US Hands off Haiti! For a Socialist Republic in a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Americas
The following is translated from our Brazilian comrades of the Grupo de Trabalhadores Revolucionários do Brasil (GTR-BR)
Haiti is experiencing yet another moment of great instability as state power is disintegrating. Hunger and misery plague the country and armed gangs are spread across the capital, blocking roads and taking over public buildings. A consequence of centuries of control and exploitation by French and later US imperialism of the country.
Haiti had the only successful slave revolution. Its military defeat of France in 1804 sparked the wave of national independence across Latin America led by Simon Bolivar who began his struggle to ‘liberate’ Latin America from the European powers from an already liberated Haiti.
Yet Bolivar refused to come to the aid of Haiti fearing that it might inspire workers and peasants to overthrow the Latin American bourgeoisies. Isolated without support from the Bolivariains, Haiti was re-colonised by France and Napoleon forced the free slaves to pay the price of their freedom as part of the national debt well into the 20th century.
Imperialism and the Latin American bourgeoisies never accepted Haiti’s freedom because it stood out as the only example of a national liberation struggle led by slaves. Since that time it has suffered countless occupations and interventions by American imperialism which regarded it as the poor child on its back door step, either occupying or creating puppet governments for more than a century until the election of Aristide in 1991. The populist priest Aristide was elected President in 1991 but ousted by a US backed military coup that same year. Another US military occupation followed and Aristide returned in 1994 to complete his term of office. Aristide was re-elected in 2000 but fell out with the US and its neoliberal policies and was forced out of the country in 2004 by a US/French coup.
In 2004, MINUSTAH, a US intervention fronted by the UN, militarily occupied Haiti, which lasted until 2017. Under the pretext of taking care of security, it imposed terror on the population and ensured that American companies could control oil and other resources etc without risk of democratic intervention.
MINUSTAH was led by Brazil, which at the time was governed by Lula, a Popular Front government that served the interests of imperialism, whether at home or abroad. The general that Lula sent to command MINUSTAH in Haiti was the general who later became Bolsonaro’s right-hand man in his government.
Haiti is the historic expression of naked capitalist barbarism from colonisation in the 15th C to its terminal crisis today. It turns the imperialist narrative of the civilizing mission on its head when slaves were the only exploited class to win freedom from bourgeois rule. In a time of decadence in American imperialism, which is in dispute with rising Chinese imperialism, the USA intends to hold on to Haiti at all costs. Through the UN, it is trying to create a security force in Haiti that appears to be independent of the hated US and UN occupations. Its attempt to use Kenyan police officers is opposed both in Kenya and in the Global South. In Haiti, the rebels have rejected all external intervention outright.
In the face of all imperialist exploitation and attacks, workers and poor people in Haiti have always resisted. Today, many of the gangs that the media demonizes are organizations that were formed in neighborhoods for self-defense against state abuse and crime. One of those who is recognized as the main leader of the popular revolution, Jimmy Cherizier, who has united a number of territorial ‘gangs’ into the G6 which fights corruption and crime and seeks to organise all the working masses in an armed struggle.
Cherizier makes it clear that he is fighting against the foreign intervention that has led the country to misery and chaos for decades. Tired of government leaders who are just puppets of imperialism, he demanded the departure of the US favoured Prime Minister Ariel Henry and prevented his return to Haiti. He is now fighting the installation by the US of a Presidential Transition Council that is not elected by the people and does not represent them.
We support the rebels who take up arms and resist imperialist domination and the national bourgeoisie who only follow orders from their international leaders. It is a basic democratic right to rebel against hunger, famine, poverty, lack of infrastructure and corruption that plague the country.
We strongly oppose the demonisation of working class rebels like Cherizier as ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists’ on the part of the bourgeoisie and the fake Left. It is patronizing and racist to label the descendants of revolutionary slaves as doomed to fight among themselves and incapable of resisting their oppressors. The duty of the revolutionary left is to come to the aid of such incipient armed anti-imperialist rebellions and fight for their national self-determination.
It is also the duty of the revolutionary left to win the resistance to the permanent revolution for a socialist republic and prevent the revolution being overwhelmed by the bourgeois counter-revolution. Haiti was betrayed by the first Bolivarian revolution and now by the second of Castro/Chavez. The G6 led by Cherizier needs to advance towards the organization of workers and poor peasants into armed committees who make this fight in an organized and classist way. Haiti has no way out of the barbarism it finds itself in without the seizure of power, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the expulsion of imperialism.
It is necessary to build a party of world revolution that guides workers in this moment of instability that affects countries around the world, especially in the global south. The so-called global south means the semi-colonial countries exploited and controlled by imperialism and which today are suffering the instability of a world order in which the decadence of the USA puts it directly in dispute with the ascending imperialisms of China and Russia, transmitted to the semi-colonies and moving towards a new world war.
We are for a new Zimmerwald to bring together a revolutionary left and build a program of transition to socialism for the working and poor masses in the struggle for the world revolution. A revolutionary leadership that fights Castro-Chavism as a counter-revolutionary force that prevents class independence and leads workers to an International Popular Front with the Chinese imperialist bloc and to die in inter-imperialist wars.
For class independence, for the World Party of Socialist Revolution based on Trotsky’s Transitional Program! For Permanent Revolution!
