The Struggle for a Zone of Peace Continues!: A Conversation With Austin Cole

The US/NATO Out of Our Americas Network officially launched on February 21, the anniversary of the assassinations of two legends in Nuestra América, Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz) and Augusto C Sandino. An auspicious date, one that marks the next bold, action-oriented and mass-based phase of the Zone of Peace campaign. Black Agenda Report contributor Clau O’Brien Moscoso spoke to Austin Cole, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) National Co-Coordinator and Haiti/Americas Team Co-Coordinator on the recently launched network, the machinations of the US/EU/NATO Axis of Domination, and what the masses must do to “avenge Nuestra América.”

Clau O’Brien Moscoso: So, to start us off, can you introduce yourself and touch base on what happened this weekend?

Austin Cole: My name is Austin. I am a co-coordinator of Black Alliance for Peace, and one of the co-coordinators of BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team, and I’m based in the Boston area.

Back in April of 2023, we launched the Zone of Peace campaign, which calls for and takes up the 2014 Community for Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) call for a zone of peace in The Americas. And our focus in that campaign is really to activate the grassroots aspects of that call, towards popular struggle and popular sovereignty and self-determination for the peoples of The Americas, to expel capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and colonialism from the region.

This call for a zone of peace in our Americas is really a call for the peoples to come together under our different and unified struggles to guarantee peace. i. And by peace, we don’t mean the absence of conflict but the presence of liberation.

And so in that vein, on Friday, February 21, which was also the commemoration of the assassination of Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary, and the sixtieth anniversary in commemoration of the assassination of Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik Al-Shabbaz. And so that really important date marks the various aspects of the struggle in our Americas, from Latin America and The Caribbean and also with African/black peoples in The United States. We launched, not just BAP, but the collective organizations of the Zone of Peace campaign and what we call the Popular Steering Committee for a Zone of Peace in Our Americas. We also launched the US/NATO Out of Our Americas Network.

CO: Can you talk a little bit more about how we connect that struggle in the local context? How do we talk about what’s happening, whether it’s here in Lima, Peru, in Guayaquil, in Haiti?

AC: A few of the really critical aspects of the campaign in terms of how we do this, that we’re focused on is, really, one, building deeper coordination among our anti-imperialist organizations, political parties, labor and social justice organizations and movements throughout The Americas.

Another one is really connecting the shared struggles across our different regions and across the different nations of the region and peoples and communities to really build power and internationalize those local struggles. And then, finally, the third focus is really around developing popular education, advocacy, grassroots organizing campaigns, and things like that.

Nuestra América goes back to 1891 to Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary, who fought for the independence of Cuba and also the anti-colonial unity of Latin America and The Caribbean. And so he published a piece in 1891 called, Nuestra América, or Our America. And so that really focused on conquering colonialism not only from Spain but also the impending kind of neocolonialism from the Monroe Doctrine of the US in the region.

So in terms of how we think about that with the Black radical peace tradition, which understands this idea that peace is not the absence of conflict, but it is the overcoming or the defeat of the forces of imperialism, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy that destroy our people, that destroy our communities, that wage war against us.

We achieve that by popular struggle, self-defense and resistance. That is not only for black or African people. But it is a struggle for black and African liberation as part of the struggle for the liberation of all peoples. So when we’re talking about the black radical peace tradition when we talk about folks like Malcolm X or Franz Fanon or Patrice Lumumba, all of whom it’s the centennial of their birthdays this year. And we talk about others in the tradition, at least that I come from in terms of the US, we talk about Fannie Lou Hamer. We talk about Assata Shakur. We talk about Jalil Muntaqim. We talk about many, many other people who have fought, and struggled, for liberation of African peoples here.

And we see that as the same form and certainly the same enemy that is destroying the lands, the peoples, the cultures of North America, of Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as on the African continent, in Asia, in Palestine, throughout the world. And so when we think about connecting these things, it’s about understanding, as Malcolm X said, that we have a common enemy.

We can understand that those are the same structures, systems, and interests that marginalize and oppress and maintain domination over black and African peoples within the US. And while that may be a different form because we who are in the US are inside the belly of the beast, it does not change the fact that we are fighting the same enemy just because the conditions are different.

And the fact that we all speak different languages also doesn’t help. The fact that many times, Haiti is left out of the discussion of Latin America and The Caribbean, partially because of white supremacy, partially because of language, and for many other reasons as well, and for convenience oftentimes. And so we also say while we’re talking about Marti, while we talk about Malcolm, while we talk about others, we have to talk specifically as well about this idea of avenging our Americas and understanding that the Haitian Revolution offered an alternative whereby the enslaved Haitians who fought for thirteen years to free themselves from one of the most brutal and depraved regimes of colonialism and slavery that the world has ever seen, where enslaved people in Haiti had a life expectancy of three years.

That when the Haitian Revolution overtook not just France, but Britain and Spain, and in certain instances, aspects in the US of economic isolation, they offered a different path to understand not only are we talking about a liberal form of freedom, which is the freedom to own property and the freedom for capital to move beyond borders. But we’re talking about actual human freedom.

Dessalines said, “Let us walk down a different path, let us not have a missionary spirit to overtake our neighbors, but let them live in peace.” So while Dessalines was living in a very different time, and the Haitian people were living in a very different time in 1804, he was at that time, before Marx, before others had theorized around socialism, was talking specifically about peace and about having self-determination and sovereignty in a peaceful and harmonious, and fraternal community.

CO: How do you see the struggle that’s happening in Haiti since 2004 and predating that, but definitely since the overthrow of Aristide and the formation of The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH). One of the core demands of the campaign is opposing intervention into Haiti. Why is it important for us to be talking about Haiti, to study Haiti, to advocate around this?

AC: There are clear, material interests that the US, NATO, EU – these architects of world imperialism have in maintaining a Haiti that is subservient, that does not have self-determination, and that cannot be an example of what black or African liberation looks like in the world. In addition to a very strong material interest in exploiting Haiti as a source of human labor, as a source of minerals, and as a geographical strategic location within the Caribbean in the middle of the Caribbean. So why should someone in the US care about Haiti? When the Clintons through the Clinton Global Health Foundation helped to, and even before then, Bill Clinton as president helped to destroy the Haitian rice industry by flooding the Haitian market with US rice. One of the main reasons to do this is to open up new markets for capital. In this case, for rice farmers in the US.

And these are large rice farmers. We’re not talking about the small rice farmers in Louisiana who are black, who are themselves struggling to survive. We’re talking about these large companies, many of whom are sending their lowest quality rice to Haiti, which has been shown recently to include arsenic and other toxic chemicals.

They did so because it helps to create a new market for cheap goods that are subsidized by the US so that farmers in the US can have a place to sell their goods that basically has to accept it because they now have the rice industry in Haiti that did exist has been destroyed. And so when things like that happen, it provides no incentive for US capital to try to renegotiate its relationship with labor, with communities in the US and to do anything about the crisis of capitalism.

Instead of them having to potentially reshape relationships between labor and capital here in the US, they get government subsidies, and they push their products out to other markets that can’t complain about the quality because they have no place for recourse to take any action. And then those farmers are gonna do whatever they can to hold on to those subsidies. They become completely intertwined with the politicians at the US level who are then very incentivized to make sure that the Haitian rice industry does not pick back up.

And how are they getting subsidized? Because of US imperialism in Haiti and because of the destruction of infrastructure in Haiti. So all of these things are connected as well when it comes to the export of labor in Haiti. When Obama was president, I believe in 2009, Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State. There were protests in Haiti over garment manufacturers wanting higher wages in the country. And the government in Haiti was considering increasing the minimum wage because it was so low. The Clinton State Department said no.

“Under no circumstances will you increase the minimum wage.” Why is that? Because companies like Levi’s and others that have factories in Haiti don’t want to pay their workers more. And in Haiti, just like in many other countries, those factories have been offshored.. Because they can suppress wages very easily, there’s going to be no pushback in the US because people don’t even know about it. And then, even if they do know about it, they consider it as “Well, it’s Haiti, they should be lucky to have to get $2 an hour. That’s a good job at least.”

They don’t have to consider that because the US government is helping to protect their corporate interests in these other countries. And Haiti is so close that it is very attractive to the US. People might not know that Haiti has the largest population of any island in The Caribbean. There’s over 11 million in Haiti. It has a greater population than the entire English-speaking Caribbean combined. And it is very strategically placed.

And so those are kind of really small examples. Another one I’ll just mention as our comrade, Dr. Jemima Pierre, has mentioned many times, Haiti is a laboratory. In the same way that Palestine and Gaza in particular, but Palestine as a whole is a laboratory for Zionist occupation and settler colonialism in modern settler colonialism, with weapons manufacturing and surveillance and forms of social and physical confinement and all of these things.

Haiti has also been a laboratory for exercises in neocolonialism but also with other forms of aid and disaster capitalism, as I already mentioned, with the Clinton Health Foundation, the UN, many NGOs, the USAID all of these organizations have basically tried out many, many different tactics of control and of a form of humanitarianism that is a liberal humanitarianism.

So, barely any of the money is actually getting to the people of Haiti, and they are being blamed for the lack of “progress and development of infrastructure”. Not only that, Haiti has been a pilot country for neocolonialism- in the 1915 occupation of Haiti by US marines that lasted for nineteen years. They were pilots in many ways throughout the Duvalier dictatorship and in many different forms.

Also, in the post-earthquake disaster relief and the disaster capitalism surrounding that event. And then, since 2004, this operation of the Core Group, which is an unelected, unaccountable group of countries and institutions that basically make the decisions behind the scenes in Haiti as well as the Global Fragility Act that the US has recently piloted in Haiti and in some African countries, in Papua New Guinea, and then the Multinational Security Support mission that is currently in Haiti that is a non-UN mission, that they are trying to convert to a UN peacekeeping commission, which will be a unique UN peacekeeping commission like the one in Somalia. If it happens, it will be funded out of a trust. And that will be like a UN peacekeeping mission previously, but even less accountable, under the guise of “financial feasibility”.

The US required any person who’s going to take over in the transitional presidency in Haiti to accept an intervention and to accept whatever the US and the Core Group say will be the direction of Haiti. So this pseudo-democratic guise of this transition process is all of a laboratory, not only for Haiti and not only for The Americas but also for the entire world.

The exact same thing like Cop City, where there are corporate entities helping to support the Police Foundation in Atlanta to basically say we need to combat the violence that is rising in this city. And what violence were they trying to combat? The uprisings in 2020 against police brutality.

They basically flipped the defund police “demand” on its head and said, no we’re actually going to fund police even more. We’re going to “train them better,” and we’re going to build these massive cop cities.

And this is not new. Folks who have talked about this have noted this. Robert Allen talked about this with the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, MARC, back in 1969 and understanding that organization was taking learnings from Vietnam and counterinsurgency and applying them back during the sixties and then would apply them even more in the seventies and eighties and even to this day.

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CO: Well said. You mentioned Haiti, obviously, but I would like to speak more about its geostrategic location and how that relates to militarization in the region, whether it’s through U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) bases expanding but also joint military exercises in that area. Particularly if you can speak more about Operation Tradewinds and what does that mean for what seems to be an eventual war with China?

AC: So geostrategically, Haiti is relatively central within the Caribbean. If you just look at a map – Haiti is just east of Cuba. So when you’re thinking about The Caribbean, that is almost directly Southeast of Florida. It is above Venezuela and Colombia. Folks might have seen the Colombian president Gustavo Petro visit Haiti about a month ago or so and pointed out how, you know, the lines for drug trafficking from Colombia to Florida to Miami, and all these areas, passed directly through Haiti. That is a critical drug smuggling route. But it’s not just that, it’s a critical route in general for any sea-based trade.

And it’s actually where in 1492, the island where Columbus landed to begin the genocide and and the colonization of The Americas. So, in that area, the US has actually, in the past, wanted to purchase Mole Saint Nicolas, which is an area in Haiti, like an island just off of Haiti. They’ve wanted to purchase many other parts of Haiti or wanted to use Tortuga, the island right by Haiti, and that is a place which was a really important place for piracy and shipping during colonial and precolonial times.

Those sea lanes are not less important than they were back in the 1700s when piracy and these wars were happening. They’re still critical. There is a reason Trump, in one of his first announcements, was so strong about the US wanting to retake the Panama Canal.

So, shipping lanes are really critical. And then another aspect of what you mentioned is Operation Tradewinds. Another aspect of this pivot to focus really strongly on SOUTHCOM, which Trump in 2017 started to focus more on SOUTHCOM. And then particularly towards the end of his presidency, really made that an emphasis, and then Biden deepened that even more.

Trump has now come on to build off of what the Biden administration did and the Biden/Blinken State Department. Now the Trump/Rubio State Department is really intensifying its focus on The Americas and on SOUTHCOM. And one of the critical aspects of that is these training exercises.

They do these training exercises like Operation Trade Winds, which many of them are nominally training exercises for environmental disasters. But, obviously, they’re all through military agreements.

And all of this is to really merge the military processes of all of the countries of the Caribbean in in terms of Trade Winds, not just the islands of the Caribbean, but all the countries in the Caribbean Sea, as well as other operations that happen throughout Central And South America with the US/EU/NATO axis of domination. They bring in EU countries, NATO countries to come to the Caribbean and to take part in these exercises along with the US military.

And they even bring in the National Guard, especially from the South and all across the US. They train with folks in Costa Rica and Panama and Colombia and Chile and Barbados and all in The Bahamas and all of these countries. And so that is under the guise of “climate change is happening, disasters are happening more frequently, so we need to be prepared.”

But they’re also creating this military infrastructure that serves US imperialism and US domination 100%. They are building coordination to be able to do that and to be able to do things like threaten Venezuela with this “border dispute” with Guyana and threaten Nicaragua.

Like they attempted a coup in Nicaragua in 2018 or threatened Cuba and intensified the blockade. And so not only are they sanctioning those countries already economically, not only are they trying to politically subvert them right into causing coups, but they’re also encircling them militarily and building more coordination with these various countries. I think it was just in the news recently in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as in Guyana, how close those countries’ militaries have become in the last few years with the US military.

This broader push for all the solutions runs through the US military. All the solutions run through the Department of Defense. There is a reason that Laura Richardson, the former General Commander of SOUTHCOM, was the one throughout the Biden administration visiting all of these countries in South and Central America and The Caribbean. Not the diplomats, not Blinken even. Although he visited obviously for certain things, it was Laura Richardson that did tours around the region, meeting with presidents, ministers, and other military leaders. This is happening right now, this militarization of our region, and it’s not subtle.

It’s really critical in this battle when we think about Haiti, when we think about Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Honduras, countries that are really in the eye of the storm of US imperialism; all of these other things that are happening in the region are a critical part of the US encircling them and putting pressure on them and trying to really lock down complete control of this hemisphere in preparation for, like you said, potential war with China. That’s why things like the Special Economic Zone in Honduras when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s State Department in 2009 helped perpetuate a coup in Honduras and overthrew Manuel Zelaya (current Hondurand President Xiomara Castro’s husband).

The right wing narco government that came in created agreements with the US and corporations to build these special economic zones to do all of this stuff where the US and these corporate entities could use part of Honduras as more than a free trade zone. It’s like an entire land that they own, like a tech park that they could literally build up. Part of that strategy is to build up these areas of the Western Hemisphere to not have to rely on China. That’s why it’s such a big deal, when Xiomara Castro, the now president of Honduras, said no. That’s why Biden said Latin America and The Caribbean are no longer our backyard. It’s our front yard. We see Trump is very dedicated to it being the backyard. But it is still the same. It is the yard.

Whether it’s physical, a hot war, or a cold war, they are gearing up for it. So we have to understand that it is our role as people in this hemisphere, and particularly as people in the US to defeat imperialism from the inside, to defeat it in this hemisphere, to build a zone of peace, to create a zone of peace, built through popular struggle in our region because that is the only way that we will survive.

CO: Is there anything else you wanna leave the audience with?

AC: How are we going to organize, to coordinate, to communicate among the progressive, radical, and revolutionary movements and formations around our region to expel those forces of domination from our Americas. We’ll have an orientation webinar thinking about this, but this is something that we are not building only as Black Alliance for Peace or even the Popular Steering Committee for a Zone of Peace in Our Americas. This is something all of the forces that are aligned to do this are building, and that we want to include all of those forces and to build this truly from the bottom up through popular struggle understanding that we have to be coordinated in those actions. To quote Dessalines’ independence speech because this really sums up the goal:

Let us walk down another path. Let us imitate those people who, extending their concern into the future and dreading to leave an example of cowardice for posterity, prefer to be exterminated rather than lose their place as one of the world’s free people.

Let’s avenge our Americas. The time is now. We must make our Americas a zone of peace.

(Black Alliance for Peace) by Clau O’Brien Moscoso