Latin America
Haiti: A natural and human-made catastrophe combine
Submitted by Resistance on Wed, 20/01/2010 - 1:52pmAny large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on January 12. But it's no accident that so much of Haitian capital Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone.
Much
of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous
disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly
human-made outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence. The full
scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not
become clear for several weeks. What is already all too clear,
however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even
longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment.
Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in
the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of
perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world
history, compounded by decades of systematic post-colonial
oppression. The noble “international community” currently
scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is
largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to
reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915,
every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move
(in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) “from
absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and
deliberately blocked by the US government and its allies.
Resistance member interviewed by Al Jazeera on Colombia crisis
Submitted by Resistance on Wed, 12/03/2008 - 8:41amLatin American and Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum
Submitted by Webteam on Wed, 04/07/2007 - 11:14pmA conference to share ideas and experiences between Latin American, Asia-Pacific and Australian social movements, political organisations and individual activists, and to build solidarity with grassroots movements and political organisations fighting neo-liberalism.

