never finished or used. The storms of 2008 destroyed it.

Most of the farmers near Gonaives have lost all hope. Their sons and daughter have often fled to the Bahamas to find work. They will be exploited, of course, since they will be illegal immigrants, but the lucky ones will at least survive the journey.

One farmer I talked to had sent his son, Santo, to Nassau. They spent $2000 to get him there – the family’s life savings. They had spoken to Santo by phone recently. He confirmed that life is certainly tough for illegal immigrants, but at least he is there.

Rodrigue

On the bus trip back to Port-au-Prince I chatted with a gentle 23 year old man named Rodrigue. He fled Gonaives in 2008 and now works in an iron shop in Port-au-Prince. His father still lives in Gonaives and is very ill. Rodrigue had only returned to Gonaives to check on him for three days. Rodrigue’s job allows him to pay his high school tuition and take care of his father. He still has not finished high school and will have to quit this year to replenish his funds. “Next year, God willing, I will be able to enroll in night school.”

DUBLIN –(Business Wire)– Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/79c421/latin_american_tel) has announced the addition of the “Latin American Telecommunications Infrastructure – 8th Edition” report to their offering.

This report covers telecommunications infrastructure developments in Latin America and the Caribbean. The countries covered in this report include: Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the small Caribbean island nations.

In the Latin American and the Caribbean region, telecom infrastructure varies from nonexistent to rudimentary, and from adequate to well advanced. Despite a low 18% teledensity (in most OECD countries teledensity ranges between 40% and 65%), fixed-line growth in most countries has stagnated since 2001, with consumers favouring mobile phones over fixed-lines. The highest teledensity rates in Latin America can be found in Costa Rica (32.5%) and Uruguay (28.7%), where interestingly the incumbent operator is state-owned, while the lowest rates are found in Haiti (1.4%) and Nicaragua (4.6%). Venezuela recorded the fastest growing fixed-line market in 2008, following the renationalisation of its incumbentCANTV ( News – Alert). VoIP has become popular throughout the region, although the situation in each country is different. Some governments only allow licensed fixed-line voice operators to provide VoIP. Others require operators to be registered or to hold a specific concession. And others regard VoIP as a VAS that doesn’t require regulating and is covered by a regime of free competition. The only countries where VoIP is still a monopoly are Paraguay and Cuba. Besides making voice communications accessible to poorer people, VoIP has been instrumental for the success of telecentres and cybercafés, which have in turn been a key element for Internet growth in Latin America.

Read More

By: Berthony Dupont – Haiti Liberte

Subversion and destructive violence are rampant in Iran, aimed at destroying the peace and independence of the Iranian revolution. This trouble is fomented by Western imperialism which wants to cast doubt on Iran’s recent election results. U.S. President Barack Obama has found nothing better to say to the Iranian government than “the world is watching.” Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, in contrast, said: “We ask the world to respect Iran because some are trying to undermine the stronghold of the Iranian revolution.”

This is not the first time that the so-called “international community” has used electoral violence to destabilize a country. We will never forget the attacks on the elections of May 21, 2000 and November 26, 2000 in Haiti, where opposition parties including the OPL, the MPSN, MOCHRENA, RDNP, PADEM, and the MDN formed the Democratic Convergence and on February 6, 2001 proclaimed Gérard Gourgue provisional president, while the next day, February 7, Jean Bertrand Aristide was to be sworn in as the President constitutionally elected by the people. We know all the fuss the “international community” made to sabotage our nation, which it still militarily occupies.

Today in Iran, Western imperialism calls to “verify the expressed will of the people.” What a great idea! Since when has the “international community” paid attention to the people’s will and respected their choice? Look what had happened in Mexico during the 2006 presidential elections with the two leading candidates Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. More than two million people protested for more than three months in the streets of Mexico against Calderón’s electoral coup. At the time, the West did not feel compelled to “verify the expressed will of the people” of Mexico.

On April 19 and June 21, 2009, the Haitian people clearly and peacefully expressed their will by massively boycotting Préval’s rigged elections. Worse yet, the masses were excluded from the outset. What was the international community’s reaction? It was pleased with the vote and welcomed the fact that these elections were conducted peacefully in all of Haiti’s geographic departments.

There are events which by themselves forever mark an era, either because of their importance or because of the profound changes they herald. The Iranian crisis should be for us in the Haitian popular and progressive sector an indicator, a guide, for the transformation of our overall strategy, because class struggle is the only dynamic, rational and historically correct approach to defeat the maneuvers of the imperialist powers.

Thus during the student demonstrations to force the bourgeoisie and Préval to publish the minimum wage law, the UN occupation force’s soldiers fired at the students, killing one. At the funeral of the progressive Lavalas priest, Father Gérard Jean-Juste, MINUSTAH soldiers repeated the crime by killing a young man from Solino. What is the message, the link between these two crimes? What is the lesson we should draw? It is that one cannot separate the struggle of the students from the struggle of the masses. They are one. The struggle for change and national liberation is the struggle of all progressive forces of the people.

The aim and tactic of the imperialists is to neutralize, to paralyze us, to break the resistance of the dominated classes. In this sense, to avoid the mistakes of 2004, where Apaid, Baker and the other agents, instruments, allies, partners or agents of imperialism infiltrated the students, it is now essential and even vital, in this phase, to strengthen our solidarity and our class cohesion to combat the common enemy.

From all appearances, the situation is moving towards a confrontation which which will effect all the people. A crisis is deepening in the State University; many Lavalas supporters still languish in Préval’s jail; modern-day slave drivers, led by Préval, want to maintain slave wages; in the February 2004 coup d’état, then-President Jean Bertrand Aristide was arrested by Western imperialists just as their colonialist ancestors kidnapped Taino Indian leader Caonabo and anti-slavery revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture. In order to save this country, a unity of the forces for change is needed among Haiti’s progressive and democratic forces against the common enemy of the masses.

By the force of events, we are all called on to take responsibility. We remain confident that the vigilance of revolutionary and progressive forces will defeat the dark machinations and shenanigans of the people’s main enemy.

A handful of fruit companies dominate the global banana trade. Combined with supermarkets on the consumer side, both end up squeezing workers who are often exploited or work under terrible conditions. Fair trade offers promise of some relief, but an entire region such as the Caribbean has had an almost unhealthy reliance and dependency on banana exports. This update provides some additional background information and links.

http://www.globalissues.org/