forgiving haiti's debt
January 20, 2010 - 2:04pm
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Venezuela? Huh.
Eric Toussaint, president of CADTM Belgium (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, www.cadtm.org, had this to say about Haiti's odious debt to Northern countries:
According to the latest estimates, over 80% of Haiti’s foreign debt is with the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IBD) with up to 40% each. Under their leadership, the government applied “structural adjustment plans”, now disguised as “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” (PRSP). In exchange for contracting more loans, Haiti has been given some insignificant amount of debt relief or cancellations, which cast the creditors in a positive light. The Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC), for which Haiti was accepted, is a typical odious-debt laundering manoeuvre, as was the case with the Democratic Republic of Congo[7]. Odious debt is replaced by new so-called legitimate loans. CADTM views these new loans as a key part of odious debt as they are used to pay off the old debt. The offence continues to be committed.
Inter-American Development Bank(IBD) has a number of member countries that are borrowing countries, and also non-borrowing countries, and some of which are the USA and U.K., Canada, etc., and Venezuela is but one of a number of South American member countries since before Chavez was democratically elected as Venezuela's president. Venezuela created The Bank of the South to compete with the IMF and IBD creditor nations as an alternate source of financing for Latin American countries and without the neoliberal ideological strings-attached that come with IMF emergency loans and longer term loans from the World Bank.
Forgiving the debt? Hell there should be reparations.
I figure the French should start by making reparations of ...oh let's say...$20 billion. Just for starters.
That's what the French government extorted from Haiti because of the "ruined" slave trade post-independence.