The Uses of Paul Farmer » Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/17/the-uses-of-paul-farmer
(Pour ce critique, Paul Farmer se serait rapproché des Clinton et se serait par conséquent ramolli.)
Farmer had always been a sharp critic of the international community’s treatment of #Haiti.
Eventually I asked him a blunt question: “Do you think the administration here was under pressure from international forces to fight the increase in the minimum wage?”
(...) Farmer stammered a little bit, said he didn’t know, and subtly changed the subject.
One reader left an ominous comment on the interview. “No disrespect to Dr. Farmer, as I believe he is sincere,” he wrote, “but he is now a part of the ‘machine’ that essentially drives Haiti.”
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Two years later, WikiLeaks provided me and two colleagues with a window into that machine: 1,918 secret diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Haiti.
The cables proved beyond any doubt what had seemed obvious. Behind the scenes, American officials had mounted a full-scale assault on the minimum wage increase, financing studies against it and pressuring the president to oppose it.
If Farmer had “engaged in the hard process of discernment” – an idea he promotes in his book Haiti After the Earthquake – the answer to my question would have been “Yes, of course.”
It was strange. In the past, Farmer wrote disapprovingly of plans to give Haitians low-paying jobs in textile factories – what many consider to be sweatshops. Either he had changed his mind or was holding his tongue.
