What does it mean to defend our Americas? For the Black Alliance for Peace, defending our Americas begins with a re-drawing of the map of the Americas. No longer can the United States stand at the center of the hemisphere, upholding an eternal whiteness while imposing a suffocating capitalism. Instead, for BAP, Haiti is the center of the Americas. Solidarity with Haiti is key to the defense of the Americas. Haiti endures the original territory of Black emancipation from slavery, of Black independence from colonialism, and Black resistance to racism and global capitalism.
Yet Haiti has also become the region’s laboratory for neocolonialism and neoliberalism and a centuries-long counter-revolution against Black freedom and sovereignty. Haiti exposes the network of structural connections that fuse the republic to the rest of the Caribbean, but also to Brazil, Colombia, and the US South. These structural connections are forged through global capitalism, militarism and police violence, and the multinational machinations of organizations that serve as proxies for US economic and political power, including The Core Group, The United Nations, the Organization of American States, NATO, and SOUTHCOM.
Defending our Americas means defending Haiti, and defending all Africans in the Americas, against these nefarious neocolonial overlords. And it means replacing the US geography of deprivation, violence, and war, with a grassroots people-centered Zone of Peace.