Haitian slum-dwellers protest eviction

This video is about the Jalousie neighbourhood in Haiti, 20 November 2010.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Haitian protesters fight slum clearances

Tuesday 26 June 2012

by Our Foreign Desk

More than 1,000 Haitians marched through the capital Port-au-Prince on Monday to protest against a reported plan to destroy their hillside shanties for a flood-control project.

Police fired tear gas in an attempt to control the protesters, some of whom threw rocks.

The demonstrators snaked through Port-au-Prince chanting threats to burn down the relatively affluent district near the shanties if the authorities flatten their homes.

The Environment Ministry said last week that officials want to demolish several hundred homes to build channels and reforest the hillsides in an effort to curb floods that come with the annual rain season.

Many of the threatened homes are in Jalousie, a shanty town that spreads across a mountainside alongside the affluent city of Petionville.

The protesters said that President Michel Martelly had not fulfilled his promise to build homes destroyed in the 2010 earthquake.

The disaster destroyed tens of thousands of houses in the capital and other cities in the south and 314,000 people died.

The government is building hundreds of homes north of the capital, but too few to house the more than 400,000 people still living in the precarious settlements that emerged in the aftermath of the quake.

In an effort to move people out of the camps, the Haitian government, foreign aid groups and governments gave displaced people year-long rental subsidies.

Residents of six highly visible camps moved into hillside shanty areas such as Jalousie. Others have moved there because they were evicted by landowners.

Port-au-Prince, a city of around 3 million people, has seen concrete houses and hovels sprawl across its hills because governments past and present have failed to provide affordable housing.

The march began peacefully but some protesters threw rocks at a towering hotel financed by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, a charity set up after the earthquake by former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

The demonstrators were angry to see the opulent hotel under construction amid fears that they will lose their homes.

Update 13 July 2012: About 100 people marched in Haiti’s capital on Thursday to protest against a government plan that threatens to demolish their homes: here.

Britain: Transport workers called for joint action with the TUC today to support the Haitian people’s struggle two and a half years after a devastating earthquake killed over 300,000: here.

As mining conglomerates target Haiti, Latin America rises against them: here.

“This is How Duvalier Started”: Critics of Haitian President Imprisoned: here.