PORT-AU-PRINCE, April 14 — The human tragedy of the global economic crisis continues to smash workers’ daily lives here, but PLP communists and the working masses are building strength by resisting the regime’s moves towards more fascist social control, with the open agreement of the U.S. Embassy. We need revolutionary imagination to arrive at the only worthwhile response: overthrow capitalism and take power for the workers.
Meanwhile, endemic joblessness is killing slowly while cholera kills quickly; homelessness, malnutrition, lack of clean water, health care, electricity, transport, education, and drought continue to worsen.
Fascism intensifies inside the gangster government, installing ex-military figures like Himler Rébu in ministerial posts. There are increasing crackdowns on the media and the right to demonstrate in the streets and outlawing any sort of legal opposition. This includes several assassinations of Pres. Martelly opponents: the murder of two prominent human rights workers, and the killing of Fitzgerald, a leader of the reform party Lavalas.
Police gunfire wounded three students inside the Faculty of Ethnology (a long-time center of student resistance), during mass protests against the arrest of the opposition lawyer André Michel. The government has threatened media like Radio Kiskeya and Radio Zénith if they criticize those in power.
Elsewhere, gangs violently harass street merchants and market women (those getting by without wages for work). Landlords’ vigilantes attack peasants in many areas. And the youth are the favorite targets of the gangster rulers.
Parliamentary ‘National Dialogue’ Supplements Fascist Crackdown
Martelly is trying to co-opt any opposition in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies with a “National Dialogue” of all political parties. One result is the newly voted anti-terrorism law, which defines any protester in the streets as a terrorist, justifying mass arrests and heavy sentences in case of a mass uprising. This law shows how capitalist-elected parliaments participate fully in developing fascism (like the U.S. Congress and Homeland Security).
Lavalas, the semi-banned party of the celebrity populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was about to join this Dialogue but pulled out before signing. Jean-Charles Moïse, an Aristide rival inside Lavalas and leader of its fake left wing, was expelled from Lavalas for disobeying the party directive not to demonstrate outside the U.S. Embassy. Thus Lavalas too participates in the advance of fascism.
‘Enrichissez-Vous!’
Drugs, Arms Good for Business
Governing is good business for those who accumulate wealth directly from their government posts. Politicians seize land for urban renewal or reconstruction while themselves being part-owners of the finance or construction companies who get the government contracts. One farcical example: the electricity promised for workers’ districts yielded only a few solar-powered street-lights, illuminating the rutted streets while the houses themselves remained in darkness. The Prime Minister holds shares in the electric company selling such “services” to the state.
In the South, several land parcels which are used as small airports by drug-traffickers as transshipment points between South America and the U.S., have been seized by the State, only so the politicians themselves can benefit more directly from the drug trade. And the Prime Minister has been implicated in the illegal arms traffic entering Haiti from Israeli manufacturers, often destined for use by politicians at election time to intimidate their rivals’ voters.
The Communist Imagination
The step-up of fascist violence makes fightback more difficult. Public demonstrations have slowed since the big December garment-workers’ protests for unionization — tough when rebel workers are so easy to fire.
PLP is always among the masses at these events, determinedly fighting for our communist outlook. Whether youth study groups, literacy classes using communist ideas as texts, a community organizing group, private meetings with workers and professionals (mostly unemployed or unpaid for work performed), or just sitting under a tree in the public park, comrades in Haiti are pursuing our vision. We will overturn this profit-driven heartless world.
International Dimension
With sharpening imperialist conflicts among Russian, U.S. and Chinese bosses, communists are examining Haiti’s position relative to these great powers. Extreme joblessness turns Haiti into a “reserve army of the unemployed,” available to supply low-wage workers, and thus lower all workers’ wages throughout the region. Thousands of Haiti’s workers get easy entry into Brazil, for example, for poorly paid construction work, and the bosses of both countries profit.
Brazil, the region’s rising “sub-imperialist” with an ambivalent relation to the U.S., is the largest supplier of troops for the UN’s military here, where they perfect their dirty techniques of repression for use at home (e.g., in “cleaning up” working-class slums for the World Cup and Olympic games).
Another “sub-imperialist” is Venezuela, which gives cheap oil to Haiti. Henrique Capriles, the Venezuelan millionaire prominent in the opposition to the Chavista regime, is also donating “gifts” such as soccer stadiums to Haiti.
Given Haiti’s relationships to inter-imperialist rivalry, if war erupts, misery and fascism in Haiti will only intensify, especially if the U.S. needs Haiti in an inter-imperialist war, as they did against Germany in World War I when the Marines invaded Haiti and occupied it until 1934. Would Haiti be caught between the U.S. on the one hand and Brazil and Venezuela on the other?
But we are clear here that workers must not take a side in this fight between exploiters, but unite for revolution under the red flag of the international PLP.