Unrest on Guadeloupe claims its first victim

By Calvin Palmer

A union official was shot dead overnight in Guadeloupe when he drove up to  a roadblock in the island’s main city Pointe-a-Pitre.

Jacques Bino’s death is the first in a month-long strike and growing unrest over the rising cost of living in the Caribbean island.

After holding an emergency meeting on the deteriorating situation on the island, Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie announced that four squadrons of police reinforcements, 280 men, would fly to the island immediately.

“Acts of pillaging, atrocities and violence against other people … will not be tolerated,” she said.

A few days ago, 150 riot police were sent to the island.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is due to meet with elected officials from Guadeloupe tomorrow to “address the anxiety, worries and also a certain form of despair from our compatriots.”

Bino’s car was hit three times by 12-gauge shotgun rounds. Two rounds hit the rear of the vehicle and the third was fired through a side passenger window and fatally wounded the activist in the chest.

“These were not stray rounds,” prosecutor Jean-Michel Pretre said, adding that he was looking into the possibility that, given their age, Bino and a passenger had been mistaken for plain-clothes police officers. Bino was in his 50s.

Rioters fired at police and emergency workers, preventing them from reaching the wounded Bino for several hours.  By the time they reached him he was dead.

Six members of the security forces were slightly injured during clashes with armed youths, police said.

The protests in Guadeloupe and neighboring Martinique are hurting scores of businesses, including restaurants, hotels and car rental agencies during the islands’ peak winter tourist season, Martinique Tourism Authority chairwoman Madeleine de Grandmaison said today.

“Tourism is fragile,” she said. “People are not only canceling this week, but also for all the months of February, March and April. We have a huge deficit of tourists ahead of us.”

At least 10,000 tourists have canceled vacations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, according to the National Travel Agencies organization.
Guadeloupe’s strike has persisted for almost a month. Martinique’s is in its third week.

A Paris-based association of tour operators that works with France’s government tourism department has designated Guadeloupe a “red zone,” meaning it is not endorsing it as a destination. The association began redirecting tourists to Martinique — until the strike arrived there.

Guadeloupe’s Tourism Committee said today the main airport reopened after closing briefly because of a lack of workers. But American Airlines canceled a night flight. Much of the violence on the island has occurred after dark.

[Based on results by the AFP news agency and the Associated Press.]

Guadeloupe strikers bring island closer to rebellion

By Calvin Palmer

The French island of Guadeloupe is on the verge of rebellion after stone-throwing protesters set cars and buildings on fire and clashed with police.

Nearly four weeks of work stoppages and demonstrations for lower prices and higher pay on the Caribbean island have caused thousands of tourists to flee or cancel holidays.  Many hotels have closed and cruise ships are heading elsewhere.

“It is a political crisis, an institutional crisis and we are on the brink of sedition,” Guadeloupe’s Regional Council President Victorin Lurel said in a radio broadcast.

He warned that the island was heading toward “radicalization, a rise in extremism.”

“We have the impression that we have been abandoned, that there is an organized indifference,” he said.

France’s Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said the protests had caused “degradation, devastation and confrontations” on Guadeloupe and its sister island, Martinique, where most shops and offices have been closed by the protests.

She urged “calm, responsibility and restraint” and said she hoped for a resumption of talks with protesters that broke down last week.

Police said they arrested 18 people overnight as protesters burned cars, a library and a boat-rental store in Sainte-Anne and Point-a-Pitre.
Three officer suffered minor gunshot wounds as armed looters took advantage of the chaos.

Guadeloupe’s main airport was closed today and several flights canceled because workers could not pass through barricaded and debris-clogged roads, said Guadeloupe’s senior appointed official, Nicolas Desforges.

Paris has refused to budge on strikers’ demands for a 200 euro ($250) monthly raise for low-paid workers who now make roughly 900 euros ($1,130) a month.

But business leaders in Martinique did agree today to a 20 percent price cut on most supermarket products, despite initial refusal.

Stephane Hayot, a spokesman for the National Union of Wholesale Distributors, earlier said the move “would represent our death sentence” by forcing them to sell at prices that don’t cover their costs.

[Based on a report by the Associated Press.]