Letter of the Day | True help to Haiti

THE EDITOR, Madam:

CARICOM members are taking careful note of the US’s current treatment of Venezuela. Trinidad Prime Minister’s endorsement of its slaughter of the Venezuelan fishermen is, nonetheless, shocking to other Caribbean countries.

US actions toward Venezuela are typical of its behaviour toward Latin American and Caribbean countries, its open and covert interference in their internal affairs, often the overthrow of their governments, the exploitation of their resources that is then enabled. Venezuela has the world’s largest deposits of oil, which the US eyes greedily.

The replacement of Chile’s Allende by General Pinochet may be the case most known to Jamaicans. But the pattern is to be found in Panama, Guatemala, Grenada and so many other countries. This is not to hold up the leaders challenged by the US as all, like Chile’s Allende, icons of good governance. President Maduro of Venezuela is regarded by some as a dictator.

But how much of the reports on Maduro is US propaganda is not a question to be lightly dismissed. Consider the initial cover-up and still weak reporting in the Western press of the genocide in Gaza. The US itself is fully guilty of this genocide, among other things, supplying the bombs and other weapons used by Israel.

To come to the case of Haiti, the US record is not good. Two centuries of open racism, slaughters and exploitation that has no equal. It even refused to recognise Haiti as an independent country (1804) until 1862.

There was the occupation of Haiti by US marines from 1915 to 1934, with its massacres and exploitation of the land. This was followed from 1957, the stage having been set, by the 30-year dictatorial bloody rule of François Duvalier and his Tontons Macoutes. Papa Doc and son Baby Doc had plentiful US support.

After several assassination attempts by the military failed, there was the removal of Aristide by the US. Elected by a landslide, President Aristide gave Haiti seven months of genuine democracy, the first it ever knew, the people-rule that is not really desired by the US or the propertied Haitian rich. With the complicity of the military, by a US-orchestrated coup of September 1991, Aristide was abducted from his country.

The only difference between past and current US conduct toward Haiti is that, because its past has made it so unwelcome to Haitians, any new entry has to take a less open approach. It has to have a ‘cover’. That is what Kenyan black soldiers and Caribbean islands are providing: a ‘cover’ for US exploitation. Is this what Jamaica wants – to be a part of a US cover? As is evident in respect of Venezuela, the US has not changed its ways.

Caribbean countries can provide real help to Haiti’s gang control, governmental disorder and human need, not least in how they treat Haitian migrants. But not in simple response to the propaganda and under the lead of the very country which bears responsibility for so much of Haiti’s chaotic governance and violence.

HORACE LEVY