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In this way, the Préval government and CIRH appear ready to squander the millions contributed to Haiti by buying land at inflated prices from the bourgeoisie, land which was often stolen or obtained by ruse in the first place.
Land is also needed to grow food for Haiti’s increasingly hungry masses, especially as post-quake humanitarian aid begins to drop off. Haiti’s bourgeoisie and big landowners are more interested in building assembly industries, office buildings and luxury homes, not on developing fields of rice, millet or corn. In the past six months, four new industrial parks, according to one report, have been built to take advantage of Haiti’s $3 a day minimum wage.
This struggle for Haiti’s principal means of production – the land – has now been thrown into sharp relief as sharks and vultures use this moment of a weakened state to expand their real estate holdings, not contribute them to their devastated compatriots.
A good example of this is in Ganthier, a town of about 72,000 located 18 miles east of the capital near the Dominican border. Half the town’s residents are peasant farmers who survive by farming on state lands used as a commons to grow food for over 80 years. But in recent weeks, two businessmen have laid claim to this state land.
Two weeks ago, the businessmen sent out a bulldozer that began to clear the peasants’ plots. The peasants banded together, burned the bulldozer, and blocked the road from the border. The local mayor, Ralph Lapointe sided with the peasants and was arrested for a few hours. He credits his partial freedom to immediate local protests and barricades. His office’s general director was imprisoned for more than 24 hours.
“We are both now under virtual house arrest,” he told journalists from Haiti Liberté and Democracy Now! “My life is in danger if I leave my home. As a government representative, I am supposed to defend the interests of the local population. Instead the judicial authorities are allying themselves with the marauding businessmen and are attacking the peasants and those that defend them, like myself.”
Meanwhile the interlopers, armed with false deeds to the land (the elite’s age-old weapon of choice), have enlisted the police in a manhunt for the leaders of the peasant rebellion against the land grab. Mayor Lapointe identified the two businessmen trying to take the land as Frank Galette and Gérald Brutus. “Because I don’t agree with their actions, they have promised to assassinate me,” the mayor said.
This stand-off in Ganthier does not bode well for Haiti’s reconstruction under the leadership of Préval and the CIRH. To build Haiti back better, Haitian authorities will need to expropriate at least some of the land the elite has stolen and accumulated over the past 200 years. Instead, landowners’ thugs, often in concert with police and UN troops, are brutally uprooting people, often at gunpoint and at night, from spontaneous settlements without giving them any alternative homes. The internally displaced just have to move farther up the mountainsides or further into the Arizona-like desert north of the capital. ...
In this way, the Préval government and CIRH appear ready to squander the millions contributed to Haiti by buying land at inflated prices from the bourgeoisie, land which was often stolen or obtained by ruse in the first place.
Land is also needed to grow food for Haiti’s increasingly hungry masses, especially as post-quake humanitarian aid begins to drop off. Haiti’s bourgeoisie and big landowners are more interested in building assembly industries, office buildings and luxury homes, not on developing fields of rice, millet or corn. In the past six months, four new industrial parks, according to one report, have been built to take advantage of Haiti’s $3 a day minimum wage.
This struggle for Haiti’s principal means of production – the land – has now been thrown into sharp relief as sharks and vultures use this moment of a weakened state to expand their real estate holdings, not contribute them to their devastated compatriots.
A good example of this is in Ganthier, a town of about 72,000 located 18 miles east of the capital near the Dominican border. Half the town’s residents are peasant farmers who survive by farming on state lands used as a commons to grow food for over 80 years. But in recent weeks, two businessmen have laid claim to this state land.
Two weeks ago, the businessmen sent out a bulldozer that began to clear the peasants’ plots. The peasants banded together, burned the bulldozer, and blocked the road from the border. The local mayor, Ralph Lapointe sided with the peasants and was arrested for a few hours. He credits his partial freedom to immediate local protests and barricades. His office’s general director was imprisoned for more than 24 hours.
“We are both now under virtual house arrest,” he told journalists from Haiti Liberté and Democracy Now! “My life is in danger if I leave my home. As a government representative, I am supposed to defend the interests of the local population. Instead the judicial authorities are allying themselves with the marauding businessmen and are attacking the peasants and those that defend them, like myself.”
Meanwhile the interlopers, armed with false deeds to the land (the elite’s age-old weapon of choice), have enlisted the police in a manhunt for the leaders of the peasant rebellion against the land grab. Mayor Lapointe identified the two businessmen trying to take the land as Frank Galette and Gérald Brutus. “Because I don’t agree with their actions, they have promised to assassinate me,” the mayor said.
This stand-off in Ganthier does not bode well for Haiti’s reconstruction under the leadership of Préval and the CIRH. To build Haiti back better, Haitian authorities will need to expropriate at least some of the land the elite has stolen and accumulated over the past 200 years. Instead, landowners’ thugs, often in concert with police and UN troops, are brutally uprooting people, often at gunpoint and at night, from spontaneous settlements without giving them any alternative homes. The internally displaced just have to move farther up the mountainsides or further into the Arizona-like desert north of the capital. ...
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