Haiti’s first free and fair elections were scheduled to be held in 1990. Washington was confident that its candidate, Marc Bazin, a World Bank official, would be elected president and oversee the continued integration of Haiti into its plan for a world system of American-led transnational capitalism. But, at the last minute, Aristide was persuaded to run for president as the representative of the Lavalas movement. Lavalas was the successor of the Ti Legliz movement. Lavalas means flood. Each person is a drop of water. As they all come together to achieve a common goal, they become an unstoppable force of nature, like the flash floods that carry everything along with them during Haiti’s torrential rains. When Aristide agreed to run for the presidency, Washington’s plans were swept away with the tide. Candidates identifying with Lavalas and Aristide were virtually assured of victory. Many senators and deputies saw Aristide as a convenient stepping stone to government, one of the few sources of income in Haiti. By the constitution of 1987, political power was shared among the three levels of government: the presidency, the senate, and the legislature. Haitians had long lived with the reality of a president with total control, however. They assumed, as have analysts and casual observers, that Aristide had that power. In reality, Haitian presidents must work with the other two bodies of government, not to mention the external sources of power. The minister who had overseen the tontons macoutes under Duvalier, Roger Lafontant, attempted a coup on 17 January 1991, a couple of weeks before Aristide’s inauguration. Thousands of people left the poorest neighbourhoods to place themselves between the guns of Lafontant’s thugs and their president-elect. This time, they were victorious.
Aristide proceeded cautiously to soften the harshness of life among the poor without challenging the system. Nevertheless, USAID criticized his policies on labour and foreign-exchange controls as inhibiting growth. While USAID funnelled $26.7 million to the business sector in 1991, it opposed both a rise in the minimum wage from thirty-three to fifty cents an hour as well as the government’s attempt to stabilize food prices.16 USAID was a branch of the State Department whose mission is to support American business internationally. Even a modest rise in the minimum wage could mean that transnational corporations would locate their assembly plants in countries where the state could better control the workforce and assure business a supply of cheap electricity. For that segment of the oligarchy whose revenue depended on sub-contracting work from transnational corporations, the poor were Haiti’s most attractive resource. Policies that improved the conditions of the poor threatened their interests.
General Cédras took power on 30 September 1991 in a military coup. This time, the Army was prepared when the poor came to protect Aristide. They opened fire; many were killed. Thousands would be slaughtered by the reactionary forces in the months that followed. Aristide escaped assassination. For the next three years, Aristide would search for allies in the United States to help lobby the administration on behalf of his, and the Haitian people’s, presidency. Meanwhile, the CIA worked with the coup to destroy Lavalas. CIA assets were paid to organize death squads, weapons were funnelled into Haiti from Miami, and Washington protected the assassins from prosecution when the coup ended in November 1994.17 Those in the slums who could not escape or go into hiding formed themselves into gangs to defend themselves against the death squads.18
For three years, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Clinton negotiated with Aristide in Washington while they supported the Army that gunned down his supporters in Haiti, especially Cité Soleil. Aristide would be allowed back into Haiti only when Washington was convinced that he no longer posed a threat to its interests. Clinton attempted to manipulate Aristide into implementing a neoliberal program upon his return. But Aristide negotiated cleverly. He agreed to drastically reduce tariffs on rice, but only if accompanied by investment in that sector. Bush and Clinton insisted that Aristide grant amnesty for the authors of the coup. When Aristide insisted on holding the assassins accountable, President Bush called him “vindictive.” Finally, Aristide did agree to the condition, but framed it in terms of the actual coup of 30 September. In that way, all of the crimes that preceded or followed the coup would be open for prosecution. (In fact, when he returned to Haiti, Aristide established the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, which, along with colleagues from the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, helped to successfully prosecute members of the death squads for a massacre in Raboteau during the coup.) Washington also required that Aristide sell state assets. Clinton wanted to force Aristide to betray himself and the Haitian people who had elected him. Aristide finally agreed to this demand on the condition that part of the money from the sale be put in trust and used for housing, education, and health.19
The most extraordinary thing about this agreement — the Paris Plan — is that it existed at all. Washington first sponsored a coup, then negotiated the conditions under which it would allow the elected president to serve out what remained of his term. Washington assigned a number of technocrats to accompany Aristide back to Haiti and to “help” him implement the Paris Plan, which Lavalas supporters called the Plan of Death, meant to control every aspect of the transition from military dictatorship (for which Washington was responsible) to “democracy” (which it would not allow). In 2009, the United Nations would name the man responsible, Bill Clinton, its special envoy for Haiti. After the earthquake of 2010, he would attempt to implement the same policies.
At the time, in the mid-1990s, there was a campaign in North America to sensitize the public to the working conditions in the peripheral countries where transnational corporations were transferring manufacturing jobs. The Clinton administration was aggressively pursuing a global restructuring of class relations in favour of transnational capitalists. Workers in the core countries like Canada and the United States discovered that they were in direct competition with the poorest peoples in the world for their jobs. However, the sweatshop campaign addressed North Americans not as workers, but as consumers. The campaign asked them to petition certain corporations to improve the conditions of Haitian workers.20 Corporations like Disney and Nike responded by transferring production to China.21 In response, the Clinton administration, together with the biggest corporations, established a monitoring agency controlled by the garment industry.22 Many student organizations in North America uncritically accepted the “solution.” A more astute World Bank official advised the industry not to worry about Aristide’s attempt to increase the minimum wage because “in a country like Haiti the government’s enforcement capacity is nil.”23
In the parliamentary elections of June 1995, Aristide’s group, the Plateforme Politique Lavalas, won seventeen of twenty-seven Senate seats and sixty-seven of eighty-three seats in the Chamber of Deputies. However, inside the Plateforme, the largest group was the Organisation Politique Lavalas, led by Gerard Pierre-Charles, an economist who had returned from exile after the fall of Duvalier. He now represented the interests of the oligarchy. Since the Chamber of Deputies has as much power as the president, the government was deadlocked. In 1996, the confusion inside of Lavalas was resolved. Those like Aristide who were fighting for the poor founded the political party Fanmi Lavalas, which drew its support from local groups all across Haiti called the Organisations populaires (Popular Organizations). The OPL of Pierre-Charles renamed itself Organisation du peuple en lutte. By suggesting a people in struggle, it attempted to retain the allegiance of the same constituency as Fanmi Lavalas; however, the people it was struggling for already owned Haiti. Once the electorate knew who was who, they voted overwhelmingly for Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas in the legislative elections of 1997. After the first round of voting, the OPL could see the writing on the wall and refused to participate in the second round so that the legislature would not be swamped with FL deputies. They persuaded the UN to validate their boycott. Their terms expired in January 1999, but they delayed organizing elections until May 2000. As long as they sat in the Assembly, they could block the FL program that President Préval supp
orted.
After disbanding the Army (that had carried out the coup) on his return to Haiti, Aristide established the Haitian National Police (PNH) in July 1995. To run the PNH, Aristide trusted an ex-Army officer, Dany Toussaint, who had been loyal to him on a number of occasions, even refusing orders to assassinate Aristide in 1988. However, Washington clandestinely took control of the new police force. It sent a dozen soldiers from the disbanded Haitian Army and the coup death squads, including Guy Philippe, to its base in Ecuador for paramilitary training. It sent police recruits to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri for training. Any officer who supported Aristide was systematically denounced by the US as untrustworthy, a drug dealer, and a human rights abuser. Since American officials refused to disarm the members of the death squads and Army responsible for atrocities under the coup, the most disloyal paramilitaries were well armed. In 1996, Bob Manuel, the chief of security under President Préval, uncovered coup and assassination plots among the Presidential Guard. Both Préval and Aristide were targeted for assassination. When Manuel began a purge of the Guard, the American State Department sent forty security agents to oversee the changes.24
The core capitalist countries, under the direction of Washington, worked to control Haiti’s economy through political and military interventions. What role, then, did non-governmental humanitarian and developmental organizations play? When the American organization CARE wanted to expand its aid programs in 1999, it contracted anthropologist Timothy Schwartz to evaluate its existing distribution process. Schwartz discovered that the massive amounts of food aid that CARE sent to Haiti each year were being embezzled and sold on the market. CARE had no idea what had been happening to its food aid. The promotional material describing its school feeding programs was simply cooked up by public relations personnel. Meanwhile, food aid arrived at times when it did the most harm to Haitian cultivators. Schwartz compiled data to discover that, in periods of bountiful harvests, NGOs distributed more food than during droughts. When Schwartz reported his research to CARE, the assistant director told him candidly that they were aware that their aid was in fact subverting Haitian agriculture. However, they had no money to buy local Haitian products for their food aid programs. Their funding from USAID comes in the form of subsidized American food to be sold on the Haitian market. That aid further weakens the local cultivators. Whether imports entered Haiti as humanitarian aid and were then embezzled and sold for profit, or were sold on the market by the NGOs to fund their programs, the effect was the same: the subversion of Haitian agriculture. The system that finances humanitarian organizations, in other words, sets up a dilemma. They are structurally compelled to fail in the stated goal of helping the poor. In fact, they are part of a system that creates the poor, which then justifies their presence as humanitarian workers. Their employees are left to their own devices to resolve the moral issue, if they can see it.25
“Democracy” in a Transnational Economy
By 2000, the divisions within Lavalas were more clear than a decade earlier. The opportunists — Dany Toussaint, Serge Gilles, Evans Paul, Gerard Pierre-Charles — appealed to the poor who, in every election that followed, showed that they did not believe them. The overwhelming majority of the poor continued to trust Aristide, whose party, Fanmi Lavalas, tabled a program of egalitarian development. Aristide represented, both to the rich and to the poor, a pole in the Haitian class struggle. The oligarchy could never hope to win power in an electoral contest. Aristide would be in the way. The oligarchy and their transnationalist allies in the core capitalist countries could govern Haiti only by manipulating elections. The subsequent history of chaos and terror in Haiti is the details of that manipulation.
The May 2000 parliamentary elections would loom large in the struggle between “democracy” and class rule. The Organization of American States observed and sanctioned the elections as free, fair, and peaceful.26 Sixty-five percent of eligible Haitians voted, an impressive turnout in the context of intimidation and violence that had marked each election since Duvalier’s departure. For many people, casting a ballot was an act of defiance and courage. Fanmi Lavalas won 72 of 83 seats in the House of Deputies and 16 of 17 seats in the Senate. Around the country, Fanmi Lavalas won 89 of 115 mayoralty positions.27 The people had unequivocally chosen Fanmi Lavalas, which was now in a position to implement its program to redress the huge inequalities and to establish a viable system of justice. The state would have to belong to the people who elected this government. The oligarchy would have to step aside.28
Meanwhile, the American Deputy Secretary of State Roger Noriega called the elections a farce.29 Noriega was Washington’s most accomplished saboteur of Latin American democracy. On 2 June 2000, he enlisted the help of the OAS, which suddenly questioned the methodology that the Electoral Council used to calculate the vote percentages for Senate candidates. In fact, the Electoral Council had followed traditional practices.30 While all Fanmi Lavalas candidates had won handily, an alternative method would have forced run-off elections in two of the Senate races. Even in those two cases, the Lavalas candidates received twice the votes of their closest rivals. This belated challenge to the calculation methodology by OAS was first rejected by the head of the Electoral Council, Léon Manus. However, after he was flown to Washington on 21 June 2000, he returned to Haiti claiming that Aristide and Préval had pressured him to overlook “massive electoral fraud” and that they had threatened to engulf the capital and departments in “fire and blood” unless he approved their fraud.31
Washington used the OAS claim of fraudulent elections to impose an embargo on all foreign aid to Haiti. Haiti, like all countries heavily indebted in a foreign currency, faced a dilemma. It was dependent on the international financial institutions to meet its basic operating expenses. The structural adjustment programs that the Clinton administration had attempted to force on Aristide as a condition of his return to Haiti stripped the state of its meagre domestic sources of revenue. So it needed to take out more loans. These loans drive countries deeper into debt and dependence. But to not take the loans means that governments cannot operate. The people will revolt. And if they are ignorant of how the system operates, they will blame their domestic governments for incompetence. The role of Washington and the international financial institutions is obscured.
Since the fall of Duvalier, no opposition had formed to challenge Lavalas. There were two poles in Haitian politics: representative government or authoritarian rule. The politicians who lost the May 2000 elections banded together to create the Democratic Convergence, funded by Washington through the National Endowment for Democracy, established by President Reagan in 1983 to obscure Washington’s aggressive, anti-democratic foreign policy.32 The Democratic Convergence was composed of two separate groups: the upper class, who simply loathed the poor, and vindictive rivals jealous of Aristide’s stature among the people.33
Given that Fanmi Lavalas had swept the legislative elections in May, it was clear to all that Aristide would win the presidential election in November 2000. Since the Democratic Convergence was arguing that those elections had been rigged, they risked being discredited by an Aristide win. Their only option was to boycott the election and claim they had the support of the public. In fact, their support was located outside of Haiti, among the power elite of the core capitalist countries that mediated events in Haiti (and everywhere) for their domestic audiences. In fact, some elements within the diaspora initiated a campaign in Miami and New York in support of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Baby Doc, from France, took the opportunity to criticize Lavalas and to hint that he was still available to serve his country. Meanwhile, in October 2000, Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis uncovered a plot against the Préval government. The conspirators had sent their families to France months earlier. Their goal was not to take power, but to assassinate a number of Lavalas leaders. Then, an emergency government would be put in place. At the centre of the intrigue was a group of thirteen police commissioners, all of whom had worked under Duvalier or
in the Army and had been trained at the American Military School in Ecuador.
During the week prior to the presidential election of 26 November 2000, bombs exploded throughout Port-au-Prince. While that may account in part for the low turnout in the capital, the provinces were equally unenthusiastic. With a turnout of between 10 and 15 percent, Aristide was elected with 92 percent of the vote.34 In response, the Democratic Convergence announced that Gérard Gourgues would act as a parallel president. He operated out of the offices of the Organisation du peuple en lutte that had lost the legislative elections of 1997, then denounced them as fraudulent and blocked the legislative process. The Democratic Convergence, in naming him the actual president of Haiti, demonstrated that there was nothing behind their posturing.35
The US ambassador, Dean Curran, advised Aristide that the US would not normalize relations until the problems of the May 2000 elections were resolved. From 2000 to 2003, USAID continued to give an average of $68 million a year to American NGOs that helped to undermine Aristide and the authority and legitimacy of the government. Washington also blocked $145 million in loans from the Inter-American Development Bank that had already been approved. Although the loans were frozen, the Bank demanded that the Aristide government pay the interest. By 2003, the Aristide government had a budget of $300 million for the entire country, of which $60 million had to go to service the debt. Forty-five percent of that debt had been incurred by the Duvaliers and was now being squandered on the French Riviera while Joegodson was putting grains of salt on his tongue to ward off hunger pains. In November 2000, the IMF required that the government reduce subsidies on essential commodities such as fuel. Between 2002 and 2003, consumer prices rose by 40 percent. By 2004, Haiti’s GDP was about half of what it had been in 1980, measured in constant 2000 dollars.36 But this contraction of the economy, measured in dollars, was taking place as the percentage of Haitians dependent on money for their survival was increasing. In summary, the actions of Washington and the international financial institutions undermined any chance that the Fanmi Lavalas government would be able to implement a meaningful program of governance at the same time that they increased the resources available to the Democratic Convergence and drove the poor deeper into poverty. They blamed everything on Aristide.
Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun: A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti Page 38