Pesticide, used in West Indian bananas until 1993, is implicated in deaths and serious environmental damage.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
Chlordecone continues to poison relations between the Antilles and Paris. About eight hundred people, according to the police, demonstrated on Saturday December 10 in Fort-de-France to denounce the dismissal required by the Paris prosecutor’s office in the investigation into the damage caused to the Antilles by the Chlordecone, a pesticide authorized in The bananaraies from 1972 to 1993. In symbol of the dead linked to this substance responsible for unprecedented soil pollution in Martinique and Guadeloupe, the demonstrators lengthened before the prefecture.
Former 69 -year -old agricultural worker, Christiane Césaire explains that she saw her family carried away by illnesses: her two brothers and her father, who died of prostate cancer; and his mother, breast and uterus cancers. She herself suffers from health problems and, if she was able to get out of it, says he keep “a lot of consequences”.
“no protection”
“With my parents, we worked in the banana fields in Basse-Pointe”, in the north of Martinique, she told the Agency France-Presse (AFP). “The boss gave us no protection, no gloves, no boots, and our nails, our fingers, our toes were gnawed.”
At the end of November, the public prosecutor requested the dismissal in the investigation opened after deposits of complaints, in 2006, by Guadeloupe associations, then in 2007 by Martinican associations. These denounced a crime of poisoning and a endangerment of the life of others, but the Paris prosecutor’s office considered that it was not necessary to continue anyone, considering that the facts were prescribed or not characterized.
The demonstrators chanted songs to claim a judgment and a conviction for the officials, and a “reparation” for the Martinican population. “This contempt that we are served as this file is advancing is unbearable,” denounced with AFP Marie-Joseph Sellay-Hardy-Dessources, member of the Lyannaj Pou Dépolé Matinik collective. If the activist for the Union of Women of Martinique deplores a weak mobilization, she believes that the population is today “too informed to give up”.
“Go to the end”
“Even if there is a dismissal, there are other elements on which to fight,” said a lawyer for civil parties, Raphaël Constant. “Let us admit that we arrive at the criminal level: the main officials died. We can continue those who used chlordecone until 2004 and who ordered it, but that will not solve the fundamental problem which is repair of the country, “he said.
During the campaign for his re-election, Emmanuel Macron had been questioned on March 23 On the chain of overseas per 1st , about chlordecone. He had judged that “you have to go to the end of the path” to Guadeloupe and Martinique, “identify responsibilities”, “compensate people”, in particular those who “had to live in their flesh The consequences of these poisoning “. On April 6, in a video addressed to the inhabitants of Martinique, the Head of State had qualified the Chlordecone case as “scandal” and stressed that the public authorities had “mobilized nearly 100 million euros on this subject “.