Protests demanding that the Haitian government deliver on promised development projects rocked neighborhoods around Port-au-Prince this week. At press time, one boy was killed and four other people injured in the violence.

Meanwhile, in Haiti’s northeast, tensions are growing over the government’s proposal to build "free trade zone" assembly factories on the region’s most fertile farmland (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 4, 4/20/2002).

On Apr. 29 and 30, angry demonstrators around the capital erected burning tire barricades, threw rocks and bottles at cars, and broke some car windows to protest unfulfilled government promises. The police’s elite crowd-control unit -- the CIMO -- was deployed but was unable to keep up with the demonstrations which ignited and reignited like brush-fires in teeming quarters such as Carrefour, Delmas, and Nazon.

"Healthcare, a professional school, a telephone calling center, piped water, and jobs for our militants in state offices: the president himself made a series of such promises," a demonstrator in the Carrefour neighborhood of Solino said. "He as to keep them."

Marc Arthur Alexandre, a 12-year-old boy, was killed on his way to school when someone in a car driving past demonstrators lowered the window and fired at them. "My little boy was standing beside me when the bullet hit him," his distraught mother explained on Radio Kinase. "I saw his guts begin to spill out, so I wrapped up his stomach and ran with him to the hospital... but he died."

Another demonstrator was shot in the shoulder and one broke his leg fleeing from police. As the street battles heated up, so did the demonstrators’ anger. "I am not in the Lavalas anymore," one protestor said to Radio Haïti Inter, referring to the name of the political movement which brought President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1991 and 2001. "This is a Lavalas which smells, a garbage Lavalas. The country has to change."

Similar rebellions have been occurring elsewhere. Last week, residents of the capital’s Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood held protests because of unfulfilled promises from Aristide. For several days, protestors have closed the wharf which serves boats sailing to the city of Jérémie, whose promised repairs are long overdue. In Pétion-Ville, municipal workers walked off the job because they have not been paid for ten months.

May Day also promises to be filled with protests. The National Popular Party (PPN) announced that 3000 peasants from their branches around the country would march on the National Palace to demand agrarian reform and justice.

Another May Day demonstration in the northeast town of Ouanaminthe may be foiled, the AlterPresse news agency reported. Agronomists, human rights workers, and political activists were planning to demonstrate their solidarity with peasants of the area protesting a planned "free trade zone," whose ground-breaking ceremony was held near the town earlier this month. "But on Monday, Apr. 29, an official vehicle of the [Northeast] department’s central government representative urged the peasants with megaphones to assemble for the distribution of tools on the same day and in the same place as the planned solidarity activity," the agency reports.

"We don’t want a confrontation with anybody," one of the demonstration organizers told AlterPresse. "We are only defending our rights. And we informed all the Ouanaminthe authorities (the police and others) about the demonstration which has long been planned. The population was preparing to support us in our just demands."

Crackdown on Workers in St. Raphael
Batay Ouvriyè warning of danger of a massacre

by Charles Arthur, Haiti Support Group

In a statement issued on Apr. 24, the Haitian workers' organization, Batay Ouvriyè, denounced a month-long wave of violent repression endured by workers and peasants at the Guacimal orange plantation at St. Raphael in northern Haiti. The violence perpetrated by police, acting in collusion with the local landowners and agents of the Guacimal company, has forced workers in the area to go into hiding.

Two peasant farmers have been imprisoned without trial for over a month, while another was arbitrarily arrested last week. One worker was brutally beaten up on Mar. 22 but when he tried to file a legal complaint, the judge at the St. Raphael court refused to hear him and made it clear he was not concerned with the fate of the Guacimal workers.

The main targets of the repression are members of the St. Raphael orange workers' union and a local association of peasant farmers, both of which have been involved in a long and bitter dispute with the Cap-Haïtien-based Guacimal company.

The Haitian state authorities have refused to back the workers' legitimate struggle for union rights and collective bargaining, and the judiciary has openly sided with the ruling class in land disputes. Batay Ouvriyè says that these factors have created the context where the local bosses and landowners have decided to get rid of, to eliminate, all those who work and cultivate the plantation land.

Batay Ouvriyè is warning that the situation is now so dire that there may be a repeat of the massacres seen in earlier times, such as those at Piatre and Gervais. Batay Ouvriyè is calling on all organised workers and all progressive forces to mobilize themselves to support the St. Raphael workers, and to force the state and the ruling class to respect workers' rights.

The St. Raphael workers, who grow and harvest oranges that provide orange extract for European companies such as Remy Cointreau, formed a union in late 2000 in the hope of negotiating improved pay and conditions. However, the Guacimal management refused to even recognize the union's existence, and used every trick in the book to try and crush it.

An international solidarity campaign attempted to press Guacimal share-holder and principal client, the Paris-based drinks giant Remy Cointreau, to take action in support of the workers' legitimate rights. For months, Remy Cointreau said it was doing what it could to make its junior partner in Haiti play fair, then suddenly, at the beginning of this year, Remy Cointreau announced that it had only ever been a client, and that the problems at Guacimal obliged it to end its involvement in Haiti and buy its orange extract for the Cointreau liqueur elsewhere. However, weeks after this announcement, Guacimal boss, Nonce Zephir, told a reporter from the British newspaper, The Observer, that he had not heard of any changes in Guacimal's relationship with Remy Cointreau.

Meanwhile, the peasant farmers of the area, many of whom are related to the orange plantation workers, have grown increasingly angry with the Guacimal company's failure to carry out the improvements to local infrastructure that formed part of the leasing agreement when the plantation land was acquired by Guacimal over forty years ago. Their frustration boiled over when guards at the Guacimal orange plantation began discriminating against peasant farmers connected to the workers' union by preventing them from cultivating plots of land between the orange trees during the summer.

In early March some peasants began cutting down orange trees in protest. A short time later, Myrtho Julien, the departmental delegate of President Aristide (there is one for each of the country's nine departments, and they act as a link between the executive and the local government) visited the St. Raphael fields. He met with various officials, including the police, and declared his opposition to the tree-cutting. Immediately after this, the wave of repression of workers and peasants began in earnest.

The situation has been further aggravated by the installation of a new mayor of St. Raphael in place of Fernand Sévère who was shot dead in Dec. 2001. (The elected representative of the region - the member of Parliament or Deputy - was arrested and charged with involvement in the murder, and remains jailed to date.) Whereas the Deputy had sympathized with the Guacimal workers, the murdered mayor had clearly opposed them, and in Feb. 2001 had personally intervened to break a workers' strike at the plantation. Consequently, the decision, taken in late March 2002, to install the brother of the murdered Fernand Sévère as the new Mayor, has clearly impacted negatively on the workers' struggle.

For more background on this story, see the Batay Ouvriyè web site:
http://www.ifrance.com/syndicats-bo-haiti

or the Haiti Support Group web site:
http://www.gn.apc.org/haitisupport

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The Haiti Support Group is a London-based organization in solidarity with the Haitian people's struggle for justice, participatory democracy and equitable development since 1992.