This presentation took place during a December 2, 2021, webinar. Toward Freedom has 69 years of experience publishing independent reports and analyses that document the struggles for liberation of the majority of the world’s people. Now, with a new editor, Julie Varughese, at its helm, what does the future look like for Toward Freedom and for independent media? Toward Freedom‘s board of directors formally welcomed Julie as the new editor. She reported back on her time covering Nicaragua’s critical presidential election. New contributors Danny Shaw and Jacqueline Luqman also spoke on their work for Toward Freedom as it relates to the value of independent media. Danny touched on the rising Pink Tide in Latin America while Jacqueline discussed the role of the Pentagon in Hollywood.
Indigenous people protesting on February 8 in the streets of Perú against the parliamentary coup that ousted President Pedro Castillo Terrones / credit: Clau O’Brien Moscoso
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in The Canada Files.
Two months on from the coup against Peru’s democratically-elected President, Pedro Castillo, Canada is providing key support for a regime responsible for the deaths of 58 civilians (as of February 6, 2023).
There is a dramatic contrast between Canada’s chummy relationship with Peru’s de facto authorities and its increasingly hostile treatment of socialist Nicaragua.
President Pedro Castillo’s December 7, 2022 ouster and political imprisonment was followed by threemassacres, with teenagers among the dead. 1,229 reported civilians have been wounded, according to Peruvian health authorities, and an unknown number of arbitrary and mass arrests.
Protests are ongoing, with 72 active roadblock points on national roadways, and an indefinite strike which began on January 4, 2023 in regions of southern Peru continues. A recent poll by the Institute of Peruvian Studies showed the Congress with 9 per cent approval rating and 71 per cent disapproved of Dina Boluarte’s presidency. The unrest ignited throughout the country in rejection of the removal and imprisonment of Castillo, and subsequent installation of Dina Boluarte, as well as in rejection of the right-wing Congress, has not gone unnoticed by Canada. Global Affairs Canada has published several travel advisories since the start of the anti-coup mobilizations.
Global Affairs warns of a “volatile” political situation and acknowledges “many casualties”, attributing deaths to “clashes between protestors and the security forces”. In December 2022, mobilizations intensified to the point where Canadians became stranded and at least four humanitarian flights were organized to evacuate Canadian nationals.
Canada expressed ‘deep concern’ in a tweet by Ambassador Louis Marcotte on the day of President Castillo’s removal and its recognition of Dina Boluarte, who was sworn in within hours of Castillo’s arrest, was made known shortly after. Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly then ‘reiterated’ her administration’s “support for the transitional government of President Boluarte” during a call with Peru’s Foreign Minister, Ana Cecilia Gervasi.
Ottawa’s actions closely resemble those of 2019, when the Trudeau government and other CORE group members were first to recognize the coup regime of Jeanine Añez in Bolivia and silent before the brutal repression which accompanied the coup. The similarities between the two cases are countless and it’s worth noting that Canada has the same ambassador for both Peru and Bolivia.
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
The state terror unleashed on protesters and civilians prompted an observation visit to Peru by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Canada acknowledged the visit and report to the Organization of American States (OAS) by the IACHR at a Special Meeting of the OAS Permanent Council. The IACHR is currently drafting the relevant report but published a press release on January 27, 2023, previewing its findings.
The Commission “condemned violence in efforts to disperse demonstrators” and “mass arrests” during the raid on the National University of San Marcos, in Lima. It noted reports of “excessive use of force by law enforcement” by civil society organizations, arbitrary arrests and complaints of “verbal attacks including the use of intimidating, derogatory, racist, and humiliating language” by police who impeded lawyers’ ability to access their clients. Amid reports of sexual violence by officers against women detainees, the IACHR stressed categorical condemnation of the practice as a tool to exercise control. The statement also issued a reminder on the rights of persons deprived of liberty.
Ottawa’s relative silence on the Peruvian state’s widely reported abuses is particularly eyebrow raising given Canada’s good graces towards the IACHR, which derives its mandate from the OAS — an intergovernmental body dominated by the United States and Canada.
OAS
The OAS has in no way contributed positively to the situation in Peru and should be investigated for its role in the December 7, 2022 coup. A High-Level Group delegation of the OAS Permanent Council visit just two weeks prior to Castillo’s ouster failed to avert the crisis. Castillo himself had gone directly to the Secretary General in search of support from the organization.
Fast forward to January 30, 2023, and with no end in sight for Peru’s turmoil, a Special Meeting of the OAS Permanent Council to address the situation was held, at the request of four member countries.
The brief remarks delivered before this council by Canada’s representative to the OAS, Ambassador Hugh Adsett, referred to the IACHR’s “conclusions” but avoided elaboration. Adsett offered no condemnation of the crimes committed against the Peruvian population, as Canada has on many other occasions, particularly when the OAS Permanent Council has met to address the political situations in Nicaragua and Venezuela. Adsett also participated in the gutting and re-writing of a draft declaration, which in its final version received the approval of all members of the aforementioned council, including the United States, the Peruvian regime itself, and with the blessing of OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.
A call for prompt, supervised elections in Peru is central in the final document, as well as a call for the Peruvian Public Ministry to investigate, prosecute, and punish “those responsible for violations of human rights” — with no mention of security forces and their use of repression against the population. The “excessive use of force by security forces” was cited in the earlier version first drafted by Colombia and Antigua and Barbuda, but was modified in the carefully-worded final version. This version purposely omitted all reference to security forces and didn’t attribute violence or human rights violations to the state, leaving the declaration open to interpretation.
In the face of a mountain of irrefutable evidence of flagrant human rights violations by the Boluarte government, the OAS has expressed its “full support” for Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, a position it shares with Canada and the United States.
Canada and the OAS Target the Sandinista Revolution
During October 2022, just two months before the coup in Peru, Lima was the host of the OAS General Assembly. ‘Human rights’ in Nicaragua topped Foreign Minister Melanie Joly’s agenda at a peculiar time, given the absence of any significant political development in the Central American country that would warrant special attention.
Canada assumed the lead in the coordinated attack on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in 2021, similar to the shift in U.S.-provided tasks in 2018 when then-Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland led the charge against the Bolivarian government of Venezuela through the now defunct ‘Lima Group’.
Since receiving the baton from Washington in 2021, Joly has made numerous statements aimed at Nicaragua’s democracy and has sought to escalate the regional and international campaign of aggression. This comes in addition to the illegal sanctions regime first introduced by Ottawa in June of 2019. According to Global Affairs, sanctions have been enacted “in response to gross and systematic human rights violations that have been committed in Nicaragua.”
The result of the October OAS General Assembly meeting in Lima was a strongly-worded resolution with a long list of action items to address a non-existent political and human rights crisis in Nicaragua.
Canada has arbitrarily and illegally imposed three rounds of unilateral sanctions against the country which has enjoyed years of political stability, and whose citizens feel the most peaceful out of all countries of the world, according to a Gallup poll.
Canada’s Interests in Latin America
Canadians ought to question why Canada is harassing a country at peace, with the lowest levels of violent and transnational crime in Central America while leading the world in gender parity, as it rubber stamps the excessive use of force and extrajudicial killings by the widely-hated regime in Peru.
The reality is that Canada never wanted Pedro Castillo in power to begin with and saw better allies in his neoliberal opponents. With CAD $9.9 billion in assets, Canadian companies are Peru’s largest investors in mineral exploration. The country’s mining and resource extraction firms are always attentive to political shifts in Latin America because of the direct effect of policy changes on their ability to operate and secure contracts. The ambassador himself made an appearance alongside his constituents of the mining industry, including Hudbay Minerals, at the Canada Pavilion at the PERUMIN 35 Mining Convention.
Post-coup, Louis Marcotte, Ambassador of Canada to Peru and Bolivia, was quick to meet with Peru’s Mining Minister, Oscar Vera Gargurevich, to promote investment by Canadian firms in mining and hydrocarbon, as well as in the development of electromobility. Vera Gargurevich confirmed his ministry’s participation in the infamous PDAC mining convention in Toronto, Ontario, to be held in March, where Peru will seek new foreign investors.
The president of the Peruvian delegation to PDAC 2023, Óscar Benavides, has said that his country’s representatives will be reassuring investors at the Toronto convention and explain the situation in his country and what’s being done to solve it.
Ottawa’s actions amid flagrant abuses by the Peruvian state are consistent with its track record of legitimizing unpopular neoliberal regimes despite overt and well-documented violent repression (Ivan Duque, Juan Orlando Hernandez, Lenin Moreno, Guillermo Lasso, Jeanine Añez). At the same time, it has worked to undermine the governments of Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, Nicolas Maduro, and Manuel Zelaya, all of which guarded the sovereignty of their respective countries and resources against foreign exploitation. These leaders, through nationalization, have insisted that resources be used to the benefit of their own populations and not for corporate profits.
Similarly, Castillo ran on a campaign which promised to reassert popular control over Peru’s natural resources through nationalization. Despite the difficulties Castillo encountered once in office, his opponents feared that he would renegotiate contracts to the benefit of the Peruvian state over foreign companies—which would affect Canadian plunderers.
Canada Out of Peru
Canada is currently urging Peru to hold new elections which appear likely to be organized by an illegitimate administration and Congress, with involvement of the OAS. In any such scenario, Castillo’s former Peru Libre party may face obstacles in running a candidate, as the party continues to be a target of political persecution and media smear campaigns.
Despite the absence of rule of law and countless human rights violations, it’s unlikely that Trudeau will cease support for Peru’s unelected regime, particularly given his track record in propping up Jeanine Añez and the make-believe Juan Guaido administration. But like Añez, Boluarte could be swapped out any day. A more permanent enemy of the Peruvian people is the Canadian government, Trudeau himself and Canadian financiers in natural resource extraction, who unabated will continue to conspire and sacrifice lives, in order to plunder Latin America and the Caribbean.
However severe the situation becomes in Peru, declarations or intervention shouldn’t be welcome from the human rights-violating Canadian government, which in addition to its historical and ongoing crimes against Indigenous peoples, maintains death sanctions on two dozen countries, at the direction of Washington.
Camila Escalante is a Latin America-based reporter and the editor of Kawsachun News. Escalante was reporting in Bolivia through the year of resistance to the Añez coup regime, which culminated in the presidential election victory of Luis Arce in October 2020. She can be followed on Twitter at @camilapress.
MOLEGHAF, a grassroots anti-imperialist organization in Haiti, held a day of activities on April 4 in the capital of Port-au-Prince, as part of a multi-country launch of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Zone of Peace campaign. Above is part of the result of the graffiti and sign-making session that took place / credit: MOLEGHAF
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), along with partner organizations, held events April 4 in three countries across the Americas to launch an effort to activate popular movements in the region in support of a call for a “Zone of Peace.”
The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) declared the Americas region a “Zone of Peace” in 2014. This came in response to centuries of oppression at the hands of Europe and, later, the United States. U.S. policy has related to Latin America and the Caribbean as the United States’ “backyard” ever since the Monroe Doctrine was announced in 1823.
“The U.S. declared the European states must stay out of the hemisphere, which meant the United States was claiming the entire region as its own,” said Margaret Kimberley, a BAP Coordinating Committee member, who spoke at a BAP press conference held April 4 in Washington, D.C. She added CELAC exists to counter the Organization of American States (OAS), a multilateral organization based in Washington, D.C., and known for backing U.S. policies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
After years of struggle and U.S. sanctions that have been linked to the deaths of 40,000 people in 2018, socialist-led Venezuela completed its withdrawal from the OAS in 2020. Meanwhile, another socialist country, Nicaragua, announced it was exiting in 2021.
“Biden says it is the ‘front yard’ in a clumsy attempt to be somewhat progressive,” Ajamu Baraka, chairperson of BAP’s Coordinating Committee, told Jacqueline Luqman and Sean Blackmon on the day after the launch, April 5, on “By Any Means Necessary,” an afternoon talk show on Radio Sputnik.
Launch events were held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Washington, D.C., USA; and in Havana, Cuba, where the call for a Zone of Peace was initially made in 2014. The event in Port-au-Prince involved eight hours of activities, ranging from performances, talks, exchanges, and graffiti and sign-making.
The launch took place on BAP’s 6th anniversary, which is the 55th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Exactly one year prior to his murder, King had publicly denounced the U.S. war on Vietnam, as well as what he identified as the three pillars of U.S. society: Materialism, militarism and racism.
“This campaign will be informed by the Black Radical Peace Tradition,” reads BAP’s press release. “With its focus on the structures and interests that generate war and state violence—colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and all forms of imperialism—the fight for a Zone of Peace is an attempt to expel all of these nefarious forces from our region.”
BAP describes the reason behind the use of “Our Americas” on its website:
Nuestra América is a term revolutionary forces in the Americas have used to assert themselves against colonialism and imperialism by claiming one contiguous land mass stretching from Canada to Chile for all of the historically oppressed peoples of the region. BAP has translated the singular Nuestra América (Our America) into the plural “Our Americas” to help bridge the gap between the U.S. usage, “America,” that describes the United States as the only “America” and the concept put forth by revolutionary forces.
However, Baraka distinguished the campaign’s target.
“We’re not talking about the people of the U.S.,” he told “By Any Means Necessary.” “We’re talking about this settler-colonial state. We know [the United States] cannot exist as a settler-colonial state if it gave up its militarism.”
The public and members of Haitian organization MOLEGHAF gathered for a day of activities to launch the Zone of Peace campaign on April 4 in Port-au-Prince / credit: MOLEGHAF
BAP also issued six “initial core demands”:
Dismantle SOUTHCOM. Shut down the 76 U.S. military bases in the region
End U.S./NATO military exercises. Close foreign military bases, installations and enclaves, as well as withdraw foreign occupation troops
Disband U.S.-sponsored state terrorist training facilities. Shutter the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (WHINSEC)—formerly the School of the Americas—in Fort Benning, Georgia, United States, and terminate U.S.—as well as foreign—training of police forces
Oppose military intervention into Haiti. Support the people(s)-centered movement for democracy and self-determination
Return Guantánamo to Cuba. The United States must give back to the Cuban people and their government the territory it illegally occupies
Sanctions are war. End illegal sanctions and blockades of regional states, including all economic warfare and lawfare, and recognize their sovereignty
The Zone of Peace campaign was launched in three cities, including in Havana, Cuba. Here, Black Alliance for Peace members pose with members of Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (ICAP), an organization that encourages people-to-people exchanges / credit: Black Alliance for Peace
Yet, BAP is clear the method for going about this work must be different than what has emerged from predominantly-white organizations based in the United States.
“This work must be de-colonial, anti-imperialist, advance a People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) framework, and be conducted across at least five languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Haitian Creole,” BAP states on its website.
Jemima Pierre, co-coordinator of BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team, said at the press conference that the United States uses multi-lateral organizations like the OAS to oppress the peoples of the Americas. And, so, of the initial approximately 25 organizations that had signed onto the campaign before it had been launched, more than half are based outside the United States and Canada. Some of the partner organizations that will help coordinate the effort include:
MOLEGHAF (Haiti)
REDH (Network In Defense of Humanity) (Cuba)
Caribbean Organisation for People’s Empowerment
African People’s Socialist Party (Bahamas, Jamaica, United States)
Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) (Colombia)
Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (Nicaragua)
“Our homelands are not playgrounds for the U.S. to launch its wars of aggression,” said Nina Macapinlac, secretary general of BAYAN USA, an anti-imperialist alliance of 20 organizations dedicated to the liberation of the Philippines. Macapinlac spoke at the Washington, D.C., press conference as a member organization representative of the United National Antiwar Coalition, one of the organizations that BAP has partnered with for the Zone of Peace campaign.
BAP invites organizations and individuals to endorse the Zone of Peace campaign and activate the popular movement element in what they describe as a “multi-phase campaign that aims to build a united-front opposition to liberate our Americas from the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination.” A U.S./NATO Out of the Americas Network will be launched as the mass-based structure of this campaign.
A Dominican soldier stands by a 118-mile border wall the Dominican Republic built to keep out Haitian migrants / credit: La Prensa Latina
Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis and was originally published in Eurasia Review.
On December 16, two Haitian embassy diplomats—Williamson Jean and Jackson Lorrain—were arrested on their way from the Dominican Republic’s capital of Santo Domingo to a farm in the Monte Cristi province, where they were planning to deliver 11 passports for the hundreds of Haitian workers awaiting their arrival. The Dominican military confiscated the passports and computer equipment used to produce personal identification cards—all of which belong to the Haitian state. The arrest took place in spite of Jean and Lorrain showing diplomatic identification, the authenticity of which was later confirmed by a top Haitian consulate official, Francois Guerrier.
These incidents have occurred against a backdrop of rising tensions between the two countries, with the Dominican Republic tightening border surveillance and implementing a series of measures to curb irregular migration from Haiti.
Colonial Exploitation
Present-day hostilities between the countries that occupy the island of Hispaniola are deeply rooted in the historical soil of racism and imperialism. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick formalized French control over the western third of Hispaniola—at that time a Spanish asset—under the name of Saint-Domingue. In 1797, Spain ceded the entire island to France. A valuable spigot of wealth, Saint-Domingue supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave trade. It was a greater source of income for its owners than the whole of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies combined.
The half-a-million slaves who propped up the dazzling opulence of the French commercial bourgeoisie rebelled in August 1791—two years after the French Revolution and its ripple effects in Saint-Domingue. Collective British, Spanish and French efforts to crush the rebellion set off a war that lasted 13 years and concluded with the humiliating defeat of imperial powers. William Pitt the Younger and Napoleon
Bonaparte together lost some 50,000 troops in the campaign to restore slavery and the elaborate structures of exploitation. The defeat of the latter’s expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the state of Haiti on January 1, 1804. Frightened by Haiti’s establishment of a black republic resolutely opposed to the barbarism of European civilization, Dominican elites developed a national identity that defined Dominicans as white, Catholic and culturally Hispanic, in contradistinction to Haitians, whom they characterized as black, animist and culturally African. “Antihaitianismo,” or anti-Haitian racism, became stronger with Haiti’s occupation of the Dominican Republic, which lasted from 1822 until 1844.
President Jean-Pierre Boyer—under whom Hispaniola was unified—feared the French would use Dominican territory as a base to try to re-conquer Haiti. His decision also followed a constitutional ideal: Merger of the whole island in the face of foreign aggressions. Though Haiti’s occupation was welcomed positively by poor Dominicans, the Dominican ruling class disliked being ruled by people they considered inferior. Thus, soon after Boyer was overthrown in 1843 and General Charles Rivière-Hérard took power, a small group of activists in Santo Domingo overturned unified rule. Rivière-Hérard tried to oppose the separation and sent troops eastward, but he was more focused on the consolidation of power at home and could not succeed due to domestic instabilities. On February 27, 1844, the Dominican rebels drove the last Haitian troops from the capital, securing independence.
The Myth of the “Indio”
The fight for independence among Dominicans was heavily tainted by anti-Haitian myths. One such myth concerned the Dominican “Indio.” Even though the indigenous Taíno people were mostly killed after the Spanish conquest, Dominican leaders insisted Dominicans’ ancestors were Indigenous and Spanish, not enslaved African laborers. Why were Indigenous people chosen as the central symbol of Dominican identity? Taínos are neither white nor Black—an attribute capable of accommodating the ambiguity of the Dominican mulatto, a slang term for a person of mixed European and African ancestry. Battle lines were now drawn according to this racial schema—the Indio being pitted against the Haitian, who came to be regarded as the real Black.
These conflicts intensified over the subsequent decades, preparing a context of disunity favorable to the imperial project of the United States, which threatened both nations of Hispaniola with the possibility of intervention if they did not get “upheavals and banditry” under control.
Using these pretexts, the U.S. empire invaded the Caribbean island. First in 1915 in Haiti, then entering the Dominican Republic in 1916. The 8-year-long occupation of the Dominican Republic sparked the creation of a comprador class—local people who served as a subsidiary to the foreign corporations that owned Dominican sugar plantations through their dominance in the National City Bank of New York, which managed the country’s finances. A social architecture as rigidly exploitative as this required an authoritarian government—an imperative fulfilled by the Guardia Nacional Dominicana (Dominican National Guard, or GND). The U.S. Marines instructed Rafael Leonidas Trujillo to lead the GND in 1918 and made him commander-in-chief of the National Army in 1927. In 1930, with support from his military, Trujillo supported a coup against then-President Horacio Vasquez.
Under the ruthless dictatorship of Trujillo—which lasted until 1961—antihaitianismo solidified. In 1937—during what is now called the Parsley Massacre—Trujillo aimed to whiten the Dominican Republic by expelling Haitians. Trujillo, who was known to lighten his own skin with makeup, ordered the deaths of those who refused his order to leave. These Haitians were recognized by their inability to pronounce “perejil,” Spanish for “parsley.” Most Haitians could not make the Spanish “r” sound as the French “r” was different. This massacre killed nearly 30,000 people. These mass killings were followed by the production of propaganda in favor of an anti-Haitian ideology. Dominican history books started over-emphasizing the Haitian occupation—the demonization of the dark-skinned “other” became par for the course.
In 1962, Juan Bosch ran for president under the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), inaugurating the first democratic government of the post-dictatorial era. Seven months later, he was overthrown by a coalition of the oligarchs, the old Trujillist army and the Catholic Church. Faced with a popular revolt, the putschists solicited the support of the United States, which sent its military in 1965, killing 5,000 people. After the defeat of the democratic revolution, Joaquin Balaguer—a disciple of Trujillo—led a repressive government. An anti-communist flunky of the United States, as well as a close collaborator of François Duvalier’s dictatorial regime in Haiti, Balaguer’s 12-year reign was responsible for incarcerating, torturing and murdering 6,000 people.
In the late 1970s, the PRD came to office. After that, the reins of the national government alternated among the PRD, the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) and, briefly, the Social Christian Reform Party (PRSC)—associated with Balaguer.
Antihaitianismo Under Neoliberalism
While the PLD became largely dominant, the PRD came to represent the country’s main official opposition. With the growing impact of neoliberal globalization, the progressive legacy of the struggle against Trujillismo and Balaguerismo was abandoned in favor of a rightward shift toward anti-Haitian Hispanophilic identities. In 2010, the formerly center-left PLD called a constitutional convention, largely to exclude a new group from the birthright-citizenship clause: The children of anyone “residing illegally in Dominican territory.”
The injunction was aimed at Haitians and served as a blueprint for the Constitutional Court’s regressive ruling on September 23, 2013. It declared the nearly 500,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were illegal, thus subject to deportation. The ruling extended to the descendants of Haitian immigrants who came to the Dominican Republic as early as 1929. Systematic stigmatization has enabled the Dominican bourgeoisie to force Haitians into conditions of semi-slavery on sugar plantations, to deport tens of thousands of Haitians without a court hearing, and to deny citizenship and access to public services to Dominican-born children of Haitian parents. In the en masse expulsions of Haitians, some dark-skinned Dominican citizens have been identified as Haitian and deported to Haiti without being given a chance to prove citizenship. This is emblematic of a wider problem facing the Black and mulatto masses of the Dominican Republic: To either assume the Indio identity and Hispanic culture, or to be ostracized from the body politic.
In 2014, when former president Hipólito Mejía left the PRD to form the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), Luis Abinader—a 52-year-old businessman with no previous experience in public office—jumped on the bandwagon. In 2020, he was elected president, ending the 16-year dominance of the PLD. Dominicans of Haitian descent—who make up 7.3 percent of the population—had placed their trust in the administration, hoping it would put an end to their condition of statelessness.
Abinader, however, has continued to deport thousands of Haitians. He also has begun constructing a 118-mile border wall between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The estimated cost is over $100 million. Taking into account the negative impact of the pandemic on tourism, construction and the flow of remittances, the erection of a xenophobic wall should be the last thing on Abinader’s agenda. The government’s continued maintenance of such an exclusionary project indicates it is fundamentally anti-people in nature, using antihaitianismo to deflect the public’s attention from its destructive, market-oriented economic policies.
Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. He can be contacted at [email protected].
