y cousin, who lived in Haiti for most of her life, described her former home as “chaotic,” with government corruption compounding an already bad situation. She told me how drug traffickers and gangs terrorize the impoverished populace with apparent impunity. Crimes such as kidnappings are remarkably common, and the economy is as bad as it has ever been. Wracked by emotion, she told me how the poorest people have resorted to literally eating dirt to survive. “Mud cookies,” as they are called, are made with salt, vegetable shortening, and clay. She then ended her account by accusing “civilized countries” like ours of contributing to the disastrous state of affairs in her home country. The historical basis of her accusations goes back hundreds of years, but recent U.S. administrations are also responsible for the tragedy that engulfs Haiti.
The kidnapping phenomenon afflicting Haiti has made headlines in the past year or so because foreigners, especially Americans, are highly coveted targets for savvy abductors. An American hostage may be worth as much as a $10,000 ransom, whereas a Haitian may only pull in half that amount. In 2005, 43 Americans were among the hundreds kidnapped, and many cases go unreported—not that it necessarily helps with a police force whose most notable characteristic is its rampant corruption. FBI agents are frequently in Haiti negotiating with gangs, and by the summer of 2006 the problem there had “surpassed Columbia” according to Judy Orihuela, a Miami based FBI agent. Kidnappings are rarer now, but only slightly.
The current Haitian government, headed by President RenÉ PrÉval, maintains that the gang activity is strictly economically motivated, but critics do not agree. These other voices paint a different picture of politically affiliated gangs wrecking havoc to destabilize a government that they feel no longer represents them. A number of these gangs profess loyalty to the former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown by a rebel coup in 2004 and exiled to South Africa. The violent gang activity makes the bad situation worse by forcing factories to close and making any type of tourist industry impossible. These gang loyalties to Aristede, and the details of his ousting, illuminate the United States’ hand in the background of Haiti’s chaos.
Noam Chomsky argues that the U.S. has been doing “what it [can] to strangle Haiti” since it won its independence from France in‘04—and he has a point. Our government stood behind France’s absurd request for Haiti to pay an enormous sum of money for the “crime of liberating itself,” a sum Haiti has yet to repay and is unlikely to ever be able to. But more importantly, Aristede was Haiti’s first democratically elected candidate and was enormously popular among Haiti’s common people—and for that sin, we overthrew him. Such a candidate made Washington and its “traditional allies” in Haiti uneasy. The U.S. was afraid that it would lose its economic and political dominance over its small neighbor. In’91, when international financial institutions like the World Bank were receptive to Aristede’s economic plans, the U.S. saw only the “threat of democracy,” as Chomsky puts it. The first Bush administration responded to this dastardly threat by supporting, financially and otherwise, Haiti’s elites, whose interests better aligned with U.S. geopolitical power in a quest to crush the first democratically elected Haitian Government. Essentially, the U.S. helped create and support a dictatorship that swiftly overthrew Aristede. The Clinton administration helped restore Aristede’s power in’94 with the threat of military intervention, but only after forcing Aristede to adopt an economic plan that “was virtually guaranteed to demolish the remaining shreds of [Haiti’s] economic sovereignty.” Even a Democratic administration, though willing to allow a democratically elected ruler come to power, was not willing to allow Haiti to slip from America’s firm grasp.
Aristede remained president until 2004 when the current Bush administration facilitated his overthrow in a similar fashion. The former U.S. ambassador to Haiti tells the provocative story of how his own government used independent organizations and elite Haitian diplomats to undermine his mission of nurturing the young democracy. Ultimately, U.S. involvement served as a catalyst for the 2004 coup which brings us to Haiti’s current plight.
Former Ambassador Brian Dean Curran was replaced in 2003. He left frustrated, certain of Haiti’s disastrous future, and he largely blamed the Bush administration for their “amateur” diplomacy, and partisanship. Their personal interests—directly opposed to those of the common Haitian people—also contributed to their “mishandling” of the political situation.
The official stance of the Bush administration was to support Aristede because he was Haiti’s democratically elected leader. Curran insists that Washington used the International Republican Institute, a supposed politically neutral democracy-building group, to strengthen the anti-Aristede sentiment in Haiti. Despite its claims of neutrality, the I.R.I. had strong ties to the Republican Party around 2004, with a board stacked with Republican foreign-policy heavyweights and lobbyists. It received funding from government agencies like the State Department, but also from independent corporations, including strangely familiar names such as Halliburton and Chevron. Federal support for the I.R.I. has since tripled and Bush praised “democracy-building as a growth industry” at an I.R.I fundraiser in 2005. Aristede’s Lavals party felt threatened by this blatant Republican subversion and, as a result, they vocally opposed the I.R.I.
The I.R.I., with Republican approval and support, actively contributed to Aristede’s fall in complete disregard of its charge to support local democracy free of political bias. Its director in Haiti, Stanley Lucas, was vehemently opposed to Aristede’s presidency, and he freely expressed his political affiliations. In the time before the second anti-Aristede coup, Lucas urged the rebels to not negotiate with the Lavals Party. Even former presidential candidate Evans Paul, the leader of an anti-Aristede movement, called Lucas’s anti-negotiation stance “a bit too harsh.” There is a clear record of Curran warning his higher ups about the I.R.I.’s activity and how it “risked us being accused of attempting to destabilize the government,” but he was denied tighter controls over the I.R.I. in 2002.
The U.S. ultimately made a military coup inevitable by abruptly and unexpectedly canceling last minute negotiations between Aristede and his hostile opponents. At that time, Aristede was prepared to give up much of his power to reach a peaceful settlement. This was, of course, unacceptable for the greater good of American interests. After U.S. influence drove the country into war and violence consumed Haiti, Aristede appealed to neighboring countries for help. While Colin Powell maintained U.S. support of Aristede, the administration refused to send troops to help Aristede stabilize Haiti. Finally, in early 2004, Aristede flew to South Africa on a United States military plane, and the coup was complete. Caricom (The Association of Caribbean Nations) and a few congressional Democrats called for an independent investigation into the U.S.’s involvement in the Haitian coup, but the State Department deemed such an investigation unnecessary.
Aristede was far from perfect—he was, in fact, extremely flawed as president. But he was Haiti’s democratically elected leader, and since his departure Haiti has been through perhaps the worst times in its free history. Politically allied gangs terrorize the Haitian peop
le while the corrupt justice system does little to stop them. The people are getting poorer. The drug problem is growing. The intensification of these challenges in recent years is due, in part, to the United States’ willingness to intervene in Haitian affairs when it sees its interests in jeopardy. Even the liberal Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut said of Aristede, “he wasn’t beholden to the United States, so he was going to be trouble…we had interests and ties with some very strong financial interests in the country and Aristede was threatening them.” This occurred while the State Department verbally maintained its “ironclad” commitment to a free democracy in Haiti, even while the U.S. government did something else altogether. Ultimately, it was the U.S.’s willingness to put its own financial and political interests above its vaunted commitment to freedom and democracy that helped turn the former “Pearl of the Caribbean” into a cesspit of corruption and chaos.
