Kevin Pina
Encyclopedia
Kevin Pina is an American journalist and filmmaker. He is known for his reporting that focused on human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 abuses in Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

 following the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a Haitian former Catholic priest and politician who served as Haiti's first democratically elected president. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies...

 on February 29, 2004 and the installation of the interim government of Gerard Latortue
Gérard Latortue
Gérard Latortue was the Prime Minister of Haïti from March 12, 2004 to June 9, 2006. He was an official in the United Nations for many years, and briefly served as foreign minister of Haïti during the short-lived 1988 administration of Leslie Manigat.In February 2004, the country suffered a coup...

 and Boniface Alexandre
Boniface Alexandre
Boniface Alexandre is a politician in Haïti. He served as acting president of Haïti from 2004 to 2006. The 2004 Haitian coup d'état removed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the Americas on February 29, 2004...

 in March 2004. Pina reported on events in Haiti from 2003–2006 as a Special Correspondent
Correspondent
A correspondent or on-the-scene reporter is a journalist or commentator, or more general speaking, an agent who contributes reports to a newspaper, or radio or television news, or another type of company, from a remote, often distant, location. A foreign correspondent is stationed in a foreign...

 for the radio program, Flashpoints
Flashpoints (radio program)
Flashpoints is a daily investigative news and public affairs program broadcast weekdays at 5 p.m. PST on Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California...

, heard on KPFA
KPFA
KPFA is a listener-funded progressive talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station signed on-the-air April 15 1949, as the first Pacifica Station...

 - the flagship station of Pacifica Radio
Pacifica Radio
Pacifica Radio is the oldest public radio network in the United States. It is a group of five independently operated, non-commercial, listener-supported radio stations that is known for its progressive/liberal political orientation. It is also a program service supplying over 100 affiliated...

 based in Berkeley, California. Pina is also the Founding Editor of the Haiti Information Project (HIP)http://www.haitiinformationproject.net/index.html, a non-profit news agency based in Port-au-Prince and Northern California, and an Associate Editor for the Black Commentator, an online magazine.

Kevin Pina began reporting from Haiti in 1991 for the KPFA
KPFA
KPFA is a listener-funded progressive talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station signed on-the-air April 15 1949, as the first Pacifica Station...

 News in the United States. He reported on human rights violations committed by the Haitian military in the poor neighborhood of Cité Soleil following the coup of September 30, 1991 that was led by Raoul Cédras
Raoul Cédras
Raoul Cédras is a former military officer, and was de facto ruler of Haiti from 1991 to 1994.-Background:Cédras was educated in the United States and was a member of the US-trained Leopard Corps...

 and Michel François
Michel François
Joseph-Michel François was a colonel in the Haitian army. As Haiti Chief of National Police he participated in the 1991 Haitian coup d'état, which overthrew Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The Haitian Presidential candidate Michel "Sweet Mickey" Martelly is known to have...

.

Pina's first Haiti documentary, Haiti: Harvest of Hope
Haiti: Harvest of Hope
Haiti: Harvest of Hope was originally planned as a documentary about democracy coming to Haiti with the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in December 1990. During the final editing of the original Haiti was struck by yet another military coup...

, focused on the formation of Aristide's Lavalas
Lavalas
Lavalas, the Kréyòl word for "avalanche", may refer to:* The Lavalas Political Organization in Haiti, founded in 1991 by Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his supporters, later part of the Struggling People's Party...

 political movement, the military coup of 1991 and Aristide's eventual return from exile in October 1994. The Kreyol version of Haiti: Harvest of Hope was narrated by Haitian poet Jean-Claude Martineau and premiered in Haiti on Haitian Mother's Day in May 1995. The English version is narrated by the actor Roscoe Lee Brown and was released for distribution in the U.S. in 1997.

In early January 1999, Pina moved to Port-au-Prince where he lived and worked for the next seven years. He was the first journalist to write that paramilitary forces of the former Haitian military and the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haïti
Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haïti
The Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti was a far-rightparamilitary group organized in mid-1993. Its goal was to undermine support for the popular Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who served less than eight months as Haïti's president before being deposed, on 29 September 1991,...

 (FRAPH), operating in the neighboring Dominican Republic, were being used as part of a larger strategy to oust the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in April 2003. http://www.blackcommentator.com/36/36_guest_commentator.html

Between 2001 and 2003 Pina was hired for short stints as an independent consultant for Télévision Nationale d'Haïti
Télévision Nationale d'Haiti
Télévision Nationale d'Haïti is the state television broadcaster of Haiti. Founded December 23, 1979 under the Ministry of Information and Coordination, it was Haiti's second television station after Télé Haïti .In 1987, it was merged with the state-run Radio Nationale into a network called RTNH ...

 (TNH), a government owned station, to teach camera and digital editing. Pina was contracted concurrently for a similar position with the privately owned station Tele-Haiti in 2003, and later became the Station Manager for Haiti's largest privately owned television station TeleMax in early 2004.

According to Yves Engler
Yves Engler
Yves Engler is a Montréal writer and political activist. In addition to three published books, many of Engler’s writings have appeared in the alternative press, with articles also appearing in mainstream publications such as The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen and Ecologist...

 and Anthony Fenton
Anthony Fenton
Anthony Fenton is an independent print and radio journalist and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His first book, Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority , which he co-wrote with Yves Engler, was published in August 2005. He is a regular contributor to - Bibliography :...

 in their book Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, Pina was beaten by an off-duty SWAT officer of the Haitian National Police on June 4, 2005. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1552661687 In subsequent interviews, Pina said he believed this was retribution for his actions during a demonstration on May 18, 2005 where he and several Haitian journalists blocked police from firing on unarmed protesters. A Brazilian military commander, working for the United Nations mission in Haiti known as MINUSTAH, gave orders to have Pina's picture taken during the demonstration while threatening, "You are always making trouble for us. I have taken your picture and I am going to give it to the Haitian police. They will get you." http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/5_18_5/5_18_5.html

Pina was arrested in Haiti on September 9, 2005 and held in jail for three days after attempting to videotape a search by Judge Jean Pérs Paul in the church of prisoner of conscience
Prisoner of conscience
Prisoner of conscience is a term defined in Peter Benenson's 1961 article "The Forgotten Prisoners" often used by the human rights group Amnesty International. It can refer to anyone imprisoned because of their race, religion, or political views...

 Father Gérard Jean-Juste
Gérard Jean-Juste
Fr. Gérard Jean-Juste was a Roman Catholic priest and rector of Saint Claire's church for the poor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was also a liberation theologian and a supporter of the Fanmi Lavalas political party, the largest in Haiti. In 1978, Father Jean-Juste founded the Haitian Refugee Center...

. Pina later said he had gone to St. Claire's parish because he had received information that the judge intended to plant weapons in Jean-Juste's rectory to justify holding the priest in prison. http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/9_30_5/9_30_5.html

After Haiti: Harvest of Hope
Haiti: Harvest of Hope
Haiti: Harvest of Hope was originally planned as a documentary about democracy coming to Haiti with the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in December 1990. During the final editing of the original Haiti was struck by yet another military coup...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJXCc7q701g, Pina released a second video entitled Haiti: The UNtold Story.http://www.teledyol.net/KP/HUS/HUS.html The film chronicles human rights abuses by the Haitian police and a military assault on July 6, 2005 http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/7_12_5.html by United Nations forces where residents accuse them of massacring civilians in the impoverished neighborhood of Cité Soleil
Cité Soleil
Cité Soleil is an extremely impoverished and densely populated commune located in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area in Haiti. Cité Soleil originally developed as a shanty town and grew to an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 residents, the majority of whom live in extreme poverty...

. Haiti: The UNtold Story was an earlier version of Pina's latest documentary, Haiti: We must kill the BANDITS,http://www.haitiinformationproject.net/page2/blog.html subsequently re-edited for a final release in 2009 at the Bahamas International Film Festival
Bahamas International Film Festival
Bahamas International Film Festival is an annual film festival held in early December in the Bahamas, founded in 2004.The Bahamas International Film Festival is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing the local community and international visitors with a diverse presentation of films...

.

Pina's film credits and videography include El Salvador: In the Name of Democracy (1985), Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), Amazonia: Voices from the Rainforest (1990), Haiti: Harvest of Hope
Haiti: Harvest of Hope
Haiti: Harvest of Hope was originally planned as a documentary about democracy coming to Haiti with the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in December 1990. During the final editing of the original Haiti was struck by yet another military coup...

(1997), Haiti: The UNtold Story (2005) and HAITI: We Must Kill the Bandits (2007).

Articles by Kevin Pina


Articles about Kevin Pina


Interviews by Kevin Pina


Interviews with Kevin Pina

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