Military, scientific and legal experts worldwide question whether 200,000 Haitians were sacrificed for gold and oil
Mary Ratcliff~San Francisco Bay View
And whether the quake was triggered, either accidentally or intentionally, by human intervention or is a natural disaster ripe for exploitation, the world’s major powers appear to fear sovereign control by Haiti over its vast reserves of oil, gold and other minerals that are only now being widely revealed. Haitian sovereignty, after all, was born in the world’s only successful slave revolution.
Knowing the Haitian people guard their independence as fiercely as ever, world powers don’t want to contend or compete with another Venezuela, an oil-rich country that owes its independence to Haiti’s support for Simon Bolivar. When, on Jan. 25, President Hugo Chavez announced he was forgiving Haiti’s $352 million debt to Venezuela – one third of Haiti’s total debt – he said: “Haiti has no debt with Venezuela. On the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti.”
“The Russian Navy reports that the U.S. created the earthquake in Haiti,” reports Pravda on Jan. 21, “through one of its earthquake weapons.”
Pravda suggests that the earthquake in Eureka, Calif., on Jan. 9 was caused by a U.S. Navy test in the Pacific. And it reports that the Russian Navy has diagrammed a series of quakes “identical in depth and linearly on the same fault” in Venezuela on Jan. 8, Honduras on Jan. 11 and Haiti on Jan. 12 – all at the same 10 km depth.
A Russian Navy report, according to Pravda, notes that “it is ‘more than likely’ that the U.S. Navy had ‘full knowledge’ of the catastrophic damage that this test earthquake could potentially have on Haiti and had pre-positioned its deputy commander of the Southern Command, Gen. P.K. Keen, on the island to oversee aid work if needed.”
“Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a ‘tectonic weapon’ to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week,” reports Press TV Jan. 21, adding, “President Chavez said the U.S. was ‘playing God’ by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes.”
“Venezuelan media have reported that the earthquake ‘may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate,’” according to the Press TV story, which concludes, “Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen in 1997 expressed concerns over countries engaging ‘in eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.’”
This map from Eurasian Minerals Inc. shows a “Gold-Silver-Copper Mineralization Belt” running across the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, highlighting major mineral discoveries in Haiti.
In a Jan. 28 email to the Bay View, geoscientist Leuren Moret writes: “The Soviet Union and the U.S. co-developed HAARP during the Cold War,” supposedly “to prevent development of weapons to use against the environment or to use the environment as a weapon.”
“On Jan. 12 Haiti was hit with tectonic warfare by the U.S. from our HAARP facility at Arecibo, Puerto Rico,” Moret asserts.
Why? “Canadian mining companies (tied to City of London bankers) have been mining gold, silver, zinc and copper since 1975 in the Dominican Republic. Now that they have mined and know the estimated yields – $54 billion from just ONE old volcano – they are going for the blood of the Haitians who would not allow mining.
“Three years ago, Eurasian Minerals Inc. bought as much as 20-25 percent of the mining rights in Haiti,” which is shown on its home page as the location of one of its five largest projects. “All of the five projects are located near a HAARP facility. On Dec. 8, 2009, Eurasian Minerals applied to IFC (World Bank) for funding to mine Haiti in a formal proposal.”
Even without a trigger as esoteric as HAARP, human-triggered quakes are well documented. The Wall Street Journal, in a June 25, 2009, story titled “At Fault: Does Drilling Cause Earthquakes?” reported: “The idea that human activity can cause seismic activity is widely accepted in the scientific community. A 2000 paper in the journal Oilfield Review – published by the oilfield services giant Schlumberger Ltd. – noted that the connection between oil production and earthquakes dates back to at least the 1920s, when geologists in South Texas noted faulting near the Goose Creek oil field.”
Both drilling for oil and gas and a technique that involves “injecting water into the ground to fracture rock formations far beneath the surface,” which is also used for accessing renewable geothermal energy, have been blamed, according to the Wall Street Journal. A geothermal project in Switzerland “was shut down in 2006 after [the water injection technique] was blamed for a magnitude 3.4 quake – enough to cause quite a stir in an area not accustomed to temblors.”
“The New York Times reported Wednesday [June 24, 2009] on concerns that a geothermal energy project about to begin near San Francisco could trigger quakes in the seismically active region,” reports Ben Casselman, writer of the Wall Street Journal story. The developer of the San Francisco project says “they’ve improved the method and won’t cause serious quakes. Residents aren’t so sure – one told the Times the project was ‘terrifying.’”
On Jan. 29, attorney Marguerite Laurent of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network posted a new story to her website that begins: “I wrote Part 1 of ‘Oil in Haiti as the economic reason 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?’).”
She quotes from a Jan. 26 Bloomberg BusinessWeek story: “Haiti Earthquake May Have Exposed Gas, Aiding Economy”: “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.”
The Bloomberg story cites a 2000 report by the U.S. Geological Survey that estimates “at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas” in the Greater Antilles, which include Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and their offshore waters.
Marguerite Laurent
Laurent writes, “According to Haitian scholar Dr. Georges Michel (in ‘Oil in Haiti‘), the U.S. 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 U.S.’ to be tapped when Middle Eastern oil became less available.
“I’ve been writing for years now that the U.S. 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 populist 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 scientists say there’s more oil in Haiti than in Venezuela.) …
“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 ousting President Aristide and putting in Haitian puppets to empire. …
“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! [She’s referring to geologist Stephen Pierce in the Bloomberg story.] Don’t fall for the empire’s latest spin and cleanup 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.”
On Jan. 30, in a Global Research story called “The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti,” journalist, historian and economic researcher F. William Engdahl describes the behind-the-scenes tug of war between world powers over what oil geologists call a “Super-giant oilfield” in Cuba and reserves in Haiti that may equal or exceed it. “In an interview with a Santo Domingo online paper,” Engdahl writes, “Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, former head of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA), stated, ‘There is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people.’ Haiti’s minerals include gold, the valuable strategic metal iridium and oil, apparently lots of it.”
The Lavalas “white book,” “Invest in the People,” compiled under President Arisitide as a catalyst for Haitians to discuss and determine their own development destiny, contains this map detailing the locations of Haiti’s mineral resources.
Under the subheading “Aristide’s development plans,” Engdahl continues: “Marguerite Laurent (‘Ezili Dantò’), president of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network (HLLN), who served as attorney for the deposed Aristide, notes that when Aristide was president – up until his U.S.-backed ouster during the Bush era in 2004 – he had developed and published in book form his national development plans. These plans included, for the first time, a detailed list of known sites where the resources of Haiti were located. The publication of the plan sparked a national debate over Haitian radio and in the media about the future of the country. Aristide’s plan was to implement a public-private partnership to ensure that the development of Haiti’s oil, gold and other valuable resources would benefit the national economy and the broader population, and not merely the five Haitian oligarchic families and their U.S. backers, the so-called Chimeres or gangsters.”
In a footnote at that point, Endahl adds: “The Aristide development plan was contained in the book published in Haiti in 2000, ‘Investir dans l’Human. Livre Blanc de Fanmi Lavalas sous la Direction de Jean-Bertrand Aristide,’ Port-au-Prince, Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 2000. It contained detailed maps, tables, graphics, and a national development plan for 2004 ‘covering agriculture, environment, commerce and industry, the financial sector, infrastructure, education, culture, health, women’s issues and issues in the public sector.’ In 2004, using NGOs and the U.N. and a vicious propaganda campaign to vilify Aristide, the Bush administration got rid of the elected president.”
‘There is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people.’ – Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, former head of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA)
To conclude his story, Engdahl writes that according to Laurent, “under the guise of emergency relief work, the U.S., France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control. She reports rumors that Canada wants the North of Haiti, where Canadian mining interests are already present. The U.S. wants Port-au-Prince and the island of La Gonaive just offshore – an area identified in Aristide’s development book as having vast oil resources, and which is bitterly contested by France. She further states that China, with U.N. veto power over the de facto U.N.-occupied country, may have something to say against such a U.S.-France-Canada carve-up of the vast wealth of the nation.”
VoltaireNet, the non-aligned press network, reports that the swiftness of the U.S. troop deployment to Haiti “can be easily explained since these troops were already pre-positioned in the context of a military exercise. Under the orders of Gen. P.K. Keen, military deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), they took part in an exercise simulating a humanitarian operation in Haiti after a hurricane. Keen and his staff had arrived a few days earlier. At the precise moment that the earth shook, they were already sheltered in the U.S. Embassy, built in compliance with anti-earthquake norms.”