email info@socialistviewpoint.org

US and World Politics

Horsemen of a New Apocalypse

By Chris Kinder

In the Middle Ages, people were terrorized by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. Today, people from Haiti face all that under a new unending terror: U.S. imperialism.

Since the article on the crisis in Haiti in Socialist Viewpoint’s September-October issue, Haitian refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border were attacked by mounted border guards, all white men, using their horses and long reins as whips to force the refugees back into the Rio Grande.

Most readers will have seen brief reports in the mainstream media of this atrocity, over one or two days at most; but it was soon dropped. These men, women and children are some of the most deserving refugees in a world that is full of them. And their attackers were a bunch of racist thugs, seeming quite full of themselves and enjoying every minute of it.

Most of the Haitians trying to enter the U.S. were refugees from Brazil and Chile, where they had been settled and employed for the last decade or so. Many of their young children had never been in Haiti, yet thousands of them who had sought refuge under a bridge in Del Rio Texas were rounded up and forced into more than 40 airplanes over a few days, and deported to Haiti, despite complaints from what there is of a Haitian government that it could not deal with so many arrivals.

Title 42, a legal measure allegedly designed to protect the U.S. against health hazards supposedly being brought in by “illegal” immigrants, was used by Trump and now by the Biden administration to justify the deportation of asylum seekers without a hearing. This is a blatant violation of the internationally-recognized right of asylum.

The New York Times reported that these refugees had actually done well in Chile and Brazil, working at good jobs, but being greedy for more given as a reason to get to the U.S. This insulting and chilling nonsense is a world away from the truth. Haitians were invited to these countries because cheap labor was needed for big construction projects, such as the 2016 Summer Olympics held in Brazil, and similar constructions in Chile. But once these projects were complete, the Haitians were let go. Racist attacks on them in both these countries were on going, but they got worse after they lost their jobs.

Facing devastation and death squads in their home country—which the U.S. has turned into a brutal narco-state—as well as racist threats where they now lived, the Haitians at the U.S. border were refugees seeking asylum. But with vicious contempt, they were treated just like they were in Brazil, Chile and in Haiti: like slaves whose lives were expendable.

At first the refugees under the bridge in Del Rio were offered a piece of bread and some water. This wasn’t enough, so many of them went back to Mexico to find food. When they came back, that is when they were attacked by the mounted guards.

According to Nicole Philips of the Haitian Bridge Alliance (http://haitianbridge.org/) heard on KPFA-Flashpoints on the 28th of September, there was also a suspicious rise in the water level in the river during this attack, from waist high to neck high in short order. This might have been deliberately arranged, Philips said. (We have not been able to verify this.) Whether the river’s rise was deliberate, or naturally occurring, it led to the men on horseback being able to force people into water so high that, especially with loads of food to carry, they could lose their balance. One of many interviewed by Haitian Bridge people said he almost drowned.

The denunciations of this atrocity, first by Vice President Harris, and then by Biden were hypocritical to say the least. Has this administration stopped the mass deportations of Haitians without a hearing, or returned all those kidnapped children who were torn from their mothers’ arms and incarcerated in hell hole barracks? Has it recanted Harris’s warning to potential refugees from Central American narco-states, saying “don’t come?” No, no and no.

Here on the U.S. border or in Haiti or other countries in South America, Haitians, along with so many others, are victims of U.S. imperialism’s endless war for exploitation, control of autocratic regimes and “Total Spectrum Dominance.” It will take a mighty world-wide socialist revolution to finally defeat these horsemen of the apocalypse.