The elections in Brazil were without a doubt among the most important and anticipated events of the year in Latin America. The largest economy in the regional economy’s political definition is a core element in the current political context ever since the scope of the new Latin America progressive wave depends to a large extent on its political and economic trajectory. Domestically, it was vital, as Brazil had over 6 years of right-wing governments combined with the pandemic, which plunged millions of Brazilians into poverty.

Fortunately, the winning candidate was the Workers’ Party (PT) representative Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who won by a narrow margin of 2 million votes, or 0.8% of the vote. Despite the narrowness, the victory is still resounding.

The ultra-right-wing politician, Jair Bolsonaro, had the government machinery on his side. On top of it, he counted on the oligarchy and the Brazilian upper middle class’ support, meaning an economic and influential power able to define any electoral process.

The main component of Lula’s victory was his collective leadership strategy and alliances with the most diverse political forces, ranging from the center-right to the most progressive and left-wing organizations in the country. However, once the elections are won, this type of coalition turns into a challenge. Given the fact that Bolsonaro will be out of power in two months, differences could emerge, putting Lula’s government strategy at risk and leaving him exposed in front of right-wing forces, whose main objective is to destroy him politically. Therefore, a lot of work and conscientious strategy will be needed to avoid such a scenario.

The elections result

An interesting fact about the election result is that young adults voted for Lula. This is peculiar since ultra-right politicians are often popular in this sector. However, in Brazil, it seems to be different. Today’s young adults were born before Lula’s first term and saw how the country improved after 13 years of PT governments. These same people have witnessed the disastrous management of Bolsonaro and are willing to recover what they consider normal living standards. At the same time, Bolsonaro’s neoliberal approach to social and economic issues is not preferable to Lula’s fair and modern treatment of key topics like LGTBQ+, women, Black people’s rights, and environmental policies.

The elections showed a country divided economically and politically. It is no coincidence that Bolsonaro won in the states with the highest Human Development Index (HDI), the lowest illiteracy rate, and the richest Amazonian states. His agreement to cut down millions of hectares of forests, ignoring the environmental consequences, earned him the logging and cattle sector’s support. Many of these businessmen not only funded Bolsonaro but campaigned by threatening their workers with consequences, claiming Lula’s government will shut down their businesses.

Bolsonaro clearly won in the two states with the largest urban population, while Lula won in those with the largest rural population. This distribution of the vote shows the abysmal chasm that exists between the countryside and the city in Brazil, one of the problems that both Lula and his PT successor Dilma Rousseff tried to alleviate through the implementation of social policies.

According to the vote by states, Lula won in 13 of the 23 states. Those with less population, low incomes, and hit hardest by COVID-19 due to their health systems’ weakness and governmental neglect.

However, the power distribution in state-level elections was different, although balanced. The PT won only 4 out of the 23 governorships, featured with another 3 from the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), whose presidential candidate was Simone Tebet, one from the Solidaridade Party, and 3 from the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). The rest of the governorships are in Bolsonaro’s and his fellows’ hands. In the Senate and the House of Representatives, the correlation between forces is equally unfavorable for Brazilian progressivism, which makes government management even more complex.

The overseas vote also reveals the transnationalization of the right-wing agenda in the region. Although Lula won the overseas vote in general, in the United States, for example, Bolsonaro won overwhelmingly. Something similar happened in Latin America, except for Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Cuba. Lula won all across Europe, where Brazilians are less exposed to the media might of Latin America’s right-wing and the frenetic smear campaigns organized against Lula.

Lula is aware of the current political and social situation, which explains his conciliatory stance. During the victory speech, he said he will work for all Brazilians regardless if they voted for him or not. Then, uniting the country is one of his priorities and, at the same time, his biggest challenge, given the right-wing parties’ political strength and capacity to mobilize their supporters.

Regarding domestic policy, Lula had a strong environmental and social justice agenda. These remain two neuralgic topics, ever since they were totally neglected by the previous administration. However, moving forward with concrete proposals may be complicated due to the opposition of agribusiness and economic elites who are reluctant to improve the country’s wealth distribution.

On the other hand, Congress’ composition will be Damocles’ Sword on Lula’s neck. The lawfare impeachment of Dilma is still fresh in many lawmen’s minds. Moreover, the polarization, the division of political forces, and the constant alliances changes in Brazil are all elements that weaken democracy and pave the way for the lawfare to act.

The response of the international community

Lula’s victory was a cause for joy not only for Brazil, where millions celebrated in the streets but for the region in general. Dozens of presidents and Prime Ministers immediately congratulated Lula, most of them regional leaders such as Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, and Argentina’s Alberto Fernandez. After this victory, integration mechanisms such as the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) will get momentum. Brazil played a leading role in both projects, and the arrival of right-wing presidents like Bolsonaro marked the stagnation of both. Today, the obstacles are fewer, and the opportunities to work together and move forward now that many countries in the region are more inclined to challenge neo-liberalism.

The President of the United States did not miss a chance to make public his relief with Lula’s victory. His congratulations were among the first. This reaction was influenced by Biden’s deep differences with Bolsonaro, who is a faithful follower of former President Donald Trump. This reality led to a rift between the two nations, something Biden is eager to change due to Brazil’s geopolitical and diplomatic importance in multilateral forums and organizations.

Bolsonaro’s response

While the whole world was celebrating, Bolsonaro went to sleep and took over 24 hours to make a statement. In his first words after the elections, he did not acknowledge the results or congratulate Lula, as is the tradition. He rather questioned the results, which was interpreted by his supporters as a call to maintain federal highways blocked. However, hours later, when chaos had taken over the highways, Bolsonaro made a call to withdraw the blockades, but to maintain the protests.

He intends to keep Brazilian democracy in check, as Trump did in the United States. Once again, the right wing’s modus operandi remains the same: not recognizing the election results and betting on social disorder and instability to hinder the new government’s work, many calling for the military to step in to fulfill their fantasies.

In this context, the presidential transition will be very complicated due to Bolsonaro’s uncooperative attitude and the perennial threat of a coup d’état lingering around.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – US

Mass demonstrations continued across Europe in October. Primarily they were protests against skyrocketing energy prices and soaring inflation. They were also against war and the sanctions on Russia that are seen to be directly responsible for the cost of living crisis across Europe.

Tens of thousands of people have marched in cities in France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Germany. Most are fed up with sanctions on Russia that have sparked economic ruin. Also, support for the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine is falling.

Here are some of the protests in Europe:

https://twitter.com/AxelLeReer/status/1583877250419605504

https://twitter.com/Ukraine66251776/status/1586080828622503936

https://twitter.com/China_News12/status/1586382062902448129

https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1586771762288775171

https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1587031205286928384

In the midst of a growing economic attack on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by the Biden Administration, an Oct. 12th article in the tech newsletter gizmodo.com carried the extraordinary title “Taiwan Official Explains with Extreme Calm Why the U.S. Doesn’t Need to Blow Up TSMC if China Invades”. TSMC refers to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s leading manufacturer of equipment to create the most powerful computer semiconductors, known as “chips”:

 The country’s defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng reportedly said ‘there is no such plot’ for the U.S. to start dropping bombs on TSMC factories if the country were invaded.

National Security Bureau Director-General] Chen further tried to tamp down on fears the U.S. is going to sap Taiwan’s top chipmaking minds from the country, calling those wargaming plans “just scenarios” while adding “If they understood TSMC’s ecosystem better, they would realize that it’s not as simple as they think. That’s why Intel can’t catch up with TSMC.

Despite these assurances from Taiwan’s officials, the Pentagon is indeed discussing proposals to destroy TSMC facilities on the island and to whisk away its research workers off the island.

The U.S. Army War College Quarterly published a Nov. 2021 article titled “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan”. The authors call on the Taiwan government to threaten to destroy the TSMC facilities in a Dr. Strangelove-like scenario:

The challenge, of course, is to make such a threat credible to Chinese decisionmakers. They must absolutely believe Taiwan’s semiconductor industry would be destroyed in the event of an invasion. If China suspects Taipei would not follow through on such a threat, then deterrence will fail. An automatic mechanism might be designed, which would be triggered once an invasion was confirmed. In addition, Taiwan’s leaders could make it known now they will not allow these industries to fall into the hands of an adversary. The United States and its allies could support this endeavor by announcing plans to give refuge to highly skilled Taiwanese working in this sector, creating contingency plans with Taipei for the rapid evacuation and processing of the human capital that operates the physical semiconductor foundries.

Imagine working in a facility ringed with explosives. Taiwan is within the Pacific Rim’s “Ring of Fire”, subject to frequent earthquakes, including a 6.8 one this year. Could not one of these accidentally trigger the “automatic mechanism”?

In January 2018, a nuclear attack false alarm created panic on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Could not such a mistake trigger the destruction of the TSMC facility while its researchers and staff are working?

But a PRC “capture” of the TSMC computer chip factory is not really what the warmakers at the Pentagon, the Washington politicians or their Wall Street patrons are concerned about. Since TSMC’s main customers are companies within the PRC, U.S. imperialism seeks to squelch the amazing technical and scientific advances made by socialist China by any means. For them, the destruction of this remarkable research facility is a small price to pay. Certainly, it is telling the Taiwan leadership if they are not willing to turn their island into a “porcupine” of U.S. weaponry, if they are not ready to blow up their own facilities at the behest of Intel, Texas Instruments and the rest of Silicon Valley and of course the Wall Street banks, the U.S. will do it for them.

Semiconductors: the nexus of U.S. imperialism’s economic war with China

That is only part of the Biden strategy to prevent China’s scientific and technical development. This last summer, Biden pushed through the $52 billion “CHIPS and Science Act”, subsidizing Intel and other computer monopolies building new facilities matching those in Taiwan and, most importantly and explicitly, keeping U.S. imperialism ahead of the PRC in computer chip development.

The Act’s political and corporate sponsors promised thousands of new jobs. But it did not take long for that pledge to be broken, as an October Time magazine article revealed:

When a group of semiconductor companies, including Intel Corp., lobbied Congress to pass the $52 billion chip-stimulus bill earlier this year—one of the biggest federal investments in a private industry—they argued in part that the subsidies and tax breaks would protect American jobs.

But now just months before the funding applications open, the nation’s largest semiconductor company is reportedly planning a major reduction in its workforce—yet could still receive billions in federal subsidies. Thousands of Intel employees are expected to be laid off later this month to cut costs amid a steep decline in demand for PC processors, according to Bloomberg. Some divisions, including sales and marketing, could lose 20% of their staff.

Even so, the reported job cuts come at an awkward time for Intel, given that the company lobbied heavily for the subsidies and committed $20 billion to build a manufacturing mega-site on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio earlier this year. The move also puts Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger—who received a $179 million compensation package last year—in a difficult position. In December, he lobbied Congress to pass the funding, co-signing a letter to lawmakers that said federal subsidies would be “supporting millions of jobs for Americans.”

Biden, not China, disrupts international semiconductor industry

Not yet satisfied with this corporate boondoggle, Biden on Oct. 7th announced through his Commerce Department stern measures to outlaw U.S. and foreign semiconductor companies from doing any business with China.

Wall Street has responded with ecstatic glee, with, for example, benziga.com, a Wall Street newswire, headlining an October 26th article: “China’s Semiconductor Industry ‘Decapitated Overnight’: What ‘Annihilation Looks Like’.” U.S. imperialism’s standard bearer, the New York Times, published an Oct. 20th opinion piece titled “Biden Just Clobbered China’s Chip Industry.”

Biden himself could not restrain himself from getting in on the act, with Bloomberg.com, after an interview, headlining an article with: ”Biden Crows About Chips Bill, Says Xi ‘Concerned’ About US Plans”.

China’s government has responded to the U.S. new restrictions:

Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the United States was trying “to use its technological prowess as an advantage to hobble and suppress the development of emerging markets and developing countries.”

“The U.S. probably hopes that China and the rest of the developing world will forever stay at the lower end of the industrial chain,” he added.

China is not the only one objecting to Biden’s international extortion scheme. An opinion piece from the Oct. 20 New York Times describes the international network for creating new computer chips:

A typical chip might be designed with blueprints from the Japanese-owned, U.K.-based company called Arm, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When a design is complete, it’s sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultrapure silicon wafers and specialized gasses from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies, one Dutch, one Japanese and three Californian, without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make. Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.

An Oct. 27 New York Times article describes the impact of Biden’s anti-China campaign on the smaller companies in the computer industry and its workers here:

The Biden administration delivered its own blow this month with sweeping restrictions aimed at hobbling China from using U.S. technology related to chips. The measures restrict sales of some advanced chips to Chinese customers and prevent U.S. companies from helping China develop some kinds of chips.

Lam Research, which produces tools that etch silicon wafers to make chips, estimated that the China limitations would reduce its 2023 revenue by $2 billion to $2.5 billion. “We lost some very profitable customers in the China region, and that’s going to persist,” Doug Bettinger, Lam’s chief financial officer, said during an earnings call last week.

Applied Materials, the biggest maker of chip manufacturing tools, also said sales would suffer because of the restrictions. On Wednesday, another maker of chip manufacturing tools, KLA, said its revenue next year was likely to shrink by $600 million to $900 million as it reduces equipment sales and services to some customers in China.

‘Wargaming’ Biden: Hands off Taiwan! It does not belong to you!

On Taiwan itself, whose main trading partner is the PRC, and with companies there facing these same U.S. restrictions, there is deep concern, as expressed in an Oct. 19th Euronews article:

The new rules require U.S. companies to cease supplying Chinese chipmakers with equipment to make relatively advanced chips, though Washington has granted some non-Chinese companies operating in China one-year licenses.”

“The difficulty this time will be a very big challenge,” Nicky Lu, chairman of Taiwan chip design firm Etron Technology Inc, told reporters ahead of the event. “No one will escape the impact.”

Frank Huang, chairman of Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, said the sector was caught in a difficult situation.

“We do business on both sides of the Strait. So we can’t listen to the U.S. and not do any business with mainland China. Then what would everyone eat?” Huang said. “Our industry’s position is to maintain our competitiveness.”

Ideally, semiconductor development could help make the world’s population far more prosperous. But once again U.S. imperialism through its political and military minions demonstrates its only goal is its own hegemony, not the welfare of the workers and oppressed here and abroad.

Taiwan is part of Socialist China. Our class has a duty to prevent the U.S. from interfering in the internal affairs of China as it resolves this issue. And it has the right to maintain normal commercial and trade relations with the rest of the world.

Source: Fighting Words

In what critics are calling a “dangerous escalation,” the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China.

“The ability to deploy U.S. Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power,” the U.S. Air Force told “Four Corners,” a television program of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), on Sunday.

Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, told ABC that “having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further.”

Investigative journalist Peter Cronau, however, described the plan, which came with “no debate [or] discussion,” as “military madness [that] is fanning tensions with China.”

Cronau’s message was echoed by David Shoebridge, an Australian Greens senator for New South Wales.

“This is a dangerous escalation,” Shoebridge wrote on Twitter. “It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence—and by rising military tensions it further destabilizes our region.”

According to ABC, “Washington is planning to build dedicated facilities” for the nuclear-capable B-52 bombers at Royal Australian Air Force Base Tindal, less than 200 miles south of Darwin, the capital of the country’s Northern Territory.

The Pentagon’s plan represents the latest U.S. act of hostility toward China.

Relations between the two countries have only worsened since August when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress visited Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) despite opposition from Beijing, which—along with most of the international community, including Washington since the 1970s—considers the breakaway province to be part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

In a departure from more than four decades of “One China” policy—in which the U.S. recognizes the PRC as the sole legal government of China and maintains informal relations with the ROC while adopting a position of “strategic ambiguity” to obscure how far it would go to protect Taiwan—U.S. President Joe Biden has repeatedly threatened to use military force in response to a Chinese invasion of the island.

Although Biden warned earlier this month that Russia’s assault on Ukraine has brought the world closer to “Armagedeon” than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis, his move to station B-52 bombers in Australia further increases the global risk of nuclear war.

News of the impending deployment comes just days after the Biden administration released a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that nonproliferation advocates said makes catastrophe more, rather than less, likely.

“The formal statement of U.S. nuclear strategy pays lip service to the need to limit the spread and prevent the use of atomic weaponry and cancels an egregious Trump-era missile program,” Common Dreams reported last week, but “the document makes clear that the country will move ahead with dangerous and costly modernization plans—and leaves intact the option of a nuclear first strike.”

According to Stephen Young, senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “The world is becoming a more dangerous place, but the only military threat to the survival of the United States is a nuclear war with Russia or China.”

“Rather than recognizing that threat and seeking to find ways to end it,” said Young, “the Biden NPR doubles down on nuclear deterrence and the status quo approach to security that says we all must be prepared to die in less than an hour.”

The move to park B-52 bombers at the Tindal air base also comes just over a year after the establishment of the so-called AUKUS alliance, a trilateral military partnership through which the U.S. and the United Kingdom plan to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines—a long-term initiative widely seen as a challenge to China by Western powers determined to exert control over the Pacific region.

Some Australian critics expressed concerns that the planned deployment of U.S. military aircraft to the Northern Territory locks the country into joining Washington in the event an armed conflict with China erupts.

“It’s a great expansion of Australian commitment to the United States’ war plan with China,” said Richard Tanter, a senior research associate at the Nautilus Institute and longstanding anti-nuclear activist.

“It’s a sign to the Chinese that we are willing to be the tip of the spear,” said Tanter. “It’s very hard to think of a more open commitment that we could make. A more open signal to the Chinese that we are going along with American planning for a war with China.”

Beijing, for its part, accused Washington of destabilizing the entire Pacific region with its planned deployment of B-52s to the Tindal air base.

Asked about the U.S. positioning nuclear-capable bombers in Australia, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that military cooperation pacts between countries should “not target any third parties or harm the interests of third parties.”

“The relevant U.S. behaviors have increased regional tensions, seriously undermined regional peace and stability, and may trigger an arms race in the region,” Zhao told reporters at a regular briefing in Beijing.

“China urges the parties concerned to abandon the outdated Cold War and zero-sum mentality and narrowminded geopolitical thinking, and to do something conducive to regional peace and stability and enhancing mutual trust between the countries,” he added.

Source: Common Dreams

October 30 – Just a few minutes ago, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal announced Lula da Silva’s victory by over 2 million votes or 1.5%. Undoubtedly it was a tight race with many obstacles for the progressive candidate, but in the end, the people’s will to leave behind 4 years of a disastrous government prevailed.

With over 99% of the voting stations counted, Lula won almost 51% of the votes, while his rival, the ultra-right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, achieved a concerning 49% of the votes. This runoff was similar to the first round’s turnout. In other words, neither of the two candidates managed to significantly mobilize those who did not take part in the political process in the first round.

Apparently, Bolsonaro achieved better results as his numbers shrank from the first round’s difference by almost three million votes. This will have to be analyzed because the third and fourth candidates of the first round presumably gave their support to Lula. However, if they did not join the campaign to mobilize it was just lip service to create a distance from Bolsonaro without giving real support to Lula.

Greater mobilization of Bolsonaro’s forces after the unexpected result of the first round and the unfair maneuvers of the neo-fascist candidate were key points in this result. Since the morning of election day, the federal police were on the streets obstructing the traffic instead of easing it on such an important day. They clearly had a mandate to stop buses bringing people to voting stations from rural areas.

Thousands of complaints have been posted on social media about long lines of public and private vehicles waiting to be checked by the police. Even the Uber app was out of service, and many drivers refused to give a ride to people who were clear Lula supporters. These occurrences were much more prevalent in the northeast region of the country. This area is considered the stronghold of Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT). In some places, Bolsonaro supporters went so far as to cut down trees to block roads for hours to prevent PT supporters from reaching polling stations.

In Brazil, public transportation is usually free on election day to ensure that lower-income people can vote. This time, many governors and mayors sympathetic to Bolsonaro refused to take such a measure. The right-wing is aware of the strong support Lula has in the poorest sectors of society and used this low blow in hopes of impacting the outcome. Maybe this would not be a relevant issue in another country, but in Brazil, public transportation is expensive for many people who have to spend an average of $US5 for a ride.

Despite all these fraudulent actions, neo-fascist forces could not stop the irrevocable will of a country to move forward, to have hope, and see a path to progress.

Lula’s victory is very positive for Brazil and Latin America and the world for that matter. It is the largest economy in the region and its support is essential for the left and anti-imperialist processes. At the same time, the right-wing lost its most important stronghold in Latin America, which substantially reduces its power to influence regional dynamics. However, this does not mean it is defeated.

Senate and governorship composition in the country is quite complex and is not to the advantage of the new government. This is a significant reality in a federalist country.

Today’s victory is significant not just in Brazil but it shifts the relationship of forces in the entire region.  The narrow victory reflects how every progressive move by Lula will be met with resistance and dirty tricks.  The threats of a coup d’état are still latent and will not be going away anytime soon. The frauds committed today, and Bolsonaro’s s statements about his intentions to try and organize a coup against Lula, show that the right-wing has a deep disdain for democracy and the people’s will. They will not miss an opportunity to reverse their huge defeat today as they did in Bolivia in  2019; as they are constantly trying to do in Peru, also in Argentina against Cristina Fernandez, and as they did before in Brazil against Dilma and Lula. The international right, neo-liberal forces, have been set back but Lula will need to consolidate quickly because they are not going to let such a valuable country as Brazil just slip away. The licking of their wounds will be momentary.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – US

As a popular uprising engulfs Haiti and threatens to topple the U.S.-backed regime of de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, Washington is seeking to deploy a military force to target the figure at the storm’s center, Jimmy Cherizier, nicknamed “Barbecue.”

Cherizier is the leader of a federation of armed groups called the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, or FRG9. Since September 19, Cherizier and the FRG9 have blockaded with trenches and empty truck containers the Varreux gas terminal, where Haiti receives some 70 percent of its fuel supplies. Haitian National Police (HNP) forces have attacked the FRG9 in attempts to dislodge its fighters but have failed. This barricade, which is only one of hundreds around the capital and Haiti generally, is today providing the excuse for Henry to request foreign military intervention.

While the masses of protesters demand Henry’s resignation and denounce his request, it is the G9’s blockade of the terminal that presents the most severe threat to Henry’s continued grip on the country.

On Oct. 21, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2653, drafted by the United States and Mexico, leveling international sanctions against “gang” leaders and their financial and political sponsors. However, only one leader was named: Cherizier. This follows U.S. Magnitsky sanctions leveled against Cherizier in December 2020.

“This resolution is an initial answer to calls for help from the Haitian people,” U.S. ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield remarked. “Today’s adoption of this resolution is only the first step. We have much more work to do.”

Haiti is plagued by criminal armed groups like the 400 Mawozo and the Five Seconds Gang, all arrayed against the FRG9 in the G-Pèp confederation, which is connected to powerful oligarchs with close ties to the U.S.. Haitians have taken note that, Cherizier, an anti-crime crusader, is the only figure targeted by the resolution, which claims that he “has engaged in acts that threaten the peace, security and stability of Haiti” and that the fuel blockade has “directly contributed to the economic paralysis and humanitarian crisis in Haiti.”

“Ironically, the UN Security Council sanctions on Cherizier alone have boosted his image among the Haitian masses,” remarked a Cité Soleil community leader, who requested anonymity.

The resolution also activated the UN Charter’s armed intervention clause, outlined in Chapter 7, which was used to legitimize UN “peacekeeper” missions in Haiti from 1994 to 2000 and 2004 to 2019.

Indeed, Washington is pushing for UNSC approval to deputize a UN-member country to carry out a military intervention, which dovetails with the U.S. Global Fragility Act, a 2019 law that authorizes covert military operations in targeted countries, with Haiti being the test case.

Secretary-General António Guterres put forth an October 8 proposal for foreign military intervention in Haiti, calling for a “rapid action force” that would be “composed of special armed forces personnel provided by one or several Member States, with one Member State providing leadership to the effort, including in terms of the planning, start-up, command and direction of operations.”

This would be followed by a “multinational police task force” to either train and advise a HNP hit squad, or to establish a “special force” to operate alongside the HNP in “tackling gangs, including through joint strike, isolation and containment operations.”

Greenfield-Thompson, draft co-penholder, told the council in an October 17 debate that “This resolution will pose a limited, carefully-scoped, non-UN mission, led by a partner country, with a deep, necessary experience required for such an effort to be effective.”

Guterres’ proposal was reflected in an earlier draft of the resolution containing a section calling for “immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force,” however it was struck from the resolution in negotiations.

Preparing for war

Cherizier is well aware of the possibility of the U.S. military attempting to assassinate him. “We know that U.S. troops are preparing to trample on sovereign Haitian soil,” he told Haiti Liberté, “We are devising our strategies and tactics to deal with them.”

The U.S. and its allies’ crosshairs on Cherizier follow a multi-faceted disinformation campaign, alleging that Cherizier has committed multiple massacres in Port-au-Prince’s slums on behalf of the ruling Haitian Bald Headed Party (PHTK). These accusations have been listed in State Department annual human rights reports and were cited as justification for U.S. sanctions against Cherizier, who remains the only Haitian “gang leader” under such designation.

Indeed, the UNSC draft resolution contains similar language, claiming that Cherizier “planned and participated in the November 2018 deadly attack against civilians in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood known as La Saline.”

However, as this investigation, based on visits to La Saline, interviews with residents and local officials, a U.S. official, and careful examination of media and human rights reports, will show, there is no evidence of Cherizier’s involvement in a massacre in La Saline, or that a massacre even took place. The events of Nov. 1-13, 2018 have been mischaracterized as part of a disinformation campaign emanating from the State Department and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that has paved the way for the current push for military intervention in Haiti. The allegations of massacres provide a patina of human rights concern for aggression against the burgeoning revolutionaries of the G9, and maintenance of Haiti as a neo-colony of the U.S. empire.

U.S. disinformation machine in action

According to multiple interviews we conducted in Haiti, on Nov. 1, 2018, two armed groups began fighting in the Croix des Bossales market (Slaves Market) in the Port-au-Prince shantytown of La Saline, the site where French slavers sold captive Africans until Haiti’s revolution (1791-1804) initiated the demise of the western slave economy. The conflict culminated in a fierce gun battle on Nov. 13, 2018.

By the time the fighting subsided, piles of dead bodies were strewn upon piles of garbage, gnawed on by wild pigs and left to rot under the Caribbean sun.

This outbreak of violence, and the Nov. 13 battle, would become the central plank in the disinformation campaign targeting Cherizier. Yet there are few established facts regarding what exactly happened in La Saline, and several narratives, often contradictory, exist among various political sectors and currents of those who allege a massacre took place.

There are a total of seven reports on the events of La Saline.

The most widely-cited report was published by the Haitian National Network for Human Rights (RNDDH), which is funded by the NED, Open Society Foundation, and American Jewish World Service (whose top donor is former Google CEO’s Eric Schmidt’s Schmidt Family Foundation). The RNDDH is headed by Pierre Espérance, a close collaborator of the U.S. State Department.

Espérance’s office in Port-au-Prince is adorned with an award from the U.S. Embassy dated 2002, the period when his prior employer, the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), led a disinformation campaign in the lead-up to the 2004 U.S.-backed coup d’etat against President Jean Bertrand Aristide, accusing it of committing a “crime against humanity” and “genocide.”

Espérance and the NCHR maintained close ties to the coup government of Gérard Latortue as state and paramilitary forces rounded up and imprisoned without charges former Aristide government officials and imprisoned and killed 8,000 Lavalas activists. The NCHR report used to justify the persecution of former Aristide officials and Lavalas activists were later discredited. United Nations Special Rapporteur Thierry Faggart called the NCHR’s actions “a real failure” that demonstrated a “lack of responsibility.”

Espérance, now head of the RNDDH, has continued to develop ties to the U.S. and is backed by some of the world’s most powerful oligarchs.

According to one account in the RNDDH’s report on the November 2018 events of La Saline, Cherizier convened a meeting with government officials in his Delmas 6 neighborhood several days in advance to plan it and distribute weapons. The report claims that Cherizier and Serge “Ti Junior” Alectis, whose armed group would later become an original component of the FRG9, went on a rampage, murdering people, destroying homes, and feeding human remains to pigs.

Despite the report’s total lack of evidence, subsequent reports on the La Saline events would cite and draw on its version of events.

Another report written by Pierre Espérance’s former right-hand woman, Marie Yolène Gilles, who now heads the Open Eyes Foundation (FJKL), was released just two days after the La Saline incident. It primarily describes a conflict between formerly allied armed groups for control of the Croix de Bossales market, however, it tacks on the word “massacre” at the end, though provides no evidence for its claim.

A third report published by the California-based National Lawyers Guild and Haitian Action Committee insists, in sharp contrast to the RNDDH and FJKL reports, that the narrative of a clash between armed groups was a cover for a state-sponsored massacre that sought to “punish and destroy” La Saline because of its historic support for the Lavalas movement. Despite its opposite conclusion as the FJKL report, it too claims that Jimmy Cherizier partook in the violence, however it does not allege he oversaw or partook in a massacre as the RNDDH and FJKL do. Instead, it alleges that he blocked victims of the massacre from fleeing into his lower Delmas neighborhood. This allegation is based on an interview to a link that no longer works. However, Cherizier has stated publicly that he, along with residents and other police officers from his neighborhood, blocked alleyways to prevent criminals from the notorious “117 Gang,” which they had previously expelled, from returning. Cherizier’s clashes with this armed group have been reported by the RNDDH itself, whose May 3, 2019 report states that “Having learned that some members of base 117 have joined Pablo’s gang in Nan Tokyo, Jimmy CHERIZIER alias Barbecue has decided to make war on them.”

The report claims that Cherizier’s statement on blocking the alleyways “corroborates the testimony given by survivors in Lasalin accusing him and other police officers of participating in the massacre.” However, the testimonies contained in the report never mention Cherizier.

This sloppy and false claim is characteristic of the NLG/HAC report. It also states that Cherizier is a PHTK member, though provides no evidence for this claim. Presumably, it is based off of two photos circulating on social media of Cherizier wearing a PHTK bracelet. Cherizier has stated that he helped the campaign of Espwa candidate Jude Célestin and the photos were from an event several years ago in which bracelets were handed out where he and other police officers provided security. This was prior to his 2018 firing from the Haitian National Police and ideological transformation to revolutionary leader. Whether one believes Cherizier or not, photos that are several years old are insufficient evidence to prove that he is a member of the PHTK, and fly in the face of all circumstantial evidence.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic published a report deeming the incident a “state-sanctioned massacre.” Its authors relied heavily on the RNDDH and conducted no fieldwork.

The Port-au-Prince-based Center For Analysis and Research of Human Rights published a report portraying the La Saline incident as a massacre amid gang violence, but in contrast to other reports, it never mentions Jimmy Cherizier and accuses the state only of “complicit silence.”

A United Nations report is the most circumspect of all, repeatedly qualifying its claims against Cherizier. “The alleged presence of the departmental delegate and national police agents suggests a possible involvement of these state officials,” the report reads.

The Organization of American States (OAS) – notorious for its subversion of democracy in Haiti, issued a report on Dec. 31, 2019. The five-page document uses careful and qualified language. The words “alleged”, “suggests,” and “supposed” appear 25 times. The report makes no definitive claim, nor does it mention Cherizier. A body known as the Victims Committee on La Saline appealed to the OAS, but even this did not overcome the body’s circumspection.

Belying all the narratives is the wide disparity of death tolls, ranging from 15 to 71. The NLG/HAC report concedes that “it has been difficult to get an accurate number of those killed.”

Ultimately, none of the contradictory reports provide concrete evidence of Jimmy Cherizier’s involvement, or that a massacre even took place.

Cherry picking testimony and ignoring victims

According to Jean Renel Félix, director of the Croix des Bossales market, the La Saline incident was not a massacre, but a battle between two armed groups in which innocent civilians may have been killed in the crossfire.

“To have a massacre, you’d have to have peaceful, inoffensive citizens that another group attacks, there I could talk about a massacre. But when it’s two armed groups which lock horns on the same block, both sides had casualties. That meant that the civilian population was also victim.”

Félix’s description of a fight for control of the area is supported by the RNDDH, Open Eyes Foundation, CARDH and UN reports on the incident.

Cherizier maintains that he never left his Lower Delmas neighborhood during the events in La Saline and recalls that Ti Junior called him on November 1 ahead of the battle to inform him that the criminals he had previously expelled from his Lower Delmas neighborhood would attempt to return, thus prompting him and other neighborhood residents to block three alleyways.

“We, the area’s police officers, along with the local population, took measures so that these guys couldn’t return into lower Delmas,” Cherizier recalled. “In other words, it was the first time that I spoke to Ti Junior, on the telephone no less. But I had never met Ti Junior face-to-face, much less would I go fight for him, much less carry out a massacre.”

Haitian-born U.S. citizen and Delmas 6 resident Mario Brunache recalls hearing on the radio that Cherizier was carrying out a massacre in La Saline.

“It was about 6 or 7 o’clock at night, I heard over the radio that Barbecue was in La Saline shooting people,” Brunache said. “I was in my house and I said ‘Goddamn, what the hell is going on? What is he doing in La Saline?’

Brunache says he ran from his house to ask neighbors why Cherizier was in La Saline, and found him asleep on the floor.

“I woke him up, I said ‘They say you in La Saline shooting people.’ He said, ‘Huh?’”

Brunache said he gave testimony to the police and to a former law school colleague who is an investigator for the FJKL, which authored the first report on the La Saline incident. His version of events, however, does not appear in the report.

Haiti Liberté journalist Kim Ives contacted FJKL co-director Samuel Madistin to ask about his organization’s documentation of the La Saline events.

Madistin is the lawyer of Reginald Boulos, an oligarch who is a key supporter of Ariel Henry’s regime. U.S. diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and Haiti Liberté revealed that Boulos had been paying the Haitian National Police as a private security force. He also sat on former U.S. president Bill Clinton’s Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which decided to which projects to channel the $13 billion donated to rebuild Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

Not only did the FJKL exclude Brunache’s version of events, but its authors made no attempt to obtain Cherizier’s testimony about his whereabouts during the La Saline incident. Madistin insisted that he both did not know which neighborhood Cherizier resided in, and that his neighborhood was too dangerous to visit.
“So they didn’t know where he was or they were afraid?” asked Ives.

“Both,” replied Madistin. “We didn’t know where to find him. Nor was it an area that was accessible for an investigator to make contact with him… There is no investigator who could enter the area saying they’re investigating and then find Barbecue. It’s a lawless neighborhood.”

Cherizier says these human rights groups have political agendas.

“The human rights organizations in Haiti, particularly the two most influential ones, have transformed themselves into political parties,” he said, referring to the RNDDH and FJKL. “They do not do their job with fairness. They have a lot of bias. They destroy one side and protect the other. They destroy me and they protect those that I’m up against.”

“Whether it’s RNDDH or FJKL, they have no tangible proof,” Félix commented. “I defy them, defy them, to prove what they say in their reports..”

Félix claims that these human rights groups described both people who had died long before and gang members killed in the fighting as innocent victims of a massacre in their reports.

“They put photos of people who died a long time ago and they never have the family of those victims to say that a given person was a victim. Many people whose pictures they put had guns and were fighting.”

The ‘political hand’ behind the massacre

“The reason they say there was a massacre is because there was a political hand behind the scene,” Félix continued. “There’s a political hand which is for, and [another] which is against. The political hand which is for, I will take an example.

The opposition, which they say there was, …because that opposition worked in concert with those people in the human rights organizations to destroy young people in the poor neighborhoods.”

Indeed, a former U.S. official told me that it is plausible that the opposition would fabricate allegations of massacres for political reasons.

“I can certainly see Jovenel’s opposition coming up with that narrative. Absolutely,” the official said.

In 2019, the IMF imposed fuel-price hikes, sparking a round of protest known as “Peyi Lòk”, or National Lockdown. For about two months, protesters and barricades shut down city streets. Protests turned to riots as businesses were burned and looted.

Cherizier, however, once again mobilized lower Delmas residents to stop the looting from entering their neighborhood. This earned him the attention of multiple opposition figures, who courted him, believing he would act as a hired gun.

“At that time, those guys offered me a lot of money,” Cherizier recalls. “Another militant named Fernando Duclerc offered to give me 80,000 Haitian gourdes ($1,114 USD) along with two Galil military firearms for me to fire on the motorcade of President Jovenel Moïse when he came to Point Rouge.”

With Cherizier reluctant, a prominent opposition leader and former schoolmate named Rony Timothée, visited him on November 18th, 2018, the day of a major demonstration against Jovenel Moïse.

Cherizier alleges that Timothée again attempted to convince him to join the opposition. This time, he communicated an offer from Pierre Espérance to have Cherizier’s name removed from the RNDDH’s upcoming report on La Saline in exchange for supporting their bid to overthrow Jovenel Moïse.

His success in protecting his neighborhood brought him the attention of oligarch Réginald Boulos.

Following protests against fuel price hikes in July 2018, Cherizier says that Boulos, whose Nissan car dealership was burned down in the uprising, began contributing money to his neighborhood association, and approached him to set fire to the rival Toyota dealership across the road from his Delmas 6 neighborhood.

“That’s something I would never agree to,” Cherizier says, explaining that he was initially perceived as a gun-for-hire.

“In the beginning, when people were talking about ‘Barbecue, Barbecue, Barbecue’, a lot of people thought that I was the head of a gang or of bandits who were going around killing people and burning businesses. That’s why Boulos proposed that to me.”

Having rejected Réginald Boulos and Pierre Espérance’s requests, Cherizier was at odds with both the Jovenel Moïse government and the bourgeois opposition. Thus he was named as the culprit of a massacre in La Saline.

The mainstream media’s promotion of the ‘massacre’ narrative

This narrative has been accepted by virtually all establishment political sectors and is found in news reports on the incident. A Jan. 14, 2019 Associated Press article became the first to recycle the RNDDH’s claim of Cherizier’s involvement in a supposed massacre in La Saline. The same day, Voice of America published an article based on the AP’s report. The allegations went to appear in virtually every mainstream article, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Miami Herald, Vice, PBS, USAID-funded Insight Crime, and the NED-funded Ayibo Post, though many qualify them as “alleged.”

Western governments and UN bodies have used these reports to bolster their calls to punish Cherizier.

• On Nov. 13, 2019, the House Foreign Affairs Committee called for legislation to hold the “perpetrators of the La Saline massacre accountable.”
• On Nov. 14, 2019, the U.S. embassy urged the Haitian government and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate what it called the “La Saline violence.” Notably, it did not deem the incident as a massacre.
• In August 2020, United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), headed by longtime State Department official Helen La Lime, demanded Cherizier’s arrest, despite qualifying his involvement in massacres as “alleged.”
• In November 2020, the U.S. embassy called to “accelerate and intensify efforts” to punish the revolutionary leader.
• In February 2021, Nathalie Broadhurst, France’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, called for Cherizier’s to be put behind bars. “I ask this question straightforwardly: how is it possible today that Jimmy Cherizier is still walking free? Those responsible for the La Saline and Bel Air massacres must be brought to justice,” she said.
• In January 2022, the U.S. Senate, passed the Haiti Development, Accountability, and Institutional Transparency Initiative Act ( 1104), authored by Senators Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida), also calling for “holding perpetrators of the La Saline massacre accountable.”

In short, the demonization campaign against Jimmy Cherizier and the FRG9 began long ago in preparation for this precise historical moment. It aims to provide a clearly delineated and vilified straw-man to overcome anti-intervention sentiments and confuse influential sectors of the liberal and progressive “left,” both in Haiti and abroad.  With the UNSC having passed international sanctions on Cherizier, another resolution calling for military action will soon circulate. Once again, Haiti finds itself in the crosshairs of the U.S. empire.

Source: Haïti Liberté

On October 20, 2022, in Guinea, a protest organized by the National Front for the Defense of the Constitution (FNDC) took place. The protesters demanded the ruling military government (the National Committee of Reconciliation and Development, or CNRD) release political detainees and sought to establish a framework for a return to civilian rule. They were met with violent security forces, and in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, at least five people were injured and three died from gunshot wounds. The main violence was in Conakry’s commune of Ratoma, one of the poorest areas in the city.

In September 2021, the CNRD, led by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, overthrew the government of Alpha Condé, which had been in power for more than a decade and was steeped in corruption. In 2020, then-President Alpha Condé’s son—Alpha Mohamed Condé—and his minister of defense—Mohamed Diané—were accused of bribery in a complaint that the Collective for the Transition in Guinea (CTG) filed with the French National Financial Prosecutor’s Office. The complaint alleges that these men received bribes from an international consortium in exchange for bauxite mining rights near the city of Boké.

Boké, in northwestern Guinea, is the epicenter of the country’s bauxite mining. Guinea has the world’s largest reserves of bauxite (estimated to be 7.4 billion metric tons) and is the second-largest producer (after Australia) of bauxite, an essential mineral for aluminum. All the mining in Guinea is controlled by multinational firms, such as Alcoa (U.S.), China Hongqiao, and Rio Tinto Alcan (Anglo-Australian), which operate in association with Guinean state entities.

When the CNRD under Colonel Doumbouya seized power, one of the main issues at stake was control over the bauxite revenues. In April 2022, Doumbouya assembled the major mining companies and told them that by the end of May they had to provide a road map for the creation of bauxite refineries in Guinea or else exit the country. Doumbouya said, “Despite the mining boom in the bauxite sector, it is clear that the expected revenues are below expectations. We can no longer continue this fool’s game that perpetuates great inequality” between Guinea and the international companies. The deadline was extended to June, and the ultimatum’s demands to cooperate or leave are ongoing.

Doumbouya’s CNRD in Guinea, like the military governments in Burkina Faso and Mali, came to power amid popular sentiment fed up with the oligarchies in their country and with French rule. Doumbouya’s 2017 comments in Paris reflect that latter sentiment. He said that French military officers who come to Guinea “underestimate the human and intellectual capacities of Africans… They have haughty attitudes and take themselves for the colonist who knows everything, who masters everything.” This coup government—formed out of an elite force created by Alpha Condé to fight terrorism—has captured the frustrations of the population, but is unable to construct a viable agenda to exit the country’s dependence on foreign mining companies. In the meantime, the protests for a return to democracy are unlikely to be quelled.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

The ultra-right-wing governor of the department of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, and his separatist clique have been maintaining an elitist and bosses’ strike against the government of Bolivia since October 21, which has already cost one life and economic losses of tens of millions of dollars. Camacho and the leaders of the Civic Committee for Santa Cruz demand that the population and housing census, postponed for technical reasons for a year later, be brought forward to 2023 with the consensus of all the governors and only the opinion against the governor of Santa Cruz.

It is worth remembering that Camacho is one of the most reactionary, racist, pro-imperialist, and patriarchal politicians of the Altiplano country and one of the most prominent subjects in the organization of the coup against Evo Morales in 2019, initiated with a strike very similar to the current one, which dragged important sectors of the middle classes of Bolivia. But today the conditions are not the same as then, the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) gained experience and consciousness and it comes from a great electoral victory in which it defeated the right-wing coup with more than 55% of the votes while maintaining its combat morale is high.

On the other hand, the Santa Cruz demand on the census has not materialized in other departments. The strike does however have the capacity to damage the regional and national economy due to the extraordinary economic and commercial importance of Santa Cruz. The census is important, among other reasons, because it has to do by law with the allocation of resources by the national government and the number of representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, where Santa Cruz could increase by three seats, although at least one would be for MAS, the second political force in the department. But it is not understood that postponing it, for technically well-argued reasons, is a cause to create a national political conflict, with serious economic consequences, at a time when the economy is recovering well from the effects of the pandemic, the disastrous economic management of the coup perpetrators and the international crisis.

The government of La Paz, from the very beginning, set the position of maintaining the dialogue with the government of Santa Cruz, but it did not do more than initiate the talk between María Nela Prada Tejada, Minister of the Presidency, and Camacho, when the latter decided to leave the table and abandon it, furious because his demands were not being met. The national government even agreed to consider the possibility of advancing the census if the Santa Cruz government technicians could demonstrate that it could be anticipated. More than a strike, it is a road blockade and mandatory closure of businesses and establishments which has hardly any popular support.

The MAS called a Great People’s Council on October 23, which was attended by hundreds of thousands of Santa Cruz inhabitants, who rejected the measure of force. Many of them not only disagree politically with the measure, but it affects them economically, as is the case of the workers of the informal economy and the agricultural producers of the region. Those summoned pronounced themselves in this way: “before the announcement of an indefinite strike by the Civic Committee pro Santa Cruz, the Great National Council in Defense of Democracy and the Economy developed on October 21, 2022, at the foot of the monument of Chiriguano, in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, with the participation of the people of Santa Cruz, workers, indigenous nations, natives, workers, peasants, intercultural organizations, economic and productive sectors of the countryside and the city, women’s organizations, trade unionists, transporters, students, university students, cooperatives, micro, small and medium entrepreneurs, artisans, artists, seniors, people with disabilities, youth and organized civil society; with the firm democratic conviction and within the framework of respect for the norms that govern the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the sectors of society demand that the intentions to destabilize the national government, which has democratically won the national elections of October 2020 with more than 55 percent, led by Lucho Arce and David Choquehuanca, be stopped”.

The United States and the Latin American oligarchies have resigned themselves to the existence of social transformation processes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Much less when at the head of them are successful, sovereign, and combative governments such as those presided over by Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca. That is why although the coup and all the maneuvers of the OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro to keep the dictator Jeanine Añez in government was defeated, and despite the fact that the MAS and its candidates Arce and Choquehuanca were legitimized with an overwhelming vote, the northern empire will continue to do everything possible to stifle the process of change in Bolivia.

Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US

The gloves came off at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on Mon., Oct. 17, 202,2 in one of the best bare-knuckle diplomatic throw-downs since the dawn of the new multipolar world on Feb. 24, 2022. And the subject was Haiti.

The United States is searching for a formula to justify its fourth major military intervention into Haiti in a century. To do so, Washington is playing fast-and-loose with the UN Charter, trying to deputize one nation or group of nations to intervene on its behalf. Sources say that the candidates for the honor are Canada, Mexico, and Norway.

However, veto-wielders China and Russia are pushing back, and there’s no guarantee that the U.S. (with its usual allies, Canada and France) will succeed in its gambit.

Brazil played the leadership role in the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), which lasted from 2004 to 2017. But that was a conventional UN “peace-keeping” mission authorized under the UN Charter’s Chapter 7, thoroughly directed by the UNSC.

What UN Secretary-General António Guterres proposed in his Oct. 8 letter to the UNSC (S/2022/747) was an aberration, on two counts.

First, like its immediate predecessors, MINUSTAH and the UN Mission for Justice Support in Haiti or MINUJUSTH (which lasted from 2017 to 2019), any new mission would be a flagrant violation of Chapter 7, Article 43 which only authorizes the deployment of troops “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” Haiti’s current trouble is solely an internal political struggle, not a conflict between two states, although Dominican Republic’s President Luis Abinader ludicrously claims that Haitian migrants and refugees crossing into the neighboring country are a threat to its “national security.”

Furthermore, de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry and his rump cabinet have absolutely no legitimacy or legal standing to invite foreign troops onto sovereign Haitian soil. He is merely a head of government, nominated but not sworn in by Haiti’s last elected head of state, President Jovenel Moïse, on Jul. 5, 2021, two days before his murder. Henry was shoe-horned into power two weeks later by the U.S.-dominated “Core Group” of ambassadors in Haiti. Moïse’s term indisputably ended on Feb. 7, 2022 (most legal experts say one year earlier), thus ending any legitimacy that Henry might have had.

Secondly, any Chapter 7 multinational military force deployed is supposed to be fully overseen and controlled by the Security Council. However, Guterres’ proposes that the UN pass the responsibility for military action to one country or group of countries, a formula that is nowhere in the UN Charter.

“The Security Council cannot ‘outsource’ a military mission,” explained Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, the first UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. “The Secretary General can say whatever he wants but has no power. In this case, he is making an unwise proposal.”

In his letter, Guterres proposed a “rapid action force” made up of “one or several Member States, acting bilaterally [our emphasis] at the invitation of and in cooperation with the Government of Haiti, [that] could deploy, as a matter of urgency,… to support the Haitian National Police [PNH].”

He suggested two options for how to configure the force.

Option One would be a “multinational police task force” of advisors and trainers to “enhance the tactical and operational capabilities of the [PNH] to combat gang violence” while the PNH “would remain the only force on the front line of operational policing and anti-gang operations.”

Option Two would be a more aggressive “multinational special force” to support the PNH “in tackling gangs, including through joint strike, isolation, and containment operations across the country.” In short, a Special Forces hit squad.

Interestingly, the word “bilateral” is used six times throughout the eight-page letter of the multilateral body’s leader. This dovetails nicely with Washington’s Global Fragility Act (GFA), passed in 2019, which envisages the basing in Haiti of U.S. troops, using the State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID) as a “humanitarian” cover, under a 10-year bilateral agreement.

To sell this ruse, Washington needs a bad-guy straw-man whom its white knights will slay. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield made the pitch:

“The draft resolution specifically lists Jimmy Cherizier, also known as “Barbecue,” as the subject of such sanctions. He is directly responsible for the fuel shortage that is crippling the country. By passing this resolution, we would take concrete actions to hold him and so many other violent criminals to account.” Cherizier is the foremost spokesman of the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, Mess with One, You Mess with All (FRG9), an alliance of crime-fighting armed neighborhood organizations.

Thomas-Greenfield further tried to sell the formula by saying: “This is also a direct response to Prime Minister Henry’s and the Haitian council of ministers’ request for international assistance to help restore security and alleviate the humanitarian crisis.”

Predictably, Russia and China pushed back.

“We would like to underscore that external interference in the political process in Haiti,” said Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN. “Subsuming [Haiti’s] interest to the interests of well-known regional players [a thinly veiled reference to the U.S.] who view the American continent as their backyard is unacceptable.”

He also noted that “many opposition groups call for not allowing a foreign intervention, and they rightfully refer to a not-very-successful experience, to put it mildly, with external interference in the country’s affairs.”

Finally, “we cannot support the attempts to quickly push through a resolution for this council on the sanctions either,” Polyanskiy concluded.

China also opposed a military option saying it had “taken note of the immediate opposition from some political parties and groups to the presence of a foreign armed force in Haiti, at a time when the Haitian government lacks legitimacy and is unable to govern.”

Haitians held massive anti-invasion demonstrations in Port-au-Prince on Oct. 17, the 216^th anniversary of founding father Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ murder. Many protestors waved Russian flags. In chaotic confrontations, Haitian police dispersed some of the demonstrators with tear gas. The same day, about 60 demonstrators walked down Nostrand Avenue from Eastern Parkway to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, NY to demand no intervention.

China did, however, express support for sanctions but gave no indication whatsoever that it agreed with Washington’s targeting of Cherizier, an anti-crime crusader. Cherizier’s call for a social revolution in Haiti is what alarms the U.S. and its allies in Haiti’s ruling class.

“China supports targeted sanctions including travel bans, assets freeze, and an arms embargo, among other measures, against gang members and their supporters,” Geng Shuang, the Deputy Permanent Representative of China to the UN said, likely referring to the criminals grouped in a confederacy known as G-Pèp. It includes murderous gangs engaged in kidnapping, extortion, rape, and assassination like the Five Second’s Gang of Village de Dieu, the Martissant gang of Ti Lapli, and the Croix-des-Bouquets gangs of Vitelhomme and 400 Mawozo, which has publicized on social media the decapitation of its victims of late.

Cherizier has also recently denounced the collaboration of the PNH with G-Pèp gunmen who ride in their armored cars.

Part of the Haitian bourgeoisie’s and Washington’s campaign against the G9 is to say not only that it is holding Haiti hostage by blocking Port-au-Prince’s Varreux Fuel Terminal, but also by spreading rumors on radios and social media that the G9 is selling the gas for their own profit.

“It’s their attempt to discredit us and fool the masses into thinking that the G9 steals and sells gas,” Cherizier told Haïti Liberté on Oct. 17. “It’s how they’re trying to make the people not trust us, just like when they accused us of receiving 10 million [$81,000], or 43 million [$348,300], or 20 million gourdes [$162,000] from Ariel Henry. It’s just pure defamation.”

“The terminal is closed,” Cherizier continued. “It is barricaded by huge trenches we dug and empty containers. If one wanted to take the gas, how would one get it out? The huge amount of gas they’re talking about, how many recipients would we need to have to get this gas and transport it? They say that we overcame the facility’s security guards; let’s hear the testimony of the terminal’s security agents. The terminal has 70% of the nation’s gas; such a terminal undoubtedly has cameras. Let them show the footage that proves their accusations against the G9. What is sure: the gas will not leave unless, and only unless, Ariel backs down from his decision to hike the gas price, and returns it to what it was before. As long as he sets it at the IMF’s price, the gas will not leave. Unless he uses imperialism’s military force to retake the terminal.

“It is not by chance that every day the U.S. talks about the G9, but the G9 has never kidnapped or raped anyone,” Cherizier went on. “We have not blocked Martissant, which for a year and four months has cut off the capital from four [southern] departments. The G9 did not block Croix-des-Bouquets. But the U.S. target, the beast to be slaughtered, is the G9 because we, like the popular masses, are demanding real change, so that the living conditions of people living in working-class neighborhoods improve so they live decently.

“The foreigners will land,” Cherizier said. “Let them come! However, they will not only face Jimmy Chérizier but all the angry people of the ghettoes, seething in their working-class neighborhoods, who have nothing to lose and are ready to fight and die for their country.

“We have threatened the interests of the oligarchs, the wheeler-dealers, who destroyed our industries,” Cherizier said. “They only buy to sell. They closed [the state sugar mill] HASCO, which had more than 30,000 workers, the cement plant, and the flour mill, and kept the population in misery. Certainly the interests of imperialism are threatened! Let it happen! When imperialism arrives, we will stand up to fight politically and defend our lives.”

Russia and China may thwart Washington’s designs in the UN, but the U.S. may then turn either to the Organization of American States (OAS) or even an impromptu hemispheric coalition, as it did to invade tiny Grenada in 1983.

“I think they will send soldiers from the CARICOM countries with support from U.S., Canada, Mexico, [and] DR,” tweeted Dr. Jemima Pierre, a Haitian analyst with the Black Alliance for Peace and Black Agenda Report.

Source: Haïti Liberté