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By
the morning after Haitian president Jean Bertrand
Aristide’s abduction at the hands of the US military,
the meaning of the coup was already clear. Well-armed
right-wing vigilantes, “all businessmen”
according to the Boston Globe, descended by
the dozens from their gated enclaves on the hills
overlooking Port-au-Prince’s slums and began
“cleaning up the neighbourhoods.” “We
went down every alley, every street,” one thug
reported, and by nightfall a single squad gloated
that they had murdered more than twenty Aristide supporters.
By the following day US Marines had imposed a 6pm
curfew on the capital, but paramilitaries had worked
out an arrangement to patrol the pro-Aristide stronghold
of Cite Soleil side-by-side with the police, now commanded
by one of their “friends.” Elsewhere their
cohorts torched buildings providing services for the
poor, and in Petion-Ville they targeted a mansion
expropriated from the Duvalierist drug-runner “Ti
Je” and converted, under Aristide, into a school
providing free meals to 400 poor children. Presumably
the torture chamber that lies under the complex’s
swimming pool, sealed since its confiscation, is back
in business.
Bush
administration officials have tried to put a democratic
face on this, the latest in a long string of coups
in Haiti, and to distance themselves from the psychopaths
who have led the so-called “rebellion” against
the country’s only ever elected leader, but it
is clear that Aristide’s ouster has been in the
works for years and that right-wing Bush operatives
are up to their necks in it. The list of local coup
leaders reads like a “Who’s Who” of
the sadistic Haitian right, all of them with a history
of coup-making and many with years of American military
training under their belts. And far from being marginalized
in the “new” Haiti, the thugs are basking
in sudden respectability. The newly-appointed Interior
Minister, former General Herard Abraham, has been
seen socializing with coup leader and former police
chief Guy Philippe, a self-proclaimed fascist who
fled to the neighbouring Dominican Republic after
being exposed in a coup plot in 2000. At a mid-March
rally in Gonaives, US-handpicked Prime Minister Gerard
Latoure heaped praise on the Cannibal Army, the paramilitary
gang that had previously controlled drug traffic in
the city’s port and which provided local firepower
for the ‘rebellion” that ousted Aristide.
Sharing the podium with Latoure were OAS officials,
the newly installed Haitian chief of police, and representatives
of right-wing paramilitaries, who vowed to “keep
working with the government” as long as it served
their interests. “If the government cannot work
with us,” they vowed, “we will overthrow
it.”
Aristide’s
exit was the end result of a carefully orchestrated
de-stabilization program conceived well before the
2000 elections but pushed aggressively since 2001.
Overseen by two prominent Bush administration officials—NSC
envoy Otto Reich, who helped direct the Contra war
against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government two
decades ago and was more recently implicated in the
attempted coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez,
and Roger Noriega, US adviser to the Organization
of American States under Bush Sr. and a former aide
to the archconservative segregationist Senator Jesse
Helms—the US implemented a three-prong strategy
aimed at bringing down Aristide: they funnelled millions
into setting up the right-wing Democratic Convergence
coalition; implemented a devastating economic embargo
against the poorest country in the western hemisphere,
blocking more than $500 million in desperately-needed
aid; and, through the Dominican Republic, armed and
assisted the Duvalierist commandos who would eventually
march on Port-au-Prince. In early 2003, Canadian and
French leaders signed on to the project, inviting
OAS and American officials to attend the “Ottawa
Initiative” and declaring their support for regime
change in Haiti.
Inside
Haiti it was clear that the US-funded “opposition”
was directed by the widely hated local bourgeoisie
and could garner very little mass support. Andre Apaid,
head of the “Group of 184,” is a sweatshop
owner and the son of a prominent Duvalierist who had
been known to brandish weapons against union organizers
in his plants. A USAID official admitted that while
DC “could get the big shots together…the
program was never able to build a base of support
from among the people.” It was this lack of popular
support that explains the opposition’s insistence
on maintaining the military option against a regime
with no standing army and only a ragtag police force
at its disposal.
The
only possibility for spoiling the coup rested with
the Haitian majority itself, but here the weaknesses
in Aristide’s reform strategy proved fatal. Deposed
in a coup just seven months after his election in
1991, Aristide’s return to power in 1994 came
with the condition that he implement IMF-imposed economic
“shock therapy.” With half of its population
“unable to secure their minimum food requirements,”
according to the UN, Haiti was compelled to pay $2m.
a month in debt repayments alone. Aristide went along
with structural adjustment, which called for massive
privatization (cutting civil service jobs by half
in a country with 60% unemployment), the slashing
of tariffs and import restrictions, and massive deregulation
of the corporate sector. The government managed to
slip through a small rise in the minimum wage, but
rampant inflation means that those earning it enjoy
less buying power today than they did before the 1990
elections. The legal wage since 1995 is $14.40 (about
£7.80) for a 48-hour week, but a series of loopholes
means that more than half of Haiti’s assembly
plants pay even less. In a situation of increasing
misery, the euphoria and confidence so visible in
the movement that brought Aristide to power in 1991
dissolved, sapped by more than a decade of neo-liberal
economics. As an increasingly demoralized popular
base retreated from politics, the government came
to rely upon corrupt street gangs to hold the line,
and in the end serious disaffection among Lavalas’
traditional base rendered effective resistance against
the coup plotters impossible.
It
is difficult to see where the US-appointed regime
will go to make Haiti even more attractive to multinational
capital. The marines will continue to turn a blind
eye to the Haitian bourgeoisie’s attempt to inflict
revenge on Lavalas supporters and punish any attempts
to mobilize workers and the poor, but at some point
the new regime will come up against the expectations
of Haitians who have no choice but to fight their
corner and who, having briefly tasted a sense of power
in the early 1990s, might take this democracy thing
a bit too seriously for the likes of Bush and the
directors of global capitalism.
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