Haiti: “The biggest disgrace is indifference”

by Jim Hodgson

More than 42 years after my first visit to Haiti, I can’t disagree with that assessment. It was offered June 16 by UN secretary general António Guterres near the end of his one-day visit to Port-au-Prince.

The visit came 40 years after the fall of the Duvalier family dictatorship; 36 years after the election of a liberation-theology-inspired priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide; 35 years after the first coup against him; 22 years after the second coup; 16 years after the earthquake killed at least 220,000 people; five years after the assassination of Haiti’s last elected president; and after a decade of still-surging gang violence in the capital city and beyond.

A week after the visit by Guterres, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced $35 million in new funding Tuesday for projects aimed at shoring up security and curbing violence in the Caribbean. Just $7.5 million was to support the Haitian National Police service’s fight against gang violence.

Now two-and-a-half months have passed since Guterres denounced indifference and Anand offered money. But by any measure, everything has gotten worse. 

Two events caught my attention over in recent days.

Gang coalition attacks Kenscoff

First was a vicious gang attack in Kenscoff, a farming community high in the mountains above Port-au-Prince. At least 47 people were killed, including five children. Fifty others were abducted, though six children and seven women in the group were later released. Many of those killed had sought refuge in a church compound at L’église de l’Arche de la Nouvelle Alliance.

Days later, Pope Leo XIV called for release of all remaining hostages. Bishop Pierre André Dumas of the diocese of Anse-à-Veau et Miragoâne called for more action from Haiti’s government to protect the population and to end impunity:

“Haiti cannot become an immense cemetery where we come now and then to leave flowers, recite our condolences and publish statements.”

Gang violence has displaced about 1.5 million people in Haiti, where at least 3,050 people were reported killed from January to June, according to U.N. statistics released Aug. 25.

My first visit to Kenscoff came during my first visit to Haiti in March 1984. In Kenscoff, the repression was blatant. Duvalier was still in power, and we watched as his militia, the infamous Tontons Macoutes, extorted payments from vendors in a market in Kenscoff. In subsequent years, I passed through Kenscoff during visits to a Methodist congregation in nearby Furcy and to a school in Duplan rebuilt after the 2010 earthquake. (Photo: Jim Hodgson)

The Trump regime’s assault on Haitians in the U.S.

The second matter that grabbed my attention is that the United States has abruptly ended the “temporary protected status” that had kept Haitian asylum-seekers in years since the earthquake from being deported. On Aug. 27, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “Haiti TPS has been TERMINATED. Those with TPS are in our nation illegally. They have two options: LEAVE IMMEDIATELY or be DEPORTED.” Attached was a video of chained Black men and women being moved through the rain toward a waiting plane.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote: “Officials at DHS chose to publish a video of Black people in chains that evoked the slave coffles of the Old South.”

That news came at around the time that Eleazar S. Fernandez, a theologian from the Philippines currently teaching in Minnesota, wrote an excellent appreciation of Haitians and their rebellion that ended slavery in 1804. When he posted the text on Facebook, however, it was met with vile, bot-driven racist attacks that recalled phrases used by Trump, Vance and others in the current U.S. regime to malign Haitians.

UN Security Council speeches reveal the failure of the international community

The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting about Haiti on Friday, Aug. 28. Like conversations about Gaza, Sudan or Somalia, the meeting only revealed failures.

Gotson Pierre, editor of Haiti’s Alterpresse news service, wrote: 

“Three years after authorization of an international mission intended to support the Haitian National Police action against the gangs, results remain largely insufficient when measured against announced objectives.”

After one failed effort (known as the Multinational Mission to Support Security, MMAS), the UN created the Gang Suppression Force (FRG). 

The intent was to deploy a force of 5,500 international members but, as Dominican foreign affairs minister Roberto Álvarez Gil told a UNSC meeting in July, barely 1,000 were on the ground. On the surface, the problem was logistical – insufficient aircraft to bring police from countries that had promised them (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire and others) – but it shows the deeper problem of UN member-state arrears. As you might guess, the United States under Trump is the largest and most reluctant debtor.  And the United States seems to have plenty of aircraft that it uses for deportations all over the planet.

At the Aug. 28 meeting, UNSC members called for rapid deployment of the FRG forces, renewal of the FRG mandate in September, and for tighter enforcement of an arms embargo. 

Two other problems. As noted in the Drop Site report above, the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate. Meanwhile, Haiti’s illegitimate interim government, headed now only by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé after U.S.-led manoeuvres in January that removed the previous Transitional Presidential Council, is trying to hold general elections for the first time in more than a decade on Dec. 13. It has been registering voters in Port-au-Prince and beyond. 

But, given the history of U.S. interference (and worse) in Haiti over more than a century, my expectation is that such an election will have a low voter turnout and produce a new president who is favourable to U.S. security and business plans, much like those of Michel Martelly (2011-16) and Jovenel Moïse (2017 until his assassination on July 7, 2021). Again, the parties, popular organisations and social movements with different visions for Haiti will be shoved aside.

Javier Giraldo and “community ways of thinking”

“The killers did not seek to kill individuals, but rather to destroy community ways of thinking.”

Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest, was speaking of the paramilitary death squads and their allies in the official armed forces who did most of the killing during Colombia’s decades-long civil war. “This was their project since the sixties.” The paramilitaries were created by forces of greed – the large land-holders and industrialists – who demanded the land and fealty of impoverished people who had learned over centuries to support each other in community.

We had gathered on a Sunday evening in November 2019 to witness the presentation of a report to the chair of Colombia’s Truth Commission, Francisco de Roux, also a Jesuit. We met in an auditorium of the seventeenth-century Colegio San Bartolomé. It sits on a corner of Bogotá’s Plaza Bolívar, roughly between the national congress building and the cathedral. This was three years after ratification of the peace agreement between the government and the largest guerrilla army. 

The event mourned the victims of war but also celebrated decades of work for peace with justice and the investigations then underway into past crimes. The report, “Blood of Martyrs, Seeds of Liberation,” was prepared by the Mesa Ecuménica por la Paz (MEP), an ecumenical peace movement supported by The United Church of Canada and the KAIROS Canada ecumenical coalition.

Padre Javier died Tuesday (Aug. 25): 82 years of age, 61 of them among the Jesuits, 50 years a priest. After surviving countless death threats, he died quietly in hospital.

“Arm yourselves, leave, or be killed”

Javier Giraldo was partly responsible for my first visit to Colombia in 1993. He led a group of Roman Catholic religious communities called the Inter-Congregational Commission for Justice and Peace (known as Justicia y Paz). Later, after tension with conservative bishops, the group became the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace. 

Months before our 1993 visit, Justicia y Paz had presented a report on the growth of paramilitary activity in the mountains of Santander department. It compiled testimonies that showed how paramilitary groups – backed by the Colombian armed forces – were imposing control in the region. In the early 1990s, I was working with the Canadian Council of Churches as its ecumenical education and communication secretary. My colleagues at the Inter-Church Committee for Human Rights in Latin America (ICCHRLA) invited me to join a small delegation that would show solidarity with affected communities and amplify the findings of the Justicia y Paz report.

From people who had been displaced from their land, and from people who lived in fear of displacement, we learned of the paramilitary strategy. People were given three options: join the paramilitaries, leave or be killed. In 1993, the number of displaced in Colombia was around 200,000. 

Over time, the paramilitary strategy we witnessed in Santander was imposed on most of the country. My work with the United Church brought me back in 2001 and the number of displaced was two million. (During that visit, I met Fr. Javier again; because of threats, he was sheltered within a maze of connected churches and schools in central Bogotá.) By the time of my last visit in 2019, more than eight million people had been displaced.

In 1986, large land-owners had thirty-six per cent of the land; by 2011, they controlled 53.6 per cent of the land.

The violence

Media depictions of Colombians, with the drug lord Pablo Escobar as an archetype, have not served its people well. Yes, the violence is real. I think each of the Colombians I know has been touched within their immediate families by war and crime. A child watches a man be murdered in their father’s apartment. A teenager is witness to the killing of another teen and the whole family flees to Venezuela. A middle-class family surrenders its modest savings to extortion after a parent is kidnapped by one of the guerrilla armies. A local bank manager becomes aware that the security firm that delivers cash to the ATMs is pilfering money, and that senior management allows them to do so; he and his family leave for Canada. While I talk with a human rights defender in Bogotá, I am distracted by the bullet hole in her office window. 

But Colombia also produces countless stories of people who work for justice, peace and reconciliation within and among communities. Against all odds, they restore “community ways of thinking.” At all stages of my decades of travel in Colombia, there was time for friendship: a coffee, una cerveza, a conversation, dancing, or a hike in the hills above Bogotá. And now, after more than sixty years of war and despite a new crop of hard-right politicians, they’re still working toward “total peace.” 

Fr. Javier is mourned by many and will be missed, but there are thousands more inspired by his vision who will carry on the labour for peace with justice.

In reading many tributes yesterday and this morning, I am struck by his impact far beyond the Catholic religious communities. Here is what Bishop Luis Andres Caicedo of the Colombian Methodist Church wrote in a Facebook post:

“To follow the path of Father Javier Giraldo is to understand that peace is not built from silence in the face of injustice, but from truth, dignity and commitment with those who have suffered most. 

“May his path continue to engage us and our commitment to peace be also a commitment to justice and life.”

Our season of fire

by Jim Hodgson

Summerland – both my hometown and the site of my so-called “retirement” – made national and global headlines over the past 10 days because of that ultra-fast-moving wildfire that ignited just west of town on Friday evening, August 7.

The fire, frightening as it was and devastating as it is for those who lost homes and jobs because of it, brought out the best among neighbours: from the first minutes, people helped each other. Soon, residents of Penticton and other communities welcomed 20,000 evacuees from Summerland, Peachland and the smaller communities like Faulder and Meadow Valley to the west. I am grateful to neighbours, first responders, and the fire-fighters who came from near and far (gracias, México!) to help control the fire. I’ll say a bit more about my situation below.

Over the summer, I had been pondering the concept of development as I have been using it in my Unwrapping Development blog posts – mostly the international sort that attempts (and often fails) to improve livelihoods in less-privileged parts of the world – and the way the word development gets bandied around in local, provincial and Canadian politics.

By way of illustration, I was going to write about a conflict over a proposed gravel pit mine in Garnet Valley, the northwest part of Summerland. In July, the provincial government of British Columbia re-ignited public debate over the gravel pit. Those of us who opposed the proposal thought we had won when a B.C. Supreme Court judge quashed it in February.

But no. It seems provincial mining laws can override opposition from the municipal council, the regional district (like a county in other places), residents, the Okanagan Nation Alliance and the Penticton Indian Band.

Garnet Valley, like nearby Prairie Valley, Cartwright Mountain and the mountains between Garnet Vally and Okanagan Lake, suffered still-not fully known damage in the recent fire. But the human and ecological concerns about the proposed gravel pit remain. Over time, plants and trees will grow again, and wildlife return. Better, however, with no gravel pit!

Our journey

David and I had left Summerland Wednesday, Aug. 5 before the fire for a visit to Ottawa. When the fire erupted, we talked about whether to try to return early or not. We chose to remain in Ottawa until our scheduled return Tuesday, Aug. 10. By then, it was clear to us that we needed to go back.

Getting there, however, turned into our own Odyssey, or as David called it, our own Amazing Race Canada. Our flights were cancelled, re-scheduled, and cancelled again because of heavy smoke at Kelowna airport. We talked the airline into taking us as far as Calgary, thinking that then we could rent a car and drive to Kelowna, retrieve our car there, and then drive on to Penticton to re-connect with family and retrieve our cat. 

“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” as John Lennon sang, and no sooner than the new flights were confirmed, car rented and motel room booked, the plans fell apart. Avis became my Cyclops, and hotels.com my Poseidon. I eventually won both battles, however, and we were able to buy (expensive) tickets on a late-night flight from Calgary to Kelowna. We got the car back and spent the night in a motel in East Kelowna. 

The next day, we made the long detour to Penticton, arriving there mid-afternoon. We got ourselves sorted out with the good people of B.C. Emergency Support Services, recovered our cat Chia, and settled into a hotel in Oliver.

This of course is a story very different from those of people I know who survived the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or the more recent earthquakes in Venezuela and Colombia. Mine were, as we sometimes joke, first-world problems. We have enough money to absorb some stupid mistakes; we have insurance; we have governments capable of providing assistance.

When I write about development, it has to included capacity for disaster-response just as it must respect the principle of subsidiarity (prominent in Catholic social teaching): community challenges should be handled by the most local authority possible. A higher authority should only assist, support, or coordinate when a lower group cannot do the job alone.

We have a home to go back to and we’ll work with others to clean up and where necessary, re-build. And, more than ever, we must evoke ecological concerns about development. What we do in the name of development continues to affect the climate. Every summer is becoming a season of dread.