How to help Haitians

Partners in Health has been working in Haiti in an exemplary way for years. The literal collapse of many medical facilities in Port au Prince and other areas hardest hit by the quake has made their network of clinics and local health workers an even more important part of the country's sparse medical infrastructure. Please support them today.

Some people consider it unseemly to speak about the political context in which a massive, tragic catastrophe is happening. If you're one of those people, please stop reading this post now.

On February 29, 2004, the U.S. government helped depose the elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Marines forced him onto a plane in the middle of the night and flew him to the Central African Republic. With U.S. and U.N. military and economic support, Haiti's new rulers launched a campaign of assassination, detentions, and intimidation against leaders and activists of Aristide's Lavalas party. The U.N. "peacekeepers" have participated in this campaign, firing on demonstrators, ignoring crimes committed against Lavalas activists by the police (who are being trained by the U.N. troops), and massacring civilians while carrying out sweeps in Lavalas neighborhoods against "criminal gangs".

Lavalas candidates have been prevented from running in subsequent elections. Their exclusion from this past spring's Senate election resulted in a massive boycott; even the government claimed only 11% participation. Now they have been barred again from the general elections scheduled for February 28, the eve of the coup's sixth anniversary.

Through all this, most of the U.S. political class has painted the overthrow and forced exile of Aristide and the reimposition of government for the rich as a good thing, a "transition to democracy". (This piece by Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch is typical.) This is a lie, as big a lie as the claim that the coup against Pres. Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was a legal "democratic transition".

The Obama administration, and the State Department run by Sec. Clinton, are firmly committed to this lie and the policies for which it is a cover story. But suppression of the largest political party in the country is not going to make it, or Haiti's poor, disappear. Haiti can only rebuild and develop if its people drive that development. An organization supporting such work is the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. Your solidarity can make a difference to Haitians struggling for something they need as badly as shelter, food, and water: genuine democracy.

Update: 3:15pm, 19 Jan - Media analyst Danny Schechter forthrightly assesses the near-FUBAR relief effort, which is making the situation even more explosive. [Hat tip to Rupa Shah in comments at A Tiny Revolution.] Mark LeVine has an incisive overview of exactly how the U.S.-imposed economic model has set Haiti up for maximum damage from the recent series of natural disasters.

On the horizon is a prolonged U.S.-U.N. occupation of Haiti, even more comprehensive than the MINUSTAH mission that's been in place for the last five years. The proconsuls of the "international community" will do everything in their power to prevent Aristide from returning, but that demand will be heard again and more often as the crisis deepens.

State spokesman P.J. Crowley, a reliable fount of empire-speak,

says the Obama administration is discouraging visits to Haiti by prominent political figures, including Mr. Aristide. "The last thing that we need is to have someone land and put an additional burden in an already-stressed situation," said Crowley. "We've sent that same message to our members of Congress."

Ass. Aristide wouldn't be jetting in for a "visit" like prominent political figure Secretary of State Clinton (whose arrival caused the U.S. to hold up landings of relief planes for hours), he'd be a citizen of Haiti returning to his country, from which he is illegally being barred.

Update 2: 6:15pm, 19 Jan - People-to-people solidarity ties are the way around our overlords' high-handed approach of creating ever-deeper dependence. The program developed by Haitian popular organizations themselves should be the rebuilding project that we support by word and action, not the kind of "help" our government wants to impose. (Did you know that the International Monetary Fund conditioned disaster relief funds to Haiti on an immediate freeze in public sector wages and a rise in electricity rates? No, apparently there's not a minute to waste in even a fleeting gesture of human compassion; the only thing to do in a crisis on this scale is to press the advantage.)

Beverly Bell puts it well:

Friends: There are ways that your donation, no matter how small, can have a big impact. They are not via the huge bureaucracies, but via the foundations who have long histories of accompanying, trusting, and strengthening the grassroots groups which, in Haiti, are the only ones who have ever made a sustained difference. These are small foundations that know that the only thing that ever works in Haiti is for people to have control over their own rebuilding, over their own communities, and over their own needs and destinies. These are the small foundations who understand that the best that they can do is strengthen those groups' capacities and strength with funding, infrastructure, and technical support.

The need today is of course enormous and overwhelming. Even the UN and Red Cross have no idea how to respond to a calamity of this size. Past the urgency of everyone now getting food and water (which will not happen) and the wounded getting care
(neither), what will be needed is what the Lambi Fund called today "second responders." That involves rebuilding the efforts that were under way to move Haiti "from misery to poverty with dignity," as it is known there. That is the slow, careful work of helping grassroots movements get back on their feet, reclaim what they lost, and move forward - both individually, and as organized movements working for change and justice.

We're not yet beyond the first responder stage, for which Partners in Health is the best "multiplier" channel. But the Lambi Fund and Grassroots International, along with the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, are organizations of integrity that have earned the respect and trust of Haiti's real leaders.
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Honduras: death toll update

For more than a month I haven't been able to bring myself to post; I haven't even done much commenting on other sites following the situation.

But my promise to update the post summarizing murders of resistance activists (Honduras: high price of the struggle) forces me to note a number of additions:

Luis Gradis Espinal, a teacher from the department of Valle, was found dead on Wednesday, November 25 in Las Casitas neighborhood in western Tegucigalpa. He was tied and had been executed. His family reported him disappeared when he didn't return after having left for the capital on Sunday, Nov. 22. During the weeks before the election (and since) there were dozens of police search and captures for resistance participants.

Isaac Coello, 24; Roger Reyes, 22; Kenneth Rosa, 23; Gabriel Parrales; and Marco Vinicio Matute, 39. The five men, active in the resistance from the Victor F. Ardon and Honduras neighborhoods of Tegucigalpa, were massacred [Sp.] on December 7 by men in military and police uniforms. A young woman working with them was also shot, but not fatally; she survived by pretending to be dead.

Santos Corrales García was found dead [Sp.] on Thursday, December 10, near Talanga (50 km east of Tegucigalpa). His body was headless. On December 5 Corrales had been taken away with four others from the Nueva Capital neighborhood of Tegucigalpa by five men dressed in uniforms of the national criminal investigation directorate (DNIC). He was tortured and interrogated about the location of a businesswoman who provided supplies to the resistance during demonstrations. The two men and two women who were taken with Corrales were transported, tied hand and foot, dumped at highway exits far from home and told not to return to their neighborhoods.

Walter Orlando Tróchez, a human rights advocate, member of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual community, and active member of the Resistance Front was assassinated with two shots the morning of December 14, just outside of Larach & Co. in the center of Tegucigalpa. On December 4 Tróchez had been kidnapped outside the "El Obelisco" Park in Comayaguela by four masked men who drove a gray pickup without plates (presumed to be DNIC). They hooded and beat him, and demanded information about resistance activities; Tróchez managed to escape and filed a formal complaint. More from Adrienne Pine and Feminists in Resistance, via Honduras Resists.

There have been several attempted assassinations, and continued police sweeps of homes and offices in which resistance participants have been sought and many taken away. Most of those taken have resurfaced alive, but have been forced to move. Four activists who were taken from the Carrizal neighborhood of the capital on December 5 have not been seen since and are considered disappeared.

Assistant Secretary Valenzuela now freely describes the current regime as a military coup, yet no one in the State Department at any level will acknowledge, much less condemn, these ongoing acts of terror. What a sickeningly familiar feeling.

Update: 7:00 pm, 15 Jan 2010 - Added another couple of entries to the archive post. The last month has seen a wave of murders, kidnapings, and disappearances of both resistance activists and ordinary Hondurans, as well as ongoing violence directed against farmworkers in Aguan by those trying to drive them off their land. A Garifuna radio station was torched. It's difficult to sort out the targeted political killings from the background violence, which is no doubt the point for some of the assassins involved.

[Images from Honduras Resists]

Honduras: elections a sick joke

The coup regime has made a mockery of the agreement, the U.S. is playing along, and Bertha Oliva of COFADEH (Committee of the Families of the Disappeared/Detained, Honduras' largest human rights organization) has the appropriate response:

...[T]he United States government is silent while Hondurans are subjected to arbitrary arrest, the closure of independent media, police beatings, torture and even killings by security forces. ... And now the U.S. government says we can have free elections in less than three weeks. That is a sick joke.

She was speaking in Washington yesterday, where she met with members of Congress.

While Oliva was in DC, the State Department continued its months-long practice of issuing statements encouraging rightist intransigence and undercutting the pretense that this administration supports democracy. Undersecretary Thomas Shannon, who negotiated the agreement a week ago, said that the U.S. would recognize the November elections whether or not Zelaya was restored. Sen. Jim DeMint said that Sec. Clinton told him the same thing, and expressed his satisfaction by releasing the long-standing holds he'd put on two nominations (Shannon as ambassador to Brazil and Arturo Valenzuela as his successor for Western Hemisphere Affairs). The closest State Dept. spokesman/punching bag Ian Kelly came to walking back the damage: "[W]e believe [Zelaya] should be restored to power. ... Let’s just see how it works out."

How it's working out: Verification commission members Richard Lagos and Hilda Solis returned to their countries yesterday after barely 48 hours in Honduras. That's a mighty casual approach to implementation of a difficult agreement on a tight deadline. The coup-supporting leaders of the national congress are stalling on a vote on Zelaya's restitution. Micheletti has named a "unity government" headed by himself, with no nominations from Zelaya or from the Liberal or National parties -- apparently taking 'unity' in its sense of 'one'.

Brazil and the ALBA governments aren't amused, reaffirming their refusal to recognize the result of elections without Zelaya's restoration as president. The resistance is at the point of no return on rejecting the elections. Sec. Clinton has not had the courtesy to respond, in person or through intermediaries, to Pres. Zelaya's request four days ago for a formal clarification of U.S. policy. Even the LA Times can see what's going on: 'A U.S.-brokered deal to return ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to office is unraveling, and the Obama administration seems to be wavering'. Conclusion:

If the Obama administration chooses to recognize the election without Zelaya first being reinstated, it will find itself at odds with the rest of Latin America. That would be a setback for democracy and for the United States.

When fascists like Jim DeMint are satisfied with your foreign policy, you're doing it wrong.

Update: 3:15pm, 6 Nov - The agreement is dead. Zelaya retains his dignity and integrity; the coup-makers blew their chance to have their phony elections blessed. The crisis is bigger than ever now. Heckuva job, U.S. gov!

Update 2: 10:20am, 9 Nov - Another excellent video report by Jesse Freeston of the Real News Network on the breakdown of the agreement, including footage of Shannon's damning remarks. Carlos Reyes has withdrawn his candidacy, and the Front reaffirms it's actively rejecting the elections regardless of what happens with Zelaya's restitution. There are talks to try to revive the agreement, but given the U.S. government's apparent determination to pretend that elections are a way out of the crisis, there's little basis for optimism. The agreement appears more than ever to have been a way out of Tom Shannon's personal crisis of having his ambassadorship held up, and to hell with the Honduran people.
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Honduras: figleaf restitution, not real democracy

As expected, an agreement has apparently been reached for a last-minute, highly symbolic restoration of Zelaya to the presidency, now that the U.S. has involved itself directly. A comparison of the points reported in Honduran papers with Laura Carlsen's October 15 summary of agreements reached at that point shows that the only change is the crucial one, restitution -- dependent on a vote of Congress (as Zelaya's delegation proposed at the time).

The only people at any level of the U.S. government who come out of this sorry episode with my respect are the members of Congress who pushed the administration to put more effective pressure on the coup regime and to explicitly condemn the dictatorship's violence. Their most recent letter to Pres. Obama, sent just before the State Dept. delegation left for Honduras, contains two passages that are worth remembering:

While the siege of the [Brazilian] Embassy is a serious violation of the Vienna Convention, more disturbing is the broad assault against the Honduran people unleashed by the coup regime.
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Free and fair elections cannot take place under these conditions.

Though we commend the administration for having strongly stated their support for the restoration of democracy in Honduras, we are concerned that neither you nor the Secretary of State has denounced these serious human rights abuses in a country where US influence could be decisive.

It is now more urgent than ever to break this silence. It is critical that your Administration immediately clearly and unequivocally reject and denounce the repression by this illegitimate regime. We can say sincerely and without hyperbole that this action on your part will save lives.

Obama and Clinton have not done so, and never will. Message received.

Update: 7:45pm, 30 Oct - The agreement has been signed, but its actual text is unlikely to become public for a while, so the coup regime is already citing obstacles in it that are denied by the Zelaya delegation. There's going to be a difficult, tedious process of implementation; see RNS and Laura Carlsen for good overviews.

So it may well be that Zelaya will not even be restored to office until just before the elections, the "last minute goal" alluded to by OAS snake John Biehl. Even in the best-case scenario, too much time has already been allowed to pass for anyone to feel obliged to respect the legitimacy of the upcoming elections -- presided over by an illegally constituted election tribunal, who will now have nominal command of the murderous armed forces.

Update 2: 3:25pm, 31 Oct - The signed agreement is posted as a PDF at Adrienne Pine's and as plain text in a comment by El Cid at Al Giordano's. RAJ has an English translation. The Honorable Raúl Grijalva does even more to earn that title by hosting a visit to Congress on November 5 by Berta Oliva of COFADEH, the Committee of Families of the Disappeared and Detained.

[Image: Resistance participant beaten by police yesterday when they charged a peaceful demo with tear gas and batons, while the State Dept. delegation met with coup negotiators. Honduras Resists]
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Honduras: too late to pretend there's democracy

Since posting 'Honduras: high price of the struggle' five days ago, I've had to add two more names to the list of those killed by the coup regime since Zelaya's return. I will continue to put any additional names there, so that the post can serve as a reference (and have added a link to the sidebar); pray that there will be no need.

As the Obama-Clinton State Department worms its way toward recognizing elections held under conditions of dictatorship, remember these men and women. As firms like Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates take in hundreds of thousands of dollars for being willing to put a smooth facade of lies on a brutal regime, remember their blood. Remember the courage and commitment for which they were targeted. Look into the eyes of Jairo Sánchez, whose funeral was yesterday; then make our government do the same.
Nothing now can make the November elections any kind of exercise in democracy, whether Zelaya returns to office or not. Presidential candidate Cesar Ham and all the other Unification Democratica (UD) candidates have withdrawn. A hundred members of the social-democratic party PINU, including several of their candidates, have denounced their presidential candidate's support of the coup and will withdraw unless Zelaya is restored. Three weeks ago, 68 Liberal Party candidates announced their withdrawal en masse (Avi Lewis' acclaimed Al Jazeera video shows them taking the vote).

The members of the national tribunal overseeing the elections, the TSE, were selected for their jobs in blatant violation of Honduras' election laws, which bar current elected officials from serving. That's just one of the many reasons why the upcoming elections can't possibly be made free and fair, and should receive no support or recognition, but it's a particularly relevant reason in light of their being invited to visit Congress tomorrow by coup-supporting Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Some administrations would deny visas for such a visit, given that the men are part of and support the coup government. This one won't even rule out meeting with them.

Update: 1:30pm, 21 Oct - If coup paper La Tribuna can be believed, some more coup functionaries had their U.S. visas revoked yesterday -- too little, too late even if true (no announcement from now confirmed by State). The lifting of the decree hasn't changed much for the police, who in addition to assassinating another resistance leader Monday morning used batons and live ammunition to break up a demonstration later in the day in El Progreso, home of Micheletti, and yesterday in San Pedro Sula, home of most of Honduras' industry.

The resistance, and the campaign for a new constitution, is truly national. Getting back on its feet, Ch. 36 showed a big demo from a rural area yesterday [via Charles]. The police and military are concentrated in the cities, and are going to be spread thin if, as appears to be the case, there has been a fair amount of local organizing since the National Front's convention in early September. On tap for today: a big caravan from towns to the west of Tegucigalpa, ending up in the capital. Tomorrow, a gathering in El Paraiso (near the Nicaraguan border). Friday morning, an assembly of popular candidates on the elections, to take place in the national headquarters of the union of the recently martyred Eucebio Fernandez. The OAS meeting going on now is broadcasting live [via Oye], if you feel like sitting through hours of speeches to see how offensive Lew Amselem manages to be this time.

[Image: Union president Jairo Sánchez, two days after being shot in the head by police Sept. 23, just before the second of five operations. Photo by Mirian Huezo Emanuelsson.]
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Honduras: U.S. media fail

Tim Padgett's writing for Time on Honduras has been significantly better than that of many U.S. reporters. But that's faint praise, and his latest piece contains several seriously problematic passages.

1. Micheletti ... lifted many of his emergency decrees during a visit last week by U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen... But human-rights groups like Amnesty International say police and soldiers are still blocking street protests.

The decree has not been lifted. A state of siege has been in effect since Sept. 26, when the decree suspending constitutional rights of assembly and free expression (issued on Sept. 22) was published in Honduras' federal register, La Gaceta Oficial. Decrees, and decrees repealing other decrees, take effect when published. The repeal has not been published. Update: 2:15pm, 19 Oct - Repeal published today. UN human rights team in for three-week investigative visit. End update.

No one should need Amnesty International reports to be able to tell that demonstrations continue to be broken up with force. Soldiers and police teargassed and beat demonstrators the day after the supposed "lifting" of the decree, the very day the OAS-mediated dialogue began, in full view of the international press, who reported it. The police gave as the reason for the repression that the demonstrators were "violating the decree" (which, among other things, forbids public gatherings of more than 20 people). They repeated the performance two days later, again widely reported: Riot police shoot tear gas to disperse supporters of ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya during a demonstration outside the hotel where representatives of Zelaya and Honduras' interim government are meeting in Tegucigalpa, Friday, Oct. 9, 2009. [AP caption]

2. To their credit, the leading presidential candidates — Porfirio Lobo of the National Party and Elvin Santos of the Liberal Party — have contributed responsibly to resolving the crisis.

As the front-runner in the elections, Lobo has the most to lose from their being discredited, so he did push back strongly against Micheletti's constitution-suspending decree -- once the international response made clear how lethal a threat it posed to the elections' acceptance.

But I'm unaware of anything Santos has done to help resolve the crisis. Instead, on several occasions he's actively and violently intensified it: During his visit to the national university in August, when students jeered the candidate for his support of the coup, Santos' bodyguards fired their weapons and pistol-whipped one student; the charming episode was YouTubed. A month later, his goons responded to demonstrators heckling a Santos campaign appearance in Choluteca by attacking the protesters with machetes; this too was captured on video, broadcast on Ch. 36. As a result of his role in tearing apart the Liberal party, Santos was only polling a few points ahead of independent candidate Carlos Reyes in a late August national survey by COIMER&OP (solid polling with other newsworthy results that is still unreported by any English-language news outlet other than the site that first made it available).

3. [Acting U.S. Ambassador to the OAS] Amselem, a holdover from the George W. Bush Administration, called Zelaya's surprise reappearance in Tegucigalpa "irresponsible and foolish."

That he did, but he's not a 'holdover' in the sense of being a political appointee, and State Dept. spokesman Philip Crowley defended his comments as consistent with the administration's policy. While Amselem has throughout his career demonstrated the kind of energetic support of right-wing governments characteristic of Republican administrations, he's a career State functionary. He is serving as the acting OAS representative without Senate confirmation, at the pleasure of the Secretary of State. If Sec. Clinton wanted another State employee acting in that position until the new administration's pick is confirmed, it would happen. Speaking of that pick: Despite the declared intention to re-engage with the hemisphere, and despite the emergence in June of a crisis on which it was purportedly determined to work with and through the OAS, the Obama administration didn't even nominate its own OAS representative until September 15; I wouldn't bet on her being confirmed until sometime next year.

4. After setting up in the Brazilian embassy last month, [Zelaya] claimed Israeli mercenaries were trying to zap him and his entourage with high-frequency radiation.

The source of this assertion, Frances Robles' Sept. 24 Miami Herald article, was a hit piece intended to paint Zelaya as unhinged. The writer didn't repeat the president's actual words, just luridly characterized them -- and has yet to produce the quotes to back it up. But the damage is done; one commenter after another repeats her unsupported attribution as gospel.

Moreover, the smear is repeated without even a nod to the context in which Zelaya spoke to Robles: a day after the coup regime had laid military siege to the Brazilian embassy. The regime cut the power, water, and phone service to the whole neighborhood. They filled the street with tear gas (some of which infiltrated the embassy). They set off the LRAD sonic cannon from the street outside, well within the 300 feet within which the manufacturer warns the device causes damage. The weapon is designed to flush out buildings and disperse crowds; use against people who are trapped in the path of the highly focused, 150-dB directed sound is torture. Soldiers ordered out the residents of houses on all sides of the embassy and occupied the buildings. The next day the regime inserted at least one phone-jamming device into the embassy and directed others at it from outside. Pro-coup Honduran media reported that the sonic cannon was supplied by the Israelis.

A day after the Robles hit piece appeared, the regime subjected the embassy to chemical attacks and renewed the sonic blasting with the LRAD. More than a third of the 60 people inside the embassy had serious symptoms ranging from nosebleeds to respiratory irritation to vomiting blood, while medical personnel were prevented from entering the embassy for hours. That Manuel Zelaya -- what a craaazy guy.

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The main point of Padgett's article is that the State Department is considering supporting and recognizing the November elections even if Zelaya is not restored to office. Evidence for this includes a revealing email from "a high-level official in the U.S. OAS delegation" who is not Amselem, as well as signals new and old in State briefings that the U.S. is counting on the elections as an escape route.

What puts Padgett on a slightly higher level than the run of U.S. reporters and commenters is that he does some actual reporting, treats anti-coup sources seriously, manages to write about Zelaya's presence in the Brazilian embassy without using the phrase 'holed up', and -- most significantly -- recognizes that the rest of the world isn't blind and that their opinion counts for something:

if Micheletti doesn't yield the presidency back to Zelaya by Nov. 29, whoever wins that day is likely to be a global pariah — a fact that perhaps the U.S. needs to come to terms with.

Perhaps.
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Honduras: World Cup sweetness

Yesterday Micheletti had the World Cup qualifying football team in to the presidential house, trying to hog the national celebration. Team captain Amado Guevara, in a lovely gesture, sent a jersey to Pres. Zelaya with a message of support.

Above is his mom Flor presenting it to Zelaya's daughter Pichu.

Update: 3:00pm, 17 Oct - Bonus! Adrienne Pine's friend Oscar reports that Amado Guevara declined to receive his medal from the dictators at the ceremony Micheletti arranged. Update: 2:30pm, 21 Oct - Or maybe not; see comments.
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Honduras: two paths diverge

Via Hibueras, Zelaya early this morning called on the popular movement to assemble at 10:30am to demonstrate for his restitution, saying that it could come within hours. Laura Carlsen provides the best account of what's been agreed to in negotiations up to this point.

But it's too late for any agreement to legitimize the elections. The regime, and the U.S., blew off that deadline. They're fine with symbolic restoration, a point of view expressed by the snake-in-the-grass OAS envoy John Biehl, who said he’s confident the country will resolve its political crisis before election day. "Some goals are scored in the final minute." (Cute. Honduras qualified for the World Cup yesterday and everyone, including Zelaya, is celebrating.)

Israel Salinas made clear this morning that only immediate and full restoration today could bind the resistance to the elections. It's not going to happen.

As Zelaya said in the Al Jazeera video (you have watched it, haven't you?), there's a two-stage process. One stage is reversing the coup -- restoring formal democracy. The other is the longer, larger struggle to democratize the country. The two efforts were fused up until now, but the popular movement can't let its hands be tied by negotiations in which it's not taking part.

The ALBA countries are meeting today to consider new sanctions against the coup regime. No hint of anything similar from the U.S. government; apparently even formal democracy's too much trouble to defend. Ben Fox of AP brings home the effect of the ho-hum U.S. approach on the Honduran people, detailing the intense economic pain caused by the drawn-out crisis.

Oh, and a special brass balls award to others in the brain-dead media, who are still, three and a half months on, propagating the zombie lie:

A wealthy rancher who moved to the left after taking office, Zelaya angered conservatives by building close ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and toying with a reform of the constitution to change term limits for presidents. [Reuters, no byline]

Gosh, it must be true; they keep saying it.