Haiti ― one more ongoing tragedy imposed on Latin America, as on many other parts of the world, by the manipulations and might of the United States, in this instance aided and abetted by France, a former colonial ruler that, after Spain, had earlier pillaged that once-idyllic half of Hispaniola.

      Yes, another imposed, brutal tragedy, but also a chance for the peoples of the Americas to join with the eight and a half million Haitians in rejecting and defeating the American Empire’s attempt to crush Haitian self-government.

The banner reads, “Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca
“Ricardo Flores Magón”
Many hands and a single heart for struggling”
At a protest facing the government palace in Oaxaca Nov 18, 2003

      The U.S.-based group MADRE, an on-the-ground humanitarian aid organization focussed particularly on the suffering of women and children, helped found and works with a women’s clinic in Haiti. Its recent paper, “Abducting Democracy - A MADRE statement on Haiti’s 33rd coup d’état”, begins:

      “On February 29, 2004, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown for the second time in 13 years. The opposition gangs that placed millions of Haitians under siege are armed with sophisticated weapons, including US-made M-16s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. This was no popular insurgency from Haiti’s grassroots, but a military operation funded and orchestrated by the US. The nucleus of the armed opposition is the FRAPH paramilitary that overthrew Aristide in 1991. When the US restored Aristide to power in 1994, the Marines were ordered not to disarm the FRAPH. Instead, the death squads were treated as a legitimate opposition and left in the wings to serve as a contingency plan to Aristide. With the implementation of that plan, the Bush Administration offers yet another display of its contempt for democracy, sending a clear signal from Haiti about how it will treat any defenseless country that it cannot fully control.” (Go to http://www.madre.org/country_haiti_abductingdemocracy.html for the complete MADRE statement)

      On March 15, just15 days after the U.S. virtually kidnapped the president and flew him to the Central African Republic, he was “rescued” and flown back to the Caribbean, to the nearby island of Jamaica.

      That rescue, carried out despite the strenuous objections of the United States government, and after an uncertain standoff in the Central African Republic, succeeded because the whole world knew of the kidnapping and the U.S. could not hope to credibly deny its action if it continued to have Aristide held against his will after it forcibly removed him from Haiti to Africa. American pseudo-statesmen (and Condoleezza Rice) were caught with their pants (and panties) down in their own lies and could only complain loudly that by returning to the Caribbean Aristide would inflame the situation.

      As “outsiders”, and except for the eight and a half million Haitians we are all “outsiders”, it is not for us to say whether a particular person should or should not be president. That must be decided by Haitians, and Haitians alone, without the meddling of imperial power. Haiti must belong to the Haitians. Now for a final victory: How to get from here to there

      Haiti offers an almost unique opportunity for the peoples of Latin America to act together in rebuffing U.S. imposition of a puppet regime. It is tiny and materially impoverished, but with a deservedly proud tradition as the first slave colony in the Americas to free itself from European colonialism, which it did 200 years ago when it defeated Napoleon's imperial troops. How can we act to get the American boot off the Haitian neck?

      As I wrote in 2001, at that time with particular attention to Mexico, “In order to stop, to put an end to the United States robbing Mexico (and the other Latin American countries), it's necessary to have a form of mutual aid among all the societies of Latin America (societies with a total population of 517.3 millions). That way they would be able to gain independence from the tyranny of global capitalism and from the avarice of the United States and of the other rich countries. The combined natural resources of the Latinamerican countries are immense: resources of energy, agriculture and livestock, water, forests, resources of biodiversity, minerals, industries, cultural resources and above all human resources: there is the spirit, ability, energy and generosity of the people. The myth that development of the so-called "Third World" depends on the "aid" of the "First World" is false. It is totally false.” (For my full statement go to http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/Discus/2001-01-19Fox2.htm)

      The “secret” is its tiny size. At just slightly over one third the population of Venezuela, numerically Haitians are only about 1.6 % of all Latin Americans. The amount of support, of mutual aid from the rest of Latin America that would enable the Haitian people to free themselves from the U.S.-allied paramilitary thugs is miniscule in comparison with the combined wealth of américa latina. A popular grassroots initiative focussed on Haiti could achieve a real victory. Of course material assistance from those Latin American governments that are not totally cowed by the U.S. can be enormously helpful. The presence of Cuban doctors is invaluable. The announced support from the Venezuelan government ― allocation of 1 million U.S. dollars ― is important, as will be whatever other mutual aid is forthcoming from other nations.

      But above all in importance is support from the grassroots ― from ordinary everyday people outside of governments, both within and outside of Latin America. There is, I’m sure, a multiplicity of grassroots groups that have working ties with popular Haitian grassroots groups. To mention only a few (U.S.-based) groups, the following come to mind: Partners in Health, MADRE, TecsChange, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Grassroots International, and the Haiti Reborn Project of the Quixote Center. And Latin America is awash with grassroots groups struggling for the defense of human rights. Their interest in preventing violations of human rights is immediate, and can easily embrace opposition to U.S.-encouraged and supported violations in Haiti. There is a vast reservoir of Latin Americans with a direct interest in stopping the U.S. drive for domination, and the impoverishment and suffering it imposes on them.

      The building of grassroots infrastructure throughout the hemisphere and its practice of mutual aid is key to our liberation and fulfillment as human beings. Ultimately, to be successful it will have to embrace hundreds of millions of people, but to end domination of Haiti by the U.S. surrogates now staging another rampage of terror, a far smaller grassroots infrastructure can be successful.

      Hope does not die. It must be killed! Oppressive governments know that. As long as ordinary people can continue to live our everyday lives, caring for our children, doing the tasks needed for survival, we hope for the future, for better lives for our children and our grandchildren. And as long as that hope is not obliterated, we struggle against oppression, to make our lives better. We maintain as best we can the infrastructure that permits us to live and to hope. And oppressive governments everywhere seek to destroy the parts of the infrastructure that they don’t control, in order to destroy our hope. Among the crimes that governments and their armed forces and hired thugs (paramilitaries) commit are: demolition of clinics, attacks on and forced closing of schools, assassination of human rights workers, burning and stealing crops, cutting off water supplies, massacring buffalos, bulldozing olive groves, blocking or destroying roads, destroying homes, arresting, terrorizing, torturing, and humiliating people. Examples abound: the Chiapas State and Mexican Federal governments in Zapatista communities in Chiapas; the U.S. government on various Indian reservations and in Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Haiti and elsewhere; the Oaxaca State and Mexican Federal governments in the northern and southern Sierras of Oaxaca; the Israeli government in Palestine; the Chinese government in Tibet; the Russian government in Chechnya, and so on.

      We ought to recognize the critically important role of international grassroots support in sustaining the struggles of the Zapatista communities in Chiapas and of the Palestinians’ communities throughout the Israeli-controlled and assaulted areas of Palestine. In both cases powerful nation-states are trying to destroy people’s infrastructure, right now more openly and brazenly in Palestine, but also in Chiapas, where it’s not really hidden from those who would know, despite all the lies and denials.

      Of primary importance in both these struggles for human dignity has been the worldwide grassroots communications infrastructure. During episodes of “major” bloody violence the corporate media is right there publicizing all the gore and horror it can record to boost its sales or ratings (and advertising revenues), and that generates some public awareness of the conflict, but always with distortions that serve to whitewash the U.S. or U.S.-allied government. But as soon as the level of violence is not “worthy” of corporate media headlines, the struggles would largely drop from popular consciousness if not for the grassroots communications infrastructure. This was true for the Zapatista uprising, which lost any “front page” coverage as soon as the Mexican government stopped its widespread aerial bombing and ground attacks on rebellious indigenous villages in Chiapas and turned to so-called “low-intensity” warfare. It has been true as well for the Palestinians’ struggle, with coverage intense when it benefitted the Israeli government and slight during “quiet” periods when only Palestinian Arabs were the steady but largely underreported victims of Israel.

      Misrepresenting reality and telling outright lies for the benefit of the dominant groups of the society (which of course own practically all commercial media) is precisely what the corporate media inevitably does, by natural choice and by directives of their employers, who are hired by the owners. This should not be a surprise. Only when they are forced by outside circumstances to act otherwise and tell a fragment of the truth harmful to the ruling class, or a part of it, will they do so. We need the global grassroots communication infrastructure to help garner the same kind of awareness and support for Haitians it has helped gain for the struggles of the Zapatistas and the Palestinians.

      And we should be clear. Mutual aid is an act of solidarity, not of charity. And it is political in the deepest sense. In joining actively in a struggle for liberation, whether it be of the Eritrean peoples, of the Haitians, the Zapatistas, the East Timorese, the American Indians, the Palestinians, the Basques, the Kurds, the Iraqis, and on and on, wherever a group of whatever ethnicity or cultural identity is seeking to gain its right to determine its own life autonomously, whether it is a national group struggling against an outside nation-state or a group within a nation-state seeking autonomy within that nation, when we join such a struggle we are struggling for our own liberation from the ruthless rule of the powerful. The worst, most destructive fundamentalism of all is the fundamentalism of capitalism, enforced as it now is primarily by the most destructive nation-state that has ever existed, the United States of America. Ultimately we must become a United Peoples to replace the impotent United Nations, increasingly a supine servant of the most powerful nation-states.

      That is the title of a magnificent essay by Edward Said in his defense of the dignity and basic humanity of all peoples, though written explicitly with the Palestinian Arabs in mind. Referring to one of the many pathetic cowards who strut around in the fine clothing of well-healed politicians, he writes, “[Israeli] [t]anks in Jenin (where the demolition of the refugee camp by Israeli armor, a major war crime, was never investigated because cowardly international bureaucrats such as Kofi Annan back down when Israel threatens) fire upon and kill children, ...” His essay is both a cry of anguish at the horror being inflicted on his fellow Palestinians and also, remarkably, a statement with hope ― in spite of everything ― hope based on the Palestinians grassroots infrastructure and the international mutual aid to sustain it from the Palestinian Diaspora.

      He writes, “Nonetheless ... It may seem quixotic for me to say, even if the immediate prospects are grim from a Palestinian perspective, they are not all dark. The Palestinians stubbornly survive, and Palestinian society-devastated, nearly ruined, desolate in so many ways-is, like Hardy’s thrush in its blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul upon the growing gloom. No other Arab society is as rambunctious and healthily unruly, and none is fuller of civic and social initiatives and functioning institutions (including a miraculously vital musical conservatory). Even though they are mostly unorganized and in some cases lead miserable lives of exile and statelessness, Diaspora Palestinians are still energetically engaged by the problems of their collective destiny, and everyone that I know is always trying somehow to advance the cause.” Said’s marvelous essay is in The Politics of Anti-Semitism”, a small volume well worth reading.

      The task of making this a decent world for our children and grandchildren is one for all of us, and is coincident with our standing together with all peoples struggling to achieve human dignity. Haiti offers the peoples of Latin America, and indeed all of us, a fine opportunity to get on with the task in an arena where we, together with the Haitian people, have a fair chance of winning.