Latin American discusses Haiti, foreign military intervention: four items

1. UNASUR Debates reduction of MINUSTAH contingent

Published on CEPR, June 20, 2012

On June 5, Ministers of Defense and Foreign Relations from South American countries met in Asunción, Paraguay to discuss the future of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti – or MINUSTAH. Ten of the twelve countries in the regional group known as UNASUR – the Union of South American Nations - contribute troops to MINUSTAH and make up nearly 50 percent of the entire force. As we have described in other posts, there has been quite a bit of debate regarding MINUSTAH in troop-contributing countries, especially Brazil, the largest contributor.

Since last summer, there has also been a wave of civil society opposition to the ongoing presence of foreign military troops in Haiti, as attested by separate letters addressed to Latin American presidents and the UN Secretary General and signed by prominent intellectuals and human rights defenders from throughout Latin America. This opposition has been bolstered by a string of recent sexual abuse cases, including more than one involving troops from UNASUR member country Uruguay, as well as the overwhelming evidence suggesting that MINUSTAH bears responsibility for introducing cholera into Haiti.

As the Telesur correspondent in Paraguay, Amanda Huerta explained, there were two competing positions among UNASUR countries: those that favored a rapid reduction of troops and a shift in focus to reconstruction and humanitarian activities and those who favored maintaining current troop levels until 2014. The final declaration on MINUSTAH noted the need to develop a policy of sustained cooperation which “respects the sovereignty and the self-determination of the Haitian people”. Further, ministers agreed to form a working group “for the purposes of elaborating a scheme on the strategy, form, conditions, stages, and timeline of a Plan of Reduction of Contingents of the Military Component of the Mission.” Given the large role South American countries play in MINUSTAH (an importance clearly recognized by the United States), any decision made on reducing troops would have a tremendous impact on MINUSTAH’s future in Haiti.

While the UNASUR declaration was welcomed by civil society groups, many urged the South American nations to go further. Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, together with many other human rights advocates and groups (June 13, 2012), sent an open letter to the ministers of UNASUR countries calling for:

• The non-renewal of the MINUSTAH mission when its current mandate expires on October 15;
• The formal recognition of MINUSTAH’s culpability for the introduction of cholera and the corresponding reparations to the affected persons and communities;
• The immediate re-conversion of the segment of the budget now dedicated to the maintenance of MINUSTAH (approximately US$800 million annually) to social investment without further debt, to support reforestation, to insure universal access to potable water and sanitation facilities, and to create health and public education infrastructure.

The letter added:

The Haitian Senate unanimously approved the withdrawal of MINUSTAH one year ago, and Haitian social and human rights organizations and the public in general are expressing with ever greater vehemence their rejection of this custodial presence. It is time for the Member States of UNASUR to hear those voices and assume their historic and current debt towards that country and its people, the precursor and fellow supporter of the struggles for freedom throughout our entire region.

Indeed, public opinion polls have shown that the vast majority of Haitians have a negative opinion of MINUSTAH and express a desire for the mission to leave. A survey published in February 2012 of Port-au-Prince residents found that only 24.2 percent of respondents considered that MINUSTAH’s presence was “a good thing” and a majority indicated that, for the most part, they didn’t feel more secure when in close proximity to a U.N. soldier. To the question “when should MINUSTAH leave the country?”, 72.2 percent of those who expressed an opinion thought that MINUSTAH should leave either now, within six months or within a year. Only 5.9 percent stated that they thought MINUSTAH should not leave.

2. Social movements in the UNASUR countries join Haitians in calling for withdrawal of UN Mission (MINUSTAH)

South America, June 13, 2012, published on Let Haiti Live website.(Original in Spanish available here, thank you to Samantha Eyler-Driscoll for this translation)

To: Councillors Ministers of Defense UNASUR Member States UNASUR Secretary General

Dear Sirs:

We commend the Ministers of Defense and the High Representatives for Foreign Relations of UNASUR’s Member States for the consideration given at their meeting at Asunción, Paraguay, on June 5, 2012 to the situation in our fellow country Haiti, and we support the recognition expressed in their Declaration of the importance of consolidating a policy, on behalf of UNASUR, of a sustained cooperation which “respects the sovereignty and the self-determination of the Haitian people” and which achieves “a tangible improvement in the living conditions” as the necessary basis of security and lasting peace.

We therefore urge UNASUR’s member states to take firm and effective measures in that direction, including the immediate withdrawal of the 4,929 occupying troops (including both soldiers and military police) currently deployed in Haiti by 10 of UNASUR’s 12 Member States; an end to the MINUSTAH mission and of all other foreign military presence; and furthermore an end to the impunity and absence of justice that have allowed the continued toleration of violations of human rights by these forces.

Together with the civil organizations and social movements in Haiti with which we share analyses and activities in a permanent way, we further demand the opening of a dialogue with the participation of society, both in Haiti and in each of UNASUR’s Member States, regarding the policies of cooperation and support that the Haitian people want and need. We reiterate, in this regard, the principles and demands expressed in the Letters which we sent in May 2011 to the governments of UNASUR’s Member States, and in October 2011 to the United Nations and OAS, with the support of hundreds of organizations from both the region and the world, and which we are attaching to this letter.

We take special note of the decision adopted in Asunción by the Ministers of Defense and the High Representatives for Foreign Relations of UNASUR’s Member States to form a Working Group “for the purposes of elaborating a scheme on the strategy, form, conditions, stages, and timeline of a Plan of Reduction of Contingents of the Military Component of the Mission.” We appreciate that the countries in our region, after eight years of the military presence in Haiti constituted by most of them, are finally recognizing that that presence—and the very mandate of MINUSTAH, which is predicated on the hypocritical premise that “Haiti is a threat to Peace and world security”—cannot achieve the results that the Haitian people need, and should be ended.

For these same reasons, however, it is unacceptable that the withdrawal of troops continues to be delayed and furthermore that a layer of confusion has been added which only serves to disguise and to attempt to legitimize the decision approved by the UN Security Council in October 2011 to reduce the military occupation to its level prior to the earthquake and to continue to promote the presence of MINUSTAH beyond the current period of its mandate when it expires next October.

The Haitian Senate unanimously approved the withdrawal of MINUSTAH one year ago, and Haitian social and human rights organizations and the public in general are expressing with ever greater vehemence their rejection of this custodial presence. It is time for the Member States of UNASUR to hear those voices and assume their historic and current debt towards that country and its people, the precursor and fellow supporter of the struggles for freedom throughout our entire region.

While MINUSTAH continues to occupy Haiti—with the consequences of still-unpunished violations of human rights, including the rape of women and youths and the introduction of the cholera epidemic that has killed more than 7,000 people and has further complicated the precarious health and sanitation situation that affects the population, absorbing ever more of the financial resources set aside for the cleanup of debris and resettlement of those affected by the earthquake, urgent tasks that are still incomplete more than two years after the tragedy—the concrete processes of occupation and economic and ecological re-colonization advance with dangerous speed. These processes include the privatization and de-nationalization of services fundamental to human rights, such as telecommunications; the conversion of the most fertile areas in the country into free zones for garment-manufacturing, or agrofuels, or mega-dams to motorize the advance of the green economy, or strip-mining for gold.

The governments of UNASUR Member States should not, through their presence and support of MINUSTAH, continue to support the plundering, exploitation, and re-colonization of Haiti. We hope, rather, that they will advance in the consolidation of the articulated policies of cooperation based on the fundamental rights of the Haitian population and that in the relevant multilateral forums they will firmly champion, among other demands, the following:

The non-renewal of the MINUSTAH mission when its current mandate expires on October 15; The formal recognition of MINUSTAH’s culpability for the introduction of cholera and the corresponding reparations to the affected persons and communities; The immediate re-conversion of the segment of the budget now dedicated to the maintenance of MINUSTAH (approximately US$800 million annually) to social investment without further debt, to support reforestation, to insure universal access to potable water and sanitation facilities, and to create health and public education infrastructure.

Please accept our regards and reaffirmation of our willingness to move forward together in the direction we have indicated.

Signed,

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and President, Servicio Paz y Justicia; Nora Cortiñas y Mirta Baravalle, Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Founding Line; Amigos de la Tierra de América Latina y el Caribe (ATALC); Comité por la Anulación de la Deuda del Tercer Mundo – AYNA; Convergencia de Movimientos Populares de la América (COMPA); Coordinadora Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC); Encuentro Sindical Nuestra América; Jubileo Sur/Américas; Marcha Mundial de las Mujeres – América Latina y el Caribe; School of Américas Watch (SOAW); Servicio Paz y Justicia en América Latina (SERPAJ); Via Campesina; ATTAC-Argentina; Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina CTA; Coordinadora de movimientos populares de Argentina (COMPA); Diálogo 2000, Argentina; Federación Universitaria de La Plata (Argentina); Frente Popular Darío Santillán FPDS (Argentina); Movimientos Sociales hacia el ALBA (Capítulo Argentina); Servicio Paz y Justicia - Argentina; Rede Jubileu Sul Brasil; Políticas Alternativas para el Cono Sur (PACS) Brasil; Central Memorial Martín Luther King, Jr. (Cuba)

Encl.: Letter to UNASUR, May 2011; Open Letter to the UN and OAS, October 2011

Letter from: Diálogo 2000 - Jubileo Sur/Américas Piedras 730 (1070)/ Buenos Aires
Dialogo2000@gmail.com; Dialogo2000.blogspot.com
 

Created in June 2004, after the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and under Brazilian command, the United Nations Stabilizing Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has 18 member nations, most of them from Latin America.

 

4. Chile: Human Rights Activists Protest New U.S. Base

By Weekly News Update on the Americas, published on Upside Down World, May 15, 2012

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3636-chile-human-rights-activists-protest-new-us-base

 

A US military training center in the port city of Concón, in the central Chilean province of Valparaíso, will be used for exercises "clearly oriented toward the control and repression of the civilian population," according to an open letter that more than 20 human rights organizations sent Chile's Defense Minister Andrés Allamand on May 7. The US government has spent $460,000 constructing the installation, which opened on April 5 at the Chilean military's Fort Aguayo naval base. UPI Business News writes that the site "is growing into a major destination for regional military trainers and defense industry contractors."

 

According to the US Southern Command (USSC), which heads US military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, the installation will be used for training in Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) by Latin American soldiers as they prepare for international operations, such as United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions. But the human rights groups wrote in their letter that the Fort Aguayo training ground—a simulation of an urban zone, with eight buildings and sidewalks and roads—suggests plans for military intervention in civilian society. The groups noted that the installation was opened at a time when "broad and massive social demonstrations are developing on the part of the citizenry throughout the country." [The government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera has been shaken over the past year by militant protests by students, the indigenous Mapuche, residents of the southern region of Aysén, and other groups;.

 

The human rights organizations said the US lacks "the moral quality to teach 'peace operations,'" since "it has promoted coups, financed destabilization operations in sister countries, and has promoted war in the world. We don't forget that in 2009 the Soto Cano base in Honduras, with US military personnel, was used to implement the coup d'état" against former president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales [2006-2009]. The letter also held the US responsible for the brutal 1973 coup in Chile and for training "the worst human rights violators in our country" at the US Army's School of the Americas. (El Ciudadano, Chile, May 9; Adital, Brazil, May 10; People's World, April 26; UPI Business News, April 30)

 

The Southern Command is also planning to build an installation in Argentina, at the airport in Resistencia, capital of the northeastern province of Chaco. The plan seems to contradict center-left president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's policy against allowing foreign military bases, although the province's governor, Jorge Milton Capitanich, insists that the installation isn't a "base," since the US now describes its facilities with terms like "Cooperative Security Location" (CSL) and "Forward Operating Location" (FOL).

 

The $3 million installation in Chaco will ostensibly be a humanitarian aid center for dealing with natural disasters, but critics suspect the real goal is to monitor the sensitive Triple Frontier region, where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet, and the Guaraní Aquifer, one of the world's largest sources of fresh water. The US officer in charge of the project is Col. Edwin Passmore, who was expelled from Venezuela in 2008 on a charge that he had engaged in espionage while serving as US military attaché there. In November 2011 Passmore was involved in an incident in which a US military plane landed in Buenos Aires carrying undeclared electronic monitoring equipment, medications, and intelligence transmission devices.

 

The US currently has about 800 bases worldwide, with 22 in Latin America, including bases in Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Peru; naval stations in Aruba and Curaçao; and a "CSL" under construction in the Dominican Republic.

 

Sources: People's World, April 26; El Ciudadano, May 5