The Red Review — A Deep Dive into Haiti's Colonial Past and Present Ft. Yves Engler

All the people who work on The Red Review live and work on stolen Indigenous lands across Turtle Island. There can be no reconcilliation without restitution, which includes Land Back and seizing the assets of the major resource corporations and returning them to the commons. 

In this bonus episode of The Red Review, brought to you by Socialist Action, we feature an interview with Montreal-based activist, author, and Canadian foreign policy expert Yves Engler. Prompted by the assassination of sitting Haitian President Jovenel Moïse on July 7th, we dove deep into the colonial history of Haiti, from its successful slave rebellion in 1791 to Canada’s role in the 2004 coup d’etat that brought down President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

You can find Socialist Action on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, or visit our website for more information. Socialist Action also plays a leading role in the Worker's Action Movement, which ran the Labour Forward slate at the most recent Canadian Labour Congress, and the NDP Socialist Caucus.

Links:

Website: The Canada-Haiti Information Project

Website: Canadian Foreign Policy Institute

Website: Yves Engler

Facebook: Solidarité Québec-Haïti

Books published by Yves Engler can be purchased from Fernwood Publishing.

Transcript

[0:16]
Daniel Tarade: Hello comrades. Welcome to another bonus episode of the red review brought to you by socialist action. Your co-hosts, myself Daniel and Emily, will be interviewing today Yves Engler, a Montreal-based activist and foreign policy expert on Canada's role in Haiti.

We scheduled this interview because of the recent developments in Haiti, where on July 7th, Jovenel Moïse, the sitting Haitian president was assassinated. It was recorded then on July 28th. As a result, we were not able to discuss just the most recent tragedy to afflict Haiti which was the August 14th earthquake. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck the island nation, and killed at least a thousand people so far, as of recording this introduction.

This is going to be a deep dive into the colonial history of Haiti and how U.S, Canada and other European imperial powers have so ensnared Haiti such that it really is the most destitute nation in the western hemisphere and plays a really important strategic role in maintaining imperial hegemony in this hemisphere, and really internationally. It's a very illuminating interview and we hope that all of you enjoy it and are able to leave this podcast better informed on what's happening in Haiti, as the media continues to cover just the most recent developments.

[1:37]

Emily Steers: So, as we begin this podcast I do want to acknowledge that all of us who work on this podcast live and work on Indigenous lands across turtle island. We recognize that there can be no true reconciliation without restitution which includes giving land back and seizing the assets of the major resource corporations and returning them to the commons.

[1:58]

Daniel Tarade: Cuba for me has always been that great example of how even with such a tiny GDP they're able to achieve those great accomplishments like a virtually universal literacy rate. They're able to do so much with so little money whereas other neighboring Caribbean countries like Haiti, which we will talk about, are so ensnared within the imperialist hands of the U.S, the European Union and Canada. Despite having a GDP that's more similar to Cuba than not, the people there suffer even more materially, highlighting that the solution isn't economic liberation of Cuba, it's rather the overthrowing of American imperialism. But Haiti is in the news these days for entirely different reasons. There is again historic upheaval in Haiti. On July 7th, sitting Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated; and at present the precise circumstances surrounding the murder are unknown. We will be talking right after we're done with what we know about what's going on in Haiti. We'll be talking to author and activist Yves Engler, who is one of the eminent scholars on Canadian foreign policy in Haiti, and hopefully he will be able to answer a lot of our questions.

[3:19]

Emily Steers: Well and also the media coverage surrounding what's going on in Haiti has not been necessarily the most transparent. We've been hearing lots about the protests and upheavals in Cuba from the American and Canadian media, but there have been massive protests in Haiti going on three years now, and immense dissatisfaction with the government. But we have heard very very little about that, because a lot of their ire is directed at Canada and the U.S.. and France and the EU for the ongoing economic repression and exploitation of people in Haiti.

[4:00]

Daniel Tarade: Haitians are also just no strangers to assassination plots and there is at least a historical basis for assuming that there has been foul play in this instance at the hands of foreign imperialist powers. To illustrate this point, take the example of president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, who was assassinated in 1915 under equally dubious circumstances, and although the United States denies official involvement in the plot on Sam’s life, President Woodrow Wilson's administration in the U.S.. had explicit designs to use Haiti as a point of defense in the Caribbean and had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from the Haitian national bank just the year before. After the assassination there was the full-blown invasion that commenced the subsequent occupation of the country concluded with the extremely onerous Haitian American treaty of 1915, which explicitly gave the United States control over Haitian military affairs and finances. As well as the right to intervene in politics. So this is how America's foreign policy works when they get what they want and this is again what the Cuban people have been resisting for the last 60 years or so.

[5:07]
Emily Steers: So, it's a small wonder that Haitians are a little bit suspicious of the party line. To be sure there are many other reasons abounding for why we should be suspicious. Jovenel Moïse was no socialist nor a democrat in any sense of the term. His popularity has been very low since his re-election, which was also marred by irregularities. He was a candidate hand-picked by the previous administration, which was notoriously corrupt and had been established following a coup d'etat at the behest of foreign imperialist powers. Protests have been ongoing against his government since 2016 which was the year in which he was elected after his term constitutionally expired. On February 7th of 2021 he refused to step down, propelling even larger protests against his rule. The plot thickened as prime minister Claude Joseph subsequently anointed himself president, with the backing of the core group, a group of imperialist powers which includes Canada, the United States, the European Union and the so-called United Nations stabilization mission in Haiti. This organization was set up following the 2004 coup d'etat against former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a proponent of liberation theology, public education and public health care with, we'll note, decisive Cuban support. This group has been functioning as an arm of the imperialist powers inside Haitian political life. It sets the agenda for Haitian politics at the elite level and since the coup has Haiti seen anything like the level of progress achieved under Aristide? There is little reason to suspect that the core group has the Haitian people's best interests in mind with its endorsement. So when will Haiti finally be free of the yoke of imperialism? This nation, one of the most impoverished nations in the world, has been systematically targeted since the successful revolution over two centuries ago. As socialists our duty is to stand in solidarity with the Haitian people, and expose the imperialist agenda of our government here in Canada we must resist our capitalist ruling class and their imperialist projects at every opportunity. Hands-off Haiti now and down with Canadian imperialism

[7:19]

Daniel Tarade: Down with Canadian imperialism and so now we're going to go to our interview with Yves Engler and hopefully you all find it as illuminating as Emily and I did.

Here at the red review this month we're very excited to be joined by Yves Engler. Yves is a Montreal-based activist and author who has published eleven books, including his latest called ‘House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau's Foreign Policy in 2020’ 

Yves Engler also co-founded the Canadian foreign policy institute which monitors and publicizes the actions of the Canadian state and its corporations abroad. Welcome Yves, to the podcast.

[8:00]
Yves Engler: Thanks for having me.

[8:07]
Emily Steers: Yeah, thanks so much for being here. So before we specifically discuss Canada's disastrous role in Haiti. Can you just catch up our listeners on the situation in Haiti and what it's been like since the assassination of the sitting Haitian president Jovenel Moïse on July 7th.

[8:21]
Yves Engler: Yeah, it's been very politically chaotic with the complete sort of void and who's in charge of things. In fact, it seems like there's been a slight reduction or stabilization, with regards to some of the insecurity and the violence that was plaguing a number of the neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. I think a lot of people are just sort of worried and concerned and not really sure what comes next. I think that Jovenel Moïse’s assassination was really the symbol or the final phase of just the disintegration of Haitian political life.

[9:06]

Daniel Tarade: Absolutely, we mentioned it when we were recording the podcast earlier, but people have been protesting the prime minister, and the president for a long time now and it never really got a lot of coverage. So Jovenel Moïse as a leader of Haiti, what was his connection then with the imperialist powers and what was happening with the Haitian people under his rule and what is now the possibilities are just the chaos that ensues now?

[9:36]
Yves Engler: Well, from July of 2018 until the end of 2019 just before the pandemic hit the biggest mass uprising in the world. So they got a lot of attention on Hong Kong, a bit of attention on Lebanon, Ecuador, Chile received less attention, but the biggest uprising anywhere in the world most sustained was in Haiti. Was the calling for a combination of things one initially opposed to an international monetary fund, imposed austerity plan, also calling for some light to be shown on this massive corruption scandal that Moïse was part of. Ultimately was calling for Moïse to go, and there was a series of general strikes. One towards the end of 2019, that closed Port-au-Prince down for more than a month. Serious uprising, massive protests, and so, Moïse was very very unpopular, he was, he really was only in office still because he had the backing of the foreign powers. I mean he didn't, he came to become the president by being basically selected by Michel Martelly, who was somebody who was somewhat well known as a singer, but Michel Martelly was was really imposed by Washington and Ottawa after the terrible   20 january 2010 earthquake, and then Moïse was the selection of Martelly to run for his PHTK Kale, a very right-wing political party, and there were mass protests against Moïse’s ostensible first round election win. That then scuttled the second round. It was a kind of a complicated process, but Canada and the U.S. were pushing this process forward the whole time and were maintaining support for Moïse, even after. 

So as of February 7th of this year, the limited constitutional legitimacy that he had, because even according to the official numbers there's only 590,000 people that voted for him in a country of eleven million people, and it's best to take those official number numbers with a certain amount of skepticism. His constitutional mandate ended on February 7th of this year, and so there would be a rekindling of the mass protests against Moïse at the start of the year, and the Canadian officials had really stayed behind him right till the end. Provided all kinds of diplomatic support. Of course, very important Canadian support via the building up of the Haitian police. So, Moïse was somebody who was very very unpopular. Even big chunks of the traditional oligarchs, the ten families that basically run Haiti's economy and that are generally quite light-skinned, even big chunks of them had turned against Moïse, because it was so unpopular. They probably, the most likely scenario, in terms of the assassination, was certainly it was an inside job. Certainly it was important elements of the government and the police force and the PHTK Kale party that supported ousting, or , killing, assassinating; But most likely, it was funded by one of the wealthy families. The Bulows family possibility, and I don't think that it's unlikely that Canada supported his assassination. It's possible that some segment of them, the CIA, or some segment of the U.S. was aware of the assassination, and sort of, turned a blind eye and said we don't really care if he's assassinated, so long as another element of the PHTK Kale party takes over. His assassination, one hand, he was a tyrant, but it really, his assassination, reflects the complete disintegration of Haitian political life. 

What's happened, subsequently with the Core Group, which is the U.S, France, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Germany, the U.N, and organization of American states, and it’s this body that gets to make declarations about Haitian political life. A week ago now they basically decided that Ariel Henry was the president, or it was the prime minister of Haiti, and that he was going to lead the government to elections that they want to have very quickly, and that, this Claude Joseph, this other person who was claiming to be the prime minister, after Moïse’s assassination, that he wasn't and he wasn't the actual prime minister. Within 48 hours of the Core Group putting out the statement, Claude Joseph fell in behind Ariel Henry, and it just just shows you this incredible power, that the the U.S, Canada primarily secondarily the other members of the core group, have where they can literally put out a statement and they get to decide who who is ruling a country of eleven million people. And that's a reflection of a couple parts, one just the total disintegration of Haitian political life also how sort of imperially penetrated the country is and that has a whole broader history that that we might might want to get into in further detail.

[15:28]
Emily Steers: I wonder if you could go into a bit more detail with exactly how all of these imperialist interventions and this political turmoil how does it affect the material day-to-day conditions of the Haitian people.

[15:42]
Yves Engler: Well, Haiti is the most impoverished nation in this hemisphere. I don't have the exact number in front of me, but it's like sixty percent of the population gets by on less than two dollars a day. The minimum wage is ridiculously low. As a very concrete example, when René Préval, the president, is sort of a social democratic president that came to office after the coup in 2004. Who the U.S. and Canada really tried to block from winning the presidency, when he tried to increase the minimum wage from like 31 cents an hour to 60 cents an hour, the U.S. and Canadian officials  lobbied aggressively against doing that and we have all the internal documents because of wikileaks showing just how aggressive they were with that lobbying campaign. So, that's a very concrete example of the material conditions of primarily women working in the sweatshops in Port-au-Prince for companies like Gildan Activewear or their subcontractors. Gildan Activewear being a Montreal-based company that the imperial intervention undercuts them being paid  60 cents an hour. So, I think at a more macro level, Haiti is, it doesn't really have an economy. I mean, it just doesn't export almost anything. Even in the sweatshops they don't even necessarily produce the whole t-shirts right, because electricity is so expensive in the country, because everything's so dysfunctional, the sort of more energy-intensive parts of some of the apparel production is actually done in the Dominican Republic, or elsewhere; and that the really high labor intensive parts, because they pay people so little, that those elements are done in Haiti. 

So, it doesn't even necessarily produce full t-shirts let alone, if you look at what Haiti exports, it imports almost everything, and that's what the, when I talk about these like ten families that run the economy, what they really do is they run the imports and control the imports into the country. Very little rice production, very little milk, so much of what Haitians eat is actually imported from foreign. In fact, often not cheap either it's often quite expensive unlike some other kind of poor places that have major internal agriculture, at least   sectors; and basically what the Haitian economy is based on is people who have left the country sending money back right. It's people of Haitian descent in Canada and the U.S. and Dominican Republic and elsewhere, sending money back into Haiti remittances; and that's like a third of the economy. So you have that, and you have some money that goes in via international aid projects, missionary initiatives, and so that's largely what sustains the Haitian economy. 

So, the material conditions of average Haitians are terrible and and the history of that, you have to go back all the way to the Haitian revolution and this was the richest place in the world. This was, the French gave up big chunks of Canada to keep Haiti, because Haiti was the source of incredible wealth in the capitalist class and aristocracy in France made incredible sums in the sweat and blood of the Africans that were stolen and brought to Haiti and put in horrible plantation conditions. The cycle of Haitians sort of breaking from imperial domination, there was this incredible break with the Haitian revolution, but immediately, Haiti was stuck in a world that was very hostile to it; and that's really continuing today. In the last twenty years, you have the Canadian government being second after the U.S, the second player in basically undermining efforts by the poor to try to break free from their their impoverishment, and break free from their domination, by a combination of the oligarchy in the country and Washington led empire.

[20:07]

Emily Steers: Yeah, actually so we're gonna ask if you could go into a bit more detail, for those who don't know about the history of Haiti as a slave quality and their successful revolution. What were the economic impacts of that and the sanctions that they faced as an in the aftermath of the revolution.

[20:19]
Yves Engler: Well, the Haitian revolution is probably the greatest example of human liberation in the history of humanity. You went from the most barbaric of the plantation economies. What happened in the U.S. south looks pleasant compared to what happened to the Africans in Haiti, and they revolted in 1791. It was a 13-year rebellion that's a incredibly complicated political dynamic shifting dynamics, but effectively the Haitian masses defeated the  French empire, the British empire, the Spanish, the U.S. supported different periods as well; and created a place where all people were considered equal,    decades and decades before that idea had any traction any mass traction It was of course incredibly threatening to the whole slave system that that dominated in the Caribbean, dominated in the south of the U.S, much of South America and they were completely isolated from after 1804. If they declared independence were isolated internationally and the U.S. didn't recognize Haiti until 1862, after slavery was abolished in the U.S. But the probably the the most important element of that to understanding how impoverished Haiti is today, is that is that the French, twenty years later, after independence, it actually began the process the whole way through, but twenty years later they they succeed in basically demanding that the Haitian government pay a debt of independence for France’s lost property. So not only did like half of the population die, of the Haitian population of the African slaves died during the revolution, but they paid for lost property which was the land and themselves right. So they paid France for having liberated themselves and how why this process ends up working out how it does with the Haitian government agreeing to make this payment is, this complicated political process that has to do with, divisions within Haitian society, among the elites who were very French, continued to be French-centric and who wanted to, as you refer to the sanctions, they wanted to be able to trade internationally. They kind of wanted to return to some element of the previous   plantation, slave plantation economy, and to do that they needed to be able to trade with France and other countries. So they agreed to this debt of independence which took 122 years for Haiti to pay off. In 2003, the then elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide calculated that it worked out to 21 billion dollars. 

So even into the late 1800s, more than sixty percent of Haiti's government's budget was going to pay France for having won their liberation from slavery and their their independence. That had a devastating effect on Haitian economic and social and political life. That's an effect that you still see right up until today. Haiti has been a country that has really faced it's independence for  200 plus years now, but it has faced every different form of neo-imperialism, neo-colonialism, imagined. From gunboat diplomacy where European, U.S. repeatedly sent gunboats   including some that came from Halifax in the late 1800s to intimidate the Haitian government to make some sort of payment to. It's been caught into a position of indebtedness to the leading capitalist powers. Since the 1825 payment of that independence, it's been, the U.S. occupied Haiti for twenty years from 1915 to 1934 and maintained control of Haiti's finances for another decade. Just before, occupying Haiti for one day, the U.S. marines just landed in Port-au-Prince, went to the bank of Haiti and just took all the gold. Literally just stole all the gold, put it on a ship and sent it to New York. I mean, the history of imperial viciousness towards Haiti is long-standing and unfortunately is very active right until today.

[25:35]
Daniel Tarade: We talked this month on the podcast a lot internationally. We talked about Haiti, we also talked about Palestine, but we also talked about Cuba. Now, Cuba has another Caribbean nation with a similar population, but they had a socialist revolution this century or sixty years ago, and you see very different material conditions, and also to this day very different reporting, or lack of reporting, on what's happening in these different countries. Cuba now is in the media for fairly small protests, whereas, we already talked a bit about what was happening in Haiti to oppose Moïse, and that never really got the same traction. So, do you want to maybe talk a little bit about how then, Cuba went a different route, and how that plays out, and what you see materially today, but then also how the mainstream media is just continuously manufacturing consent both with respect to Cuba and Haiti?

[26:35]
Yves Engler: Yeah, the month-long general strike in Haiti in October and November of 2019, probably got like a tenth of the media attention that the thousand people, 500 people, whatever the number was exactly, in Havana, protesting one time, has received. Right, just completely out of proportion, probably one of the most important ways in which the media is, the dominant media is complicit in Canadian imperialism, is by basically ignoring uprisings and protests that challenge Ottawa's policy, and giving incredible amount of attention to protests that align with Ottawa or Washington's policy. 

Probably the starkest example is [the] Hong Kong protests, versus the protests in Haiti, and I wrote about that back in 2019. There's no doubt, one of the reasons for different interventions and for backing François Duvalier and then Jean-Claude Duvalier, the 30-year dictatorship from the 1950s to the mid-80s in Haiti, was a fear of what had happened in Cuba, with the Cuban revolution. I don't know, I've never seen polling on this, but I'd be very interested to see it. People from afar know there's Cuba, know there's lots of criticism or bad, Cuba or Cuban revolution did this or that, and there's not enough democracy or this, these different criticisms. I bet you if you did a poll of Haitians, you'll find that 90 percent of the population looks on what happened in Cuba, and has happened in Cuba for sixty years, in a quite favorable light, next to their conditions. 

So one of the things that they hated, Washington hated, Jean-Bertrand Aristide for was when he returned in the mid 90s, after the first coup against him, was beginning opening up diplomatic relations with Cuba which go back to François Duvalier voting to kick Cuba out of the organization of American states and they had begun one of the things that they destroyed after the 2004 coup in Haiti, that the U.S, Canada and France perpetrated was, they had the Aristide foundation had built a second medical school in Haiti, and it was it was Cuban doctors that were doing the teaching primarily and they, the U.N occupation, actually took over the school and they made it their own, they made their compound and ended the medical school. Fortunately there were hundreds of Haitian, young Haitians that all of a sudden had their training     disrupted. Fortunately, my understanding is that most of them, the Cubans took most of them to Cuba to be able to continue that training process; but there's no doubt, part of in the background to us, Canadian treatment of Haiti is is really a fear that Haiti might go in the direction of Cuba and break free from that that grip of U.S. domination.

[30:05]
Emily Steers: If I may inquire as well as you said from 1915 until 1934 the U.S. directly occupied Haiti and then controlled their economy for many more years. We understand the economic incentive of  cheap forced labor what were the other motivations of the United States occupation of Haiti and continued presence in Haiti.

[30:30]
Yves Engler: Yeah, what was the U.S. occupation obviously that's during world war one. So there was a geopolitical competition going on between Washington and Germany and France, but that was during world war one. So there was some element of the U.S. occupation being about solidifying U.S. control in the context of German and French influence. That was secondary to the economic motivation and I think a central part of that economic motivation of the U.S. occupation was that the post, after the Haitian revolution, for pretty good reason, the Haitians put in legislation that said that foreigners couldn't own land. Right, I mean, a pretty bad history of foreigners owning land and a fear of returning to slavery and all that stuff. So the Americans didn't like that of course and that they rewrote the Haitian constitution quite quickly after invading in 1915 and opened it up to foreign companies and it was quite a growth of foreign U.S. companies. At that period, in fact, the Royal Bank of Canada, began its operations in Haiti in 1919, alongside the U.S. occupation. There were some other Canadian insurance companies that became players and the actual world bank was one of only two banks operating in Haiti for quite a while. They had actually some of their top employees later became president and they were involved in funding some of that political activity. 

So, I think that's historically part of it up until today. Not like so clearly, the thing Haiti offers most importantly, as you mentioned to sort of global capitalism is cheap labor. It's not just a matter of cheap labor from the standpoint of that there's tons of production taking place in Haiti that that has sort of gone up and down and during periods of Jean-Claude Duvalier, in the early 1980s, there was actually 60,000 people employed in the sweatshops and Port-au-Prince was quite a thriving industry. They produced most of the baseballs that were used in the U.S, and stuff like that. That has declined drastically over the years, depending mostly on different, sort of, political dynamics. Now I don't know the exact number. It was Gildan Activewear, the Montreal company was the second biggest employer in Haiti. I'm not sure that's still the case, but from the sort of, late like 2008 to 2015, they were viewed as the second biggest employer in Haiti, with about 8,000 employees, and from a mix of their own   manufacturing and or their assembly making, primarily subcontracting to local   oligarchs. Including their main subcontractor, at the time of the 2004 coup, was André Apaid who was the head of the opposition to the elected government. He was the main person campaigning to overthrow the elected government. So, a Canadian company is very deeply tied to a pro-coup force.

So, the cheap labor in Haiti is also of value in terms of weakening union organizing and workers rights and elsewhere. Right, it's basically, you can say to the people in Honduras, Gilden has major operations in Honduras, that if you try to move your wages up to three dollars an hour right now. I don't know what, I think probably about a buck and a half, two dollars an hour in Honduras. If you try to move them up to three dollars an hour, we can always move to Haiti. So it's always been a way of dampening pressure on workers movements throughout the hemisphere. We have U.S. and Canadian officials including the aid officials of the Canadian international development agency on record on what Haiti offers, is this competitive advantage on wages. Which is another way of saying what Haiti offers is it's impoverishment and so but this is like Canada's development officials saying this stuff right. So it's like what's the development in that. Right, so that's an important part of it. There's been mining interests; at one point a Canadian company had prospecting rights for ten percent of Haitian territory. 

There's a Canadian mining company going back into the fifties that was working with the François Duvalier regime of that period. There's been a more recent phase of mining, most of that hasn't really panned out. They've put a lot of pressure on   Haitian politicians after the coup of 2004 to put a lot of pressure to rewrite the mining code and to basically open it up completely to the mining sector, which of course is, the it's mostly in the north of the country, the peasantry wants nothing to do with this. They know that they're just going to be displaced and it's going to lead to all kinds of ecological damage and whatnot so there's   some mining interests. 

Canadian banks have continued to be in Haiti and have been in Haiti, but if you really take Haiti's economy, it wouldn't surprise me if York University has a bigger economic output than all of Haiti. 

So, from the standpoint of global capitalism, Haiti is of incredibly limited importance; but it's basically, to understand the viciousness of imperial policies, I don't think you can understand it from a simple sort of dollars and cents, but rather that Haiti is at the bottom of this imperial system and modest efforts to move it out from the bottom of this imperial system are threatening to the imperial system and need to be crushed and that's what the best explanation of what they did to Aristide in 2004. He refused to privatize some state-owned companies and again these state-owned companies from the standpoint of Canadian capital completely inconsequential, but from the standpoint of, if Haiti can do this, if Haiti can resist the dictates of Washington and the IMF and Ottawa, that's a bad symbol for Guatemala, and Guatemala means a bit more to global capitalism then if Guatemala, the next thing  you got Honduras, next thing  you got Venezuela, next thing  you got Mexico, and that matters from global capitalism; and then alongside that is, you have, I think a really important racist component. I think you have an anti-Blackness, and you have a specifically anti-Haitian dynamic and some of that traces all the way back to Haiti's successful slave revolution and how threatening that was to the dominant white supremacist order. 

Haiti has been basically demonized since that time, and that continues to shape understanding of Haiti and it's partly about what they can get away with, right. Haiti is not in a good position to resist, and there's all kinds of elements to that even just from simple kinds of linguistic elements, right. The fact that the language is not a language that's spoken anywhere else. So, even if you speak Spanish, or even if half the country spoke Guatemalan mayan language, but if most of the country speaks Spanish that offers you the ability to  communicate with the rest of the world, and in some ways resist efforts to overthrow your government or weaken your popular movements or whatever. Haiti’s further compounded its isolation linguistically and that just [adds] one more element to the sort of the ability for Haiti and Haitians to resist U.S. and Canadian policies.

[38:51]
Daneil Tarade: So, this all actually reminds and even puts into more context, but during the AIDS crisis, Haiti was also uniquely singled out and in even in Canada Haitians were deferred from donating blood as a entire population regardless of any individual behaviors or not, and they were the only country singled out in such a racist discriminatory act; and when you put it in this context here it makes a lot of sense then. Even 200 years, after their slave rebellion, they've still been marked in that way. 

Now, you're from Montreal, Montreal has a very big Haitian population from what I understand relatively speaking in terms of the diaspora and you already even mentioned that people sending money back to Haiti is such a big source of just revenue in Haiti. So in Montreal right now what is going on in the Haitian community there, what are the actions that people are leading to put pressure on Canada to take their hands off of Haiti; and what are groups like the Canadian foreign policy institute doing on the ground there as well?

[40:04]
Yves Engler: Yeah, actually, today there's a rally in front of the Haitian consulate here in Montreal. There was one about five days or so after the assassination of Moïse and that's organized by people who are saying that, from the HBD, who are saying that, you have to stop with the foreign interference Canada. Canada out of the core group, but unfortunately the mobilization Haitian community is not very strong. After the 2004 coup there was the year anniversary that was probably the biggest demonstration. I saw about 400 people from the Haitian community that demonstrated on a very cold February day, but as a general rule the Haitian community was very demobilized.

It's been a lot of bad news at this point with Jovenel, just before his assassination, it was, the intellectual sector of the Haitian community in Montreal were hostile to Jovenel, that wasn't the case in 2004; and in 2004 with the coup against Aristide, the intellectual sectors were very much supportive of the coup. So, the Haitian community at that period was quite divided on the U.S. and Canada's intervention with Aristide, that's not the case. Moïse is more like, during the time of the Duvalier, by the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, it was closing in on, sort of unanimity. Eighty percent, ninety percent, who were hostile to Duvalier. I think that was more of the case with Moïse, recently but very little. They are demobilized. There's been just so much bad news, from the earthquake and all the horrors of the 2010 earthquake to cholera and different natural disasters.

There really has been a lot of bad news. So my impression is that people in the Haiti community of Montreal mostly don't want to don't want to to think about it too much. They're uncomfortable with criticizing Canada, there's a lot of discomfort with directly challenging Canadian imperialism. Especially the Trudeau Liberal party of course, most of the Haitian community votes for the Liberal party, so there's   hesitancy there. The mobilization, i'm part of this group and we've done some stuff on the issue. The Canadian foreign policy institute has also done some stuff. There's a very good film people can check out [Haiti Betrayed] about Canada's role in the coup and it kind of goes up to pretty close until today from Elaine Briere. We put out the Canadian foreign policy institute, in February when Moïse, [when] his little constitutional legitimacy ended, we put out a statement that was signed by a bunch of prominent people calling on Canada to stop backing Moïse. There's been a couple of parliamentary petitions that are calling for Canada to release the documents around the Ottawa initiative on Haiti. 

So basically, in 2003, the Canadian government organized a meeting with U.S, and French and an organization of American states officials, where they decided that the elected president must go, Haiti should be put under U.N trusteeship, and the Haitian military should be recreated. Thirteen months later, Aristide was forced out by U.S. marines, with Canadian troops patrolling the airport. Haiti was put under [the] U.N, they’ve basically sort of been under U.N. control since then, kind of differing phases, and the Haitian military has been recreated. 

So, Canada was involved in this incredible, sort of, plotting, if you like against the elected government. So recently there were new documents, new internal government documents that were released on that issue due to a parliamentary petition by Green party MP Paul Manley. Actually Breach media just published a very good story on that. So there's some activity. I was talking to a member of the Canada Haiti action network, which was a group that we set up after the 2004 coup across the country, and we did all kinds of campaigning against Canada's role in Haiti. Things didn't really change. In one sense, but what we've seen recently with some of these. 

[For instance] this public letter that we put out in February that the Canada foreign policy institute [put out]. It was signed by the likes of David Suzuki and Stephen Lewis and people who are sort of well known in progressive or NDP circles. The fact that these people [were] willing to sign, it was kind of because, I think of this 15 years of Haiti solidarity activism that it kind of seeped out a certain amount of of knowledge and criticism of Canada's role in Haiti and there's a sense out there that  Canada's doing bad things in Haiti and even after the assassination of Moïse, the corporate media provided a certain amount of space for that kind of perspective to come out. Which, I think is somewhat different, and partly due to all this activism that has sort of built up over the last 15 years. Now is it enough? Is it where it should be? Of course not, but there is a certain level of consciousness that's been developed. 

The Haiti solidarity hasn’t succeeded on how to really change Canadian policy. I think what you really need, the most realistic way of changing Canadian policy in Haiti is the Haitian community of Montreal getting mobilized, asserting its power with the progressive left in Quebec. That's the alliance that has the most realistic possibility of really causing serious trouble for the government. There's bits of it, we see, we've seen bits of it over the past. A few months of challenging Moïse, but it's still, there needs to be a lot more mobilization for that to really start costing the Trudeau government.

[45:57]
Emily Steers: As we're kind of wrapping up here, I would love to hear what you think, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of Moises, what does the future look like for Haiti?

[46:09]
Yves Engler: Well, I don't think the future looks good for Haiti. There's no sort of great   solution on offer, there is a procedure. So, when the core group as I mentioned earlier, they appointed Ariel Henry and he to lead the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale party, and to go to elections. That's basically what they wanted the core groups trying to do, is they're trying to unite this far-right political party all behind their person and to move forward elections that they want to have happen right away, because they want the the sort of letitamint elements that come with elections and they know that the circumstances right now is there's no chance of having anything approaching a legitimate election. It's going to be very easy for them to arrange the results, even if they don't arrange the results, it just, the fact that the population doesn't have any trust in the situation means that people are not going to vote, which is in the favor of the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale party and the U.S. and Canada. 

There's a proposal that a large sector of Haitian political and civil society life has come behind of trying to come up with a consensus government that will lead for a medium term of two years to try to regenerate a few of the institutions, because none of that, there's no basically all the institutions are not legitimate right now in Haiti, right. The people that the core group is saying the prime minister, they're not, they've been appointed by the core group after they were appointed by the de facto president who's lost his constitutional legitimacy. They never got okayed by the senate and the legislature because those aren't functioning as they're supposed to be by the Haitian constitution. 

It's a real disintegration of the institutions of the state and also simultaneously, you have this terrible violence. Moise’s assassination was [the start of] just tons and tons of killing, tons of kidnapping in Port-au-Prince. In the months before that, the idea that you can just have some quick election and that's going to deal with the problems is, it doesn't make sense, and that's not what this big coalition of Haitian political actors, and I say big coalition, I mean these people from, that are like the cousin of the person who talk to who was the person they imposed after the U.S, France and Canada overthrew Aristide government in 2004. That's who they imposed, Gérard Latortue, as the prime minister. So, somebody from a right-wing, almost certainly drug-running, corrupt politician, people like that, to the Platfòm Pitit Desalin, and the Fanmi Lavalas, two political parties of the left that's part of this coalition, trying to have some sort of consensus government. So it's not a government that we would like, this is not the ideology that I, or many left-wing Haitians, would be putting forward, but basically just a certain degree of stability moving aside this Haitian Tèt Kale Party, that's this really right-wing, corrupt and violent force. 

The coalition of social civil society and political groups in Haiti encompasses broad spectrum of political ideology and the idea is to have this coalition government until it's possible to have close to reasonable elections and that's part of what the core group decision to get behind Ariel Henry is about, to undercut this effort to have a consensus government, because it's preferable from Washington and Ottawa's perspective too. The Haitian Tèt Kale Party is preferable, and also for them to move towards elections, which will be easy to manipulate. So that's a solution, a political solution, that's on offer right now and it should be supported from the outside, to the extent that we can support it. But I think the main thing that we can do from outside of Haiti is to call on Canada to get out of the core group. It's totally absurd that there's this group of foreign ambassadors that puts out statements about Haitian affairs regularly and that these statements have a huge political effect. Imagine that the Jamaican, Congolese, Guatemalan and Filipino ambassadors in Ottawa got together and periodically put out statements and said hey this is who should be the prime minister of Canada that would not be a good idea, it's totally outlandish, but that's what happens in Haiti. So, there's no justification for the core group to exist, and there's no justification for Canada to be the second main player in the core group. So I think that's a demand that the progressive and socialist, anti-imperialist movements in Canada should easily be able to rally behind. 

There's other demands, I think that are important. Demands that are a bit more complicated, but shouldn't be that complicated like ending our support for the Haitian police, right. Canada has spent certainly more than 100 million dollars, probably into the hundreds of millions of dollars, building up the Haitian police force, since the 2004 coup. They frame it as trying to professionalize the police and there's elements of truth within that, but mostly what they're doing is they're building up the security apparatus to maintain an incredibly unequal Haitian economic situation, and it's a force designed to protect the tiny Haitian elite and their international backers. If we believe that we should be defunding the Canadian police, with lots and lots of problems the Canadian police have and I agree with that demand, certainly defunding the Haitian police is a demand that we should get behind. It's not just that, the police are involved and really political. Just a couple months ago the Canadian ambassador Stuart Savage in Port-au-Prince was at a was at a function for a police academy function which he the Canadian ambassador go to very regularly in Haiti, and the interior minister of Germany's was announced that the police were there to enforce the constitutional referendum. This is a completely dubious constitutional referendum that the Moïse was trying to push, and the idea that openly saying that we're basically the security force that Canada is paying for is designed to push this [referendum]. Something that was rejected by the vast majority of the population, just speaks to how politicized the whole police training is. 

There's other just simple demands, the two parliamentary petitions talked about releasing the documents, right. We haven't got a full accounting of what happened with the Ottawa initiative in Haiti, where we plan to overthrow the elected government. 

So there's just a simple kind of request from the Canadian government, releasing information which of course is educational. We're not just asking for those documents to be released because there's going to be tons more details, there probably will be more details, but it's broader. Let's remember how part of why we got to where Haiti's gotten today is because Canada and the U.S. destroyed the most popular political party in Haitian history, the Fanmi Lavalas party and we did that through a whole series of measures, but including having this meeting where we plan to overthrow that that government. 

So there's a lot of demands that are that are, I don't think that's too complicated that people can rally behind here. Now how do we operationalize those demands? There is an effort, as I mentioned, Solidarité Québec-Haïti is a group I'm involved with. We do campaigning stuff, there's this rally here in Montreal today, there's an effort to recreate the Canada Haiti action network that's just beginning to be discussed among some former Haiti solidarity activists, there's Kevin Edmonds a professor at University of Toronto who's been involved in some of this Haiti solidarity. We’ve continued some of this Haiti solidarity activism over recent years so  it's not much different than other campaigns, it's a mix of knowledge building, educational stuff, and concrete campaigning. I think an important one would be calling on Canada to get out of the core group and putting that on to the sort of political discussion in this country.

[54:58]
Daniel Tarade: Absolutely. Well thanks so much Yves, for coming on to the Red Review and providing this educational background, providing that base of knowledge so that people can take that out into the world into their interactions and we can develop a more cohesive foreign policy, and a model to explain what Canada is doing abroad. So thank you once again for joining.

Yves Engler: Thanks a lot for having me

[55:18]
Daniel Tarade: And then if you wanted to learn more about Yves Engler his work but also the work of the Canadian foreign policy institute and the other groups that Yves mentioned or any of the groups that we mentioned during this podcast just look in the description and you'll find links to twitter accounts to websites to gofundmes and every other way that you can very quickly get involved, and build up your own involvement in these struggles. Any last words Yves, anything you want to just shout out, book projects or anything?

[55:51]
Yves Engler: I have a book called ‘Stand on Guard for Whom: a People's History of the Canadian Military’ that is forthcoming in August. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity to do a bit of touring on that depending on the pandemic situation.

Daniel Tarade: Great luck with that and thanks once again hope to see you soon.

Emily Steers: Thank you so much.

Yves Engler: Thank you.