Laura Bush in Haiti: grandiose lies amid misery

Published Mar 22, 2008 8:30 AM

Laura Bush swung by Haiti for a few hours on March 13 on her way to Mexico. She stayed in her car or in a building for most of the few hours she spent there promoting the Bush administration’s interventions on poverty and AIDS.

The Bush administration has been promoting Haiti as a success story, crediting U.S. contributions of some hundreds of millions of dollars for the success. But the Bush regime doesn’t mention that almost all these millions were used to pay for the military occupation and repression and for the coup the U.S. organized against the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, on Feb. 29, 2004.

“Haiti has been a very important aspect of what we consider to be President Bush’s accomplishments in the region,” Thomas Shannon, assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, told the Miami Herald.

Laura Bush followed up with the message, “I want to encourage especially the people of Haiti and the Haitian Americans ... in Florida and all over the United States to stay involved in Haiti, to reach out as individuals ... to make sure this success continues.” She told the Miami Herald.

The region of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, where she stayed was pretty much closed off to car and foot traffic by the security forces of MINUSTAH (the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti) and the Haitian National Police while she was in town.

Laura Bush actually met with three young HIV-positive adults during her morning visit to GHESKIO, an AIDS clinic near the embassy. She used the opportunity to call for more funding for President Bush’s AIDS program.

Bush also met with a group of HIV-positive women who had received business loans through GHESKIO, Haiti’s largest treatment center for sexually transmitted diseases. GHESKIO stands for the Haitian Group for the Study of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections.

The loans range from $13.50 to $1,300 and are allegedly designed to promote economic independence.

It was typical Bush to focus on individual responses to a vast social problem, giving the minimum in financial aid in the face of a vast bucket of misery, much as the administration did in New Orleans. Haitian writer Mona Peralte points out that Laura Bush could save “many more thousands of lives by inviting George W. to stop bombing thousands of innocent civilian victims in Iraq and Afghanistan and to cease those neoliberal economic diktats on poor countries that cause mass hunger in poor countries.”