MP3. I’ll also post below an exchange I had with the Prime Minister on September 30, at a press conference during an gathering of investors at Hotel Karibe, about her government’s handling of a effort by Haitian lawmakers to increase the minimum wage.

Mediahacker: What do you say to critics who charge that the only reason there’s so much interest in Haiti is that the workers are paid such a low wage? Your administration opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage to 200 gourdes. Some say that the investors are here to take advantage of workers who can be paid such low wages compared to workers in their own countries.

And why did your administration oppose an increase in the minimum wage?

Haitian Prime Minister Michele Pierre Louis: I would never say that that’s the interest. That the interest of investors in Haiti are just to make profits off low wages. However, it’s very important to understand that every country in the region and every developing country has gone through that process, of trying to see how to make the best use of the manpower that is there, that is not qualified, but that needs to get engaged in the process of earning revenues so that the level of the economy can grow. And that’s the phase we are in.

You know, in our neighbors, the Dominican Republic started like that. And at one point there was a decision by the government to say, “All right, we’ve reached a point where we can now go into different other sectors of our economy and boost our industry and boost other sectors so that the country doesn’t stay at the low level that it started.”

So, it so happened that because of political instability, and that goes back to the question that was asked before, if we want to things to move forward, we Haitians have to make sure that we are engaging in the process of stability that can take advantage of the momentum that’s created now. Create jobs – this is the only area where we can create 100,000 jobs immediately. And whenever who create a cluster of jobs, you create around that cluster, an economy in every other sector. You are in the export industry, you’re going to have to feed the workers. So there are lots of restaurants around. To have these restaurants work, you need produce from the peasants. So you’re going to buy the local production. It’s a process that we are getting engaged in, and it would be unfair to say that’s just to profit from lower wages that we are organizing these conferences and that that’s the only interest.

President of Inter-American Development Bank Luis Moreno: Let me just say something on this here. Haiti has the best trade agreement possible with the United States. No other country has anything close to it. When you look at the sectors we’ve concentrated at this conference… are agro-industry, for a simple reason. This country is 60% rural. This is where the highest concentrate of poverty takes place in Haiti.

Second, apparel production. When you bring international firms like the ones we’re bringing. When we have the ILO [International Labor Organization] working here, hand-in-hand with us, what they are doing is establishing a barrier for labor standards that does not exist today for producers in Haiti. What is that going to do? That’s going to raise the standards of labor that you have. So it is very easy to say, “You’re going to invest in a country just for cheap labor.” That can be true for a short period of time. All the economic literature that you look at will demonstrate that countries, if they don’t move up quickly, they will be run out of competition for other reasons. So this is why you have bring a combination of efforts together to get there.

Mediahacker: Just as a follow-up, you said that starting with the wages this low is crucial to maintaining stability so that Haiti can move up, but wasn’t it – The Parliament passed the raise in the minimum wage. Wasn’t it your administration’s move to keep the wage lower, to not accept the raise in the wage, that heightened political instability in the country and sparked protest?

Michele Pierre Louis: No. The 200 gourdes passed. The only sector where it’s been negotiated is the workers starting in the export industry. But those already working in the export industry will get the new wage. And any other area will get the new wage. So it’s only the beginners, because it takes time for the entrepreneur to train that person and the wage at that level are subsidized. So the minimum wage that was proposed is the one that was voted.

And I think the President made a point which is very important. Even in that industry, the commission for the HOPE legislation has three important partners: the unions, the private sector, and the public sector. [unintelligible] And this is a big big progress – to have the three sectors sit together and see what are the common interests rather than the personal interest of each sector.

I just got back from a six-day trip to northern Haiti. Been without Internet access, so I’m posting this story here a week late! It aired last Thursday on Free Speech Radio News.

MP3 here. Rough transcript below.

The United Nations Security Council re-authorized this week a peace-keeping mission in Haiti, extending its mandate in the country by one year. Haitian and international officials credit some 9,000 peacekeepers, known by the acronym MINUSTAH, with improving security in Haiti since the US-backed ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004. But the UN troops face increasing popular resistance to its presence from many Haitians who view it as a militarized occupation force. Ansel Herz reports from Port-Au-Prince.

Christenor is a 21-year-old father living in the impoverished slum of Cite Soleil. He preferred not to give his last name. Walking past metal shacks and pigs feeding on mounds of trash in the water, Christenor – who preferred not to give his last name, said UN troops’ heavy patrols in the area forced him to move to a new house.

[Translated from Haitian Creole] “What they do the most is violence and beating people, but they are not doing anything to help the area. The violence is not against everybody, but if they are around and you don’t know, you can easily become a victim. We’re living with animals and living like animals. We wish they would come and help us build houses because we want a better way of life. We don’t have food or anywhere to sleep, but MINUSTAH isn’t doing anything for us.”

In 2007 UN troops was accused of destroying houses and killing civilians during large anti-gang incursions into Cite Soleil. This summer, the so-called peacekeepers helped police repress student demonstrations for an increased minimum wage. Students at the public university are bitterly opposed to the foreign presence in their country.

“Everybody can see that we are under occupation. They don’t say it clearly, but we can see that they’re exploiting us. They’re taking the people into a deeper misery.”

Mimose Louis-Jeune is a college student studying sociology.

“MINUSTAH is not doing anything in the country. We can see with their presence, that there is more violence. When I see them on the street, I’m upset because President Preval says they are here for security and investment, but in my opinion, they are here causing insecurity. Preval thinks the presence of MINUSTAH can bring peace and security, that’s why he keeps talking about investment, but MINUSTAH are not bringing a peaceful atmosphere for investment. When we see what he calls investment, it’s not something that can help the people get out from poverty.”

Earlier this month Haitian President Rene Preval and UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton led a conference at an upscale hotel here to attract private investment in Haiti. Representatives of corporations from around the hemisphere flooded the hallways. Officials said that building new apparel factories in Cite Soleil could generate 100,000 jobs in one year. Luis Moreno, President of the Inter-American Development Bank, said the UN troops had improved security across the country.

“There are some facts. One fact is that the security situation is getting better, the investor climate is getting better. So I am really hopeful that we begin to score small wins. I mean at the end of the day, investors will come if the right business climate is there or if they feel that they can work within it. And they definitely want to make money. People are coming here, the ones that we’ve invited, to really invest – tied to the fact that we can really generate jobs, because in my view, as I said earlier, is the most important social investment and social program that we can have.”

Haiti faces extremely high levels of unemployment. In its extension of the peacekeeping mandate, the UN Security Council directed the UN troops to work closely with UN Envoy Bill Clinton to provide the security necessary for new jobs. But Beltis James, a student at the public university, described Clinton as a modern-day Christopher Columbus, who comes to Haiti to exploit it for the American empire. He said Clinton and the UN have a twisted definition of security for Haitians.

“We don’t call security what MINUSTAH considers security, because we think that security is not setting up a checkpoint trying to catch people robbing. Even if security meant that, the presence of MINUSTAH is not stopping violence or stopping people from dying. The ones committing violence are MINUSTAH.”

Students said they are organizing with activists in Brazil, the country that leads the peacekeeping mission, to force the UN troops to withdraw. But no one in the Haitian government opposes the MINUSTAH presence, even though the Haitian Constitution expressly forbids any foreign military presence on domestic soil. Under their new Security Council mandate, UN troops will remain in Haiti at least through next year’s presidential elections.

MP3. Pictures of Farmer, Clinton, Preval, and Prime Minister Michelle Pierre-Louis, and other photos of Haiti taken over the past 11 days at my Flickr photostream.

UPDATE: Rough but complete transcript below.

Mediahacker: I asked the person from the IDB who was here this earlier. Are you concerned that the level of economic development that you’re helping to bring to Haiti is sort of outpacing the level of political development in Haiti? Given that the elections in the summer were sort of a farce, Lavalas was more or less excluded on a technicality, and hardly any Haitians participated in the election. There were riots last year over the food prices… you know, there are political problems in Haiti – and do you see the level of democracy in Haiti progressing with the –

Paul Farmer. Let me make a general point. You know, some of my co-workers here – there was a film made about the Raboteau massacre, I don’t know if you saw it, but it’s called By Kubiye ak change – did you see it?

Mediahacker: No. But I know of the massacre.

Paul Farmer: You should look at it. At the end of it, the point is made that it’s very difficult to build democracy in a setting of great poverty. And, social and economic rights, the right to a job, the right to food security, the right to be able to defend yourself, you know, that’s what poor people are always pushing for – here in this country particularly but everywhere I’ve worked elsewhere. So, I would think that those are related questions. And so, yes I’m concerned because all this cycle in my line of work is about poverty and disease are linked and it’s very difficult to pull those apart from each other, I would say.

Mediahacker: Some people point to the maquiladoras on the Mexico-American border as being something that maybe is trying to be created here in Haiti. They look at the kind of violence and corruption on the border there. I mean is that concern at all, that with the suppression of the wages here –

Farmer: Sure that’s a concern. That’s why you have to have to tie responsible labor practices to any kind of investment, especially in some sectors. Manufacturing is one of them, of course. And that’s why you have to bring people together with the idea of protecting labor rights any time you’re going to do this if you don’t want to just replicate a model that hasn’t been effective in the past.

Now you have to look hard, case by case, and decide if that’s being done. And I think that’s our obligation, to look hard at every case. Last year I wrote a piece in the Nation, after the storms, and said “progressives” – people who consider themselves progressives – hey have to be careful, not to dismiss any possibility for jobs with dignity. And I think that’s really where we are now, not just here but anywhere. We have to protect labor’s rights and think about listening to poor people who say, “We need jobs,” because they’re not asking for handouts – I mean, you’ve heard all this before – they’re asking for dignity, justice, respect for their rights to survive.

So let me just say one other thing. And this is just as someone who’s been working here a long time and considers himself an advocate of poor people’s rights. What I’m talking about is a process of discernment, you know, looking at something and studying it carefully and seeing if it really is up to snuff. If it meets the demands that are laid out, especially I think by people living in poverty. My experience has been very clear about what they want. That’s been true in Haiti but also in other places I’ve worked.

Mediahacker: There was some demand here earlier in the summer for a raise in the minimum wage. And the parliament actually passed a raise to 200 gourdes. The Preval administration essentially fought it and has kept it low, and I don’t think there’s been a final processing of what the wage is going to be at –

Farmer: I don’t know all the specifics but let me say that Haiti is enmeshed in a global political economy and has been, really, since – I mean you could start the clock ticking in the late 15th century, right?

Mediahacker: Yes – I read your book ‘The Uses of Haiti.’

Farmer: Well then you’ll know that I think these are not only local processes. They’re really transnational processes. And I think having a really broad based look at how we protect the rights of poor people in Haiti, defend their rights, is going to require us to go beyond just a local or regional analysis. And that whole notion of a ‘race to the bottom’ is race to the bottom of what? That’s a critique we made of the maquiladora industry, that it was a race to the bottom of the transnational political economy. And I guess that’s my question – how do we protect the rights that poor people are struggling for, and those are going to be workers.

This mission by the way – for example, we went from discussing things at this conference to fish farm producgion, you know, and we’re going to be talking about making capital available to people living in greatp overty. It’s not just the banks that lend to big businesses but also micro-finance – but that is not a fantasy either, as I’m sure you know if you’ve been living and working here. There needs to be a much more robust effort to create large scale jobs creation. At least that’s what I would think as a doctor working in central Haiti over all these years. You know, we have people come and show up, and they’re prematurely sick because they don’t have jobs and they don’t have decent jobs.

Mediahacker: I’ll just ask point-blank: Do you think the administration here was under pressure from international forces to fight the increase in the minimum wage?

Farmer: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think people are under pressure any time – you call it the administration but there are various parts of it – they’re under pressure to respond to the demand to create jobs. And to promote food security and access to basic services like clean water, and that’s the nature of the political process. The elected official is supposed to be under pressure to do those things, to perform. The popular movement in Haiti, as far as I can tell, has always had that message, you know, poor people’s basic rights. And that was true in the 80s, 90s, it’s true now. I’m sure it was true in the late 18th century when the movement was much more dramatic in terms of fighting against slavery but it was still a fight for poor people’s rights and respect for dignity.

Mediahacker: Maybe last question. How are you accountable, and President Clinton, and the people here, accountable to the Haitian people?

Farmer: Well President Clinton and I are both volunteers. So the accountability we have is to listen – for me it’s to listen to patients, for example, and what they say. And really, trying hard not to listen just to, for example ideology or ideas that come from people because they’re trying to promote a political platform or ideology, whether that’s in my country or any other. But the accountability for me is just listening to what poor people have to say. And I’ve been lucky that, as a physician I get to hear a lot of what poor people say. And my experience so far in Haiti is really that. I haven’t had another experience yet.

Mediahacker: I talked to somebody with Fonkoze yesterday. He’s a regional director and he was saying that he doesn’t think a lot of the NGOs here are really accountable –

Farmer: I think that’s true. I think that’s a very very important point, is that there is not an accountability mechanism for NGOs. And so we rely on the goodwill of NGOs but that’s not enough. First of all we need proper coordination. We’ve got 9 or 10 thousand NGOs in Haiti, you know, that’s the highest ratio per capita maybe in the world. President Clinton said more than any place other than India, I don’t know. He’s probably right.

And as someone who works in an NGO I just do not think we have accountability mechanisms for our work. And I could make a simple suggestion to improve it, and that is, we need to support the public sector. Like for example, you can’t have public health without a public sector. You can’t have public education without a public sector. I don’t think you can have good water projects without the public sector. So that’s the struggle I think that NGOs can get involved in too. Just because we’re in the private sector as non-governmental organizations doesn’t mean we have to regard the public sector as somehow competing. We’re supposed to be competing to serve the basic rights notions, and that’s not going to happen without strengthening the public sector.

You know, not to be too theoretical about it, but when you talk about rights like the right to healthcare. Well, who confers rights? It’s not NGOs, it’s not universities. It’s the government. So if we’re undermining, wittingly or unwittingly, the government we’re doing a disservice, I think, to the basic notion of rights to healthcare, education. Those are the things I know about – healthcare and education – much more than some of the other rights that are also important and fought for very hard for Haitians for over two centuries.

So that’s the, if I could say, the theoretical underpinning for having NGOs be accountable – is be accountable to the poor and people in general, whether poor or not poor, should be able to elect who they want and then have other accountability mechanisms but we need them too in the NGO sector. And you know, unfortunately, NGOs have not always been welcoming of any kind of accountability.

Mediahacker: I wonder if you would agree with the statement that some of the forces amassed in this hotel and just in general historically – foreign forces and also corporate forces have not been accountable to the people of Haiti and have undermined the government –

Farmer: I have to say that there’s a long list of people – who say forces who haven’t been accountable to the Haitian people. This started a long time ago as I said. You know, I’m… I think that’s something we really need to think hard about. Again, in the so-called private sector as well, because the private sector includes churches and NGOs and you know, we can do better.

Mediahacker: Okay.

Farmer: I think. Good talking to you.

I ran into Al Jazeera English Fault Lines correspondent Josh Rushing in the Dallas Fort-Worth airport a few hours ago. He lives in Austin now, apparently. The U.S. military spokesman-turned-journalist said he’s been touring the country speaking to journalism students, telling them to choose a place or subject area upon graduation and dive into it as a reporter. He said too many of them are following the beaten path of traveling to New York City or some other media hub, hoping to work their way up the ladder in a (probably dying) news company.

So he was glad to hear that I’m on my way to Haiti, not the Big Apple. Later today I arrive in Haiti’s capitol city, Port-Au-Prince. I’ve been studying Haitian Creole all summer, but haven’t had a chance to practice speaking it. If I can pick up the language, I’ll be in Haiti working as a freelance multimedia journalist for a number of the coming months.

Why Haiti?

The American people are woefully misinformed on the historical and ongoing impact of U.S. foreign policy on Haiti. That’s partly because there is little to no in-depth feature reporting by U.S. journalists working in Haiti. When Haiti does receive attention on occasion, it is too often with sensational stories of extreme poverty (or success). In that sense, I’m “going to where the silence is.”

Haiti is constantly described as the “poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” which it is, but the phrase obscures that Haiti is an important player on the world stage and not a failed state. That the country’s founding slave revolution was truly “a giant step for mankind” is not recognized in our history books. Bill Clinton, now U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, said in an interview on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show last week that “they [Haitians] have the best chance to escape their history in my lifetime.” What that means is anyone’s guess, but his words matter because the ex-president is leading public-private philanthropic partnership intent on integrating Haiti into the modern global economy.

Where does the average Haitian family fit in to development schemes concocted in Oxford or New York? What say do they have in the process? The United States, Canada, France, Brazil and other major powers are politically invested in Haiti’s growth. There are more international NGOs per capita in Haiti than any other country. Readers of this site know that journalism is a democratized two-way street now more than ever, with the establishment media’s gate-keeping and agenda-setting functions increasingly usurped by technology-equipped citizens. Is there a two-way street between Haiti and the West? Are Haitian women artisans, or the farmers’ konbit, recognized as pillars of the global economy?

These are some of the questions I’ll have in mind in Haiti. I’ve got a long list of story ideas to begin working on once I’ve settled in. What are you interested in learning about Haiti? Story ideas for me? Tips or connections that I’m missing? Please share your comments below.

Trip Notes

This trip is not financed or supported by any grant, scholarship, or institution. It is based entirely on my own savings (thanks to Capital Pedicab for the gainful employment over the past few years). I’ll be accepting donations online soon. I’m prepared to produce video, image, and audio reports with a Panasonic AG-HMC150 HD video camera, Panasonic FZ-35 digital camera, Zoom H2 flash audio recorder, Macbook Pro, 1.5TB in external hard drives, and 40GB in SDHC cards. I’m grateful to journalist Reed Lindsay for helping with the arrangements – this wouldn’t be happening, at least not now, without his guidance.

Previous Mediahacker Haiti coverage here.

Have a look around! Some of you might be interested in this post from earlier this summer: As The Pirate Bay sinks, 20 radical technology truths from Eben Moglen.

It’s unfortunate that the Young Lords are not as well known among broader public as the Black Panthers. The group was arguably more progressive for its time. Patriarchy and other oppressions within the Young Lords started to break down quickly when members challenged those hierarchies inherited from society. The Lords had deep roots in and support from the “El Barrio” community.

Which makes the New York Lords’ sudden and swift decline all the more puzzling. Why did the group fall apart after just two years of success? What can radicals learn from the Young Lords?

I cannot find any audio or video from Sunday’s forum online, oddly, to help answer those questions. You can hear Democracy Now co-host and Lords co-founder Juan Gonzalez speak on his experience in this interview.

I attempted to answer the question posed above myself last year in a paper for a ‘Radical Social Movements’ class. I’m posting it online now, to share it with y’all and Google’s indexer. The paper is entitled “The Young Lords: Examining Its Deficit of Democracy and Decline. Read it here →

An opening summary paragraph is below, but consider reading the paper itself. It analyzes the Lords’ rise and fall in some detail.

The New York Young Lords broke under the weight of unrelenting police harassment and infiltration, compounded by a series of tactical missteps that ignored the main source of their strength – their support from the Puerto Rican urban poor. These communities were oppressed and ignored, rather than represented, by social institutions. The Young Lords stepped into that vacuum and restored a sense of pride and togetherness to “El Barrio” in East Harlem. But the leadership of the organization subsequently turned its focus away from the direct action campaigns that inspired unprecedented solidarity in the ghetto. The group’s paramilitary structure was over-dependent on the charisma and cooperation of a few leaders and failed to recognize the voices of the Young Lords’ rank and file members. An attempt to open a revolutionary front on the island of Puerto Rico proved to be a fatal mistake, spreading the organization too thin, diverting resources from community programs, and initiating an acrimonious factionalism in the leadership from which the Lords would not recover. With much of the original leadership resigned or exiled, a hardline Marxist clique took over the Lords and it disintegrated.

Link to full paper. Also see Vivirlatino’s reflection on the Young Lords Party and Democracy Now’s coverage.

What are the lessons of the Young Lords’ history in your opinion? Critiques of the paper? Hit me up in the comments.

This started out as a story for Free Speech Radio News but didn’t make it into today’s newscast. I’ve heard of the Flash player not working for a few folks. Listen to the MP3 if that’s the case for you. Cross-posted to Houston Indymedia, now featured on Indymedia.us.

A Fort Hood soldier faced a military trial today for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, one week after another member of his unit was sentenced to 30 days in jail for refusing to go to war. Sergeant Travis Bishop was convicted on all charges and sentenced to one year in prison, loss of pay, and reduction in rank.

Unlike Victor Agosto, who resisted deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that the war is unconstitutional, Bishop is a conscientious objector. He opposes all wars because of his Christian faith. I spoke with Bishop on Friday evening before he was sentenced.

“Jesus is very vocal about non-violent conflict resolution. Jesus is very, very anti-war. You can tell from all his sermons. As far as my state of mind I feel good. I feel better about facing prison because of that belief than going to Afghanistan and coming back a quote unquote ‘American hero.’”

Bishop says he realized he could file for conscientious objector status only days before his scheduled deployment to Afghanistan in March. He left the sprawling Killeen base for one week and is now charged with going AWOL and disobeying orders.

Desertion rates among the Army ranks rose 80 percent between 2003 and 2007. With tens of thousands more troops now headed to Afghanistan, anti-war activist Cynthia Thomas says G.I. support networks are crucial. She co-founded the Under the Hood Outreach Center and Cafe in Killeen.

“Our soldiers know here at Fort Hood that if they choose to be a soldier of conscience and resist orders to deploy that we are here, that they have the support, that we have this network here in Killeen. It’s really amazing sometimes when you have all these boys in here, sometimes they just come into sleep, to get away from the base…”

Bishop said he wouldn’t be able to resist deployment orders without the support from the local coffeehouse.

“Under the Hood has been incredibly good to me. They said no matter what my decision, deploy or not deploy, they were going to support me. I don’t think I’d have been able to do this at all, just by my lonesome. I don’t.”

Bishop said he hopes his decision will inspire other troops to question their service in the military. Last week supporters of Victor Agosto from across Texas gathered at Under the Hood cafe and rallied across from Fort Hood. [Chants from rally]

They’ll rally outside the base again for Travis Bishop this evening. Ansel Herz, Austin.