14953: Edouard-News-The Fall of the House of Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Felix Edouard <loveayiti@hotmail.com>

"Aristide's opponents turned out to be neither the entrenched economic elite
nor the die-hard elements of the old Duvalieriste party, as almost everyone
in 1994 might have anticipated, but the social democratic–constitutionalist
wing of the Lavalas movement, the left-wing–populist coalition that first
brought Aristide to power, which was mobilized into opposition by the
Aristide government's increasingly corrupt and authoritarian character. "


New York Time Book Review
2/13/03

Haiti: The Fall of the House of Aristide
By Peter Dailey
Haiti's Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy
by Roger Fatton Jr.
Lynne Rienner, 237 pp., $55.00; $19.95 (paper)
1.
>From the air, Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic is easy to trace:
it is where the dense forests on the Dominican side abruptly stop. West of
the frontier, Haiti's mountainous countryside is scoured by gullies and
ravines; almost all of Haiti's vestigial forest cover is gone, and in the
hills of the drought-stricken northwest, smoldering charcoal pits, scattered
across the desolate landscape, consume the few trees and shrubs remaining.
Widespread erosion has exhausted land that was once fertile and productive;
and apart from islands of semi-arable soil, only cactus and spiky acacia
bushes grow in abundance.
By any measure—hunger, disease, infant mortality, access to water— Haiti is
in a desperate condition. Much of the rural population lives in the grip of
poverty of the most bleak and unremitting kind. In some regions the annual
per capita income is less than $100. The sound of an auto engine laboring up
the washed-out roads will send groups of naked children, many of them
scarcely out of infancy, their hair red from malnutrition, scrambling up to
stand on the roadside with hands outstretched.
Although no one really knows how many people live in Port-au-Prince today,
the best estimate is about two million, two thirds of whom, over the last
twenty years, emigrated from the rural districts and today crowd sprawling
shantytowns like La Saline, the slum parish where Father Jean-Bertrand
Aristide first came to prominence, or Cité Soleil, an insalubrious strip of
landfill, blanketed by smog, that stretches for several miles along the sea.
Mother Theresa is said to have described what she saw there as "fifth
world." Dark at night, except for the flickering here and there of a
hurricane lamp or the occasional glow from a house that has tapped illegally
into a power line, Cité Soleil's narrow alleys and tin-roofed shacks,
slapped together out of cinder blocks and cardboard, are home to more than
200,000 people who cook over charcoal and bathe and do their laundry in
sewage-filled ditches.
It would be hard to overstate the gravity of Haiti's longstanding
humanitarian crisis or the intractability of the problems underlying it—the
decline of the peasant system of agriculture, catastrophic environmental
degradation, a population explosion—problems that in the past were scarcely
recognized, much less addressed. For most of Haiti's two-hundred-year
history, its corrupt and authoritarian rulers regarded the Haitian
government as an engine for the personal enrichment of the clique in
control. "If the cost of maintaining power and continuing to enjoy the
spoils of the state was the plunder of the nation," the University of
Chicago anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has written, "they were quite
willing to sacrifice the nation."[1] During the Night- mare Republic" of Dr.
François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Haiti's président à vie, government corruption
and brutality reached their zenith. With the aid of the Tonton Macoutes, a
sinister auxiliary of sunglasses-wearing thugs, who murdered and tortured
his opponents and terrorized the population at large, Duvalier and his
family ruled Haiti from 1957 until 1986, when his inept son Jean-Claude
("Baby Doc") was forced to leave the country.

In the late Eighties, Jean-Bertrand Aristide's courageous opposition to the
military junta that had taken power following Jean-Claude Duvalier's
departure led many to see in him a Caribbean counterpart of Nelson Mandela
or Václav Havel. The slight, bespectacled young priest in his white supplice
seemed, at first sight, an unlikely leader of popular struggle. But his
homilies excoriating the regime and its backers among Haiti's small,
predominantly mulatto elite, delivered from the pulpit of St. Jean Bosco in
a sarcastic, pithy, and idiomatic Kreyol, and broadcast over the Catho-lic
Church's Radio Soleil, galvanized popular resistance. Neither numerous
government-sponsored assassination attempts nor the efforts of the Church
hierarchy succeeded in silencing him, and his charismatic and uncompromising
leadership hastened the junta's fall.
In 1990, the priest was elected president, inaugurating what Robert Fatton
Jr., a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of
Virginia, calls in his ambitious and illuminating new study, Haiti's
Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy, "the freest and
most hopeful period of Haiti's modern political history." It ended a bare
seven months later when Aristide was ousted by a military coup and driven
into exile. The three years of military rule that followed saw the return of
state-sponsored terror, as right-wing death squads targeted prominent
Aristide supporters among the leadership of peasant groups, trade unions,
and grassroots and neighborhood organizations, murdering an estimated three
thousand to five thousand people. It was not until September 1994, when the
landing of 23,000 US troops—part of Operation Uphold Democracy, a
UN-sanctioned "armed intervention" that cost an estimated $2.3
billion—forced the military junta to step down, that the killing stopped.
For the hundreds of thousands who lined the streets of Port-au-Prince on
October 15, 1994, the sight of an American fleet of Black Hawk helicopters
returning Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his entourage to the lawn of the
National Palace marked a decisive break with the Haitian past. The former
priest was a messianic figure, the focus of near-millenarian expectations
that his three-year exile in the US had, if anything, heightened. Haiti's
international supporters were scarcely less euphoric. Aristide resumed
office with overwhelming and unprecedented foreign backing; in addition to
the support of the Haitian diaspora, whose annual remittances, estimated at
$800 million, helped to sustain what was left of the economy, the projected
aid from foreign governments and international lenders earmarked for Haiti's
reconstruction amounted to over $3 billion. In the exhilaration of the
moment, there were few problems that didn't seem solvable.[2]
Eight years later, however, few if any of these hopes have been realized,
and given the rapidly unraveling political situation today and increasingly
vocal demands for Aristide's ouster there are scant grounds for optimism.

The elite up on the hillside are by no means the only ones who no longer
believe in Haiti's future. Their cynicism is shared by virtually every
segment of society, from the physicians dreaming of a safe and remunerative
practice in Miami or Montreal to the Ti Marchanns, the market women who
spread their blankets on the sidewalk and sell rice, millet, and beans by
the cupful. According to a recent poll, fully 67 percent of the Haitian
population would emigrate if it were possible.
Were Aristide, by the end of his term in 2006, to restore the economy to the
levels under Jean-Claude Duvalier twenty years ago, it would seem almost
miraculous. The adult literacy campaigns, rural clinics, public works, and
land reform that for years Aristide had promised remain slogans rather than
programs; under Aristide and his successor as president, his surrogate René
Préval, between 1995 and 2000 were lost years, during which Haiti's
government was brought to a standstill and all plans for development were
put on hold while a political struggle for control of the state played
itself out in slow motion. Aristide's opponents turned out to be neither the
entrenched economic elite nor the die-hard elements of the old Duvalieriste
party, as almost everyone in 1994 might have anticipated, but but the social
democratic–constitutionalist wing of the Lavalas movement, the
left-wing–populist coalition that first brought Aristide to power, which was
mobilized into opposition by the Aristide government's increasingly corrupt
and authoritarian character. The Lavalas movement took its name from the
periodic flash floods that come roaring down from Haiti's mountains along
dry river beds, sweeping away everything in their path.
By 1999, it seemed to many Haitians that Aristide, who once personified
Haitian aspirations for democracy, now represented Haitian democracy's
biggest obstacle. The firebombing of radio stations by Aristide partisans,
the murder of journalists like Jean Dominique and Brignol Lindor, and the
government's unwillingness to bring the authors of these crimes to justice,
all prompted Reporters sans Frontières, a Paris-based journalists' advocacy
group, to include Aristide on its list of Predators of Press Freedom. A
corrupt police force in the service of the ruling party has fueled mounting
human rights violations—"threats, illegal and arbitrary arrests, arbitrary
detentions, summary executions, disappearances and police brutality are
everyday events," Pierre Esperance, director of the National Coalition for
Haitian Rights, charged on October 16 of last year—reinforcing Haiti's
traditional climate of impunity and lawlessness.
Human rights workers in particular have been targeted. In 1999, Esperance
himself had his car forced off the road and was shot twice and left for
dead. The independence of Haiti's judiciary, its state university, and other
institutions has been steadily undermined. Gross electoral fraud by the
ruling party has deprived the entire political apparatus of legitimacy. For
most of this time attacks by government-sponsored and armed militants on
opposition rallies made free assembly all but impossible. "Violence, in all
its forms, has reemerged as the common currency of both public and private
life," according to a report issued in December by the Washington-based
Haiti Democracy Project. "Haiti is an armed camp" and faces a "looming
sociopolitical implosion."[3]
The Aristide government's increasingly authoritarian behavior has left it
isolated and condemned by the international community, which has suspended
crucial foreign aid to the point that today there is a total embargo apart
from emergency humanitarian relief. The consequences for Haiti, already the
poorest and most demoralized country in the hemisphere, at least a
generation behind its most impoverished Caribbean neighbors, have been
disastrous. The administrations of Aristide and René Préval have been marked
by corruption and ineptitude and have choked Haiti's economy and increased
unemployment—estimates run as high as 80 percent—leaving the Haitian people
mired in poverty, social unrest, and despair. It will almost certainly get
worse. With the Aristide government recently rocked by demonstrations and
strikes, and the prospect of increasingly violent clashes in the streets and
countryside, it looks more and more as though Aristide's time is running
out.
2.
These days, the older residential districts of Port-au-Prince have a
distinctly down-at-the-heels look. The wooden gingerbread mansions in Bois
Verna, their steep roofs, carved finials, and balconies occasionally visible
through the canopy of trees, were once the most elegant in the Antilles, and
during the US occupation in the Twenties provided the official residences
for several of the American military and diplomatic proconsuls. Today most
are in an advanced state of disrepair, prey to termites and the corrosive
effects of the salt breezes. Bougainvillea and palm fronds spill in wanton
profusion over the high walls, decorated with political graffiti, which
surround the derelict gardens.
History has never left much of a physical imprint on Haiti. Apart from
neighborhoods like Bois Verna, or the magnificently evocative ruins of Henri
Christophe's fortress and palace in the north, there are few visible
reminders of "la splendeur haïtienne d'un après-midi d'histoire," to which
St. John Perse refers in one of his letters.[4] In a great many other
respects, however, Haiti remains in the grip of an archaic past, and its
crippling social and economic legacy.
Two hundred years after independence, Haiti continues to be unequally
divided between a small, urban, predominantly mulatto elite, many of them
descendants of the country's free colored population, and an overwhelmingly
black peasantry settled in the Haitian countryside, a remote powerless
adjunct to the "Republic of Port-au-Prince." Its political culture is
equally atavistic. Two years after leading Haiti to independence in 1804,
the Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines was assassinated, and Haiti split into
the mulatto republic of Alexander Pétion in the south and the noir kingdom
of Henri Christophe in the north. The governments that followed Haiti's
reunification in 1820 were uniformly authoritarian in character and marked
by chronic instability.
In Haiti, according to the West Indian writer Jacky Dahomay, power "obeys an
ancestral, despotic logic."[5] The Haitian "character" or mentalité was a
topic about which almost every educated Haitian I talked to at any length
eventually shared his views, adducing instances of the larcenous nature of
its politicians, the profound "foreignness" of the concept of compromise,
and other supposedly indigenous traits. Like many stereotypes, these often
contained an element of truth. Scholars like Michel-Rolph Trouillot and
Robert Fatton, however, have convincingly argued that the authoritarian and
corrupt nature of Haiti's governments from Dessalines to the present is the
product not of some intrinsically Haitian character, but of Haiti's history,
and is rooted in the early years of the Haitian Republic.

On the eve of the slave uprising in 1791, Saint Domingue, the French portion
of the isle of Hispaniola, was the Caribbean's richest colony, and the
source of one third of France's foreign trade and of vast fortunes made in
rum, sugar, indigo, and coffee. Within thirty years, however, the
devastation wrought by Haiti's twelve-year-long War of Independence, the
collapse of the plantation system, ruinous reparations extorted by France in
return for recognizing Haiti's government, and a political embargo enforced
by the US, the Vatican, and other great powers all accelerated the
destruction of Haiti's economy and contributed to its rapid impoverishment.
"The island's predicament is rooted in this pervasive scarcity," Robert
Fatton writes. According to Trouillot, the Haitian state as we know it today
evolved out of an alliance during the first decades after independence
between the military and the rising merchant class, who transformed the
government into a machine to recapture the surplus value of peasant
agriculture. By the end of the nineteenth century, the customs house and
other indirect taxes on coffee accounted for 95 percent of the government's
revenue. Then, as now, the state was Haiti's primary employer, and taxes on
the labor of the peasantry, Haiti's sole productive class, in addition to
enriching Haiti's rulers, underwrote the rapidly expanding parasitic sector
of government employees.
This alliance, however, was inherently unstable: the subdivision of peasant
holdings into smaller and smaller plots and the gradual depletion of the
soil were accompanied by a decline in agricultural productivity, and the
growing urban class of those seeking a place in government eventually
outstripped the capacity of the peasantry to support them. It was no longer
possible for the governing faction to retain their hold on power without
regular resort to violence. Of the twenty-six presidents-for-life, emperors,
and presidents who ruled Haiti from 1804 to the American occupation in 1915,
all but one were generals or closely allied to the military, and all but one
were toppled by rebellions or coups, murdered, poisoned, blown up, or driven
into exile.
The result today, Robert Fatton convincingly argues, is a "predatory
democracy." In a country where for generations destitution has been
widespread and economic opportunity narrowly circumscribed, the Haitian
government remains the primary route to power and wealth. This is
particularly so for the cadres of Fanmi Lavalas ("Lavalas Family"),
Aristide's ruling party, many of whom come from the lower middle class and
the relatively poor and marginalized petite bourgeoisie—men who might
otherwise have spent their lives as village schoolteachers or shopkeepers.
The scale of Haiti's corruption, Fatton reminds us, is "not necessarily
proof of utter moral depravity—though it can be—but rather a traumatic
response to a social structure that offers little hope for a collective
escape from overwhelming poverty."

With the rise of the Colombian Cali cartel in the 1980s, Haiti's
traditionally corrupt system took on a new dimension. In addition to graft,
the use of Haiti as a route for cocaine smuggling opened up a huge new
source of money for the ruling clique. Haiti's southern coastline, 380 miles
from Colombia and a ten-hour ride in the lightweight "go-fast" boats
employed by the drug cartels, is virtually unpatrolled, and there are few
obstacles to anyone's entering Haiti either by sea or by air. Although
during the junta years large-scale drug trafficking by officers in the
Haitian army was already well established, since the return of Aristide in
1994, the volume of cocaine, either transported overland into the Dominican
Republic or shipped directly to Miami from Cap Haïtien in the north, has
almost tripled, from 5 percent of the annual total imported into the US to a
peak of almost 15 percent.[6] So while the growth of the formal Haitian
economy has steadily declined, the recycling of profits from drug
trafficking and money laundering has sent the price of real estate in
Port-au-Prince's lusher precincts skyrocketing.
The impact of narcotics money upon Haitian society, while difficult to
quantify, has been profound. Mario Andresol, who before seeking political
asylum in the US served as the third-highest-ranking officer in the Haitian
National Police and was directly responsible for Haiti's anti-drug efforts,
claims that his investigations were constantly thwarted by the intervention
of the "Secretary of State, Senators, high officials in the Administration,
high-ranking Police officials, Superintendents or Officers. They have
emerged or came out from the dark, thanks to the return to power of
President Aristide on February 7, 2001."
Politics has been transformed into an entrepreneurial vocation. In the place
of different political parties what Fatton terms "accumulation alliances"
have arisen, based on clientship and centered around the charismatic
personality of a particular gwo neg ("big man"), engaged in a "criminalized
zero-sum game" in pursuit of power.
Many of those who have been enriched by the last seven years of Fan-mi
Lavalas government have spurned the old bourgeois neighborhoods and ventured
further afield. Perched along the ridges and canyons of Bourdon and Juvenat
are their new, handsome-looking, multi-million-dollar mansions, with their
transplanted mature trees, opalescent swimming pools, and state-of-the-art
security systems. One occasionally hears these enclaves referred to as Cité
Lavalas. Were it not for the pigs and goats foraging in the garbage dumped
in the ravine below and the rapidly expanding settlement of shacks
encroaching on the hillside opposite, you might think you were in the
Hollywood Hills.
3.
In December 1995, at the expiration of his first term in office, three years
of which he had spent running a government-in-exile from Georgetown,
Aristide, prohibited by the Haitian constitution from succeeding himself,
stepped down with noticeable reluctance in favor of his hand-picked
successor, René Préval. Préval, a close associate, had been described in the
press as Aristide's Marassa—in the Vodou pantheon one of twins between whom
there exists an intuitive, symbiotic bond. Although Aristide was persuaded
to surrender office, it was soon evident that he was not prepared to
relinquish power. As Raoul Peck, director of the prize-winning film Lumumba
and minister of culture under Préval, notes in his memoirs, despite the new
administration, Aristide, although shielded from public accountability,
remained the controlling voice.[7]
Before Préval's first year as president ended, it was riven by factionalism.
The primary divergence was between the populist wing of the Organisation
Politique Lavalas (OPL), whose paramount loyalty was to Aristide, and a
social democratic–constitutionalist left led by OPL's coordinator Gérard
Pierre-Charles. The principal indictment against Aristide's supporters was
that by promoting a personality cult they were severely undermining attempts
to consolidate and institutionalize Haiti's fragile democracy and to
establish the concepts of pluralism and power-sharing integral to a modern
political system.
In November 1996, Aristide and his associates quit OPL to form Fanmi Lavalas
(FL). Préval, under mounting pressure from Aristide, withdrew his support
from his prime minister, Rosny Smarth, in June 1997, forcing the resignation
of Smarth and six of his social democratic colleagues in the cabinet. The
collapse of the Smarth ministry marks the end of the last legally
constituted government Haiti has had to date. Three times over the next year
and a half, Préval nominated a prime minister and each time the
OPL-controlled Senate refused to confirm the nominee. At issue was the
composition of the Provisional Election Commission (CEP) that the new prime
minister would appoint, a group that in Haiti's increasingly politicized and
lawless environment would have a potentially determining impact on the
outcome of future elections, and which both the FL and OPL wanted to stack
with their supporters. Since both sides preferred the continuing stalemate
to the prospect of ceding power, for the next eighteen months, Haiti made do
without a prime minister or a functioning government.
The breakdown of the Haitian government forced the World Bank and other
international lenders to suspend badly needed aid. The failure of Haiti's
political leaders to reach an accord has seriously eroded the commitment to
Haiti by the United States and the international community, whose long-term
involvement—financial and otherwise—is essential. And it has critically
undermined the belief of the Haitian people in their government's ability or
willingness to deal with the nation's fundamental problems.
Whatever the political differences between the Lavalas factions, Fatton
writes, they were largely overshadowed by personal rivalries driven by what
he terms la politique du ventre (the politics of the belly)—the struggle for
the acquisition of personal wealth through the conquest and plundering of
state offices. Fatton sees the FL–OPL split as the predictable consequence
of the Haitian government's inability, in the face of an aid embargo and a
stagnant economy, to continue supporting the growing class of new political
claimants. By the winter of 1997, corruption in the Préval administration
had become so blatant that at carnival in Port-au-Prince, the crowds, weary
of partisan squabbling and disdainful of Haiti's politicians of all stripes,
devoted much of the festivities to lampooning Lavalas bigwigs as grands
mangeurs, or "big eaters," so named because of their propensity for lining
up at the public trough.
The struggle for money and a foothold in the Haitian bourgeoisie is
unquestionably one of the principal forces shaping Haiti's authoritarian
politics. Moreover, as Fatton says, in the absence of economic growth, this
pattern will replicate itself indefinitely. However, to maintain that in
this instance the politique du ventre was the determining factor in the FL–
OPL split would be to fail to reckon with Jean-Bertrand Aristide himself.

The experience of leading a mass movement in the Eighties and articulating
the unspoken aspirations of the Haitian poor left Aristide with a deep sense
of connection with the Haitian people—"our relationship is a marriage, a
communion, a fusion"—and the conviction, to which many of Aristide's
authoritarian predecessors have been similarly susceptible, that he was the
people's only authentic and legitimate voice. Though out of office, he
remained hugely popular, revered by much of the nation. Virtually everyone
with a position in government had ridden into office on his coattails, and
he made no secret of his belief that their failure to fall into line was a
betrayal of the people who had elected them.
His initial time in office in 1991, much of which he spent at loggerheads
with the legislature, produced an abiding mistrust of government, which he
saw as a vehicle for the bourgeoisie—those of it not allied with him—to
reassert their traditional hegemony. Moreover, he displayed a notable lack
of enthusiasm for representative democracy, acknowledging in his 1993
autobiography that as far as he was concerned it was not an "indispensable
corollary" of the movement for human rights.[8] In theory at least, the
democracy Aristide sought to promote was one whose emphasis was
participatory, a popular dialogue in which the hitherto marginalized mass of
the Haitian people would for the first time be involved. However, while much
of his time is spent in audiences with peasants, workers, and members of
labor unions or women's groups, he has little good to say about the
representatives, elected or otherwise, who purport to speak for these people
and whose legitimacy he regularly questions.
It was hardly surprising, then, that in breaking with OPL to found his own
party, Aristide, as the former ambassador to El Salvador Robert White wrote
at the time,
reverted to the ecclesiastical authoritarianism he once condemned.
Confronted with a Lavalas movement escaping his personal control, he did not
seek to build new coalitions within the party. Instead he excommunicated his
longtime friends...and created a new church, without doctrine or dogma
except unquestioning loyalty to its leader.
This represented a breach with most of his comrades in the Ti Légliz
("Little Church"), as the liberation theology movement was known, as well as
with human rights activists and leaders like Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, head
of MPP (Mouvement des Paysans de Papaye), Haiti's largest peasant
organization. Aristide was now opposed by veterans of the anti-Duvalier
struggle and almost all of the left, persons who had stood with him in the
Eighties and fought for his return from exile. Among the disaffected former
supporters are virtually all of Haiti's leading intellectuals and artists,
the persons who had best articulated the humane values that should be at the
basis of any new Haitian society. Fanmi Lavalas possesses no strong leader
other than Aristide, who is both its leader and raison d'être; without him,
his peculiar coalition would collapse overnight.
Fanmi Lavalas, Jacky Dahomay has written, was based on Aristide's alliance
"with the only forces left to deal with: the traditional bourgeoisie and the
new bourgeoisie born out of all sorts of illicit traffics and their gangs of
chimeras" (thugs).[9] The new FL barons included persons from the
southwestern part of the island, known to Aristide since childhood or
connected to his family, who today staff the National Palace. They are drawn
as well from the traditional mulatto upper bourgeoisie to which Aristide's
wife Mildred belongs, most of whom supported and some of whom financed the
1991 coup. They also include a small remnant of the Ti Légliz and ambitious
military officers like Dany Toussaint, Fourel Celestin, and Joseph Medard,
who joined Aristide in exile following the 1991 coup, and are now powerful
members of the Haitian Senate, as well as the center of much of the
speculation about drug trafficking and "extra-judicial killing."

Unlike the original Lavalas movement, the new Fanmi Lavalas party, Fatton
observes, ruled from the top down. "Bypassing forms of collective
accountability and decisionmaking" that characterized its predecessor, the
ultimate authority remained in the hands of its chief. The impact of this
has been profoundly destructive. Haiti's strongest indigenous force for
democracy, its many grassroots organizations of peasants and urban poor,
which for years, as Beatrice Poligny has written, have been "inventing means
of survival that defy all conceivable clichés about Haitian misery," have to
a large extent been repressed, co-opted, or pushed to the side.[10]
A Kreyol proverb Konstitusyon se papye, bayonht se feh—"Constitutions are
paper, but bayonets are steel"— succinctly expresses the traditional
attitude of Haiti's rulers toward the law. FL proved to be no different. In
January 1999 Préval resolved his power struggle with OPL by shutting down
the opposition-controlled Parliament, a step the OPL charged was "a coup
against our democratic institutions," and for the remainder of his term,
together with a de facto government formed with his FL colleagues, ruled by
decree.
In the face of rising international protest, Préval agreed to call new
parliamentary elections. For most of the Lavalas years, I was a fairly
regular visitor to Port-au-Prince, and the resurgence of political violence,
particularly in the months leading up to the May 2000 balloting, was perhaps
the most disturbing aspect of Haiti's changed political climate. As the
campaign intensified, the police withdrew to the sidelines as gangs of
"militants" from La Saline and Cité Soleil, voicing allegiance to Aristide,
regularly broke up opposition rallies and firebombed the homes and offices
of opposition politicians, human rights activists, and journalists. The
former Port-au-Prince mayor Evans Paul, who had been beaten and tortured by
the military in the early Nineties, warned that the Haitian people were "in
the hands of politically manipulated thugs. Anarchy is overwhelming us."
The political use of paid thugs is a familiar-enough phenomenon in other
parts of the Caribbean, and elsewhere. In Haiti, as the former FL activist
Edzer Pierre notes, "There's a huge population of people who will do
anything for money." In Haiti, the Chimères, as these groups came to be
known, are "not a political force, they're a political tool," and under
Aristide they were transformed into a semi-official arm of the government.
The identity of those in charge of these operations was never a particular
secret. Roland Camille, aka Ronald Cadavre, perhaps the most feared of
Lavalas organization populaire chiefs, is a gangster from La Saline, where
he has run a protection racket in the local market. In 2001, to the dismay
of a group of senators who were involuntary witnesses, Cadavre, whose
relations with Aristide put him beyond the reach of the police, took
advantage of this peculiar immunity to shoot a rival to death on the steps
of the Palais Legislatif. For most of this time, it was clear enough that
these episodes could have been ended by a single (cellular) phone call from
Aristide's private residence in Tabarre, and equally clear, given Aristide's
conspicuous failure to denounce these acts, that such a call would not be
forthcoming. The unwillingness of the government to curb violent acts by its
partisans was sharply criticized by human rights groups like Amnesty
International, Americas Watch, and the National Coalition for Haitian
Rights, once Aristide's strongest supporters.

For international observers who had seen in recent events the lengthening
shadows of Haiti's traditional authoritarianism, the May 2000 parliamentary
elections represented a crucial test of the FL's commitment to democratic
norms. Because of the multiplicity of small political parties that is a
traditional feature of Haitian politics, the Haitian constitution and the
electoral laws enacted in 1998 direct that when no candidate achieves a
simple majority—50 percent plus one—the top two candidates must face each
other in a runoff. While most people predicted a sweeping victory for
Aristide's party, the results still came as a surprise, with Fanmi Lavalas
candidates capturing eighteen out of nineteen Senate races, seventy-two out
of eighty-two contests for the Chamber of Deputies, and the vast majority of
municipal offices.
The US and other countries hailed the outcome and indicated that they would
move quickly to normalize relations. However, the street sweepers had barely
finished removing the smashed ballot boxes and shoveling up the tens of
thousands of paper votes that covered the Rue Pavée in downtown
Port-au-Prince before OAS analysts were reporting that in fourteen out of
nineteen Senate races, the FL candidates owed their victories to a
fraudulent manipulation of the returns by the FL-controlled Provisional
Election Commission (CEP). Although in each instance the FL candidate had
failed to achieve the required majority, the CEP, fearing the possibility
that the defeated opposition parties would unite behind a single candidate,
ignored the constitutionally mandated requirement for a runoff, and awarded
the contest to FL candidates outright. The CEP was able to transform the
plurality that each FL candidate had obtained into the requisite majority by
discarding all of the opposition ballots apart from those received by the
principal opposition runner-up, approximately one third of the total votes
cast, or 1,200,000 nationwide.
The CEP's action brought that much closer Haiti's transformation into a
one-party state. The revelation of Aristide's determination to take all
power at every level raised serious questions about whether he would ever
permit an election that might result in his having to surrender control. UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Organization of American States, the
European Community, the Clinton White House, the US Congress, and the
so-called "Friends of Haiti"— France, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, and
Chile—all denounced the patently fraudulent outcome. The only effect of
their criticism, however, was to intensify FL's efforts to consolidate
power. Although in the weeks before the date scheduled for runoff elections,
the OAS attempted to negotiate some sort of face-saving compromise, Aristide
was not in a conciliatory mood. "We took power and we took it for good,"
President René Préval shouted to a crowd of enthusiastic supporters.
Aristide had plainly hoped to emerge from the May 2000 elections with a
parliamentary supermajority allowing him to amend the constitution and
eliminate all impediments to strong executive rule, and he was willing to
resort to fraudulent means to do so. However, the principal reason for
Aristide to hold elections at all was to legitimize the FL's hold on power
and break the political deadlock that for three years had halted the flow of
foreign aid, and it was now obvious that he could not achieve both. The
participation of seven FL senatorial candidates in the June runoffs would
have satisfied the OAS's objections at relatively little political cost.
Why, then, did he adopt the course he did, when it was virtually preordained
that donor nations would refuse to sanction the results? And why, when the
suspension of aid had been announced, did he ignore the growing crisis for
nearly six months until after the US presidential election, when a vastly
less sympathetic administration, with no political interest in a solution,
was about to take power? The answer is no more apparent today than it was at
the time.
Declaring that "respect of democratic principles has not yet been
re-established in Haiti," the European Union, together with the US, Canada,
Japan, and the rest of Haiti's traditional supporters announced a suspension
of all further World Bank and IMF grants, loans, and other forms of direct
aid. For Aristide and the FL it has meant that the first two years of his
presidency were given over to unsuccessful attempts to extricate the country
from a crisis that had been eminently avoidable and was entirely of his own
making.
Fatton notes that, as a result of the political course he chose, Aristide,
although swept into office by a mass movement for justice and democratic
change, "came to resemble the opportunist politician who has defined much of
the country's history." His legacy is likely to amount to little more than
the unfulfilled hopes of the Haitian people and numerous obstacles to
progress, including Haiti's traditional political culture, more firmly in
place than ever.
—February 13, 2003; this is the first of two articles on Haiti.





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