Bolsonaro and Lula Head to Second-Round Election Amid Brazil’s Contradictions

Editor’s Note: The following opinion was originally published in Black Agenda Report.

It is an exhilarating time for the “leftists” of the Americas. This past week, at the 77th meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, leader after Latin American leader made grand statements against U.S. and Western imperialism, the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, the violations of human rights, and the West’s assault on the sovereignty of smaller nations. Colombia’s brand-new president, Gustavo Petro, made an impassioned plea against the genocidal “War on Drugs.” Cuba’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla, rejected the attacks on the sovereignty of China and Russia. Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Faría railed against the Western sanctions against Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and Russia. Honduran President Xiomara Castro demanded that the United States stop its attempts at destabilizing her country and strongly pushed against Western policies of intervention in the region. Nicaragua’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Denis Ronaldo Moncada Colindres, made perhaps the most explosive claims when he stated :

“The assault, the robbery, the disgraceful abominable depredation, the looting and the genocides unleashed by the colonialists and imperialists of the Earth, are the real crimes and they are the real criminals against humanity, and we denounce this… It’s time to say enough to hypocritical imperialism that politicizes, falsifies and denigrates the very human rights which they themselves violate and deny on a daily basis.”

Most of these leaders spoke to the urgent question of Cuba, calling for the lifting of the economic blockade against the country and for Cuba’s removal from the U.S.-created list of countries that supposedly “sponsor terrorism.”

Yet, for all the eloquent denunciations of imperialism and the impassioned defenses of Latin American and Caribbean sovereignty and independence, one country was conspicuously avoided: Haiti. Not a single one of these countries applied their critiques of imperialism to Haiti. Sure, Cuba and Venezuela mentioned Haiti. Cuba’s representative called for reparations for the Caribbean for slavery, said that humanity owed a debt to the Haitian revolution, and stressed that Haiti needed international support “through a special contribution for its reconstruction and development.” Venezuela’s representative name-dropped Haiti within a list of countries, which have suffered bloodshed from “imperialism and supremacism.”

Beyond the casual mentions, the hollow rhetorics, and the empty invocations, there were no concrete critiques of the current imperial machinations in Haiti—of Haiti’s complete loss of sovereignty through the ongoing destruction of the Haitian state apparatus, of the current occupation of the country by the Western-led Core Group, and of the repression (and violent misrepresentation) of the Haitian people as they have taken to the streets to demand their sovereignty and call for an end to foreign intervention. Instead, the extension and intensification of foreign intervention appears to be the strategic end goal of not only the usual suspects of the West, but our supposed Leftist allies in the Americas.

One has to ask: Do the leaders of the region even know what has been going on in Haiti? Surely they know about the 2004 U.S./Canada/France-led coup d’etat against Haiti’s democratically elected president, and the Chapter 7 deployment of a United Nations occupation force (euphemistically known as a “peacekeeping” force). Indeed, it was Lula’s Brazil that led the military wing of that occupation that brought nothing but violence and devastation to Haitian peoples. Brazil’s active participation in that occupation led to the migration of thousands of Haitian workers to Brazil, where they provided cheap labor to build the infrastructure for the Olympics and World Cup. The savage racism experienced by Haitian migrants in Brazil, combined with the disappearance of work, led them to flee overland through Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border in search of asylum.

The leaders of the Americas must also know about the Core Group—the self-selected, unelected group of foreigners, with representatives from the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Canada, that was created during the early months of the occupation. The Core Group continues to control Haiti’s internal political affairs. They certainly know that the UN still occupies Haiti; after all, it is the left’s “anti-imperialist” darling, Andrés Manual López Obrador (AMLO), who is serving, along with the United States, as “co-penholder” and writing the UN Security Council’s imperial policies on Haiti. Similar to Brazil, will Mexico’s bid to play power-broker in the region come at the expense of Haitian people and Haiti’s sovereignty?

AMLO must know what he’s doing. After all, even as it gets celebrated for its “leftist” credentials, the Mexican government continues to collude with the U.S. Border Patrol to militarize its southern border against migrants, and enforce the U.S. “Remain in Mexico” policy. Meanwhile, Haitian and other Black migrants continue to suffer racist abuse in Mexico.

It is not lost on me that there is a deep-seated, racist view of Haiti as exceptional—and therefore exceptionally difficult to engage. The constant refrain from anti-imperialist groupings in the West is that Haiti is so “complex” and its sociopolitical terrain so difficult that there’s no way to truly understand what’s going on there. During a recent webinar against U.S. imperialism in Latin America, I brought up the current UN/US occupation in Haiti, only to have the host soberly agree with me that this was, indeed, an important problem to engage, but that, perhaps, Haiti needed a separate webinar. Many webinars later, discussion of Haiti’s destruction by a brutal Western imperialism, continues to get short shrift.

While we celebrate the rise of another “Pink Tide” in Latin America, the emergence of a truly multipolar world, with new economic and political alignments, it seems clear that Haiti will continue to be on the outside of “leftist” imaginations—beyond, of course, the non-specific words of “solidarity” thrown its way.

In a discussion on Twitter about the ways that Haiti appears— and dismissed—in global discourses, a colleague, Vik Sohonie lamented , “Haiti is unfortunately where all good will, solidarity, and Third Worldism goes to die… The ‘international community’ that occupies it, as you know, is Nepali, Brazilian. You get looked at funny elsewhere in the Carib if you compliment Haiti. It’s astonishing.” He’s not wrong. One of the reasons that the brutal UN military occupation of Haiti could fly under the radar was because it was populated by a multi-national and multi-racial military and civilian force. The United States admitted as much, as revealed in the Wikileaks files. Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson lauded the occupation force (MINUSTAH) as a cheap source of U.S. power in Haiti, as it is made up of a multinational coalition of Western and non-Western forces, including countries ranging from Benin and Kenya to Brazil and Ecuador, who seem all bent on using Haiti as their training ground.

Why is it so easy for these nonwhite and oppressed nations to come and serve U.S. and Western imperial interests in Haiti? Could it be that they, too, have imbibed the dehumanized and, frankly, racist views about Haitian people? Is Haiti’s Blackness seen as the root cause of its problems and struggles—even by many Black people? One would think so if one reviewed the recent actions of the leaders of CARICOM who, also, deploy the dehumanizing language and white supremacist assumptions about Haiti that is the foundation of Western imperialist actions in the country.

This wasn’t always the case, of course. Back in 2004, under the leadership of PJ Patterson, CARICOM at least spoke up against the U.S./France/Canada coup d’etat against elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide (and this was despite his often problematic public positions against him). Jamaica was even threatened with sanctions—by the Bush administration’s Condoleeza Rice—if it attempted to provide Aristide asylum. The other bold voice was Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who railed against the coup and later provided direct support to Haiti’s masses through the PetroCaribe fuel subsidies.

Where are those voices now?

Perhaps if people in the region saw Haiti less as an abstraction and more as a place with real humans, citizens of the world, with the same claims to rights and livelihood, confronting a white supremacist imperialism, they would recognize the current denial of its sovereignty. Until that time, the Leftists of the Americas are betraying a people that have given so much to the struggles for sovereignty and independence in the region.

Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, the Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, and a Black Studies and anthropology professor at UCLA.

Editor’s Note: The following dispatches are a service of Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service.

Argentina and Brazil Rejoin UNASUR

The governments of Argentine President Alberto Fernández and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have officially rejoined the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), a regional integration organization founded in May 2008.

Between 2018 and 2020, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, under the leadership of conservative heads of state, withdrew from UNASUR due to their alignment with U.S. interests.

In November 2019, following the coup against democratically elected president Evo Morales, the de facto government led by Jeanine Áñez withdrew Bolivia from UNASUR. In November 2020, after the election of President Luis Arce, the country rejoined the regional body.

In August 2021, the government of former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo also announced his country’s reincorporation into the bloc. However, following his ouster and arrest in December 2022, Castillo’s successor Dina Boluarte suspended Peru’s membership.

On April 5, Argentine foreign minister Santiago Cafiero announced the country’s official return to the body after four years of absence. Likewise, on Thursday, April 6, President Lula signed a decree making official Brazil’s return to UNASUR, also after four years.

The measure marked a step in Lula’s drive to reposition the country’s politics after the four years of conservative former president Jair Bolsonaro, who withdrew Brazil from the bloc in April 2019.

Brazil’s decision came a day after the member states of the Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Countries against Inflation (APALCI), including Brazil and Argentina, agreed to join efforts to face the inflation crisis and strengthen regional integration and trade.

Latin American and Caribbean Governments Agree to Join Forces Against Inflation

On April 5, the leaders of 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries took part in a virtual summit against inflation called by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The summit sought to form an alliance to jointly face the inflation crisis affecting the region.

In addition to President AMLO of Mexico, the countries represented were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Honduras, Venezuela, Belize, Colombia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

During the meeting, political leaders discussed joint solutions to face high food prices and shortages in the region, as well as to strengthen regional integration and trade. They expressed their will to unite efforts to guarantee economic growth and development that promote inclusion, equity, and sustainability of food and nutrition security for people, and to face inflationary pressures on the basic food basket and essential goods and services. They also committed to strengthening their economies and productive sectors through inclusion, solidarity, and international cooperation.

In this regard, the leaders signed a joint declaration and agreed on actions to “advance the definition of trade facilities as well as logistical, financial, and other measures that will allow the exchange of basic food basket products and intermediate goods under better conditions, with the priority of lowering the costs of such products for the poorest and most vulnerable population.”

Eighty-Seven Percent of Service Workers in the U.S. South Were Injured on the Job Last Year

A March survey of 347 service workers in the U.S. South found that a shocking 87 percent were injured on the job in the last year. The workers surveyed came from eleven states across the “Black Belt,” or Southern states with historically large Black populations. Workers organized under the Union of Southern Service Workers filed a landmark civil rights complaint against the South Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Administration (SC OSHA), alleging that the agency “discriminates by disproportionately excluding Black workers from the protection of its programmed inspections.”

The survey, conducted by the Strategic Organizing Center, laid bare the shocking reality of the service industry in the U.S. South, composed of principally Black workers. More than half of survey respondents reported observing serious health and safety hazards at work.

The survey data indicates that workers often fear retaliation to avoid enforcing safety rules themselves, something they shouldn’t have to do in the first place. Service workers need OSHA agencies, whose jobs are to step in to enforce safety regulations.

But in South Carolina, their statewide OSHA plan is not doing its job, workers say. As USSW reports in their complaint, “SC OSHA neglects key industries whose workforce is 42% [Black] employees while focusing the vast majority of its programmed inspections on industries made up of only 18% [Black] workers.”

In conjunction with their complaint, USSW workers went on a one-day strike across three states—Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina—yesterday to fight the dangerous trend of unsafe service industry workplaces.

CALÍ, Colombia—Observers of the first-round presidential elections in Colombia shared with Toward Freedom irregularities they encountered in Buenaventura, a predominantly Afro-descendant city on the Pacific coast. This comes as it appears a left-wing candidate who faces death threats is surging in a recent poll against his social-media-savvy competitor.

With a population that is more than 90 percent Afro-descendant, Buenaventura voters appeared at polls with pride and joy to vote for an Afro-descendant woman whose vision matched theirs. That woman is Francia Márquez, the vice-presidential running mate of Gustavo Petro, the Pacto Histórico coalition presidential candidate.

“One man was at least 90 years old. He said he walked over a mile to vote. Then he had to walk up two flights of stairs with a cane,” said Janvieve Williams Comrie, founder and executive director of AfroResistance, a group that advocates for Afro-descendant women and girls in the Americas. AfroResistance organized the largest-ever observer delegation in Colombia and the only one centering Afro-descendant women. “But the fact he had to… is not only an act of resistance, but also an act of joy.”

The left-wing Gustavo-Márquez ticket garnered 78 percent of votes in Buenaventura. Aside from witnessing the Afro-descendant population’s excitement in voting for a radical Afro-descendant woman, election observers founded several irregularities in this predominantly Afro-descendant city. In 2017, a 22-day civil strike led by the Afro-descendant population in Buenaventura shut down the country’s main port on the Pacific Ocean.

Voter turnout was low—only 40 percent.

“Most poll workers far outnumbered the voters,” said Charisse Burden-Stelly, a professor at Carleton College and co-coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Research and Political Education Team who observed on the AfroResistance delegation. Burden-Stelly also said a locally based observer explained that voting lines usually wrap around blocks. But this year, paramilitary groups issued threats to the Buenaventura populace, warning against voting. Plus, the large police and military presence at polls compounded the threat.

Comrie said one member of the military threatened their group.

“His firearm was resting on one of our delegates. He was that close to us,” Comrie said. “Then he asked us for our name[s]. He wanted to know why we were there, even though we had explained beforehand we were part of this international observation delegation.”

Between threats and voter intimidation, Colombians have been quiet about who they are voting for. Charo Mina Rojas, a member of @renacientes, spoke in Calí about the challenges of voting in #Colombia this year. pic.twitter.com/3xr6Pn3Cp6

— Toward Freedom (@TowardFreedom) June 1, 2022

Buenaventura in particular is known for “chop houses,” buildings where paramilitaries cut adversaries’ bodies alive. The cries emanating from those buildings are designed to warn the public not to cross these groups, some of which have helped the production and flow of illicit drugs.

Burden-Stelly also noted that although vote results were announced at 5 p.m. in Buenaventura, the group of observers witnessed piles of bags containing uncounted ballots. This, in a city where observers noticed a disparity in biometric machines to validate voter identification cards.

Securing Voter Rights

Voting polls were supposed to contain literature explaining how the rights of people with disabilities and transgender people would be protected while voting.

However, a school used as a polling site had no cooling system or any way for people with mobility issues to climb stairs. But this location did have biometric machines. “It didn’t map directly onto resources, but that tended to be the trend,” Burden-Stelly said of the general lack of machines in poor neighborhoods.

“The math doesn’t add up properly,” Comrie said. “I understand communities are poor, but it’s 2022. What is also not adequate enough in these communities is that school was just raw. The classroom was in a little tin building, with no ventilation and it was so incredibly hot as we moved to the top floor.” Comrie further asked what elected officials were doing to secure human rights.

However, observers were proud to be able to support a transgender woman vote. The name on her identification card was not the same as the name she presented at the poll, so she was rejected. “The trans woman was ready to walk away,” Burden-Stelly said. But observers stepped in. That is why Comrie said AfroResistance’s presence of 29 observers was significant.

Meanwhile, observer badges were reportedly confiscated from Pacto Histórico observers at a polling site in Buenaventura. According to what observers heard, police also had detained those coalition representatives. Colombia’s National Electoral Council and Pacto Histórico did not reply to Toward Freedom‘s inquiries into the matter. Meanwhile, the Petro-Márquez campaign’s press team said they were unaware of this incident.

‘A Hug for Petro’

Petro has 44.9 percent support while millionaire Rodolfo Hernández has 41 percent support, a survey found.

While centrist and right-wing forces converge against Petro, and as the Biden administration attacks left-wing governments this week at the U.S. government-hosted Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he wanted to send a hug to Petro.

“Why a hug? Because he is facing a dirty war of the most cowardly and undignified kind, everything we suffered in Mexico,” López said. “All the conservatives are united, unethically.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom. She recently reported on Colombia’s presidential elections here, here and here.