19609: Lemiuex: Dissident Voice: Bringing Hell to Haiti, Part 1 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Bringing Hell to Haiti, Part 1
by David Edwards and Media Lens
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 1, 2004

Introduction - Anyone Here Feeling Stupid?

Have you noticed how stupid you feel when you watch the
news? Hands up anybody who understands what’s going on in
Haiti?

The media is good at repeatedly broadcasting footage of
armed gangs roaming in trucks, and of quoting senior
officials. But the absence of meaningful context and
informed analysis ­ and above all the unwillingness to
question the official version of events - means that it is
often literally impossible for viewers to make sense of
what is happening. For all their satellite communications
and computer-generated studios, the news media often do not
give us news at all ­ they give us noise.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and
the fourth poorest country in the world - 50% per cent of
the country’s wealth is owned by 1% of the population. Life
expectancy is 52 years for women and 48 for men.
Unemployment is about 70%. Some 85% of Haitians live on
less than $1 US per day. (Source: Yifat Susskind, ‘Haiti -
Insurrection in the Making', ZNET, February 25, 2004))

The United States is Haiti’s main commercial ‘partner’
accounting for about 60% of the flows of exports and
imports. Along with the manufacture of baseballs, textiles,
cheap electronics, and toys, Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and
sisal are all controlled by American corporations. Disney,
for example, has used Haitian sweatshops to produce
Pocahontas pyjamas, among other items, at the rate of 11
cents per hour. Most Haitians are willing to work for
almost nothing.

The US Network For Economic Justice reports:

“Whereas corporations receive vast incentives to set up
plants in Haiti... returns to the Haitian economy are
minimal, and working and living standards of Haitian
people, whose wages are generally below the minimum of
thirty cents an hour, steadily decline... Decades of public
investments and policy manipulation by the World Bank, the
IMF, and the US government have deliberately created an
environment where the exploitation of workers is hailed as
an incentive to invest in Haiti.” (‘50 years is enough:
Corporate Welfare in Haiti’, http://www.50years.org)

The US, in other words, is not a disinterested spectator of
events in Haiti.

Cruelty Never Seen Before ­ Conquering Paradise

When Cristobal Colon (Columbus) first arrived on Hispaniola
­ today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic - in October 1492,
he found something close to an earthly paradise. Of the
Taino people he encountered, he said:

“They are the best people in the world and above all the
gentlest... All the people show the most singular loving
behaviour and they speak pleasantly... They love their
neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk
in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.” (Quoted,
Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, Papermac, 1992,
pp.99-100)

Colon did not allow sentiment to stand in his way for long.
Formal instructions for the second voyage to Hispaniola in
May 1493 were significant, historian Kirkpatrick Sale
writes, in that they constituted “the first statement of
the colonial strategies and policies of empire that were
eventually to carry Europe to every cranny of the earth”.
Colon’s plans were almost entirely concerned with
“establishing the means of exploitation and trade,
providing no suggestion of any other purpose for settlement
or any other function of government”. (Ibid, p.127)

The rights of the Taino people were not an issue - the
concern was simply to steal their gold.

Las Casas, a Spanish eyewitness, described how the invaders
were motivated by "insatiable greed and ambition,"
attacking the Tainos "like ravening wild beasts... killing,
terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the
native peoples" with "the strangest and most varied new
methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before”. (Quoted
Noam Chomsky, Year 501, Verso, 1993, p.198)

The idea seems to have been to utterly crush the spirit of
the Tainos. Las Casas comments:

"As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and
inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the earth by
the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by
dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of
exquisite tortures...[they] decided to abandon themselves
to their unhappy fate with no further struggles, placing
themselves in the hands of their enemies that they might do
with them as they liked." (Ibid, pp.198-9)

Near-identical horrors are documented under the subsequent
French rulers of Haiti, who shipped in hundreds of
thousands of African slaves to work their plantations. From
that time to this, the logic of Western exploitation of the
Third World has remained fundamentally the same: dreams of
a better life must be crushed by violence and grinding
poverty so extreme that local people will accept any work
at any rate, and abandon all notions of improving their
lot.

This is why death squads, tyrants and torturers are such a
standard feature of the Third World ­ hope is always being
born and is always being killed by local thugs serving
Western elites. This is also why weapons consistently flow
from the rich West to the world’s worst human rights
abusers. In the 1980s, the leading academic scholar on
human rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz, found that US
aid, including military aid, "has tended to flow
disproportionately to Latin American governments which
torture their citizens... to the hemisphere's relatively
egregious violators of fundamental human rights".
(Schoultz, Comparative Politics, January 1981)

Terror was required, Schoultz added, “to destroy
permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of
socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political
participation of the numerical majority”. (Schoultz, Human
Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America,
Princeton, 1981)

Haiti And The Racketeers For Capitalism

Between 1849 and 1913, the US Navy entered Haitian waters
24 times to "protect American lives and property". The US
invasion of 1915 brought back slavery to Haiti in all but
name and imposed a US-designed constitution giving US
corporations free rein. After ruling for 19 years the US
withdrew leaving its wealth in the safe hands of the
murderous National Guard it had created. In November 1935,
Major General Smedley D. Butler explained the logic of
intervention:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active
service as a member of our country's most agile military
force ­ the Marine Corps... And during that period I spent
most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big
Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I
was a racketeer for capitalism.

"Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for
American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and
Cuba a decent place for the National City boys to collect
revenues in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the
international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American
sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for
American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped
see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
(Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire, Pluto
Press, 2003, pp. 270-271)

In the 1950s, with firm US support, the Duvalier
dictatorship took over. Anthropologist Robert Lawless
comments:

"The United States would support the continuation of the
Duvalier dynasty, and Jean-Claude, when he came to power,
would support a new economic programme guided by the United
States, a programme featuring private investments from the
United States that would be drawn to Haiti by such
incentives as no customs taxes, a minimum wage kept very
low, the suppression of labour unions, and the right of
American companies to repatriate their profits... Largely
because of its cheap labour force, extensive government
repression, and denial of even minimal labour rights, Haiti
is one of the most attractive countries for both the
subcontractors and the maquilas." (Quoted, Paul Farmer, The
Uses Of Haiti, Common Courage Press, 1994, p.114)

This is the Guardian editors’ version of Haiti’s history:

“The US ignored [Haiti’s] existence until 1862. Later,
beginning in 1915, it occupied Haiti for 19 years and then
abruptly left. Years of dictatorship and coups ensued.”
(‘From bad to worse’, Leader, The Guardian, February 14,
2004)

Years of dictatorship merely “ensued” ­ no mention is made
of the dictatorship +under+ occupation. There is also no
hint that the following years of dictatorship were imposed
by the US in order to maximize returns on investments.

On the rare occasions when US support for terror is
admitted, the motivation ­ maximized profits ­ is out of
sight. Thus Lyonel Trouillot writes in the New York Times
of how “the United States's automatic backing of the
Duvalier dictatorship because it was anti-Communist”
resulted in terror. (Trouillot, ‘In Haiti, All the Bridges
Are Burned’, The New York Times, February 26, 2004)

Haiti’s Big Surprise - Aristide

Terror-backed exploitation continued in an unbroken line
until December 1990 when Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic
priest, won national elections with 67.5% of the vote,
beating the US candidate, former World Bank official Marc
Bazin, into second place with 14.2%. The grassroots
movement that swept Aristide to power took the West
completely by surprise. Aristide took office in February
1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected
President in Haiti's history before being overthrown by a
US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The
Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed
after the coup:

"Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic's
tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of
tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which
had smothered all previous attempts at democratic
expression and self-determination." His victory
"represented more than a decade of civic engagement and
education on his part," in "a textbook example of
participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and democratic political
development". (Quoted, Chomsky, op.cit., p.209)

Aristide's balancing of the budget and "trimming of a
bloated bureaucracy" led to a "stunning success" that made
White House planners "extremely uncomfortable”. The view of
a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed
up the reality beneath US rhetoric:

"Aristide - slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of
Liberation Theology ­ ‘represents everything that CIA, DOD
and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country
against for the past 50 years’,” he said. (Quoted, Paul
Quinn-Judge, Boston Globe, September 8, 1994)

Before deciding to run for office, Aristide had observed:
“Of course, the US has its own agenda here", namely:
maximizing its returns on investments. "This is normal,
capitalist behaviour, and I don't care if the US wants to
do it at home... But it is monstrous to come down here and
impose your will on another people... I cannot accept that
Haiti should be whatever the United States wants it to be."
(Chomsky, op.cit., p.211)

A Haitian businessman told a reporter shortly before the
September 1991 coup: "Everyone who is anyone is against
Aristide. Except the people." (Quoted, Farmer, op., cit,
p.178)

Following the fall of Aristide, the Haitian army "embarked
on a systematic and continuing campaign to stamp out the
vibrant civil society that has taken root in Haiti since
the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship," Americas Watch
noted. At least 1,000 people were killed in the first two
weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The
paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees
Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras ­ Aristide was forced
into exile from 1991-94.

In response to the coup, the Organization of American
States announced an embargo and sanctions. The US
immediately declared 800 of its firms “exempt”. As a result
levels of US trade increased by around 50% under the
embargo. Noam Chomsky summarizes the situation:

“Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect
were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders
of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole
population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in
the way after you’re gone.’... And that’s exactly what
Cedras and those guys did, that’s precisely what happened ­
and of course they were given total amnesty when they
finally did agree to step down.” (Chomsky, Understanding
Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157)

Writing in The Nation in October 1994, US journalist Allan
Nairn quoted paramilitary leader Emmanuel Constant as
saying that he had been contacted by a US Military officer,
Colonel Patrick Collins, who served as defence attaché at
the United States Embassy in the Haitian capital,
Port-au-Prince. Constant said Collins pressed him to set up
a group to "balance the Aristide movement" and to do
"intelligence" work against it. Constant admitted that, at
the time, he was working with CIA operatives in Haiti.
Constant and other paramilitary leaders were trained in
Ecuador by US Special Forces between 1991-1994.

One phone call from Washington would have been enough to
stop the generals, Howard French noted in the New York
Times. But "Washington's deep-seated ambivalence about a
leftward-tilting nationalist" prevented action. "Despite
much blood on the army's hands, United States diplomats
consider it a vital counterweight to Father Aristide, whose
class-struggle rhetoric... threatened or antagonized
traditional power centres at home and abroad." (French, New
York Times, September 27, 1992)

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000
troops after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the
popular movement that had brought him to power. The title
of a 1994 article by Douglas Farah in the International
Herald Tribune summed up the horror: "Grass roots of
democracy in Haiti: all but dead." (May 10, 1994)

The day before US troops landed, the Associated Press
reported that American oil companies had been supplying oil
directly to the Haitian coup leaders in violation of the
embargo with the authorization of the Clinton and Bush
administrations at the highest level. Although the world’s
media were intensely focused on Haiti at the time, the
revelations were met with near-total silence in the US
press.

Human Rights Watch describes “disappointing” aspects of the
US military intervention:

“The United States, notably, showed little enthusiasm for
the prosecution of past abuses. Indeed, it even impeded
accountability by removing to the US thousands of documents
from military and paramilitary headquarters, allowing
notorious abusers to flee Haiti, and giving safe haven to
paramilitary leader Emmanuel ‘Toto’ Constant.” (‘Recycled
soldiers and paramilitaries on the march’, Human Rights
Watch, February 27, 2004)

Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch,
wrote about the documents seized by the US in a letter to
the New York Times:

“The Clinton Administration refuses to return these
documents without first removing the names of Americans.
The Administration's apparent motive is to avoid
embarrassing revelations about the involvement of American
intelligence agents with the military regime that ruled
Haiti.” (‘US Must Release Evidence on Haitian Abuses,’ New
York Times, April 12, 1997)

Crucially, Aristide’s return was permitted only when he
accepted both the US military occupation and Washington’s
harsh neoliberal agenda. His government was to implement a
standard “structural adjustment” package, with foreign
funds devoted primarily to debt repayment and the needs of
the business sectors, and with an “open foreign investment
policy”.

The plans for the economy were set out in a document
submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the
World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the
World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial
to the "more open, enlightened, business class" and foreign
investors. The Haitian Minister in charge of rural
development and agrarian reform was not even told about the
plan. (Quoted Noam Chomsky, ‘Democracy Restored’, Z
Magazine, November 1994)

Aristide also agreed to dismiss his Prime Minister and to
replace him with a businessman from the traditional elite
who was “known to be opposed to the populist policies
during Aristide’s seven months in power” and was “generally
well regarded by the business community.” (Boston Globe,
July 27, 1993)

Now consider the ‘free press’ version of these events:

First, the Times:

“Mr Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, won Haiti's
first free elections in 1990, promising to end the
country's relentless cycle of corruption, poverty and
demagoguery. Ousted in a coup the following year, he was
restored to power with the help of 20,000 US troops in
1994.” (‘Barricades go up as city braces for attack’, Tim
Reid, The Times, February 26, 2004)

Not a word about the long, documented history of US support
for mass murderers attacking a democratic government and
killing its supporters. No mention of the limits imposed on
Aristide’s range of options by the superpower protecting
its business interests.

The Guardian writes:

“To a degree, history repeated itself when the US
intervened again in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide. Bill
Clinton halted the influx of Haitian boat people that had
become politically awkward in Florida. Then he moved on.
Although the US has pumped in about $900m in the past
decade, consistency and vision have been lacking.” (‘From
bad to worse’, Leader, The Guardian, February 14, 2004)

In reality there has been great consistency and vision in
exploiting the people of Haiti for Western gain. Ignoring
mountains of evidence, the Guardian reports: “The US [was]
at one time a staunch ally” of Aristide. (‘Haitian rebels
continue advance on capital’, Agencies, Guardian Unlimited,
February 27, 2004)

Ross Benson writes of the Haitian boat people in the Daily
Mail:

“It was to stem that flow and keep what the former American
presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, colourfully if
disgracefully called 'the Zulus off Miami Beach' that,
three years later, 20,000 US Marines invaded and restored
Aristide to his white-domed palace that looks as if it
might have been built for Saddam Hussein...” (Benson, ‘The
Land of voodoo’, The Daily Mail, February 28, 2004)

No mention of Aristide’s achievements or of the US
determination to destroy them. We note that Buchanan’s
“colourful” language was disgraceful enough to merit
repetition.

The BBC reports:

“Months later [Aristide] was overthrown in a bloody
military coup, but returned to power in 1994 after the new
rulers were forced to step down under international
pressure and with the help of US troops.” ('Country
profile: Haiti', 14 February, 2004;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/country_profiles/1202772.stm)


Again, not a word about the double game being played by the
US at the expense of the Haitian people and their
democracy. Indeed in the mainstream reports we have seen we
have found almost no mention of US commercial interests in
Haiti.

Part 2 will follow shortly...

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality,
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Write to the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger:
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David Edwards is the editor of Media Lens, and the author
of Burning All Illusions: A Guide to Personal and Political
Freedom (South End Press, 1996). Email:
editor@medialens.org.



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