WikiLeaks points to US meddling in Haiti

US embassy cables reveal how anxious the US was to enlist Brazil to keep the deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti

guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 January 2011 18.24 GMT


General Bacellar, Brazil and Haiti, Minustah commander Minustah's commander, Brazilian Army General Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2005. In January 2006, Bacellar was found shot dead on his balcony, after what his government described first as a 'firearm accident' and then as 'suicide'. Bacellar had earlier resisted calls to use his UN peacekeeping force to crack down on pro-Aristide rebels. Photograph: AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos

Confidential US diplomatic cables from 2005 and 2006 released this week by WikiLeaks reveal Washington's well-known obsession to keep exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti and Haitian affairs. (On Thursday, Aristide issued a public letter in which he reiterated "my readiness to leave today, tomorrow, at any time" from South Africa for Haiti, because the Haitian people "have never stopped calling for my return" and "for medical reasons", concerning his eyes.)

In a 8 June 2005 meeting of US Ambassador to Brazil John Danilovich, joined by his political counsellor (usually, the local CIA station chief), with then President Lula da Silva's international affairs adviser Marco Aurelio Garcia, we learn that:

"Ambassador and PolCouns ... stressed continued US G[overnment] insistence that all efforts must be made to keep Aristide from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process … [and that Washington was] increasingly concerned about a major deterioration in security, especially in Port au Prince."

The ambassador and his adviser were also anxious about "reestablishing [the] credibility" of the UN Mission to Stabilise Haiti (Minustah), as the UN occupation troops are called. The Americans reminded Garcia that then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called "for firm Minustah action and the possibility that the US may be asked to send troops at some point".

Careful reading between the lines of the cable shows that Garcia was a bit taken aback by the Americans' "insistence"; he reassured the duo "that security is a critical component, but must move in tandem with", among other things, "an inclusive political process". Garcia also noted that "some elements of Lavalas [Aristide's political party] are willing to become involved in a constructive dialogue and should be encouraged", although there was "continued Brazilian resolve to keep Aristide from returning to the country or exerting political influence".

Aristide "does not fit in with a democratic political future" in Haiti, Garcia is quoted as saying. However, he was "cautious on the issue of introduction of US forces" into Haiti, and "would not be drawn into discussion".

The American duo then met on 10 June with Brazilian Under-Secretary for Political Affairs Antonio de Aguiar Patriota. They told him, and he acknowledged, that "Minustah has not been sufficiently robust." All this dismay was over the leadership of Brazilian General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro, then Minustah's military commander. Heleno had repeatedly voiced trepidation about causing unnecessary casualties and, more importantly, being hauled before an international court for war crimes. (At the time, there was an independent International Tribunal on Haiti preparing to hold hearings on the crimes committed by UN troops, Haitian police and paramilitaries during the 2004 coup and the runup to it.)

Less than a month after these meetings, on 5 July 2005, a browbeaten Heleno would lead Minustah's first deadly assault on the armed groups resisting the coup and occupation in Cité Soleil. Attacking in the middle of the night with helicopters, tanks and ground troops, the Brazilian-led operation fired tens of thousands of bullets and dropped bombs, killing and wounding many dozens of innocent civilians, including children and infants.

Later that month, Heleno was cycled out of Minustah and replaced by 57-year-old General Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar. Like Heleno, Bacellar was reluctant to use force in Haiti's shanty towns. But pressure from Washington for "robust" action continued, and in late December 2005, "Bacellar had tense meetings with UN and coup regime officials and the rightwing business elite," reported the Haiti Action Committee at the time:

"They reportedly put 'intense pressure' on the general, 'demanding that he intervene brutally in Cité Soleil,' according to AHP. This coincided with a pressure campaign by Chamber of Commerce head Reginald Boulos and sweatshop kingpin Andy Apaid, leader of Group 184 [the civic front that took part in the 2004 coup against Aristide]. Last week, Boulos and Apaid made strident calls in the media for a new UN crackdown on Cité Soleil."

On 6 January 2006, Minustah's then civilian chief, Chilean Juan Gabriel Valdès, said that UN troops would "occupy" Cité Soleil, which UN troops already surrounded.

"We are going to intervene in the coming days," Valdès said. "I think there'll be collateral damage but we have to impose our force, there is no other way."

But some UN officials said that Bacellar "had opposed Valdès' plan", according to Reuters. "The general had insisted that his job was to defend the Haitian constitution, but not to fight crime," the Independent of 9 January reported.

Then, on 7 January 2006, General Bacellar was found dead in his suite at Pétionville's deluxe Montana Hotel, a bullet through his head. He had been sitting in a chair on his balcony, apparently reading. Initially, Brazilian army officials called the shooting a "firearm accident". After a few days, they changed the official verdict to "suicide".

Four days later, US State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Patrick Duddy met with Dominican President Leonel Fernandez, who "inquired about the circumstances surrounding the death" of Bacellar, another WikiLeaks-released cable reveals. Duddy said that it looked like suicide, but "Fernandez expressed skepticism. He had met General Bacellar; to him, suicide seemed unlikely for a professional of Bacellar´s caliber."

Fernandez suspected Bacellar had been assassinated by "a small group in Haiti dedicated to … creating chaos; [and] that this group had killed Minustah members in the past (a Canadian and a Jordanian, and now the Brazilian General) … The President said he knew of a case in which a Brazilian Minustah member had killed a sniper."

When Duddy asked who might be in this group, the only name Fernandez suggested was that of former soldier and police chief Guy Philippe, the Haitian anti-Aristide "rebel" leader in 2004. A former Dominican general, Nobles Espejo, told a March 2004 fact-finding delegation (on which I travelled) that Philippe's contras had been armed by the US. Philippe had staged guerrilla raids and then invaded Haiti from the Dominican Republic under Fernandez's predecessor, Hipòlito Mejia.

While Fernandez wouldn't rule out "an accidentally self-inflicted wound", the cable explains:

"He believes that the Brazilian government is calling the death a suicide in order to protect the mission from domestic criticism. A confirmed assassination would result in calls from the Brazilian populace for withdrawal from Haiti. Success in this mission is vital for President Lula of Brazil, because it is part of his master plan to obtain a permanent seat on the UN security council."

Fernandez's suspicions – if that's all they were – seem well-founded. It seems unlikely that a decorated army veteran, parachutist and instructor would be careless enough with a pistol to accidentally shoot himself in the head. Furthermore, Bacellar was a very religious man, with a wife and two children in Brazil. He had just returned to Haiti four days earlier from a Christmas visit home. Even if suicide cannot be ruled out, one would have expected such a man to leave behind a message of some sort.

Yet, according to the sources of Brazilian journalist Ana Maria Brambilla, Bacellar "did not display any signs of depression during his last days". He was accustomed, after "39 years of service, to pressure far worse than he had seen in his four months in Haiti," his military colleagues told the Independent.

According to the South African newspaper Beeld, "the latest reports in the Dominican media questioned the feasibility of suicide, as no bullet casing was found near the body … He would have been an easy target for a sniper." Most incongruously, Bacellar's T-shirt and boxer-clad body was reportedly found with a book on his lap, according to the Dominican daily El Nacional, as he had apparently been reading and relaxing in his underwear on his balcony when the urge to shoot himself came on.

Is it possible some interested party may have wanted to kill Bacellar for his reluctance to crack down on the rebellious shanty town of Cité Soleil? We can only hope that further documents from the WikiLeaks cache will discover the truth.

We don't need wikileaks to know that the US meddles in Haiti or any country around the world for that matter. It is obvious and pretty much a given.

How did you like Mr. Fernandez' input?

? Foreign Policy, Human Rights, International, Must Reads
"When White People Are Here, We Can Get Milk"

— By Mac McClelland
| Fri Jan. 14, 2011 4:00 AM PST
US Navy

Editor's note: Mac and MoJo photo editor Mark Murrmann are in Haiti all week. Read her previous posts here, and read her features on AWOL aid and the rapists terrorizing the tent camps. And check out more of Mark's photos here.

Laporte Peterson would love some aid. He's hungry and homeless, living in the Place de la Paix displacement camp in Port-au-Prince. But since he doesn't have any aid, for now he has porn.

Inside Peterson's tent, the 20-year-old shows me a narrow room with a few propped-up wood planks for benches, all oriented toward the platform at the front that holds the TV. Patrons pay 10 gourdes, or about 25 cents, to watch sex flicks under the USAID tarp on weekend nights. During the week and on days when school's out, they pay half as much for Haitian movies, or non-Haitian movies, like Schwarzenegger vehicles, or films about ninjas. Peterson's been in the theater business for eight months. His establishment gets pretty full, but it's small, and it's cheap, so he only makes about $2 a day.

Peterson's is one of three theaters in the camp. "It's nice that the cinemas create a distraction," says camp vice president Exalus Fritznel. "People have nothing to do. There's no jobs." Many of the 22,000 residents of this lawless and squalid soccer field borrow money to buy water or food or shampoo and try to resell it at a profit. "If residents don't make some [job] to do, their kids will be hungry, or die," Fritznel explains. Sometimes NGOs provide "cash-for-work" jobs, "but it only employs a few people, and for a few days."

There are currently 10,000 aid organizations in Haiti. Yet there is little coordination between them, they are not present in all the camps, and they do not deliver anything close to comprehensive food aid. In general, their goal is to only fill the displaced's most basic needs, like temporary housing, hygiene, and toilets. "We want to provide minimum services in camps," explains an International Organization for Migration spokesman, "and at the same time make sure services are provided in communities." The Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund raised $53 million in the aftermath of last year's earthquake and has already committed $20 million. But all of its recent grant recipients work outside the camps.

While waiting for former president Bill Clinton to arrive and dedicate Port-au-Prince's reconstructed Iron Market, I spoke with Mark Summer, the cofounder of the San Francisco-based non-profit Inveneo, which has gotten Clinton-Bush money to help bring Internet to rural areas. Summer told me how thrilled the Haitians he helps are for the opportunity to communicate better or start online businesses. Though Inveneo usually works on a three-year timeline, it's fast-tracking its Haiti project, trying to get in and out in one year. Part of the reason is that Summer is aware of complaints about aid to Haiti.

And there are plenty of complaints. Critics posit that development aid creates crippling emotional and financial dependency among recipients; Slate ran a four-article series on this idea last week. Some of the complaints come from Haitians. Two days ago, while earthquake-anniversary commemorations were taking place all over the country, some groups protested against aid groups' "occupation" of the country. Entire grassroots organizations are dedicated to opposing the United Nations, which presides over the massive NGO force as well as an army of 10,000 soldiers stationed for "stabilization." In his official statement on the anniversary, President Obama said that Haiti "can and must lead the way, with a strong vision for its future. The international community must now fulfill the pledges it has made to ensure a strong and sustained long-term effort." But the international community isn't dropping off billions of dollars of aid and abdicating any say in how it's spent. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission is led by Clinton, whom Haitians widely and sometimes bitterly refer to as the president of the country. (When I asked someone outside the still-ruined National Palace when it was supposed to be rebuilt, he snapped, "Why don't you ask Bill Clinton?"

It's certainly true that Haiti's long history of foreign aid has not dragged it out of extreme poverty. But it's also true that many Haitians feel that their lives are improved by what help they get. And for now, the NGOs are the only game in town. Regularly mistaken for aid workers, both Mother Jones photo editor Mark Murrmann and I have been approached and asked if we can give people jobs. A displaced man hanging around the demolished National Cathedral approached me and said, "I'm happy you're here. When white people are here, we can get milk," and he pointed at the starvation-swelled naked toddler holding his hand.

"We have no government!" one of my Haitian friends often exclaims. He works for aid workers, but hopes that someday he will work for a functioning Haitian government. He hopes that maybe after the elections in February, the country will move closer to having one. Maybe, as the aid critics suggest, the government would just pull itself together if the international community pulled out. If it weren't so dependent on Western NGOs, perhaps it would have, say, quickly mobilized to figure out how to deal effectively with the cholera epidemic. "Or," my friend says, "you know. Maybe it wouldn't have."
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Mac McClelland is Mother Jones' human rights reporter, writer of The Rights Stuff, and the author of For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story From Burma's Never-Ending War. Read more of her stories and follow her on Twitter. Get Mac McClelland's RSS feed.

When White People Are Here, We Can Get Milk

I am surprised that milk has not already become the great white hope for Haiti.

El presidente de Haití admite que la ayuda está mal utilizada



Michel Martelly busca nuevos inversionistas en Europa

THOMAS SPARROW | Madrid 08/07/2011
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El presidente de Haití, Michel Martelly, reconoció que buena parte del dinero destinado a la reconstrucción del país tras el seísmo de enero de 2010, que dejó más de 200.000 muertos, se ha utilizado mal. Durante su primera visita oficial a España, el mandatario de 50 años explicó a la cadena SER (del grupo Prisa, editor de EL PAÍS) que "se han inyectado 4.000 millones de dólares y hoy tengo problemas para identificar algo que se haya hecho con ese dinero".



Martelly añadió que "los haitianos no quieren ayuda, sino que los inversionistas faciliten el propio desarrollo del país". Con eso en mente, el presidente enfatizó que una de sus prioridades es estrechar los lazos con empresas europeas.

El viernes, a la salida de una reunión privada que sostuvo en Madrid con el secretario general iberoamericano, Enrique Iglesias, Martelly expresó que está dispuesto a hablar de los problemas de su país, pero que quiere enfatizar las riquezas.

"Sí, hay departamentos donde no tenemos electricidad, pero en vez de quejarnos, ¿por qué no viajamos a España, hablamos con inversionistas y buscamos oportunidades?", se preguntó Martelly, quien ganó las elecciones en abril pasado. "Eso representaría un negocio para ellos y electricidad y desarrollo para nosotros". En la misma línea, explicó que en su país hay playas que ahora son "espacios vacíos que vemos como miseria". "¿Por qué no las transformamos en zonas de desarrollo turístico?"

Tras despedirse del mandatario, Enrique Iglesias explicó que ve con buenos ojos que Martelly haya venido acompañado de representantes del sector privado. "Él tiene muchas expectativas en cuanto a la cooperación de España al desarrollo, pero también en la cooperación de la empresa española", acotó.

Ayuda de España

El mandatario haitiano indicó que su visita tiene como objetivo "agradecerles a los españoles". "Desde el terremoto hemos sentido la presencia de España, que no lo hace por su propio interés sino por el de los haitianos".

El presidente del Gobierno español, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, reiteró tras hablar con Martelly en el Palacio de La Moncloa que su administración sigue comprometida "en primera línea" a ayudar a ese país, que ha sido "muy castigado por la naturaleza".

Zapatero recordó que España es el tercer país que más dinero ha donado para la reconstrucción de la nación caribeña y anunció que creará un fondo de 50 millones de euros con el objetivo de entregar créditos a pequeñas y medianas empresas.

The 'US' evil empire is everywhere - that's why the DR needs a decent army, air force and navy.

Hopefully the metro will help. Who cares about milk.


S.

ABC offers, meekly

The 'US' evil empire is everwhere - that's why the DR needs a decent army, air force and navy.

Hopefully the metro will help.

the meds, ABC, the meds.

If you take enough you won't notice when the bombs go off.


S.