Haitians in New York City are flocking in great numbers
to the campaign of challenger Bernie Sanders, hoping to
give leading Democratic Party presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton a little payback for her meddling in
Haiti’s 2010-11 election when she was the U.S. Secretary
of State.On the evening of Apr. 12, about 15 Haitians
gathered at the Sanders mobilizing office at 1300
Flatbush Ave., corner of Foster Ave., to plan canvassing
routes and lawn sign distribution for the campaign.
“We had a good meeting, and everyone is very
motivated,” said Marlène Jean-Noel, a veteran Haitian
activist who had proposed a Haitian march and rally with
Sanders the day before to Nadya Stevens, NY State
Director for Bernie 2016. Jean-Noel had gone to the
Sanders campaign headquarters in Gowanus with a
delegation from a recently formed “Haitians for Bernie
Sanders” coalition, one of at least three which have
popped up in the New York Haitian community.
“If Haitians unite in a strategic alliance behind
the Sanders campaign, this can influence large sectors
of the black American Democratic Party base who are
either fooled by the Clinton campaign’s propaganda or,
if they sympathize with Sanders’ message, as many do,
are fearful that he cannot win,” Jean-Noel’s coalition
wrote in a statement which was given to Stevens.
“If Sanders wins New York State
[in the Apr. 19 primary], this will be a
crushing blow to Hillary Clinton, not just in terms of
its large number of delegates, but symbolically and
psychologically, because she was the state’s senator.”
Haitians are primarily angry that Hillary
intervened in Haiti’s sovereign elections to make
Haitian President Michel Martelly president in 2011. But
they also condemn her for fighting the Haitian
Parliament’s efforts in 2009 to raise the Haitian
minimum wage to $5 a day (winning $3 instead), impeding
exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return home in
2011, and, after the 2010 earthquake, unilaterally
deploying in Haiti without permission 22,000 U.S.
troops, who brought more guns than gauze. Clinton also
always supported MINUSTAH, the hugely unpopular UN
military occupation of Haiti, first deployed after the
2004 coup d’état against Aristide.
Haitian ire also comes from the record of Bill
Clinton, who is blamed for hijacking the post-earthquake
Interim Haiti Recovery Commission’s $13 billion in
international aid to build sweatshops and luxury hotels
and for destroying Haiti’s rice production by dumping
cheap Arkansas rice on the country. (Clinton now
publicly admits that this was a “terrible mistake,” the
consequences of which he “must live with for the rest of
my life.”)
On Sun., Apr. 17 at 3 p.m., Haitians will join in
a rally outside Clinton campaign headquarters at 1
Pierrepont St. in Brooklyn to denounce her role not only
in Haiti, but in Honduras, Libya, Syria, and the Ukraine
as well.
“Always a hawk, she was a fervent supporter of
the attack on Iraq and not only supported the invasion
of Afghanistan but pushed for even greater involvement,”
the international coalition organizing that rally wrote.
With perfect timing, on Apr. 11,
Counterpunch
published an account of how Clinton used her “soft
power” to shoehorn Martelly into office. The article was
an excerpt from the recent book “International
Crossroads and Failures in Haiti” by Ricardo
Seitenfus, a Brazilian law professor who was the
Organization of American States (OAS) Special
Representative to Haiti from 2009 to 2011.
After the earthquake, Hillary’s “idea was to
transform Haiti into a Taiwan of the Caribbean, with
maquiladoras,
an apparel industry, tourism, and call centers,”
Seitenfus explained. “These would be the niche sectors
that would guide the new cooperation framework. In this
plan, the particularities of Haiti itself didn’t matter
much.”
Seitenfus explains how in a December 2010
diplomatic meeting on Haiti’s election crisis, he and
then Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive turned back the
U.S. Ambassador and his allies who had “plotted a coup
against Haitian President René Préval.” However, the
coup would come a month later, Seitenfus explained, when
“on Sunday, January 30, 2011, the unavoidable foreign
actor in the recurring Haitian political crisis decided
to put an end to the dispute. Hillary Clinton had
arrived in Port-au-Prince.”
Seitenfus masterfully relates how, with the
couched euphemisms of a Mafia don, Hillary commanded
Préval, without doing so, to withdraw his protégé, Jude
Célestin, from the presidential race if he wanted to
reserve for himself “a special place in the pantheon of
Haiti’s history and the struggle for democracy in the
continent.”
“Préval replied with an emotive, albeit enigmatic
smile,” Seitenfus concludes. “It was only him who knew
that the crisis had reached its epilogue at that
moment.”
Clinton has a few Haitian-American elected
officials supporting her, like New York State
Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte. However, those
endorsements don’t count for much among the Haitian
grassroots, where influential radios, like Radio Panou,
are running pro-Sanders spots.
Bernie Sanders has beaten Hillary Clinton in
seven out
of the past eight primaries, but if she loses New York,
it could be her Waterloo. Haitians are pushing hard to
make it just that.
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