19157: Esser: Echoes of Venezuela 2002 Are Heard Across the Caribbean (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Narco News
http://www.narconews.com


February 25, 2004
Issue #32
Five Questions About Haiti and the Coup Attempt

Echoes of Venezuela 2002 Are Heard Across the Caribbean

By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

February 19, 2004

Not being a Creole or French speaker, nor having any experience in
the island nation of Haiti (this French-Creole speaking country
shares the isle of Hispaniola with the Spanish-speaking Dominican
Republic), I’m going to abide by the advice I so often give to others:

That when we don’t speak or read the language in any given land, we
have to be very cautious and careful not to pretend that we know what
is happening in those places.

That’s especially true during times of crisis when the Commercial
Media, governments, and the financial interests behind them both,
start spinning their paintbrushes onto the public canvass. As we saw
during the coup attempts in Venezuela of 2002, these are the moments
when confusion reigns, when urban legends are reported as “fact,”
when lies travel halfway around the world before the truth can put
its pants on, and even the spin doctors get caught up in the
whirlpool of the cesspool of the press pool.

In recent hours, the Pentagon has announced it is sending a team of
military advisors into Haiti. On the same day, the State Department
issued an advisory for Peace Corps members and other Americans to
leave Haiti. The rumor mill is at a fever pitch.

Take this statement from U.S. State Department spokesman Richard
Boucher, yesterday, when asked by an alert reporter about Jeremy
Bigwood’s findings of U.S. government money spent on behalf of coup
proponents in Venezuela:

“As far as the facts of the matter, we have spoken many times before
about our assistance to democracy in Haiti—excuse me—our assistance
to democracy in Venezuela.” – Richard Boucher
U.S. State Department spokesman

Oops! That Freudian slip – confusing the documents that show
coup-provoking activity in Venezuela by Washington with U.S. policy
toward Haiti – tells us a lot more about how Washington views current
events in Haiti than most of what press-spinner Boucher said
intentionally.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-California) returned this week from
her second trip to Haiti in fifty days, and implored that “the
international press must discontinue the practice of repeating rumors
and innuendos and begin to spend quality time learning the truth and
writing the truth about what is really going on in Haiti.”

Haiti – a nation that celebrates its bicentennial this year – has
suffered 30 coups in 200 years. In that context, when President Jean
Bertrand Aristide tells reporters that he will die before being
pressured to resign, given his history as a social fighter, it’s
probably a safe bet to believe him: “We cannot continue to move,” he
says, “from one coup d’état to another.”

So let’s begin, before the 31st coup d’etat gains traction, asking
the questions to help us learn and write that truth.

It’s no secret that the Bush administration – with its extremist
Latin America policy chiefs and their obsessive fear of a red planet
– doesn’t like Aristide, the Canadian-educated former Catholic
priest, and historic leader of the poor. But in its final year, the
Clinton administration turned on Haiti, too, imposing an economic
embargo against an already impoverished country that has been
continued by Bush. Proponents of the embargo raise different reasons
for it: alleged fraud in May 2000 congressional races, unwillingness
to abide by conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund and
other global banking entities, and one of the questions that must be
asked is “what is the agenda, really?” Is it simply to make an
example of a small nation to warn other Latin American countries that
they had better fall in line with impositions from above? After all
we’ve seen this same trend in U.S. policy for three years now
regarding Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil, all relatively large and
resource-rich countries, and also regarding a smaller, poorer,
country, Ecuador where the policy has already succeeded in turning
the president against his indigenous electoral base and toward
obedient compliance with the dictates of the North.

Of course, the law of unintended consequences kicks in, especially
with Haiti, as even AP reporter George Gedda acknowledged yesterday
when writing about Haiti:

Among the congressional dissenters a decade ago was Sen. Jesse Helms,
R-N.C. “Aristide may have won an election, but he’s not likely to win
a medal for promoting true democracy,” Helms thundered on the eve of
the invasion.

Nowadays, many in the administration – and in Haiti – would agree with
Helms.

Aristide’s government has accomplished little but, then again, he has
received minimal support from Washington, which contends that he has
violated democratic norms. Assistance from the United States and
other donor countries has been limited in recent years to food and
other forms of humanitarian aid.

“They’ve cut off aid to the government and starved them of
resources,” says James Dobbins, a former State Department Haiti
expert. “They’ve gone to the opposite extreme of the Clinton
administration.”

Jimmy Carter is an authority on that subject. Between April and
September of 1980, the Carter White House allowed 125,000 Cuban
refugees to land in Florida. Carter was blamed for arrival of so many
unwelcome visitors, and Ronald Reagan won the state handily that
November.

And many analysts believe Clinton lost the only election of his life
in 1980 because a number of Cuban refugees were sent to Fort Chaffee
in Arkansas, where some rioted. He won back the Arkansas governorship
in 1982.

The Bush White House, not surprisingly, wants disgruntled Haitians to
stay put and not flee to Florida, especially in this election year.
As the presidential balloting in 2000 showed, how Floridians vote is
no small matter.

While it’s obvious that Washington’s policy was to sabotage the
Aristide government, now it’s not very clear exactly what the Bush
administration wants. But as for what is happening with this coup
attempt in Haiti this week, I have some questions that I hope readers
and others who do speak the language and have experience in the
country can help answer.

Five Questions

1. What Is at Stake?

Follow the money: What resources would the coup-plotters gain control
over by taking the government? The CIA World Fact Book says of
Haiti’s economy:

About 80% of the population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of
all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly
of small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of
the economically active work force. Following legislative elections
in May 2000, fraught with irregularities, international donors –
including the US and EU - suspended almost all aid to Haiti. The
economy shrank an estimated 1.2% in 2001 and an estimated 0.9% in
2002. The contraction will likely intensify in 2003 unless a
political agreement with donors is reached on economic policy.
Suspended aid and loan disbursements totaled more than $500 million
at the start of 2003.

The industrial sector of the Haitian economy is only 20 percent of
its $10 billion annual Gross Domestic Product, and is made up of
“sugar refining, flour milling, textiles, cement, light assembly
industries based on imported parts,” and its agricultural products,
to which 30 percent of the economy is based, are “coffee, mangoes,
sugarcane, rice, corn, sorghum; wood,” in other words, no big ticket
item like petroleum or rare minerals.

Which brings me to the next question…

2. Is This a Battle for Control of Narco-Trafficking?

Haiti has no luxurious resources to covet, and, as the CIA Fact Book
also acknowledges, it has a very poor infrastructure, low education
levels, an inadequately trained workforce, and less than eight
million people… so that leads to the next obvious question: Where
does the drug trade – where the big money exists – fit into this
conflict?

Haiti is not a drug producer nation either, but, as Michael Ruppert
wrote back in May 2000, Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the
Dominican Republic, is in “a key strategic position in between the
drug producing countries of South America – especially Colombia – and
the largest single importation center for illegal drugs in the United
States, New York City.”

Ruppert noted in 2000 that the Dominican Republic was favored over
Haiti by narco-traffickers and Washington alike. But do current
attempts to topple the government of Haiti foretell a new importance
for the western side of the island to cocaine transport routes, the
narco-traffickers, and the bankers who launder their money?

3. Do Aristide Defenders Want Foreign Intervention or Not?

This is a tense little question with big consequences for other
debates in other regions. Haiti’s ambassador to Cuba says yes,
calling for an international police force set up by the Organization
of American States.

But Stan Goff, a veteran of past US military intervention in Haiti,
writing last weekend in Counterpunch, said that “there is an attempt
to start a civil war in Haiti, engineered in the United States of
America and supported by its lapdogs in Caricom and the Organization
of American States.”

So, do we trust OAS to send cops or troops or not? Can any foreign
force be trusted? If so, which?

Or are there alternative paths to preserving the democratically
elected government? What about, for example, helping the elected
Haitian government to defend itself? As Maxine Waters notes:

President Aristide disbanded the military when he returned to office
and has a police force of only 5,000 for a country of 8 million
people. The United States aborted its efforts to support and train
the new police force and currently has a ban on selling guns and
equipment to Haiti. This policy effectively denies Haitian law
enforcement officers the essential equipment that they so desperately
need to maintain order and enforce the rule of law.

And, regarding narco-trafficking, the Congresswoman adds:

President Aristide has given the United States special authority to
assist with drug interdiction efforts by allowing the United States
to interdict drugs in Haitian waters. The government of Haiti does
not have the resources needed to wage a tough and consistent war
against drugs, and the president of Haiti is begging the United
States for assistance to eliminate drug trafficking.

Which brings us to the next question…

4. How Can Washington Justify its Economic Embargo Policy Any Longer?

There are a lot of mixed messages from the State Department, from the
IMF, from the International Development Bank, and others, as to why
this economic embargo still stands. Is the Bush administration really
going to make its stand in Haiti over alleged election fraud in
Congressional races? That might be a tough sell for him this year in
49 states not named Florida. If not that, what is the justification?
And how do Authentic Journalists force clearer answers out of
Washington and these other international entities?

5. Who Is Financing the Paramilitary Coup Operations?

The elected government may not count with well equipped and trained
police, but the paramilitary coup backers, photographed in recent
days armed with fancy assault weapons, financed their effort somehow.
Where are they getting their money?

Where there are paramilitary troops, there is always contraband. To
what extent are the coup plotters in Haiti financed by
narco-trafficking money? Is this a repeat from Bush Senior’s funding
Nicaraguan contra fighters with cocaine trafficking proceeds? Is a
certain U.S. Senator who led that investigation going to touch this
one now that he’s running for president?

And what about governments that have outside interests in Haiti: Not
just Washington, but also France, Canada, the Dominican Republic, and
others. Are they financing, covertly, the paramilitaries? And how do
we find out what forces are financing the coup attempt?

Let’s begin with those five questions, and the various questions that
they raise. Copublishers are invited to comment in The Narcosphere.
Others can send email answers and tips to publisher@narconews.com.
I’ll be inviting some journalists and investigators who know a lot
more about these questions, and about Haiti, than I do, to accept
copublisher accounts in exchange for their labor answering these
urgent questions.
.