#4036: Foreign funding in Haitian politics: Chamberlain responds to Pina (fwd)

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

Kevin Pina wrote:


> Your assumption is that Aristide or members of Lavalas must necessarily
be 
involved with drugs as it is the fashion by virtue of circumstance. This is

a false argument and assumption based on inductive reason and logic which 
requires a priori experience and fact to provide substance to the claim. 
Otherwise, it is merely one more attempt, among many documented attempts,
in 
the media to "pin the tail on the donkey." If they had the evidence you can

be sure something would have already been done with it given the current 
political climate. The desparation of US foreign policy combined with a 
clinical disposition toward moving the goal line are strange bedfellows 
indeed.

___________


It might well be the fine-sounding thing Kevin claims it is -- "a false
argument 
and assumption based on inductive reason and logic which requires a priori 
experience and fact to provide substance to the claim" -- but please permit
me
to express my plain scepticism about the matter.  

It would certainly take a monumental effort to prevent members of any
political 
movement (= seeking power and money, behind any official ideals) from 
indulging in this kind of thing.  I was just wondering if Lavalas, as the
most 
powerful of all the political players at the moment, was taking any steps
in this 
direction (to prevent it).

We know the police is riddled and rotten with drug smuggling.  I don't
understand the magical sharp division between a corrupt cop and his pal
the local political (Lavalas, as we see from the election results) big
cheese.

It is simply an utterly reasonable assumption that the biggest political
player
in a country awash in drug smuggling is also involved in it to some degree.
Can Kevin make a plausible argument to the contrary?  Why does he seem
so desperate to believe something which really is quite implausible?

That said, I don't blame Haitians, or any other poor people, for smuggling 
drugs to buy themselves a better life.  The root of the cocaine problem
lies 
in American society, not in the coca plantations of South America.  But we 
were talking about the presence of foreign funding, political or from
drugs,
in the Haitian political scene and its noxious effects, with Kevin (who
first
raised the matter) and Lavalas sympathisers trying to claim a 
holier-than-thou position vis-à-vis the opposition's supposed foreign 
funding.

As for the Taiwanese $20 million, I don't have the reference to hand, but I
it's somewhere in my archives.  It was an interview about six years ago
with Bernardin in, I think, a Canadian paper, perhaps La Presse, of
Montréal.  
It shouldn't be hard to find with a good search engine.

I wasn't asking about the funding of the Fondation Aristide, I was asking
what Aristide was doing taking $20 million from abroad when he preaches
the opposite.

Never mind about Claudette Werleigh being PM.  She was in office for only 
three months in an interim period (the changeover from Aristide to Préval)
so I hardly think she was able to get much of a handle on such matters,
with the crushing weight of Aristide on the scene.  She was indeed an 
honest person and it's always handy to have a front figure like her to hide
behind if anything shady is being done, when all concerned know perfectly
well she had no power in that kind of domain.  

Kevin says he "spoke with people who were responsible for administration
of those funds and repeated these assertions to them."  Yet curiously he
does 
not tell us what they said !  Well, what _did_ they say?  



        Greg Chamberlain