By Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. After more than a century sailing along as an independent black nation, Haiti collided with the Monroe Doctrine in the person of U.S. kingmaker Roger L. Farnham in 1915. He soon met his match in Haitian hero Charlemagne Peralte.
By Staff, Dominican Today | Editorial comment by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. As the Dominican Republic’s flooded Santiago province erupted in protest against a poorly-built bridge and a scarcity of functional storm drains during the recent rains, the country’s President Leonel Fernandez celebrated the ground breaking for a U.S. $293 M inter-mountains road that is part of grander plan for highway construction throughout the country.
By Josefina Ortega, Granma | YouTube | Haiti Chery. George Gershwin was infatuated with Cuban rhythms. During a 1932 visit to the island, he was taken to a Havana radio station where the Ignacio Piñeiro Septet was broadcasting a live performance. He immediately struck up a friendship with Piñeiro and took some musical notations of his works. The ideas for the Cuban Overture were thus born.
By Staff, Terra Daily (AFP) | Haiti Chery. Latin America accounts for 45 percent of global copper production, 50 percent of silver and 20 percent of gold. But several commercial mining projects have been put on hold in Chile, Peru and Argentina, as local communities have fought for their rights to prior consultation under the International Labor Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention.
By staff, AHP | Translation by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery | AlJazeera, YouTube. Nineteen year-old Johnny Jean from Port-Salut was heard on Thursday May 10 by Uruguayan Judge Guido Alejandro. Jean identified in court the soldiers he accuses of having raped him in a Port Salut base of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). (English | French)
By Gerard Maxineau, Le Nouvelliste | Editorial comment by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. The National Federation of Haitian Mayors (FENAMH) has fingered the executive and some lawmakers as having recently drafted a plan to dissolve 140 municipal councils and replace them with municipal boards at the service of the parliamentarians, but this plan was drafted abroad in the prefab constitution that came along with Haiti’s prefab president and its prefab parliament exactly one year ago. It is a plan especially designed to grab lands in northern Haiti.
By Tamara Pearson and Staff, Venezuelanalysis. Venezuela passed a spectacularly progressive labor law on April 30th that is consistent with work’s main objectives being: “to overcome forms of capitalist exploitation, as well as… guarantee economic independence, satisfy human needs, through the just distribution of wealth, and create material, social, and spiritual conditions that allow for the family to be the fundamental space for the integral development of people.”
By Marcela Valente, Tierramerica | Rebelion. A number of Latin American countries have achieved economic growth by an extractivist model of production that increases the gross domestic product (GDP) at the cost of the intensive use of gradually exhausted natural resources such as: large-scaling mining with cyanide to cause major environmental impacts, or monoculture plantations for export, at the expense of diversified rural production.
By Nocles Debreus, Le Matin | Translation by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. Haiti’s agricultural sector creates 50% of the country’s employment overall and 80% in rural areas. Agronomist Phito Blémur and many others believe that policies toward development and poverty reduction must take into account the vital role this sector played immediately after Independence when it accounted for 95% of the GDP (instead of the current 26%). Revival of this sector will require a departure from neoliberalism and the establishment of serious fiscal and monetary policies.
By Staff (EJ), Radio Metropole | Editorial comment and translation by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. The mandates of one third of the Haitian Senate and various municipal executives expired in mid-January 2012, and the mandate of another third of the Senate expired on May 8. Mayors and local officials have been dictatorially replaced by presidential decree, and no administrative provision has been made to assemble a new electoral body to organize new elections so as to replace the elected parliamentarians whose terms have expired. (English | French)
By Mario Osava, IPS. A year ago, unrest was predicted to break out at Jirau because: growth in wages has not kept up with the demand for labor, the large concentration of workers at enormous construction sites is leading to worker solidarity in the fight for improved wages and conditions, and the dam is being built by a foreign utility (GDF Suez) that provides terrible working conditions and allows little personal time to the workers. (English | Spanish)
By Staff, Huffington Post. More than 5,100 children were living in foster care in January 2012 because their parents were detained or deported, according to a study released by the Applied Research Center, which advocates for immigration reform.
By B. Traven, Hill and Wang, New York, 1967 | Scribd | Wikipedia | Introduction by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is regarded as B. Traven’s masterpiece, and it is indeed a superb novel; but this book, written in 1935, is merely the best-known work by a master storyteller who lived and wrote for another 34 years. Traven’s body of work celebrates wildness and chronicles the loss of individual freedom in his lifetime.
By Christopher Minster, Latin American History/About.com. Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday that celebrates the victory over French forces on May 5, 1862 at the Battle of Puebla. The French attacked Mexico to try to collect a debt from this country after Mexican President Benito Juarez declared bankruptcy from a civil war, but the French were soundly defeated by a cavalry led by young General Porfirio Diaz.