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

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: This article was originally published by People’s Dispatch.

On August 20, the newly inaugurated left-wing government of President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez in Colombia launched the first Unified Command Post for Life (PMU) in the municipality of Caldono, in the Cauca department. The PMU is an initiative that aims to achieve total peace and protect the population affected by violence across the country, especially social leaders, human rights activists, environmentalists and former combatants of the demobilized FARC guerilla group.

The launch was led by Interior Minister Alfonso Prada, Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, Labor Minister Gloria Inés Ramírez, and around 30 legislators from across the political spectrum, including the president of the Senate, Roy Barreras, and the president of the Peace Commission of the Senate, Iván Cepeda.

Con las ministras de Trabajo y Ambiente, @GloriaRamirezRi y @susanamuhamad, el presidente del Senado, @RoyBarreras, y la Comisión de Paz del Congreso con su presidente @IvanCepedaCast, estamos a esta hora en Caldono, Cauca, escuchando las demandas y preocupaciones de la comunidad pic.twitter.com/e2J6BoCg7n

— Alfonso Prada (@alfonsoprada) August 20, 2022

“We have installed the PMU, which is a command post to achieve rapid security in a preventative approach, not in the approach of sadness when we receive the news of the death of social leaders,” Prada said.

Prada explained that the protection plan will cover the 65 municipalities hardest hit by violence in the country, adding that initial emphasis will be placed on “5 to 10 of them, which are in a very delicate situation and are systematically assassinating their leaders.” He said that the state would provide accompaniment and maintain a permanent presence in those 10 municipalities.

The Interior Minister said that the government is particularly committed to the Cauca department. “For us, Cauca is a huge priority… If we achieve integral and total peace in Cauca, I have no doubt that we can dream of having total peace in Colombia,” said Prada.

Prada explained that instructions had been given to the institutions that have powers related to the protection of the lives of social leaders, land defenders, environmentalists, community leaders, peace signatories, land restitution managers, and those who work in crop substitution.

Prada added that the government had already ordered the local authorities to comply with the early warnings issued by the Ombudsman’s Office, especially for the municipalities of Caldono, Buenos Aires and Santander de Quilichao, in Cauca. He also said that the government would strengthen the National Protection Unit (UNP).

For her part, Environment Minister Muhamad stressed that this plan recognizes land defenders as people who make a positive, important and legitimate contribution to the protection of nature and promotion of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Muhamad assured that with the beginning of the plan, the implementation of the Escazú Agreement also begins, pending its ratification by the House of Representatives.

With regard to illegal paramilitary groups, Senator Barreras said that dialogues are the only way that allows peace. “The government and the congress have every desire to allow them to reintegrate into society and these command posts for life are spaces for dialogue and listening, the message that we are sending them is that they take advantage of the opportunity to lay down their arms so that they can join the life of Colombia,” said Barreras.

Iniciamos el Plan de Choque para salvaguardar la vida de las y los Líderes Sociales en Colombia, así como de quienes firmaron la paz .

Comisión del Gobierno Nacional, 20 congresistas y la Comunidad Internacional en defensa de la vida y la paz en los Territorio, rumbo al Cauca pic.twitter.com/sTQgD8i0rD

— Iván Cepeda Castro (@IvanCepedaCast) August 20, 2022

On August 19, the Ombudsman’s Office released a report in which it reported that between January 1 and July 31, 122 social leaders and human rights defenders had been assassinated in different departments of the country. It also reported that Cauca with 19 assassinations, Nariño with 17, Antioquia with 12, and Putumayo with 11, are the departments with the highest number of cases.

According to the Colombian human rights organization Institute of Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ), between January 1 and August 20, 119 environmentalists, land defenders, human rights defenders, Afro-descendent, Indigenous, peasant and social leaders had been killed by illegal armed and drug-trafficking groups operating in the country. Additionally, during this period, 32 ex-combatants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who were in the reincorporation process, had also been murdered.

Petro and Márquez, during their election campaign, vowed to fight drug trafficking and paramilitarism, and consolidate peace in the country. The day following their inauguration, on August 8, in the first press conference to local media, Petro confirmed the resumption of negotiations with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the largest leftist guerrilla group active in Colombia. On August 11, a delegation of the Colombian government, headed by Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva Durán, visited Cuba to establish contact with the leadership of the ELN in order to advance towards peace negotiations. On August 20, President Petro announced that in order to further advance in the dialogue with the ELN, the arrest and extradition orders against the members of the insurgency group were suspended. At the same time, he confirmed the restitution of the negotiation protocols with the ELN that had been signed with the government of former president Juan Manuel Santos.

Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR, by Tricia Starks (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, New York, 2022)

Tricia Starks’ Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR (2022) is an exploration into the evolution of a unique industry throughout the course of the former Soviet Union.

Juxtaposed against the development of the cigarette industry in the West, the evolution of tobacco within the USSR provides a looking glass into both the distinctions between the two systems and how they both similarly confronted social pressures. In the author’s words, “[the book] presents the relationship among state, production, profit, health, culture, gender, biology, use, image, and users” (p. 10).

The Cigarette Industry’s Utility in a Nascent Socialist State

Starks begins prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1917, during Lenin and his comrades’ famous train ride back to the then-Russian Empire. She proceeds to move the reader through time by commissioning a theme for the periods that she covers in each chapter, including posters and photographs for reference throughout. The book concludes with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and a brief preview of the transformation of tobacco in the immediate aftermath.

The choice to focus on the tobacco industry through the paradigm of the Soviet system is an interesting case study in what distinguished their socialist system and the particular challenges they faced throughout the 20th century. In the capitalist West, and particularly in the United States, the traditional narrative on the rise of the tobacco industry is one of capitalist marketing and the explosion of consumerism as industrial modes of production expanded throughout the century. However, despite the lack of consumption-driven marketing within the newly formed Soviet republics, the demand for tobacco was tremendous. Soviets initially smoked it in the form of a coarse Russian tobacco known as makhorka or as filterless Russian cigarettes known as papirosy, only later increasing consumption of cigarettes.

Soviet Approach to Health and Cigarettes

Lenin despised the use of tobacco, going as far as to enforce designated smoking areas and issue smoking vouchers during the revolutionaries’ train ride back to Petrograd (p. 1). Following the triumph of the October Revolution, the Soviets would go on to found the first national prophylactic [preventative] healthcare system in 1918 (p. 2). Under the leadership of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, the new People’s Commissariat for Public Health (known as the Narkomzdrav) quickly acknowledged the dangers of smoking and launched the world’s first mass anti-smoking campaign, calling for both wide-reaching public education and curtailment of production and distribution. However, the conditions that the USSR’s planned economy faced presented them with a difficult choice. That was because demand for tobacco far exceeded supply coming out of the destruction of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, the industry’s unions were strong, and the revenue from its sale and export was badly needed. Thus, they decided to continue production while committing to a robust propaganda campaign to inform the public about the dangers of smoking.

The perspective that the public awareness campaigns took serves as a great example of what distinguished the Soviet approach from the West. Representative of the collectivism that guided the state, posters and resources throughout the period highlighted individuals’ responsibility to their community and the social impacts of smoking. While the extent of tobacco’s danger to physical health was far from fully understood, the socialist perspective of Soviet medical professionals led them to include the social implications of smoking in their understanding of its dangers. At a delicate time for the revolutionary project, Narkomzdrav rightfully warned smoking could not only limit one’s ability to be a productive member of society, but could also drain badly needed resources from the state. Posters highlighted how smokers caused fires in factories and in homes, polluted public and personal spaces, and influenced the next generation to take up the habit.

An Unusual Analysis of Former USSR

The focus of Cigarettes and Soviets is enticing. Starks’ avoidance of Cold War-era pseudo-history and histrionic oversimplifications, which seek to disparage the Soviet project, is particularly refreshing. Starks notes:

“The depiction of tobacco as the true opiate of the masses assumes a passive smoking population and a state in total control. The potency and popularity of papirosy prepared the Soviets to have a massive market for any tobacco they produced, and for the state to interfere in the biopsychosocial bond between smoker and tobacco held danger (p. 8).”

The first anti-smoking campaign demonstrated the question of tobacco was complex and the way Soviets chose to respond illustrates their principles. Pamphlets and other materials produced during this early period criticized alcohol and tobacco for “[endangering] order, health, and political progress” as well as “[softening] consciousness (p. 95).” Narkomzdrav looked to align their message with the Bolshevik Revolution and tap into the revolutionary energy among the people to dissuade them from smoking. However, Starks also points out the Soviets were restricted in their ability to take action by both the social conditions and the concrete benefits tobacco production provided. In 1931, Anastas Mikoian, head of the People’s Commissariat of Food Industry, “praised tobacco workers for fueling the Stalinist industrialization drive (p. 111).” Mikoian was commenting on the reality the USSR faced; industry and the economy were still developing and tobacco was in high demand, able to provide welcome satisfaction in the face of shortages of other products while the revenue it produced funded development.

In later chapters of Cigarettes and Soviets, the thoughtfulness that guides the author’s exploration of the pre-Stalin era at times fades. Starks mentions the Soviets declined aid offered through the Marshall Plan, but fails to explain that this was due to the purposefully small amount offered to a country that suffered a great deal of damage throughout World War II and that the USSR recognized the strings attached to the aid in the plan (p. 157). The analysis of later decades doesn’t provide the depth to fully understand the profound changes happening within the tobacco industry and within the USSR. For example, one of the first Western industries to break into the Soviet market was tobacco, following the lead of Marlboro owner Philip Morris’ joint venture with a Soviet tobacco factory on the topically named Soiuz-Apollon cigarettes in 1975 (p. 175). However, unlike her analysis of how the post-1921 New Economic Policy era’s policies influenced tobacco imagery and propaganda, Starks does not elaborate on the post-WWII sociopolitical developments influencing the changes.

Nonetheless, Tricia Starks’ new book, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR, is enlightening and thought-provoking. The case study on the peculiar USSR tobacco industry provides an interesting window into the Soviet project, highlighting challenges the Soviet people faced and successes the Bolshevik Revolution was able to produce.

Nick Flores is a co-founder of and organizer with Bushwick, Brooklyn-based G-REBLS, a grassroots organization as well as a member organization of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Solidarity Network. Nick holds a double-major bachelor’s degree in history and Latin American studies.