Lautaro Rivara
The execution of a journalist and a feminist activist have shaken Haitian society, submerged in a spiral of political violence and criminality hitherto unknown.
There is no one in Port-au-Prince who does not hear the gunshots. Nor is there anyone who does not grit their teeth, instinctively duck their heads and turn down the radio. They are usually short, intermittent bursts, in some cases simultaneous, traveling to and from all the cardinal points of this great plain wedged between the Caribbean Sea and the mountains. Dry gunshots piercing the artificial silence of the early morning. A city that used to be cheerful, nocturnal and bustling, today lives a tacit curfew, self-imposed by its own population after 6 p.m., the time when even the most daring begin to pick up their stall at the market to start their journey home. Never before had danger and night been synonymous here.
A city that can hardly remember the exact day it was kidnapped, along with several hundred of its own citizens. It is difficult to get used to this Haiti, a street people, of outside the walls, of easy sociability and open doors, living for months this strange domestic confinement that not even the second year of the pandemic had managed to impose. The reason? It would be easy to reduce it to some bare numbers, all of them certified by state entities and by national and international human rights organizations: 12 massacres (RNDDH), 76 armed groups (CNDDR), 234 kidnappings (UN), 10 thousand displaced persons (CARDH). And, since the early morning of June 30, 15 new murders.
Diego Charles, journalist of Radio Vision 2000, and Antoinette Duclaire, feminist and communicator, spokesperson of the Matrix Liberation movement and activist of the organization Rassemblement Diyite Haiti (RADI), were both 33 years old. They had just arrived at the entrance of Charles’ residence, located in the Christ-Roi neighborhood, in the early morning hours of June 30. They were executed on the spot. Although the fact was not clarified, several witnesses mentioned that they were shot by large-caliber weapons fired from a Mazda van. Some of the more than 500,000 weapons, most of them of North American manufacture, which according to the National Disarmament Commission are illegally circulating in a country where only 20 years ago it was almost impossible to find them, except for some old and rusty pistol in the hands of the peasantry.
In a press release, the director of the Haitian National Police (HNP), Léon Charles, attributed the incident to a reprisal by dissident members of his own force, organized in a union, the SPNH-7, rejected by the police hierarchy and outlawed by the State itself. According to Charles, unidentified rebel policemen have allegedly acted on their own to avenge the recent murder of agent Guerby Geffrard by criminal groups. Marie-Rosy Auguste Ducena, of the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights in Haiti (RNDDH) considered however that the Police Director expressed himself “very hastily and lightly” given that no investigation has been carried out so far.
Various sectors of the opposition and civil society expressed that this is in fact a scapegoat to cover up a political crime. At least for several reasons. First, because of the modus operandi: a precision attack on an activist and a journalist, both public figures, in the home of one of them, which does not fit in any plausible scenario of “stray bullets” or “collateral damage”. Secondly, because Duclaire, as spokesperson for her organization, is a well-known opponent of the de facto government of Jovenel Moïse, whose constitutional mandate ended on February 7 of this year. Thirdly, because in the same hours 13 other people were killed by motorized death squads in other parts of the city. Fourthly, because if this were the case, it would not be the first selective assassination in recent times: such were the cases, which shocked the country, of the president of the Bar Association Monferrier Dorval, on August 28, 2020, and that of the university student Gregory Saint-Hillaire, executed by a specialized unit of the PNH last October 2.
Nor would it be the case of the first journalist killed under the governments of the PHTK party, as Jacques Desrosiers, secretary general of the Haitian Journalists Association, recalled. According to Desrosiers, this phenomenon would have worsened in the last three years, marked by the kidnapping and disappearance in March 2018 of photojournalist Vladjimir Legagneur, who had come from investigating the actions of armed gangs in their stronghold in Martissant, as well as their alleged collusion with the government. And also for the murder of radio broadcasters Pétion Rispide, of Radio Sans Fin, and Néhémie Joseph, of Panic FM, both in 2019.
As if she were not saying a sentence of singular crudeness and mystery, one neighbor says to the other, as if in passing: “and that’s how we started to die”. She does not say it in Spanish, of course, but in Creole, the only language in which Haiti speaks, feels, behaves and keeps silent. He does not refer either particularly or necessarily to the crime that is on everyone’s lips. It does not refer to death as a dream or as a passage, the “going through” with which they metaphorize here the inevitable end of physical existence. It refers to the country and its slow agony. It refers to a death that threatens to become banal and routine, even in a nation with a very rich and variegated mortuary culture, marked by fire by African heritage, voodoo religion and peasant culture. But this is another kind of death, unassimilable, unknown to this people who are subjected to the abyss of paramilitarism and a meticulously planned chaos.
Haiti is living a war, but is it accurate, and even fair, to call it that? Can we call this endless confrontation between an invisible and multiple enemy and an unarmed people a war? There are hardly any more wars of a different kind, the ones we still see in the movies from time to time: those of symmetrical forces, belligerent spirits and declared enemies. Or those in which at least it was clear what people killed and died for, even if it was cowardly, stupid or useless. But this is not the case. For some, the mere permanence of the conflict is profitable: criminals, hitmen, smugglers, arms dealers, all the fishermen of troubled rivers. But above all the ruling classes, who have finally managed to amesthetize the endless peaks of popular mobilization that have shaken the country since July 2018, when hundreds of thousands of people, and even millions, put in check again and again the weak state security forces, which were overwhelmed and impotent. For the others, for those who do not win, for the vast majority, the mere existence of this seemingly random conflict, without established patterns, is a daily defeat. There is no room here for armistices or denouements. A war without beginning is a war without end, endless. Antoinette Duclaire and Diego Charles were the last to be devoured by it.
In the play “The Resistible Ascension of Arturo Ui”, the German poet and playwright Bertold Brecht drew a parable between an American mafioso of the 1930s and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist movement. The parody could not be more eloquent, referring to a “resistible rise”, although not (sufficiently) resisted, as the title itself hints at in its implicit denunciation. It would be there that Brecht would consecrate a phrase destined to become history, when he sentenced, thinking about the eternal return of authoritarianism and violence in Europe, that “the womb from which the filthy beast emerges is still fertile”. Seventy years after the publication of that work, we can only agree with an almost prophetic text, as we see the return of fascism and paramilitarism not only in half of Europe, but also in nations as distant and dissimilar as Narendra Modi’s India, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, former President Donald Trump’s United States and Jovenel Moïse’s Haiti. But as Brecht suggests, the focus should be placed not only on the analysis of the beast, but also on the social body (national and international) that time and again engenders it. The question is: Are we resisting sufficiently that disintegrating and violent rise? Are we still in time to stop it?
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 