Black Immigrant Daily News

Every day when Daniel Marie Carmel’s husband put on his flak vest and walked out the door for another day of fighting Haiti’s gangs, she wondered if he would come home that night.

Friday was the day her smiling spouse of 18 years, Ricken Staniclasse, didn’t.

One of the country’s nearly 200 gangs ambushed his police unit that morning, sending gunfire echoing through the streets in an unexpected area — a mansion-lined stretch of the country’s capital, Port-Au-Prince.

A gang lead by Lionel Lazarre battled the police patrol under the sweltering Caribbean heat as officers desperately called for backup. But help never came, the country’s police union said.

The fighting killed three officers, hospitalised a fourth with bullet wounds and left the 44-year-old Staniclasse missing.

Carmel, meanwhile, was terrified for herself and their three children.

“My husband was fighting a lot with the gangs, and we don’t know what could happen to us,” Carmel, 43, said while curled up on her red couch surrounded by neighbours. “I can’t sleep at the house anymore because I don’t know what could happen to us.”

The firefight was just the latest example of how Haitian gangs have grown in power and expanded in reach, leaving much of the population terrorised.

While the United Nations estimates that 60 per cent of Port-Au-Prince is controlled by the gangs, nowadays most Haitians on the street reckon that number is closer to 100 per cent.

Haiti has struggled with endemic gang violence for years, but the country spiraled into lawlessness after the 2021 killing of former President Jovenel Mo?se.

Powerful gangs have taken advantage of the political chaos and discontent with the current government led by Prime Minister Ariel Henry to further consolidate their control.

The government has failed to ease the violence, forcing many to flee their homes. News of rapes, kidnappings and ambushes on police have become the new norm.

Jolicoeur Allande Serge, director of the police unit that was attacked, said the Friday blitz in the Petion-Ville neighbourhood was a sign of that. He noted that moving into upper class areas “benefits (the gangs’) economic interests.”

Kidnappings and ransoms as high as $1 million have been a key part of the financing for such armed groups.

Meanwhile, police units struggle to keep up.

While Canada and the United States have sent armored vehicles and other supplies to Haiti, law enforcement officials say it is just a fraction of what they really need.

Tensions remained high Saturday, and in the afternoon Serge stood among a pack of armored trucks dented with bullet strikes. Officers holding automatic weapons, their faces covered by black masks, bustled about.

A group of 50 officers was returning to the area where they fought Friday night to try to break a gang blockade and search for the missing officer, Staniclasse.

“I lost three men … We’re not scared. We’re frustrated because we don’t have enough equipment to fight,” Serge said as he watched a convoy of police trucks roll out from the station. “We need ammo, helmets, armored vehicles.”

Analysts expect the bloodshed to get worse, especially after Haiti’s final 10 elected officers ended their Senate terms in early January, leaving the parliament and presidency unfilled because the government has failed to hold elections.

Critics say that has turned Haiti into a “de-facto dictatorship.”

Meanwhile, people like Daniel Marie Carmel feel hope drain for their country. Carmel said her husband always hoped he could help clean up his city. Together, they built a home and a life together. Their 11-year-old son dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps.

“He loved people, he loved to help people,” she said of her husband.

But two years ago, violence began to get so bad in their neighbourhood that they applied for a visa to migrate to the United States, hoping to join an exodus of people leaving Haiti. They never got a reply.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, but I’m worried,” she said. “If we were able to leave the country, my husband would be alive.”

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Black Immigrant Daily News

By Sir Ronald Sanders

Many countries in South America are now in a state of troubling unease. Recent events in Peru have catapulted it to the forefront of security concerns in all its dimensions. But worry also exists about other countries which are tiptoeing through political minefields that could explode overnight.

Although the causes of these conditions of dysphoria are ascribed to hostilities between political parties in their constant battles to control power, the root of the problem lies in inequality, injustice and racial and ethnic discrimination.

The dispossessed, throughout Latin America, found a voice and a champion among left-leaning parties which demand change. The elite and the privileged, including the military, maintain their economic and social advantage through right wing political parties and alliances with powerful multinational companies from North America and Western Europe. The two sides are persistently in conflict.

These conditions have been portrayed in the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the novels of Isabelle Allende, Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa among others; and in the painstaking research and raw descriptions in the works of Marie Arana and Eduardo Galeano.

In his seminal work, Open Veins of Latin America, in one sentence, Galeano poignantly describes the structural divide in many Latin American societies – “The system has multiplied hunger and fear; wealth has become more and more concentrated, poverty more and more widespread. That is recognized by the documents of specialized international organizations in whose aseptic vocabulary our oppressed territories are ‘countries in the process of development’ and the pitiless impoverishment of the working class is ‘regressive income distribution’.”

And, inasmuch as the judgement may seem harsh, there is a sobering truth in Marie Arana’s assertion in, Silver, Stone and Sword, that “… extractive societies such as Latin America’s are built on social injustice. They are designed and maintained by a ruling class whose primary goal is to enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. They thrive when absolute privilege reigns over absolute poverty”.

None of this is to say that, over the years, progressive elements in Latin America have not succeeded in pushing for institutional change. They have been aided in the work of the United Nations Human Rights bodies, and in the efforts of the Inter-American Commission and Court on Human Rights. Authoritative external organizations have been hugely instrumental in pushing governments to adopt international treaties on human rights and non-discrimination.

But adherence to treaties and laws is only as good as effective implementation of their values. In this connection, not all law enforcement agencies and governments have been as dutiful as they could have been. Thus, inequality has continued and the desire by the disadvantaged to overturn it has escalated.

The role of the military has also not been neutral or respectful of their constitutional requirement to be apolitical servants of the executive branch and subordinate to their civilian commander-in-chief, the President. As social unrest escalated throughout Latin America in the decades between 1964 and 1985, military dictatorships took control in several countries including Brazil, (1964), Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973), and Argentina (1976).

It was the military that pressured Evo Morales in November 2019 to abandon his disputed Presidency in Bolivia. The same military acted heavy-handedly to subdue street protests over the controversial installation into the Presidency of the right-wing, opposition representative Jeanine A?ez.

While in Argentina and Chile, the return to democratic regimes was “accompanied by transitional justice, a reckoning with the past and a recognition that the armed forces had strayed from their constitutional mission”, as one political commentator put it, the role of the military in Brazil and Peru remains questionable.

Brazil’s President Lula da Silva dismissed the country’s army chief, General Julio Cesar de Arruda, in the aftermath of the storming of several government buildings by the supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro on January 8. Lula said he suspected collusion by “people in the armed forces”.

In Peru, where elected President, Pedro Castillo, was ousted on December 8, after an ill-advised and clumsy attempt to suspend the Congress, which was seeking to impeach him, his vice-president, Dina Boluarte, was sworn in to replace him. He was carted off to prison at a police base that triggered protests in the rural areas and poorer neighbourhoods in the capital.

In response, police raided San Marcos University, detaining hundreds of protestors. This was part of a violent crackdown on the protestors which has left many dead or seriously injured. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Peru condemned the Peruvian administration over the violence used to curb the protests.

But the fundamental problems, driving the unrest remains ignored – a huge gap between rich and the poor, particularly the people in the South of the country who feel neglected by its institutions and, most of all, its hugely unpopular congress, which is largely viewed as a tool of the rich and powerful.

Hemispheric institutions, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), should seek a constructive role in Peru, and they must keep a watchful eye on the military and right-wing forces in Brazil which may yet turn on President Lula.

It is difficult to see what practical role the OAS can play in resolving the political issues in Peru, but, at the very least, the member states must let the Peruvian government know that further brutality against protestors will receive the strongest condemnation; and, instead, they should seek meaningful dialogue to address the deep-rooted issues in the country.

In the meantime, Caribbean governments and political parties should ensure that, in their own countries, economic inequalities must be discouraged. Dissatisfaction is fuelling the fire of unrest in Peru and other Latin American countries; it must not spread to the Caribbean.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The Caribbean Development Bank, CDB, will be backing a study on regional airlift amid early moves to find a solution to the long-standing dearth of transportation that has been hobbled by limitations on free movement within Caricom and exacerbated by the collapse of LIAT airline two to three years ago.

For the Eastern Caribbean, the airline’s failure in 2020 cut airlift from 500 weekly flights to 50 now.

“We don’t have to have a critical mass of political will for us to get to a harmonious solution,” said CDB Vice-President Isaac Solomon at the bank’s annual news conference. But, he added, “we are encouraged because at least seven governments approached us in August last year to begin the study … it is the start of a process.”

A long-term resolution would require a system that addresses the cost of transportation, regulatory issues around transport, and the bottlenecks that hamper seamless movement from country to country.

CDB President Dr Hyginus ‘Gene’ Leon said the bank views dependable and cost-effective air transportation services as essential for the transformation of several of the region’s economies.

“Consequently, to safeguard the region’s future, governments need to take decisive and integrated action to reform the air transportation operating environment,” he said at the news conference.

He acknowledged that there would be a series of hurdles and issues to overcome, including the assets required, the financing of those assets, as well as the legal framework and environment in which those assets would be deployed.

“Then you have to have the political arrangements in place that would say we are all benefiting from this. Networks cannot exist in segments … they have to exist in their entirety, and so connectivity of a network becomes a global public good,” the CDB president said.

Leon said establishing a regional transportation system would require two phases, starting with free movement among the 15-member Caricom bloc.

“That is a major problem not only for the people, but equally for our heads of state, our governments … ,” he said.

“Now, if we are citizens of the region, why can’t we ask for that right to be able to move freely across the region? So transportation is part of the CSME [Caricom Single Market & Economy] issue that we have to solve. We need to solve this urgent part now, and how we do it may or may not be optimal or efficient.”

But: “We need to get a service going,” Leon added.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

Reflecting on the “broken promises” they have been left with, a group of former LIAT employees has blasted the Mia Mottley administration for failing to pay the severance the airline has owed them for more than two years.

The distraught workers noted that not even a petition they started nine months ago to raise awareness of their plight has resonated with the Barbados Government.

“Despite 2, 273 [people] signing the petition which was submitted to the Clerk of Parliament in Barbados on June 14, 2022, unfortunately, our plight has once again fallen on deaf ears. Many of the former employees across the region are still depressed and are facing dire circumstances despite their best efforts to rebound after not being compensated in any way since 2020. Other public appeals and petitions have also been ignored,” the group told Barbados TODAY.

“The shareholder governments, namely Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines should hold their heads in shame as they have left hundreds of their citizens and former employees in the dark as it pertains to the status of the severance due,” the retrenched airline staff added.

In the case of Barbados, the ex-employees here said Prime Minister Mottley had promised to provide an update back in June 2022, but that has not materialised.

“To date, those staffers have heard nothing from her on what the Barbados Government is doing to fulfil their promise of assisting in getting the issue of the owed severance resolved for the workers. Surely, Prime Minister Mottley could do much more to solve this unjust situation,” the ex-employees of the Antigua-based airline declared.

Minister of Tourism and International Transport Ian Gooding-Edghill has told Barbados TODAY he will look into the matter.

Meanwhile, the former workers have urged the leaders of Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Dominica to follow the lead of their St Lucian counterpart who last month paid severance in the form of bond certificates to 47 citizens of that country who were among the hundreds of LIAT workers made redundant in 2020.

“Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre of St Lucia, a non-shareholder of LIAT 1974 LTD, heard the plight of the former workers from his island and sought to put an end to it. He made a promise and delivered on it. In December 2022, Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre awarded all former workers from St Lucia 100 per cent of the value of their severance owed to them by LIAT 1974 LTD.

“Yet, the four other governments of Antigua, Barbados, Dominica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines who are major shareholders of LIAT cannot find it in their hearts to end the suffering of the remaining staff members. We will not be silent about this issue! We will not stop speaking out about this injustice. We are still suffering and need to have this issue rectified immediately,” contended the former staff.

“Pay us what we are owed if there is an ounce of decency left,” they said.

They drew reference to a widely publicised offer of a 50 per cent severance payment made to the ex-workers by the Antigua and Barbuda government.

Describing that as “nothing more than a golden calf”, they said most of the staff had turned it down as it required them “to sign away their rights to their legal entitlement to full severance”.

“Some of the former employees who took that offer after being owed hundreds of thousands of dollars ended up receiving less than five per cent of what they were owed with many still waiting for funds to be sent to their accounts. Also, it is alleged that, to date, they have not received the land or bonds component that was communicated to be included in the settlement,” they said.

The group added that not only were the former employees not fully paid but promises of new employment had gone unfulfilled. “They were… promised jobs that were purportedly negotiated by the government with an airline in the United States of America, which proved to be futile as many who applied were immediately denied on the basis of not having green cards,” the former workers claimed.

They added that the administrator of LIAT 1974 LTD who was to submit a report on the resuscitation plan for the airline to the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Court has been tight-lipped and had not said a word to the employees on when they can expect what is due to them.

“Yet the company continues to fly one plane under the guise of administration, while the staff remains without their due. This should not have been permitted and should not continue. The former staff of LIAT 1974 LTD continue to be treated unfairly and have been kept in the dark for the past two and a half years. Do you think this is right?” they asked.

“How would you feel if you were not paid for over two and a half years with no explanation as to when and if you would receive your severance?”

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