loyola llothta
☭☭☭
[break]
Link:
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview on Haiti with independent journalist Anthony Fenton, co-author of the book, Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Fenton, one of the people that you have written and talked about is Ira Lowenthal. I remember him from, well, more than a decade ago in the midst of the first coup against President Aristide in 1991 to ’94, working for USAID in-country in Haiti. What is his role today?
ANTHONY FENTON: Well, after the coup, Ira Lowenthal reentered Haiti. Now, he had had to leave, I believe, in 2002, because he was getting too hot. He was up to some activities that were being scrutinized by the Haitian government. Now, he joined and helped create the Haiti Democracy Project in 2002, in late 2002, and then he supported the emergence of the Group of 184 shortly thereafter, which is basically the Haitian version of the Haiti Democracy Project. I mentioned the Boulos family. Rudolph Boulos is a board member, founding board member of the Haiti Democracy Project, as well, and he’s actually running for Senate in the area of Haiti where they plan to develop free-trade zones and open up a whole swath of sweatshops.
But Ira Lowenthal, he was working for the Americas Development Foundation, which is one of the key organizations implementing these so-called Democracy Enhancement projects prior to the coup. After the coup, he had a brief stint with them, and then he moved on to this other organization called the United Nations Office for Project Services. Now, it’s a very interesting organization that does reconstruction work, and they’re working — they’re called the self-financing arm or management services arm of the United Nations, very obscure and little known, but Ira Lowenthal became the director of this organization in Haiti just after the coup, and he helped set up registration centers for the elections, and he’s played an integral role in the sort of infrastructure of carrying out this election process.
Now, he stepped down as director of UNOPS, and UNOPS currently gets a $3 million contract from USAID to work and funnel money to the political parties — the “approved” political parties, most of which happen to comprise the former political opposition to Aristide, the Democratic Convergence. Now Ira Lowenthal is a key consultant for UNOPS today, and in fact, there’s a Canadian by the name of Jean-Francois Laurent, who directs the UNOPS activities in Haiti. But Ira Lowenthal, anyone I speak to, everyone speaks glowingly of him in the democracy promotion community. He’s an old hand there, as you’ve said. He had links to the Boulos family back in the previous coup period, and, of course, the Boulos family is said to have had relations with FRAPH, the paramilitary organization set up by the C.I.A. in order to destroy the popular movement at that time.
Now the Boulos family again, it has been widely reported that they may be linked along with the Apaids to death squad activity in Cite Soleil, anti-Lavalas gangs that are designed to destroy the popular support for the calls of demanding the return of Aristide or demanding the right to vote for the candidate of choice, now Rene Preval. But Ira Lowenthal has played an instrumental role. In fact, every week this organization, UNOPS, to give you an example of the sort of familial relations there, they meet with the I.R.I., the N.D.I., with USAID, and with I.F.E.S, which is linked to the I.R.I. The chairman of I.F.E.S. is a former Reagan advisor and a Bush appointee as U.N. ambassador just before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, William Hybl.
So you see this family meeting on a weekly basis, coordinating their activities. They’re funneling millions of dollars to the political parties, by way of giving them credits for TV advertising, for pamphlets, for t-shirts and all sorts of other activities. And, of course, this is all geared towards — they’re hoping, I think, right now, that there will be a run-off election, sort of like there was in Liberia, where the International Republican Institute and these other organizations played a central role, as well, because if there’s a run-off election — and it’s possible that one of their rightwing candidates, perhaps such as Marc Bazin, who’s running under the Lavalas name today, but of course was a World Bank candidate that Aristide beat in a landslide in 1990 — they’re hoping that one of these candidates, maybe it’ll be Henri Baker, will be able to win in a run-off.
But there’s also the terror card that they’re holding over their heads. The paramilitaries that entered in 2004 like Guy Philippe. Other well known NARCO traffickers, the nephew of the current Prime Minister, Gerard Latortue, his name is Youri Latortue, the mere mention of his name in Haiti, strikes the fear in the people’s eyes when you speak to them, and this person is running for senate in the Artibonite region. And the possibility of a violent intervention in this election process is in the background, and it looms, and people like Ira Lowenthal and these other organizations, the N.E.D., they are well aware of this, and so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Link:
Last edited: