The earthquake that put the brad to the thrust of the empire

For don Lucien de Peiro

Last January 12, shortly before the five of the evening, an earthquake of 7 grades of magnitude shook Haiti during a minute. In only two weeks 150.000 bodies of human beings recovered without life and the official number of deceased overcomes the 220.000 almost two months later. To many kilometers, on February 27 at half after three in the morning, a new earthquake destroyed to a Latin-American country: Chile. This one was 8.8 magnitude grades and it extended for space of three minutes. At the moment 800 deceased have been taken into account and it does not seem that the number could be equal to that of the tragedy of Haiti.

The NASA has gone so far as to say that the earthquake of Chile displaced up to 8 centimeters the axis of the Earth and reduced ligerísimamente the duration of the day in which it took place. And so, in Chile, at dawn, with most of citizens in his beds, with a magnitude that it places between more serious that they have never measured themselves and during three longest minutes, the earthquake took ahead (at the moment) a few hundreds of persons. On the other hand, in Haiti, with most of the awake citizens, with a clearly low magnitude and with a duration of only a minute, the earthquake took ahead tens thousands of persons. What would have happened in Haiti if they had surprised the earthquake at three o'clock in the morning, had lasted 2 more minutes and had reached 8.8 magnitude grades? I do not even want to think it.

I wonder how many dead persons it has caused the earthquake in both cases, especially in Haiti, because I do not realize not well that the earthquake that triumphed to the Caribbean country was the real person in charge of so many deaths. I incline to think that the number of dead persons in Haiti explains herself for other causes, for other reasons more related to the paupérrimas living conditions of his citizens. That's why to understand them, to understand the chilling number of almost a quarter of million human beings that with so many violence contrasts with also chillingly (but not so much) Chilean number, we should do a revision to the history of Haiti. Let's do it succinctly of the hand of Naomi Klein:

When the Haitians gained his independence of France in 1804, they had all the right to claim repairs to the powers that had taken advantage for three hundred years of the stolen work. France, anyhow, was sure that they had been the Haitians who had stolen the property of the slaves' proprietors refusing to work free. For it, in 1825, with a fleet of ships of war moored on the Haitian coast threatening to enslave the ancient colony again, king Carlos X came to gather: 90 million Francs in gold – ten times the annual revenue of Haiti in this moment-. Without aptitude to refuse, and without possibilities of paying, the young nation was moored to a debt that would be late 122 years in be paying. (...)

In 2003 the Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, faced an oppressive economic sequestration, announced that Haiti would demand the French government for the theft perpetrated time behind. «Our argument», said to me the ex-lawyer of Aristide, Ira Kurzban, «it was that the contract was an agreement without validity because it was based on the re-esclavización threat on times in which the international community was considering the slavery to be an evil». The French government was the sufficiently worried as to send a mediator Port-au-Prince so that it was supporting the case out of the courts. Finally, nevertheless, his problem was eliminated: while the arrangements of the judgment were carried out Aristide was demolished. The judgment disappeared, but for many Haitians the repair claims still continue. (...)

From 1957 until 1986, Haiti was governed by the diet desafiantemente cleptocrático of Duvalier. In contrast to the French debt, the case against Duvalier was exhibited in several courts that traced the Haitian funds up to an elaborated network of bank accounts in Switzerland and magnificent properties. In 1988 Kurzban gained a key trial against Jean-Claude «Baby Doc« Duvalier when a Court of District in Miami passed that the laid down leader «had embezzled more than 504 million dollars of public funds».

The Haitians, of course, still keep on waiting for the restitution of this money – but this was only the beginning of his losses-. During more than ten years the creditors of the country insisted that the Haitians had to pay the astronomical debts contracted by Duvalier, estimated in 844 million dollars, big part of which belonged to institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. Only in debt services, the Haitians have to pay 10 million dollars per year. (*)

From Havana they ask me: who has the hardest face, the empire or his footmen? My answer is that it finds it hard to answer to this question, because we speak about very hard faces, about granitic rocks, about practically indestructible facial frameworks. I do not have doubts that the earthquake of Haiti gave the brad to tens thousands of persons who had been massacred, sentenced in advance for two centuries of development that has not ended yet, two centuries of real terrorism, with multitude of persons died to hands of the genocidal empires of shift that enslaved them by means of practically free work and severe famine, empires that created the conditions so that the consequences of a serious earthquake as that of January 12 were multiplying dramatically.

(*) Translation done for the magazine sinpermiso for Camila Vollenweider.