Nearly 22 years ago, the Salvadorean social psychologist, Ignacio Martín
Baró
<http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/volumeID_17-editionID_111-ArticleID_761>was
murdered along with 5 other academic and Jesuit colleagues, their
housekeeper and her daughter. Ignacio was the founder of Liberation
Psychology and was a fearless critic and analyst of repression,
including the use of terror as a means of political domination and
suppression. One of the favoured means of exerting domination was the
abduction and murder of trade unionists, community leaders and other
activists, a technique that is now in use in Honduras and Colombia by
government aligned forces. The murders of the UCA 8 were carried out by
an elite group from the Salvadorean army, some of whom were trained at
'School of the Americas <http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec>' a
military college for agents of State repression based in Georgia (USA).
Nearly 4 years ago, another psychologist activist was 'disappeared',
never to be seen again, in another American country, Haiti. He was
Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine.
The following appeared in Narco News
<http://www.narconews.com/Issue48/article2935.html> at the time.
Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, a prominent Haitian human rights activist,
disappeared on the evening of 12 August, 2007. He is co-founder of
the /Trant Septanm/ ("September 30") Foundation, an organization
originally formed to help the victims of the 1991 coup in Haiti.
For over a decade groups organized by Pierre-Antoine have provided
medical and psychological assistance to the victims of violence in
some of Haiti's poorest slums. The groups he helped to found also
assisted migrants deported from abroad to resettle in Haiti, and he
played a leading role in the successful campaign to disband the
Haitian army.
Trant Septanm has been a concerted voice in calling for the arrest
of US-trained military men in the hemisphere, including the
terrorist Luis Posada Carriles
<http://narconews.com/Issue45/article2666.html> [responsible for the
blowing up of a Cuban airliner over Trinidad and recently acquitted
on minor charges by US court - MB].
Pierre-Antoine was abducted shortly after he had announced his
intention to run as a Fanmi Lavalas candidate, the party of former
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in the upcoming round of
parliamentary elections in Haiti.
As a leading human rights activist for the poor, he was outspoken in
denouncing human rights abuses under the UN and US-backed
dictatorship of Gerard Latortue, which governed for two years
following the coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in
February of 2004.
Under the Latortue regime an estimated 4,000 political murders were
perpetrated in the greater Port-au-Prince area alone (overwhelmingly
of Lavalas activists and supporters) according to one scientific
survey
<http://www.haitianalysis.com/2007/7/31/interview-with-athena-kolbe-co-author-of-lancet-study-on-haiti>
published in the /Lancet/ medical journal.
Pierre-Antoine's wife, Michele, says she has received no help from
the Haitian government, and that she continues to call the Haitian
police weekly, but that they don't seem eager to help. According to
Michele, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti told her that they didn't have
time to look for her husband.
In October 2005 at the first "International Tribunal on Haiti" that
investigated the 2004 coup, Pierre-Antoine explained to an audience
of hundreds <http://www.lasolidarity.org/haiti.shtml> in Washington
how he had been arrested, assaulted and expelled from the country by
authorities at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince.
Since his kidnapping the U.S. and Canadian Embassies in
Port-au-Prince have been totally silent. Soon after his kidnapping
Canadian Embassy officials brushed off Canadian activists seeking
assistance with Pierre-Antoine's case <http://www.thac.ca/node/69>.
I for one was not aware of Lovinsky's case until I read an article in
Counterpunch on the return of President Aristide
<http://www.counterpunch.org/roth04112011.html>. There has been no
coverage in the BPS journal The Psychologist, and not a lot elsewhere.
Certainly Lovinsky strikes me as a model for principled community
psychologists. While we do not have to encounter such extreme 'limit
situations' as Martín Baró and Pierre-Antoine, their situations are the
consequence of a system of global exploitation and domination to which
we are all intimately connected.
Some additional web resources on Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine:
http://lovinsky.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/remember-lovinsky-pierre-antoine/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovinsky_Pierre-Antoine
http://hcvanalysis.wordpress.com/haiti-lovinsky-pierre-antoine/
http://www.haitisolidarity.net/article.php?id=193
http://www.counterpunch.org/roth04112011.html
and this piece in French names his killers, citing Washington Post, but
nothing comes up on the Post site when these names are searched for
http://ppfantomedhaiti.com/revelation_washingtonPost.html
Does anyone know anything more?
--
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