That's patreon.com slash the Katie helper show again. That's patreon.com slash the Katie helper show. Hello, welcome to the Katie helper show.

I'm Katie helper and we have a great show for you today. I'm joined by this is not Leslie Lee actually. This is Sam Alcott. Hi Sam. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you Katie and welcome to our listeners and viewers from around the world.

This is the Katie helper show. I'm Katie helper joined by Sam Alcott from his home in where New Jersey is long and sourced from.

I'm just from here. You're just from here around town. Yeah.

By the way, I was supposed to go on rock fin. Oh, I think I'm doing it now. All right. So hi everyone on rock fin. Hi everyone on YouTube and hi everyone around the world tuning in and

and thanks a lot for coming. Of course, you can subscribe to the Katie helper show. We're almost at 50k, which is great. Of course, you can become patreon supporters patreon.com slash the Katie helper show.

And boy, oh boy, oh boy, do we have a good show for you tonight. So first we're going to be talking to Kevin Pena about Haiti, which is not getting as much attention as it was before. That tends to happen to things in the news though.

And then we're also going to be joined by Steve Donziger and he's been on the show before and he's an update for us about what he's going to do now that he's been found guilty of six counts of contempt.

So let's just let's just do it. Let's just get into it. We're going to start with our interview because this guy is a real gem. Really excited to be joined by him. He's like a real wealth of information. Kevin Pena is an American journalist filmmaking educator who serves as a country expert on Haiti.

For the varieties of democracy project, which is sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing, the University of Gothenburg Department of Political Science and the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

He's also from the Haiti Information Project and he is a filmmaker and his films are great. And he lived in the neighborhood where the president and Haiti was assassinated when he was a journalist and he can be followed on Twitter at across mediums.

So without further ado, Kevin, welcome. Thanks so much for having me, Katie. Of course. Thanks for coming on. And folks, if they want to kind of follow along and do a little bit of research, be sure to check out Haiti Information Project on Twitter. It's Haiti Infoproj, H-A-I-T-I-N-F-O-P-R-O-J.

Search the timeline. We've been doing it a decade and I work with citizen journalists in Haiti who I send cameras to and by phone time and they're out there in their neighborhoods in the streets, chronicling reality. And so my hats off to them, I got to give a shout out to all those folks in Haiti.

Actually, so before we get into what's happening in Haiti and the history, how did you get involved in Haiti?

Oh, as a documentary filmmaker, I had spent time in El Salvador and I met Archbishop Romero before he was assassinated and killed. I produced a documentary called In The Name of Democracy about U.S. foreign policy there.

And I was sort of intrigued by this liberation theology priest who was running for the presidency in 80, Jean Bertrand de Aristide. And so I got invited to cover his campaign in 1990.

And then I spent six months chronicling, his first six months in office, then there was a coup. And I had to go back and shoot during very difficult moment in Haiti's history, very scary, frightening time, military dictatorship had taken over, drug dealers had taken over.

Because my friends were in hiding in prison, torture killed. And I went back and spent three weeks chronicling that horror show. And then finally finished that film when Aristide returned to 94.

Wow. So before we get back into Haiti, how well did you know Romero?

We were shooting a film. So I mean, well enough to hang out in the rectory and talk to him and shoot footage with him and, you know, as a filmmaker.

It was even dicey, dicey back then. I mean, it was very, very scary in El Salvador during the 70s.

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