Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?

Did Western greed through mining and oil drilling behind US/UN guns these last six-years post Bush regime change in Haiti trigger the Haiti earthquake?

_{Map of mining resources in Haiti and showing five oil/gas sites in Haiti}

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Did the mining of Haiti's riches since 2004 GW Bush regime change cause the earthquake? Listen to Ezili Dantò on mining Haiti's riches and concern for environmental degradation by the foreign companies. (Read the transcript with reference links.)

"The idea that human activity can cause seismic activity is widely accepted in the scientific community ...the connection between oil production and earthquakes dates back to at least the 1920s, when geologists in South Texas noted faulting near the Goose Creek oil field...A 1967 human-triggered earthquake in western India linked to the Koyna Dam registered a 7.0 earthquake."

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Since the earthquake, I've had occasion to ponder, like many others, about what may have caused this heretofore-unknown natural disaster in Haiti? Was it a natural occurrence or man-made? Port-au-Prince, Haiti has not had an earthquake in 239 years. Why now? The nation of Haiti is only 206 years old, so Haitians in Port-au-Prince have no experience with earthquakes whatsoever. Did not know that for an earthquake you run away from the house. So, when the trembling started they did the worst possible thing - ran into their houses as they are used to, for protection, with hurricanes. The houses all collapsed on them.

The devastation is heartwrenching. 200,000 dead in the capital alone, devastation in the South also, in Leogane, Les Cayes, Jacmel. In Port Au Prince everything collapse, 400,000 to be relocated, millions homeless, untold numbers with amputated limbs, hundreds of thousands right now dying without access to water, food, shelter and medical treatment.

Since the 2004 Bush regime change, Ezili's HLLN has been concerned about the digging up of Haiti without any regards to environmental degradation.

In an April 29, 2009 interview with Chris Scott of CKUT (90.3 FM) in Montreal, entitled Haiti's Riches: Interview with Ezili Dantò on Mining in Haiti, I expressed concerned that under the UN occupation which made the Haitian goverment a puppet government, Haitian lives and welfare were not priorities just corporate exploitation of Haiti's resources and cheap labor. Haiti's emergency civil preparedness agency was destroyed during the Bush regime change and never rebuilt. (See, Earthquake in Haiti: Under Aristide, Haitians were prepared for disaster.) We've had severe hurricanes in 2004, 2005 and then the four back-to-back hurricanes of 2008. The people's living conditions has not improved in the 6-years the U.S., France and Canada have controlled Haiti through the U.N. proxy occupation. In fact, with clorox hunger, food riots, no monie to send children to school, high food and fuel prices, no development, things, had gotten much worse since the coup against President Aristide. The people were simply slowly dying as UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton waxed on about the "good business climate" in Haiti prior to the earthquake. They died and there was no rebuilding of the institutions the Bush coup d'etat had helped destroy. But there were 9,000 UN troops in Haiti doing what?

In the Mining Haiti's Riches interview, I recount how there were areas in Haiti hidden behind UN guns, fenced off where Haitians knew nothing about what these soldiers were doing.

Then the earthquake hit. What remains is unimaginable. The rescue and recovery process was and is inhumane. The relief from pain and hunger is still not in place. And, as I think about the process of rebuilding, I started checking whether digging for gold, iridium, copper, uranium, coal, marble, diamonds, oil and gas could trigger an earthquake. And the answer I found sent chills up my spine. Made me sick to my stomach. Can this really be?

From what I've read, drilling deep into the earth, digging and mining may trigger earthquakes.

And, drilling either for fossil fuels or renewable energy exploration may cause earthquakes. Both geophysicists and oilmen agree that natural-gas drilling trigger earthquakes. One oilman stated that "there is not the slightest doubt" that gas production caused the temblors." (See, At Fault: Does Drilling Cause Earthquakes?).

A New York Times report confirmed drilling for oil sets off earthquakes and detailed how a drilling project near San Francisco and a similar project in Basel, Switzerland were shut down over concerns they triggered damaging earthquakes. Both diggings involved fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep.

...large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor. (Geothermal energy and Quake Threat Leads Swiss to Close Geothermal Project.)

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Haitians have been under occupation by the US through the proxy UN mission since the 2004 Bush regime change/coup d'etat.

Before the earthquake, Rene Preval, the president of Haiti answered to Washington not the people of Haiti. I've written extensively about this and that information is readily available. The mining in Haiti and the digging up of Haiti was going on without any oversight. (See, Recommended HLLN Links (Energy and Mining in Haiti): The wealthy, powerful and well-armed are robbing the Haitian people blind and, Oil in Haiti - Economic Reasons for the UN/US occupation and Oil in Haiti by Dr. Georges Michel; Fayed's Forgotten Years: The Conman, The Dictator and the CIA Files.)

Since the earthquake hit, it's been clear that the power-brokers who control the US military, the free marketeers, are exploiting this Haiti earthquake shock, when the Haitian people are hurt, in pain, disorientated and horrifically more defenseless than usual, to impose their privatization and further entrench their corporate domination in Haiti. (Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again.)

I know some folks are saying there are sophisticated equipment ( HAARP and Tesla) that are used to deliberately set off weather anomalies such as earthquakes, but I'm wondering whether the drilling, possibly for oil and gas in Haiti behind the UN guns - offshore at the Gulf of La Gonave and at the Island of La Gonave and around the bay of Port-au-Prince fairly near the epicenter of the earthquake - exacerbated the fault line in Haiti, causing the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake as an unattended consequence? (Can there possibly be an earthquake in Port-au-Prince? ; Haiti sits on two seismic fault lines and a major disaster was expected ; At Fault: Does Drilling Cause Earthquakes? See also, the map showing where the oil sites of Haiti are located.)

[Read the rest of this article by Ezili Danto at OpEdNews...]

Stephanie McMillan's View

Click for full size image.

[Originally posted by Stephanie McMillan at Minimum Security]

US accused of annexing airport as squabbling hinders aid effort in Haiti

The US military's takeover of emergency operations in Haiti has triggered a diplomatic row with countries and aid agencies furious at having flights redirected.

Brazil and France lodged an official ­protest with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince's congested airport, forcing many non-US flights to divert to the Dominican Republic.

Brasilia warned it would not ­relinquish command of UN forces in Haiti, and Paris complained the airport had become a US "annexe", exposing a brewing power struggle amid the global relief effort. The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières also complained about diverted flights.

The row prompted Haiti's president, René Préval, to call for calm. "This is an extremely difficult situation," he told AP. "We must keep our cool to co-ordinate and not throw accusations at each other."

The squabbling came amid signs that aid was reaching some of the hundreds of thousands of people in desperate need of water, food and medicine six days after a magnitude 7 earthquake levelled the capital, killing more than 100,000, according to Haitian authorities.

The UN was feeding 40,000 and hoped to increase that to 1 million within a fortnight, said the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, as he arrived in Port-au-Prince yesterday. "I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way," he said, speaking outside the severely damaged national palace. He also acknowledged "that many people are frustrated and they are losing their patience."

Ban said he has three priorities in Haiti: saving as many lives as possible, stepping up humanitarian assistance and ensuring the co-ordination of aid coming into the country. "We should not waste even a single item, a dollar," he said.

The plight of 80 elderly people at a partially collapsed municipal hospice just a mile from the airport, now a huge aid hub, showed the desperate need. The body of a dead 70-year-old man rotted on a mattress, nearly indistinguishable from the exhausted, hungry and thirsty people around him. "Others won't live until tonight," an administrator, Jean Emmanuel, told the Associated Press.

The Haitian government has established 14 food distribution points and aid groups have opened five emergency health centres. Water-purification units – a priority to avert disease and dehydration – were arriving.

But with aftershocks jolting the ruins, bloated bodies in the street and severe shortages of water and food many survivors had had enough: an exodus trekked on foot out of the city to rural areas.

The security situation worsened, with some looters fighting with rocks and clubs for rice, clothing and other goods scavenged from debris. In places the embryonic aid machine did not even try to organise distribution. Aid workers tossed out food packets to crowds and US helicopters took off as soon as they offloaded supplies, prompting scrambles in which the fittest and strongest prevailed.

"They are not identifying the people who need the water. The sick and the old have no chance," Estime Pierre Deny, ­hoping to fill a plastic container with water amid a scrum of people, told Reuters.

Frustration over aid bottlenecks among donors became tinged by national rivalry as it became clear the US was taking ownership of the crisis. A vanguard of more than 1,000 US troops was on the ground and 12,000 were expected in the region by today, including marines aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson which anchored offshore as a "floating airport".

The Haitian government, paralysed by the destruction of the presidential palace and ministries, signed a memorandum of understanding formally transferring control of Toussaint L'Ouverture airport to the US. Former president Bill Clinton said he will travel to Haiti today to meet with government officials and deliver much-needed emergency supplies.

The UN mission, which had a 9,000-strong peacekeeping force in Haiti before the quake, seemed too stunned by its own losses to take control. Its dead include its Tunisian head, Hédi Annabi, his Brazilian deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa, and the acting police commissioner, Doug Coates, a Canadian.

Flights seeking permission to land continuously circle the airport, which is damaged and has only a single runway, rankling several governments and aid agencies. "There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti," Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for the UN's World Food Programme, told the New York Times. "But most flights are for the US military. Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync."

France, which as the former ­colonial power expects a prominent role, ­protested when an emergency field hospital was turned back. The foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said the airport was not for the international community but "an annexe of Washington", according to France's ambassador to Haiti, Didier Le Bret.

Brazil, which saw its leadership of the UN peacekeeping mission as a calling card of its burgeoning influence, was also indignant when three flights were not allowed to land. The foreign ministry reportedly asked Hillary Clinton to grant Brazil priority over chartered flights. Nelson Jobim, the defence minister, said Brazil would not relinquish command duties and suggested it, not Washington, would continue to lead UN forces. Analysts said it was vital command issues be resolved.

The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières complained about flights with medical staff and equipment which were redirected to the Dominican Republic. "We are all going crazy," said Nan Buzard, of the American Red Cross.

The Obama administration has enlisted former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to spearhead relief efforts. In a series of interviews both men deflected right-wing accusations that the White House was seeking political advantage from the disaster. "I'd say now is not the time to focus on politics," Bush said, as he sat beside his predecessor. "You've got children who've lost parents. People wondering where they're going to be able to drink water."

[Originally posted by Rory Carroll and Daniel Nasaw at The Guardian]

Why the U.S. owes Haiti billions: The briefest history

Why does the U.S. owe Haiti billions? Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell stated his foreign policy view as the “Pottery Barn rule.” That is, “If you break it, you own it.”

The U.S. has worked to break Haiti for over 200 years. We owe Haiti. Not charity. We owe Haiti as a matter of justice. Reparations. And not the $100 million promised by President Obama either – that is Powerball money. The U.S. owes Haiti Billions – with a big B.

The U.S. has worked for centuries to break Haiti. The U.S. has used Haiti like a plantation. The U.S. helped bleed the country economically since it freed itself, repeatedly invaded the country militarily, supported dictators who abused the people, used the country as a dumping ground for our own economic advantage, ruined their roads and agriculture and toppled popularly elected officials. The U.S. has even used Haiti like the old plantation owner and slipped over there repeatedly for sexual recreation.

Here is the briefest history of some of the major U.S. efforts to break Haiti.

In 1804, when Haiti achieved its freedom from France in the world’s first successful slave revolution, the United States refused to recognize the country. The U.S. continued to refuse recognition to Haiti for 60 more years. Why? Because the U.S. continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and feared recognizing Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the U.S.

After the 1804 revolution, Haiti was the subject of a crippling economic embargo by France and the U.S. U.S. sanctions lasted until 1863. France ultimately used its military power to force Haiti to pay reparations for the slaves who were freed. The reparations were 150 million francs. (France sold the entire Louisiana territory to the U.S. for 80 million francs!)

Haiti was forced to borrow money from banks in France and the U.S. to pay reparations to France. A major loan from the U.S. to pay off the French was finally paid off in 1947. The current value of the money Haiti was forced to pay to French and U.S. banks? Over $20 Billion – with a big B.

The U.S. occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to invade in 1915. Revolts by Haitians were put down by U.S. military – killing over 2,000 in one skirmish alone. For the next 19 years, the U.S. controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes and ran many governmental institutions. How many billions were siphoned off by the U.S. during these 19 years?

From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was forced to live under U.S.-backed dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The U.S. supported these dictators economically and militarily because they did what the U.S. wanted and were politically “anti-communist” – now translatable as against human rights for their people. Duvalier stole millions from Haiti and ran up hundreds of millions in debt that Haiti still owes. Ten thousand Haitians lost their lives. Estimates say that Haiti owes $1.3 billion in external debt and that 40 percent of that debt was run up by the U.S.-backed Duvaliers.

Thirty years ago Haiti imported no rice. Today Haiti imports nearly all its rice. Though Haiti was the sugar growing capital of the Caribbean, it now imports sugar as well. Why? The U.S. and the U.S. dominated world financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – forced Haiti to open its markets to the world. Then the U.S. dumped millions of tons of U.S.-subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti – undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture. By ruining Haitian agriculture, the U.S. has forced Haiti into becoming the third largest world market for U.S. rice. Good for U.S. farmers, bad for Haiti.

In 2002, the U.S. stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Haiti which were to be used for, among other public projects like education, roads. These are the same roads which relief teams are having so much trouble navigating now!

In 2004, the U.S. again destroyed democracy in Haiti when they supported the coup against Haiti’s elected President Aristide.

Haiti is even used for sexual recreation just like the old time plantations. Check the news carefully and you will find numerous stories of abuse of minors by missionaries, soldiers and charity workers. Plus there are the frequent sexual vacations taken to Haiti by people from the U.S. and elsewhere. What is owed for that? What value would you put on it if it were your sisters and brothers?

U.S.-based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.

The Haitian people have resisted the economic and military power of the U.S. and others ever since their independence. Like all of us, Haitians made their own mistakes as well. But U.S. power has forced Haitians to pay great prices – deaths, debt and abuse.

It is time for the people of the U.S. to join with Haitians and reverse the course of U.S.-Haitian relations.

This brief history shows why the U.S. owes Haiti Billions – with a big B. This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparations. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the U.S. to own up to our country’s history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response.

For more on the history of exploitation of Haiti by the U.S., see Paul Farmer, “The Uses of Haiti”; Peter Hallward, “Damming the Flood”; and Randall Robinson, “An Unbroken Agony.”

[Originally posted by Bill Quigley at San Francisco Bay View]

Haitian Earthquake, Made In The USA?

You want to hear about chutzpah? You want to hear about sheer gravity-defying audacity? Well, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, prepare to catch your lower jaw. Forget Limbaugh’s racist anxieties. Forget about Pat Robertson drooling about Haiti’s ‘pact with the devil’. He’s a senile old bigot, and his sick provocations are familiar by now. This is the Heritage Foundation on the Haiti earthquake, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 people:

Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S.

In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region…

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

While you’re letting that sink in, let me lay this on you. It is, or ought to be, widely enough understood that the category of ‘natural disaster’ is increasingly redundant. Whether it’s an earthquake, a storm, a flood or a crop failure, the truly shocking and baleful consequences of ecological events are generally caused by their interaction with existing political economies. Ashley Smith

therefore asks the right questions:

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city’s mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

Well, quite. The wretched subjugation of Haiti by the ‘international community’, particularly since the multilateral anti-Lavalas coup in 2004, is angrily and movingly described by Peter Hallward in today’s Guardian, and there is more here (the Tomb’s coverage of the coup is here). The coup was promoted to advance the process of neoliberal capital accumulation, break the left and the unions, and break Famni Lavalas and the civil society organisations sustaining resistance. For years, UN ‘peacekeepers’ have slaughtered thousands of Haitians, and the residents have been put through rigged election procedures. Lavalas members, priests, and activists have been subject to political imprisonment and murder, some of them characterised as ‘gang’ members. This is all for the aid of sweatshop bosses such as Andy Apaid, and the multinationals principally based in the US and Canada that benefit enormously from the exploitation of Haitian labour. This process of capital accumulation is what has driven Haitians out of a devastated rural economy and into impoverished slums with a tinpot infrastructure, and left them vulnerable to this extraordinary catastrophe. There are a tremendous number of NGOs operating in Haiti, but there is hardly a public service infrastructure capable of a response. What support systems were available have themselves suffered terribly in the quake.

Following from the above, such disasters are generally exploited by states and companies in the vicious and predatory way that Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine. Perhaps a lesser known example of this is the way in which in the wake of the tsunami in late 2004, the Indonesian military took the opportunity to ramp up repression in Aceh. A more obvious example is the depraved way in which the Bush administration (and the local Democratic party) effectively ethnically cleansed New Orleans and turned it into a haven for developers and construction firms after Katrina. So, what depraved agenda is going to be more forcefully thrust on Haiti in the middle of this catastrophe? Obviously, there is no danger of Obama allowing any impoverished immigrants into the US on the back of some rickety boats. You might recall that after last year’s hurricanes, his administration continued to deport people, even in the middle of urgent legal appeals. So what is the plan? Back to Ashley Smith, who writes:

In close collaboration with the new UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, Obama has pushed for an economic program familiar to much of the rest of the Caribbean–tourism, textile sweatshops and weakening of state control of the economy through privatization and deregulation.

In particular, Clinton has orchestrated a plan for turning the north of Haiti into a tourist playground, as far away as possible from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince. Clinton lured Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing $55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050.

From there, Haiti’s tourist industry hopes to lead expeditions to the mountaintop fortress Citadelle and the Palace of Sans Souci, both built by Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of Haiti’s slave revolution. According to the Miami Herald:

The $40 million plan involved transforming the now quaint town of Milot, home to the Citadelle and Palace of Sans Souci ruin, into a vibrant tourist village, with arts and crafts markets, restaurants and stoned streets. Guests would be ferried past a congested Cap-Haïtien to a bay, then transported by bus past peasant plantations. Once in Milot, they would either hike or horseback to the Citadelle…named a world heritage site in 1982…

Eco-tourism, archaeological exploration and voyeuristic visits to Vodou rituals are all being touted by Haiti’s struggling boutique tourism industry, as Royal Caribbean plans to bring the world largest cruise ship here, sparking the need for excursions.

So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti’s great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.

At the same time, Clinton’s plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labor available from the urban masses. The U.S. granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.

Clinton celebrated the possibilities of sweatshop development during a whirlwind tour of a textile plant owned and operated by the infamous Cintas Corp. He announced that George Soros had offered $50 million for a new industrial park of sweatshops that could create 25,000 jobs in the garment industry. Clinton explained at a press conference that Haiti’s government could create “more jobs by lowering the cost of doing business, including the cost of rent.”

As TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now! “That isn’t the kind of investment that Haiti needs. It needs capital investment. It needs investment so that it can be self-sufficient. It needs investment so that it can feed itself.”

One of the reasons why Clinton could be so unabashed in celebrating sweatshops is that the U.S.-backed coup repressed any and all resistance. It got rid of Aristide and his troublesome habit of raising the minimum wage. It banished him from the country, terrorized his remaining allies and barred his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular in the country, from running for office. The coup regime also attacked union organizers within the sweatshops themselves.

As a result, Clinton could state to business leaders: “Your political risk in Haiti is lower than it has ever been in my lifetime.”

Would those who sycophantically defended Clinton, particularly over his Haiti policy, care to comment? Do the ‘progressives for Obama’ have anything to say at this point?

[Originally posted by Richard Seymour at Desertpeace]