Category: In the News

In the News: Miami billboard promotes Haiti as vacation spot

Originally posted at sacbee.com

MIAMI — There’s a new Caribbean destination being promoted to travelers passing through Miami.

A billboard promoting Haiti was installed last week above Interstate 95 in Miami. The message “Live the experience – Seize the opportunities” is printed across an image of a tropical coastline and clear blue waters.

Haiti’s ministry of tourism and its consulate in Miami put up the billboard in the hopes of attracting tourists and investors to the country. Political instability, chronic poverty and disasters such as the 2010 earthquake have long crippled tourism and development in Haiti.

Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, which boasts many popular resorts.

Consul General Francois Guillaume says the billboard is the first in a series of media campaigns to boost Haiti’s image.

In the News: Haiti death toll jumps to 19 after tropical storm

Originally posted in The Huffington Post

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A government official says that Haiti’s death toll from Tropical Storm Isaac has jumped to 19.

Marie Alta Jean-Baptiste of the country’s Civil Protection Office gave few details on how each person died in the storm that drenched Haiti over the weekend.

That puts the total regional death toll from Tropical Storm Isaac at 21. Two people died in the neighboring Dominican Republic after they were swept away in a river.

Some of the Haitians died because their homes fell on top of them.

Haiti is prone to flooding and mudslides because much of the country is heavily deforested and rainwater rushes down barren mountainsides.

Jean-Baptiste gave the new figures in an interview on a private radio station.

In the News: Haiti’s Gold Rush

by Jacob Kushner, published in Guernica Daily

Deep in Haiti’s northern mountains, a half-dozen supervisors at a mining exploration site spent their days playing dominoes at a folding table next to a helicopter pad. For weeks they waited in La Miel, off a dirt road deep in the countryside, for Haiti’s government to give them the go-ahead to search for the gold they believe is buried in the hills around them. Fig Newtons and water bottles filled the shelves of their staff tent. On a whiteboard, in scratchy handwriting, was a single-item to-do list for the week: Change $83,000 into Haitian gourdes.

Images from Flickr via waterdotorg
A mile west, a team of locals with shovels widened a dirt road and lined it with a drainage ditch. They were paid by Newmont, the Colorado mining company working at La Miel, to prepare local roads for heavy mining machinery, which moved here when Newmont got permission to dig.

Continue reading In the News: Haiti’s Gold Rush

In the News: The UN’s Cholera Epidemic in Haiti

by Mark Weisbrot
Originally published in CounterPunch

Haitians have had a long and arduous struggle just to achieve the rights that most people in the rest of the hemisphere have enjoyed. From the revolution of Haitian slaves that won independence from the French in 1804, through the U.S. occupation (1915-1934), the Duvalier family dictatorship (1957-1986), and the last 20 years of devastating foreign intervention, the “international community” just hasn’t seen Haitians as having the same basic human rights as people in other countries.

They still don’t, perhaps because Haitians are too poor and black. While the horrific earthquake of January 2010 brought international sympathy and aid – much more pledged than delivered – it didn’t bring a change of attitude toward Haiti.

Continue reading In the News: The UN’s Cholera Epidemic in Haiti

In the News: Police kill unarmed peasants in another controversial eviction

by Kim Ives, Haiti Liberté

Haitian police have killed four people and destroyed seven homes in an attempt to clear peasants from a remote mountain-top park where they have lived and farmed for the past 70 years. The bloody confrontation, which occurred (July 23, 2012) exactly 25 years to the day after an infamous 1987 peasant massacre near the northwestern town of Jean-Rabel, has incensed the Southeast Department’s population and redoubled charges that the President Michel Martelly’s government is resurrecting the repressive tactics of the Duvalierist and neo-Duvalierist dictatorships which ruled and scarred Haiti over two decades ago.

The incident was first reported and photographed by Claudy Bélizaire of the Jacmel-based Reference Institute for Journalism and Communication (RIJN). His photographs of bloody corpses and burned houses in Galette Seche/Seguin, a remote locality near the peaks of some of Haiti’s highest mountains, have gone viral on the Internet, Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has largely ignored the story to date.

Continue reading In the News: Police kill unarmed peasants in another controversial eviction

In the News: Brazil delegation meets with Defense Minister, demands withdrawal of UN Troops from Haiti

by Kim Ives, published in Haiti Liberte (print weekly), July 25, 2012

On July 10, a delegation of parliamentarians, unionists and Haiti solidarity activists met with Brazil’s Defense Minister Celso Amorim at the Defense Ministry in Brasilia and grilled him about the continuing UN military occupation of Haiti.

Brazilian generals head the military component of the 9,000-member force known as the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH) and Brazilian troops predominate.

Markus Sokol, a member of the national directorate of Brazil’s ruling Workers Party (PT), told Amorim that over 600 people, with representatives from seven countries, had gathered in São Paulo last November for a congress which launched a “Continental Day of Action” against the UN occupation of Haiti on June 1, 2012, the date of the eighth anniversary of MINUSTAH. There were anti-occupation actions in ten countries (including 20 Brazilian cities) on that date.

“What are we doing in Haiti?” Sokol asked Amorim. “Former [Defense] minister [Nelson Jobim] said that we were training to scale the hills of Rio; that can’t be!

Continue reading In the News: Brazil delegation meets with Defense Minister, demands withdrawal of UN Troops from Haiti