America's sorry history with Haiti, Part 2

Excerpted from my article at ConsortiumNews.com:

The Haitians have a saying in their native créole language: Piti, piti, wazo fe nich li. “Little by little, the bird builds its nest.”

Freed of the powerful grip of the Duvaliers in 1986, and despite a dysfunctional system, little by little, the Haitians undertook the difficult work of rebuilding their nation into a more democratic place from within.

They formed trade unions, created independent radio stations, initiated literacy programs, and built silos to store their grain so they could wait for better prices before selling their crops.

Meanwhile, a quiet, small Haitian man who spoke eight languages and who had declared capitalism a “mortal sin” was espousing a brand of liberation theology too radical for the Catholic Church that had ordained him.

In 1988, the Catholic Church expelled Jean Bertrand Aristide for preaching class warfare in a move that, ironically, made him far more powerful.

Undaunted, Aristide, called affectionately by the diminutive “Titide,” opened a medical clinic, ran a children’s shelter, and continued to speak to the people.

As Haiti headed into its first internationally supervised election, the U.S. was banking on Marc Bazin, now their chosen candidate for president. But the majority of the Haitians saw Bazin as “America’s Man” and refused to support him.

The strongest leftist candidate, however, was considered lackluster, and the other candidates were too little known to win.

On Oct. 16, 1990, just two months before the elections were to be held, Aristide entered the race. He called his movement and its followers the Lavalas, a créole word for torrents of water that rushed down gullies, sweeping away everything in their path. He summed up his platform in three words: “participation, transparency, justice.”

Predictably, the U.S. government, then headed by President George H. W. Bush, was disconcerted. One businessman probably summed up a lot of businessmen’s thoughts when he called Aristide “a cross between Fidel and the Ayatollah.”

Just before the election, Ambassador Andrew Young, at the request (he said) of former President Jimmy Carter, tried to persuade Aristide to sign a letter accepting Bazin as president if Bazin should win, in the hopes of forestalling a violent reaction from Aristide’s followers. William Blum, in his book Killing Hope, noted the Bush White House likely had a hand in this as well.

Hope, Then Tragedy

On Dec. 16, 1990, in the country’s first internationally supervised election, Aristide won with over two-thirds of the vote, proving the Lavalas worthy of their name. The margin also gave him the largest majority of any democratically elected leader in the Western Hemisphere.

But in a sad parallel to some recent U.S. elections, when the time came to vote for the legislature and other offices, turnout was light. An opposition-dominated legislature then thwarted much of the legislation that Aristide proposed.

Still, Aristide upset the status quo. He initiated “programs in literacy, public health, and agrarian reform,” Blum wrote. Aristide also sought to increase the minimum wage; he asked for a freeze on the prices of basic necessities; and he created a public works program to generate jobs.

Aristide also criticized the business class, accusing some of the Haitian elite of corruption. He also sent a youth group from Haiti on a friendly visit to Haiti’s neighbor to the west, Castro’s Cuba.

Aristide, who had survived assassination attempts in the past, created a private force that he could trust. He further antagonized the military by making temporary appointments to key positions rather than permanent ones. He hoped this would encourage good behavior, but instead it rankled those stuck in tenuous situations.

But perhaps Aristide’s greatest affront to the military was to crack down on smuggling and drug-running, which were rampant in Haiti. According to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, Aristide’s actions “were putting a dent in many officers’ life styles.”
Janus-faced America

Any student of real history can guess what happened next. The military overthrew Aristide a short nine months into his five-year presidential term.

And as Blum notes, while there is no direct evidence that the CIA or the United States supported the coup, given the CIA’s role in training and supporting the Haitian military, the coup could hardly have come as a surprise.

Bob Shacochis supports Blum’s suspicions in his book The Immaculate Invasion, where he wrote that President George H.W. Bush “swiftly announced that the coup would not stand, then just as quickly receded into embarrassed silence when informed by his staff that his own crew in Port-au-Prince not only had foreknowledge of the putsch but had allowed it to advance without a word.”

Shacochis decried how America had been essentially “Janus-faced” toward Haiti due to a the split between those in the U.S. willing to support a true democracy, no matter how messy, and those whose knee-jerk reaction was to decry the leftist president, despite the fact that “the Haitians democratically chose Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the only Haitian president who ever attempted to lead his people out of darkness; the only Haitian chief of state who seemed to display an ideology beyond self.”

Read the rest of my article at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013110d.html.