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Many people continue to believe that the US supported Aristide's return to the Haitian presidency in 1994 because the Clinton administration supported democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The intelligence summaries we received during his reinstallation were violently anti-Aristide, and the policies pursued from Day One were designed to ensure Aristide's neutralization as the leader of Haiti. He spent three years in talks with the United States trying to gain support for his return, and during that time the United States placed increasing pressure on him – especially by allowing the body count of the Cedras-Francois coup government to increase at the expense of Aristide activists from the Lavalas movement he founded. It is unlikely that the G.H.W. Bush administration would have ever put Aristide back into office.
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Last December, Peter Kornbluh of the National Archives told a Newsday reporter:"The resurfacing of the Iran-Contra culprits has been nothing short of Orwellian in this administration. These are not 21st-century appointments. They are retrograde appointments, a throwback to an era of interventionism when the U.S. was the big bully on the block." There is much speculation that these appointments – most intimates of the Miami-Cuban right-wing and mafia – are a form of reciprocation for gusano assistance with the Florida-based judicial coup that put George W. Bush into the Oval Office.
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In 1994, just before the United States launched the invasion of Haiti that became my last deployment, Paul Farmer published an excellent book called The Uses of Haiti.<28> He described America's horrifically successful Haitian policy of blaming the victim while continuing to strangle him. For instance, it's often pointed out that Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince is overpopulated, jerrybuilt, and afflicted by almost irremediable drainage and waste-disposal problems. Huge numbers of peasants continually leave the countryside in search of work in the city, forming overcrowded, sprawling bidonvilles (shantytowns) with little or no potable water or electricity. But mainstream American papers rarely go on to explain what drives this process: as foreign agribusiness disrupted the Haitian sharecropping system, land enclosure and mechanization(as well as terrible soil erosion) forced more and more people off the land and into the cities to seek work that was not available except to a very few(accounting for the criminally low wages paid in Port-au-Prince by foreign manufacturers). Paradoxically, the Artibonnite valley which grows enough rice to feed Haiti ships most of its product abroad to get export dollars, and the US ships(taxpayer subsidized) rice into Haiti at prices most Haitians can ill afford.
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The interests of the Republicans diverge from those of the Democrats based on their constituencies. Both parties are run by elites who want to see the removal of Aristide and others who have the capacity to mobilize their population. But where Democrats would prefer something that looks like a success story – along with managed elections and other trappings of “progress” – Republicans, as the party that still employs its latter-day version of the Southern Strategy, want to see Haiti in chaos. They will put on the mask of paternalistic sympathy while they continue to impose dysfunction, but they need Haiti to continue to serve as an example of Black incapacity for self-governance – which reinforces their white supremacist appeal to the Helms wing of the party. There is, in my opinion, a kind of imperfect comparison that can be made between Haiti and the American South that sheds further light on American-Haitian ruling class relationships.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/032304_haiti_pt1.htmlThis article is somewhat chaotic in its organization but contains LOTS of good information.
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