African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
78 p., This documents the lack of access to reproductive and maternal care in post-earthquake Haiti, even with unprecedented availability of free healthcare services. The report also describes how hunger has led women to trade sex for food and how poor camp conditions exacerbate the impact of sexual violence because of difficulties accessing post-rape care. It looks at how recovery efforts have failed to adequately address the needs and rights of women and girls, particularly their rights to health and security.
Explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti.
Grassroots Haitian movements for social justice have set themselves a formidable task: not only addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis, but also challenging the reconstruction effort to include their leadership and avoid reproducing the conditions that helped make the earthquake so disastrous.
Despite the righteous platitudes of the American and French Revolutions, the idea of an independent Black Republic created through force of arms did not sit well with the powers that be in the Capitols of Europe and America. There was virtually universal agreement among the European/White leaders of the time, including President Thomas Jefferson, that the example of Haiti was a threat to their national interests - profiting from the slave trade and/or colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America. Therefore, it was imperative that Haiti be isolated, marginalized and rendered weak as a "Black nation." Under threat of a new invasion, Haiti succumbed to demands from France to pay millions of dollars in reparations for title loss of property (enslaved Africans and the plantations) incurred during the Revolution. The burden of this debt would cripple Haiti's struggle for development well into the 20th century. In 1915 the U.S. invaded and occupied Haiti until 1934, and has treated Haiti as a neo-colony ever sense.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) is an independent, non-partisan think-tank dedicated to strengthening Canadian relations with Latin America and the Caribbean through policy dialogue and analysis. It seeks to create new partnerships and policy options throughout the Western Hemisphere through its promotion of good governance, economic prosperity and social justice.
The 39-member Congressional Black Caucus is on record as supporting Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed Hatian president, but is split on whether the US should use force to reinstall him.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Inter-governmental organization, composed of 25 countries from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula, exchanging experiences and knowledge on state reform and the modernization of public administration in the search for higher levels of social development and equity; news, databases, and information on publications, meetings, projects, agreements, and more; English and Spanish.
"Throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean, various legal challenges have been brought to the imposition of the death penalty, the most recent series of which deals with the mandatory nature of the penalty's imposition for crimes of murder (or in some states, certain categories of murder). Efforts undertaken since the mid-1990s to challenge the legality of a mandatory death sentence finally paid off in 2002, when the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Privy Council), acting as the highest appellate court for all but one of the Commonwealth Caribbean states, held in a series of three cases that such a sentence was contrary to the prohibition on inhuman punishment and therefore unconstitutional." (author)
