The social and trade union movement wants to break the cycle of crises and interference in Haiti

The social and trade union movement wants to break the cycle of crises and interference in Haiti

The international trade union meeting of 25 and 26 January 2023 in Ouanaminthe, Haiti led to a statement calling for a “transition of rupture” based on the implementation of the decent work agenda, social justice measures and public policies to ensure access to social services.

(Frédéric Thomas)

The 7th February 2023 marked the 37th anniversary of the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) and the second year without a legal government in Haiti. Former president Jovenel Moïse, having completed his term in office on 7 February 2021, had refused to step down and intended to govern for another year pending the organisation of elections and a referendum on the constitution. He was assassinated on 7 July 2021 and since then it is the prime minister, Ariel Henry, who is governing or pretending to govern the country. At present, from the lowest to the highest levels of the state, there is not a single democratically elected official in Haiti.

The latest UN report, published in January, paints an apocalyptic picture: inflation is skyrocketing, food insecurity is growing, cholera is spreading and impunity reigns supreme. Organised gang-related violence has meanwhile reached proportions not seen “for decades”. Homicides increased by over 35 per cent and kidnappings by 100 per cent between 2021 and 2022, and (systematic) rape continues to be used as “a strategy to instil fear in communities”.

If you follow the news, read the reports and listen to the humanitarian workers, the whole country seems to have collapsed over the last four years. The words ‘abyss’ and ‘chaos’ were often used by the Haitians speaking at the international trade union gathering in Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican-Haitian border, on 25 and 26 January 2023.

But, unlike the narrative of the international media and diplomacy, which is tinged with a neocolonial and complacently fatalistic outlook, all of them insisted on the fabricated and organised nature of this chaos, or even its “functional” dimension, as well as the international community’s share of responsibility in provoking and exacerbating the current crisis.

The event, organised by the CTH and CTSP, both affiliated to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), had two objectives: to (re)launch an international solidarity campaign with Haiti, based on the analyses and the demands of Haitian organisations in general and, more specifically, the “roadmap” of the CTH and CTSP, and to reaffirm that the trade unions are anchored in the Haitian social movement and fully committed to the project to secure a “transition of rupture”.

A country held hostage

Thamara Etienne is a young woman in her twenties, widowed, with a three-year-old son, and living with her mother, whom she supports financially. When asked what her dreams are, the union member who works in a textile factory, replies: “To finish my studies and find a normal job, a decent job.”* But how can we talk about decent jobs, decent work, when more than 90 per cent of workers operate in the informal sector, when production is concentrated in free trade or export processing zones, and when the economy, dominated by a few families, is reduced to little more than an import-export counter?

The announcement, at the beginning of February 2023, that the South Korean multinational, Sae-A, was dismissing 3,500 workers, is the culmination of the recent wave of dismissals that has hit the Haitian textile sector. With this simple announcement, Sae-A, the main employer in the Caracol Industrial Park (PIC), the showcase of the “Haiti is open for business” campaign, clearly illustrates the failure of the development strategy pursued over the last few decades.

Although the idea predated the 2010 earthquake, the country’s reconstruction moved it along at a much greater speed. In contrast to so many poorly designed, uncoordinated and unfinished projects, the PIC was intended to exemplify the success of public-private partnerships, bolstered by international aid; Caracol was the main US cooperation project designed to supposedly help Haiti “build back better”.

A symbol of the new Haiti, the PIC was meant to create 65,000 jobs and turn the country into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean”. At the height of its production output, the largest export processing zone in Haiti employed 20,000 people, on very low wages, and the entire textile subcontracting sector employed nearly 60,000 men and (mostly) women workers. Rather than facilitating Haiti’s industrialisation and development, it kept the country at the bottom of the international division of labour and made it entirely dependent on the United States, which set all the terms and conditions and absorbed all the country’s textile exports.

“These dismissals only serve to aggravate the vicious cycle of poverty in a country where social protection is almost non-existent,” says the Haitian trade union movement.

Yet the poverty, the lack of public policies and the absence of prospects for young people are the recruitment grounds for gangs. “It is easier for a Haitian to have a gun than bread,” laments CTSP president Jean Bonald G. Fatal. “Haitians and their economy are being held hostage.”

But the Haitian government, indifferent and passive when it comes to the fate of the Haitian people, has not yet reacted to Sae-A’s announcement. Neither has Washington nor the international financial institutions, which were unwavering in their praise, their support and their financing of the CIP and the overall strategy based on export processing zones. Unburdened by such trivial concerns, the Western embassies and the Haitian prime minister, Ariel Henry, were busy discussing the establishment of a new High Transitional Council – the umpteenth attempt to impose their will, under the guise of a “national consensus”, smothering any idea of a transition and, even more so, of a “rupture” – to ensure the holding of elections as soon as possible.

“We are in favour of elections,” says Jacques Belzin, president of the CTH. “But not just any elections: elections that are held under the right conditions, in which people can freely express their will. Elections cannot be held in Haiti at the moment. There are too many problems: armed gangsters – financed by politicians, by the corrupt economic sector – currently occupy more than 60 per cent of the country. If we organise elections under these conditions, we will have a parliament full of legal gangsters, ministers and a president appointed by gangsters.”

Like the EPZ strategy, the Haitian government’s latest plan is doomed to fail. Outward-looking, internationally driven, ignorant of the local situation and without regard for the demands of the social movement, it is creating the economic and political conditions for maintaining the status quo, which Haitians no longer want.

Unfortunately, it is all the more tempting to ignore its catastrophic record and not to learn from past failures when one does not have to suffer the consequences and when it is the Haitian people who pay the price.

Building the new Haiti

The force of events, spoken of by the French revolutionary Saint-Just, is pushing Haitian trade unions to go beyond the traditional framework of their struggle. How can social protection be promoted when social services, which are virtually inaccessible, have been subcontracted out to international NGOs, privatised or simply surrendered to private interests? How can social dialogue be promoted when the state is corrupt and in the hands of an oligarchy that controls the lion’s share of the country’s trade? And how can we defend decent work in the most unequal country in the most unequal continent in the world?

It is impossible to tackle these issues without overhauling the economic model and rethinking public institutions through the lens of popular sovereignty. All the problems faced by the Haitian trade unions are rooted in a series of shocks, such as the North American military occupation (1915-1934), the Duvalier dictatorship, the liberalisation of the economy from 1983 onwards, and the arrival to power in 2011 of Michel Martelly (now the target of Canadian sanctions for his support of armed gangs), followed by his successor Jovenel Moïse. The current outbreak of widespread violence is the latest shock in a series that seals the takeover of the state and the country’s dependence on the international community, in general, and Washington, in particular.

The trade unions were stakeholders in the people’s uprising of 2018-2019 and in the convergence of civil society actors within the Montana Agreement, signed on 30 August 2021, enshrining the consensus based on national sovereignty and the idea of a “transition of rupture”.

The Ouanaminthe Declaration, which closed the international trade union gathering of 25 and 26 January 2023, reaffirmed this convergence and this project, underlining its social dimension: the implementation of the decent work agenda, social justice measures and public policies paying particular attention to women’s rights and ensuring access to social services.

Fighting insecurity and corruption implies dismantling the entire chain of chaos, from the members of the armed gangs and the oligarchy that finances and instrumentalises them, to the state – which is accelerating Haiti’s “gangsterisation” – and the international actors who impose their “solutions”.

The crisis in Haiti is structural. Its resolution requires a transition and a rupture, a break with “the historical cycle of crises, shocks and interference”. It also requires international solidarity to reverse the Western and UN policies that are trapping Haitians in a crisis with no end in sight, mortgaging, as the declaration says, “the construction of the new Haiti to which the people aspire”.

This article has been translated from French by Louise Durkin

* All quotes are from interviews conducted in Ouanaminthe on 25 and 26 January 2023.