Crisis Update - U.S. Duplicity, From Brazil to Haiti

Elections have consequences, and stolen elections have dangerous ones

Like Ukraine, Brazil is the victim of past and present Western intrigue.
President Jair Bolsonaro has praised the era of Brazil's military dictatorship.
Yet the U.S. which now chides him, trained its police in torture after the 1964 coup.

Haiti faces cycle of destabilization by outside forces, followed by armed intervention.
Following the 2010 earthquake, aid has been used to hijack the country’s economy.
Environmentalist propaganda has innoculated Westerners to what’s going on.

(about 3,000 words or 14 minutes of your time.)

“Fraud at the ballot box.”

Nov 3, 2022

We begin with a brief comment on Brazil — it is getting ample coverage in the alt media — and move on to Haiti. It is futile to spend so long at the typewriter as to be outdated.

Social media, state corporate press and Western megaphones have turned up the volume to prevent any challenge by persident Jair Bolsonaro to Sunday’s result in favour of Lula Inácio da Silva.

Those of a skepical bent will smile at long-time CIA bullhorn Time magazine’s description of Lula as “a beloved but controversial leftist former President.”

(Note to younger folk: not long before you were born the CIA, like the FBI, was an extremely right-wing institution. They served corporations then; they serve them now. The fact that they act Woke today is nothing but duplicity`.)

YouTube has announced it is censoring any posts in Brazil that question the outcome. Censorship is a big clue, or rather the alliance of propagandists and censors, because the two go together.

Truth does not need the protection of censors.

Brazil’s courts rejected any inquiry. A supreme court judge has told social media companies to remove any posts that doubt the outcome.

The TL;DR Moneycircus take: the state, corporations and institutions of the West have not suddenly turned “soft on communism.” This is a strategy, as “beloved but controversial” Wolk Volk will discover.

Millions of Brazilians are questioning whether all ballots were counted and, squat in the centre of the ring, is the bullock of former British Foreign Office manipulatist Lord Mark “Molloch” Brown and the Soros organization who run Smartmatic and the Dominion voting machines. Brazil did at least manage to count all the votes on election day, something that the U.S. cannot do with only a slightly larger population.

Bolsonaro came to power with the help of U.S. intelligence, who held several meetings with him prior to the jailing of his predecessor Lula who was unable to campaign freely for a second term. Jair is learning that American agencies speak with forked tongue.

However, two wrongs don’t make a right. To delve deeper, this is not a left-right battle. The attacks by Lula supporters on cars sporting the Brazilian flag suggest a bigger game at play. We will examine China’s role in Latin America another day.

Jair stoked controversy when he defended Brazil’s dictatorship (1964-1985). During that election campaign The Guardian blared that Bolsonaro was a misogynist. I countered that he was something much more dangerous — and why was the neo-lib-con Guardian minimising a supporter of dictatorship by saying he was merely disrespectful to women?

People have the right to change their opinions and Jair questioned the holy of holies — the safe and effective. Before I place my trust I verify, and this says more about The Guardian than it does about Bolsonaro.

I lived in Brazil until 1971 at the age of 10 and left behind an unreplaceable piece of my soul in the “Coração do Meu Brasil.” Diplomats and their families continued to live in Rio de Janeiro though it had ceased to be the capital. But in a country that large, the action is often elsewhere.

Two decades of dictatorship

It is said that Jim Jones had a friend. Dan Mitrione taught torture techniques to the Brazilian police, using beggars for demonstrations with electrical wires. The legend is that he discovered the genitals but Brazilians say there’s nothing Mitrione could have taught the police that they didn’t know already.

Maybe there was more to Mitrione’s technique beyond electrical wires, fingernails and private parts.

Mitrione joined, in 1960, the International Cooperation Administration, soon to become the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Wikipedia says after two years in Belo Horizonte (1960-62) Mitrione was transferred to Rio de Janeiro. But Brazilian researchers say Mitrione was based in Belo Horizonte until he left for Uruguay in 1970, apart from a two-year rotation back to Washington.

That August of 1970, Mitrione was kidnapped by Uruguayan Tupamaro guerrillas only days after landing in Montevideo. His story is told in the Costa-Gavras movie, State of Siege (1972).

Jones had arrived in Brazil in 1962. According to Wikipedia, the preacher was motivated by fear of nuclear war and the shelter of Brazilian mountains was considered one of the safer locations.

Jones, his wife and children settled in the south side of Belo Horizonte, in Barrio Santo Antonio, about 30 minutes drive from Mitrione, who was living in the district of Independência.

Brazilian authorities named a road in honour of Dan Mitrione, in Bairro das Indústrias, next to José Carlos da Mata Machado.

The myth of Mitrione is that he represented democracy and his opponents were communists. Yet few saw any benefit from this supposed war against communist forces — communists that in Russia and China had been financed by the same tycoons and oligarchs that now demanded their elimination in the Americas.

As evidence they pointed to public officials, like the U.S. ambassadors in Greece and Brazil. But these victims, including Germans and Italian executives and politicians who exploded in cars back in Europe, were merely the unfortunate playthings of the world’s powerful business interests.

See Moneycircus, Mar 2022 — Eurasia note #32 - Ukraine May Meet Its Gladio: Insurgents may drag Russia into a version of Italy's 'Years of Lead' or Greece's 'Z'

Mitrione gets too much credit. Brazilian researchers suggest the police had experience in torture long before he arrived. He was more likely putting the U.S. imprimatur on repressive activities, consistent with U.S. corporatist objectives. According to researcher Patto Sá it was U.S. electrical devices that bought them cachet with Brazilian investigators — the forerunners of today’s Tasers.

The U.S. engaged former Nazis like Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” to train Latin American governements in anti-communist techniques. The movie, The Battle Of Algiers (1966), which depicted the suffering of Algerians, was repurposed by the CIA as a training manual in repression.

CIA reports show they mined popular culture, scrutinizing the Bolshevik confessions described in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). The impetus was revenge after US soldiers detained during the Korean War publicly had denounced their own country in front of the cameras. Drugs, torture, electro-shocks and hypnosis comprised the American response, in an publicly choreographed effort to outdo the North Koreans and Chinese.

Brazil is one of many countries that have been manipulated through the years. Haiti is another.

See Moneycircus, Nov 2021 — Jabbed At Gunpoint: Tropical Mémoire: Jim Jones was a CIA red flag: was it a dress rehearsal?

Haiti in a vise

The United Nations is to vote on a fourth U.S. military intervention in Haiti. The last one was in 2004, which then Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva supported, putting Brazilian boots on the ground with those of many other countries.

Political turmoil is the pretext, with an installed prime minister Ariel Henry leading the call by the business elite for the U.S. to restore their kind of order. Last week saw the latest politician to be assassinated. Eric Jean Baptiste, a former presidential candidate, was fatally shot a year after president Jovenel Moïse.

The outcome of the last intervention was not good. The foreign troops proved as brutal as any Haitian gang, and they brought with them cholera and sexually transmitted diseases.

This time the Organization of American States is not united behid the U.S. as it was in the 1980s when the U.S. was intervening across Central America and the Caribbean. Before the assassination of Moïse in Jul 2021 the OAS Sec-Gen Luis Almagro had supported his claim to several more months in office — a view the Biden administration also shared. [1]

The U.S. has turned instead to CARICOM, the heads of government of the Caribbean Community, to build a consensus. Last month CARICOM issued a statement blaming criminal gangs for fuel shortages, forcing the shutting down of water pumps and public services, and blocking roads in the capital. It called for international intervention to enforce security prior to a general election.

Disliberation theology

The issue is more complex than criminal gangs who, as we’ll see, are often simply hired muscle. If the elected outcome of the democratic process is not enough for the owners — whether the rich sitting in Pétion-Ville or in their corporate suites in New York — then you get a power vacuum. It is not accidental.

It was in 1991 and and 2004 that the U.S. backed a coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide, a Liberation Theology (LT) priest, and the country's first democratically-elected president.

Wait a minute, isn’t Pope Francis an LT, as the state corporate media tells me? No, Jorge Bergoglio is a fraud which is obvious if you compare him with Aristide. Bergoglio was allied to Argentina’s dictatorship and implicated in persecuting LTs.

This being America’s backyard, according to the Monroe Doctrine, everything that happens does so under the 24/7 watchful eye of U.S. intelligence and the State Department.

If there is persistent destabilization across the region, it’s because that suits U.S. policy — or rather the corporations who want the region’s resources. This is hardly controversial: major general Smedley Butler should by now be familiar to every reader. He was in his time the most highly-decorated marine in U.S. history and served in Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, as well as in Haiti.

It feels redundant to quote Butler, just as it seems repetitious to cite Orwell, but in the unlikely event that it is foreign to the reader, here it is:

“I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to major general. During that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of the racket all the time. Now I am sure of it.”

CARICOM’s statement is laughable. Fuel prices are not rising due to the action of criminal gangs. Reuters reported in 2018:

“The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday it expects Haiti to create a revised reform plan that will include a gradual lowering of fuel subsidies, even after four days of protests sparked by double-digit increases of gasoline, diesel and kerosene prices.”

If Haitians have to pay $25 a gallon for petrol (gasoline) — that is gouging by international financial institutions and bankers.

One thing Haitians know is their history. As the first enslaved nation to throw off their masters, they had to pay reparations to France of $21 billion between 1825 and 1947. Haiti has called on its former colonist to repay some of that money, which France refused in 2004.

The now-demolished national palace of Haiti, destroyed in the 2010 earthquake that also took the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption.

The destruction of the national palace and the Cathédrale Notre Dame de l'Assomption symbolized the country’s broader collapse.

An international appeal reached $16.3 billion in pledges, yet more than 10 years later most Haitians lack running water. Like other countries that have failed to develop into a sharing economy and a stable society, the causes and fissures run deep.

It is one of those catastrophes that sucks you in. I thought I knew the Caribbean fairly well, having lived in wealthier nations like Trinidad and Tobago and smaller ones like Grenada but the challenges in Haiti are mountainous.

Haiti faces some of the worst soil erosion in the western hemisphere as a result of deforestation. That in turn results from the lack of any other energy source except charcoal. So although it has the Caribbean’s usual fertile soil, only a quarter remains or is accessible.

That makes France's extraction of $21 billion in rent more eggregious — but it probably would not have made much difference. The country was dealt a bad deck.

Haiti has mineral resources — marble, gold, bauxite and copper — but these are extractive industries: the name says it all. A crucial weakness is the lack of energy and the decline of a once-thriving agricultural sector. It is an environmental crisis as much as a political or economic one.

The Papaye Peasant Movement accuses USAID, an arm of the State Department, of working with Monsanto, largely owned by Bill Gates, of diverting earthquake aid money into their own projects such as the Watershed Initiative for National Natural Environmental Resources (WINNER), run by an outfit called Chemonics. Under the cover of an environmental initiative, small famers are being eclipsed by large-scale production controlled by non-Haitian owners.

“Non-profits” like the International Crisis Group do the dirty work of investors like George Soros. As in Ukraine, where Soros funds AntAc (Anti-Corruption Action Center), these “charities” identify local corruption as the problem and outside investors as the solution.

The think tank The Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW21) charges multinational corporations with seeking to maintain a monopoly on the import of food into Haiti, and seeking to control domestic production. But it's worse than that.

Charities are the new colonialists

Driven by the search for alternative fuels, the owners have identified curcas, a flowering plant in the spurge family that is native to the American tropics, as a candidate for the production of biofuels. [2]

At first glance one might think this is the answer to Haiti’s energy deficit but it ignores the alimentary needs of the local population: in other words, it not only cannot feed them, it replaces what food they have.

In 2010, the year of the quake, WINNER announced that producers would partner with private associations, which turned out to be Monsanto, that would “donate” genetically-modified seeds to farmers at a reduced price. As IBW21 notes:

“The real costs not discussed by Monsanto, USAID, Chemonics and the ICG are the long term effects on biodiversity, farmer debt and corporate control of Haiti’s aid and agricultural economy.” [3]

Sure sounds like a winner for Bill Gates & Co. The Mouvement Paysan Papaye says aid projects intended to help local farmers have been hijacked by international concerns. The US Inspector General agreed, in 2012 ruling that WINNER posed pesticide and environmental risks while threatening bioidiversity.

Biodiversity is the lynchpin of the Rockefeller and United Nations environmental program. As the authors of The Earth Brokers revealed in 1994, biodiversity is a euphemism. It is really about taking full control of the human. The main focus of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is not protecting the environment but enabling pharma and biotech to profit from genetic manipulation and the patenting of life.

The Comedians

Moïse had survived seven attempts to assassinate or overthrow him, and was finally killed in July 2021 by four gunmen disguised as U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents.

The novelist Graham Greene would have seen the dark humour in that — he titled his 1966 novel about Haiti, The Comedians. The nation is being flooded with guns under the nose of the DEA and the Haitian American diaspora, arming gangs in much the same way the Obama administration pumped weapons into Mexico: the immediate purpose is unclear but the resulting chaos is inevitable.

In the case of Haiti, the activity of gangs is being used as the excuse for external forces to “restore order.” Traditionally gangs have been co-opted as tools of local politicians but also of foreign intervention.

One of the reason for using gangs as political levers is that they are opaque, their actions have plausible deniability and their victims can always be chalked up to crime. At the same time, their illicit activities make them self-financing.

Those of a certain age recall the gangs of Jamaica during the era of rival prime ministers Edward Seaga and Michael Manley — most notably because that violence took the life of the musician Peter Tosh. Bob Marley survived one such shooting, only to fall victim to a fast-acting cancer.

According to Gary Webb’s book, The Dark Alliance (1998), the CIA station chief in Jamaica, Norman Descoteaux, used gangsters to destablize the Manley government in late 1970s, after it developed closer relations with Cuba.

The result was a campaign of assassinations, labor unrest, and the export of marijuana and cocaine into the United States to fund the misleadingly-named Jamaican Labour Party run by the conservative Edward Seaga. The chief gangster in this operation was Lester “Jim Brown” Coke, a tradition carried on by his son Christopher “Dudus” Coke, until his indictment by the U.S..

The writer and musician Casey Gane-McCall, author of Inside The CIA’s Secret War In Jamaica blames the agency for a cycle of gun trafficking, drug smuggling and violence that plagues the Caribbean to this day. [4]

It is also documented in Marlon James’ novel, A Brief History Of Seven Killings. [5]

Clouds of smoke

Close ties with Cuba was of course just for the newspaper headlines. Castro, a long-time darling of The New York Times for his exploits in Colombia in the 1940s, was installed by the CIA, as evidenced by the U.S. ambassador to Cuba Earl T. Smith in his interview with Stanley Monteith.

Manley was an alumnus of the London School of Economics and an admirer of Harold Laski. Despite an elite upbringing, he worked with trades union and his People’s National Party presented itself as a champion of the poor. That would place him close, ideologically, to the stance of the three-letter agencies of the U.S. in the present day.

Since the Rockefellers and Rothschilds for whom the intelligence agencies work are engaged in projects that span a century, there are clear elements of deception, or a Hegelian character to these antics — “problem, reaction, solution.”

Haiti’s gangs are curently headed by a former police officer who has halted infighting while confronting the country’s notoriously corrupt elite. Jimmy Cherizier, who goes by the nom-de-guerre Barbecue, coordinates a federation of gangs known as G9, concentrated in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince. Accounts vary as to whether he provides muscle to opposition politicians or whether he has political ambitions himself.

Edit: On Nov 7, Haitian troops forcibly reopened the Varreux fuel depot where Cherizier’s gang had been blockading the main terminal for the country’s fuel, allowing tankers to supply fuel to petrol stations and generating plants.

[1] Miami Herald, May 2021 — Can the OAS help break the political impasse in Haiti? A mission will soon visit

[2] USAID, 2007 — Environmental Vulnerability In Haiti

[3] Institute of the Black World 21st Century, 2015 — Haiti: Corporations Are The New Conquistadors

[4] Casey Gane-McCall, 2010 — How The CIA Created The Jamaican Shower Posse

[5] Insight Crime, 2015 — Acclaimed Novel Offers Illuminating Portrayal of Jamaica's Gangs