Oil in Haiti: Reasons for the US Occupation

Part II

In-depth Report:

I wrote Part 1 of Oil in Haiti as the economic reasons for the US/UN occupation back in October, 2009.

After the earthquake I questioned whether oil drilling could have triggered the earthquake: Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?

Then suddenly, after spending years hitting myself against Officialdom’s colonial rock that kept denying Haiti had significant resources….

After being called crazy and un-American for writing that the 2010 earthquake gives the US the perfect disaster-capitalism opportunity to come out from behind the UN and openly occupy Haiti to secure Haiti’s oil, strategic location and other riches for the corporatocracy…

Just after, I wrote about oil drilling causing earthquakes, on the following Tuesday, a veteran oil company man comes forward in Business Week to say, and one wonders how he can so authoritatively speculate about the area of the faultline without intimate knowledge of the drillings, explorations,

Haiti’s wellheads and oil map, et al, but nonetheless his sudden, seemingly unprompted REVELATION, is that Haiti lies in an area that has undiscovered amounts of oil, it must have oil and the earthquake “may have left clues” to petroleum reservoirs! Oil that, uhmmm, “could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, a geologist said.” (Haiti Earthquake May Have Exposed Gas, Aiding Economy by Jim Polson, Jan. 26, 2010, Bloomberg.) Yep, yep he may really mean: “that could aid Haiti’s US-occupied economy recover its strategic oil reserves” for the global elite. No? I could be wrong, but I am thinking “and the cover up, starts.” But I won’t say so. Let Stephen Pierce tell the story:

The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said yesterday in a telephone interview.

“A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn’t been drilled,” said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas- based company that’s drilling in Israel. “A discovery could significantly improve the country’s economy and stimulate further exploration.

…The Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and their offshore waters, probably hold at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas, according to a 2000 report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Undiscovered amounts may be as high as 941 million barrels of oil and 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to the report. Among nations in the northern Caribbean, Cuba and Jamaica have awarded offshore leases for oil and gas development. Trinidad and Tobago, South American islands off the coast of Venezuela, account for most Caribbean oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

For the record, Haiti has a large reserve of oil and natural gas. How could it not? It shares the waters with oil producing island from all around. We noted this also. Besides, this is not new or a surprise to the United States and certainly shouldn’t be new to “a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp.”

There’s always been oil in Haiti. The US /USAID guaranteed an oil contract for an American businessman named Charles C. Valentine back in November 1962 that gave his company a monopoly control over pretty much everything to do with oil in Haiti and seems to have also paid him to back out of it.

Valentine successfully claimed $327,304 from the development agency, a sum USAID was itself able to extract from the Haitian government along with $4,396 in interest charges.

According to Haitian scholar Dr. Georges Michel, the US has known there’s oil and natural gas reserves in Haiti since 1908 and did their explorations in the 1950s and locked up what they found as “strategic reserves for the US” to be tapped when Middle Eastern oil became less available. (See, Oil in Haiti by Dr. Georges Michel)

I’ve been writing for years now that the US has been trying to get rid of Haiti’s democratically elected government since 1991 so they could get to “their” strategic reserves without any fear of a populous president nationalizing the oil and gas reserves to benefit the miserably poor majority in Haiti as has been done in Venezuela or elsewhere in Latin America. (See, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, where these scientist say there’s more oil in Haiti than in Venezuela.) No one has been listening. Not even the white liberals who are such defenders of Haiti. To the best of my knowledge, other than Haitians, over the long years before the earthquake, the only non-Haitian observers who ever paid attention and picked up on our reports and concerns about the plundering and pillaging of Haiti’s riches, were John Maxwell and Chris Scott of CKUT Radio in Canada.That’s it. All the others bought the State Department line that Haiti was a charity case and had no resources to mention. I supposed if they acknowleged Haiti could be self-reliant, these savoirs, wouldn’t have a gig to support themselves and their heroic self-image, right?

Today Haiti has oil and it’s all good cause 20,000 troops are down there to secure it and Haiti’s other riches while the vision is to perhaps herd the displaced earthquake victims – who don’t die from their TV-aid – into hastily constructed pre-fabricated houses and let the ghettos fester as they do in Kingston, Jamaica, while the areas the whites and Haitian oligarchy want are developed into tourist havens and all capital is flown out of Haiti.

Notice where the earthquake fault line is and its juxtaposition to the Bay of Port au Prince where the drilling was taking place and the damage at Kafou’s Morne Cabrit, the epicenter of the earthquake and where the poor built their houses on the mountainside and all around the Southern coastal towns by the Bay of Cayes where there’s oil according to Haitians and the geologist map of Haitian resources in the Lavalas white book. Notice how the earthquake was LOCALIZED to these areas and Port au Prince and never reached the Dominican Republic and there was no tsunami…

The Lavalas map of Haiti’s resources shows that Kafou’s Morne Cabrit housed a huge reservoi of oil. Here’s the article I wrote, last year documenting that Haiti had oil and that was the reason for the US/UN forced removal of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. I do so hope, this time, to honor the lives lost and really help protect the remaining survivors of Bush the first and Bush the lesser’s two regimes changes in Haiti and now this total occupation, that conscious Americans and all decent folks on this earth, are paying attention and will help us stop this latest travesty.

The just thing for now, is to allow former President Aristide who was kidnapped out of Haiti on a rendition plane by the US Special forces and has been practically under house arrest in South African for 6-years, forbidden first by US Secretary of State Condi Rice and now Hillary Clinton from returning home, to return to his country. He ought to be returned to Haiti so he may assist Haiti’s majority at this agonizing time and help in the relief and rebuilding of the nation. (Go to: Part I, Oil in Haiti and Oil Refinery – an old notion for Fort Liberte as a transshipment terminal for US supertankers )

Don’t fall for this hoax. The powers-that-be are already drilling and for years, HLLN has been pointing to the Lavalas’ white book detailing Haiti’s
resources as part of the reason for oustering President Aristide and putting in Haitian puppets to empire. Now that 20,000 US troops are in Haiti behind the pretext of humanitarian aid, oh yeah, by the way the EARTHQUAKE “may have left clues to petroleum reservoirs that could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, a geologist said”!!!

Never mind that stealth offshore and on-land drilling may have disturbed the fault line, those Haitians are Black idiots anyway. Just yesterday, I was called CRAZY for saying Haiti had oil and substantial mineral resources. But today, today, if the white man says it, it must be true! Don’t fall for the empire’s latest spin and clean-up job. Two many defenseless people are still dying behind this earthquake and classquake. Too many long-suffering flesh and blood who won’t get rescue, recovery, relief and rebuilding, but the cold steel of military occupation.

Ezili Danto / Marguerite Laurent


Articles by: Marguerite Laurent

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