Laura Bush in Haiti: grandiose lies amid misery
By
G. Dunkel
Published Mar 22, 2008 8:30 AM
Laura Bush swung by Haiti for a few hours on March 13 on her way to Mexico. She
stayed in her car or in a building for most of the few hours she spent there
promoting the Bush administration’s interventions on poverty and
AIDS.
The Bush administration has been promoting Haiti as a success story, crediting
U.S. contributions of some hundreds of millions of dollars for the success. But
the Bush regime doesn’t mention that almost all these millions were used
to pay for the military occupation and repression and for the coup the U.S.
organized against the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
on Feb. 29, 2004.
“Haiti has been a very important aspect of what we consider to be
President Bush’s accomplishments in the region,” Thomas Shannon,
assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, told the Miami
Herald.
Laura Bush followed up with the message, “I want to encourage especially
the people of Haiti and the Haitian Americans ... in Florida and all over the
United States to stay involved in Haiti, to reach out as individuals ... to
make sure this success continues.” She told the Miami Herald.
The region of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, where she stayed was
pretty much closed off to car and foot traffic by the security forces of
MINUSTAH (the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti) and the Haitian National Police
while she was in town.
Laura Bush actually met with three young HIV-positive adults during her morning
visit to GHESKIO, an AIDS clinic near the embassy. She used the opportunity to
call for more funding for President Bush’s AIDS program.
Bush also met with a group of HIV-positive women who had received business
loans through GHESKIO, Haiti’s largest treatment center for sexually
transmitted diseases. GHESKIO stands for the Haitian Group for the Study of
Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections.
The loans range from $13.50 to $1,300 and are allegedly designed to promote
economic independence.
It was typical Bush to focus on individual responses to a vast social problem,
giving the minimum in financial aid in the face of a vast bucket of misery,
much as the administration did in New Orleans. Haitian writer Mona Peralte
points out that Laura Bush could save “many more thousands of lives by
inviting George W. to stop bombing thousands of innocent civilian victims in
Iraq and Afghanistan and to cease those neoliberal economic diktats on poor
countries that cause mass hunger in poor countries.”
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email:
[email protected]
Subscribe
[email protected]
Support independent news
DONATE