Murderous gangs deployed in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley, the country’s most fertile agricultural region, are starving the population, attacking farm communities and driving farmers off the land, destroying their crops, animals, and homes. In the early part of December, the Miami Herald reported Dec. 17, the Gran Grif gang forced more than 11,000 people to abandon their homes and farms. For weeks before that, in an attempt to expand its territorial hold, the gang targeted several rural communities in the Lower Artibonite region, aiming to expand its control to the port city of St. Marc. The brutal gangs are part and parcel of drug-running syndicates, controlled by London’s Dope, Inc. apparatus.
Wanton destruction continued in other parts of the valley, during which the rice-growing region of Verette came under armed attack, and homes and agricultural storage units were burned to the ground. This is occurring in a country where six million of Haiti’s 11 million inhabitants don’t have enough to eat. At least 1.5 million Haitians are displaced, having been driven from their urban communities by violent gangs and mostly reside in crowded shelters with inadequate food, sanitation, or medical care.
The significance of the Artibonite Valley is not just its fertility and agricultural potential. Under Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, and subsequently under the auspices of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), founded in 1942 by then-Vice President Henry Wallace, the Artibonite Valley was selected as the site of a huge development project, which allowed Haiti to become self-sufficient in food production. Roosevelt also promoted the project to build the Peligré Dam in the Artibonite Valley, built in the 1950s as part of the same IICA development project.
