Indigenous-Led Occupation in United States Demands City of Minneapolis Call Off Demolition

Correction: The definition of Haitians of Dominican descent has been clarified. The length of the constructed portion of the border fence has been corrected. The name that Dominican officials had given for a victim has been updated, based on newly obtained information.

Whenever Malena goes to work or heads out to study, she tries to leave her home very early and return after dark. The 33-year-old mother of five does so for fear of being detained by the Dominican Republic’s immigration agents, even though she is Dominican.

Born and raised in a batey, a settlement around a sugar mill in the San Pedro de Macorís province, Malena is the daughter of Haitian sugar cane workers who arrived in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s, during the U.S.-backed Dominican dictatorship of Joaquin Balaguer.

Malena now lives in La Romana, also in the eastern part of the country. She has three sisters, two of whom have an identification card, acquired through a regularization plan for foreigners. Meanwhile, she and her other sister don’t have any documents. Close encounters with immigration authorities are normal.

“On a trip to the capital, Migration [officers] stopped the bus,” Malena recounted. “They said to a young man: ‘Papers, moreno!’ And since he only had a Haitian ID card, they took him off the bus. They only look for Black people. Luckily, they didn’t look at me. Sometimes by WhatsApp, I’m warned not to pass through some place because Migration is there. It’s always a danger.”

Malena and her sisters are some of the more than 200,000 people affected in the last 10 years by Constitutional Court ruling 168-13, according to estimates of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. This ruling deprived Dominicans of Haitian descent who had been born after 1929 of their citizenship. As such, the impacts of statelessness are rampant.

“My children have no papers,” Malena said. “Without papers, you can’t have health insurance. You can’t have a good job. I had to repeat 8th grade because I couldn’t take the national test. The same thing happened to my son.”

Mass Deportations

Since 2021, the government of Luis Abinader has been promoting a campaign of mass deportations of the Haitian immigrant community. This also affects Dominicans of Haitian descent. Those are people who were born in the Dominican Republic, have Haitian parents or grandparents, and often are stateless, as in Malena’s case. The head of the General Directorate of Migration, Venancio Alcántara, declared recently that between August and April, more than 200,000 Haitians had been deported. “A record in the history of this institution.”

This statistic shows its true dimensions when contrasted with the size of the Haitian migrant community and the population of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Although no recent official figures exist, Dominican Ambassador to Spain Juan Bolívar wrote an opinion piece in June that estimated both populations, when counted together, at less than 900,000 people, or about 8 percent of the country’s population of 10.6 million. Bolívar’s estimation is based on the 2017 National Immigrant Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office.

That means 22 percent of Haitians had been deported between August and April.

This is why Dominican and Haitian organizations have warned of the danger that the mass deportation campaign could turn into a process of open ethnic cleansing and consolidate an apartheid regime, as previously reported in Toward Freedom.

Extortions, Theft and Violence at the Border

One of the flagship projects of the Dominican government is the expansion of a border fence. Previous governments built the first 23 kilometers (14 miles). Now, fence construction is continuing, so it can cover 164 kilometers (101 miles).  The Abinader government insists in forums, such as the United Nations, on the need for the “international community” to militarily occupy and “pacify” Haiti, complaining about the “burden” the neighboring country represents for the Dominican Republic.

However, the violence of the Dominican state has crossed the border into Haiti.

On March 19, members of the Dominican military attacked the Haitian border village of Tilory in the north, killing two people—Guerrier Kiki and Joseph Irano—and wounding others in their attempt to suppress a protest. According to a statement signed by Dominican and Haitian organizations, the Dominican military regularly engages in extortion and theft, including the seizure of motorcycles and other property, which led to the protest.

This is not the only recent cross-border incident. On August 5, an agent of the Dominican Directorate General of Customs (DGA) shot and killed 23-year-old Haitian, Irmmcher Cherenfant, at the border crossing between Pedernales and Anse-A-Pitres, in the southern end of the north-to-south Dominican-Haitian border. Dominican officials identified Cherenfant as Georges Clairinoir. The DGA and the Dominican Ministry of Defense justified Cherenfant’s killing as an instance of self-defense. Dominican social organizations questioned this version, pointing out contradictions in the official communiqués.

A human rights defender from Anse-A-Pitres who spoke with witnesses said the conflict began when the victim refused to pay a customs guard to be allowed to transport a power generator purchased in the Dominican Republic. After Cherenfant was killed, a struggle ensued, in which the guard was disarmed by Haitians. Subsequently, the Dominican military fired weapons of war indiscriminately into Haitian territory, injuring two people. The human rights defender, who works for a local organization, asked not to be identified for security reasons.

The Dominican government paid a compensation of 400,000 pesos (approximately $7,200) to Cherenfant’s wife the following week. But when the community mobilized on August 12 against military violence and in memory of the victim, the Dominican military threatened some of the protest organizers that they would be prohibited from entering Dominican territory.

‘A Vibrant Democracy’

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Santo Domingo on April 12 and met with Abinader. According to State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, they discussed their “deep ties” and “shared democratic values,” as well as regional security issues, including the “urgent situation in Haiti.”

During her visit, Sherman recorded a video message in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo, extolling the country as a tourist attraction and calling the political regime a “vibrant and energetic democracy… a strong and exceptional partner with the United States of America.”

In her tour of the colonial zone, Sherman can be seen escorted by the mayor of the National District, Carolina Mejia, a member of the ruling Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), and by Kin Sánchez, a guide of the Tourism Cluster. Significantly, Sánchez was part of a mob led by the neo-fascist organization, Antigua Orden Dominicana, which attacked and shouted racist slogans against a cultural activity held on October 12 that was intended to commemorate Indigenous resistance. The complicity of the National Police caused nationwide repercussions.

After Sherman’s visit, Republican U.S. Congressmember Maria Elvira Salazar and Democratic U.S. Congressmember Adriano Espaillat, announced the U.S. State Department would withdraw a November 19 travel alert warning Black tourists of racial profiling by Dominican immigration authorities. The April 17 travel advisory only mentions risks related to criminality. Dominican Tourism Minister David Collado welcomed the move as a “very positive and appropriate” measure, describing the U.S. as a “strategic partner.”

Meanwhile, two days after Sherman’s visit, Haitian driver Louis Charleson was shot and killed by a military officer in the Dominican border town of Jimaní following a traffic altercation. A young Haitian man was wounded, too. The Haitian Support Group for Returnees and Refugees (GARR) denounced the impunity that covers the Dominican military and police in the border area. The agent who murdered Irmmcher Cherenfant last year in Pedernales continues to hold the same position at the Directorate General of Customs. He has not been dismissed or prosecuted.

“As always, Dominican officials present the simplistic argument of self-defense to comfort the offending soldiers with impunity,” GARR stated.

Vladimir Fuentes is the pen name of a freelance journalist based in the Dominican Republic.

Editor’s Note: This is based on a presentation the author gave during a February 6 webinar, “U.S./NATO Aggression at the Russian Border. No War with Russia.” The event was a conversation between Russian, Ukrainian and U.S. activists the United National Antiwar Coalition had organized.

We have serious concerns that the accelerated drive to militarization and war by the United States and its allies dramatically unfolding with the crisis in Ukraine might very easily escalate to the point that it could threaten global humanity.

In their mad drive to advance their geostrategic interests to the detriment of everyone else—the Democratic Party version of “America First”—the Biden administration willfully violates all of the core principles of international relations and law. The respect for national sovereignty, the prohibition against threatening other members of the United Nations with military actions, non-intervention and adherence to international law are not recognized by the United States, which sees itself as an exception to the rule of law.

The manufactured crisis in Ukraine is just the latest episode of the reckless and delusional drama that the United States is involved in to attempt to maintain hegemony in conditions that have fundamentally changed. That is why contextualizing Ukraine as another example of why a global anti-war and anti-imperialist movement is so vitally important.

As long as the commitment to “Full Spectrum Dominance” remains bipartisan policy, today, it’s Ukraine. But tomorrow, it is certain to be another nation, another issue that will require a response from the peoples of the world.

As stated in the final declaration of the Fourth Canada-United States-Mexico Trilateral Peace Conference in Moca, Dominican Republic, held in September 2018, there must be a firm and principled commitment on the part of peace and anti-imperialist organizations that “peace must be based on the principles of non-intervention and full respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination and independence of all states, as stipulated in the United Nations Charter and covenants of international law enacted since the end of the second imperialist war known as World War II.”

Yet, the web of global U.S. command structures—with over eight hundred military bases—NATO as the largest military alliance in the world; illegal, draconian sanctions; and political subversion through coups makes national sovereignty impossible. The illegal and unilateral actions by the United States and its allies represents a constant threat to international peace and perpetuates a lawless, international Hobbesian state of nature.

So, while it is quite clear how we got to this moment with the situation in Ukraine, the challenge for the anti-war, pro-peace movement—and more specifically for the anti-imperialist organizations and movements in the United States and Europe—is to ground our understanding of the driving force and objective interests responsible for where the international community is at this moment.

For the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) the common enemy is the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination. We argue that we must center our analysis within the context of the global class struggle—a struggle sharpened by the ongoing and irreconcilable contradictions of the global colonial-capitalist system.

That is important because if we do not identify the real, concrete material forces, we can find ourselves struggling against shadows, instead of against the corporeal reality of an alliance of states dedicated to advancing their interests to the detriment of everyone else.

It is imperialism, led by the United States, that is the culprit. Its parasitic imperialist domination would be impossible without its core instrument of enforcement and control: State violence. That is why we are discussing Ukraine today. 

Imperialism: That is framework. Today, it is Ukraine. Tomorrow, it might be China. Why? Because with the seemingly sudden and spontaneous crisis that emerged with Ukraine, the steady, violent, oppressive and repressive relations of power between the United States and Western capital and the rest of humanity continues. Objective reality bears this out. While we are focused on Ukraine as the most immediate danger, the people of Afghanistan are starving, bombs are still dropping in Yemen, coups are unfolding in Africa, the United States is still pivoting to Asia, and the peoples and nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are still suffocating from the predatory weight of the U.S. hegemon.

When we remind ourselves that the doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance animates U.S. foreign policies, we can disabuse ourselves of any illusions on what our historic task must be.

The drive for dominance has always been fueled by one objective: To position U.S. capitalist interests to be able to more effectively plunder the labor and resources of the peoples and nations of the world.

Is that not what is in play in eastern Europe? Is it not capitalist competition and its geostrategic implications that is driving events? Can we understand Ukraine, the role of NATO and the United States, without understanding the economic interests involved with Nord Stream 2 and the Eurasian Economic Union and even the Belt and Road Initiative? Was it a surprise that after being pushed out of Afghanistan, a crisis would emerge in Kazakhstan as the United States desperately tries to re-position itself in central Asia? That is why nothing short of the defeat of imperialism must be seen as our task.

There are significant points of resistance emerging from popular struggles that are moving us toward that task of building powerful international peoples’ movements:

1. Prohibition against nuclear weapons. January represented the one-year anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW came out of UN General Assembly resolution in July 2017. It represents the first legally binding agreement that comprehensively prohibits nuclear weapons with ultimate goal of total elimination. The treaty came into force January 22, 2021, after reaching the goal of fifty instruments of ratification or accessions. The Black Alliance for Peace was one of the first organizations to take up the work of publicizing the treaty as soon as it emerged from UN General Assembly in July of 2017.
2. We must work to abolish NATO. In a 1997 essay published by the New York Times, Kennan said, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era… Such a decision may be expected… to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” But our concerns on NATO extend beyond the contradictions that NATO poses in Europe. For African peoples and other colonized peoples, NATO is correctly seen as an instrument of U.S. and European military domination. BAP actively campaigns to dismantle NATO and considers it an integral part of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination. The international campaign to close U.S. and NATO bases and shut down the U.S. global command structures represents much needed international cooperation and coordination to bring attention to and build opposition to the global U.S. and NATO network of military bases and structures
3. Support movements for Zones of Peace. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) declared the Caribbean and Latin America to be a “Zone of Peace.” BAP is leading an effort to revive the civil society element of this state-centered declaration by popularizing the declaration and building popular support across the region.
4. Campaign against sanctions. There is a growing awareness of the devastating consequences of economic sanctions on the general population in those more than 30 nations that are under the illegal sanction regime of the United States and Europe. Coalitions like Sanctions Kill have been organizing to bring attention to this issue in the United States and globally.

The white supremacist, colonial-capitalist, patriarchal ruling classes of the United States and Europe are clear—even if we are not—that war and repression will be used with maximum efficiency to maintain their hegemony. Therefore, we can have no illusions: We must fight back, and we must win!

Every mobilization against illegal sanctions; subversion in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba; the global U.S. command structures and bases; mass incarceration in the United States; police killings; the murder of Palestinians; and the continued capitalist assault on Mother Earth have to be seen as part of our efforts to defeat the colonial-capitalist order—to fight imperialism, and the way we do that is to turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism!

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

More than 10.3 million acres of primary tropical forests—spanning about the size of Belgium—went up in flames in 2020. A new coalition claims it will mobilize $1 billion to thwart global climate change’s increasingly devastating forest fires. But scientists and other experts have raised doubts about this new program corporations and governments have kicked off.

Primary tropical forests are untouched by human development. More than 1 billion people live in and depend on the world’s tropical forests, and nearly 300 million people live in lands targeted for tropical forest restoration, according to Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a non-governmental organization. Meanwhile, RRI’s data shows over 900 million people live in the biodiverse areas of low- and middle-income countries.

The new coalition is called “Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance”—or LEAF—and it is expected to become “the single largest private-sector investment to protect tropical forests.” At the Leaders Summit on Climate on April 22, multinational corporations entered into a coalition with the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway. The list of corporations includes Airbnb, Amazon, Bayer, Boston Consulting Group, GlaxoSmithKline, McKinsey & Company, Nestle, Salesforce and Unilever.

Experts have raised this coalitional strategy could further marginalize communities dwelling in tropical forests across the developing world. They also have questioned the effectiveness of strategies that aim to raise funding to halt deforestation.

For example, Forrest Fleischman, an assistant professor of forest resources at the University of Minnesota, says the success of the LEAF coalition will depend “not on their ability to mobilize money from wealthy companies, but in their ability to negotiate complicated political arrangements which may involve challenging the powers that be, including states and private companies.

 

How Has Carbon Finance Worked?

Political and economic conditions create opportunities for power plays in carbon finance, i.e. the funding provided for carbon sequestration programs like forest restoration. In most cases, governments, corporations and aid organizations have immense discretionary power regarding carbon finance. That is why experts say Indigenous and other forest-dependent peoples should have primary decision-making power over monetary allocations, as well as the power to choose projects.

Not involving such communities can erode their rights. For example, consider how afforestation programs in India have been carried out on lands used for agricultural purposes by Indigenous and forest-dwelling communities.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, says forest conservation programs like LEAF “cannot work if the rights of Indigenous communities are not protected and the flow of money only leads to violence and conflicts” because of struggles over land rights. More specifically, she highlights a need to ensure land rights of forest-dwelling communities are recognized and that these communities play an active role in designing the LEAF program, as well as receive a fair share of the resources LEAF aims to gather.

Indigenous communities, such as the Yurok tribe in what is known as northern California, the Suquamish tribe in what is known as the Seattle, Washington area, as well as the U.S.-based Indigenous Environmental Network, could not be reached for comment, as of press time.  

Fleischman also emphasizes LEAF’s aim ought to be to “transform the economic and political conditions surrounding forests, rather than just setting up conservation areas and providing payments to people.”

As for effectiveness, past efforts offer lessons.

“In Brazil, deforestation is a major source of emissions. So, it is important to have [internationally mobilized] resources to fight the climate crisis. But, at the same time, we worry when we hear about new funds to support forests because we have seen how the Amazon Fund has been used,” says Maureen Santos, policy officer at Federation of Organizations for Social and Educational Assistance in Rio de Janeiro.

Santos adds President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has failed to use the fund as a climate change tool. Deforestation rates in the Amazon have surged under Bolsonaro.

The Amazon Fund is a REDD+ initiative the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recognizes. “REDD” stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The aim here is to provide economic incentives for forest conservation. But reports have pointed to high deforestation rates in the Amazon basin, even after the Amazon Fund was fully operationalized.

Pays to note a leading partner at LEAF is the United States, which is the biggest historical emitter of CO2. “Initiatives like LEAF have to be followed up with stronger initiatives to reduce emissions, because even if you save all the forests in the world, you cannot solve the climate crisis until you stop emissions,” Santos adds.

 

Recognizing Land Rights and Asymmetrical Power

A recent paper that analyzed what happened with the Yurok tribe, who occupy the redwood forest of northern California in the United States. The tribe obtained funding to enable carbon sequestration on ancestral territory. This is different than what is known as the “Indian model,” which includes large-scale plantation drives by the government under the Paris Agreement and other forest conservation, afforestation and reforestation efforts funded by international agencies like the World Bank.

The paper highlights when land managers and users possess enforceable rights, like in the case of the Yurok tribe, “power is balanced, accountability is clear, authorities represent the interests of the broader user community and carbon storage aligns with local interests.”

In India, the report found, forest carbon finance is controlled by state governments who “do not share benefits of carbon finance with the rural forest-dependent people whose actions play a major role in determining the outcomes of these programs.”

Communities dependent on forests also lacked countervailing power because their rights to forest land are not recognized.

One of the key findings of the paper is mobilizing money is not enough to ensure forest protection. This is because a wide variety of influences impact forest conservation, many of which are not directly related to financial incentives. Fleischman, the lead author of the paper says, “We’ve long recognised that insecure land tenure is a major driver of forest loss, however it is not clear how giving a country or state money leads to securing land tenure for poor or marginalized people.”

Financial investment, including ones that aim to promote forest conservation, do not work out well. This occurs, Fleischman explains, in cases where financial investments in land end up undermining secure land tenure, which then leads to land degradation. When land values increase, owing to interest from international funding agencies, power actors like companies, states and NGOs are incentivized to control land-based revenue by grabbing land for themselves. This process forcibly takes away the land rights of rural and Indigenous people.

The problems that arise from not recognizing land titles extends to Brazil, too.

Santos adds the first priority ought to be to ensure community land rights are recognized, and environmental regulations and oversight mechanisms are strong enough to assess the success and failures of proposals like LEAF.

Organizations that monitor land use, such as Land Conflict Watch and Vasundhara in India, as well as Amazon Watch, could not be reached for comment.

 

The Path Ahead

“Substantial investment in the recognition of Indigenous and community land rights is a prerequisite to the global climate agenda,” concluded a study published in June by Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). The authors looked at 31 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which hold 70 percent of the world’s tropical forests to highlight risks in developing carbon markets without first settling the land rights of Indigenous communities.

Bryson Ogden, associate director for strategic analysis & global engagement at Rights and Resources Group—the secretariat for RRI—notes “serious power imbalances” in the geographies where the LEAF Coalition plans to operate. He adds power imbalances between companies and governments on the one hand, and rural communities on the other, “often exacerbated by insecure land tenure, have driven land-grabs and violations in the past, and more recently, hindered efforts to eliminate supply chain-driven deforestation.”

In response to concerns about power asymmetries and land rights, Emergent Media, administrative coordinator of LEAF Coalition, told Toward Freedom that LEAF participants recognize Indigenous peoples and local communities are “essential stakeholders in the design and implementation” of plans to reduce deforestation and maintain forest cover in the jurisdictions where they live.

Emergent Media noted safeguards have been drawn up to ensure protection and respect of land-tenure rights and effective stakeholder participation. They also added these safeguards are based on the Cancun Safeguards drafted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

But doubts still remain. Nothing is concrete in either publicly available documents about the coalition, nor in its statement that Indigenous and local people are directly involved in the design and evaluation of projects. Fleischman pointed out it seems like the coalition is treating Indigenous and forest-dependent people “as secondary people who need to be protected in projects designed and financed by others, as opposed to directly empowering those people to make decisions about their lands.”

The kind of economic and political changes that are needed to “ensure [forest] conservation when it conflicts with the profits of companies and the interests of national governments” are left lacking, Fleischman says.

Ogden of RRI suggests a just way to achieve emission-reduction aims would be to scale-up the legal recognition of customary land and resource rights of forest communities—including the carbon stored therein—across proposed accounting areas; develop operational feedback and grievance redress mechanisms; and adequately involve affected constituencies in the design of benefit sharing plans. 

The question remains of whether the $1 billion LEAF proposes to raise is enough to conserve tropical forests around the world. 

“To the extent that money can address conservation challenges, the quantity of money may need to be much larger to make a real dent. In other words, if money is what matters, the money may need to be roughly equivalent to the potential profits to be made by clearing forests to grow soybeans or palm oil,” Fleischman says.

Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.