Eyewitness Report from Haiti

[Ethan Boyles]

Seattle ISO member Jesse Hagopian is currently in Haiti and was interviewed on Democracy Now this morning.

In his interview he describes the absolute devastation on the ground and what he's been able to do to help care for the injured and dying.

The video and the transcript are available here.

Jesse and his family are expected to be evacuated and back to the US sometime this weekend. The ISO will be hosting an Eyewitness Report from Haiti meeting on wed Jan 20th for Jesse and his wife Sarah to talk about their experiences on the ground as well as the history of Imperialism in Haiti. We are planning the event as we speak and will have more details out as soon as possible. Please stay tuned and check www.seattleiso.org for updates.

Want to help Haiti? 

Consider giving to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund Since its inception in March 2004, the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund (run by the American solidarity organization Haiti Action) has given concrete aid to Haiti’s grassroots democratic movement – including labor unions, women’s groups, educators and human rights activists, support committees for prisoners, and agricultural cooperatives – as they attempted to survive the brutal coup and to rebuild shattered development projects.   Now they will attempt to funnel needed aid to those most hit by the earthquake.

and from
 
Analysis: Ashley Smith
Catastrophe in Haiti
Ashley Smith describes the natural and not-so-natural factors that contributed to the devastation when Haiti was struck by a strong earthquake.

...."The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti," Canadian Haiti solidarity activist Yves Engler said in an interview. "They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why."

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line--U.S. imperial policy toward Haiti. The U.S. government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe."   read the full article here....