Haiti

  Carter did not win a second term, though, and Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 dealt a profound blow to the Haitian prodemocracy movement. Within weeks of the U.S. elections, realizing that American foreign policy was about to change, Duvalier carried out a sudden wave of arrests, attacking those who had spoken out against his regime over the previous years. Opposition radio stations were ransacked and shut down, journalists imprisoned and tortured. Reagan, for his part, sent Coast Guard ships patrolling the waters between Haiti and the United States in order to stop Haitians fleeing their country from making it to Florida. The goal was to prevent Haitians from setting foot on U.S. soil, where they had the right to apply for political asylum. Only a tiny number of Haitians were ever granted such asylum—despite the widely reported political repression in Haiti, the “boat people” were systematically categorized as “economic refugees”—but the U.S. government wanted to avoid having to carry out such hearings altogether. The Haitians who were intercepted on the seas were often shipped back to Haiti, where they risked severe punishment from the Duvalier government. Others were held at Guantánamo Bay or in the Krome detention camp in Florida, sometimes for years. Activists in the United States lambasted the policy, insisting that it was both unethical and racist, especially given the continuing welcome of refugees fleeing Cuba during the same years. But Haiti remained a U.S. ally, and immigration policies flowed from that.82

  Facing hostility abroad and continued repression at home, Haitians found their horizons closed off in every direction. But the flowering of opposition in the late 1970s was impossible to suppress completely. Journalists continued to brave the threat of arrest and torture, and young people carried out ever-bolder street protests against the regime. The disastrous pig eradication campaign pushed rural Haitians to criticize local power structures with increasing fervor. And Haitian Catholic leaders, influenced by the broader currents of 1970s liberation theology, added their voices to the demands for reform. A young priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide attracted large and impassioned crowds with his riveting preaching, packed with wordplay and complex symbolism and fearless in its attacks on Duvalier. “We must end this regime where the donkeys do all the work and horses prance in the sunshine,” he declared in 1982 in his first sermon as an ordained priest. The following year, Haitian Catholics got high-profile encouragement for their efforts when Pope John Paul II visited the country and declared to a crowd that included Jean-Claude Duvalier: “Something must change here.”83

  The Duvalier family, meanwhile, seemed increasingly unhinged from the population. In 1984, the first lady, Michèle Bennett, held a lavish benefit dinner to raise money for her pet project, a hospital in Port-au-Prince. “If Nero were to come back to earth and throw a party, this was the party he would throw,” one of the guests said of the proceedings. Bennett made sure that the entire evening was televised: the Haitian population was meant to see the luxurious event as a symbol of how much their rulers cared about them. The next year, Bennett took two dozen of her friends to Paris for a $1.7 million shopping spree. U.S. officials and Haitian industrialists, longtime supporters of the regime, worried that such provocations would make a revolution inevitable. Even Duvalier’s loyalists began to perceive him as a liability.84

  In November 1985, an incident in the town of Gonaïves opened the way for the final push against the dictator. As a student demonstration raged in the street outside, a student named Jean-Robert Cius was leaning against the wall in the courtyard of his school with a notebook in his hands. Cius himself wasn’t demonstrating, but when government militiamen trying to suppress the protests fired into the courtyard, a bullet hit him squarely in the chest. He fell dead to the ground, the bullet-pierced notebook still clasped against his body. Two other students were also killed that day. One of them, who had shouted out in protest after watching Cius die, was chased into a dead-end alley and shot by a militiaman at point-blank range. The other, wounded by militia gunfire, was beaten to death as he lay on the ground.85

  Somehow, after all the tens of thousands of killings, after the decades of political repression and poverty that had sent more than a million fleeing Haiti, these three murders tipped the scale. Students poured into the streets in Gonaïves and other towns; fifty thousand protesters marched in Le Cap. Invoking the spirit of Dessalines, they proclaimed that a new revolution was imminent, and that Duvalier had to go. “Get out, Satan!” Aristide cried in a sermon. In January 1986, Duvalier apparently called a delegation of leading Vodou oungans to the National Palace to get advice about how he should respond to the situation. He got an earful, as the leader of the delegation, Max Beauvoir, laid out the grievances of the Haitian people against the regime. A few days later, Beauvoir delivered the verdict: “The spirits are annoyed and angry.” For many months, he said, “the spirits have wanted you to leave.” The U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince gave Duvalier the same message, arranging for him to be carried out of the country to a comfortable life in France—sustained there by a Swiss bank account filled over the previous decades with millions of dollars from the Haitian treasury.86

  The thirty years of Duvalier rule left behind a devastated country. As many as a million Haitians had fled into exile. The treasury was empty. The civil institutions that had previously provided an alternative means of organizing Haitian society had been largely demolished or absorbed by the state. Haiti was still burdened by crushing foreign debt and battered by foreign involvement in its affairs. And while international investment and aid had helped to build up some aspects of the country’s infrastructure, what remained of the state had little capacity to maintain it. The only truly functioning institution that Duvalier left behind was a massive military apparatus. By the early 1980s, perhaps as many as three hundred thousand individuals were incorporated into the Tontons Makouts hierarchy. The army, meanwhile, had long ago been purged of its opposition elements and now was composed of men who had also loyally served the dictator. The militia chiefs and the army officers had little desire to let go of the social and political power that the regime had given them, and they retained tremendous influence even after Jean-Claude Duvalier himself was gone.87

  The protesters who had at last succeeded in overthrowing Duvalier, however, were buoyed by a sense that radical change was truly possible. The uprising of 1985–86, and the years of activism that preceded it, had created a network of grassroots organizations that seemed poised to reconstitute a democratic order in the country. The moment had come, they hoped, to finally put an end to Haiti’s perpetual cycle of violence and poverty. Stripping politics to its core, the student demonstrators had demanded: “Long live life! Down with death!”88

  EPILOGUE

  “We have become the subjects of our own history,” announced Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1987, “and we refuse from now on to be the objects of that history.” Aristide’s exultation captured the hope and determination of the moment. The 1986 overthrow of Duvalier was spoken of as the “uprooting”: the tree planted by decades of dictatorship had to be completely destroyed before something else could grow in its place. Under the aegis of a transitional military government known as the Conseil National de Gouvernement (CNG), an assembly set about writing a new constitution aimed at undoing the three decades of Duvalierism. The resulting document was a watershed in the country’s constitutional history, the first attempt at creating a truly participatory democracy in Haiti.1

  The 1987 constitution explicitly identified the central problem in Haitian political culture: the gap between the mass of the population and the political class. The aim of the new political order, it declared, should be to “eliminate all discrimination between urban and rural populations, through the acceptance of a community of language and culture and the recognition of the right to progress, information, education, health, work and leisure for all citizens.” To that end, the constitution for the first time made Kreyòl an official language of the country on a par with French, requiring the government to disseminate all laws, decrees, and in
ternational agreements in both French and Kreyòl in the press and on the radio. Taking aim at the political culture of the Duvalier regime, the constitution also announced that “the cult of personality is formally outlawed,” and it ordered that no streets, public buildings, or works of art could be named after living individuals. It prohibited those who had carried out torture or committed other crimes under Duvalier from serving in office for ten years. And it created a new electoral commission, charged with overseeing the political process and assuring the legitimacy and fairness of elections.2

  Almost immediately after its ratification, though, the ambitious new constitution ran into a wearily familiar challenge: the military seemed determined to stay in power. They refused to apply the new laws and seemed intent on putting off the transition to democracy for as long as possible. Haiti was stuck in what Michel-Rolph Trouillot dubbed “Duvalierism after Duvalier”: the dictator was gone, but his generals and his tactics were still in place. It seemed possible that, as had happened so many times before, the popular uprising would find itself stifled, blocked off, and ultimately evanescent. A song by the musical group Les Frères Parent pointed out that Haitians had spent almost all of the twentieth century struggling against leaders they couldn’t trust: “Vincent let Lescot rise up / Lescot was succeeded by Estimé / Estimé left Paul Magloire / Our misery did not abate … / Magloire gave us Duvalier the father / Duvalier the father gave us Duvalier the son / Duvalier the son gave us the CNG / And that’s why we have to watch them!” Still, activists kept speaking out, through songs and sermons, newspaper columns and street demonstrations, and after years of repression by the military, they finally prevailed. In 1990, the CNG, yielding to the pressure, named the supreme court justice Ertha Pascal-Trouillot to the post of provisional president—making her Haiti’s first female head of state—and put her in charge of organizing an election.3

  The field of candidates was large and diverse; among others, it included Louis Déjoie Jr., the son of Duvalier’s 1956 opponent. But the competition shifted dramatically when, a few weeks before the election, Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced that he was running. Since his participation in the anti-Duvalier movement of the early 1980s, Aristide had become one of the most prominent voices of protest in Haiti, speaking out boldly against the CNG and criticizing many aspects of U.S. policy in Haiti. Infuriated by his blistering speeches from the pulpit, the military regime had carried out several assassination attempts against him; but although they killed dozens of his parishioners and burned his church to the ground, they never got Aristide himself. These repeated escapes from death were seen by many of Aristide’s supporters as evidence of divine protection, and they helped to establish him as the embodiment of the popular push for democracy in Haiti.4

  Aristide called his party Lavalas, “the flood,” after a popular anti-Duvalier song that likened the demonstrators to a deluge that would carry away the oppressive regime. As his symbol he chose a white rooster, a symbol of strength and combativeness. It decorated his campaign posters, the pro-Aristide murals that sprang up throughout the country—and the ballots that about two-thirds of the voters put into the urns. Not since the 1930 elections, when the end of the U.S. occupation was in the offing, had an electoral process generated such enthusiasm, and the levels of participation were significantly higher than ever before. At last, many Haitians hoped, there would be a real connection between the country’s population and its government institutions. A song produced for the electoral commission summed up the ebullient mood: “We are the state … / The state is us.”5

  The day after his inauguration as president, Aristide led a march to the notorious Fort Dimanche prison and declared that it should be made into a museum documenting the crimes of the Duvalier years. Families of the prison’s victims carried photographs of the dead and disappeared and placed them around the site. Many hoped for a reckoning with the crimes of the recent past and a fundamental transformation of the political order. But while the movement to overthrow the Duvalier regime had created a flowering of new organizations and institutions, they emerged in a landscape scarred by the repression of civil society. The state was essentially a shell, offering few services to the Haitian population. And despite the efforts of the previous years, the army was in fact far from uprooted and still had support from influential sectors of Haitian society. With Aristide promising sweeping changes that threatened their power, the military leadership struck back. On September 30, 1991—less than eight months after Aristide’s inauguration—a group of army officers organized a coup. Aristide was able to escape to the United States, but the army carried out brutal reprisals against his supporters, killing at least twelve hundred over the next few days and many thousands more in the following years.6

  Aristide returned to the presidency in 1994, escorted by U.S. troops ordered to Haiti by President Bill Clinton with the sanction of the United Nations. Once back in office, Aristide disbanded the Haitian army entirely, convinced that if left in place it would represent a recurrent threat to the fragile democratic regime. Foreign troops—first from the United States, and then from a U.N. mission—took over some of the army’s duties. Aristide had long spoken about the need for Haitians to emancipate themselves from foreign influence, but the conditions of his return in fact helped establish a long-term foreign military presence in the country.7

  In the three years of Aristide’s absence, the economic situation in Haiti had gotten even worse: an embargo put in place after the military coup had taken a deep economic toll. As a condition of their support, international financial institutions insisted that Aristide follow the neoliberal economic doctrine and remove all protectionist tariffs—a policy which, as Clinton himself would later admit, devastated Haiti’s rice growers and deepened the country’s dependency on imported food. When Aristide attempted to resist, he found himself facing the threat of withheld aid and loans. With the government in tremendous debt, he also had difficulty financing state projects that might have improved the lives of the population. And he was given little time: the United States counted Aristide’s years in exile as part of the five-year presidential term and insisted that he step down and allow a new presidential election in 1995. René Préval, a member of the Lavalas party, was voted in as his successor. Aristide remained a powerful political figure, however, and at the end of Préval’s term, he was elected president once again. This succession of presidential elections was a landmark in some respects: they represented largely peaceful and democratic transfers of power of a kind rarely seen before in Haitian history. Nevertheless, especially after Aristide’s second election, there were complaints of electoral fraud, and the next years saw increasing political conflict as his opponents tapped into popular frustration at the lack of improvement in the country. Protests against him increased, and Port-au-Prince and other cities were racked by violent street confrontations.8

  The year 2004 was supposed to be a moment of triumph for Haiti: the bicentennial of the country’s independence. Aristide had prepared elaborate celebrations and invited international guests to attend. He also issued a challenge to France, accusing the country of having condemned Haiti to poverty through the 1825 indemnity and demanding that France pay it back. But the bicentennial instead became the occasion for an uprising: in February 2004, a small group of former military officers took up arms against Aristide, approaching Port-au-Prince from the north. The U.S. government made it clear that it would not intervene to support him, and at the end of the month, Aristide left the country in circumstances that remain the subject of tremendous controversy. He was escorted by U.S. troops and officials, who claimed that they were simply helping him to flee to safety; Aristide himself, however, described the event as a kidnapping. Exiled for a second time, Aristide would remain abroad until 2011, when, despite strenuous objections from the United States, he returned to Haiti as a private citizen. Aristide’s return came just a few months after Jean-Claude Duvalier astonished virtually everyone by similarly reappearing in Haiti
, and the political life of both men is probably far from over.

  What happened to Aristide between 1990 and 2004? Why did the promise of the uprooting remain unfulfilled? The question still haunts political debate. There were powerful people both inside and outside Haiti who always distrusted Aristide, and they played a crucial role in undermining his regime. But in time he and his party also lost the support of many close allies, some of whom accused Aristide of sinking into the very patterns of authoritarianism and corruption he had once so eloquently denounced. His defenders, meanwhile, continue to insist that such accusations are largely ideological fabrications and that his attempts to bring democracy and reform to Haiti were crushed by the policies of foreign governments and international financial organizations. Given the recentness of these events, and the fact that many of those involved are still playing central roles in Haitian political life today, the dispute is an intense and often hyperbolic one, a tangle of accusations and counteraccusations of bewildering complexity. But the larger lessons to be learned must be less about individuals than about structure, about the long-term historical processes that came bearing down on Haiti in the wake of Duvalier. Regardless of their opinion of Aristide, all those who look back at the 1990s can share a sense of mourning that yet another moment that seemed to offer hope for real and profound change in Haiti fell prey to the seemingly inescapable cycle of crisis and decline.9