WikiLeaks cables reveal history of US succumbing to pressure from oil companies’ to block aid to Haiti.
In 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that Haiti would be added to his Petrocaribe program, in which Caribbean and Central American nations can pay for oil with goods and get cut-rate financing if oil prices rise above $40 a barrel. This amounts to around 60% savings on oil. Chavez agreed to also provide Haiti aid in education and health.
Oil giants Exxon & Chevron, fearful that these insanely cheap oil prices would undermine their billion dollar profits in the region pressured then-President George W. Bush to discourage the deal that would save Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, $100 million per year! This amounts to around 10% of the Haitian government’s budget that they use for things like hurricane relief, schools and hospitals.
“We in the United States, in our workplaces, in our homes, in our community groups, were raising money for Haiti. We sent money for earthquake victims, we sent money for hurricane relief, with our churches, go on missions to Haiti to build, to help build the country” Says Dan Coughlin, Democracy Now Haiti Corespondent. “But what we realize, in these cables is that the main obstacle to development in Haiti today is Washington.”
What’s strange is that the US opposition didn’t stop with oil. One cable in particular talked about the Cubans wanting to replace two million light bulbs throughout Port-au-Prince at a cost of $4 million, but that that would save Haiti around $70 million annually in electricity costs, yet the U.S. embassy was opposed to it also.
George W. Bush with Vicente Fox
It grew to become simply political opposition, not based on any health or safety concerns. One of the cable actually referred to Chavez’ deal as “very good for the country [Haiti].”
Janet Sanderson, Bush’s then-ambassador and present deputy assistant secretary of state very arrogantly states in one of the cables, “You all don’t understand how important our opposition to Venezuela is. Don’t do this deal.” She goes on to say that Venezuela and Cuba “appear to be taking advantage of Haiti’s electricity gap” to further their influence in the region.
The US Govt goes as far as encouraging Mexico to offer a similar program under then-President Vicente Fox. The program, called “Plan de Puebla” would offer about half the aid that Chavez did. The released cables stated that the purpose of this deal was to “counter the Petrocaribe deal.” This arrangement never materialized.
To the chagrin of the United States, Haiti eventually accept the deal from Venezuela. In a matter of years, electricity production skyrockets in most of the country.
“Hospitals, schools, factories and homes have electrical power that they didn’t have under 50 years of U.S. development aid” says Coughlin. “All of a sudden, in two or three years, Venezuela and Cuban technicians come in, patch a few power stations together, three of them, bring in the oil supply, a steady oil supply that benefits Haiti, and sure enough, there’s electrical power.”
This isn’t the first time that America has stuck it’s nose in Haiti’s affairs. The US has a long history of exploiting the island nation.
In honor of Black History Month, I would like to remind some and expose to others the words of one of the greatest defenders of justice this world has known; Frederick Douglass.
In 1852, Douglass is asked to give a speech as part of the Fourth of July celebrations in Rochester, New York. Douglass accepted the invitation.
In his speech, however, Douglass delivered a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with speeches, parades and platitudes, while, within its borders, nearly four million humans were being kept as slaves.
Enjoy.
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, “may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth”! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July!
Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate, I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just….
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply….
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
