a1643: This Week in Haiti 20:4 4/10/2002 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                       April 10 - 16, 2002
                          Vol. 20, No. 4

ARISTIDE EMBRACES FREE TRADE ZONES

Free Trade Zones (FTZ) in the Caribbean are sometimes referred to
as "islands within islands." Having spread like a virus
throughout much of the impoverished Third World over the past 30
years, they are fenced-in, low-wage, tax-free assembly enclaves
catering primarily to North American and European capitalists.

In the Caribbean, the nation most checkered by FTZs is the
Dominican Republic (DR). The multinational Gulf & Western built
the first one in La Romana in 1969, and today about three dozen
operate around the country.

For decades, unions and human rights groups have denounced the
harsh working conditions and abuses prevalent in the FTZs.
"Forced overtime, repression of labor unions, pregnancy tests,
sterilization certificates, insufficient bathroom breaks and work
recesses, among other things, are still trademarks of the FTZ
workplace," wrote Esther Hernández Medina of the Research Center
for Feminist Action (CIPAF), a Dominican NGO, in a 1996 report.
"One particular statistic illustrates the situation well: among
the 469 enterprises in existence in December of 1995, only 130
labor unions had been registered, of which less than 10 were
active. Even worse, in all the years that FTZs have existed in
the [DR], only two labor unions have ever been able to sign
collective bargaining agreements."

In a May 2000 report entitled "Globalization," the British NGO
Oxfam explained how "competition to attract foreign investment
has led to downward pressure on employment conditions" and the
abandonment of labor safeguards. "The effects can be seen in the
significant recent growth in free trade zones, where fundamental
labor rights are often denied. Research carried out by Oxfam's
partners in the Dominican Republic indicates that although
government legislation protects the right to freedom of
association and collective bargaining, in practice foreign
companies have resorted to a variety of tactics to deter
unionisation, including temporary recruitment, black listing,
intimidation, and the promotion of solidarity associations as
substitutes for trade unions. Such practices limit the benefits
of foreign investment to workers and contribute to unacceptable
exploitation and suffering."

In the early 1970s, dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, with U.S.
State Department guidance, established in Port-au-Prince an early
version of an FTZ, an "industrial park" for assembly factories,
whose pitiful wages of about $2 a day contributed to the misery
of giant slums like Carrefour, La Saline, and Cité Simone
(renamed Cité Soleil after Duvalier's fall). As political
instability wracked the capital in the late 1980s and early 1990s
and when the Haitian government raised the minimum wage in 1991,
businessmen fled the country to more hospitable climates like
Honduras, Nicaragua, and the DR.

Now President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is pursuing the same
tarnished economic model as Duvalier, but this time in the long-
coveted northeast corner of Haiti and in conjunction with the
Dominican bourgeoisie and government, which wields an aggressive
25,000-strong stability-enforcing military.

On Apr. 8, Aristide traveled to a northeast region called Marie
Bahoux, 70 km east of Cap Haïtien near Ouanaminthe, where he met
with his Dominican counterpart, Hipolito Mejia, for the ground-
breaking ceremonies of a 26-factory FTZ which will straddle the
border between the two countries (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No.
2, 3/27/02). The "twin" FTZ, which will be linked by a bridge
over the Massacre River and funded by $7 million from the "Grupo
M" Dominican investment group, is predicted to have the first two
plants up and running by early 2003. The businessmen, whose
investment is a part of the US State Department-backed Mejia-
championed "Hispaniola Plan" to reduce the DR's nearly $7 billion
debt load, boast that the first two plants alone will employ
1,500 Haitians and 800 Dominicans during the their first three
years of operation, and create another 4,000 ancillary jobs,
according to the Dominican press.

But Haitians in the area are not won over. Peasant groups linked
to Border Solidarity, an international Dominican-Haitian rights
group, had planned to protest the ground-breaking ceremony for
the FTZ which will pave over the region's most fertile land, but
their "banners and placards prepared for the occasion in Creole
and Spanish were seized" by Haitian authorities, according to the
AlterPresse press service. "The protesting peasants were
carefully kept at a distance and promised that their demands
would be delivered to President Aristide in Port-au-Prince."
Haitian officials sought to discourage the protest in the days
before the ceremony, AlterPresse reports, and the Haitian press
was not told that Aristide would visit the area until the last
minute and had limited coverage.

Most symbolically, "the peasants complained that a corn field was
destroyed to provide a landing pad for the President's
helicopter," AlterPresse said.

The Haitian press reports that the proposed FTZ would pave over
80,000 square meters of the region's most fertile farmland, but
the Dominican newspaper Hoy reports that the FTZ will cover
200,000 square meters. The FTZ "will be built on Haitian
territory with investments from Dominican capitalists," Hoy said.

In his speech for the occasion, Méjia declared the FTZ to be "the
first son" of a "marriage without divorce" between Haiti and the
DR, which "we hope will offer 8000 jobs." Aristide, for his part,
said that he dreams of the day when "the public and private
sectors will join hands so that poverty and hunger will wind up
in a museum." For the time being, however, the poverty and hunger
of the displaced peasants of the Marie Bahoux plain will likely
wind up in a new northeast shanty-town.

Meanwhile, two Haitian organizations, PAPDA (Haitian Advocacy
Platform for an Alternative Development ) and GARR (Support Group
for the Repatriated and Refugees), issued a stinging critique on
Apr. 8 of the proposed FTZ and demanded that the Aristide/Mejia
international accord "follow normal constitutional and legal
channels," which would include parliamentary approval. "The
Agriculture Ministry should take all measures to help the
peasants on the Marie Bahoux plain to work the land better and
irrigate it so that they can grow more food and agricultural
products, which Dominicans already buy from them" in cross-border
trade, the groups said, and they demanded studies to predict the
FTZ's impact on the local peasant economy, town infrastructure,
and environment, "since free trade zones, due to the miserable
wages they pay workers, always bring in their wake slums and
environmental damage."

PAPDA and GARR also demanded that the Haitian government explain
what wages and work conditions would be (noting that the
Dominican government had just lowered its minimum wage by one-
third), what rights unions would have, which nation's labor laws
would prevail, which police force would be in charge, how a
population influx would be handled, how Haitian and Dominican
businessmen and workers would "share" this joint zone, and how
the construction of the FTZ would contribute to reducing the debt
of the two countries through the "Hispaniola Plan." "We declare
that this scheme will not benefit the Haitian and Dominican poor
who are suffering the most under the debt burden," the groups
said, calling the plan hatched among "Haitian and Dominican big
shots" behind closed doors "a slap in the face of all those who
have struggled against the debt."

The groups concluded that an FTZ could only be a "complement" to
a larger, clearer economic plan, but it could never be "the
engine for the country's development."

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