Following a disastrous UN mission in 2010, several Western-backed coups d’état, and the U.S. occupation of 1915-1934, the initiation of yet another foreign intervention in Haiti aligns with the longstanding imperial policy of the U.S., Canada, and European powers towards the country. Jafrikayiti, author and activist for Solidarité Québec-Haiti, underscores the broken social contract in Haiti, where installed leaders are neither elected by nor are accountable to the people but serve the interests of the private sector, over a dozen rich families, and the countries of the Core Group.
Corporations and Haiti’s Ruling Families Profit From Young Labour and Warring Gangs – Jafrikayiti (pt 2/2)
Talia Baroncelli
Hi, you’re watching theAnalysis.news, and I’m your host, Talia Baroncelli. I’m really excited to bring you part one of my conversation with Jafrikayiti. We’ll be speaking about the conditions on the ground in Haiti.
We really can’t make this content without you, so if you’d like to support us, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Get onto our mailing list and also like and subscribe to the show wherever you watch the show, be it on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple streaming services. See you in a bit with Jafrikayiti.
Joining me now is Jafrikayiti, also known as Jean. He is an author, activist, artist, radio show host, and member of the activist group Solidarité Québec-Haiti. Thanks so much for joining me again.
Jafrikayiti
Thank you, Talia, for inviting me again.
Talia Baroncelli
Ariel Henry, who is the acting unelected President in Haiti, was put into power after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021. He’s currently stuck in Puerto Rico and is unable to return to Haiti as the gangs or paramilitary groups, whatever you want to call them, have shut down the airport and have called for his resignation. He has said that he will resign on the condition that a transitional governing council is put into place.
On March 11, CARICOM, which is the organization of 14 Caribbean states, including Haiti, along with a few other states, including the United States, Canada, France, Brazil, and Mexico, put out a statement saying that they would support the putting into place of a transitional governing council. They also laid out what would have been in that council and what the requirements of that would be. We can definitely get into those requirements as it’s quite important to address.
Why don’t we first talk about what’s going on in Port-au-Prince on the ground? Thousands of people have been displaced. There’s virtually no access to humanitarian aid because humanitarian aid can’t get in. Also, importantly, I think something like two-thirds of the population in Haiti are under the age of of 24. We should note that this is a very young population who is currently going through all of these upheavals and violence. What’s your assessment of what’s going on on the ground?
Jafrikayiti
Indeed. That’s a good point because when I speak with family members, it’s interesting how often it comes into the conversation that the kids are not going to school. See, even when people’s lives are at risk, Haitians are always thinking about schooling for their kids. It’s something that people understand to be one of their possible ways out of misery and poverty. Of course, with that young population, it’s something that is always on their mind. But of course, the security is a major concern.
Young people from my family who lived in Port-au-Prince are moving from house to house. They’ve left the family home because that neighborhood is completely taken over by the U.S. armed militias. The older ones have gone to the countryside where there is more tranquillity.
Another thing that we need to say is that there’s psychological warfare happening in the way the news is being reported in Haiti. It’s been several months, if not a year now, that they’ve been saying that the gangs, the U.S. armed paramilitaries, control 80% of Port-au-Prince. They’re still saying 80%. If it was 80% a month ago, now it should be 100%.
In reality, no one is telling the truth when it comes to the mainstream media. They’re exaggerating sometimes in order to justify the unacceptable invasion of Haiti under a false premise. There’s that happening. But at the same time, they’re putting the population in such disarray and panic that, essentially, it’s like a kidnapping. They’ve kidnapped a nation, and now they’re negotiating with the hostage and saying, “Okay, you have to do this in order to be released.”
The way you describe what happened with CARICOM, with Ariel Henry, and then the whites who are really running the show, you can see there are three levels of puppets there. Ariel Henry is nothing. He’s never been acting president of Haiti. You cannot be named president if you’re not elected in Haiti unless you did a coup and you name it. You can give yourself any title that you wish. But he was appointed Prime Minister by the occupation forces, chiefly the United States, Canada, and France.
Questions people should ask themselves: why should France be invited to a meeting of the Caribbean Nations? Well, that’s because this whole thing was a sham. The folks in the Caribbean pretended that they were meeting to discuss Haiti in the same way they had mobilized ECOWAS in West Africa because the whites wanted to attack Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and so they mobilized their local agents to put pressure on those countries. That’s what they’re doing with CARICOM with regard to Haiti.
Those demands that they’ve made are really addressing the Haitian Civil Society, basically telling them that in order for you to come to the table or to have a role in the future of Haiti, you have to first accept that the multinational force, the illegal force that they are deploying, you’re going to agree to it. It’s illegal. The judicial system in Kenya said that it’s illegal. It was illegal because there was no Haitian who had any capacity to sign on behalf of the people of Haiti to accept foreign troops coming into Haiti. That’s why they keep on using the term acting president for Ariel Henry. There’s no such thing. The title that was given to him was Prime Minister, but even that was illegal because he wasn’t ratified by the parliament. Because, of course, the illegal PHTK regime that was established by the Americans in Haiti had never organized elections, so there were no parliament.
There are plenty of smokescreens that you need to go through before you can get to what’s really going on in Haiti. But in the end, I think there are some declarations and some statements that have clarified matters greatly, and this happened in the last 24 hours.
It was a statement, an interview that the former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Pamela White, gave to Fox News, where essentially she said, “Well, I hear that they’re calling Guy Philippe a bad boy.” This is a convicted criminal who just spent six years in jail after having pleaded guilty to accusations of drug running and money laundering in the United States. He was condemned to nine years in prison. The United States sent him back to Haiti in the middle of all of this turmoil only after six years. The United States pretends that they’re trying to help Haiti resolve the crisis. Then they send this guy whose reputation is that he was used by the CIA by his own admission. He was armed and trained in the Dominican Republic in 2004 to help the Americans unseat the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. What this meant was that as a former police officer trained in Ecuador by the Americans, he had a commander with him who went from the north of Haiti, burning police stations and killing police officers. That’s how he was entering Port-au-Prince. Eventually, when the young people in the capital put up resistance to his advance, the Americans realized that he couldn’t conduct the coup. White soldiers, from the United States and Canada entered the house of President Aristide, kidnapped him, and took him to the Central African Republic. That’s how the coup happened in 2004.
Guy Philippe, who now, the former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Pamela White, is praising, is saying that, well, she doesn’t know why they’re calling him a bad boy. He should be part of the solution. He’s very charismatic. He’s articulate. She couldn’t find enough words to praise the criminal who was convicted and pleaded guilty in the U.S. judicial system. Then she found that this wasn’t enough. She started to praise Barbecue, Jimmy Chérizier, who is the other police officer that the Americans are using in Haiti to create this panic while they’re negotiating with the Haitian population. In other words, you want a socialist who’s going to invest in healthcare, education, and all of that. You’re only going to have a government, if you agree, to have the PHTK regime that we’ve established as part of the transition. That’s what they’re forcing us to accept.
Talia Baroncelli
We’ll get into more details on the different gang members and what some of them stand for. Some of them are characterized more as revolutionaries, whereas others are characterized or perceived as glorifying violence and all that sort of thing. I think some people are saying that the U.S. is supporting them to create all this chaos in order to create a pretext to have an international intervention.
As you mentioned, what the international community decided without the voice of Haiti, essentially, because there’s no legitimate government in Haiti, the social contract is completely broken there. There’s not a government that represents the people or that is accountable to the people. Given that fact, the international community without Haiti decided that Kenya should send a thousand police officers to Haiti. I think, as you mentioned, this was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.
One interesting fact is that usually when countries deploy their forces abroad, it’s the armed forces and not the police force, which is supposed to be operating within a domestic context. There’s a lot of problems with that.
I also want to go back to the statement that was issued on March 11 by CARICOM and the other countries that we mentioned, Brazil, France, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. I’m just going to read from part of it because the statement said, “We acknowledge the resignation of Ariel Henry upon the establishment of a transitional presidential council.” Then they said, “The creation of the transitional presidential council should comprise of seven voting members and two non-voting members.”
Then it lists who these seven voting members would be, namely, “Collectif, December 21, EDE/RED/Compris Historique, Lavalas, Montana, Pitit Desalin, and the Private Sector.” Then there would be two other non-voting members from the civil society, as well as one member of the InterFaith community. Then they list some specifications for the seven voting members that would form this transitional presidential council, saying that these people could not be targets of UN sanctions, they couldn’t have a criminal record, and they also couldn’t be opposed to UN resolution, I think it’s [2699]. I don’t have the exact number in front of me, but I believe it was [2699], which set forth the mandate to actually have an international intervention in Haiti.
It seems that everyone who would potentially be part of this transitional presidential council would de facto have to be in support of an international intervention. This just sets the whole thing up for, in my view, more failure, don’t you think?
Jafrikayiti
Of course, it’s a setup. It’s completely devious to do something like that. First of all, they’re speaking from both sides of their mouth because the parties that you’ve mentioned in the 7, the only ones that cannot be associated with the current ruling party, the PHTK, are Lavalas and Montana. All the others are linked to PHTK. Whether it is EDE and all of these things, they’ve created all kinds of fake names that were just created in the last few weeks to regroup names and try to obfuscate, but they’re still talking about the same criminals of the PHTK that have been in power since 2011 when Hillary Clinton entered Haiti and ordered the Director General of the Electoral Council to change the results and put Michel Martelly in power. Then, later on, they say that people who have resolutions against them at the UN cannot be part of that. But that’s just a little game because they are part of the same party. Specific individuals who were named, for instance, Barbecue, may not be sitting on the council, but if he’s the one who’s appointed someone to be on the council, it’s him. That’s a game that they’re playing.
Again, like I said, it’s like they’ve kidnapped Haiti from Haitians, and now they’re negotiating the terms of how we’re going to let you breathe. You have to accept that criminals that we’ve armed over all of these years and empowered be part of the transition to democracy. How is that going to happen?
This, if you would compare it, it is like after January 6, 2021, when the supporters of Donald Trump stormed the capital in Washington, DC, killing six people and causing all kinds of havoc. Then imagine that you had the ambassadors of Ethiopia, China, Russia, and Bangladesh meet and decide, “Okay, Americans, here’s how you’re going to solve this. The Democrats and the Republicans are going to sit together. You’re going to negotiate a sharing of [power].” Of course, this is ridiculous. No one would have imagined that, for instance, QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley, who had the Viking helmet, would be sharing power with Joe Biden.
If you were to apply the same stupidity that they are trying to propose for Haiti to the crisis in the United States, that’s what you’d have as a result. This is also happening with a racist lens, which suggests that there are no good leaders in Haiti. There are no decent men who could run the country. That’s not true.
I remind folks that the president who was kidnapped in 2004 and kept in exile for seven years in Africa when he returned in 2011, he vowed to invest in education. Since 2018, every March, he has graduated 350 professionals, doctors, lawyers, and architects.
This is not a new situation. That’s what happened when they killed Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and put Mobutu in power. They killed Thomas Sankara and then placed Blaise Compaoré in Burkina Faso. It’s the same scenario. They kill your good leaders. Then when things are going wrong in the country, they say, “Well, you have bad governance.” Well, you established that bad governance. When I mean you, and again, there’s this term ‘international community’ that is being misused here. It’s not the ‘international community.’ There are over 100 something countries in the world. I know they went through the UN to play a charade, but the UN is not a democratic organization, as you know. It’s the five countries that make the real decisions.
Talia Baroncelli
Security Council.
Jafrikayiti
The Security Council, yeah. But it’s not even that. It’s the United States, Canada, and Europe that are running the show in Haiti, and they’re just hiding their white face by using Black faces. You have the Kenyan mercenaries being hired, and every week they’re negotiating, and they’re saying, “We want more money.” Then at the same time, they’re adding words like Pan-African solidarity to mix and confuse the thing. That’s such an insult because there are people like Kwame Nkrumah who actually fought for real Pan-Africanism. They took this fool, Samuel Ruto, in Kenya, who’s really… I speak to a lot of folks in Kenya. They’re telling me they’re very embarrassed to see the man who is being called their President behave like that. It’s not the only occasion where this happens because at the United Nations, whenever the Americans want to have some resolution passed, such as these shameful decisions about what’s happening in Palestine, they always send a Black person to raise their hand, that Black woman who raises her hands all the time to deny the people of Palestine access to food. As a Black person, I cannot look at what’s happening in Haiti and not realize that there’s a minstrel show being played here.
Some of your viewers may not be familiar with the term minstrel show, but the racist people who established the United States for the longest time could not be comfortable with seeing the elegance, the beauty of Black people. In order for them to feel comfortable with themselves, they had to convince their own self and their children that these people were inferior. Since it wasn’t true, in order to create that perception, they organized these theaters where white actors put themselves in Black face and they are scratching themselves, laughing, doing all kinds of ridiculous stuff, pretending that this is how Black people behave. They even hired some Black people to play on the stage. This wasn’t like ancient history. Not so long ago, they were doing those minstrel shows.
In dealing with Haiti, when you hear Pamela White, the former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, referring to a convicted criminal, an assassin who admitted that he worked for the CIA, that the CIA paid him to conduct the coup in 2004. Then she says in front of the camera person point blank, “Well, this is a very articulate leader. This guy is perfect for Haiti.” I don’t think Pamela White is stupid. I think she’s evil. Just like many of the folks who are suggesting to Haitians that a doctor like Dr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who went into exile, I’ll remind folks, in the country of Nelson Mandela, who was embraced by Nelson Mandela, President Thabo Mbeki, while he was in South Africa, unlike the dictators that went to spend their money with the French elite like [François] Duvalier, Aristide was in Africa teaching in university and completing a Ph.D. while he was in Africa. He was not going to parties and wasting the people’s money. He was working, and then he came back. Now you have connections between Haitian scholars and South African scholars because of the work that this couple, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his wife, Mildred Trouillot-Aristide, are doing in Haiti.
When you see that the policies of Canada, the United States, and Europe go counter to someone like Aristide and Lavalas, it’s not a new thing. They’ve always adopted that approach and look for these caricatures of strong men with arms and say, “Okay, these are the leaders. These are the leaders that the people want.” Of course, they found a few people who were running around after Guy Philippe and Barbecue and saying that he’s a leader because, just like El Chapo had all kinds of people supporting him in his community because he kidnapped them, and he had the power and the money.
That’s why you will see in many of the interviews that CBC has done, they’ve not invited articulate Haitians who don’t support the occupation. Because, as you know, people do pre-interviews, and if they hear what you’re going to say, they scratch it. That’s why many of us have decided that we’re only going to do live interviews when we’re dealing with these fools. Because in a live interview, before they cut it, you’ll have an opportunity to say at least a partial truth.
Talia Baroncelli
Well, this isn’t live, but I promise you that we won’t cut what you’re saying.
Jafrikayiti
No, I know. [Laugher]. TheAnalysis is not part of that.
Talia Baroncelli
Okay, so you make a good point about how the U.S. is supporting people like Guy Philippe and even Jimmy Chérizier. You said that the U.S. is talking out of both sides of its mouth. I’m wondering, is there a coherent U.S. policy, or is there maybe tensions within U.S. policy itself? Because some of the officials are saying, “We need to establish a transitional presidential council, a transitional governing council.” Then there are clearly other officials who are in support of people like Guy Philippe and Chérizier and are trying to foment even more havoc to then have a pretext for more intervention. Do you see those two things as being at odds with one another, or is it a really concerted, coherent policy strategy?
Jafrikayiti
The coherence comes to the point of imperialism. That is, all of these people are convinced that Haitians shouldn’t be running hate. That’s where they come together. Some of them think that the United States should just invade, and that’s what Pamela White had said.
Two years ago, she was publishing these op-eds saying that we need boots there now. She said, “The private sector,” which is a code word for the 15 white Mafia families in Haiti who are running the whole place economically, “should put money on the table and have mercenaries come and fix the situation for them.” That’s what she said. Now, she’s pretending that she never supported that idea because it’s becoming awfully clear that the amount of money that the mercenaries from Kenya are asking may not be the amount of money that they’re willing to invest in this thing. That’s why they’re backpedaling.
There are no good players in the American system. Whether it is when Barack Obama was President, George Bush, or Joe Biden, the policy remains very stable. The United States sees Haiti as its backyard. As Luigi Einaudi, the former Secretary General of the Organization of American States, said in my face, I was in front of him when he stated that, on December 31, 2003, in the lobby of Hotel Montana, this white man said that the real problem with Haiti is that the international community is so screwed up and divided that they’re letting Haitians run Haiti. A couple of months later, white soldiers entered the residence of the President and kidnapped him, and Haitians are no longer running Haiti.
It’s not a question of whether there are contradictions among American diplomats. You’ll find variations in how they would see it happen, but they all agree that they should be running the show. We, in Haiti, equally refused that. We’ve refused that since 1492, when the first white man, Christopher Columbus, set foot on the island and started murdering the native people.
Talia Baroncelli
There’s also a class element here as well because it’s not just enough to say Haitians should be running the show. I mean, which Haitians? Because the U.S. and Canada are already doing business with elite ruling families in Haiti. These people have an interest in doing business and profiting. They’re not really from an economic bourgeoisie or from an industrial class, but they’re still elite, and they’re still making money off of the relationships they have with Ottawa and Washington. I’m assuming that the solution also has to be to ensure that a grassroots movement and other average Haitians have a say in the actual government and not just the ruling families.
Jafrikayiti
Well, that’s part of the forked tongue, two-face attribute that I’ve mentioned. For instance, in Canada, with Solidarité Québec-Haiti, the group that I work with, we’ve put a lot of pressure on the Canadian governments since 2004 to tell them that there has to be a paradigm shift here. What you’re doing is unconscionable. If Canadians were aware of what our tax money was doing in Haiti, they would be revolted.
What happened is that we were telling them that you cannot continue to work with the criminals and pretend that you’re helping Haiti. Then they thought, “Okay, well, this could be a good thing for us, for the image of Canada.” Then they started to apply sanctions against people they say are involved in criminal activity in Haiti. They targeted Youri Latortue and Joseph Lambert. These are people who are part of the PHTK regime of Michel Martelly. But it so happens that all of these guys are dark-skinned criminals in Haiti. Then, some of these officials pretended to consult us in the community, asking us, “What do we think about those sanctions?” We said, “What? You want a Nobel Prize?” We told them, “No, this is not sufficient.” This is just one, two, or three small criminals. They are criminals, and we’ve been fighting them all of these years. You’ve been supporting them because Canada participated in rigging the elections so that the PHTK regime could come to power alongside Hillary Clinton.
Talia Baroncelli
In 2010, right?
Jafrikayiti
In 2010. Exactly. When Hillary Clinton entered the country and changed the results of the election. Now, when we replied like that to the Canadian officials, we noticed that in the next round of sanctions, they decided to apply the sanctions. Every two months or so, they announce a list of people who are being sanctioned. Now, we started to see that they’re getting lighter skinned, like people a bit like my skin color or even lighter, started to be on the list of people sanctioned. Then they came back and asked us, “What do we think?” We said, “Well, what? We don’t think anything. I mean, this is ridiculous. You know who the criminals are.” We mentioned to them that there are white warlords in Haiti. It’s not a question of targeting them because they’re white, but the fact that they’re white shouldn’t give them immunity either. If you are targeting criminals, you have to target all criminals on the basis of what their crimes are.
It still happens that the only billionaire on the island, Gilbert Bigio, there has been proof all of these years that the private port that he has called Port Lafito, and the fact that for 25 years, he was the Council of Israel in Haiti, he has diplomatic immunity, he was using that to get illegal weapons to come into the country.
One of the kidnapping gang leaders, Arnel Joseph, who, before he was killed, gave a load of information about how Gilbert Bigio, this billionaire warlord, was fighting another warlord, another white warlord named Reynold Deeb, and they each had created their own militias, these Black men with weapons, and they were fighting each other for territory in the ports of the capital city. That’s how he, Arnel Joseph, became a leader and was working with Michel Martelly and Jovenel Moïse to kidnap people. They collect money. He mentioned that they collect some of the money, but the bulk of the money goes to the oligarchs, those 15 white mafia families that I keep on talking about, and the mainstream media pretends they are invisible elephants. These guys are so visible in Haiti.
You go into a population that is 99% African and impoverished, and there is 1% white people who live up the mountain who are rich. All of a sudden, you’re seeing reports on CNN, on Radio Canada, and [inaudible 00:32:52], they never mention this man.
I recall very vividly after the first coup against Aristide in 1981 I was in the store of Gilbert Bigio, and we went to the cash. The two brothers, the two white brothers there, they owned the store, and they were joking. They were laughing at our faces because Aristide had just been taken outside of the country by a coup with the military. They were saying that they don’t understand how George Bush, the father at the time, is suggesting that they would be listening to Aristide to know what his point of view is. In their mind, Aristide is out, he’s out, he cannot come back, and they don’t understand what Bush is talking about because they financed his election in Florida.
These folks are very arrogant and very aware of where their power lies in their connection with corrupt elites in the United States. The reason why I keep on insisting on mentioning Gilbert Bigio and Michel Martelly is because of the sheer power differential.
There’s a UN report that confirmed in November 2023, it was published, that almost all of the militias surrounding Port-au-Prince were created by Michel Martelly and were used by him for his political power. It’s not me saying that. It’s the UN who published that report. Once that report was published, what happened? Nothing. Michel Martelly is still in Miami. No one is touching him.
Talia Baroncelli
Does that mean that he financed Chérizier as well?
Jafrikayiti
All of them.
Talia Baroncelli
Okay.
Jafrikayiti
Yeah, all of them. They have that information. Of course, there are researchers like Robert Muggah, who was participating in a workshop in January at Université [foreign language 00:34:56], in which Michaëlle Jean participated, the Director of the University Ottawa. A lot of those people were there. In that conference, Robert Muggah put a poster showing that Ariel Henry is one of the supporters of one of the major militias called 400 Mawozo, the guys who apparently kidnapped the 17 missionaries in Haiti. Do you remember when they made a big fuss about that? It’s not a mystery. They know who is financing the militias. They know where the weapons are coming from. They confirm in those UN reports that it’s 100% from the United States. Some come from Israel, passed by the Dominican Republic, but it’s all from the United States.
That means if you were to arrest these two men, Martelly and Bigio, Bigio because he’s a billionaire. If a billionaire is financing militias, if you go and you’re just wasting time, you say, “Okay, you’ve killed or you’ve arrested a couple of militia leaders,” you’re just wasting your time. The man has resources living in a country where almost everybody else is impoverished. How long is it going to take him to create another set of militias? In fact, that’s what happened. They used militias to conduct the coup in 1991 and in 2004.
Canada, when they got annoyed with us and said, “Well, we are very proud of the lead we’re taking with sanctions,” we told them, “No, we’re not impressed.” We say, “Imagine if the richest person in Canada was found to be in collusion with Rock Machine and Hells Angels gangs in Montreal, and for two, three, five years, they’ve been kidnapping and killing people in Montreal. Would you just say that, okay, well, we have sanctions. They cannot trade. They cannot travel. That’s sufficient? No. You arrest the criminal, and you put them in jail.” That’s what we’ve been saying. Of course, if they were to do that, immediately you would see the militias being weakened, because if they don’t have ammunition, if they don’t have weapons, the population will deal with them. That’s what they don’t want. They don’t want the population to rise against the militias, but more importantly, they know that the population would go up the mountain and uproot the white Mafia families.
This is exactly what the crisis in Haiti has been since the time of the revolution. A small minority that has links with outside militaries, with racial connections that will call for help whenever they feel threatened by the Black majority.
Why is it that the United States, Canada, etc, see themselves as natural allies of these 15 white Mafia families? Because the Canadian multinational corporations such as Gildan Activewear, their partner in Haiti is, Andy Apaid, who owns these factories, these sweatshops. In these sweatshops, women are getting raped because when they make sexual advances to the women, if they say no, they lose a job. When you lose a job, and you’re impoverished in Haiti, you don’t have options because the schools are not functioning, and there’s not a plethora of universities in order to give people options. From generation to generation, these Black women are working for Andy Apaid, for Gilbert Bigio, for Brandt, for Madsen. This is colonialism, and it has to end. It’s not sustainable.
We’re saying to the Canadian government that in order for you to give access to the gold of Haiti, the lithium of Bolivia, to the Canadian mining companies, the idea that you’re going to work with corrupt leaders that you imposed on Haiti, on Bolivia, on Guatemala is a stupid idea. It is not sustainable foreign policy. Instead, become civilized and accept the reality that the gold of Haiti belongs to Haitians. The lithium of Bolivia belonged to Bolivian, just like the oil of Canada in Alberta belongs to the Albertans of Canada. You would not agree that the Chinese come and start stealing our stuff here in Canada, then why is it we cannot understand a simple fact?
The Haitians are aware that there is cobalt in the mountains of the neighborhood where I grew up in Port-au-Prince. Cobalt is a very important mineral right now. We have Iridium in Haiti. We know that we don’t have all of the engineers and scientists that we need, but we have a good number of them all around the world, and we are ready to return home and work on that. But of course, Gilbert Bigio doesn’t want me to return to Haiti because then I will become a competition for him because I will not work in his factory. Neither will I want my mother, my cousin, my sister, to be working as a slave in 2024.
In order to keep people like me outside of Haiti, they will arm militias and create havoc in the country so that they continue to rule the neo-colony, thanks to the support they get from their white cousins in the United States, Canada, and Europe. This is not sustainable. This is a disaster that they are setting up, and they’re thinking that the victims are going to continue to be on the same side.
Talia Baroncelli
Jafrikayiti, it’s been great speaking to you. Thank you so much for all of your time. It’s been a pleasure listening to you, and what you have to say about this current situation.
Jafrikayiti
Talia, I thank you, and I thank theAnalysis.
Talia Baroncelli
That was part one of my conversation with Jafrikayiti. Join us for part two, where we discuss what motivates Western intervention in Haiti. Thanks for watching.
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Jafrikayiti is the co-founder of two self-help organizations AKASAN (Ayisyen ki ap soutni Ayisyen nètalkole) and Jaku Konbit which follow the principles popularized by Marcus Garvey. He is also an artist-activist immersed in the Global Peace and Social Justice movement.