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.
Anyone aware of the crisis in Haiti didn’t expect China and Russia to help end an occupation, foreign meddling and violence on the ground.
Despite China delaying a vote by two days to hold closed-door negotations, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously agreed Friday to renew the UN’s mandate in Haiti. Since 2004, as many as 13,000 troops from around the world have served as part of the UN’s peacekeeping mission.
For many Haitians, the mandate is a foreign occupation.
“Can anyone tell Haitians what [UN Integrated Office in Haiti] BINUH has put in place since Friday, July 15th? This is DAY THREE,” tweeted Daniella Bien-Aime, a Haitian living in the United States. Bien-Aime, as well as others, have used Twitter to voice their opposition.
‘Elites Use Young People’
Among many things, the mandate renewal terms include a call for all countries to end the transfer of small arms, light weapons and ammunition to anyone involved in gang-related activity.
But Haitian-born Jemima Pierre dismissed its viability, given even poor young people have obtained guns worth thousands of dollars. She also rejected the use of the term “gang violence” to describe the struggle on the ground.
“The elites use young people to settle economic and political scores,” said Pierre, who is Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace and an anthropology and Black studies professor at the University of California Los Angeles.
Pierre added Haiti’s elite families control five major ports.
“Guns come through the boats and customs turns a blind eye,” she said.
UN Missions Brought ‘Misery’
The two UN mandates—the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH, 2004-17) and the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH, 2019-present)—have introduced sexual violence and cholera.
“These missions were supposed to stabilize Haiti,” Dahoud Andre told Black Agenda Radio. He is a member of grassroots group KOMOKODA, the Coalition to End Dictatorship in Haiti. “It’s brought misery. It’s brought terrorism to the people of Haiti.”
Adding to the violence and foreign occupation is the humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by last year’s earthquake. Out of 11.4 million Haitians, 4.9 million will need humanitarian assistance this year, with the majority needing “urgent food assistance,” according to the United Nations.
Between July 8 and July 12, the UN reported at least 234 deaths and injuries. That is due to a recent surge in gang violence, which Pierre questioned having occurred just days before the UNSC vote.
Haitian to UN: ‘China Has Put You On Notice’
Some applauded China’s role in adding grit along the UNSC’s path to renewing the mandate.
“You have one year to get your act together. By this time next year, you won’t be able to tell the world why you are so ineffective,” Bien-Aime tweeted in reply to a UN tweet on Friday. “China has put you on NOTICE. And it’s good for Haiti.”
For now! And this is after a FORCED postponement of the vote. Please do not embellish this. You have one year to get your act together. By this time next year, you won't be able to tell the world why you are so ineffective. China has put you on NOTICE. And it's good for Haiti.
Last month and this month, dozens of grassroots Haitian organizations signed onto open letters to China and Russia. Those letters asked for both countries’ representatives to vote against renewing the UN mandate. Mexico’s role as “co-penholder” alongside the United States in drafting the resolution put the Latin American country in the spotlight, with one open letter addressed to the Mexican president.
David Oxygène, a member of MOLEGHAF, a grassroots anti-imperialist organization based in the Fort National neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, told Toward Freedom via a Haitian Kreyol interpreter that China and Russia have had opportunities in the past to show solidarity with Haiti. Yet, they failed, he said, as the mandate was renewed year after year.
‘Tilting At Windmills’
Russia’s UN representative pointed out in a June 16 meeting that international actors must respect Haiti’s sovereignty as a baseline to helping Haiti out of its crisis.
A summary of that meeting paraphrased Dmitry A. Polyanskiy as saying solving security problems in Haiti “might be tilting at windmills” because of chaos in the government.
In January 2021, protests broke out over President Jovenel Moïse refusing to step down once his term ended. He was assassinated about six months later. That brought to power U.S.-supported Prime Minister Ariel Henry of the right-wing Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (“Haitian Bald-Headed Party” in English).
Pierre said UNSC mandate renewal resolutions normally have been rubberstamped each year. She saw China playing a positive role in questioning the basis for the 2022 renewal and demanding closed-door negotiations, which delayed the vote by two days.
“But at the same time,” Pierre said, “They’re leaving it up to the UN to work with [regional Caribbean alliance] CARICOM—the UN occupation is the problem.”
Andre told Black Agenda Radio the world should denounce what he referred to as the UN’s “anti-democratic nature.” He pointed out 193 countries are UN members, while only 15 vote on the UNSC.
Representatives for Mexico, China and Russia could not be reached for comment.
‘A Wall Around Haiti’
Haitian-born and U.S.-raised activist Chris Bernadel said Haitians feel isolated from the peoples of the Americas, partly because of the UN occupation’s impact on the economy and communications.
“There has been a feeling of a wall around Haiti,” said Bernadel, who is a member of MOLEGHAF and the Black Alliance for Peace. “The voices of the Haitian people, and the poor and struggling working people, have not been able to be integrated within the wider region. That is something MOLEGHAF has been trying to break through.”
For Oxygène, the support of organizations outside Haiti helps.
“We feel like we are not alone in this fight and we want it to go further, so we can find a solution to occupation,” he said.
What really happened on the night the president of Haiti was assassinated? We may never know the true story. According to initial reports, the home of Jovenel Moïse was invaded at around 1 a.m. on July 9 by more than two dozen armed men, most of them Colombian nationals, plus at least two U.S. citizens. So far, about 20 suspects have been detained. But some of the hitmen have evaded capture, and three so far are dead. At the moment, the fragile government is being headed by acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph.
Breathless news reports call the events shocking, bordering on unprecedented. But they also note that Haiti has bordered on being a “failed state” for some time. In fact, it crossed that border long ago, and more than 20 heads of state have been assassinated since World War II. The list of countries on that list, in just the Western Hemisphere, includes Bolivia, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Grenada.
In 1946, Bolivian President Gualberto Villaroel was killed by a lynch mob in La Paz. Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo Molina was gunned down in 1961; his assassins included one of his generals. Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza was murdered in 1980. And Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was killed by local militants in 1983. Six days later, the United States led an invasion and ousted the regime that had attempted to replace Bishop.
Other prominent heads of state who have died violently since 1945 include Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, Iraq’s King Faisal, Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquate Ali Khan, South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, South African Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd, Iranian President Mohammed Ali Rajai, Iranian Prime Minister Hojjatoleslam Mohammed Javad Bahonar, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Lebanon President-elect Beshir Gemayel, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and, of course, U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Still, Haiti does have an especially violent past. In July 1915, for example, its head of state, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, was cornered in the French embassy by rebel forces. The insurgents had widespread popular support. This also was no shock, since Sam was known as a rampaging, vindictive thug, who had seized the government by force and murdered hundreds of his political enemies before running for cover. When a mob finally found him cowering in an attic, they hacked their president to pieces.
The island nation, once known as the “pearl of the antilles,” had been through seven presidents in the past four years, most of them killed or removed prematurely. The rural north was under the control of the Cacos, a rebel movement that adopted its name from the cry of a native bird. Although widely portrayed as a group of murderous bandits, the Cacos were essentially nationalists, and were attempting to resist the control of France, the United States and the small minority of mulattos who dominated the economy.
But a Haiti run by rebels and peasants was not acceptable to U.S. interests, which considered the nation an endangered investment property. The National City Bank controlled the country’s national bank and railroad system, and sugar barons viewed the country’s rich plantations as promising takeover targets. Thus, on July 29, 1915, after several weeks of observation from cruisers anchored offshore, two regiments of Marines landed. Their initial objective was to make certain that the U.S. choice, Senator Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, was installed as head of state. A snap-election was staged less than two weeks later.
“When the National Assembly met, the Marines stood in the aisles with their bayonets until the man selected by the American Minister was made President,” recalled Smedley Butler, the Marine hero who led the decisive military campaign and administered Haiti’s local police force during the following two years. “I won’t say we put him in,” Butler wrote later. “The State Department might object. Anyway, he was put in.”
April 1978 feature story, Vanguard Press / credit: Greg Guma
Few journalists were on hand in 1915, and most newspapers were willing to accept the official version. According to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, establishing a protectorate was part of a grand effort to halt a radically evil and corrupting revolution, support the slow process of reform, and extend his policy of the open door to the world.
But that was just the official story. Actually, Wilson saw the island nation as a geo-strategic pawn in the build-up to World War I; specifically, he was worried that Germany might take advantage of the local political turmoil to establish a military base in the hemisphere. He also had other, largely economic reasons to seize control of the country. Haiti was an endangered investment property.
During the early years of the U.S. occupation, the Cacos continued to resist, under the leadership of their own “Sandino,” an army officer turned guerrilla leader named Charlemayne Peralte. Murdered by a U.S. Marine in 1919, Peralte became a symbol for the democracy movement of the late 1980s that ultimately led to the election of the liberation theology priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide.
In the 1990s, it happened again. Seven months after Aristide’s 1991 election, he was overthrown in a military coup. It took three years, but by 1994 Haiti’s plight was big news. The coverage was highly selective, however, never mentioning CIA support for those who conducted the coup or the Haitian military’s involvement in drug trafficking. Prior to this U.S. occupation, the media also was suspiciously silent about, as Aristide put it, a sham embargo that squeezed the poor but exempted businesses. Although an oil embargo was imposed, fuel was easily smuggled into the country from the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, a smear campaign against Aristide was launched.
Just as Wilson had veiled his autocratic actions on behalf of U.S. economic interests with rhetoric about stability and democracy, U.S. President Bill Clinton talked about upholding democracy. In fact, the central objective of the 1990s occupation was to maintain effective control of the country until Aristide’s term expired. Media coverage tended to obscure the obvious: the United States, never comfortable with Aristide, had entered into an agreement with the Haitian military for national co-management until the next elections.
Looking back, most policy-makers and analysts suggested that the U.S. had entered Haiti in 1915 only to restore stability. Few stressed that some sort of revolution was underway; even those who did invariably described the situation as chaotic. According to conventional wisdom, the United States remained in Haiti for 19 years in the early 20th century because the Haitian people could not effectively govern themselves or sustain democratic institutions. They weren’t ready in 1915 and, some skeptics claimed, they still weren’t in the 1990s.
At a September 1994 rally, U.S. presidential candidate and businessperson Ross Perot echoed this popular prejudice in his own know-nothing style. “Haitians like a dictator,” he announced, “I don’t know why.” The implication, underscoring his opposition to U.S. intervention, was that he also didn’t care what happened there, and neither should most people.
The Bush administration may have counted on a similar reaction when it embraced a violent uprising against Aristide beginning in late 2003, or even after it reportedly forced him to sign a resignation letter at 2 a.m. on Sunday, February 29, 2004. According to the “ex-president,” he was kidnapped at gunpoint, and flown without his knowledge to the Central African Republic. This should not be so hard to believe, since Aristide never had the Bush administration’s support, and his inability to maintain order in an atmosphere of U.S.-backed destabilization provided an excellent pretext for another exercise in “regime change.”
In early February, a “rebel” paramilitary army crossed the border from the Dominican Republic. This trained and well-equipped unit included former members of The Front for the Advancement of Progress in Haiti (FRAPH), a disarming name for plainclothes death squads involved in mass killing and political assassinations during the 1991 military coup that overthrew Aristide’s first administration. The self-proclaimed National Liberation and Reconstruction Front (FLRN) was also active, and was led by Guy Philippe, a former police chief and member of the Haitian Armed Forces. Philippe had been trained during the coup years by U.S. Special Forces in Ecuador, together with a dozen other Haitian Army officers. Two other rebel commanders were Emmanuel “Toto” Constant and Jodel Chamblain, former members of the Duvalier era enforcer squad, the Tonton Macoute, and leaders of FRAPH.
Both armed rebels and civilian backers like G-184 leader Andre Apaid were involved in the plot. Apaid was in touch with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in the weeks leading up to Aristide’s overthrow. Both Philippe and Constant had past ties to the CIA, and were in touch with U.S. officials.
On February 20, 2004, U.S. Ambassador James Foley called in a team of four military experts from the U.S. Southern Command, based in Miami, according to the Seattle Times. Officially, their mandate was to assess threats to the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and its personnel. Meanwhile, as a “precautionary measure,” three U.S. naval vessels were placed on standby to go to Haiti. One was equipped with vertical takeoff Harrier fighters and attack helicopters. At least 2,000 Marines also were ready for deployment.
After Aristide’s kidnapping, Washington made no effort to disarm its proxy paramilitary army, which was subsequently tapped to play a role in the transition. In other words, the Bush administration did nothing to prevent the killing of Lavalas and Aristide supporters in the wake of the president’s removal. In news coverage of the crisis, both Haiti’s dark history and the role of the CIA were ignored. Instead, so-called rebel leaders, commanders of death squads in the 1990s, were recognized as legitimate opposition spokesmen.
The Bush administration effectively scapegoated Aristide, holding him solely responsible for a worsening economic and social situation. In truth, Haiti’s economic and social crisis was largely caused by the devastating economic reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund beginning in the 1980s. Aristide’s 1994 return to power was conditioned on his acceptance of IMF economic “therapy.” He complied, but was blacklisted and demonized anyway.
Which raises a key question: Why does this keep happening? One reason may be basic geopolitics. Hispaniola (the island that contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic) is a gateway to the Caribbean basin, strategically located between Cuba to the northwest and Venezuela to the south. Thus, having a military presence on the island, or at least leverage with whatever regime emerges, can help to sustain political pressure on other countries nearby, while providing a base to step in as part of any regional military operation deemed necessary in the future.
Diary kept during 1977 visit / credit: Greg Guma
Photos in this article are courtesy of the writer.
Greg Guma has been a writer, editor, historian and progressive manager for half a century, leading businesses and campaigns in Vermont, New Mexico and California. His early work with Bernie Sanders led to The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution. His other books include novels, Spirits of Desire and Dons of Time, and non-fiction like Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Deceptions and the forthcoming Restless Spirits & Popular Movements: A Vermont History.
The Latin American Left is regrouping. On July 19, 2021, Peru’s National Elections Jury announced the official results of the 2021 presidential elections, declaring Pedro Castillo as President of Peru. An important voting survey in Brazil has revealed that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would outperform neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro in all scenarios for the 2022 elections in the country. Colombia is in socio-economic turmoil, creating a potential opening for the election of Gustavo Petro – a left-wing politician. In Chile, the result of elections held on May 15-16, 2021, for the 155-member new constituent assembly has thrust progressive candidates to the forefront of national politics. All these dynamics will regionally strengthen the leftist governments already in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. An anti-neoliberal shift in Latin America’s political compass carries global significance.
Imperialism
Large swathes of humanity who live in the peripheries of the world system have been witnessing a deadly process of absolute immiseration. Imperialism has restricted the economic growth of the periphery to mineral and agricultural sectors in order to assure raw materials for advanced capitalist nations. Hence, most Third World economies are heavily dependent on the export of primary commodities. In Latin America, such primary commodities account for the majority of exports for nearly all countries. While Latin American countries export primary goods to the Global North, they tend to re-import manufactured products from these same countries. The value added to these manufactured commodities – typically constructed from the primary inputs imported earlier – generates profit for northern countries while maintaining Latin American countries in a perpetual trade deficit.
While some countries in the periphery have facilitated a degree of industrialization through the surpluses accumulated from export-led growth, the disarticulated structures of these economies persists. The imperialist states’ monopolies – technological, financial, natural resources, communications, and military – has meant that there has been a lack of any significant indigenous technical development. Even to the extent that industrial growth has occurred, it has been based on the import of capital and technology, which has considerably reduced the dynamic effects on the economy that are usually associated with industrial growth. Moreover, a relocation of the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery means that the core relies less and less on the unprofitable exploitation of its own workers. Instead, the metropole increasingly divides the world into what has been labeled as Southern “production economies” and Northern “consumption economies.”
The main driver behind this process is undoubtedly the low wage level in the South. Entrenchment of extroverted economies like these has generated cut-throat competition amongst Southern firms for foreign capital. What we have now is a global race to the bottom, marked by a deathly spiral of exchange rate devaluations, hyper-low taxes and depressed wages. Multinational corporations based in the capitalist core have unendingly feasted on this wretchedness, fattening their profits from the extreme exploitation of the Third World’s large labor reserves. As such, the structure of today’s global economy has been profoundly shaped by the allocation of labor to industrial sectors according to differential rates of national exploitation. Thus, only the outward form of value transfers from the South to the North has changed, with the unequal exchange of products embodying different quantities of value steadily continuing. A large pool of precarized workers has been created, which consistently remains enmeshed in networks of informal economy, being forced by the productive configurations to enrich foreign capitalists and nourish the parasitic nature of the comprador bourgeoisie.
International Finance Capital
The continuation of the international division of labor and the creation of dependent industrialization has been complemented by the hegemony of international finance capital. Prabhat Patnaik writes:
“In the current phase of imperialism, finance capital has become international, while the State remains a nation-State. The nation-State therefore willy-nilly must bow before the wishes of finance, for otherwise finance (both originating in that country and brought in from outside) will leave that particular country and move elsewhere, reducing it to illiquidity and disrupting its economy. The process of globalization of finance therefore has the effect of undermining the autonomy of the nation-State. The State cannot do what it wishes to do, or what its elected government has been elected to do, since it must do what finance wishes it to do.”
The interests of the financial oligarchy lie in strongly opposing state expenditure financed either by taxes on capitalists or by borrowing – the only ways of financing through which the state can effect a net expansion in aggregate demand. Financial interests are against deficit-financed spending for a number of reasons. First, deficit financing is seen to increase the liquidity overhang in the system, and therefore as being potentially inflationary. Inflation is anathema to finance since it erodes the value of financial assets. Second, financial markets fear that the introduction of debt-financed spending – which is driven by goals other than profit-making – will render interest rate differentials that determine financial profits more unpredictable. Third, if deficit spending leads to a substantial build-up of the state’s debt, it may intervene in financial markets to lower interest rates with implications for financial returns.
Under these circumstances, even moderate welfarism has become a danger to the neoliberal order. Whereas the welfare state in the immediate post-War era served the ruling class by warding off the threat of communism, in the neoliberal era – where accumulation by dispossession has become the predominant mode of capitalist growth – even the most modest of demand management policies have had to face intense political opposition. Taking into account the internationally polarizing and nationally suffocating results of global capitalism, the slow resurgence of the Latin American Left will provide an avenue for the advancement of an alternative agenda.
The Experience of the Pink Tide
Firstly, progressive governments in the continent have always tried to tackle relations of dependency, as is discernible from their experience in power during the Pink Tide. In opposition to metropolitan control over mineral resources and plantations, the Latin American Left consolidated the public sector which displaced the dominance of foreign capital. These arrangements ensured that the revenues coming from the primary commodity sector were no longer siphoned off by the rich but were diverted towards the poor. The assertion of control over financial resources and their redirection toward social developmentalism was coupled with the uneven promotion of sovereign forms of industrialization, trade and finance through various initiatives like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Union of South American Nations and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America.
Before the public sector and regional groupings could be fully used for developing domestic heavy-industry base and technological capability, the commodity boom itself collapsed. This external event did not allow the Left’s redistributive strategy to transform into concerted attempts at changing the productive forces. However, the fact that a politico-ideological project of independence was advocated stands as a testimony to the fruitful possibilities contained in the Pink Tide. Industrialization, social welfare, and the nation came together in the notion of sovereignty; industrialization was not posed simply as a means by which Third World capitalists could accumulate capital more effectively, but as a means of improving the nation as a whole.
Moreover, a programme of selective delinking was supported which allowed Latin American governments to self-determine which sector of the economy could be safely opened up. They could differentially open up a sector where foreign capital was needed to supplement local capital in whole or in part. As part of this blueprint of economic self-determination, clear-headed campaigns were initiated to resist pressures to liberalize the financial sector. In fact, Latin America’s leftist governments tended to increase the level of capital controls instead of merely adapting to the constraints imposed by financial globalization. The reregulation of cross-border financial flows was part of a coordinated effort to obtain further macroeconomic policy autonomy and attend to the interests of impoverished constituencies.
The existence of capital controls enabled the Latin American Left to temporarily soften the impact of the end of commodity boom. One of the visible ways that the collapse of primary commodity prices makes itself felt is through a shortage of foreign exchange to finance necessary imports. This gives rise to inflation, to currency depreciations which further aggravate inflation, and to shortages of essential goods. Further, the reduced incomes -a result of the slump in the primary commodity demand – cause recession, stagnation and unemployment. The conservation of foreign exchange for importing essential commodities, and the prevention of outflow of foreign exchange by wealth-holders hedging against exchange rate depreciation, become extremely important. Towards this end, the Latin American Left’s regulatory management of banks and foreign trade proved to be crucial in mitigating the effects of changing global conditions.
Secondly, Latin American leftist governments extensively used planning and welfare policies, such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), financed through the receipts of economic growth and the taxation of rising commodity exports. Under a new socio-economic structure of accumulation, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates increased and social conditions improved, reversing the adverse consequences of neoliberalism and cementing popular support for the Pink Tide administrations. The GDP per capita of Latin America and the Caribbean rose by 31% between 2003 and 2013, poverty rates fell from 32 to 17%, and the country-average of the Gini index of household per capita income in Latin America fell by 0.06. All this stood in complete contrast to the past implementations of harsh austerity programs and fiscal niggardliness which were intended to restore government’s “credibility” and return to the elusive cycle of growth led solely by private investment.
The implementation of welfare policies needs to be looked in the specific context of contemporary capitalism. In a global situation marked by the hegemony of international finance capital and calcified hierarchies, the unleashing of successful poverty alleviation schemes, increase in minimum wages, strengthening of labor regulations and the weakening of deficit targets were not acceptable to the elites who saw these policies as a precursor to more radical shifts. Thus, in an era of finance capital where even the most basic welfare spending runs contrary to the interests of an inflation-fearing financial oligarchy, the Latin American Left’s fiscal expansionism and consolidation of social policies constituted a sharp attack on neoliberal interests.
Present-day fluctuations in the balance of forces in Latin America hint towards a revival of the Left. We need to comprehend these fluid tectonic plates of popular power from an actively political perspective. Building a socialist society in a Third World country, in which – despite its wealth of natural resources – there remains immense poverty and hideous inequality is a hard task. Moving against the powerful tide of reactionary forces and helping the oppressed classes to overcome social humiliation requires a long gestation period. In short, the entrance of the Global South subaltern on the stage of history is a richly textured pathway of socialized autonomy which never follows a linear or perfect course of economic reconstruction. Most of the times, the width of populist culture and depth of working class power intersect to generate a multi-sided trajectory of revolution. As Vladimir Lenin himself said, “Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.” Thus, in the current conjuncture, we need to show solidarity with Latin America’s renascent Pink Tide which promises to deal a blow to imperialist capitalism.
Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at [email protected]. His articles have been published in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey and several countries of Latin America.