#jeanbertrandaristide — Public Fediverse posts

Nicaragua and the USA

,> The highest per capita debt in the region is Nicaragua’s, currently $6.4 billion and clearly unpayable. The human costs of the IMF programs designed to ensure that lenders are compensated many times over are incalculable. About $1.5 billion is from the Somoza years, hence clearly “odious debt,” of no standing. Another $3 billion is from the post-1990 period when the US regained control over Nicaragua; also odious debt. The remainder is the direct responsibility of the United States, which was conducting brutal economic warfare and a murderous terrorist war against Nicaragua, for which it was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the US to pay reparations, variously estimated in the range of $17 billion. Accordingly, the highly conservative principle of adhering to international law, as determined by the highest international judicial body, would suffice to eliminate Nicaragua’s debt, with a good deal left over. Were elementary moral principles even to be imaginable in elite Western culture, similar conclusions would at once be drawn far more broadly throughout Europe and the US, even without World Court judgments. But that day remains very distant.  [Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.]
  
   - Noam Chomsky in Rogue States Jubilee 2000

Haiti and France (and the USA...)

.> ... The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French owners not only of land and equipment but of their human ‘property’.
.> The impact of the debt repayments – which continued until after World War Two – was devastating. In the words of the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, ‘the incompetence and frivolity of its leaders’ had ‘turned a country whose revenues and outflows had been balanced up to then into a nation burdened with debt and trapped in financial obligations that could never be satisfied.’ ‘Imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had already paid with their blood,’ the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher argued.
...
.> Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.
.> Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’... [ Paul Farmer in "Who removed Aristide? Paul Farmer reports from Haiti" ]

Eyes of the Heart (2000)

In 1982 international agencies assured Haiti's peasants their pigs were sick and had to be killed (so that the illness would not spread to countries to the North). Promises were made that better pigs would replace the sick pigs. With an efficiency not since seen among development projects, all of the Creole pigs were killed over period of a thirteen months.
Two years later the new, better pigs came from lowa. They were so much better that they required clean drinking water (unavailable to 80% of the Haitian population), imported feed (costing $90 a year when the per capita income was about $130), and special roofed pigpens. Haitian peasants quickly dubbed them "prince a quatre pieds," (four-footed princes). Adding insult to injury, the meat did not taste as good. Needless to say, the repopulation program was a complete failure. One observer of the process estimated that in monetary terms Haitian peasants lost $600 million dollars. There was a 30% drop in enrollment in rural schools, there was a dramatic decline in the protein consumption in rural Haiti, a devastating decapitalization of the peasant economy and an incalculable negative impact on Haiti's soil and agricultural productivity. The Haitian peasantry has not recovered to this day.
Most of rural Haiti is still isolated from global markets, so for many peasants the extermination of the Creole pigs was their first experience of globalization. The experience looms large in the collective memory. Today, when the peasants are told that "economic reform" and privatization will benefit them they are understandably wary. The state-owned enterprises are sick, we are told, and they must be privatized. The peasants shake their heads and remember the Creole pigs.
The 1997 sale of the state-owned flour mill confirmed their skepticism. The mill sold for a mere $9 million, while estimates place potential yearly profits at $20-30 million a year. The mill was bought by a group of investors linked to one of Haiti's largest banks. One outcome seems certain; this sale will further concentrate wealth-in a country where 1% of the population already holds 45% of the wealth of the country.

I see [for the children of Haiti a future] country with 85% literacy, rather than 85% illiteracy. Cooperatives flourish in villages and in the informal sectors of the cities. Water is flowing through the fields of the countryside-where food enough for all of Haiti's people is growing. Creole pigs are seen more and more in the countryside, the descendants of those few that the peasants hid away and saved from extermination. Seedlings are beginning to take root on the mountainsides. The seedlings have a chance at survival because the people are no longer in misery, but are already on the road to poverty with dignity. There are primary schools and health clinics in every municipality of Haiti. The schoolbooks are not just half-price-they are free, in accordance with Article 32.1 of our constitution which promises a free education to every Haitian child.

🇭🇹 Ce jour-là, le 16 décembre 1990, il y a 33 ans, Jean-Bertrand Aristide a été élu président de la République d'Haïti, à l'issue de la première élection démocratique en Haïti depuis la fin de la dynastie des Duvalier. #Haïti #Ayiti #JeanBertrandAristide
https://www.haitianaute.com/2022/09/aristide.html

🇭🇹🧿 Ce jour-là, le 4 avril 2003, le président Jean-Bertrand Aristide a signé un arrêté reconnaissant le vodou comme religion à part entière en Haïti. #Vodou #Vodoun #Haïti #JeanBertrandAristide
https://www.haitianaute.com/2021/11/arrete-presidentiel-du-4-avril-2003-de.html

🇭🇹🧿 Ce jour-là, le 4 avril 2003, le président Jean-Bertrand Aristide a signé un arrêté reconnaissant le vodou comme religion à part entière en Haïti. #Vodou #Vodoun #Haïti #JeanBertrandAristide
https://www.haitianaute.com/2021/11/arrete-presidentiel-du-4-avril-2003-de.html

🇭🇹🧿 Ce jour-là, le 4 avril 2003, le président Jean-Bertrand Aristide a signé un arrêté reconnaissant le vodou comme religion à part entière en Haïti. #Vodou #Vodoun #Haïti #JeanBertrandAristide
https://www.haitianaute.com/2021/11/arrete-presidentiel-du-4-avril-2003-de.html

🇭🇹🧿 Ce jour-là, le 4 avril 2003, le président Jean-Bertrand Aristide a signé un arrêté reconnaissant le vodou comme religion à part entière en Haïti. #Vodou #Vodoun #Haïti #JeanBertrandAristide
https://www.haitianaute.com/2021/11/arrete-presidentiel-du-4-avril-2003-de.html

🇭🇹🧿 Ce jour-là, le 4 avril 2003, le président Jean-Bertrand Aristide a signé un arrêté reconnaissant le vodou comme religion à part entière en Haïti. #Vodou #Vodoun #Haïti #JeanBertrandAristide
https://www.haitianaute.com/2021/11/arrete-presidentiel-du-4-avril-2003-de.html