14433: Anonymous Post r.e. OP's and Lavalas corruption (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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Z Magazine Online
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Dec2002/james1202.htm
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December 2002 Volume 15 Number 12



The Raboteau Revolt

by Clara James

Burning barricades of smoldering tires mark every entrance to the “liberated
territory,” a seaside slum which separates the dusty port town of Gonaïves
from the Caribbean. Beyond the barricades, people watch tentatively from
their stoops as men, women, and children drag rusted-out hulks of stripped
sedans and broken-down market stands into the intersections. Graffiti
proclaims “Down with Aristide” or wonders, bitterly: “Aristide—The people of
Raboteau do not understand.” Down the dirty lane, lined on both sides with
green sewage-filled canals and dilapidated huts, hundreds of marchers are
approaching, chanting, singing, and screaming their frustration and anger.

“Tell the Americans to take their trash back,” shrieks one woman, referring
to the 1994 U.S. military occupation, which returned President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide to power after a three-year coup d’état (1991-1994). “We’re
finished with Aristide. We don’t need him anymore. Aristide, traitor.”

“We made Lavalas, and look where it got us,” says a young man, referring to
Aristide’s Lavalas Family political party. This is Raboteau, the home of
Amiot “The Cuban” Métayer, resistance leader during the coup and vocal
Aristide supporter after “the return,” and in August, scene of the Raboteau
Revolt when the slum—led by Métayer—rose up against the former parish priest
turned president. The story behind the Revolt is also the story of the ugly
underbelly of Aristide’s political machine and of the erosion of Haiti’s
popular movement.

Métayer is the most well-known Aristide supporter and street leader in the
coastal city of Gonaïves. During the coup, he and his family were repeatedly
harassed and sometimes arrested for their connection to the now defunct
Raboteau Democratic Popular Organization (OPDR), one of hundreds of popular
organizations that resisted the military regime. Thus, when a delegation
from the capital showed up on July 2 and said the president wanted to see
him at the National Palace, Métayer was not surprised and got into the
waiting vehicle. Once en route, however, he discovered he was headed to
jail.

While authorities claimed Métayer’s arrest was unconnected, just one day
earlier the Organization of American States (OAS) finally published its
80-page report on what the Aristide government and his Lavalas Family party
calls the “attempted coup d’état” of December 17, 2001. Early that morning,
about 20 armed people entered the National Palace and occupied it for
several hours, destroying some offices and then escaping. After a shoot-out
and chase, where several people were injured and some police killed, most of
the attackers escaped.

According to the OAS, and contrary to the claims of the government, the
incident was not a coup attempt. While the report did not go as far as
Aristide’s arch-rivals, the Democratic Convergence coalition of political
parties, who claim it was an “auto-coup” cooked up to rally popular support,
OAS investigators did say attackers had police complicity. More importantly,
they listed a number of Lavalas officials and party members they say incited
and aided the violent armed mob attacks against Convergence party members
and headquarters which took place in several cities around the country the
following day.

In Gonaïves, for example, the OAS said Métayer led an armed mob who torched
buildings of a Convergence party and demanded to meet with its leader.
Failing to find him, they grabbed a security guard, killed him with machete
blows, and then torched his body with gasoline.

Rather than condemning that and other attacks—where over a dozen offices,
homes, and cultural centers were burned and looted—the next day Prime
Minister Yvon Neptune praised them, saying: “The people have identified
their enemy.”

But Lavalas is up against its own enemy, namely the Democratic Convergence,
with whom it has been squabbling for two years over fraudulent elections.
The dispute led foreign lenders and donors to freeze some $500 million in
aid and loans. With the OAS as the chief mediator, the National Palace had
to react to the July 1 report and Métayer’s arrest the following day is seen
by many as an attempt to toss the OAS a token, since nobody else—and
especially none of the Lavalas officials—was picked up.

“The Cuban” did not take his fall guy role lightly. He denounced Aristide in
radio interviews, and in Gonaïves his supporters—former OPDR members and
some thugs who now call themselves the “Cannibal Army”—erected burning
barricades, torched the customs house, and covered city walls with graffiti.
At one point, a delegation from the National Palace arrived in a helicopter
to “negotiate,” some say with the help of a briefcase full of cash. Within
hours, chants of “Down with Aristide” were replaced by “Long live Aristide
but free Métayer” and overnight the word “Down” in anti-Aristide graffiti on
scores of walls around town was replaced by “Long live.”

But the truce only lasted a few weeks. Daily demos soon resumed, and on
August 2 Cannibal Army members brazenly hijacked a bulldozer and smashed a
house-sized hole in the prison wall, freeing Métayer and some 150 others
while their heavily armed “soldiers” kept the police and guards—most of whom
only carry revolvers—at bay. They also sacked and set fires at the Court
House and City Hall and torched a police car and the city’s only garbage
truck.

In the demonstrations Métayer—adorned in a red scarf to honor Ogou, the
Voodou war spirit—and Cannibal Army members called for the entire country
“to rise up together, because Aristide the traitor must go.” Métayer,
Simeon, and hundreds of others swear the National Palace called Métayer
early on December 17 with orders to take to the streets with arms, to “lock
down the town,” to torch opposition headquarters.

“If they are going to arrest someone, it shouldn’t be the Cuban,” fumed Jean
Simeon, a 54-year-old mason during a march. “They should arrest Aristide,
because he is the one who had them call us…. We burned for him, we killed
for him…. We thought it was a coup.”

By the end of the week, as suddenly as it had arisen, the Raboteau Revolt
was over. Métayer sent his “Cannibal Army” back to the barracks and suddenly
he had a team of six lawyers. He told reporters he had shouted “Down with
Aristide” with only “half his heart” and his lawyers said he did not break
out of jail but was “kidnapped, forcibly, at gunpoint.”

Today, “the fugitive” is living a couple of blocks from the police station,
occasionally meeting with reporters and preparing his defense. Ordinary
Raboteau residents have stopped marching and shouting, only to resume their
usual more cautious and cryptic form of complaining—elliptical and quiet
grumbling. But their anger, now betrayed by not only by their president, but
also by their leader, is palpable.

As the social and economic situation has deteriorated in Haiti—due, among
other reasons, to a decade of neoliberal economic policies, the two-year
political impasse, corruption, and the recent collapse of hundreds of
pyramid scheme credit unions—anti-government protests have spread throughout
the country. Not a day goes by without barricades going up or city buildings
being shut down. Usually those in the streets are loosely organized but
legitimately angry and fed up citizens—fed up with a contracting economy,
rising prices, with the lack of services and public schools, with 70 percent
unemployment, with tale after tale of government corruption, with impunity
and rising crime, with harassment and even murder of journalists. The
demonstrations are often met with harsh force. Police have shot and killed
demonstrators, and in a recent incident killed 40 goats and a half-dozen
cows of peasants who had stopped traffic to demand electricity for their
region.

But the mostly spontaneous anti-government demonstrations are not the only
show of “street heat” in Haiti these days. Save for its momentary rebellion,
armed gangs like the Cannibal Army are usually running pro-government
and—especially—pro-Aristide demonstrations. As the president loses popular
support, he and his political machine have increasingly relied on such
troops to show up at rallies, set up barricades, denounce this or that
politician, or terrorize legitimate protestors. Rights groups like Amnesty
International and the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission have
denounced them as “para- militaries,” “mercenaries” and “parallel security
forces,” but the local press calls them “popular organizations” because some
of their leaders came to the fore in the 1990s as part of the popular
movement.

“These groups have major weapons. They can break into a prison. They can
attack the police. They constitute real armies, armies which are completely
illegal,” explains Elifaite St. Pierre, Secretary General of the Platform of
Haitian Human Rights Organizations. The guns come from a variety of
sources—from the coup period, from the drugs business, and, some say, from
people connected with the National Palace. “They are paramilitaries aligned
with the political power structure, with Lavalas, and they work for the
government, just as the death squads did in Central America.”

The UN’s independent human rights expert for Haiti, French lawyer Louis
Joinet, visited Haiti in September and was shocked at what he found:
“quasi-public armed leaders” of structured paramilitary gangs operating with
“impunity.”

The gang leaders—some call them “crowd brokers”—are paid “zombi” checks from
state businesses like the telephone company or work at the National Palace
as “aides.” When warm bodies are needed, money is distributed in a pattern
now so well-known that street thugs do not hesitate to show a well-placed
journalist their checks. The prime minister even made a reference to it
after two well-known brokers—with very close ties to Aristide—took to the
airwaves in September to announce a “movement” to force him from office. His
predecessor exited in much the same way only a few months earlier.

“Yvon Neptune must go,” raged Paul Raymond into journalists’ microphones.
“We brought down Cherestal and we’ll do the same with Neptune.” Raymond,
once a member of a “ti kominote legliz” (church-based community group) at
Aristide’s former parish, St. Jean Bosco, then read off a list of officials
he called “grabbers” and “thieves” and was answered with the crowd of men,
his “popular organization,” shouting “Tie them up.” For a few weeks, the
capital saw demonstrations and press conferences, all accompanied by the
same crowd, but suddenly they ended. Obviously, Raymond’s handler had
decided the demos were not working or had achieved their purpose at some
unknown, back-room politics level.

The politico-paramilitary troops were also on hand when Aristide visited the
state tax office early this fall. Some of those very same faces blocked
downtown streets, cheering wildly and holding up Aristide posters every time
he or a camera passed by. That same week, they were on hand for a different
assignment. Buses delivered at least 100 of the “popular organization”
members to block a peaceful demonstration of university professors,
students, and their supporters. Holding large signs dominated by Aristide’s
grinning face, the counter-demonstrators, some of them the older, destitute
women usually seen sweeping city streets, laid siege to the marchers,
throwing reams of Aristide flyers, bottles of urine and rocks as the police
looked on. The standard pay that day was $10, the equivalent of seven days’
labor at minimum wage.

The Platform’s St. Pierre, a former student activist, was directly
threatened by several of the gang members who hissed: “We’ll crush you.
We’ll get you no matter what.” Such threats cannot be taken lightly in a
country where, last year, a journalist was hacked to death by Lavalas
supporters—from the so-called “popular organization” “Sleep in the
Woods”—because he had opposition party members on his radio program. More
recently, reporters have been threatened directly by police and Lavalas
authorities, and a St. Marc congressperson announced that anyone saying
“Down with Aristide” should be arrested. A week later he led a Saturday
night mob—his “popular organization” is called “Operation Clean Sweep”—on a
house-to-house search for opposition party members to beat up.

It is no wonder, then, that most people call the politico-paramilitary gangs
“chimè,” which in Creole means armed bandits. But the mainstream media
consistently labels them “organisations populaires” or “OPs,” lumping them
together with the authentic church-based, peasant and popular organizations
who in the 1980s threatened to bring about real revolution. The bourgeois
daily Le Nouvelliste delights in denigrating the “OPistes,” suggesting they
publish an advance schedule of their burning barricades, so that the upper
classes—commuting from the suburbs—can plan their morning drives.

“The Haitian press is totally controlled by the bourgeoisie, so it’s not
surprising that while some reporters might innocently confuse real popular
organizations with any group from a poor neighborhood, there are others who
purposefully obfuscate the term in order to empty it of its political and
ideological meaning,” explains Marc-Arthur Fils-Aimé, director of the Carl
Lévêque Cultural Institute (ICKL), a popular education center which has
worked with Haitian popular organizations since 1989. “It is not a
geographic origin—like a poor neighborhood—which defines a popular
organization. The determining element is the choice to struggle for another
kind of society.”

Popular organizations burst onto the political scene in Haiti in the 1980s
as the movement to topple the Duvalier regime gathered strength. When “Baby
Doc” fled in 1986, hundreds of groups sprang up. Neighborhood committees
organized to demand basic services, founded theater groups, and schools.
Peasant associations mobilized to regain stolen land or to protest
exploitative coffee buyers. Liberation theology influenced groups spread
from parish to parish, carrying out consciousness-raising literacy
campaigns. In Port-au-Prince alone, studies found up to 150 such
organizations by the end of the decade. Together with unions, professional
associations, student groups, and political parties, these organizations
made up Haiti’s democratic and popular movement which carried Aristide to
power in the country’s first-ever democratic elections in 1990.

Once in office, however, Aristide—whom the foreign mainstream press
characterized as “firebrand” and “radical” but who nonetheless proceeded to
implement International Monetary Fund-advised neoliberal policies—dealt what
many consider the first blow to the nascent movement by filling state jobs
with popular organization leaders, whether or not they were competent, and
by converting them into old-fashioned ward captains.

“Aristide wanted militants in the public administration,” remembers Janil
Louis-Juste, social policy and agronomy professor at the State University of
Haiti. “But he hired them on an individual basis. He co-opted them.”

Six months later, the popular movement received its second blow when U.S.
operatives in the Haitian Armed Forces carried out the September 30, 1991,
coup d’état. For almost three years the army and the CIA-linked paramilitary
FRAPH (Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress, whose name was clearly
chosen for the acronym which sounds like the Creole word for “hit”)
terrorized the country, targeting popular organizations and their
supporters. Some 5,000 people were killed. A thousand popular organization
members also accepted asylum in the U.S. through a controversial program
progressives suspect was aimed at siphoning off the country’s best
activists.

By the time he returned to power in 1994, Aristide had lost his radical
grassroots base because of the deal he cut with the imperialists. (He
returned on the coattails of the U.S. military’s “Operation Restore
Democracy” and he agreed to carry out even more profound neoliberal economic
policies.) He once again looked to the individual popular organization
leaders for support. He gave them jobs and vehicles and set up the “Little
Projects of the Presidency” which handed out an estimated $7.3 million in
“grants.” The projects were heavily criticized for their favoritism and
corruption.  At the same time, non-governmental organizations—some
well-meaning and others, like the ones funded by U.S. government “democracy
enhancement” programs, less so— scooped up organizations with “development”
projects.

Aristide returned to office in 2001 after sitting out for five years (the
Constitution forbids back-to-back terms) in elections characterized by
extremely low turn-out and riddled with accusations of fraud. Lacking
legitimacy and with slipping popularity, he once again turned to former
popular leaders and groups, many of whom had evolved into armed gangs.

“Today most real popular organizations have disintegrated,” says Ertha
Charles, a teacher and former youth group leader in the northern town of
Pilate. “We struggled for democracy. We risked our lives during the coup.
But then we saw our leaders run for office or get jobs and fill their
pockets. Today many people—me included—are totally deceived about the ideas
we had and about the promises Aristide made to us. Today we are all worse
off, not better off. Only a few opportunists, people who attached themselves
to someone’s hem, have jobs. The rest of us have nothing.”

The gangs terrorize people with the crimes they commit with impunity when
“off-duty” and, more importantly, discourage people from taking to the
streets, from making their voices heard, from organizing.

But not all popular organizations disintegrated or turned into paramilitary
gangs. Across the country, despite police and chimé repression, there are
groups—women’s organizations, youth groups, community radio stations, and
peasants associations—which have hung onto their ideals.

“There has definitely been a major retreat of the movement since 1995, but
starting about a year and a half ago, we saw a certain stability, especially
among peasant organizations,” Fils-Aimé adds. His organization works with
over a dozen associations around the country. “People are starting to figure
things out and they are refusing to play the game of Lavalas vs.
Convergence. They are thinking about real alternatives.”

“Lavalas, Convergence, chimè, they are all the same to us,” agrees Clement
François, a member of the executive committee of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen
(Heads Together Small Haitian Peasants), which has about 10,000 members in 8
of Haiti’s 9 departments. “They are merely fighting for personal power. They
are the ones responsible for our terrible situation. The only thing that
will rescue the country now is for all of those who are suffering—workers,
peasants, exploited people—for us to fight together, for us to struggle.”


But the decade of repression and cooptation has taken its toll on an
exhausted people and their grassroots organizations. What remains to be seen
is whether or not those still committed to real change can organize in a
context of repression from police and from armed gangs like the Cannibal
Army, gangs which—the Raboteau Revolt made clear—it does not always control.

That is probably the reason Métayer is still free. Even if Lavalas
authorities wanted to arrest him and other leaders, they might not be able
to handle the backlash from their troops. When Métayer took to the airwaves
to announce he heard plans were afoot to eliminate him in October, his gang
was immediately in the street, but a day or two later—after a call from
Port-au-Prince or another briefcase?—he once again fell silent. Félix “Fefe”
Bien-Aimé was not so lucky. Former director of the National Cemetery and
head of the “Galil Base popular organization” gang (Galil is a machinegun),
he and two others were arrested in Port-au-Prince in late September and have
not been heard from since, in spite of violent protests by his gang members
and demands of human rights organizations.

In any case, while Lavalas tries to keep a handle on its troops in the
slums, the enemies of even a populist version of change in Haiti—sitting up
in the elite hillside neighborhoods above Port-au-Prince’s slums as well as
in air-conditioned Washington offices—are doing their best to trip up
Aristide and also to prevent a radical popular movement from taking root
once again.

The external and internal contradictions might lead to the long dragged-out
death of the Lavalas machine or to its sudden implosion. Both outcomes will
have differing effects on the embryonic efforts to rebuild the democratic
and popular movement. As the saying goes, Se lè koulèv la mouri ou konnen
longe li (”Only when the snake is dead do you know its length”).