Philippine political crisis: Threats of assassination, military coup, and impeachment

John Malvar

An immense crisis grips the Philippines—a political war between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Vice President Sara Duterte, complete with threats of assassinations, military coups, and impeachment. Driving the crisis are Washington’s preparations for war with China, far advanced, that have riven the Philippine ruling class.

Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, left, in Quezon City, Philippines, Nov. 13, 2024, and Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Vientiane, Laos, Oct. 9, 2024. [AP Photo/Aaron Favila, Sakchai Lalit]

Vice President Duterte held a midnight press conference on November 24, saying there were threats against her life from the president and his political allies. Duterte announced that she had issued orders for the assassination of the President, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the first lady, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, first cousin of the President, in the event that she herself was killed. Her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, issued an appeal to the military in a speech live-streamed on Facebook, to turn on Marcos and Romualdez, an obvious call for a military coup.

The Vice Presidency of the Philippines is not a lame-duck of merely symbolic office. The Vice President oversees a tremendous network of government offices and aides, constituting a sort of shadow presidency, a rival to the seated president waiting in the wings.

Sara Duterte is inclined to the same vulgar, unhinged political tirades as her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte. “We made a mistake with that f**** Marcos…” she declared to the nation. The Dutertes brought the thuggish culture of provincial warlordism, a culture of private armies and gangster families that has plagued much of the Philippines for over half a century, to the national and international stage.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Sara Duterte became political allies in the 2022 presidential election, forming a slate they called the “Uniteam.” It brought together the Marcos control of the Ilocano-speaking North, and Duterte’s control of the southern island of Mindanao. During the campaign period, Marcos pledged that he would continue outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte’s approach to international relations, orienting Philippine politics more closely to China and away from the United States. More than any other politician, Sara Duterte was associated with this orientation to China. She often concludes her speeches in Mandarin, an attempt to appeal not to Chinese Filipinos who are overwhelmingly Hokkien speakers, but to Beijing.

Shortly after taking office, however, under tremendous pressure from the Biden administration, Marcos began to reintegrate the Philippines into the camp of Washington. He opened up basing facilities under the auspices of the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), resumed massive war games, and began aggressively prosecuting Manila’s claim to disputed islands in the South China Sea. The Biden White House quietly buried outstanding warrants issued by US courts for human rights violations and theft against the Marcos family.

The open conflict between Marcos and Duterte erupted over investigations in the Philippine legislature. The House of Representatives, despite its representatives being split along numerous different party lines, is aligned in a supermajority behind Marcos. Under the leadership of Romualdez, it organised a four-committee investigation (Quad-Comm) panel to identify links between Philippine offshore gaming operators, known as POGOs, the illegal drug trade, extrajudicial killings, and the Chinese. At the centre of all of the allegations raised by the so-called Quad-Comm investigation are connections between the Dutertes and claims of Chinese subversion and infiltration of Philippine society.

POGOs are online gambling businesses catering largely to an international Chinese clientele. They began operating in the Philippines in 2003 under the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo administration. They were immensely profitable and received official sanction and government regulation in 2016 when Duterte took office. Like call centres and other forms of offshore globalised labour, POGOs sprang up in many semi-rural parts of the Philippines. The Chinese government issued repeated appeals to the Duterte administration to end the POGOs, which they saw as circumventing China’s ban on gambling.

After a bevy of wild accusations raised in the press of kidnapping and criminal syndicates through the POGOs, an investigation was launched in the Senate, headed by Sen Risa Hontiveros. An ugly anti-Chinese atmosphere gripped Philippine politics. Hontiveros alleged that the POGOs were a plot of the Chinese government to infiltrate Philippine society. She attempted to expose individuals as having been born in China, and stripped them of their Philippine citizenship. She has alleged mass infiltration of the country by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), stores of Chinese military uniforms housed in POGOs, and denounced multiple people as Chinese spies. Two days ago, Hontiveros claimed that one of former President Duterte’s key economic advisers, Michael Yang, was an agent of Chinese intelligence.

In July, the Marcos administration banned POGOs. The Quad Comm investigation followed. The centre of its efforts, like those in the Senate, is the attempt to associate the Dutertes with alleged Chinese espionage by way of the POGOs and to strip them of their political power.

The House quad-comm investigation summoned the Vice President for interrogation in mid-November, claiming that she had misused her allocated budget of confidential and intelligence funds for personal benefit, bribery, and to oversee red-tagging and extrajudicial killings. The budget of the Office of the Vice President for 2025 was slashed from P2 billion to P733 million. Duterte declared that she would need to close ten satellite offices, and lay off 200 staff members as a result.

The hypocrisy of the House and Senate investigations is staggering. Both branches of the Philippine legislature, most of the representatives of which are still seated, overwhelmingly supported Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency and his war on drugs. Duterte had the largest supermajority support in the legislature in Philippine history.

Marcos has reoriented Philippine geopolitical ties back into the camp of Washington, however, and this has brought the Philippines to the brink of armed conflict with China. US medium-range missiles have been deployed to the northern Philippines targeting China. A joint US-Philippine military task force has been created to oversee confrontations with China in the South China Sea.

The investigations and accusations that have brought the Philippines to the current sharp political crisis originate in the consolidation of power around Marcos on the basis of this geopolitical reorientation. The lurid, racist accusations of Chinese espionage, all baseless, that run throughout the investigations express the political essence of the matter. The Marcos administration is isolating and cutting off the power of the Dutertes because they represent factions of the Philippine elite who are looking to secure better political and economic relations with China. Such improved relations can only come about if the Philippines distances itself from Washington’s aggression.

During quad-comm proceedings, Zuleika Lopez, Sara Duterte’s Chief of Staff, was charged with contempt. Arrest orders have been issued for other senior aides to the Vice President as well. Lopez was hospitalised for a panic attack. When the House ordered her transferred from the hospital to a detention centre, the Vice President and her head of security allegedly physically assaulted the police officer involved. The Quezon City Police District filed charges of direct assault against Duterte and the head of her security group on Wednesday. It was after these events that Duterte launched her midnight tirade threatening the assassination of President Marcos.

The charges were the pretext for Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner to order the replacement of the entire Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group by a new contingent appointed by the AFP. Duterte, maintaining that there were threats against her life, refused the new contingent of twenty-five officers and said that she would rely on a private team she would put together herself.

The security teams of the President and Vice President, while they are special military and police detachments, function to a large extent as a private army. It is a form of warlordism. Seventy-five police officers on Duterte’s team have already been removed. The military personnel will likely be removed today.

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) served a subpoena to Duterte for her declaration that she had hired a hit-man to kill the President, should an attempt on her life succeed. The NBI stated that it was considering filing charges against Duterte for violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.

The Anti-Terrorism Act was enacted by Rodrigo Duterte in 2020 as a means of suppressing dissent. It authorised arrest without warrant, warrantless wiretaps and surveillance, and was the mandate for the creation of the murderous National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) that oversaw the suppression of left-wing organisations.

Rumours of military coup are circulating widely, as they always do during an intense political crisis in the Philippines. General Brawner told the press he was confident of the loyalty of the whole Armed Forces of the Philippines to the constitution. History has repeatedly proven that the loyalty of the generals and ranking officers of the Philippine military is not to the constitution but to individual members of the political elite. It is these personal loyalties that have shaped the many coup attempts that have rocked the country over decades.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte on November 25 issued an appeal to the military. “Nobody can correct Marcos. Nobody can correct [House Speaker] Romualdez. There is no urgent remedy. It is only the military who can correct it.” The Department of Justice said Duterte’s remarks “bordered on sedition,” and the Office of the Executive Secretary said it was treating them as “a blatant call for the military to launch a coup.”

Most fundamentally, the loyalty of the Philippine military brass is to the United States. Many of the leading officers received training at American military institutions, where they were trained in the geopolitical interests of Washington, the politics of violent anti-communism, and the art of torture and repression. Both this training and the history of martial law incline them to a personal loyalty to Marcos. Former Senator Antonio Trillanes, his career based on being a military officer who attempted to stage a coup, called for the immediate impeachment of Sara Duterte.

The Philippine National Police (PNP), on the other hand, are not the instrument of coup attempts and power grabs, but of day-to-day repression, of dead bodies in the streets and disappearances. The loyalty of the police in the Philippines, fed by the impunity of mass murder under Rodrigo Duterte’s so-called war on drugs, inclines to Duterte. Their perspective was articulated by Senator Ronald dela Rosa, former PNP chief, who told the press he agreed with Duterte’s appeal to the military. The police are not a force to overthrow Marcos, but disgruntled they can create immense instability.

The political allies of the Dutertes are scurrying for cover. Former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo—immensely politically influential, a longtime ally of the Dutertes, and herself closely associated with the sections of the Philippine elite oriented toward China—seems to be moving to the Marcos camp. She posed for pictures in the legislature with Speaker Martin Romualdez two days ago, both of them giving the cameras a thumbs-up sign.

UK Labour government sets asylum seeker deportations record

Robert Stevens

The anti-immigration offensive of Britain’s Labour government has seen a record number of deportations of asylum seekers since it came to power in July.

Home Office data reveals that 9,400 people have been deported to their home countries since then. The Daily Mirror reported last week, “Altogether, more than 25 bespoke returns flights have taken place since July 5th, returning individuals to a range of countries including Albania, Poland, Romania and Vietnam, plus the first ever charter to Timor-Leste, and the biggest ever returns flight to Nigeria and Ghana.”

Including the mass deportations to Nigeria and Ghana, the Labour government has organised what the right-wing press are hailing as the “three biggest returns flights in UK history.” A significant proportion of these are “forced deportations”—almost 2,600, an increase of 19 percent compared to 2023 when the Conservatives were in office.

Labour campaigned for election pledged to deport thousands more asylum seekers. Taking office it immediately scrapped the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy, denouncing the Tories for spending hundreds of millions of pounds on failed attempts to deport asylum seekers to the African country. No flights to Rwanda were able to leave Britain due to legal challenges against a policy flouting international law.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared the Rwanda policy “dead and buried”, with Labour shifting all existing funds allocated to it over to its new beefed-up Border Security Command (BSC) and Returns and Enforcement Unit.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper visiting Dover in May 2024 with Tory-turned-Labour MP Natalie Elphicke (left) [Photo by Keir Starmer / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Three weeks after Labour took power, on July 25, the Home Office announced that 46 migrants had been deported by plane to Timor-Leste and Vietnam. The flight to Vietnam was the first for deportations since 2022. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper crowed, “We have immediately replaced the flight planning for Rwanda with actual flights to return people who have no right to stay to their home countries instead.”

In August, Cooper promised to deport at least 14,385 “illegal migrants” by the end of the year, the highest rate since 2018. The government continually briefs the media on its anti-immigrant agenda to ensure front-page coverage and in the words of the Mirror, “it’s understood more flights are planned before the end of the year—to new countries the UK hasn’t previously charted flights to,” meaning Labour may well exceed its target.

Throughout the summer, the media have kept up a morbid running commentary on how many asylum seekers have been successfully kicked out of the country by Labour, documenting any “progress” made while keeping a score on how many asylum seekers are still arriving by boat. By August 31, the Daily Mail, a frothing anti-immigrant hate sheet, was splashing a headline lauding “The biggest deportation flight in history and how Labour have drawn first blood in battle against the small boat crossings”. This was a reference to asylum seekers whose only means to enter the UK is via the hazardous crossing of the Channel.

The article by right-winger Dan Hodges, who describes himself as a “tribal neo-Blairite”, is a paean to Cooper. Hodges backed her for the Labour leadership in the 2015 election in which she and another Blairite, Liz Kendall—now Starmer’s Work and Pensions minister—were routed by Jeremy Corbyn.

Hodges was crestfallen that boats were still able to make it to the UK’s shores: “Our new Prime Minister hit the dubious milestone of 6,000 new arrivals on August 27, the 54th day of his premiership”. But this was a Labour success as the Tories’ “Liz Truss reached it after just 29 days, Rishi Sunak after 38.”

Starmer was keeping asylum seekers out, enthused Hodges, because since the election “the rate of new arrivals has actually fallen—it is currently 25 percent lower than the 25,000 who had arrived by this stage in 2022. And that’s despite the warm weather and calm seas of the past month.”

This was down to the “decision to redeploy… huge resources” away from the Rwanda policy. Hodges cited a Home Office official who said, “One of Yvette’s first acts was to move 300 officials off Rwanda, and on to ordinary deportations”.

Hodges pointed to the “immediate results. Although it was done with little fanfare, on August 23 a flight left the UK with 220 illegal migrants on board. Though ministers won’t reveal the destination for reasons of diplomatic protocol, it represented the biggest single-day deportation in British history, and was processed without the last-minute lawyerly wrangling and recrimination associated with previous removal efforts.”

Hodges noted the close relationship between Cooper and Director General of Immigration Enforcement, Bas Javid—brother of the former Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid. This has centred on deporting migrants from countries with “low grant rates”, as “there is virtually no chance of an asylum request being approved and options for a successful legal challenge are much more limited.” To fill deportation planes the government was “prioritising raids” on “car-washes, nail bars and some specific areas of the hospitality sector”.

Labour is doing everything to escalate its deportation regime, with Starmer telling reporters of the 9,400 already deported, “We have had the biggest single plane loads of returns going off, I think we have had the three biggest now that have ever gone off, so that is really good on returns.”

Starmer said he was working closely with the French, German and Italian governments—who have created a Fortress Europe with barbed wire fences sealing off the continent to asylum seekers, backed by vicious “pushback” operations, to ensure that known migrant routes are cut-off—and was “pressing hard” on law enforcement.

Italy’s government is led by the fascist Giorgia Meloni with whom Starmer has sought the closest relations since taking office, holding extensive talks at what he described as a “fantastic meeting” in Rome in September, and at leaders’ summits. The November 17 Sunday Times noted that the “pair discussed how her right-wing government had succeeded in reducing the number of migrants reaching Italy’s shores by boat, with the interior ministry reporting a 62 percent fall in arrivals over the first seven months of 2024. Frontex, the EU’s border force, has calculated a 64 per cent fall in the number of people arriving from north Africa and Malta.”

Flaunting his relations with Meloni, Starmer spoke on November 4 to the General Assembly of INTERPOL—the intergovernmental organization that co-ordinates police forces around the world.

Labour’s anti-immigration agenda is shrouded in Starmer’s oft-made statement about the need to “smash the gangs” who organise the boats making the Channel crossings. He declared, “People-smuggling should be viewed as a global security threat similar to terrorism. We’ve got to combine resources, share intelligence and tactics, and tackle the problem upstream, working together to shut down the smuggling routes.” As “illegal migration is, without question, a massive driver of global insecurity,” the prime minister declared, “I will work with anyone serious who can offer solutions on this—anyone.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as he hosts the European Political Community (EPC) Summit [Photo by Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

“Anyone” refers to the growing number of far-right governments in Europe, specifically Meloni’s of whom Starmer said, “We’re also working with Italy to dismantle the supply chains of maritime equipment, combat illicit financial flows, and strengthen our investigative capacities and our data sharing. And as part of the UK’s wider reset with the European Union, we are seeking a new security pact, including restoring access to real-time intelligence sharing networks.”

In the two weeks since, Starmer has centred praise on Italy’s “upstream work” in north Africa, in Tunisia and Libya, with which Rome has signed deals that intensify border security and train up the coastguard to prevent migrants escaping.

The Sunday Times reported that Cooper is working on a “series of Italy-style deals with several countries to help them stop thousands of illegal migrants setting off on the perilous journey to Britain. Named in the report were Kurdistan, Iraq, Turkey and Vietnam, with “‘co-operation and security’ agreements expected to be concluded before the end of the year.”

Labour have no differences with the Tories on “offshoring” asylum processing. It pulled the plug on the Rwanda scheme only because it was “unworkable”. Last month, Labour announced it had reached an agreement to deport any migrants arriving in the Chagos Islands in the British Indian Ocean territories to St Helena, an island in the South Atlantic 5,000 miles from the UK.

Hodges’ Mail piece cites a Downing Street source who said, “We’re not going back to the Rwanda scheme… It was a costly shambles. But we might have to look at some sort of offshore processing model to send a firm signal.”

The model is provided by Meloni, with Starmer “very interested” in Italy’s new five-year asylum seeker deal with Albania. The terms stipulate that the Balkan country hold 3,000 asylum seekers picked up by the Italian coastguard at any one time—roughly 36,000 across a year—in two camps while their claims are processed.

Australian Labor government trying to push through bill for mass deportations

Mike Head

Evidence came to light last week showing that more than 80,000 people could be removed from Australia to as-yet-unnamed third countries, which would be paid to take them under the Labor government’s latest immigration deportation bill.

Mass deportations on such a scale would rival in their size and brutality those being proposed by US President-elect Donald Trump, given the difference in population size between the US and Australia. 

Trump confirmed last week that he intends to declare a national emergency and use the US military and national guard forces to deport millions of migrants as soon as he takes office next January 20. 

Asylum seekers protesting in Punchbowl, Sydney, Australia

Like capitalist governments internationally, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s administration is heading down the same path. It is once again seeking to outbid the Liberal National Coalition in its anti-immigrant measures. These are designed to demonise refugees, international students and other “foreigners” and make them scapegoats for the worsening cost-of-living and housing crisis that is hitting millions of working-class households.

With bipartisan support by the Coalition, Labor’s deportation bill passed the House of Representatives last Wednesday. It was supposed to be examined in a rushed one-week inquiry by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which held a hearing last Thursday evening. 

At that hearing, Home Affairs Department officials conceded that the bill could affect far more people than the 246 released from immigration detention prisons last November. Those releases came after the High Court finally ruled, after two decades, that the indefinite detention of people who could not be deported constituted unconstitutional punishment without a court order.

The bill would authorise the Australian government to pay third countries to accept non-citizens on a “removal pathway,” regardless of whether those countries were signatories to the international Refugee Convention barring removal to face death or persecution.

Michael Thomas, the Home Affairs Department’s group manager of immigration compliance, revealed that those on a removal pathway included:

• An estimated 75,400 people with no valid visa in the Australian community.

• 4,452 people on bridging visa E, so they can make “acceptable arrangements to depart Australia”.

• 986 people in immigration detention.

• 193 in community detention.

• 246 on bridging visa R (BVR), released as a result of the High Court’s NZYQ ruling that indefinite detention is unlawful.

• A further 96 people on BVRs that predated that supreme court decision.

Officials claimed that most of the 80,000 could return to their home country, and thousands did so voluntarily. However, legal and human rights groups testified that if passed, the Migration Amendment Bill 2024 would allow governments to dump refugees and migrants in countries where they could be warehoused indefinitely, potentially in inhumane conditions. 

The bill would permit Australian governments to make “third country reception arrangements” by paying foreign governments to detain deported people. The Albanese government already does this on the remote Pacific island of Nauru, where it reopened the detention camp last year.

The bill would immunise Australian governments from any liability for harm, injury or death caused by such overseas detention, which has led to numerous deaths, some by suicide, over the past two decades. 

In the past, some civil liability claims have succeeded. In 2017, an agreement was reached between detainees imprisoned on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and the then Coalition government, following a claim of unlawful detention and negligence. Other refugees secured court orders to be brought to Australia to access urgent, lifesaving treatment unavailable in Nauru or Manus Island. Some cases are ongoing.

The bill would give governments extraordinary powers to effectively reverse refugee protection findings made by tribunals or courts and continue imposing punitive visa conditions on asylum seekers who remain in Australia.

The bill would further allow the Albanese government to quickly re-detain, either domestically or in Nauru, people released as the result of the High Court’s NZYQ ruling. It could claim that they could now be re-incarcerated for the purpose of likely deportation.

Currently, asylum seekers who reach Australia by boat can be sent to Nauru. The new provisions extend this power to “bridging visa R” (BVR) holders.

By ministerial decree, via regulations, the Labor government also has begun re-imposing police-state curfews and ankle bracelet monitoring on ex-detainees, defying yet another High Court ruling this November 6 that these measures too amounted to unconstitutional punishment.

In another bill, the Albanese government is proposing to give immigration ministers powers to ban mobile phones in migration detention facilities, cutting off detainees from communications, including family contact and support.

In the UK, the Starmer Labour government is similarly executing plans to deport at least 14,500 people deemed to be “illegal” migrants, exceeding the two previous six-month records set during Conservative government rule of 13,410 in 2018 and 14,389 last year. Sir Keir Starmer’s government has signed “returns agreements” with countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Serbia and Georgia.

This is part of a wider poisonous agenda to divide working-class people and pit them against each other along national and ethnic lines under conditions of declining living standards, a deepening economic and social crisis and a plunge into war. Right across Europe, governments are outdoing each other with reactionary moves against refugees and democratic rights. 

Labor’s bill is not an aberration. Like the Keating Labor government, which became the first in the world to impose mandatory detention on asylum seekers in 1992, this Albanese government is spearheading an assault on one of the most defenceless sections of the international working class.

This bill is reminiscent of the last Labor government’s “Malaysian solution,” which sought to dump refugees in a country that had not signed the Refugee Convention. Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s legislation was struck down by the High Court in 2011 for breaching the requirements of the Migration Act at the time, not to remove asylum seekers to countries where there was no protection against removal to face harm.

In response, that Labor government went further. In July 2013, then led again by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, it declared that no asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australian waters would ever be permitted to settle in the country. That set a global precedent for a blanket ban on refugees. Asylum seekers were transported to primitive detention camps in Papua New Guinea—one of the world’s most impoverished countries. 

Such measures violate one of the most fundamental legal and democratic rights—the right to flee repression and seek asylum from persecution, without punishment or discrimination. The Refugee Convention formally enshrines these rights, together with core rights to freedom from arbitrary detention and other human rights abuses, the provision of essential health and education facilities, and access to the courts by refugees to challenge their treatment.

Legal and human rights groups’ representatives denounced the latest bill at Thursday’s Senate committee hearing. Josephine Langbien, associate legal director of the Human Rights Law Centre, for example, testified that the bill allowed people removed to be separated from their families “sending them to permanent exile in third countries against their will.”

In an earlier media statement, Langbien pointed out: “This will expand Australia’s disastrous offshore detention regime, under which people have died and suffered conditions amounting to torture.” She added: “Despite multiple High Court rulings, the government is intent on further punishing this small group of people—and potentially impacting thousands of others in the process.”

Despite such objections and widespread opposition throughout working-class immigrant communities, the Albanese government is escalating its nationalistic offensive, including by vowing to keep slashing the number of international students in the country.

This is being accompanied by a filthy propaganda campaign throughout the corporate media depicting formerly detained refugees as murderers and rapists, and blaming students and immigrant workers for the worsening affordable housing crisis.

Vulnerable members of society, including those brutalised by years in detention, are being vilified to impose authoritarian measures. This is setting precedents for use throughout the working class as a whole, as social conditions keep deteriorating and billions of dollars are poured into military spending amid the US-backed Gaza genocide and the lurch into wider war against Russia and China.

Haiti’s unelected prime minister ousted amid surging gang and state violence, increasing social misery

Félix Gauthier

Haiti’s interim prime minister was ousted last week by the Transitional Council—the government “oversight mechanism” that the US, Canada and various factions of the country’s bourgeois elite put together earlier this year to provide a fig leaf of “popular” legitimacy for the latest imperialist-sponsored military intervention in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.

The Council’s sacking of Garry Conille came amid rampant gang and state violence and ever widening social misery.

Conille was sworn in as head of Haiti’s government last June just weeks before the international police-military “stabilization” force organized, financed and, to a large degree armed, by Washington, Ottawa and their allies began to deploy in Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital.

Six months on, the Kenyan-led “stabilization force” has failed to make any discernible progress in disarming the gangs that have overrun some 60 percent of Port-au-Prince and much of the country over the past year.

In a clear sign that the situation on the ground is spiraling out of control, the US Federal Aviation Administration has instituted a temporary ban on flights to Haiti, after gangs opened fire on commercial airlines on Monday, November 11. At least three planes were targeted by gunfire from below, including a Spirit Airlines plane that was about to land in Port-au-Prince, and departing JetBlue and American Airlines jets. A Spirit flight attendant was injured in the attack.

Police officers near the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, November 12, 2024. [AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph]

The FAA decision also temporarily grounded United Nations humanitarian flights, restricting much needed supplies. UN flights were only permitted to resume on Wednesday, November 20.

The same day as the attack on Spirit Airlines also saw a widely reported attack by law enforcement officers and aligned vigilantes on Doctors Without Borders’ (MSF) operations in Port-au-Prince. Citing this incident, as well as a “series of threats” by local police, MSF announced the suspension of its activities in Haiti on Tuesday, further compounding Haiti’s isolation and privation from urgently needed humanitarian assistance.

According to the MSF, members of a vigilante group and law enforcement officers stopped their ambulance, which was transporting three young people with gunshot wounds. Police attempted to arrest the patients and when MSF personnel objected they escorted the ambulance to a public hospital, where law enforcement officers and vigilantes surrounded the vehicle, slashed its tires, and tear-gassed MSF staff. At least two of the wounded patients were then summarily executed.

The gruesome attack on defenceless patients and MSF ambulance personnel by the Haitian police highlights once more that the very forces supposed to fight the gangs are themselves the source of like violence and criminality.

Haiti’s government and state are mired in corruption and violence, widely unpopular, and have been operating outside constitutional bounds, without an elected parliament and president, since 2020. The Transitional Council is entirely subordinated to the interests of the North American and European imperialist powers and torn by bitter factional conflicts between the political representatives of rival capitalist cliques. The gangs have been able to flourish and wield effective control over much of the Haitian-half of the island of Hispaniola because they enjoy the patronage of, and are tied to leading elements within Haiti’s ruling class and its state.

In a continuation of the rapid succession of corrupt and unelected leaders installed at the behest of Washington and Ottawa, the Transitional Council fired interim Prime Minister Garry Conille, whose family had close ties to the US-backed three-decade long “Papa and Baby Doc” Duvalier dictatorship, on Nov 10. In his place it his named Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, a businessman and former president of Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who ran for the Senate in 2015. Not unlike the numerous pretenders to Haiti’s leadership before him, Fils-Aime has promised to work towards the holding of elections, which have not taken place in Haiti since 2016. At that time, the Obama administration and the Trudeau government intervened and manipulated the process to ensure the election of Jovenel Moïse, the protégé of the outgoing right-wing president, Michel Martelly.

Ex-Haiti Prime Minister Garry Conille, speaks during a joint press conference with Kenya's President William Ruto at State House in Nairobi, Kenya, Friday, October 11, 2024. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]

The Transitional Council’s ouster of Conille came after it had attempted to change the heads of several ministries in defiance of his advice. The governmental reshuffling is occurring only six months after Conille replaced his disgraced predecessor, Ariel Henry, whom the US coerced into stepping down, without even the pretense of legal or democratic processes, by preventing his return to Haiti. Conille, for his part, has denounced his own dismissal as “tainted by illegality.”

The Council, established in April to restore “democratic order,” is constantly facing internecine conflicts and corruption accusations, as competing sections of Haiti’s bourgeoisie vie for the relatively little wealth and power accorded to them by their imperialist sponsors.

The social and political crisis roiling Haiti is among the most severe anywhere, and the direct consequence of brutal imperialist oppression, including more than a century of US military interventions and regime change operations dating back to the 1915-34 occupation of the country by US Marines.

The country has never recovered from the IMF restructuring programs imposed over the last three decades and a devastating 2010 earthquake.

Despite a crying need for humanitarian aid, international “assistance” over the past year has been primarily focused on providing troops and equipment to establish “order” and buttress the ability of the barely functioning state to exercise a monopoly on organized violence.

Much of the population—and especially the more than 700,000 people who have been internally displaced—lack access to sufficient food and other necessities.

None of this concerns the ruling classes of the United States, France, or Canada.

In a rare display of honesty caught on video, French President Emmanuel Macron summed up what imperialist leaders really think about the Haitian people. Recorded on the margins of the G20 this week, the video shows Macron arguing with a bystander in public, as he denounces the Transitional Council’s move to replace Conille. After underlining that he had supported Conille, Macron describes the latter’s Haitian opponents as “total morons,” and goes on to blame the Haitian population itself for the crisis in which their country is mired: “Quite frankly, it was the Haitians who killed Haiti.”

Macron’s remarks are an outrageous and brazen lie coming from the president of the state which is one of the prime culprits in the plunder and oppression of the Haitian people. Apart from the arrogance, condescension, and contempt for its subjects typically exhibited by imperialist leaders, Macron’s unhinged remarks reveal something else: A growing impatience and anxiety, bound up with the potential consequences of continued and worsening political instability in Haiti, and the Caribbean region more broadly.

The past few months have already seen mass unrest over the cost of living in the French territories of Guadeloupe and the nearby island of Martinique. In Guadeloupe, striking workers who seized control of the territory’s power station caused days of power outages. This has been met with repressive measures by French authorities, including days-long curfews. The instability within Haiti, as well as the mass exodus of its population, is seen as potential fuel to the fire of rapidly developing class struggles, not just in the Caribbean, but also in North America.

In September this year, the UN Security Council reauthorized the present “international security force” deployment to Haiti. Currently it is led by a few hundred Kenyan Special Forces police, who are notorious for the brutality they have employed in repressing protests in Nairobi. While they have been deployed since this summer, they have completely failed to curb the gang violence, or for that matter the terroristic violence carried out by the Haitian police, whose operations they are mandated to assist.

According to a UN report published last month, there was a surge in killings and police executions in Haiti between July and September 2024. During that period, more than 1,740 people were killed or injured, a nearly 30% increase from the previous trimester. This included at least 106 extrajudicial killings that were carried out by law enforcement officials. Among those summarily executed were six children as young as 10 years old accused of collaborating with gangs.

Residents flee their homes to escape gang and police violence in the Nazon neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, November 14, 2024. [AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph]

The decision of the North American imperialist powers to delegate the task of imposing “order” in Haiti to Kenya and other African and CARICOM nations, rather than deploying their own forces, partly reflects the fact that the United States and Canada have prioritized their military resources for arming Ukraine and preparing for direct military confrontation with Russia and China.

They are also acutely aware of the deep-seated hostility of the Haitian population toward imperialism and fear the impact at home of both having to suppress anti-imperialist protests, as well as being caught in a costly military conflict with well-armed gangs.

In regard to the crisis now consuming Haiti, the principal concern of US and Canadian imperialism is to prevent it further destabilizing the Caribbean region, which they view as their “backyard,” and provoking an exodus of impoverished refugees.

Those Haitians attempting to flee what increasingly resembles a nightmarish open air prison are met with political persecution and social hardship wherever they attempt to seek refuge, from the Dominican Republic to overseas in Canada or the United States.

In the United States, President-elect Donald Trump placed incitement against immigrants, and Haitian refugees in particular, at the centre of his campaign. Fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia, Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, assisted among others by the fascist billionaire Elon Musk and his ownership of Twitter, scurrilously denounced Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, for hunting and eating Americans’ pet cats and dogs.

Tens of thousands of Haitians are currently allowed to live and work in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status program. Many were granted this status in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions.

Trump is expected to revoke this temporary legal status and implement measures and deport all these Haitian refugees from the very first days of his presidency, as part of his plans to mount a police-military witch hunt against so-called “illegal” immigrants.

The Democratic Party not only hasn’t done anything to counter this anti-immigrant campaign, the Biden-Harris administration has implemented its own anti-immigrant policies, including increased deportations and border closures. The same goes for the Canadian Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. It recently announced a drastic tightening of immigration restrictions, entirely adapting and lending credibility to the Canadian version of the same anti-immigrant discourse promoted south of the border. Moreover, Immigration Minister Marc Miller has vowed that Canada will not provide an “open door” to those under threat of expulsion by Trump from the US and will work closely with his administration to provide border “security.”

Bolsonaro and top generals indicted for January 8 coup in Brazil

Guilherme Ferreira & Tomas Castanheira

Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) indicted fascistic former president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other members of his government on Thursday, November 21, for the crimes of violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d’état, and criminal organization for the attempted coup of January 8, 2023.

Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro and commanders of the Armed Forces, Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, Army General Paulo Sergio Nogueira and Air Brigadier Lieutenant Carlos de Almeida Baptista Junior. [Photo: Marcos Corrês/PR]

The nearly 900-page PF report has been sent to the minister in charge of the case at the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Alexandre de Moraes, and remains confidential. It will be sent in the next few days to the Attorney General, Paulo Gonet, who is expected to file charges against those indicted next year.

The PF revelations come 60 years after the US-backed 1964 military coup which inaugurated a bloody 21-year regime that Bolsonaro and his military entourage vindicate. They show that Brazil was close to a new coup and the establishment of a dictatorship after Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party - PT) at the end of 2022.

Military personnel were heavily involved in the coup plot. Of the 37 indicted by the PF, 25 were active or reserve military personnel, including Bolsonaro, a former army captain, seven colonels, six lieutenant colonels, eight army generals, and the former commander of the Navy in the Bolsonaro government, Adm. Almir Garnier Santos.

The military officers indicted include Gen. Walter Braga Netto, former Defense Minister and Bolsonaro’s vice-presidential candidate in 2022; Gen. Augusto Heleno, former chief of the Institutional Security Office (GSI), Brazil’s national security and intelligence agency; Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, former Defense Minister and previously Army Commander; and Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp who last year entered a plea bargain with the Federal Police.

Among the civilians indicted are the president of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL), Valdemar Costa Neto, and the former Minister of Justice of the Bolsonaro government, Anderson Torres, with whom the Federal Police found the first “coup minutes” in January 2023. Torres was the Secretary of Public Security of the Federal District on the day of the attempted coup and was arrested shortly after for omission and connivance in the attack by the fascist mob on the headquarters of the Three Powers on January 8, 2023.

The Federal Police also indicted journalist Paulo Figueiredo, grandson of the last president of the military dictatorship in Brazil, and Filipe Martins, the Bolsonaro government’s former special advisor for international affairs. Along with one of Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo, who was in the US during the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and for Donald Trump’s election this year. Figueiredo and Martins have close ties to the fascist layers linked to President-elect Trump in the US.

The PF report indicting the former president and members of his fascist entourage was sent to the Supreme Court two days after the launch of “Operation Countercoup,” which revealed the existence of an advanced plan to assassinate President Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Minister Moraes. Four Army officers and a federal police officer were preventively arrested on Tuesday as part of the operation.

The information released by “Operation Countercoup” added a new sinister layer of facts to the already abundant evidence of the conspiracy of the former president and a substantial sector of the military high command to carry out a coup d’état and establish a fascist dictatorship in Brazil.

The operation was launched after the PF recovered documents deleted from Lt. Col. Mauro Cid’s electronic devices, which were added to other data retrieved from a group of Special Forces (FE) military personnel, known as the “Black Kids.”

The most prominent among the active military officers arrested this week, reserve general Mario Fernandes, former executive secretary of the General Secretariat of the Presidency in the Bolsonaro government, was identified as one of the main architects of the plan to assassinate Lula, Alckmin, and Moraes.

The assassination plan and its methods, which included the possibility of shootings, the use of explosive devices, or poisoning, are openly described in the document entitled “Green and Yellow Dagger,” which the PF found to be authored by Fernandes and to have been printed by him inside the Planalto presidential palace for the first time on November 9, 2022. According to the PF, the plan was presented to and approved by General Braga Netto in a meeting at his own home on November 12, 2022.

Much of the document that supported “Operation Countercoup” describes an aborted attempt to carry out the plan to assassinate Moraes on December 15, 2022, two days after Lula’s inauguration ceremony. The PF report concludes that the assassination would serve as a trigger for the establishment of an “Institutional Crisis Management Office,” on December 16, 2022, after the coup d’état, composed mostly of military personnel, under the command of Generals Augusto Heleno and Braga Netto, with the participation of Gen. Mario Fernandes and Filipe Martins.”

General Fernandes was also one of the people who orchestrated the support of the Army’s high command for the coup plan. According to the PF’s official document on “Operation Countercoup,” Fernandes wrote on November 4, 2022 to Gen. Luiz Eduardo Ramos, former Minister-Chief of the General Secretariat of the Bolsonaro government:

You have to force the High Command, man. With General Freire Gomes [then commander of the Army], with General Paulo Sérgio, damn it ... It’s obvious that there was fraud [in the elections], damn it. .... And another thing, even if it’s just to spread the word and get the masses excited. So that they stay in the streets and then, yes, maybe that’s what the High Command, what the Defense wants. The popular outcry, like it was in [19]64. Because as you said, a good part of the High Command, at least in the Army, isn’t very willing, right? Or they won’t start the intervention, unless, well, the start is made by society. Come on, general, reinforce that. I’m doing my job with the Brigade [of Special Forces] and the division personnel [generals] from my class [from 1986, from Agulhas Negras, Brazil’s military academy].

One of the most important documents revealed by the PF, seized from Lt. Col. Hélio Ferreira Lima, is described by investigators as “a detailed spreadsheet that condenses information about the strategic planning of the coup d’état.”

The document presents a plan with detailed steps, starting with the annulment of the democratic elections based on a fabricated accusation of electoral fraud. The next steps involved the issuance of “arrest warrants against those involved in ... irregularities in the electoral process” and the neutralizing of opponents in command of the powers of State; the establishment of a new regime based on a presidential decree by Bolsonaro and its sanctioning by Congress (controlled by his allies); and the launching of a massive information campaign to legitimize the coup domestically and internationally.

The document presents as “critical requirements” for the transfer of power to the new dictatorial regime the creation of a “central crisis office” and the “preparation of a robust legal framework in coordination with the STM [Supreme Military Court] ... to establish a decree that supports military actions.”

Bolsonaro actively participated in this entire plan. According to the Federal Police, it was introduced to Bolsonaro by Filipe Martins, and Bolsonaro later discussed the plan with the heads of the Armed Forces. In a statement to the Federal Police in March of this year, the then commanders of the Army, General Freire Gomes, and of the Air Force, Brig. Baptista Júnior, confirmed that Bolsonaro discussed the plan with them. Also present at the meeting was the former commander of the Navy, Admiral Garnier Santos, who is said to have agreed to the coup and is the only one indicted by the Federal Police.

The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) last year declared Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office until 2030 due to his unfounded attacks on Brazil’s electronic voting system that paved the way for an attempted coup. This year Bolsonaro had already been indicted by the Federal Police for the illegal sale of jewelry abroad and the forgery of COVID-19 vaccination cards. Both indictments are also linked to the attempted coup.

Bolsonaro and his political circle responded to the latest indictment by attacking Minister Moraes. In an interview yesterday with the Metrópole website, Bolsonaro said that Moraes “conducts the entire investigation, adjusts statements, arrests without charges, fishes for evidence, and has a very creative advisory team. He does everything that the law does not allow.”

The indictment of Bolsonaro and high-ranking military officials far from signals an end to the greatest crisis of Brazilian democracy since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. The origin of this crisis lies in the enormous crisis of the world capitalist system that is normalizing the threat of nuclear world war and the broad shift of the world’s ruling elite towards authoritarian forms of government, with explosive consequences for Brazil, one of the most unequal countries on the planet.

Harvesters Africa Empowerment Foundation (HAEF) Scholarship 2025

Application Deadline:

The application deadline for the Harvesters Africa Empowerment Foundation (HAEF)  Scholarship 2025 is November 25, 2024.

Tell Me About The Harvesters Africa Empowerment Foundation Scholarship:

The Harvester’s Scholarship Fund provides financial support to undergraduate students across universities in Africa. The scholarship helps cover tuition, books, room, board, and other educational expenses. Additionally, the program includes access to the Harvesters Hub, a cross-sector space designed for small and medium business owners in Africa. The Hub fosters collaboration among members, enabling them to share skills and business experiences, helping each other navigate challenges and ensuring mutual success.

Which Fields are Eligible;

All fields 

Type:

Scholarship 

Who can Apply For The Harvesters Africa Empowerment Foundation Scholarship;

Also, the eligibility criteria include:

• You must be between the ages of 18-28 years
• Must be an undergraduate student studying in an accredited public University in Nigeria
• Must be studying an accredited course
• Must have a CGPA of not less than 3.0/5 or equivalent

Which Countries Are Eligible;

African countries

Where will the Award be Taken;

Africa 

How Many Awards;

Not specified

What is the Benefit of the Award;

Also, the benefits include:

• Financial support for tuition, books, room, board, and other educational expenses.
• Access to the Harvesters Hub, a collaborative space for small and medium business owners in Africa.
• Opportunity to connect with other entrepreneurs to share skills, experiences, and resources.

How to Apply:

To begin your application, fill out the form.