Haiti: “We are the ones who produce food, we are the force of the land and of life.”
Article written by Laura Buconi, originally published in the digital media outlet Luchadoras.mx
“Are you Mexican?” Mircheline Aduel asks me with an inquisitive look. “No, I’m from Italy, but I’ve been living here in Mexico for five years,” I answer automatically, since I repeat this same phrase almost every day. “And do you want to live here or in Italy?” she asks me, while her curious eyes examine me. “I want to travel, I want to see as much of the world as I can,” I tell her. “Then,” she replies confidently, “you have to come and visit me in my community.”
I open my eyes in astonishment. Mircheline lives in Haiti, a country portrayed as one of the most violent in the world for more than a decade, according to the ACLED Conflict Index and the dominant media narrative.
However, Plaisance, her town in the northern department of Haiti, remains peaceful. “I only see weapons in the hands of the police in my community. There are no organized crime gangs in my town,” Mircheline states. She explains that the dominant narrative of the mainstream media portrays Haiti as a country that has sunk, as excessively violent, ungovernable, “a country where no one can come, but that is not the case.”
I meet Mircheline at the Iztapalapa mayor’s office in Mexico City. She tells me that she arrived after a series of journeys: she managed to leave her country by combi vans, buses and a helicopter, because armed gangs had taken over the airport in Port-au-Prince, the capital.
Mircheline came to the VIII Continental Congress of the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo, CLOC-La Vía Campesina, whose focus was food sovereignty. She is part of the CLOC International Coordination Committee as a representative of youth and the Caribbean Region.
Mircheline invites me to line up with her to get food at the Utopía Estrella facilities. Her build is slender but strong, and she moves decisively towards the stations serving water, cutlery and food, greeting her comrades as she passes and wishing them a good meal with a smile. With a very maternal or big-sister-like energy (she appears to be barely 5 or 6 years older than me), she makes sure I take some of every dish and that I am served enough water, before taking me to sit on one of the forum’s bleachers.
She ties up her long, finely braided hair so it won’t get in the way while she eats, and we begin to talk.
Mircheline is the youngest of four siblings, and she is following in the footsteps of her greatest mentor and inspiration: her mother. Her mother was a Madansara, a Creole name meaning “nomadic bird,” used in Haiti for women street vendors selling agricultural products, for more than 20 years, and later became a leader of the peasant association Têt Kolé Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, “Heads Together of Small Peasants,” a role now held by the young Aduel.
Her mother has been an example of strength and resistance for the Aduel family, and her good fortune was to be able to study. Mircheline also received an important academic education. In 2013 she moved from Plaisance to Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, to study Political and Legal Sciences at the State University. In 2019, she completed three months of training in Political Theories in Latin America at the Florestan Fernandes National School of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). In addition, she has extensive experience as a peasant woman specializing in yams, and is a trainer on peasant law, comprehensive and popular agrarian reform, and feminism from the countryside.
After graduating, Mircheline stayed in Port-au-Prince to work at the national office of Têt Kolé. She was coordinating a project on agroecology focused on food sovereignty. In 2023, armed gangs completed their takeover of the Haitian capital, with unprecedented levels of violence. Mircheline pauses and shows me a video on her phone showing the inside of a house that looks as if a hurricane has just passed through it. Destroyed furniture, thrown onto the floor, drawers overturned and hundreds of sheets of paper scattered across the floor, books torn apart…
“This was my home in Port-au-Prince. One day, coming back from work, I found it like this. It was the armed gangs. And just like me, the same thing happened to thousands of people. At that time, my son was barely one year old. Shortly afterwards, I decided to return to my town and get involved in the struggle from the countryside,” she tells me.
Têt Kolé, whose motto is “Let every peasant have their own land,” was founded in 1977, while Haiti was under the brutal pro-US dictatorship of “Baby Doc,” Jean-Claude Duvalier. The movement was born underground and remained so until the regime was overthrown in 1986.
Today, Têt Kolé seeks to empower peasants, starting with food sovereignty: “We have a seed bank, several sectors for processing agricultural products, and we consider ourselves a solidarity economy,” Mircheline explains.
“We work together with other organizations that share the same worldview as us: guaranteeing food sovereignty first, and then building political sovereignty.”
Têt Kolé is a partner of the French NGO CCFD-Terre Solidaire and works together with the Caribbean People’s Assembly (APC) and ALBA Movements, as well as being a permanent member of CLOC. “We share political positions for the sovereignty and self-determination of peasants, against the intervention in our country by the UN, the IMF and the World Bank, and we accompany one another in mobilizations,” Aduel explains.
As a peasant organization, Têt Kolé’s priority is to organize collectively, in the streets and in the countryside. It has a specific food-producing capacity, but is managing to resist the logic of imports: in the community, most of what people eat consists of local agricultural products, potatoes, bananas, cocoa, etcetera. “We are the people who struggle to find ways to work autonomously in order to live together.”
Aduel denounces that Haiti is a strongly anti-peasant state, which since its independence has demonstrated deep inequality in the distribution of resources. It is very difficult to sustain oneself if all peasant women and men do not have the right to land to work. “That is why my life project is to build a comprehensive and popular agrarian reform,” Aduel states: “from here, from my reality in the countryside, this is my struggle: the land must be free for the people who work it.”
At Têt Kolé, peasant sovereignty is also pursued through political education workshops: her community is passionate about reading, including the work of educator Paulo Freire: “He teaches us that education is an instrument of liberation, it is a political act.”
Mircheline defines herself as an Afro-feminist, peasant and popular woman: “As a Black woman, I suffer greatly from racism at the international level. It is essential that we have our own space to continue discussing this issue, to prevent my son and my future daughters, or any children of future generations, from suffering the racism that today is systemic.”
Another tragic issue on which Mircheline has shed light at the international level is the systematic rapes suffered by Haitian women, at the hands of Haitian armed gangs and Dominican paramilitary groups: “We must fight against sexual violence and against all forms of violence: there is currently a lack of legal institutions that support women in my country.”
However, Mircheline maintains a firm hope that shines in her eyes and can be felt in the strength of her voice, which she accompanies with powerful gestures as she speaks: “The most important thing for me, what I want to see, is for all women and people to have the capacity to resolve the hunger crisis starting from their own families. It is an issue that worries me greatly, the hunger crisis, because there is no responsible state. But I believe that the work we are doing in the countryside is precisely moving in this direction.”
“It is very important that young people, who today are migrating massively, see that there is still hope here, that it is still possible to struggle, and return to the countryside, to their lands. We have to work and struggle for a better future, little by little, a better future for my children is possible. It is possible in Haiti,” Aduel states with strength and determination.
She fondly remembers the legacy of her mother, who was a peasant leader before her. “Now I continue in the struggle of the peasants and it is an honor for me to continue this legacy and show the world another side of what it means to be a peasant woman. We are the ones who produce food, we are the force of the land and of life.”