I overheard a Haitian guy talking to someone about this today… he said, ‘Who are these fools going to negotiate with? They’re negotiating with FBI, CIA, and they don’t even speak real English! They think it’s going to be like the movies they’ve seen, forgetting that they are in the bad guy role, and the CIA always wins.’ I don’t know about all that, but his take did give me a chuckle.
In the Duvalier era, there was no kidnapping for ransom*** - the paramilitary Tonton Macoutes disappeared you… if you were lucky, you were forced onto a plane into exile with just the clothes on your back. Otherwise, sometimes your body turned up, and sometimes it didn’t. We’re still waiting to find out what happened to some of my relatives, after 58 years.
The kidnapping phenomenon took hold starting in the late 1990s; from then up until about 2015, it was especially about destroying small businesses and destroying the middle and aspiring-middle class. I sincerely feel that those monopolistic families were behind it, in their sick, avaricious effort to control every single thing in the country, and destroy whatever they cannot control. The same families were targeted over and over… among my relatives, I think we’ve had about 10 (including me). Sometimes kidnappers or would-be-kidnappers called relatives in the diaspora directly; my ex-stepfather-in-law got into a dispute with some people, and somehow they found my cell phone number and called me making threats. (I despise him anyway, plus he might have committed some crimes himself, so I told them they would have to call someone else who would actually care. #sorrynotsorry)
In recent years, it has become a free-for-all… so many of the people being kidnapped are already very poor, with no way to come up with the absurd ransoms being demanded. It would be comical, if the kidnappers weren’t so well-armed and so willing to kill. When they got the European priests and nuns a few months ago, they must have gotten extremely emboldened.
Kidnappers in Haiti have been targeting U.S. citizens for years; the difference is that the ones they went after before were of Haitian ancestry. The American Embassy, FBI and CIA never gave a hoot when it was one of us. So it’s really aggravating to hear it reported that “Americans” are rarely targeted - *white* U.S. citizens haven’t previously been targeted much, and those are the only ones the white media cares about.
I have only contempt for so-called missionaries in Haiti, spreading their racist ideology and backwards thinking. Almost all Haitians are at least nominally Christian already; why are they there? So honestly, I don’t really care that these missionaries were kidnapped, because they had no business being there in the first place. Mennonite missionaries in Haiti are especially racist and ignorant; they act offended that there are Haitians who are educated/running businesses/not waiting around for charity/etc. … like their dumb 8th grade education rumps are superior just because they lack melanin. And these fake orphanages need to be shut down; the overwhelming majority of children in Haitian orphanages have living parents and families, but these so-called missionaries convince them to place the kids there “to be educated” or even trick them into thinking that it will be a pathway for the whole family to immigrate to the U.S.; meanwhile, they have racist evangelical white families adopting these kids into their all-white communities.
*** There was one spectacular kidnapping during the Duvalier era; some activists managed to kidnap the U.S. ambassador. It was for a good cause though - to put pressure on the government to release some political prisoners, and grant them all safe passage to Cuba.
www.cnn.com
