Haitian Plantation Workers Under Wave of Repression
In a statement issued on 24 April, the Haitian workers' organisation, Batay Ouvriye, denounces a month-long wave of violent repression endured by workers and peasants at the Guacimal orange plantation at St. Raphael in northern Haiti. The violence perpetrated by police, acting in collusion with the local landowners and agents of the Guacimal company, has forced workers in the area to go into hiding.
Two peasant farmers have been imprisoned without trial for over a month, while another was arbitrarily arrested last week. One worker was brutally beaten up on 22 March but when he tried to file a legal complaint, the judge at the St. Raphael court refused to hear him and made it clear he was not concerned with the fate of the Guacimal workers.
The main targets of the repression are members of the St. Raphael orange workers' union and a local association of peasant farmers, both of which have been involved in a long and bitter dispute with the Cap-Haitien-based, Guacimal company.
The Haitian state authorities have refused to back the workers' legitimate struggle for union rights and collective bargaining, and the judiciary has openly sided with the ruling class in land disputes. Batay Ouvriye says that these factors have created the context where the local bosses and landowners have decided to get rid of, to eliminate, all those who work and cultivate the plantation land.
Batay Ouvriye is warning that the situation is now so dire that there may be a repeat of the massacres seen in earlier times, such as those at Piatre and Gervais. Batay Ouvriye is calling on all organised workers and all progressive forces to mobilise themselves to support the St. Raphael workers, and to force the state and the ruling class to respect workers' rights.
Background
The St. Raphael workers, who grow and harvest oranges that provide orange extract for European companies such as Remy Cointreau, formed a union in late 2000 in the hope of negotiating improved pay and conditions. However, the Guacimal management refused to even recognise the union's existence, and used every trick in the book to try and crush it.
An international solidarity campaign attempted to press Guacimal share-holder and principal client, the Paris-based drinks giant Remy Cointreau, to take action in support of the workers' legitimate rights. For months, Remy Cointreau said it was doing what it could to make its junior partner in Haiti play fair, then suddenly, at the beginning of this year, Remy Cointreau announced that it had only ever been a client, and that the problems at Guacimal obliged it to end its involvement in Haiti and buy its orange extract for the Cointreau liqueur elsewhere. However, weeks after this announcement, Guacimal boss, Nonce Zephir, told a reporter from the British newspaper, The Observer, that he had not heard of any changes in Guacimal's relationship with Remy Cointreau.
Meanwhile, the peasant farmers of the area, many of whom are related to the orange plantation workers, have grown increasingly angry with the Guacimal company's failure to carry out the improvements to local infrastructure that formed part of the leasing agreement when the plantation land was acquired by Guacimal over forty years ago. Their frustration boiled over when guards at the Guacimal orange plantation began discriminating against peasant farmers connected to the workers' union by preventing them from cultivating plots of land between the orange trees during the summer.
In early March some peasants began cutting down orange trees in protest. A short time later, Myrtho Julien, the departmental delegate of President Aristide (there is one for each of the country's nine departments and they act as a link between the executive and the local government), visited the St. Raphael fields. He met with various officials, including the police, and declared his opposition to the tree-cutting. Immediately after this, the wave of repression of workers and peasants began in earnest.
The situation has been further aggravated by the installation of a new mayor of St. Raphael in place of Fernand Sévère who was shot dead in December 2001. (The elected representative of the region -- the member of Parliament or Deputy -- was arrested and charged with involvement in the murder, and remains jailed to date.) Whereas the Deputy had sympathised with the Guacimal workers, the murdered Mayor had clearly opposed them, and in February 2001 had personally intervened to break a workers' strike at the plantation. Consequently, the decision, taken in late March 2002, to install the brother of the murdered Fernand Sévère as the new Mayor, has clearly impacted negatively on the workers' struggle.
For more background see the following websites:
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- 116 Human Rights