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Why the U.S. Keeps Invading Haiti By David Wilson
There are many differences between the current action and the U.S.-led invasion in September 1994, but the most striking, of course, is that the first time the U.S. government was returning deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the National Palace, while now it was removing him from office. There’s nothing mysterious about the U.S. compulsion to keep invading Haiti. The invasions are merely occasional events in a quarter-century struggle between U.S. policy and the grassroots Haitian opposition that in many ways mirrors struggles throughout Latin America and, indeed, most of the developing world. Model 1:
“The American Plan” Most people in the United States first learned about neoliberalism when thousands protested the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in late 1999. Haitians learned about it long before. As has happened throughout the developing world, the application of neoliberal policies quickly disrupted the small-scale farming that formed the base of the economy, driving many Haitians out of the countryside. Some ended up in the new low-wage assembly plants that were churning out everything from clothes to major league baseballs for the U.S. market under the 1983 Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) trade legislation; others sought economic refuge in the United States itself. Opposition to the plan meriken (“American plan”) quickly coalesced into a broad and varied grassroots movement that included peasant collectives, workplace organizing committees and Christian-base communities known as the Ti Legliz (“Little Church”). The brutal and corrupt Duvalier regime was unable to withstand the resistance, and on February 7, 1986, “President for Life” Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier was packed into a plane and whisked to the Riviera, along with hundreds of millions of dollars he had looted from the national treasury. Duvalier’s departure was followed by five years of coups, countercoups and political jockeying as the Haitian elite and the Armed Forces of Haiti, created by the United States during a 1915-1934 occupation, tried to reassert their control over an impoverished but increasingly organized majority. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did little to conceal their support for these efforts, which were expected to culminate in the election of Marc Bazin, a member of the Haitian elite with a distinguished career as a World Bank bureaucrat. The election plan collapsed when a popular priest from the Ti Legliz movement, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, made a last-minute announcement of his candidacy. Calling on the population to unite in what he described poetically as the lavalas (“flood”), Aristide was swept to office on December 16, 1990, with some 67 percent of the vote. The other side’s response was equally overwhelming: In September 1991 the military overthrew Aristide and unleashed a wave of repression, focusing on organizers in the grassroots movement. In the first days soldiers drove armored vehicles through impoverished Port-au-Prince neighborhoods machine-gunning demonstrators. More refined methods followed, with death squads torturing and dismembering activists and leaving their bodies in the street. Estimates vary, but the death toll during the military’s 1991-1994 de facto government was somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000. In absolute numbers the loss for the grassroots movement was comparable to that of the Chilean left in Pinochet’s 1973 coup, except that Chile’s population is almost twice the size of Haiti’s. Model 2:
“Humanitarian Intervention” With Democrat Bill Clinton taking office in Washington in January 1993, a number of U.S. think tanks and even some progressives began pushing the idea that the U.S. military could now be used to stop massacres and promote democracy. With Aristide deposed and death squads leaving a trail of corpses, Haiti seemed a perfect testing ground for the idea. There were obstacles. One was that repeated U.S. invasions in the 19th and 20th centuries had left many Haitians inalterably opposed to any sort of foreign intervention. An even greater obstacle was the certainty among many Haitians that the United States itself was behind the 1991 coup and the continuing murders of activists by groups like the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, call the FRAPH. There was no lack of evidence. The New York Times reported in November 1993 that Lt. Gen. Raoul Cédras, the leader of the 1991 coup, had been a key U.S. intelligence source for years. In October 1994 U.S. investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed in The Nation that FRAPH head Emmanuel (“Toto”) Constant was on the payroll of the CIA. It seemed difficult to understand why the United States should send troops to Haiti to end military rule and paramilitary violence when the heads of the junta and the main death squad were both getting paychecks from the U.S. government. Why invade when Clinton could just make a phone call? Haitian activists asked, as did Aristide himself on occasion. Aristide was now living in Washington and was under pressure from U.S. officials. At the same time, liberal politicians and activists like Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and Randall Robinson of TransAfrica were building U.S. public support for the intervention plan. As reported by Nairn, in the end Aristide was swayed by the argument that acquiescing to the invasion was the only way to end the massacre of his supporters. In September 1994 some 21,000 soldiers in a U.S.-led “international force” entered Haiti without firing a shot, and on October 15 Aristide was again president. The coup leaders went into luxurious exiles in Central America; Toto Constant ended up living in Queens, NY, with a work permit from U.S. immigration authorities. U.S. soldiers seized FRAPH’s records and refused to make them public. Less than a month before the invasion (as Nairn reported at the time in the Multinational Monitor), Aristide economic advisers Leslie Voltaire and Leslie Delatour gave the World Bank a new economic plan that would slash the government payroll, privatize state-owned enterprises and cut tariffs in half for staples like rice, corn and beans, putting peasant families in direct competition with U.S. agribusiness giants. From Cleric
to Caudillo For some Haitian observers Aristide fits a familiar Latin American pattern: a populist whose ideas are often leftist but who fundamentally distrusts the capacity of people to organize themselves. Some on the Haitian Left were willing to give the Lavalas government leeway as it carried out the neoliberal policies forced on it by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, such as the privatization of the cement and milling companies and the de facto privatization of the telecommunications company. What they found harder to condone was Aristide’s failure to mobilize the population around vital concerns like literacy, agrarian reform and self-defense. In all those areas, Haiti fell far short of the achievements of other new Latin American governments. For example, in 1980, a year after overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas initiated a massive literacy campaign, relying on some 80,000 volunteers to teach the fundamentals of reading to 400,000 people within five months. By contrast, the Lavalas literacy campaign reached some 100,000 Haitians from 2001 to 2003, according to U.S. journalist and Aristide supporter Lyn Duff; Haiti’s population is 8 million, nearly double Nicaragua’s. From Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas’ program in the 1930s to the land takeovers of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers in Brazil today, Latin American agrarian reform has depended on campesino mobilization. In Haiti, agrarian reform was launched by Préval with considerable fanfare in 1997, but control was restricted to a few technocrats in the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, and the whole project seemed to vanish. The Lavalas policy for self-defense followed the same pattern. In 1995 Aristide succeeded in abolishing the military. But he did nothing to mobilize the population to protect itself. Instead he counted on a small police force whose 5,000 members had been trained by the United States. There were indeed some pro-Lavalas “grassroots organizations” (óganizasyon popilè, called OPs), but these were generally disavowed by the grassroots movement. Widely known as chimè (“monsters”), the OPs were often little more than street gangs associated with dubious characters like Lavalas senator Dany Toussaint, a former police chief widely suspected of engineering the April 2000 murder of popular radio journalist Jean Léopold Dominique. Toussaint joined the anti-Lavalas opposition in December 2003, just as the Aristide government began to crumble, in part because of suspicions about Toussaint. For his personal security, Aristide relied on the San Francisco-based Steele Foundation, a private executive- protection firm. Most Steele employees are veterans of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces and the State Department’s VIP protection service. Steele’s other clients include U.S.-installed Afghani president Hamid Karzai. Model 3:
Finishing the Job By the end of 2002, the Lavalas government must have seemed an easy target for the U.S. and Haitian elites. Aristide probably remained the most popular politician in Haiti, but his base of support had eroded. The traditional political groups, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development through the International Republican Institute, began mounting street protests, while veterans of the army and the FRAPH started to regroup. With no strategy for defense through mass mobilizations, Aristide ended up in February of this year asking for U.S. intervention to defend his presidency from a band of some 500 U.S.-linked paramilitaries. U.S. diplomats responded by putting him in a plane bound for the Central African Republic. U.S. policymakers undoubtedly feel that they can now finish off the grassroots resistance in Haiti for once and for all. U.S.-backed interim Prime Minister Gérard Latortue made his position clear on March 20 when he stood on a platform with convicted murderer Jean-Pierre Baptiste (“Jean Tatoune”) in Gonaïves and hailed the paramilitaries as “freedom fighters.” Adding to its problems, the grassroots movement is divided, with some of the best-known organizations, like Haitian Women in Solidarity (SOFA) and the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA), accused of being too close to the rightwing opposition. But the movement has shown surprising resilience in the past, and many groups have already announced plans to expand their ongoing struggles on economic and social issues to include resistance to the occupation. One hopeful development is that, thanks in part to the growth of the global justice movement, these organizations now have closer ties to U.S. activist groups than they had during the U.S.-sponsored repression of the 1980s and the 1990s. David L. Wilson, a co-editor of the Weekly News Update on the Americas, has worked with the Rezo Solidarite Batay Ouvriye (Workers Struggle Solidarity Network) in New York City to support worker organizing projects in Haiti.
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the evening of February 29, 2004, U.S. marines were again in control of
Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, less than ten years after the last
U.S. military intervention in a country created by history’s most significant
slave rebellion.