Monica Petersen, Haiti & the Octopus of the Deep State (Part 3)

Surviveandheal15 Lives On!!**

Part 1 HERE, Part 2 HERE

February 26th, 2021

(**Note: This is NOT a QAnon Article. This author does NOT believe in QAnon AT ALL.)

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
- Marie Curie

“… the real significance of this scandal for me […] is the link to contemporary slavery and trafficking. I can’t say to what extent, but there is human trafficking happening through the Clinton’s [Caracol] Complex. And mining has always been historically linked to trafficking, slavery, and labor exploitation.”
— Monica Petersen, Research Fellow and Assistant to the Director at the Human Trafficking Center at the University of Denver, in January 2016 Facebook Post (LINK)

The Laura Silsby Case: Another Clinton-Connected Human Trafficking Scandal in Haiti

It is again important to note Monica Petersen specifically wrote about “two huge human trafficking scandals” happening in Haiti that allegedly led back to the Clintons, in her 2016 Facebook post. However, she only specifically says that human trafficking was occurring at the Caracol complex in northern Haiti. So where was the other “human trafficking scandal” in Haiti, if there indeed was one? It is therefore very important to bring up the Laura Silsby human trafficking scandal in Haiti in 2010, that occurred 6 years before Petersen’s death. Unlike Monica Petersen, the Laura Silsby case was actually covered by a pretty wide range of mainstream news outlets at its time around 2010. Since then however, there has ALSO been a resounding “mainstream media silence” about this Clinton-connected scandal as well. Laura Silsby was a supposed Baptist missionary, who along with other “missionaries” from the “New Life Children’s Refuge” charity in Boise, Idaho, travelled to Haiti in 2010, after the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Silsby and her fellow missionaries were supposedly in Haiti to “rescue” children who had been left orphaned by the earthquake. However, only 3 weeks after the earthquake, Silsby and 10 other missionaries from her charity were arrested by Haitian authorities for attempting to illegally take 33 children across the Haitian border into the Dominican Republic. Very significantly, the Harvard Human Rights Journal published an in-depth study of the Silsby human trafficking case by Law School Professor Shani King, titled “Owning Laura Silsby’s Shame: How the Haitian Child Trafficking Scheme Embodies the Western Disregard for the Integrity of Poor Families.” Quoting from Professor King’s article:

“On January 29, 2010, less than three weeks after the earthquake, Haitian authorities arrested ten U.S. Baptist missionaries for attempting to take 33 children by bus across the border into the Dominican Republic without proper documentation. A week later, the missionaries were charged with child kidnapping and criminal association. While the missionaries claimed good intentions and ignorance of Haitian laws, Haitian prosecutors argued that there had been intentional wrongdoing. In the course of a month, President Clinton brokered the release of all the missionaries, except for the group leader, Laura Silsby.

While Laura Silsby awaited trial, the press brought to light several facts that raised serious suspicions about her intent to traffic or smuggle the children as part of a grey adoption scheme. In 2009, Silsby visited Haiti with the stated intent to establish an orphanage. At the time, Silsby faced numerous court cases in the U.S. for bad debt and unpaid wages. In November 2009, she registered her New Life Children’s Refuge charity at an address in Boise, Idaho, and a month later the house was repossessed for lack of payment. In the midst of her personal debt crisis, the January earthquake struck Haiti, and Silsby organized a mission to “gather 100 orphans from the streets” of Haiti and take them to a shelter in the Dominican Republic. The children would be housed in a leased hotel because Silsby’s purported charity did not yet manage an orphanage or own any property in the Dominican Republic. U.S. authorities later stated that New Life Children’s Refuge was not listed as a U.S. nonprofit or as a U.S. international adoption agency. In March, after her arrest, evidence was introduced in Silsby’s case showing that on January 26, 2010, she had previously attempted to take a different group of 40 children across the border. Haitian and Dominican authorities turned her away for lack of authorizing documents. Three days later she attempted to cross over with the second group — the 33 children — again without proper documentation.

[…] After the earthquake, the Haitian government tried to crack down on unauthorized adoptions to avoid child trafficking. In addition, the Dominican consul in Haiti had personally warned Silsby that she lacked the necessary paperwork to take children out of the country and risked arrest. On March 17, 2010, after careful verification of identities by the Social Welfare Ministry of Haiti, 32 out of the 33 children were returned to their families (the last one being returned shortly thereafter), thus confirming that none of the children were orphans. […] Suspicions about Silsby’s intent to smuggle or traffic the children to the Dominican Republic further increased, when on March 19, 2010, Silsby’s legal advisor — Jorge Torres-Puello, an American-Dominican living in the Dominican Republic as a fugitive — was arrested and accused of human trafficking. U.S. authorities revealed that Torres-Puello was ‘linked to a network that trafficked in Haitian and Central American children and [was] wanted in the United States, El Salvador and Costa Rica. His wife was already imprisoned in El Salvador and ‘faced charges of presumed sexual exploitation of minors and women.’

Despite Silsby’s stated intent to take the children over the border to an unauthorized orphanage and her connections to human traffickers such as Torres-Puello, the courts eventually dropped the kidnapping and criminal association charges against her. Silsby was instead convicted under the additional charge of organizing illegal travel, sentenced to time served (3 months and 8 days), and released on May 17, 2010. In the end, her sentence was based on the least polemic charge against her. The pressing issue — whether Silsby intended to deliver the children into trafficking rings or grey adoption markets — was not addressed or resolved.’’

Jorge Torres-Puello, the “lawyer” who mysteriously showed up in Haiti to defend Laura Silsby and her incredibly shady group of fellow “missionaries,” turned out to be a for-real child trafficker who was already on the run from the law himself and wanted in multiple countries, including the US! As if this could not get any sketchier, Professor King at the beginning of his article states that, “Despite evidence of association with child traffickers, the Haitian justice system- prodded in part by President Clinton’s diplomatic efforts on behalf of the missionaries- determined that none of the missionaries were guilty of illegal activities, except the leader Laura Silsby…” So we have a source no less reputable than the Harvard Human Rights Journal, stating that Bill Clinton himself “prodded” Haitian authorities to quickly release all these “missionaries” except Silsby, who herself was quickly released after just a few months also. This was in spite of the fact that the question of whether Silsby and her co-conspirators “intended to deliver the children into trafficking rings” was NOT “addressed or resolved.” Again, based on my own Google search query for “Laura Silsby,” there was a brief flurry of articles and reports from mainstream press agencies about the Silsby case after her arrest in 2010… followed by a virtual “media silence” from then on. The Laura Silsby case was quite obviously a Haitian human trafficking scandal that led directly back to the Clintons… could this have been the other “huge human trafficking scandal” that Monica Petersen was referring to in the January 2016 Facebook post?

Possible Steps Forward for Investigators and Activists

The circumstances of Monica Petersen’s death in Haiti is shrouded in a virtual media silence, accompanied by a trickle of social media posts that shed a deeply disturbing light on what the actual circumstances of Petersen’s death may have been. At the same time, I fully realize that I am writing this in February 2021, only a little over a month after a mob of Trump supporters, many of them quite openly QAnon conspiracy supporters, stormed the US Capitol. Trying to have a serious discussion about Monica Petersen’s investigation of human trafficking in Haiti, and it’s possible connection to the Clintons, is obviously an extremely difficult task. I fully get that putting “Clintons” and “human trafficking” together in the same sentence, invites every kind of ludicrous conspiracy theory imaginable. In my own defense, I have tried to stick to the most reputable sources possible in my investigation of Monica Petersen’s time spent in Haiti and her death there. I strongly feel that in order to “break through” the wall of media-generated misinformation and hysteria generated by the current “QAnon craze,” it is essential to look at the existing facts about Monica Petersen and Haiti as they actually are, and NOT ignore the available evidence that is clearly “hiding in plain site.”

I definitely believe that in order to make any progress in figuring out what actually happened to Monica Petersen, at least as I perceive it, there are four main “areas” that clearly need to be looked at:
1.) What really were Monica Petersen’s contacts with Caracol workers, and possibly their family members and friends, as well as other Haitian activists, during her time conducting human trafficking investigations in Haiti during 2015–16? Do other documented forms of labor trafficking and labor exploitation known to occur at the Caracol factory and surrounding communities, be able to shine more of a light on Petersen’s findings about what may have been occurring at Caracol?

2.) Was there anything at all to Petersen’s speculation that labor trafficking may have been occurring at the Morne Bossa gold mine that is very close to the Caracol complex? Or in other words, was Petersen’s speculation that Haitian workers may have been forced to labor at the gold mine for “little or no wages” in anyway true?

3.) Petersen alleged human trafficking may be happening near Cap-Haïtien in northern Haiti, a region of the country that in particular has a history of being destabilized by right-wing counter-insurgencies against populist movements. These counter-insurgencies are themselves undoubtedly supported by the “covert operations” of foreign intelligence agencies, corporate interests, and private military contractor firms like DynCorp and many others with a presence in Haiti. As seen in Haiti and in many other “conflict areas” in other parts of the world, this kind of highly-unstable social environment can be a “breeding ground” for drug trafficking and other kinds of criminal activities, and in its worst forms, can be an environment that enables child trafficking and human trafficking in various forms. Could this “nexus” of a highly-unstable political situation, drug trafficking and covert operations have anything to do, if at all, with Petersen’s allegation that human trafficking was happening at Caracol?

4.) Monica Petersen worked at the Human Trafficking Center roughly in the time period of 2014–2016. Do any of her academic colleagues, or other students or people connecting with the HTC, possibly have relevant information about the investigations that Petersen was doing in Haiti?

I.) In regards to Monica Petersen’s time in Haiti, clearly the most important lead is Petersen’s own statement that human trafficking was happening to some unknown extent at the Caracol Industrial Park. Again, was it workers at Caracol who told her this? This would seem most logical, since Petersen said she personally visited Caracol in 2015 and talked to workers about working conditions at the factory. The Caracol Complex, as well as the nearby Morne Bossa gold mine, are both themselves only about 16 and 6 miles respectively from Cap-Haïtien, a major population center and shipping container port for the north of Haiti. There is a 2013 report about the Caracol Industrial Park from “Gender Action,” a gender equality advocacy organization based in Washington D.C.. The report provides a very in-depth field investigation of working conditions at the Caracol factory and other detailed analysis about the lives of workers at Caracol and people in the communities surrounding the Caracol factory, as well as a detailed report about the financing and development of the Caracol Industrial Park. The report was released pretty shortly after the Caracol factory began operating in 2012, and was prepared by American researchers with research support work provided by Faculty members of the Social Sciences Department at the Université d’Etat d’Haïti in Port-au-Prince. These Haitian and American researchers personally visited the Caracol area in Haiti multiple times in 2013 and interviewed over two dozen Caracol workers and people from the communities surrounding the factory complex for this field research report. This was only about 2 years before Monica Petersen herself visited the Caracol complex to talk to workers there in 2015, according to the previously described Facebook post from 2016. The report’s investigation of the Caracol factory in 2013 found that 90% of the textile workers employed by S&H Global, the main employer at the Caracol complex, were female workers. Again, S&H Global is a subsidiary of the South Korean-based, global textile manufacturer Sae-A Traders, that itself has its own very notorious history of labor and other severe human rights abuses at their textile factories both at Caracol and in other parts of the world, as described already here.

The 2013 Gender Action report states that there are two recognized labor unions that represent the workers at Caracol. These unions are the Union of Valiant S&H Global Workers (SOVASHG), and the Union of Global Sae-A Workers (SOGSA). SOVASHG and SOGSA are essentially union “locals” at Caracol, that are each part of different national confederations of workers in Haiti. SOVASHG is organized through “Batay Ouvriye” (“May 1st- Workers’ Fight Federation”), a national workers’ confederation in Haiti that has been active in organizing workers for the Disney corporation and other workers in Haiti since the 1990s. SOGSA is organized through the “Autonomous Federation of Haitian Workers” (CATH), another national labor confederation in Haiti that represents mostly assembly workers and has roots in the Latin American trade union movement. Is it possible Petersen may have also been in touch with trade union representatives from these unions representing Caracol workers? Even if she was not, representatives from these unions, in addition to the Caracol workers themselves, would be potential resources to turn to for information about what has really been going on at Caracol. More up-to-date field reports about conditions at and around the Caracol complex in Haiti would be enormously helpful in this regard. If it was not Caracol workers, then who else in Haiti could have told Petersen about human trafficking at Caracol? Petersen also said in her 2015 Facebook post that she was seeking to work with “pro-sex worker” support organizations in Haiti. Was Petersen able to successfully make contact with such an organization or organizations? If Petersen did really have contacts with Haitian social justice-oriented groups that support sex workers, such a group or groups could have more information about Petersen’s time spent in Haiti, and maybe even about the circumstances of her death.

Labor trafficking is known to occur at the Caracol complex and surrounding communities. By “labor trafficking,” I mean in the broadest sense of the term, the various ways in which workers can be forced, via different forms of coercion of varying severity, to perform all different kind of labor for either no or very little monetary compensation. The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA), passed by the US Congress in 2000 to protect victims of trafficking, defines “labor trafficking” as follows: “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.” The US Department of Health & Human Services released a “fact sheet” about human trafficking that describes two main forms of labor trafficking: the first is debt bondage or bonded labor, which the report describes as “the most widely used method of enslaving people.” Debt bondage, or “working off a debt,” occurs when workers are forced to provide labor to an employer and/or some kind of loan shark as a means of repayment of money loaned to them, often lent to the workers at very high, usurious interest rates. Workers are robbed of the value of their labor in this situation, because the value of the labor they provide is more than the original sum of the money lent by loan sharks to workers. Workers who have to work off debt therefore loose out on a very significant amount of pay in these kinds of situations. The second and even more severe form of labor trafficking described by the report is forced labor, essentially modern slavery, where “… victims are forced to work against their own will, under the threat of violence or some other form of punishment.” The connections between child sex trafficking and various forms of labor trafficking are clear. As the DHHS report states, “…[worldwide] there are an estimated 246 million exploited children aged between 5 and 17 involved in debt bondage, forced recruitment for armed conflict, prostitution, pornography, the illegal drug trade, the illegal arms trade and other illicit activities…” It is again worth repeating that the Human Trafficking Center, Monica Petersen’s former employer, specifically specializes in researching and investigating all different kinds of labor trafficking at an academic level.

The people of Haiti are long known to suffer some of the worst poverty in the entire Western hemisphere, and various forms of debt labor, or “labor servitude,” can clearly be found in Haiti and throughout the low-wage countries of the third world. It is very important to point out however, that the 2013 Gender Action report described above found through its own field investigation of Caracol, that various forms of debt bondage were definitely commonplace amongst Haitians workers at the Caracol complex. The Gender Action field report found that small-scale money lenders, or loan sharks, were actively lending money to workers at the Caracol complex at often very high interest rates, especially considering the extremely low wages Caracol workers received to begin with. At least in some cases, these money lenders at Caracol were known to take away from Haitian workers their government ID cards or their Caracol work ID cards, as a form of collateral until the money owed to them, plus interest, was paid by the Caracol workers.

Screenshot from Gender Action’s Report on Caracol Plant, 2013

The Caracol field report includes a picture of the windshield of a Haitian money lender’s vehicle parked right outside the front entrance of the Caracol factory at closing time. The windshield of the vehicle is completely covered in the ID cards of Haitian workers that the money lender had taken from the Caracol workers as collateral, until they paid back the money loaned to them by the lender. Having your ID card taken away from you and being forced to labor at a textile sweatshop until you find a way to repay or work off your debt, is clearly a severe form of debt bondage or involuntary servitude, especially for the extremely low-wage textile workers in Haiti. As the Gender Action report found, the average wage of the Caracol textile workers laboring for S&H Global in 2013 was the equivalent of $4.57 a day. To put this in some context, a more recent 2019 report from the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, “The High Cost of Low Wages in Haiti,” states that the average minimum wage for export apparel workers (of which the Caracol workers are definitely included) was only 420 gourdes, or $5.07 a day. According to the Solidarity Center’s findings, this wage is more than 4 times less than the estimated cost of living for workers in Haiti.

The Gender Action report’s interviews with Caracol workers, revealed widespread sentiment from the Caracol workers that they could barely subsist on the wages paid to them at the factory, if they could subsist on the wages at all. The report stated that of the interviews the researchers conducted with a dozen Caracol workers, only one worker interviewed said she could save any money from her wages at the Caracol factory (and she herself lived rent-free with her parents!) As the report also stated, the “daily minimum wage [at Caracol] neither enables workers to climb out of poverty nor provides sustained demand for small business services, needed to develop north Haiti…” One other Caracol worker interviewed said his wages were “just better than nothing at all”, another worker said, “More or less, my life is slightly better now. But the salary isn’t enough and I can’t buy almost anything I need.” Other workers reported planning to return to school to try to find better paying work than what they had hoped for at the Caracol factory. The 2013 report even stated that the small number of food vendors that congregated right outside the Caracol factory to provide meals to Caracol workers on their lunch break, were themselves not able to make ends meet, because they had to sell so many meals on credit to the struggling Caracol workers. Poverty wages were so severe at Caracol that workers were literally going into debt just trying to feed themselves during their workdays. Very significantly, these statements about working conditions from Caracol workers very much corroborate what Monica Petersen herself claimed that she heard herself from workers at Caracol, when she went there to investigate working conditions only two years later in 2015. Again, Petersen reported hearing from workers that wages at Caracol were “too low & below contracts & legal minimum wage in Haiti.”

These reports clearly show that the Caracol complex and surrounding communities struggle with a high concentration of very low-wage, mostly female workers suffering from various forms of harassment and labor and other human rights abuses. Caracol workers are known to be threatened with sexual harassment while at work, and struggle to make it, if at all, on poverty wages paid at the factory while often being preyed upon by predatory lenders operating nearby. Given this overall environment of poverty and exploitation known to exist at Caracol, it is all the more chilling to consider Monica Petersen’s claim in 2016 that an actual human trafficking operation was happening to some unknown extent at the Caracol complex. Human traffickers and child abusers of all types are well known for preying upon and abusing the most impoverished and vulnerable people in any society. Given the high level of deprivation already clearly existing amongst the workers and surrounding communities at the Caracol complex in Haiti, this makes Petersen’s claim about human trafficking all the more disturbing.

II.) Given the relevant social media information available, I definitely think the Morne Bossa gold mine, located only a little under 15 miles from the Caracol factory in northern Haiti, deserved further scrutiny. Petersen stated the following specific to the Morne Bossa mine in the 2016 Facebook post: “I’d like to go see for myself who’s laboring at Morne Bossa, but I would hypothesize that the Dominicans are doing the contractual oversight of the mining, while marginalized Haitians are being exploited for low or no cost labor in dangerous mining conditions.” To be 100% clear, given the limited context of the Facebook post, Petersen is only speculating here that Haitian laborers might be being exploited as “low or no cost” labor at the gold mine, which I think by any reasonable assessment is a very severe form of labor trafficking. It goes without saying that mining is an extremely dangerous job occupation anywhere. Mining gold in Haiti only massively increases the danger posed by this kind of labor, considering that Haiti has a long history of extreme poverty, and of having a weak state with a very limited ability to enforce its own laws and regulations compared to the law enforcement power of any first world country.

I know this is a bit of my own speculation here, but I think it is safe enough to say that if Petersen was anywhere near correct in her speculation that some kind of labor trafficking operation to provide laborers might have been occurring at the Morne Bossa gold mine, this kind of highly-coerced, debt bondage or forced labor-type situation could probably not occur without significant “outside help.” Having to labor for gold in Haiti for no or almost no pay at all, would definitely seem to require a level of coercion far greater than just taking your ID card away from you until you repay a debt. In my opinion, labor trafficking of this scale could probably only really occur with the complicity of at least some highly corrupted elements of the Haitian and International “security state.” By this “security state”, I mean the Haitian police, armed forces, paramilitary groups and the myriad of private defense contractors with a history of operating in Haiti, including DynCorp and many others, along with the US intelligence agencies undoubtedly “lurking” in the shadows behind many of these private military contractor firms. These foreign-based, private military contractors and intelligence agencies have a long history of training and otherwise propping-up the Haitian armed forces, paramilitary groups and polices services, themselves long-known for their own history of brutal human rights abuses in Haiti.

The Morne Bossa gold mine is located fairly close to another sizable gold mine in Haiti, the Grand Bois gold mine, located only about 18 miles away. The Morne Bossa and Grand Bois gold mines reportedly contain an estimated 740,000 ounces, or over 23 tons, of gold. At the current gold price at close to $3,000 an ounce (2025 prices), the current estimated value of the combined gold wealth of the two nearby mines in northern Haiti is over $2.2 billion worth of gold. As previously described in regards to Monica Petersen’s Facebook postings, Petersen clearly deeply believed that the Clintons were engaged in all kinds of nefarious actions to secure at least of a “chunk” of the gold wealth of Morne Bossa for themselves and their political cronies in Haiti and elsewhere. Considering this, there is plenty of evidence independent of Petersen’s observations that Morne Bossa, and the Grand Bois gold mines have a long history of very suspicious owners, including Hillary’s own brother Tony Rodham, and there is plenty of independent evidence that both the Morne Bossa and Grand Bois mines have been excavated to a significant degree, and possibly already mined for an unknown amount of gold for many years now.

High-ranking elected members of the Haitian government have repeatedly made allegations that the Morne Bossa mine has been a site of corruption and theft of mineral wealth also for many years now. As previously stated, the US-based VCS mining company, on which Hillary’s own brother Tony sat on the Board, acquired the gold mining permit for Morne Bossa in 2012, the very same year the Caracol factory went into operation (Tony Rodham himself died in 2019.) As the Washington Post also reported in 2015, after the gold mining permit for Morne Bossa was rewarded to VCS in 2012, members of the Haitian Senate publicly denounced the project, saying that gold mining at Morne Bossa was a potential environmental disaster and “waste of resources,” and ultimately the permit was put on hold. A report from the Inter Press Service states that Haitian Senators have publicly opposed gold mining at Morne Bossa, because they say the mining permits granted for Morne Bossa and other mines are unconstitutional, because the permits were based on a 1997 Mining Convention on Haitian mining laws that was not approved by the Haitian Parliament. According to these Mining Convention laws, the Haitian state only receives a tiny 2.5% of the value of the gold mined at Morne Bossa as a “royalty fee,” which is obviously a scandalously-low amount of compensation for the impoverished Haitian people, compared to the amount of mineral wealth potentially available at Morne Bossa.

However, despite whether or not gold mining at Morne Bossa has been “permitted” by the Haitian government or occurred under illegal conditions, there is plenty of visual evidence to show that mining activity of some sort has indeed occurred at Morne Bossa for many years now. Google Map satellite images clearly show that a significant amount of excavation has occurred at both the Morne Bossa and Grand Bois mines, including plenty of visual evidence that large amounts of soil and earth have been removed from both sites, and clearly-seen roads have been built to provide access to both mining sites.

Based on my examination of the available information on the internet, there seems to be a very limited amount of information available about the true extent of what has been going on at Morne Bossa, which of course has its own very eerie similarity with the media silence about Monica Petersen herself. However, based on the most recent information I could find, there is very good reason to believe the Clinton-connected VCS Mining company still owns Morne Bossa to this day! A 2023 press release states that VCS Mining more recently changed its name to “Resource Générale Corporation”, and owns Morne Bossa through a wholly owned subsidiary.

The world of buying and selling mines and mineral resources is clearly an incredibly elitist and “stratospheric” social and financial world. In this regard, it is very important to point out that back in 2011, the Mercer Gold Corp. mining corporation announced that it had signed a Letter of Intent to purchase a 100% stake in Tony Rodham’s VCS Mining. This was only a year before VCS actually received the permit from the Haitian government to mine gold at Morne Bossa. From what I can tell, Mercer Gold Corp. must have ultimately passed on the deal. Very significantly though, Mercer Gold’s own press report states that VCS Mining was very involved in drilling for gold at Morne Bossa at the time Mercer was considering buying the mine. Mercer’s report states that “…VCS completed 9 drill holes in the last 3 months” at the time of the press release.

So very significantly, there is evidence that VCS Mining was actively drilling, and presumably extracting significant volumes of gold, back when Tony Rodham himself was still alive. Mercer Gold Corp. also owns the “Guayables” gold mine in Colombia, a nation that historically has been one of the world’s great sources of gold. Whether coincidentally or not, it is also worth pointing out that Mercer Gold Corp. happens to share its name with the immensely powerful Mercer family. Robert and Rebekah Mercer of this family, are widely reported as being among the most influential and pivotal financial backers of Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential election campaign.

Significantly, as documented here, Monica Petersen herself said she heard about ongoing mining activity occurring at Morne Bossa. She also discusses how at least one Presidential Administration in Haiti has allegedly worked in a “crony” manner with the Clintons to try to begin mining gold at the Morne Bossa mine through VCS Mining. As Petersen states in Robinson’s January 4 2016 Facebook post, “Mining was set to commence [at Morne Bossa] in 2012, but the Haitian Senate opposed it. President Michel Martelly did not, but has been unable to make progress in the Haitian Mining Conventions & laws in order for VCS Mining to move ahead, as they had hoped for before Martelly left office […] Several articles have pointed out that mining activity at Morne Bossa over the last two decades oddly corresponds to the first & second coups of former President Aristide. Haitian mining laws were revised during both coups when Aristide was ousted from office. Bill Clinton’s administration backed those coups throwing Aristide out.” Significantly, Petersen makes mention here of the incredibly unfair Haitian Mining Convention laws mentioned above. She describes how these mining laws, which grant only a minuscule portion of Morne Bossa’s wealth to the Haitian people, were put into place after the coups against Aristide that were backed by the Clinton Administration. Considering all this, it is again worth considering Monica Petersen’s speculation that labor trafficking of some form could have been happening at the Morne Bossa mine, along with her specific allegation that human trafficking really was occurring at the nearby Caracol factory complex. If there is truth to any of this, the true extent of any potential labor and human rights abuses occurring at the Morne Bossa gold mine definitely need to be investigated.

III.) When it comes to the history of the security state or “deep state” in Haiti, there is clearly a very dark history of multinational corporations acting in deep collusion with the US national security state to repress populist movements in Haiti that have sought to raise living standards in one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. Significant to Monica Petersen’s human trafficking investigations, is the fact that Cap-Haïtien, close to where Petersen’s alleged human trafficking was occurring, itself has a history of being a “base of operations” for the anti-Aristide counter-insurgency coups that drove Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office. Aristide, a former Jesuit Priest, came to power with the support of the left-leaning, populist “Lavalas” political movement in Haiti. When in office, Aristide made extensive efforts to raise the minimum wage for workers in Haiti, one of the lowest-paid and most-exploited labor forces in all of the Western Hemisphere. He faced two coups that drove him from office twice, once in the early 90s, and another coup in the early 2000s during Aristide’s second presidency. These coups against Aristide were backed by right-wing elements of his own military and security state, including brutal paramilitary organizations like the “FRAPH” death squads. The Human Rights Watch organization states that FRAPH members “… took part in the killing of at least 4,000 people as well as in thousands of rapes and acts of torture.” These coups against Aristide occurred with the active support and complicity of the wealthiest classes in Haiti and the western multinational corporations intent on exploiting an incredibly cheap labor pool in Haiti for themselves. Dr. Paul Farmer’s well-known book “The Uses of Haiti,” details this story in great detail, especially providing evidence of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations’ complicity in the impoverishment of Haiti. In particular, Farmer’s book discusses how America’s ostensible mission to restore Aristide to power after the first coup against him in the early 90s during the Clinton Administration, was really a ruse for forcing him to accept neoliberal concessions in return for being allowed to return to power. These concessions forced Aristide to abandon efforts to raise living standards for Haitian workers and contributed to further impoverishment of Haiti.

In regards to Monica Petersen’s investigation in Haiti, it is important to point out that the counter-insurgents did completely take over Cap-Haïtien for nearly a month in February 2004, and used it as a base to a significant degree, to launch their second coup against Aristide, which was successful in driving him from office a second time in the early 2000s. Cap-Haïtien is very close to both Caracol and the Morne Bossa mine, the known subjects of Monica Petersen’s investigations into human trafficking during her time in Haiti. According to an AP press report, a significant leader of the second coup against Aristide was Guy Philippe, who was a high-ranking Haitian police commander in Cap-Haïtien at the time of the second coup against Aristide. Perhaps not coincidently at all, the same Guy Philippe is also a very high-level drug trafficker. The AP report states that Philippe “received between $1.5 and $3.5 million from drug traffickers from 1999 to 2004” when he was a police commander in Cap-Haïtien. Philippe and other Haitian police “… took the money in exchange for ensuring safe passage for cocaine shipments from Colombia and other countries that went through Haiti on their way to Miami and other U.S. destinations.” In 2017, Guy Philippe was “whisked” out of Haiti to the US on drug money laundering charges. He took a plea deal in a courtroom in Miami where he avoided a potential life sentence for cocaine trafficking.

When people look into the realm of what could be called “deep politics,” there is plenty of evidence to show that there is a long-standing association between drug trafficking and covert intelligence operations conducted by US Intelligence agencies. The history of the US supporting counter-insurgencies that themselves were deeply involved in drug trafficking is nothing new. In the 1980s, the CIA and the US Intelligence community heavily supported the Contras, a right-wing counter-insurgency who fought against the leftist Sandinistas in El Salvador. The Contras themselves were notorious for working with South American drug cartels to traffic huge amounts of narcotics to the US in the 80s. Going further back to the Vietnam war era, the “Golden Triangle” region of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar in southeast Asia was notorious during the Vietnam War for being a huge source location for opium and heroin, much of which was trafficked out of the Golden Triangle with the complicity of the CIA and the Western intelligence agencies before, during and after the Vietnam War. Books such as Alfred McCoy’s “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia” and Henrik Krüger’s “The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism,” provide a great deal of information about the significance of the Southeast Asian opium trade as being a very “significant factor” in intelligence-backed covert operations during the Vietnam War era and beyond. In regards to Haiti and its history of counter-insurgency movements supported by narco-traffickers, I definitely recommend reading researcher Jeb Sprague’s 2012 book “Para-militarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti.” In the book, Sprague goes into extensive detail about the history of the formation of the two major right-wing, counter-insurgency movements against Aristide, which as Sprague documents were supported by elements of the US Military, US Intelligence agencies, and the “transnational elite” both in Haiti and abroad. As Sprague describes in detail, there is significant evidence both coups against Aristide were supported by Haitian narco-traffickers, and corrupt elements of the Haitian state and Haitian paramilitary groups who were complicit in the drug trafficking. The new President who assumed power after Aristide was ousted the second time, Gerard Latortue, had a cousin, Youri Latortue, a former Haitian Armed Forces member who was a significant leader in the second coup, and who was also alleged to be a major drug trafficker in his hometown of Gonaïves, Haiti. Sprague’s book also documents Guy Philippe as being a major leader of the second coup, and Philippe is of course documented as being a major drug trafficker as well. The connections between narco-trafficking and counter-insurgency movements are clear in Haiti.

Furthermore, the Haitian civilian population in general, have been victim to decades of extreme paramilitary and death squad-backed violence, violence that has occurred with the complicity and direction of multiple Haitian dictatorships and presidential administrations. The FRAPH death squads that terrorized and murdered Haitian supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the 90s, were according to Sprague and many other sources, arguably a direct descendent of the murderous “Tonton Macoute” death squads. The Tonton Macoute was a paramilitary force that murdered and otherwise committed extreme acts of violence against untold numbers of Haitian civilians for decades. These death squads were notorious for operating as the brutal enforcement arm of the “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc,” Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier father-and-son dictatorship that ruled Haiti from the 1950s through the 1980s. It clearly cannot be forgotten that for decades, Haitian civilians across the board have been severely terrorized, and displaced from their families and hometowns, as a direct consequence of all this paramilitary-backed violence against them.

So again, what is the significance of all this to Monica Petersen’s human trafficking investigations in Haiti? We can already see that the region of Haiti Petersen alleged human trafficking was occurring in, has a long history of being severely destabilized by counter-insurgencies driven by paramilitary and military groups known to support themselves extensively through drug trafficking. This drug trafficking itself has a long history of corrupting major elements of the Haitian state. Beyond even this, is the “background” of decades of paramilitary-backed violence against Haitian civilians that has happened throughout Haiti. Considering all this as context, when again you consider Petersen’s claims of human trafficking occurring in Haiti, you have to consider the human trafficking that has horrifically been known to occur in other areas of the world subjected to war and severe trauma and displacement of the civilian population. In particular, the civilian population of Serbia and other Balkan states were terrorized, severely displaced, and otherwise traumatized by the civil war and US and NATO coalition-led prolonged bombing campaign in the 90s and early-2000s. It was amidst this overall environment of displacement and trauma, that human trafficking reared its head. Evidence for this is mostly clearly seen with the conduct of DynCorp and certain DynCorp employees, with their involvement in trafficking underage girls and women during the war in the Balkan states of former Yugoslavia. The connections between conflicts areas, paramilitary and private military contractor groups, and human trafficking can clearly be discerned. Considering all this, I think you again have to consider that DynCorp and other private defense contractors have their own extensive history in Haiti, especially when it comes to training United Nations troops who themselves have been criminally complicit in child sex abuse and child sex trafficking in Haiti. This condition of many civilians in Haiti, seems exactly like the same kind of traumatized, displaced condition of civilians seen in other conflicted regions of the world, where Western intelligence agencies and private contractor firms have their own notorious history of often “pulling the strings” behind the curtains. This “string-pulling” is often seen to involve these Intelligence agencies and defense contractors supporting counter-insurgency de-stabilizations in foreign countries, to the benefit of the wealthiest classes in the US and abroad. In its worst “manifestations”, as horrible as it is to say, this kind of environment seems clearly “ideal” for human traffickers to prey on victims.

Monica Petersen’s investigation of the Caracol complex near Cap-Haïtien in northern Haiti in 2015, occurred in a region with a long history of these kind of criminal elements operating with relative impunity from the weak Haitian state. In terms of specific allegations of human trafficking, all we have to go on is Petersen’s specific allegation that human trafficking of some kind was happening at the Caracol complex. If this human trafficking claim is in anyway true, I think you have to ask: do any of these long-operating criminal elements in Haiti, i.e. the narco-traffickers, corrupt Haitian paramilitary groups, military and police, US defense contractors, and intelligence assets operating deep in the shadows, have anything to do with such an alleged human trafficking operation happening at the Caracol complex?

IV.) Monica Petersen worked at the Human Trafficking Center (HTC) at the University of Denver roughly in the time period of 2014–2016, and took courses at and had an association with the HTC possibly before 2014. Before its permanent closure in June 2021, the Human Trafficking Center had a graduate student staff and many alumni who worked all over the world, conducting research into various forms of human trafficking and forced labor-related situations. In addition, academics from a number of Universities have conducted various kinds of research and taught courses in association with the HTC, while the graduate program was still in existence. With the exemption of Professor d’Estree himself, I am not trying to make any unfair accusations towards anyone in this academic community at all. Could any of these people associated with the HTC be able to shine more of a light on Monica Petersen’s activities and academic research at the HTC? Could any of these HTC-associated academics possibly have information about what Monica Petersen was truly investigating in Haiti? The same questions could be asked to other academics, students, and any people otherwise associated with the larger Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Petersen received her Masters Degree from the Korbel School in 2014, and the HTC was a part of the Korbel School before being shut down by the Korbel School administration. Could any of these people associated with the HTC and/or the Korbel School have information about Monica Petersen’s Masters Thesis from the Korbel School, which again to my knowledge is not publicly available to this day? Considering that Petersen had a history of investigating human trafficking in Haiti, and her Masters Degree focuses on studying human trafficking, there is a real possibility Petersen’s Masters Thesis could have something to do with her investigations in Haiti. Petersen’s Thesis could potentially contain information useful to determining more of what she was really doing in Haiti, and possibly the real circumstances of her death.

I feel the most important thing to end with is this: I truly believe that if Monica Petersen was correct that human trafficking was happening at the Caracol complex, then the VOICES of the WORKERS at CARACOL need to be HEARD and understood to make any sense of this situation. The Caracol workers themselves, and their family and friends in the surrounding communities in Haiti, are clearly the only ones who can give the full scope of any alleged criminality occurring at Caracol. Unless their voices are heard, I do not believe there will be justice for Monica Petersen and the People of Haiti.

SOLIDARITY, STAY SAFE!!