FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
IMF Genocide Blows Up Haiti Again
July 8, 2018 (EIRNS)—Haiti is once again blowing up over IMF conditionalities. Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant was forced to suspend IMF-demanded fuel price hikes “until further notice” yesterday, after two days of serious protest, which included attacks on luxury hotels for rich tourists in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The IMF evidently believes blood can be squeezed from corpses. The Miami Herald reported yesterday that the IMF has given the government until the end of September to increase fuel prices and “reform” the state electricity company, EDH, or it will not get $96 million in pending loans from the World Bank, Interamerican Development Bank (IADB), and the European Union, which function as a creditors cartel under IMF direction. The Herald points out that since 2010, Haiti has lost more than $770 million in revenues by its refusal to abide by a 1995 decree calling for fuel prices to be adjusted with every shipment of fuel into the country! As a result, fuel has been considerably cheaper in the impoverished country than in the neighboring Dominican Republic, which adjusts its prices, the Herald writes.
The IMF creditors cartel is determined to keep Haiti from turning to the People’s Republic of China, in order to escape IMF genocide. In August 2017, Port-au-Prince Mayor Yuri Chevry signed a framework agreement with the Southwest Municipal Engineering Design and Research Institute of China to rebuild the capital, still destroyed from the 2010 earthquake, from top-to-bottom as a modern city: a $4.7 billion project involving installing the first-ever water and drainage system, roads, a modern communications system, environmental remediation works, a commercial zone and new market in the “old city” area, etc.
That project was shut down by the IMF cartel, France’s Solidarité et Progrès party reported on Jan. 28, 2018. The policy was declared by IADB representative Koldo Echebarria, who said that if the Haitian government accepted a commercial loan from China, it would be in violation of “its commitments to the international community,” and therefore would have to renegotiate its agreements with “its institutional financial partners.” That is, if it proceeded to build a modern capital with the aid of China, Haiti would be cut off from every other source of financing.
