Haitians must haul food over the border
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memo, the AFL-CIO highlighted Sae-A’s use of “bribes, death threats and imprisonment to prevent and break up unions in Guatemala.”
Washington’s policies toward Haiti are reminiscent of the policies of enslavement under apartheid in South Africa, where the African majority was removed from rich, fertile land to the non-arable land of the “homelands,” denied the right to farm, and forced to work as laborers.
In a recent Socialist Action interview with factory workers in the free-trade zone in Quanaminthe, Haiti, workers reported making around US $15 per week.
(Left) Haitians at Dominican border carrying in essential food products.
That was for working a 10-hour day and a six-day week. As we walked up a newly constructed roadway that led to the gate of the free-trade zone, dodging delivery trucks, workers explained that an NGO had recently built the road that benefit ed the factory owners’ delivery trucks but neglected to build a sidewalk for the workers.
In flawed elections in 2010, kompa sing er Michel Martelly was declared president of Haiti, after pressure from the Obama administration on both the Haitian Provi sional Electoral Council and the OAS. The country’s most popular political party, that of former President J.B. Aristide, was prevented from participating, and Wikile aks memos show that the Obama admin istration attempted to pressure the South African government into preventing his return from exile. Martelly, who declared at his inauguration that Haiti was “now open for busi ness,” has bragged of his friendship with Duvalierist figures like convicted murderer Michel Francois, the architect of the bloody 1991 coup against Aristide.
A recent wave of demonstrations against the UN oc cupation, the ever-increasing cost of food, the contin ued spread of cholera, the need for housing, and the autocratic and antidemocratic reign of Martelly has swept the nation. Many of the demonstrations have been met with arrests, tear gas, and other forms of government repression. n SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2012 7
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website: http://socialistaction.ca jammed their whole agenda into an Omnibus budget bill last spring. Now they have done it again with the 457-page “budget” Bill C-45. four years or longer. This will have a de moralizing impact, and a long term de forming effect on the working conditions of educators and school support work