Woman pleads guilty to harboring girl in Pembroke Pines home

[seemslikeadream]

By Associated Press
June 10, 2004

FORT LAUDERDALE — A woman whose family was accused of holding a Haitian girl in virtual slavery for three years pleaded guilty to harboring her, but denied ever abusing the girl.

Marie Pompee could face a decade in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Her sentencing hearing is set for July 1.

Her husband, Willy Pompee, was also charged with harboring the girl, and their oldest son, Willy Pompee Jr., was charged with sexual battery. Both fled the country in 1999 after the child was removed from their home.

The girl was 12 when local police took her from the Pompee's $400,000 Pembroke Pines residence. She told authorities she was fed little, forced to clean the house, made to sleep on the floor, and sexually assaulted by her "stepbrother."

more
http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/florida/article/0,2071,NPDN_14910_2951182,00.html

[seemslikeadream]

1. Pines couple charged with enslaving Haitian girl

Pines couple charged with enslaving Haitian girl after smuggling her into


The case came to light when the girl befriended three employees of a Fort Lauderdale modeling school after responding to a television ad for the school. During daily calls, details of the girl's life slowly emerged.

She said although she shared the house with the Pompees and their four children, she slept on the floor and was forced to clean the house from the moment she returned home from school until she went to bed. She said she was not allowed to have any personal possessions and was hardly fed. Then, as she held her abdomen in pain, details of the alleged sexual abuse came out.


The U.S. Attorney's Office said human trafficking is a modern form of slavery. According to recent government estimates, as many as 20,000 people a year are brought into the United States for forced labor or sexual exploitation.

Child slavery is an entrenched tradition in Haiti where, according to some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 child slaves, called restaveks. Restavek means "to stay with" in Creole, and children on the impoverished island sometimes are referred to as "animals."

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-censlave24mar2...


Of Haitian Bondage


Friday, May 4, 2001, Time Magazine, TIM PADGETT/MIAMI AND PORT-AU-PRINCE


By the late 1990s, Haitian-American community activists like Romer had begun to detect the presence of restaveks in Miami. When the activists began to broach the issue on Haitian radio shows and at church gatherings, they first faced denial and even veiled threats of ostracism from some of the community's old guard. But the phenomenon could no longer be covered up after Oct. 2, 1999, when Florida officials working on a tip from neighbors removed a 12-year-old Haitian girl--filthy, unkempt and in acute abdominal pain from repeated rape--from the affluent suburban home of middle-class Haitian-American merchants Willy and Marie Pompee in Pembroke Pines. The girl, a restavek, said she had been forced to have sex with the Pompees' 20-year-old son Willy Jr. since she was nine. The father and son, who police say are on the lam in Haiti, have been charged with slaveholding and sexual battery, respectively. Marie, who would not take repeated phone requests for comment, remains under investigation.

It is impossible to estimate how many others like the Pembroke Pines girl, nicknamed Little Hope in the Haitian community, are laboring in American households. But Romer and other Haitian- American social workers report that current and former restaveks are coming to them in greater numbers now for help, largely because the Pembroke Pines case galvanized support for such victims. Several organizations have set up hotlines for kids seeking help; they offer ex-restaveks assistance in finding homes, jobs and opportunities for schooling.
http://www.racematters.org/ofhaitianbondage.htm

[seemslikeadream]

2. 12-year-old girl on hit list for giving Aristide flowers

12-year-old girl on hit list for giving Aristide flowers


One of Haiti's 400,000 restaveks (unpaid domestic servants) is in hiding in Northern Haiti. Death squads targeted her after they looted her school, where they found a photograph of her giving flowers to President Aristide. The girl, whose name has been withheld for her own safety, is 12 years old. Her story was read Monday on Flashpoints, the investigative news show broadcast weekdays at 5 p.m. on KPFA 94.1 FM.

It is the words of Aristide that freed me, and it is the words about Aristide that condemn me.

My mother died when I was a child, and my father sent me to live with a family in Cap Haitian. I was four years old. Every day I got up and I washed the floor. I hauled water on my head. I went to the market and bought food and charcoal. I cooked the food and I washed the clothes. I did work all day and my back hurt.

I felt that I was not a person, just a zombie walking around asleep. I was not allowed to eat at the table or sleep in a bed. Instead I ate whatever food was left when others were finished. I slept under the table with the dogs. I was not yet alive. I had not been born.

President Aristide spoke about the restaveks on the radio, and he said, “All the restaveks are people.” I did not know who he was, so it made me laugh because I thought he must be a fool to think I was a person and to say that the restaveks are the future of Haiti.

http://www.sfbayview.com/031004/onhitlist031004.shtml

[seemslikeadream]

3. Haiti's Dark Secret: The Restavecs

Josiméne, 10, and photojournalist Gigi Cohen.
Credit: Gigi Cohen
© 2004

March 20, 2004 -- Freelance producer Rachel Leventhal presents the moving story of one of Haiti's estimated 300,000 restavecs -- young children from the rural countryside literally sold to work for families in the poverty-stricken nation's urban areas.

Josiméne, 10, is a live-in maid in a two-room house outside of Port-au-Prince. Her parents are small farmers in Haiti's remote and mountainous heartland.

Among other duties, Josiméne cares for two younger children, cleans the house, washes dishes, scrubs laundry by hand, runs errands and sells small items from the family's informal store.

As part of the Child Poverty Photo Project, photojournalist Gigi Cohen briefly got to know Josiméne. In the course of her work, Cohen heard about the life the young girl lives as a servant and the life she left behind.

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1779562


A Child Caring for Children

One of the two children Josiméne cares for argues and points at Josiméne while the girl's mother fixes her hair. Josiméne also bathes the children, cleans the two-room house, washes dishes, scrubs laundry by hand, runs errands, and sells small items from the family's informal store

[seemslikeadream]

4. Tinoire posted this awhile ago and said I could repost it

Go America. Just GO! GO AWAY! / My response to your powerful post


But these light-skinned people, descendants of the Old Colonials, and their darker skinned "house niggers"



living in these houses



and riding these very rare horses in Haiti on jump courses most Upper-class Americans can only dream of



thought it was worth it



to send School of the Americas thugs like these to kill our own countrymen



and bring the Ton-Ton Macoute Republican/DLC-loving tortures back.



These people, very dark-skinned as you can see, disagreed.



This boy will die from it



This girl, still alive, dreams of a better world

http://www.sakapfet.com/photocontest/2003/images/entries/Mariejo%20Mont-Reynaud,%20Palo%20alto,%20CA/The%20%20Red%20Kivet,%20Fort%20Kampon,%204hrs%20Hike%20from%20Leogane.jpg

Be afraid America. We will gracefully carry our burden but we shall expose your shame once again, just as in 1804.

http://www.sakapfet.com/photocontest/2003/images/entries/Andre%20Boulmier,%20Meyrin%20Switzerland/Commerce%20de%20Proximite,%20Port-au-Prince.jpg

because our children, too, have a right to dreams & rightful expectations of a decent life

http://www.sakapfet.com/photocontest/2003/images/entries/Jermain%20J%20Merola,%20Jacquet%20Haiti/Haut%20de%20Kenscoff1.jpg

We shall not forgive you or the evil bogeymen you bought



We shall not forget the boys you slaughtered



all in the name of Americans and Haitian collaborators who live in homes like this



So take your ass-hole



Take your DLC



Take your God-damned imperialistic military



And get the fuck out of my country



No need to fly your Stars and Stripes


because we have our own flag of which we are sufficiently proud, & which means things through its colors which give you NIGHTMARES



& a constitution that REALLY meant something and liberated South American countries from 'subsidizing' your way of life



Haiti, not America, was the first "Free" Republic in the Western Hemisphere but it galls America, built on the blood & sweat of slaves, to acknowledge that a bunch of slaves whooped imperialistic ass.


18 May, 2004 denouncing the US occupation of Haiti

Tens of thousands of Haitians took to the streets on May 18 to call for the return of democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and for an end to the country’s foreign military occupation.

Haitian police units backed up by U.S. Marines fired in the air and into crowds, killing at least one demonstrator. Saintus “Titus” Simpson, 23, of Delmas 33 was shot in the head, spilling his brain, as demonstrators approached the central Champ de Mars square.

Marguerite Laurent of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership cited sources saying that at least four people died. “One Haitian woman seized the fourth body that fell next to her and refused to give it to the Marines,” Laurent reported. “She removed all her clothes to show she had no weapons while Marines surrounded her at gunpoint. She cursed in Kreyol, calling on the revolutionary ancestors and shouting “Liberte ou lamo!” (Liberty or death!) She picked up the body herself and put it on her bare back, daring the Marines to kill her also while she carried it away.”

<snip>

The night before the march, U.S. helicopters flew and hovered low all over the city, Washington’s now common form of psychological warfare in Haiti.

<snip>

http://www.haitiprogres.com/eng05-19.html

[Laughing Mirror]

5. Thank you for reposting these powerful images and comments

By the way, where is Tinoire?

[0007]

6. Thank you for the powerful photos and the reminder of Haiti

and the atrociousness of this country.

[seemslikeadream]

7. Thanks so much downstairsparts and 0007 Please look at these

Tinoire's were much better but these were the inspiration.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x611496

[seemslikeadream]

8. Before fall of Aristide, Haiti hit by aid cutoff

seemslikeadream
Before fall of Aristide, Haiti hit by aid cutoff


By Farah Stockman
and Susan Milligan, Globe Staff, 3/7/2004

WASHINGTON -- For three years, the US government, the European Union, and international banks have blocked $500 million in aid to Haiti's government, ravaging the economy of a nation already twice as poor as any in the Western Hemisphere.

It is important to understand that we need help because we are the poorest country in the hemisphere," said Claude Roumain, a key opposition leader who has called for a special international fund to rebuild Haiti and an audit of the central government. "The main concern is where we stand now. To know exactly and to tell the truth to the people."

Many of Aristide's supporters, in Haiti and abroad, angrily contend that the international community, particularly the United States, abandoned the fledgling democracy when it needed aid the most. Many believe that Aristide himself was the target of the de facto economic sanctions, just as Haiti was beginning to put its finances back in order. "This is a case where the United States turned off the tap," said Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University. "I believe they did that deliberately to bring down Aristide."

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/03/07/before_fall_of_a... /






to justify a coup, and to soften up a people, so that the drug traffickers could take over. remember, everyone "when you criminalize drugs, you aid terrorists"

free button with purchase for DUers from http://pinkobuttons.com type DUer, and the title and size of your choice in the payment page comment box.





Tinoire
Response to Original message

I don't so much mind them cutting off the aid

because it's often used to shackle countries even more. What I do mind is that they wouldn't release the country from even some of the demands that it had accepted for that aid. And then when Aristide went along, despite the lack of aid, building more hospitals & schools and housing, and showing too much independence they had to go whisk him away.

So the elite & industrialists are back in charge offering the slave labor of darker skinned Haitians to the world.

'You can come and make money, keep home, and they will not come and trouble you like they did last week,'' said Gérard R. Latortue, former Haitian foreign minister and United Nations official who is now a business consultant living in Boca Raton. ``Haiti is a land of opportunity.''

<snip>

But community leaders said the abundant, available labor and low salaries makes Haiti an ideal location for investors, especially in tourism, apparel manufacture and agriculture.


<sbip>

The Haitian Parliament last month passed a new law to encourage foreign investment, with provisions such as a 15-year tax holiday, duty-free imports on equipment and supplies, and no restriction on repatriation of capital.

<snip>

Several big projects are under way, including a tourist development being planned for the island of Gonave and an industrial park being built near Cap Haitien by the Dominican Republics biggest apparel maker Grupo M.

<snip>

''Haiti is a virgin country,'' said Olivier Nadal, president of Haiti Alternative Liberté Travail Espoir (Liberty, Work, Hope).

http://www.newshaiti.com/index.php?mode=single&n=46




On edit: And meanwhile... (just found this)

Haiti: 'rebels' used to break union at Grupo M (Levi's) factory

Haiti: 'rebels' used to break union at Grupo M (Levi's) factory
2004-03-06 09:30:21
by Haiti Support Group
The new union of workers at the Grupo M factory at Ouanaminthe on Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic has been violently busted. The Grupo M management has enlisted the support of the armed insurgents, who earlier this week overthrew the Haitian government, to break the union. Please take action now to demand the re-instatement of the sacked union members.

On Monday March 1st, 2004, 34 members of the SOKOWA, the new trade union at the Grupo M-owned free trade zone at Ouanaminthe in north-east Haiti were fired by the management. The next day, as workers at the Codevi Free Trade Zone began to take action in support of the union, members of the so-called ‘rebel’ forces, who last week staged a coup d’etat against the Haitian government, arrived at the factory with guns to rough up the workers. After several workers were handcuffed and others beaten up, the workforce was compelled to resume work. Later, the ‘rebels’ revealed that they had been contacted the previous evening by the Grupo M factory management who had told them that workers were going to “make problems”.

Please take action now in support of the Sendika Ouvriye Kodevi Wanament - SOKOWA (the Ouanaminthe Codevi Workers’ Union) - who have been told to collect their final paychecks on Monday, 8th March. The main contract at the Ouanaminthe Grupo M factory is to assemble jeans for the world-famous Levi Strauss company. To support the new union at the Grupo M factory in Haiti, please write letters and emails demanding the reinstatement of the fired union members immediately.

Send to:

Fernando Capellan, CEO Grupo M SA Caribbean Industrial Park, Matanzas, Santiago, Dominican Republic email: [e-mail] cc: [e-mail]

Michael Kobori, Director, Global Code of Conduct, Levi Strauss & Co. 1155 Battery St. San Francisco, CA 94111 USA Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] email: [e-mail]

cc: Haiti Support Group - email: [e-mail] First of May-Batay Ouvriye union federation - email: [e-mail]


http://www.newshaiti.com/index.php?mode=single&page=2&n=513

[Dirk39]

9. "You are either with us or against us"

"They are our brothers, these freedom fighters and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers."
Ronald Reagan, describing the Contras in Nicaragua and the foundation of American democracy.


"Food, clean water, education and healthcare. These are basic human rights. If democracy is to be more than a facade, nice in theory, but irrelevant in the face of global economic relationships, we must democratize democracy."
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, describing democracy



And here's another moral equal of the founding fathers in the age of digital consumer cameras. No comment necessary:

I remember a lot about the Nazis, but this thump-up thing is new to me in the book of human atrocities.



Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[seemslikeadream]

10. BUSH'S PLAN FOR PEACE IS THE PEACE OF THE COMMON GRAVE

EVERY DEATH CREATES NEW ENEMIES
MORE TERRORISTS
MORE DANGER
MORE DEATH
AND REMEMBER...

HE IS JUST GETTING STARTED...

BUSH'S PLAN FOR PEACE
IS THE PEACE OF THE COMMON GRAVE

http://www.bushflash.com/pax.html


sie ahnten nichts von mir
von meiner wilden gier
doch als du kamst zu mir
da wurde ich ein tier
kein gedanke an danach
als ich dir die knochen brach

tot tot tot ich mache dich tot
tot tot tot von blut alles rot

tot

fuer mein naechstes leben
schoepfe ich neue kraft
ich bin dem toeten ergeben
in der einzelhaft

tot tot tot ich mache dich tot
tot tot tot von blut alles rot
tot tot tot ich mache dich tot
tot tot tot von blut alles rot

ein dahinsichen
von gottes hand
ich kann dich riechen
und das denken verschwand

tot tot tot tot tot tot tot ich mache dich tot
tot tot tot von blut alles rot tot tot tot tot

ich mache dich tot ich mache dich tot
ich mache dich tot ich mache dich tot

sag mir was du willst
dass du meine sehnsucht stillst
ich mache dich tot fuer immerdar
von blut alles rot auf gottes altar

tot tot tot ich mache dich tot
tot tot tot von blut alles rot

ich mache dich tot fuer immerdar
ich mache dich tot glaub mir es ist wahr
ich mache dich tot fuer immerdar
ich mache dich tot auf gottes altar


they suspected nothing of me
of my wild greed
yet as you became me
I became an animal
no thought after that
as I broke your bones

dead dead dead I make you dead
dead dead dead of blood of all red

dead