Links

There are many misconceptions around today about Haiti and its people. Much of our information is filtered through urban legends, popular media, or religious condemnations. Many all at the same time. Thankfully in the past twenty or so years, grassroots journalists have taken up the cause to uncover the real facts about the country and the immeasurable suffering it has faced. That suffering having been caused by foreign invasions, big business, and racism. Not because they sold their soul to the devil or practice Voudo as I have heard people say. With free media outlets like the internet or with the help of publishers this information is becoming more readily available and quite eye opening. I encourage you to look at some of the info provided here by some truly wonderful journalists, activists, and authors.

Journalists

Canadian Photojournalist Darren Ell,
Darren is a freelance photojournalist from Montreal, Canada. He has published many articles documenting the human rights violations in Haiti for various publications. He was also kind enough to take all the photo's for this site.
Darren's main site.
The Dominion Paper ( many of Darren's articles are here )

Haitian Grassroots Photojournalist Wadner Pierre,
At just the age of 24, Wadner is on the frontline's everyday reporting current events in his country.
Wadner's Blog translated into English

Sites

Haiti Action
This is one of the best resources on Haiti's Political and social turmoil with articles going as far back as 2005. Most top grassroots journalists involved in Haiti post their articles on this site including Darren Ell, Wadner Pierre, and Kevin Pina.

Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti
This organization of Human Rights Lawyers is headed up by Brian Concannon. These people work tirelessly without compensation to bring massive human rights violations that have occurred or are occurring in Haiti to trial. Very worth while site to check out.

RARA, Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti
This is a fun site. Listen to audio, watch video, and read about Rara. A festival held during carnival involving the Vodou religion. It's a great segment of Haiti's vast and rich African culture.

Recommended Reading

"An Unbroken Agony", by Randall Robinson.
This is a wonderful read and an good introduction to some pretty heavy material. It offers a great overview of history, facts and figures without being academic. The book documents the kidnapping of Democratic President Aristide by US forces in 2004. Robinson wrote the book with first hand accounts of eye witnesses and the exiled President himself.

"The Uses of Haiti", by Dr. Paul Farmer.
From Publishers Weekly,
In this impassioned, sometimes unwieldy, synthesis of history and report, Harvard-based Farmer, who alternates research with medical practice in rural Haiti, offers an indictment of American policy. He traces Haiti's long standing injustice from the sufferings of the 18th century slave economy, and the post-revolution establishment of a still-persistent feudal economy to the U.S. Marine invasion in 1915 and our subsequent support, based on business interests and anticommunism, for tyrants like Papa Doc Duvalier. The democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a 1991 coup shortly after he began to redress Haiti's ugly inequalities; Farmer (AIDS and Accusation) notes how media reports meshed with the Bush administration's line, and criticizes the Clinton administration's inaction. Departing from his historical narrative, Farmer also decries harassing U.S. policy toward Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; describes the torture death of a peasant as an outgrowth of U.S. military training; and suggests that AIDS in Haiti should not be blamed on images of squalor, but more on "an established political and economic crisis." American remorse, he suggests, would be the first step toward a new commitment to justice.

"The Black Jacobins", by C.L.R James.
C.L.R. James tells the story of the slave revolt in the late 1700's and the events leading up to it in his masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. James's personal beliefs infuse his narrative: in his preface to a 1962 edition of the book, he asserts that , when written in 1938, it was "intended to stimulate the coming emancipation of Africa." James writes passionately about the horrific lives of the slaves and of the man who rose up and led them--a semiliterate slave named François-Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture. As James notes, however, "Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint."

Damming The Flood, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, by Peter Hallward.
Once the most lucrative European colony in the Caribbean, Haiti has become one of the most divided and impoverished countries in the world. In the late 1980s a remarkable popular mobilization known as Lavalas, or "the flood," sought to liberate the island from decades of US-backed dictatorial rule. After winning a landslide election victory, in 1991 the Lavalas government, led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by a bloody military coup. Damming the Flood analyzes how and why Aristide's enemies in Haiti, the US and France instigated a second coup in 2004 to remove Aristide and Lavalas for good. The elaborate international campaign to contain, discredit and then overthrow Lavalas at the start of the twenty-first century was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. Its execution and its impact provide important lessons for those interested in today's political struggles in Latin America and the rest of the post-colonial world.