By Joe Emersberger

Spe­cial to The Narco News Bulletin

Decem­ber 13, 2007

(July, 2005)
Pho­to­graph D.R. 2007 Jeb Sprague

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.

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 pub­lished in the Lancet med­ical journal.

Numer­ous calls and emails to Human Rights Watch ques­tion­ing their work in Haiti have gone unanswered.

For more infor­ma­tion also view the peti­tion for the free­dom of Pierre-Antoine Lovin­sky and the Insti­tute for Jus­tice and Democ­racy in Haiti.