Guantánamo

  When, in April 1986, a crowd of unarmed demonstrators descended on the torture chambers of Fort Dimanche prison, the army beat back the crowd, guns blazing, leaving eight protestors dead and scores wounded. “By the end of its first year in office,” according to one report, Namphy’s regime “had openly gunned down more civilians than Jean-Claude Duvalier’s government had done in fifteen years.”35 The next year was no better. In July 1987, wealthy landholders in the town of Jean-Rabel repressed a peasant uprising, killing hundreds of so-called communists. Random murders accompanied the orchestrated massacres, prompting one journalist to observe, as the year drew to a close, “something strange and terrible is taking shape in Haiti.”36

  The U.S. government response to renewed violence in Haiti was slow and tepid. Confronted by evidence of slaughter, U.S. ambassador Brunson McKinley claimed to have “no proof of such killings.” Still another massacre in late November 1987 prompted the Reagan administration to formally suspend military aid to Namphy, though the CIA continued to funnel money his way to the tune of $1 million per year. By the end of the decade, U.S. intelligence officials appear to have been no more able to grasp the situation in Haiti than had the State Department at its beginning. When, in November 1987, Haitian voters threatened to replace Namphy with the moderate human rights advocate Gérard Gourgue, Namphy suspended the new electoral council and declared a military dictatorship. The United States applauded. “The electoral council was being run by foreign leftists,” Ambassador McKinley announced; “Gourgue was at least a Communist front man, if not a Communist himself.”37

  The following year began with a spectacularly fraudulent election that introduced a period of extreme instability in Haiti, culminating in September with the Saint-Jean Bosco Massacre—an attack on the congregation of a nettlesome liberal Catholic minister by the name of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The desecrating of Aristide’s church went too far for junior officers, who deposed Namphy while elevating yet another former Duvalier-era henchman, Brigadier General Prosper Avril. Avril followed his predecessor’s script to the letter, governing by intimidation and extrajudicial killings. Inaugurated with the torture and public display of three dissidents in the autumn of 1989, Avril saw his reign come to a precipitous end the following March, after soldiers under his command killed a young schoolgirl while breaking up an antigovernment demonstration in the port of Petit Goâve. Avril resigned at U.S. insistence, his place taken by Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, a justice on Haiti’s Supreme Court. The best that can be said of Pascal-Trouillot’s brief but violent reign is that it served as the backdrop for Haiti’s first free and fair democratic election. On December 16, 1990, by a margin far exceeding the estimation of U.S. intelligence officials, Haitians elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in a landslide, setting off a celebration to rival that which greeted the fall of the Duvaliers.

  But just as in the aftermath of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s demise, the popular celebration could not mask the resentment of Haitian elites. Even before Aristide was inaugurated early the next February, Roger Lafontant, a displaced Duvalier loyalist, launched a failed mutiny against Aristide’s impending “communist dictatorship.” This time, supporters of the president-elect struck back, rounding up and killing Tonton Macoutes while destroying property belonging to Lafontant’s sponsors. While there is no denying the lawlessness that followed Lafontant’s mutiny, it hardly reached the level described by the U.S. press, which, like the U.S. government, seemed determined to undermine the Aristide government before it even came to power. “Burned bodies, cannibalism and torched homes give an aura of madness to the capital,” wrote the Associated Press. “On Tuesday, two photographers took pictures of two men eating the flesh of a man who had been burned as hundreds of people looked on.” Such sensationalism distracted American audiences from confronting the crimes perpetrated by Haiti’s displaced leaders as when, several days before the new president took office, arsonists set fire to an orphanage founded by Aristide, killing four children.38

  “Everyone who is anyone is against Aristide. Except the people”—the words of a Haitian businessman complaining to a reporter in the autumn of 1991, just weeks before Aristide was deposed in a military coup. Indeed, elite Haitians had good reason to lament Aristide’s rise to power. For the first time in the nation’s history, the Haitian government committed itself not to consolidate and expand the influence of the rich and powerful but to promote the interests of the poor. Critics in Haiti and the United States pointed to a few notorious examples of elite persecution to discredit the new government, but in fact, Haiti’s transition to civilian leadership was distinguished by tranquility and moderation. The Aristide government confiscated no property, and its supposedly rabid followers killed not a single member of the old ruling class.39

  Still, even moderate reform was too much for the opposition. On September 29, 1991, a group of Haitian Army officials launched a military coup, massacring a crowd mustered to protect the new president, while forcing Aristide’s withdrawal from Haiti. This time, it was not the U.S. government that provided the means of exile but France, which sped the deposed president to Venezuela. At first the U.S. government publicly opposed the coup. Soon it changed its tune, blaming Aristide for his own downfall. Within days of coming to power, the military junta brandished papers allegedly documenting human rights abuses by the Aristide government. This was followed by “evidence” (fabricated with help from the CIA) that Aristide was mentally unstable, hence unfit for political office. Aristide was “a murderer and psychopath,” one CIA officer testified before a hearing convened by U.S. senator Jesse Helms.40

  The resurgence of Haiti’s old guard pleased U.S. business interests, which wanted nothing so much as a return of low minimum wages and minimal labor protections to Haiti. But the violence attending the coup had an unforeseen consequence, as a new wave of emigrants departed Haiti’s shores. In one of his first acts upon taking office, Aristide had dismissed the notorious chefs de section, local heads of the Tonton Macoutes, who had terrorized the Haitian people for over a generation. Upon assuming power, Raoul Cédras, leader of the military junta, promptly restored the section chiefs. With zeal that would have shamed the Duvaliers, the section chiefs hunted down Aristide supporters and prodemocracy activists throughout the country. In one case emblematic of the failure of U.S. Haitian policy, thugs in search of an alleged Aristide supporter torched the dental office of the man’s brother, Frantz Guerrier, killing Guerrier’s daughter and mother, who had taken refuge in his basement. Unsated, the killers returned a few weeks later and murdered the dentist’s wife.41 In another case, soldiers seized a woman named Yolande Jean, who had been working to promote adult literacy. Pregnant at the time, Jean was taken to the notorious Service des Recherches Criminelles police station, headquarters of the sadistic colonel Michel François, where she was beaten unmercifully and ultimately lost her baby.42

  Within days of the coup, hospital morgues overflowed with victims; within weeks, the death toll exceeded fifteen hundred. Summary executions of entire families were not uncommon, as journalists described the worst violence they had seen in years. The scale of the violence was matched only by its audacity. Aristide supporters were cut down outside churches and in public squares. Brothers were taken out in front of siblings. Fathers were murdered before their children’s eyes. In all, the coup displaced as many as two hundred thousand refugees, roughly half of whom fled to the Dominican Republic, while the other half, Frantz Guerrier and Yolande Jean among them, took to the sea.43

  In the immediate aftermath of the coup, the George H. W. Bush administration suspended the forced repatriation of Haitian refugees. It was no longer plausible to argue that Haiti was free of political persecution. In early October, as the number of Haitian boaters mounted, the commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command toured the Guantánamo naval base in anticipation of using it to hold fleeing Haitians. The first refugees to arrive there in the aftermath of the coup were not Haitians but rather a group of seve
nteen American missionaries who had escaped the violence in Haiti in four boats. Rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard on October 10, the missionaries were unloaded at the naval base before being flown home to the United States.44

  Early the next month, the Coast Guard began picking up increasing numbers of Haitian boaters in the Windward Passage and Old Bahama Channel. Official government narratives of this Coast Guard sweep describe it as a “rescue” operation. There is no doubt that many of the boats departing Haiti were unseaworthy and overloaded, and that countless refugees perished in the exodus. But a rescue that ended up returning the vast majority of refugees to face persecution, torture, and sometimes death in Haiti did not feel beneficial to the Haitians. At the very least, the experience of interdiction was profoundly alienating. “They burned our clothes, everything we had,” Yolande Jean recalled, after having been picked up by a Coast Guard boat; “the luggage, all the documents we were carrying.” The Americans gave the Haitians no explanation. “They just started towing our belongings, and the next thing we know, the boat was in flames. Photos, documents. If you didn’t have pockets in which to put things, you lost them.” Jean managed to save a few precious papers by hiding them in a pocket. 45 Moreover, the same presumption that inspired AMIO informed the policy of President Bush: the United States had the right to seize any Haitian boat bound no matter where, and detain, if not repatriate, its crew.

  On November 10, two Coast Guard cutters carrying nearly five hundred refugees pulled into Guantánamo Bay and dropped anchor. The base commander, Captain William C. McCamy, dispatched a medical team to care for the refugees aboard the cutters. Two days later, alarmed by what his team found, McCamy informed Washington that for the safety and health of all concerned he would off-load the refugees onto the base.46 The Haitians were taken to a hastily erected holding area known as Camp Bulkeley, out on the area known as Radio Range (after the old radio antennas that once enjoyed unencumbered access out into the Caribbean), along the Cuban coastline. By mid-November, the number of boaters departing Haiti reached new heights. To forestall the exodus, President Bush resumed forced repatriations on November 18. A temporary restraining order out of district court in Miami halted the president’s order the following day, prompting the president to establish a refugee camp at Guantánamo Bay. Four thousand Haitians came ashore at Guantánamo on November 20.47

  The majority of Haitians detained at Guantánamo were deposited in Camp McCalla, which consisted of six separate facilities located on the old airfield on Windward Point. Once Camp McCalla was completed, Bulkeley was reserved for special uses—to hold “screened-in” Haitians awaiting transfer to the United States, for example, and, later, for screened-in Haitians with HIV/AIDS. Still another facility, known as Camp 7, was used as detention camp for uncooperative refugees. A “Joint Task Force” (JTF) consisting of army, navy, air force, and marines personnel commanded the camps. The organization of the camp followed standard military design, and included sections for families, unaccompanied minors, and adult men and women. The camps could accommodate up to 12,500 refugees at one time.

  Determined to foster the refugees’ cooperation, camp officials charged the Haitians with electing representatives and maintaining their living quarters (excepting sanitation). The JTF solicited volunteers to help with food preparation and, in some instances, with translation in the asylum screening process. To further encourage good behavior, guards provided refugees with cigarettes, games, balls, tools, construction material, and other “luxuries.” U.S. officials also furnished the Haitians with a newspaper entitled Sa K’pase (What’s Happening), prepared by the Military Information Support Team, known by the acronym MIST, a branch of the Psychological Operations command. Published in both English and Haitian Creole, the paper informed refugees of the rules and recent development in the camps, along with rosy accounts of life back in Haiti—apparently designed to speed voluntary repatriations.48

  The distinction between a refugee camp and a prison is razor thin, and rests on the degree of trust and civility between the refugees and their guards. Boredom and restlessness, the bane of many a detention operation, proved a challenge from the beginning. With little to do and even less space in which to do it, the social interactions between the mostly male U.S. military personnel and the screened-out Haitians especially deteriorated quickly. Guantánamo was “like hell,” one witness recalled. Having fled Haiti after seeing his father and brother murdered by thugs who had been searching for him, this man couldn’t bear to be “treated like animals.” In the camps, he reported, “there are thousands of us. Children everywhere. There is so much confusion. Nobody knows what’s happening.” From the beginning, U.S. State Department officials pressured INS interviewers to screen out (i.e., return to Haiti) as many Haitians as possible, which made for tense relations between captives and captors. “If a cutter heading for Port-au-Prince still has space, more screened-in people will be questioned again,” the same witness testified, or “if a person’s story had even a small inconsistency, then he is told ‘you are lying’ and sent back” to Haiti.49

  Confined for days on end in small camps, with limited social contact and little to keep them busy, it wasn’t long before the Haitians began to feel like prisoners. As early as mid-December, after only three weeks in captivity, a demonstration broke out in Camp Bulkeley. Within several days, it spread to Camp McCalla, where Haitians confronted military guards with homemade weapons: tent poles, wooden rods ripped from cots, and chunks of asphalt. More than anything, the situation called for a mediator with knowledge of Haiti. When JTF commander George H. Walls tried to intervene, he was struck by a piece of asphalt; intervention by a representative of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) accomplished little besides clarifying that the demonstrators wanted to speak to representatives in the United States. By December 15, when Walls called home for backup, the Haitians and their captors had come to regard one another as enemies.

  The cultural chasm separating the two communities, already significant, yawned perilously that night, when U.S. soldiers dispatched to keep tabs on the demonstrators witnessed “what appeared to be a voodoo ritual.” According to an official account, some of the Haitians “wrapped themselves in white sheets and walked to the four corners of the compound, which represented the four corners of the earth, to consult with the spirits.” The Haitians “then drew strength from the earth by lying down on the ground near what appeared to be a makeshift voodoo shrine,” which, the chronicler notes, “typically includes representations of Christian and voodoo religious figures and other objects shrouded with symbolic meaning, such as candles or glass jars.” So menacing did this ritual seem that “the general and his staff worried that the next step might be a blood sacrifice of some sort.” With no more knowledge of Haitian culture than the State Department team described in Civiletti, the U.S. officers were left to interpret the Haitians’ actions on their own. “One officer thought some of the Haitians believed that a sacrifice would hasten the arrival of the ‘magical bird’ that would take them to Florida. Another officer remembered hearing about a threat by the malcontents to start throwing babies over the fence if their demands were not met within 48 hours.”50

  The Americans’ interpretation of the Haitians’ behavior could have been catastrophic. By the time the 302 marines dispatched from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, descended on McCalla II at four o’clock on the morning of December 17 with fixed bayonets, the Haitians had been thoroughly dehumanized, their grievances dismissed. Wanting nothing so much as a taste of American freedom, they had become the dark, demonic Other that Americans feared in Haiti going back centuries. Only extraordinary discipline on the part of the refugees themselves prevented “Operation Take Charge” from becoming a bloodbath. “There is no question the Haitians were taken completely by surprise,” read the government report, “and it was not a pleasant surprise. Grim-faced marines, some holding rifles, encircled the camp. Marine engineers wearing flack jackets and helmets and ar
med with breaching tools moved swiftly to make gaps in the wire through which the [marines], equipped with riot gear, entered the compound.” When “the stunned migrants offered no resistance,” the disturbance came to an end.51

  In early December the district court in Miami replaced its temporary restraining order with a preliminary injunction, demanding that the Bush administration “implement and follow procedural safeguards adequate to ensure that Haitians with bona fide claims of political persecution are not forcefully returned to Haiti.” Though overturned the following month, the injunction forced the INS to confront its dismal record in recognizing the real threat of political persecution confronting a broad class of Haitian refugees. For a time, the judicial intervention improved screening procedures at Guantánamo Bay. By mid-January 1992, the number of Haitians screened into the United States jumped precipitously to 85 percent, before falling back to 45 percent in February, then to a mere 2 percent in April. Overall, between October 1991 and June 1992, U.S. officials carried out some thirty-six thousand screening interviews at the naval base, “screening in” more than ten thousand Haitians, or roughly 28 percent.52 Which is not to suggest that 28 percent was enough, or that Americans had finally overcome their anti-Haitian prejudice. Rather, it is simply to observe that the record could have been (indeed, had been) worse.