I am excited to invite you to a program co-sponsored by the Brooklyn Greens:
Haiti After Aristide: A Grassroots Perspective Saturday, May 21 6 pm
at the Brooklyn Greens office: 388 Atlantic Avenue (between Bond St. & Hoyt St.)
2 floor walkup (sorry, no elevator)
---------------------- Speakers include:
Sandra Quintela, who toured Haiti in early April as part of an international fact-finding mission headed by Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel.
Paul Philome, a longtime organizer with Batay Ouvriye ("Workers' Struggle"), a workers' movement with an international reputation for its militant campaigns in the low-wage foreign-owned assembly shops known as maquiladoras that have come to dominate industry in much of the developing world.
--------------------- Like progressives in the US, Quintela and Philome condemn the US intervention in Haiti in 2004 and oppose the current occupation by Brazilian-led UN troops. But they also criticize the widespread view that deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was an ally of the struggles of poor Haitians.
"The Aristide government was one of great violence, of major persecution of the social movements, one with a neoliberal agenda for transforming the country into a big maquiladora," Quintela told the Brazilian magazine Socialist Opinion earlier this month after her visit to Haiti. "In December 2003 the grassroots organizations began to prepare a plan for Aristide's exit. But he was taken from the country on a plane of the US armed forces before the grassroots forces could remove him."
Philome's experience of the struggle against Aristide's policies is more direct. One of Batay Ouvriye's main focuses over the last two years has been a pioneering union at a maquiladora owned by the Dominican Grupo M corporation in the Haitian border town of Ouanaminthe. The factory is in a "free trade zone" set up by Aristide and then-Dominican president Hipolito Mejia in April 2002.
Quintela and Philome are speaking in Brooklyn on Saturday, May 21 at 6 pm at the office of the Brooklyn Greens/Green Party of NY, 388 Atlantic Avenue (and Bond Street). The forum, "Haiti after Aristide: a grassroots perspective," is organized by the Grassroots Haiti Solidarity Committee.
Quintela, who speaks Spanish as well as Portuguese, will be available for interviews on Saturday, May 21; translation into English can be arranged. Philome is available for interviews in English, French and Creole; he will be in New York through Wednesday, May 25.
Grassroots Haiti is also organizing for a picket line on Monday, May 23 to protest the Dominican government's mass deportations of Haitians over the last two weeks. The picket, with Haitian and Dominican groups, will be held outside the Dominican consulate, at 1501 New Broadway Avenue (at 43rd Street in Times Square), from 4 pm to 7 pm.
-------------------- In US progressive circles, the situation in Haiti has largely been reduced to a struggle between US-led imperialist interests and forces aligned with ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas Family party.
While we Greens of course oppose the U.S. government's removal of Haitian President Aristide, we also need to note that for the majority of progressive and grassroots activists in Haiti, the Aristide government was unfortunately not an ally but an obstacle to organizing for radical change.
This is a view that typically goes unreported in the progressive media, including WBAI radio.
The grassroots movement continues to organize against foreign military occupation and the neoliberal economic policies of the US, the IMF and the World Bank. Haitian activists are looking for solidarity from US progressives in this truly revolutionary struggle.
------------------------------------------------ Organized by the Grassroots Haiti Solidarity Committee co-sponsored by the Batay Ouvriye Solidarity Network, SELA (the Haitian Information Center), the Nicaragua Solidarity Network, and the Brooklyn Greens