Thread by @BrianMteleSUR

On January 13, 2010, my boss at ActionAid Brasil and former advisor to CUT national directorate, Adriano Campolina, told me I was going to Port-au-Prince. I got there by truck from Santo Domingo 3 days later. 13 of my 20 Haitian coworkers were missing. telesurenglish.net/news/Haiti-Hon…

I spent 3 weeks there, helping set up a food distribution network in a refugee camp of 20,000 in Carrefour neighborhood that the UN didn't know existed yet. I witnessed all kinds of sleazy behavior from international NGOs, the UN, Rene Préval and the Clintons at the time.

During my return later that year, Senator Jean Jeanty gave a great speech at a workshop I facilitated. I translated/transcribed it and it ran in Pambazuka. pambazuka.org/governance/hai…

"The UN has been here since 1994, so when we say failure we are talking about them as well as the government. What were they doing before the earthquake? They were organising fraudulent elections so that they could stay in power."

I returned in 10/2010 The Minustah's Nepalese delegation had hired a waste disposal company allegedly owned by René Préval's wife, which dumped their base's sewage in a river where women washed cloths. Cholera returned for the first time in 100 years, killing 10,000.

They were literally pulling corpses out of chemical toilets in downtown Port-au-Prince at the time. I saw this first hand.

There was a lot of enthusiasm about the alliance between progressive INGOs and the 3rd World left in the oughties, due to processes within the formation of the World Social Forum. My experiences in Haiti began to sour me on the entire concept of progressive INGOs.

I left ActionAid in 2011, but the final nail in the coffin of my support of NGO/social movement partnerships was the failure of organizations like Oxfam and ActionAid to speak out publicly against the 2016 coup in Brazil, for fear of losing bourgeois individual donors.

It also goes without saying that most International Charity organizations are sleazy and often collaborate with the US State Department to destabilize left wing governments around the World.

I have stories about this. A workshop I participated in Lima in 2007 Oxfam Bolivia had 2 reps: A liberation theology hippie working with socialist indigenous groups on the Altiplano and a guy from Santa Cruz who looked like an intel agent and was extremely anti-MAS and PT.

I remember him at lunch talking with some right-wing WWF Brasil managers about the "dangers of Dilma being elected in 2010."