Remarks at the Conferment of the Order of Caribbean Community at the 30th Caricom Heads of Government Conference, July 2, 2009

The greatest threat to the credibility of CARICOM lies squarely in the failure to implement solemn declarations and decisions made Conference after Conference. Surely mature regionalism will remain a pipe dream unless  authority is vested in an executive mechanism which is charged with full time responsibility for ensuring the implementation within a specified timeframe of the critical decisions taken by Heads or other designated organs of the Community.

For how much longer can a final decision be postponed on upgrading the institutional machinery if the Community is not to become comatose?

Click here for Patterson speech

The coup which took place in Honduras on June 28 is at the centre of attention in the hemisphere but has so far received little coverage or comment in the Caricom region. The coup follows a pattern which was seen in Venezuela in April 2002 and in Haiti in February 2004: the demonisation of the sitting President for allegedly unconstitutional actions, physical removal of the President by soldiers followed by a fake letter of resignation, and the assumption of office by a civilian leader supposedly authorised by the Constitution with the aim of securing domestic and international legitimacy. Hence Dr Isabel Rauber of the School of Philosophy at the National University of Lanus in Agentina writes of ‘neo-golpismo’ in Latin America. However, the balance of international forces has changed, and calls for the restoration to office of President Zelaya have been made by the United Nations General Assembly,  the OAS General Council, the Rio Group, the members of the Central American Integration System (SICA), the members of the ALBA Group, the EU and the United States Government. SICA has imposed a 48-hour trade embargo, the World Bank and the IDB have suspended loans, Venezuela is contemplating an oil embargo; and the OAS has given the Honduran authorities an ultimatum or face suspension of Honduran membership.  Caricom states, which have already joined in the international condemnation as members of the UN and of several regional organisations, will presumably use the opportunity of their summit which opens July 2  in Georgetown, to issue  a statement of their own.

Latin America Drags a Reluctant Washington Into Supporting Democracy in Honduras Mark Weisbrot

Caricom calls for immediate reinstatement of Honduran President

1.

AGJ: Honduras Action Alert and Media Suggestions! From: Walter Lippmann

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JR: Zelaya Delays Return to Honduras Waiting For End of OAS Deadline From: Walter Lippmann

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GLOBAL POST/Miroff: Honduras coup: The view from Cuba From: Walter Lippmann

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Statement Against Coup in Honduras: 2nd Int’l Che Conference From: Tamara Hansen

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Re: REUTERS: Q+A: U.S. could cut off aid to Honduras after coup From: Matthew Dubuque

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COUNTERPUNCH: Why Zelaya’s Actions were legal under Honduran law From: Matthew Dubuque

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COUNTERPUNCH: Honduras, a Coup With No Future From: NPV

From the ACP-EU Courier, N.11 – May June 2009 www.acp-eucourier.info

The Netherlands Antilles and the Dutch government agreed upon the dismantling of the Netherlands Antilles in January 2010. Curaçao and St. Maarten will receive more autonomous status within the Dutch Kingdom, comparable to the status aparte that Aruba has since 1986. The other three Dutch OCT-islands, Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba will become a “gemeente” of the Netherlands that is a small Dutch municipality with a Dutch mayor. …..Curaçao and St. Maarten will become autonomous countries of the Dutch Kingdom. This was agreed with Holland but only under very severe financial conditions. The central government of the Dutch Kingdom in The Hague, the Netherlands, wants to keep financial control and financial supervision of Curaçao. The population of Curaçao gave its opinion on the final agreement to get an independent status in the Dutch Kingdom during the Referendum that took place on 15 May 2009: 52% voted YES and 48% voted NO.

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Release from from the Haiti Support Group  2 July 2009

Like when a wrongly-convicted prisoner is released after years of incarceration, there can only be mixed feelings about yesterday’s announcement of the cancellation of US$1.2 billion of Haiti’s US$1.9 billion debt. Yes, it is good news that over 60% of Haiti’s debt has been cancelled under the terms of the HIPC. But, on the other hand, it is a scandal that it took so long for the international finance institutions (IFIs) to take this step. Just think what could have been done with the money wasted on debt repayments over the last years?

Part of the debt that has now been cancelled was composed of loans made to the Duvalier regimes in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These loans were never used to develop the country and much of the amount was stolen by the Duvaliers and their clique. It remains an outrage that the Haitian people had to continue paying interest on these amounts until June 2009!

The HIPC debt cancellation announced by the IMF and World Bank is good news indeed, but what about those wasted years when the debt was being repaid and Haiti’s economy went from bad to worse?

The debt cancellation means that the US$1m per week that the Haitian people have until now been paying to service the debt can instead be used for other purposes. The HSG would hope that this would mean more state support for national production for national consumption. However all the indications are that - under heavy pressure from the IFIs - the Haitian government will instead pursue a development strategy based on the deeply-flawed garment assembly export sector. Without ever providing a convincing argument, the IFIs have been pushing for decades for this sector to be the motor of Haiti’s economic development. Despite the fact that this sector exists in a virtual vacuum with only minimal impact on the wider Haitian economy, only a few months ago UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and British economist Paul Collier made yet another proposal for international aid to fund garment assembly production in new Free Trade Zones.

Indeed, Corinne Delechat, IMF mission chief for Haiti, commenting on the debt cancellation, told Reuters that Haiti is a ‘land of opportunity if you’re an entrepreneur and an investor,” adding, “It is a golden moment for Haiti to start investing in export capacity, particularly in textiles.”

It looks like the IFIs’ interventions will result in the HIPC debt cancellation being a matter of Haiti taking one step forward, while their focus on garment assembly for export will take the country two steps back.

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Sent by the Haiti Support Group - A British solidarity organisation supporting the Haitian people’s struggle for participatory democracy, human rights and equitable development
- www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org

CONTINUED FROM HOME PAGE

We are at such a time, and both policies and practices are deepening Caribbean divides. ‘The knock on the door at night’ is not within our regional culture; still less are intimations of ‘ethnic cleansing’. No Caribbean leader would countenance such departures from our norms and values; but all must not only believe, but also act as if they believe, that we forget our oneness at our peril; whether the ‘otherness’ that displaces it is an accidental place of regional birth, or otherness of any kind. I say ‘accidental’ because in the Caribbean the age-old process of trans-migration has made us all family: as a great Barbadian regionalist, the Rt. Excellent Errol Barrow, reminded us twenty-three years ago - concluding in his practical common-sense way that:

“If we have sometimes failed to comprehend the essence of the regional integration movement, the truth is that thousands of ordinary Caribbean people do in fact live that reality every day. … we are a family … and this fact of regional togetherness is lived every day by ordinary West Indian men and women in their comings and goings.”

So indeed it was; and for a very long time. My great-great grandfather on my mother’s side came to Guyana from Barbados looking for land and settlement, and found them - and so it has been up and down the chain of island societies that free movement fused into one: freedom curbed ironically with the arrival of our separate ‘national’ freedoms. But the roots of those family trees are now spread out in the sub-soil of the Caribbean. Social antipathy and divisiveness deny them; but DNA’s defy even Constitutions.

“CARICOM is at risk”, we have been warned. So it is; and few are blameless. Political leaders, in particular, have to be less casual about CARICOM, less minimalist in their ambition for it, less negative in their vision of it. Its foundations have been built on our oneness; not on the geography of a dividing sea. The Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas is not just embellished parchment; it is the logic of that oneness in a world which threatens our separate survival. And the revised treaty is not all; there are international Conventions to which all CARICOM member states are parties that are relevant to our rights and obligations to each other as human beings, much less family. The Caribbean Community is now our regional mansion within a global home. We have to make it more secure and habitable - through reaching goals like the CSME (or even the CSM), and reaching them together.

Next month is the 20th Anniversary of the Grand Anse Resolution on Preparing the Peoples of the West Indies for the Twenty-first Century - the Resolution that established the West Indian Commission. Nearing the end of the new century’s first decade, we are still ‘preparing’. No wonder ‘CARICOM is at risk’. In the era of globalization, we retrogress if we simply mark time while the world moves ahead. As CARICOM’s political directorate meet in Georgetown next week at their XXXth Summit they must demonstrate credibly that they still believe in Caribbean integration, that they care about securing it against risk, and that they are serious in their commitment to the objectives of the Treaty of Chaguaramas. I believe the people the Caribbean yearn for that assurance from inspired leadership.

And so must we all here; for without CARICOM, without the Community, where is the Caribbean Court of Justice; where, even, are Caribbean judiciaries? The siren song of separatism lures us to self-destruction - as it once did with the federal nation we were about to be 47 years ago. The Federation - ‘The West Indies’ - (how quickly we have forgotten its name) did not founder on technical rocks; it foundered on political ones. We have now re-built pains-takingly over nearly half a century; and are again ‘about to be’ - this time an economic community. And again the siren sings seductive songs of separatism. In our collective self-interest, resistance of that enticement has become a major challenge of our time; and it is from our political directorates that the will to resist must mainly come.

The Caribbean Court of Justice, with the full jurisdiction with which it must soon be endowed, with its rich inheritance of the common law and of that international law which is the under-pinning of globalization, is for me the greatest assurance that as a Community of Caribbean people we can meet and overcome the challenges of the time.

Click here for full Address at the Inauguration of the Caribbean Association of Judiciary Officers, Port of Spain, June 25, 2009

Fernando Henrique Cardoso - Brazil

Cesar Gaviria - Colombia

Ernesto Zedillo - Mexico

As Caribbean countries struggle to cope with an ever-rising tide of criminal violence connected to international narcotrafficking, a new report, from a commission co-chaired by three former  Latin American presidents, has been published with proposals that constitute a major departure from existing policies.

The report declares bluntly that while ‘the war on drugs has failed’; its alarming side-effects have been to foment violent turf wars among rival transnational gangs, corrupt justice and law enforcement systems and increasingly threaten to subvert the hemisphere’s fragile democracies.

The authors propose a ‘new paradigm’ based on three main directives: (a) treating drug users as a matter of public health; (b) reducing drug consumption through information, education and prevention; and (c) focusing repression on organized crime. Accordingly, its three main policy recommendations are to:

1. Change the status of addicts from drug buyers in the illegal market to that of patients cared for in the public health system

2. Evaluate from a public health standpoint and on the basis of the most advanced medical science the convenience of decriminalizing the possession of cannabis for personal use.

3. Reduce consumption through campaigns of information and prevention that can be understood and accepted by young people, who account for the largest contingent of users.

Several elements of the recommended new paradigm are in accordance with the views of knowledgeable public health and criminal justice professionals in our region. Some time ago, for instance, a Jamaican Commission chaired by Professor Barry Chevannes of the UWI recommended the decriminalisation of cannabis possession in small quantities for personal use. The proposal was shot down by the U.S, Ambassador to Kingston before it had been even seriously discussed. And that was that.

It is regrettable, therefore, that among the Commission’s 17 members, there was no one from the Caribbean, a region that obviously has a great interest in this subject. The Commission’s analysis of the shifting pattern of supply routes from Bolivia and Peru to Colombia and Mexico, for instance, is one that has great relevance to Caribbean islands and mainland countries that sit astride these routes. One also wonders whether a great opportunity was not missed at the recent Vth Summit of the Americas to debate the Commission’s recommendations and to forge a common Latin American and Caribbean position in talks with the United States; where the principal markets are located and whose collaboration is an essential requirement for the ‘new paradigm’ to work. As the authors of the report themselves point out, the arrival of the Barack Obama Administration presents an opportunity to engage the United States in a dialogue on the subject that is not coloured by the preconceptions and prejudices of the Bush era.

These lacunae notwithstanding, this should not be an obstacle to seriously examining the recommendations from this report, to consider forging a common Caricom position on them, and to engage our neighbours in the wider Caribbean and in the hemisphere on them. There is, quite simply, too much at stake, as the depressing daily diet of news on ghastly murders attest.

We are by this means hoping to draw public and governmental attention to this report (a copy is being sent to the Caricom Secretariat) and we are inviting all readers of this comment to bring it to the attention of government officials, the media, and whomever else may be able to ‘make a difference’.

Click here for the Report of the Latin American Commission on Drugs & Democracy

A Criminally stupid war on drugs in the US Clive Crook, Financial Times

We tried a war like this once before Mike Gray, Washington Post

Forge a Caricom Position on Drugs and Guns, Norman Girvan

I decided to wait until all the comments on my paper Port of Spain Declaration: A Critical Analysis were posted before making a global response. Four comments were received - those by Norman and Yash in this exchange and two others - by Wendy Lee and Margaret Gill - (Wendy’s contribution is posted on the website, Margaret’s is not) in two separate, parallel e-mail exchanges. Notwithstanding the several important points made by Norman and Yash (which I discuss below), it is my opinion that only Wendy’s and Margaret’s contribution grasped the essential issue involved - sustainable development.

Wendy posed the crucially important question “How can we get decision-makers to absorb and act on the information that is so readily available about sustainable development IMPERATIVES, including critical ecological requirements, instead of pursuing the same old false, unjust and unsustainable models?” Margaret identified another key aspect (one that I explored in the paper) - how do we inform and educate the Caricom public on that essential issue.

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Alberto Jones is an Afro-Cuban of Jamaican ancestry who runs the Caribbean American Children Foundation in Palm Coast, Florida

At this late stage of the fifty year old US-CUBA political strife, reasonable individuals would assume that those charged with inflicting pain, suffering and destruction on the Cuban people, would have concluded that their despicable task have come to an end, that the game is over, and as good sportsmen, they would retreat to their burrows and accept defeat with dignity.Doing what is right would have earned these Cuba-haters at least a few milligrams of sympathy, but it is now clear, that such principles are not part of their genetic make-up nor their life values.

Today, we were introduced to Dr. Jose Azel’s treatise. ‘Fidel Plays the Race Card’, Cuba Transition Project 6/16/09 ctp.iccas@MIAMI.EDU in which his mimetic, new found love for Afro-Cubans living in Cuba without family members overseas sending remittances, broke his heart. He is also profoundly offended by Castro casting himself once again as Robin Hood, with sinister overtones.

What this opportunist fails to include in his article, is that he is part of this multi-pronged effort to incite racial division, strife and a potentially dangerous racial confrontation without lines of demarcation, in such a highly mixed society.Like many others bent on squeezing out every penny out of US-AID, CIA and front foundations willing to pump millions of dollars into every fake organization purporting to be fighting the Cuban government, they are required to present a bio, a body of dirty work against Cuba to support their job application and approval.

Clever, educated and able to use some extra cash, why should Dr. Azel not build up his standing among his peers and future employers, by regularly compiling and publishing tendentious fact sheets as others do?

Key in this chain of command is Mr. Frank Calzon, who has not being indicted as yet, notwithstanding his closest aid, Felix Sixto sits in prison for the next six years, for depleting and pocketing nearly half a million dollars earmarked for their ‘Freedom Fighters’ in Cuba.

Still, the most disgraceful trait of this band of opportunists, is their shameless attempt to exploit real, unresolved problems that seriously affect the wellbeing of tens of thousands of Afro-Cubans, by pretending to be their benefactors, when most who are familiar with our convulsive history since our forceful arrival on these shores, are acutely aware of who our real tormentors are.

Beautifully laid out, are Dr. Azel’s bio-statistics of the Cuban government breakdown, is sublimely presented to draw a parallel with the racist, apartheid South Africa government, which by the way, most of them wholeheartedly supported and many fought alongside their defense forces.

Pitifully invoking the name of their newly coined poster boy, Dr. Elias Biscet and proudly reminding us of his Presidential Medal of Freedom, I wonder, as so many other Cuban dissidents who decided after time to set up shop in south Florida, if Dr. Biscet will be a welcome guest in his neighborhood, his home or as other Afro-Cubans, he will be confined and forced to find refuge in Allapath, Overtown, Parramore, Cabrina Greens or any of the hundreds of Ghettos reserved for Blacks and other minorities across the United States?

Has Dr Azel evolved at such an astronomic speed, that he no longer thinks and acts like his proud ancestors, who brag of having kept their puppet President Fulgencio Batista out of their exclusive Havana Yacht Club, Nat King Cole forced to use the kitchen door at the Hotel Nacional to perform, or when the Kasalta restaurant marked the border, beyond which, Afro-Cubans could not go after dark, without being escorted out Miramar by their private security guards?

Can any of these south Floridian, right-wing Cuban-Americans, suddenly enamored with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and staunch supporters of the Civil Rights Movement, present any document, pictures, newspaper articles or oral history, demonstrating that any one of them supported or was ever near any of these history changing developments in the early 60’s, when they enjoyed privileges denied to all blacks in the United States?

Although Cuban-Americans since the early 60’s had wide access to radio and print media in the US, never, did anyone of these upper class, rich, powerful individuals, with ample access to the highest level of the US government, ever uttered a word on behalf of blacks, whose flesh was ripped apart by attack dogs, lynched by supremacists, incarcerated in mass and murdered with impunity.

Thanks, but no Thanks, is all we can say to Dr. Azel and thousands like him, who are skillfully resorting to mimetic tactics, trying to inflame our sentiments, fight the Cuban government and hand them in a silver platter, a country they have proven to be genetically unfit to fight for by themselves.

June 18, 2009

cacf2@aol.com

On June 5, World Environment Day, Amazon Indians were massacred by the government of Alan Garcia in the latest chapter of a long war to take over common lands-a war unleashed by the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Peru and the United States.

Three MI-17 helicopters took off from the base of the National Police in El Milagro at six in the morning of Friday, June 5. They flew over Devil’s Curve, the part of the highway that joins the jungle with the northern coast, which had been occupied for the past 10 days by some 5,000 Awajún and Wampi indigenous peoples. The copters launched tear gas on the crowd (other versions say that they also shot machine guns), while simultaneously a group of agents attacked the road block by ground, firing AKM rifles. A hundred people were wounded by gunshot and between 20-25 were killed.

The population of the nearby city of Bagua, some thousand kilometers northeast of Lima near the border with Ecuador, came out into the streets to support the indigenous people’s demonstration, setting fire to state institutions and local office of the official party APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana)…

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Victory In The Amazon: Defeating the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Pact Laura Carlsen

Sixteenth article in the series

The visceral misogyny which had stamped the Catholic church and its clergy like stigmata, from the time of the early Church Fathers, continued to exercise its baneful influence on Christian societies in the Renaissance and the post-Renaissance period. The Mexican anthropologist, Fernando Benitez, recounts in his book, Demons in the Convent (1998), that the Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas (1680-1698) detested women so much that they were not allowed in his presence and, if, in a convent or monastery, a nun crossed his path, he would immediately cover his eyes with his hands. Only men were worthy of his sight - men and Christ. In his archbishopric, over zealous priests felt encouraged to give free rein to their misogyny.

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