Category: haiti

AG2024_2100729a or On a fait ce qu’on pouvait

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AG2024_2100729a

Lors d’un constat effectué au lendemain de l’attaque, des trousseaux de clés de la prison, des uniformes de police ainsi que des documents administratifs ont été retrouvés à même le sol, selon un des deux rapports obtenus par AyiboPost. Les cadenas et barrières pour la plupart étaient brisés.

«On a fait ce qu’on pouvait», déclare à AyiboPost Pierre René François, le directeur de la DAP. «On n’avait pas seulement le pénitencier national à consolider», dit-il. «Il y avait aussi le palais national, la base de l’Unité Départementale de Maintien de l’Ordre (UDMO), le commissariat de Port-au-Prince, l’aéroport… les bandits étaient partout et ce n’était pas facile à gérer.»

Widlore Mérancourt et Rolph Louis-Jeune for Ayibopost

It is easy to criticize US/UN involvement in Haiti. But who will help in maintaining some sense of order? And how?

There is enough evidence to charge in the assassination of

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Jacqueline Charles and Jay Weaver reports in the Miami Herald.

Investigative Judge Walther Wesser Voltaire, has sent his 122-page indictment, in the assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse. He has charged Martine Moïse and nearly 50 others in the assassination conspiracy.

In addition to Martine Moïse, the judge indicted [former Prime Minister Claude] Joseph and ex-Police Chief Léon Charles. Both were in office when Moïse was gunned down inside his home in the middle of the night. They are among 10 former government officials or allies of the president who, according to Voltaire, had “an active participation” in the events leading up to his shocking death.

L’ordonnance [PDF] du juge de l’instruction directement d’une source impliquée dans le dossier.

44 personnes sont arrêtées en Haïti dans le cadre de ce dossier. Des onze suspects se retrouvant devant la justice américaine, cinq ont déjà plaidé coupables. –Widlore Mérancourt et Jérome Wendy Norestyl pour Ayibopost.

The former chief of Haiti’s National Police, Léon Charles, who was police chief when Moïse was killed and now serves as Haiti’s permanent representative to the Organization of the American States, faces the most serious charges: murder; attempted murder; possession and illegal carrying of weapons; conspiracy against the internal security of the state; and criminal association. NPR.

Haiti, Dominican Republic, Matanzas

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Jacqueline Charles reports, for Miami Herald, on the closed border between Dominican Republic and Haiti.

“What is fundamental in all of this is the color of the skin, which shows that even… the Black Dominican population is in danger,” said [Edwin] Paraison.

But the fear that anyone who is of a darker hue can be arrested and detained because authorities think they are Haitian isn’t isolated to Black Dominicans. Last November, after the country launched mass deportations of Haitians, the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo warned African-American visitors they could be mistaken for being Haitian and be detained and deported to Haiti.

Dominican officials rejected the U.S. criticism and said the travel alert had negatively affected tourism. Testifying before a congressional committee four months later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the warning.

[…]

“… there is a reality that exists, it’s racism. But the authorities don’t acknowledge it and they hate it when people talk about it,” she said. “And when you speak about it, you become the person who is in danger, who is targeted.” That means, she said, the Dominican Republic remains unable to tackle the issue of racism.

“Cristina is not the first Dominican who has been confused with being Haitian and then sent to Haiti,” she said. “But what has made this case even more grave is that she is someone who suffers from mental problems and the authorities did not take this into consideration. It shows how Dominican immigration works.”

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macandal

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Cameron Rowland, macandal, 2023 Oxalic acid 37.5 x 30.5 x 67 cm Packets of materials that could invoke spirits, protect against punishment, and poison slave masters were called macandals. They were at the center of a plot in 1757 to poison all the white people in Haiti. The plot was organized by hundreds of enslaved and free black people. All macandals were subsequently outlawed. Their trade and use continued despite their criminalization. Enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world used arsenic, manioc juice, ground glass, and oxalic acid to poison overseers, masters, masters’ children, and livestock. Oxalic acid is a stain remover and household cleaner.

Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i

Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
10 February 2023 – 15 October 2023

Negations of accumulation manifested in theft, fugitivity, praise meetings, and plots.[53] Stealing the crops, eating the livestock, and refusing to work diminished the output of the plantation.[54] The formation of fugitive communities emptied the plantation of its value.[55] Sharing information evaded supervisory control.[56] Coordinated poisonings of masters and overseers instilled fear of the slave population.[57] Arson destroyed sugar mills, masters’ houses, and entire fields, inflicting property damage and halting production.[58] These black negations are unwritten losses. They are neither failed nor successful. Their impact is incalculable. They operate beyond the rubrics of value and production. Rather they were grounded in “the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” of blackness.[59]

Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i

Maxwell Graham / Essex Street. Image via C&.