Published today by Narco News:

A man in a BRICOR uniform tears apart a tarp shelter in Delmas with a knife. DR 2011 Etant Dupain.

Security forces who are tearing down makeshift tent camps inhabited by Haitians displaced in last year’s earthquake were trained by Risks Incorporated, a US private security firm involved in torture trainings in Mexico, a Narco News investigation has found. Three camps in Delmas, a district in central Port-au-Prince, have been destroyed in the past week, sending families fleeing into the street with nowhere to go.

The Delmas Mayor’s Street Control Brigade, also known by the acronym BRICOR, helped carry out the evictions. Risks Incorporated’s Andrew Wilson, who also goes by the names “Orlando” and “Jerry,” confirmed in a telephone interview that he trained them in “use of force.” In 2008, Narco Newsrevealed that Wilson trained Mexican police in torture techniques in videos leaked to the Mexican press.

Videos posted in March 2009 on Risks Inc.’s YouTube page show a man training several dozen Haitian men in the then-partially-constructed city hall of Delmas Mayor Wilson Jeudy. Delmas is the largest municipal commune in Port-au-Prince, with at least 600,000 residents. “Yes, that’s me,” Wilson said by phone from Miami.

The men, wearing T-shirts bearing the Delmas Mayor’s emblem, perform exercises leaping over walls, kicking, and hitting tires on the ground with batons. In one scene, they practice controlling a boisterous demonstration. One group steps forward, jutting out their batons in striking motions, while the other chants in mock protest.

In the Mexico videos, Wilson is seen dragging a police trainee into his own vomit as punishment for an incomplete exercise, placing a man’s head into a dirty hole, and training police to squirt mineral water up the noses, another torture technique.

Mayor Jeudy and Daniel Antoine, the brigade chief, said in interviews last year that BRICOR received training from an American security contractor.

“BRICOR is a service that exists to control the streets, the merchants, and disorderly people. To put them in order,” Jeudy said, sitting in the pristine second floor hallway of the finished, palace-like city hall building. “[The American] was here to train them. . .We knew him from his work training the Haitian National Police.” Jeudy claimed the BRICOR training was done for free.

“The brigade is here to keep the streets clean and prevent merchants from selling in the streets,” Antoine said. “There’s a lot of disorder out there. . .and when foreign tourists come, they say, ‘This is so ugly.’”

DR 2011 Etant Dupain.

He said his men had received training twice, the last time in November of 2009, with Delmas Police Commissioner Carl Henry, who commands the Haitian National Police in Delmas, in attendance.

Henry and Jeudy are reported to have threatened quake victims on the grounds of St. Louis Gonzague, an elite private school in Delmas, with forced expulsion as early as last February, only one month after the quake. Haitian National Police accompanied Jeudy’s forces in this week’s camp demolitions.

Jeudy said BRICOR is a 75-member unarmed force, without batons or guns, and is not authorized to make arrests. Yet they are seen training with batons in the Risks Incorporated videos and this reporter observed BRICOR personnel with handcuffs on their belts last year. The Miami Herald reported this week that security forces descended on a camp “wielding machetes and knives…tearing through the makeshift tents as unsuspecting campers fled for cover or yelled in protest.”

Journalist and organizer Etant Dupain raised the alarm about the evictions on May 23, after posting photos online of hundreds of tents scattered and smashed into the ground that day at Carrefour Aeroport, a prominent intersection. Two days later, another camp was destroyed. Dupain’s photos show the Haitian National Police and bulldozers on the scene, as well as an image of Jeudy with a man in a BRICOR uniform at his side. Another image shows a BRICOR-clad man ripping apart a tarp shelter with a knife.

Dupain believes about 350 families have been displaced. “I saw one family today,” he said by phone. “I know their names, they have three children. They’re in the street, still at Carrefour Aeroport. And it has rained since the camps were torn down.”

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Not long after former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide landed in Haiti yesterday, ending an exile begun in 2004 by a US-backed coup d’etat, Kristoffer Rønneberg at the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten posted online 13 new private diplomatic cables from the US government relating to Aristide and Haiti, from the Wikileaks Cablegate set.

Taken together, they portray the United States as intractably, almost obsessively occupied with marginalizing Aristide and Lavalas, and making sure other nations fall in line. The French government conspired with the US to make his return near-impossible, discussing how to make the logistics of a return flight more difficult and making plain to S. Africa that he must be kept there. There’s also the news that in 2008 current President Rene Preval was trying “co-opt” the Fanmi Lavalas party into his ruling coalition and was flatly opposed to Aristide even being in the hemisphere. Below, a round-up of key passages from the cables… Read More…

Disclaimer: I write bland headlines. But hopefully you’ll find the post itself worth your while. I’ll add links tomorrow. It’s late and I need to get home!

“President Rene Preval made reference to these rumors, telling the Ambassador that he did not want Aristide ‘anywhere in the hemisphere.’” That was in 2008, according to a secret American cable from the Wikileaks cache released today, when rumors swirled about Preval’s predecessor, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his possible passage to Venezuela.

The rumors, which began circulating again with ever-stronger intensity in the past month, finally were put to rest today.

Aristide ended a seven-year-long exile. He arrived in Haiti by private plane, gave a heartwarming speech about love and exclusion in four languages including Zulu, and headed to his mansion with his family amidst a jostling crowd of overjoyed supporters that stretched down the road surrounding his convoy.

A single smoke bomb to disperse the crowd? Nothing doing. People promptly gave each other lifts over the Aristide compounds’s newly-cleaned 13-foot-high walls. A middle-aged guy boosted me up and I clambered over.

We waited for Aristide to emerge again, some eating mangos off trees and lounging about the pool to bide their time, but he stayed inside. He’ll probably have more to say soon. When he does, many will listen, much to chagrin of his detractors, who say he tolerated corruption and violent crimes as President.

One of them is a certain Michel Martelly, a leading presidential candidate in Sunday’s runoff election, who can be seen strutting about a nightclub in a video posted on YouTube recently, saying “I would kill Aristide to stick a dick up your ass” and calling Aristide supporters “faggots.”

Martelly has been drawing huge crowds and many presume he’s handily winning the race against a less aggressive right-wing rival. But today I heard a young man remark that he’s “falling in shit.” I stifled a laugh (and a cough, as we marched through the dusty, trash-strewn streets along Aristide’s convoy).

Longtime Haitian political observer Patrick Elie, who served in the governments of Aristide and Preval, was a bit more nuanced: “These elections are going to give a president who has no legitimacy and who will be the puppet of the international community, especially now with the reconstruction.” Read More…

Nothing like the return of an ex-President on your birthday to smash writer’s block to pieces. Published by Inter-Press Service today. While you’re at it, read this excellent interview with Aristide from last November.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 17, 2011 (IPS) – Tensions are running high in Haiti as dueling campaigns for the presidency enter overdrive in their final days, and Jean- Bertrand Aristide, a popular former president, returns from a seven-year exile in South Africa.

Aristide will arrive in Port-au-Prince on Friday morning, Ira Kurzban, his Miami-based lawyer, told IPS in an email message. A private plane carrying his family left Johannesburg on Thursday.

“Aristide is a president who was elected, but had to suffer through coup d’etats,” said Hari, a professional in downtown Port-au-Prince who gave just his first name. “His return will be good for the country. It will help Haitians put their heads together, to help us resolve the crisis we’re in.”

“There were people who conspired to send him away, and if there is tension it will be because of them,” he said.

Aristide was flown out of Haiti in 2004 on a U.S. plane in what he called a modern-day coup d’etat. The George W. Bush administration and critics say his rule was marked by corruption and human rights abuses until he voluntarily fled into exile amidst a rebellion.

Diplomatic communications released by Wikileaks show that the administration pressured other countries to limit Aristide’s political influence from abroad. But last month he was given a renewed passport by the Haitian government and this week South Africa rebuffed pressure from Washington to prevent his return.

Fanmi Lavalas, Aristide’s party, was banned from participating in the electoral process by Haiti’s electoral council. “They are not planning to have free and fair democratic elections. They are planning to have a selection,” Aristide told an interviewer last fall, a talking point echoed regularly by his supporters at demonstrations.

Asked recently about prospects for stability post-election, U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti Paul Farmer told IPS, “Of course I’m worried, because if you have scant participation or you exclude anyone from engagement… that’s a formula for instability and political instability breeds health problems just like poverty does.”

In a Thursday press release, the U.N. peacekeeping force said “there is no doubt” Haitians will go to the polls to determine the future of their country, and urged them to exercise their vote en masse.

Privately, a U.N. security advisor sent out a “hibernation checklist” to foreign aid workers to prepare for possible riots.

Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly, two right-wing candidates at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Aristide, are vying for the presidency in Sunday’s runoff election. The victor will manage Haiti’s reconstruction, including billions in funds promised by international donors. Read More…

An October 2008 cable just released by Wikileaks called “Why We Need A Continuing MINUSTAH Presence in Haiti” recommends MINUSTAH’s presence continue until at least 2013. The US pays one fourth of its budget. Some notable passages:

A premature departure of MINUSTAH would leave the Preval government or his successor vulnerable to resurgent kidnapping and international drug trafficking, revived gangs, greater political violence, an exodus of seaborne migrants, a sharp drop in foreign and domestic investment, and resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces – reversing gains of the last two years.

The fundamental USG policy goal in Haiti is to make it a viable state that does not post a threat to the region through domestic political turmoil or an exodus of illegal migrants. To reach that point, Haiti must be able to assure its own domestic security, govern itself with stable democratic institutions, and create a business climate that will get the economy moving. Haiti has made progress but is still a long way from these goals. The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is the largest and most effective external institution pursuing them.

We must be sensitive to Latin fears that any Haitian opposition to the UN presence undermines their domestic support for deployments in Haiti. During the April riots, the Brazilian MINUSTAH Force Commander told Ambassador and others that his greatest fear was that his troops would be forced to fire on demonstrators. He understood that this could ignite opposition in Haiti, Brazil, and other contributing countries to his troops’ presence in Haiti.

Read up on the other Haiti-related disclosures in Wikileaks cables here.

Below, an edited September 2010 interview with Dr. Matthew J. Smith, historian at Jamaica’s University of the West Indies, Mona and author of Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 – the first comprehensive history of the post-occupation era, arguing that “the period (from 1934 until the rise of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier to the presidency in 1957) constituted modern Haiti’s greatest moment of political promise.”

I ordered the award-winning book just in time for it to be delivered before my plane left for Haiti in September of ’09. It goes a long way towards explaining why the Duvaliers rose and clung to power for so long; I can’t recommend it highly enough. I hope other American reporters have read the book as well so we can see start to see some desperately-needed decent journalism on Haiti in the establishment media. As Gina Athena Ulysse says, “Yes, we are poor and have a history of political strife, but it’s not innate. And hell no, it’s not because we are mostly black. We are not reducible to our conditions.”

What caused you to write Red & Black in Haiti? What kind of response did it generate – both within and outside in Haiti?

Growing up in Jamaica, I had seen how intense political rivalries create dangerous problems and in many instances lead to violent solutions. I wanted to find out to what extent this history was matched in Haiti, a country which I have always considered to be incredibly similar to Jamaica. An earlier generation of scholars, such as David Nicholls, Michel Hector, and J. Michael Dash had indicated in their work that the tension between Marxists and Black Nationalists in Haiti was a defining feature of the 1930s-1950s. This intrigued me and encouraged me to go further and explore this tension.

The two decades before Duvalier were very transformative for Haiti in terms of politics, but in a much larger sense in terms of culture and history. So much happened in the postoccupation period that deserved careful attention. It was really the beginning of a modern political era in Haiti, one that was defined by an increase in popular politicization.

Yet it had not been given the attention it deserved. The possibility of great positive change seemed very real in this period and Haiti could very well have evolved differently as a result. I also wanted to write a political history of Haiti that did not reduce Haitian politics to a series of failures but to give it rigorous and fair-minded assessment and to show that the radical generation of that era had invested a great deal in improving the welfare of their country. Read More…

Dominican President Leonel Fernandez told State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Patrick Duddy in January of 2006, according to a cable released by Norway’s largest newspaper, that he suspects Brazilian MINUSTAH military commander Urano Bacellar was assassinated by a paramilitary-type group, possibly led by Guy Phillippe. Fernandez said he believes Bacellar did not commit suicide and there had been a cover-up.

Fernandez inquired about the circumstances surrounding the death of Brazilian Army General Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar. DAS Duddy confirmed that all indications pointed to suicide. Fernandez expressed skepticism. He had met General Bacellar; to him, suicide seemed unlikely for a professional of Bacellar´s caliber. Fernandez said he believes that there is a small group in Haiti dedicated to disrupting the elections and creating chaos; that this group had killed MINUSTAH members in the past (a Canadian and a Jordanian, and now the Brazilian General); and that there would be more violence against MINUSTAH forces as the election date approaches. The President said he knew of a case in which a Brazilian MINUSTAH member had killed a sniper. Although he allowed that Bacellar´s death might be due to an accidentally self-inflicted wound, he believes that the Brazilian government is calling the death a suicide in order to protect the mission from domestic criticism. A confirmed assassination would result in calls from the Brazilian populace for withdrawal from Haiti. Success in this mission is vital for President Lula of Brazil, because it is part of his master plan to obtain a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

(SBU) DAS Duddy restated his understanding that the evidence pointed to suicide and that the specific circumstances of the other assassinations in all likelihood ruled out a conspiracy. (S) Fernandez elaborated further on his hypothesis: there was a cover-up of an assassination and that more attacks would occur. He was firm in this view and repeated the warning. (S) The Ambassador asked who might be behind such an attack. Fernandez said he did not know. He commented that in the case of the demonstrations against his visit to Port au Prince in December 2005, Haitian activist Guy Philippe had organized the effort. Fernandez said that Philippe had people working for him inside the National Palace.

Fernandez´s Visit to Haiti
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(U) DAS Duddy praised Fernandez on his handling of the aftermath of the Port au Prince demonstrations. (SBU) Fernandez retrieved from his desk a book of photos from the visit. He described his visit to the National Palace in Port au Prince: the growing crowd, his uneasiness, the lack of security, the “ambush” of his motorcade as they were leaving, machine gun fire, and the role of Dominican helicopters and MINUSTAH troops in rescuing the motorcade. (S) He said that entities within Haiti had killed MINUSTAH troops via sniper attack on previous occasions, and he believed they would do so again. Their goal was chaos. “Imagine,” he said, “the chaos that would have resulted if they had killed me in Haiti. There would have been wholesale persecution of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.” For this reason he had downplayed the incident to the press, but the truth was that it had been very serious.

Read up on the other Haiti-related disclosures in Wikileaks cables here.