1. The Anniversary Celebration
On September 30, the third anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Haiti in 1991, jubilant crowds marched peacefully to celebrate the restoration of democracy, encouraged by the official U.S. declaration that the right of peaceful demonstration would be protected by the 20,000 troops who had entered Haiti on September 19 under an agreement between former President Jimmy Carter and General Raoul Cedras. That was, in fact, one of the major goals of the U.S. intervention to restore democracy, the press reported. The demonstrators were attacked, beaten bloody, and scattered by armed gunmen. “The bodies of dead Haitians keep piling up,” one Western diplomat said, just as they had the day before when a grenade exploded at a celebration of the return of the elected mayor of Port-au-Prince. U.S. officials complained “that Haitian police could no longer be trusted to enforce law and order,” the press reported, “but would not say if US forces would assume responsibility.” “It would be very difficult to rely on the police to provide security given the fact they haven’t provided any security so far,” U.S. Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager said, apparently surprised that the U.S.-trained police are acting as they have always done in the past.
U.S. combat troops were in the streets in force, but not to protect the demonstrators. “Instead,” John Kifner reported in the New York Times, “the tanks, armored vehicles and even two firetrucks were deployed along Avenue John Brown leading to the wealthy suburb of Petionville, as if they were trying to protect the homes of Haiti’s affluent, light-skinned elite should the poor of the slums and shantytowns try to charge uphill.” “The only conceivable reason for this deployment appeared to be to protect commercial establishments and prevent any crowds from going up the hill toward the homes of the elite.”
U.S. military spokesman Colonel Willey “said the troops were positioned to form `a cordon so Haitian police could work on the inner perimeter’.” And work they did. Haitian police joined with the paramilitary (FRAPH) gangs attacking the demonstrators, using their trucks for “loading up the armed men in civilian clothes by the Fraph headquarters” and then helping to scatter the demonstrators, “exchanging high-fives with the gunmen or giving them rides in their pickup trucks.”
A U.S. military convoy did approach the site of the first attack on the demonstrators, where “at least eight bodies” were counted by journalists. But, Kifner continued, they “quickly drove off, as did others that followed,” making it clear that U.S. forces “would not provide protection to the marchers” so that terror could proceed unhampered. U.S. forces “were nowhere near the announced route of the march, from the Basilica of Notre Dame where a requiem mass was celebrated for the more than 3000 people whom human rights groups say were killed during military rule, to the city cemetery.” The troops are following White House orders. Explaining the continuing atrocities under U.S. military occupation, commanding General Henry Shelton informed the press that he had been instructed by his superiors in Washington that “it is not our policy to intervene in law-and-order matters per se; that is a Haitian matter.” The problem, he said, is that Haitian police are “not trained in riot control.” The “level of civility that is here,” he explained, “is provided by the police and the military, which is under the control of General Cedras.” And by the inheritors of the Tontons Macoutes, who are to be controlled by the Haitian police with whom they exchange high-fives as they perform their common tasks.
FRAPH members interviewed by Wall Street Journal correspondents Helene Cooper and Jose de Cordoba said they had no problems with the Americans troops. While the attacks on the demonstrators are underway, one said, “U.S. soldiers riding by on their `Humvee’ armored vehicles wave cheerfully to FRAPH members, who wave back.” At the September 30 anniversary march, the WSJ report continues, “those Humvees, along with tanks and other armored vehicles, staged a massive show of `presence’ with the intention of containing the pro-Aristide demonstration to downtown, and addressing what appears to be the U.S.’s principal fear: that mobs of President Aristide’s supporters will go on a rampage against wealthy Haitians and supporters of the military regime.” Back in Washington, Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch “said US troops would use force to stop violence only when their own safety was assured,” though it seems that exceptions will be allowed if “wealthy Haitians and supporters of the military regime” might be endangered by “pro-Aristide mobs.”1
The Times reacted in its lead editorial on the day of Kifner’s front-page story about the deployment of troops and its motives. It addressed one problem only: the danger that Clinton might “meddle in the nation’s political affairs” by using the CIA to promote Aristide. “If President Aristide is as popular as the Administration believes, he does not need the C.I.A.’s propaganda help,” the editors observe. Perhaps they are thinking of the barrage of propaganda let loose via the leading CIA specialist on Latin America, Brian Latell, who contrasted the “murderer and psychopath” Aristide with the model gentleman General Cedras, one of “the most promising group of Haitian leaders to emerge since the Duvalier family,” which is why Latell “saw no evidence of oppressive rule” while Cedras’s forces and their allies were slaughtering, torturing, raping and rampaging. “The U.S. should be wary about tying “its own interests, and the safety of its troops, so closely to [Aristide’s] cause,” the editors added soberly.2
The Times editorial staff reflexively assumes that the facts are what Washington declares them to be; the CIA is being used to promote Aristide, a dubious form of interference in another country’s affairs, they warn. Others, less trusting, actually inquire. Once again showing what a serious journalist can do, Alan Nairn took the trouble to find out what Clinton’s intelligence apparatus is really up to. One of the more benign figures he unearthed is Haitian-born Major Louis Kernisan, who served with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Haiti from 1989 through 1991 and is now devising the plan to “professionalize” Haiti’s police — already professionalized by the same professionals, in the very recent past. Kernisan is much impressed by the impartial role of the army that has terrorized Haiti since it was established under the 1915-34 U.S. military occupation, and by the murderous section chiefs, disbanded by Aristide in one of the moves that raised doubts about his democratic credentials. Kernisan is part of an FBI unit set up to train the security forces of Guatemala and El Salvador in 1986, with notable success. He anticipates mass detentions and other techniques of population control as the popular movements are reined in and the U.S. restores to power “the same folks as before, the five families that run the country, the military and the bourgeoisie.” Construction of yet another “showcase of democracy” seems well underway. But that is the real world.3
The real world is described succinctly by “a US official with extensive experience of Haiti,” quoted in the Boston Globe. “Aristide — slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology — `represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years’,” he said. They have not misunderstand their instructions from the executive branch, and the interests it represents.4
It is hard to imagine that Washington will permit such crass display of the class and power interests of the intervention, and its intent to subvert and eliminate any thought of democracy. Cosmetic changes will surely be needed, if only for the benefit of the doctrinal institutions, which have to have some peg, however fragile, on which to hang the official tales about “idealism,” “good works,” “benevolent intentions,” and the rest of the familiar ritual. Allowing FRAPH and the rest of the attache-Macoute system to function freely will pose an eventual threat to the occupying forces themselves, though they have been given ample time to go underground with their weapons and organizational structure intact.
2. Dilemmas of Power
The continuing state terror under the eyes of the U.S. military forces reveals the “riskiness of having the Pentagon rely on Haiti’s police,” Times correspondent Steven Greenhouse reported. The solution, the Administration believes, “is pressing prominent Aristide allies to warn people against provoking street violence” and urging that Parliament get down to serious business, beginning with the primary task: “to pass an amnesty for the military — as promised in the Carter agreement.” That seems the most direct and reasonable way to deal with the difficulties caused by those who are provoking FRAPH and its police allies.
But there is a problem. Aristide continues to be slippery and evasive, despite the tutelage he has received in Washington. While some officials challenge “the conventional wisdom of Aristide as a doctrinaire monomaniac,” the Boston Globe reports, he “is nonetheless showing some of his old ambiguity now”: while calling for “nonviolence and reconciliation,…he has also been lukewarm to the idea of a blanket amnesty,” still not unambiguously joining Washington, the media, and political commentators generally in accepting the principle of complete impunity for murder, torture, rape, and other atrocities. Untrustworthy as always, Aristide seems to be hesitant about defying the plea of the major human rights organizations, the United Nations, the South African Judge who is chief prosecutor for the UN war-crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and his Australian deputy, and others who do not rise to such heights of Christian mercy as U.S. elites, and who warn of the consequences for international human rights law if the criminals are informed that they can do their work with impunity.5
Recall that they were so informed in Haiti, from the start. Cedras, police chief Francois, and the rest were informed with great clarity that they could continue their work of decimating the popular organizations, secure in the knowledge that when the time came for them to hand the work over to others, they would either be flown out on an American jet with what remained of the country’s wealth in their pockets, like Somoza and Duvalier, or allowed to stay on in the rich suburbs enjoying the fruits of their labors and awaiting the next opportunity, which may not be too long delayed. Given such unambiguous assurances from on high, there never was the slightest reason for them to call a halt to the terrorist onslaught against the disobedient population — one of the many truisms that would be featured in a free and independent press.
The gangsters in charge know the routine as well as their Washington helpers. Guatemala, in many ways the model of successful counterinsurgency, is a case in point. Here, “democracy” was officially restored by a combination of Nazi-style violence with U.S. support, combined with softer measures, minimal services organized by the conquerors: if you want your sick child to live, come to us, and maybe we’ll help; work for us, and you have even better prospects. As the U.S. arranged to displace the generals in Haiti, “free elections” were held once again in Guatemala, which Washington has been nurturing as a “showcase” for free market democracy for 40 years. The winner was Rios Montt, a gentleman who would receive a welcome reception from Himmler and Beria, as he did from Ronald Reagan and the State Department, who hailed him as a man “totally committed to democracy” while he was presiding over the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in the highlands, levelling some 400 villages. In the recent elections, Rios Montt’s party received about 1/3 of the vote, enabling it to control the legislature along with the other right-wing pro-business party. About 80% of the population stayed away, including the indigenous people he targeted for destruction and the poor generally, who seem not to appreciate the freedoms we have won for them. Cedras and Francois may well have drawn the obvious conclusions, even if commentators here did not.
It’s easy to appreciate the dilemmas faced by policy-makers and respectable intellectuals. It is, indeed, “risky” to rely on the chief instruments of terror to stop terror, but hard to see what the alternative is when faced with irrational and criminal adversaries: those who provoke violence by peacefully calling for democracy and freedom, and those who respond to the provocation. It is also a challenging task to reconcile truths of logic with what is taking place before our eyes. Thus “the objective of the Haiti mission…is certainly an honorable one,” Anthony Lewis declares, from the outer limits of tolerable dissent. And this Certain Truth must somehow be reconciled with the sight of U.S. forces deployed to protect the wealthy and privileged while the usual victims bleed in the streets and the usual torturers maintain “the level of civility.” Furthermore, how are we to comprehend the remarkable fact that the U.S. is carrying out the same policies it has pursued without change for 200 years in Haiti, as it has elsewhere within the reach of its power? It’s all very mysterious. One can see why the situation is regularly described as “confusing,” posing extraordinary dilemmas.6
There were other difficult tasks as the troops landed, and at the time of writing (early October), they have been handled with no little success. Three central doctrines have to be defended: First, the Clinton Administration was appalled by the terror in Haiti. Second, it had become clear by “last spring” that “draconian economic sanctions would fail” so that stronger steps were needed to achieve the goal (Taylor Branch). And third, that goal is “to create conditions favorable to constitutional democracy” (Branch). The third doctrine is too deeply entrenched to be open to discussion, so let us keep to the first two, which at least seem to have a factual flavor.
The first doctrine was elaborated by senior White House officials, who informed the press that there is “nothing more moving” than “watching people being beaten,” so that “Mr. Clinton and his aides had come to view such violence as both morally repugnant and politically unsustainable.” “Four or five nights of it on television would have undone us politically,” a senior Administration official informed the press. These problems led to a “level of concern within the Administration…so great that senior officials from several agencies meet twice a day to plot their public-relations strategy, White House officials said.”7
The dilemmas faced by the Administration are clarifed by comparison with other current examples, say Colombia, where vast atrocities render ridiculous any thought of democracy; mere survival is enough of a problem for those who dare to raise their heads. But these atrocities are “politically sustainable.” The press does not report the facts made public by the leading human rights organizations, Church groups, and others. The atrocities are not even “morally repugnant,” or so a rational observer would conclude. About half of U.S. military aid for the hemisphere now goes to the state terrorists in Colombia, increasing under Clinton; and the man who presided over the worst terror in recent years took office as Secretary-General of the OAS just before U.S. troops landed in Haiti, having achieved this post thanks to a White House power play that was accompanied by much public praise for his achievements.8
Let us turn to the second Truth, the failure of the draconian economic sanctions that was evident by last spring. As known to readers of this journal at least, the facts are radically different. As of last spring, there had been no draconian economic sanctions. The Bush administration let it be known at once that the OAS sanctions announced in October 1991, shortly after the coup, were to be toothless. A few weeks later (Feb. 4), Bush undermined the sanctions more explicitly, granting an “exemption” to U.S. enterprises. Trade continued at a substantial level through 1992, then increasing by 50% under Clinton, including purchases by the Federal government and a sharp increase in imports of food exports from Haiti. The facts were not totally supressed in the mainstream. The Bush exemption of February 1992 was reported. In the New York Times, under the headline “U.S. Plans to Sharpen Focus of Its Sanctions Against Haiti,” correspondent Barbara Crossette explained that the Administration would permit these violations of the embargo so as “to punish anti-democratic forces and ease the plight of workers who lost jobs because of the ban on trade.” This “fine tuning” is Washington’s “latest move” in its efforts to find “more effective ways to hasten the collapse of what the Administration calls an illegal Government in Haiti.” Oddly, the “fine tuning” was welcomed by the “anti-democratic forces” who were punished by it, and bitterly denounced by the beneficiaries of our charitable impulses. Again, a bit “confusing.”
Occasional later references did not entirely relieve the confusion. Thus the Christian Science Monitor explained that “the Bush and Clinton administrations believed these [U.S.-owned] companies were so vital to Haiti that they allowed them to continue operating during the embargo.” While the vision of our benevolence brings tears to the eyes, nevertheless duller minds might wonder why only U.S.-owned enterprises have the curious property of being so beneficial to the suffering people of Haiti, and why the reactions are so inconsistent with Administration intent.9
Elsewhere too, one could find some hints that the embargo was less than “draconian.” In fact, as of last spring, it was “fine tuned” so as to leave the rich and their military associates pretty much untouched, though the undesirables suffered. It was only in late May 1994 that the Clinton Administration even took formal steps to implement sanctions, always excluding the most privileged.10
As the troops landed on Monday September 19, the task of maintaining the crucial doctrine became still more challenging. On Sunday, the AP wires began running reports about the military intervention that every news desk in the country could see were of major significance, perhaps the most important of the week. Beginning Sunday, John Solomon reported leaks from an inquiry initiated by the U.S. attorney’s office a few days before the invasion. The documents released to AP revealed that sanctions had never been seriously applied at all. It is possible that the inquiry was launched in preparation for the intervention, under the same general rubric that led the press to highlight the murder of orphans, narcotrafficking, and other atrocities that had previously remained at the margins or unreported.
According to documents provided to AP, the judicial inquiry focused on the most important evasion of the embargo, known to everyone watching Haiti: the import of oil. The three companies involved are Shell, Exxon, and Texaco. The first two were able to pretend that subsidiaries elsewhere were violating the embargo, leaving poor Washington helpless. But Texaco lacked that pretext, and was therefore bound by the Bush administration executive order of October 1991 banning its Haitian activities. The Office of Foreign Assets Control began monitoring Texaco’s violation of the order immediately, noting that Texaco was providing both fuel and hard currency to the military junta. On May 18, 1992, OFAC issued an order for Texaco to “cease and desist.” On the same day, Texaco executives spoke to Secretary of Treasury Nicholas Brady and OFAC Director Richard Newcomb, who met with them the following day. Both Brady and Newcomb were informed that Texaco planned to evade the executive order by creating a “blind trust” that would technically be responsible for the shipments; Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger received the same information. Texaco asked OFAC for a ruling on this evasion. No response was received for 11 months, when OFAC advised the company that the device was illegal. By then, the operation was proceeding. Until at least mid-1993, OFAC alleges, Texaco stations “illegally bought and distributed numerous tanker shipments of fuel from the junta either directly or through the blind trust.” A 1993 OFAC document reports at least 26 tanker shipments, 160 violations, and millions of dollars paid to the junta by Texaco.
Newcomb informed his senior staff that he had been directed to drag his feet by Secretary of Treasury Brady. “Brady told me to go slow on Texaco,” Newcomb is quoted as saying in notes of a mid-1992 meeting. Surely Texaco executives were apprised. “After three years and two administrations,” AP continues, “Newcomb has yet to impose a fine or refer the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office for possible prosecution,” though in September 1993 he “put Texaco on notice that the government intends to fine the company.” “Little has happened in the year since,” the report continues.
In a July 1993 memo, after Aristide had been pressured to accept the Governor’s Island compromise that Cedras violated, OFAC policy chief John Roth wrote: “Perhaps the selective and political side to FAC’s `strong enforcement’ of the sanctions…can be squared with some cosmic (but not widely known) foreign or domestic policy objectives vis-a-vis Haiti or Texaco.” Perhaps.
The illegal operations continued at least until the May 1994 Clinton administration decision to join in sanctions — making sure that plenty of loopholes remained, including the oddly porous Dominican border. Nothing was done. The Clinton administration certainly knew about the matter a year ago. “We expect a vigorous lobbying effort by Texaco to quash FAC’s penalty action,” Treasury Secreatary Lloyd Bentsen was advised in an October 1, 1993 memo, which added that “Texaco has already contacted the State Department in an effort to have State persuade FAC to drop the matter,” as it evidently did. “There has been no activity in the case for nearly a year” after this notification, Solomon reported.
In response to the AP story on Sunday September 18, Treasury Secretary Bentsen ordered an investigation, which, if it takes place, is likely to focus on the Bush years. Senator Donald Riegle and Representative Henry Gonzalez, who chair the banking committees, “expressed outrage at OFAC’s conduct described in the documents and indicated their panels will review the case” as well, also looking into the role of banks in helping Texaco fund the junta. “I think it’s outrageous,” Rep. Gonzales stated: “It’s a joke if it is decided to announce a policy and then it isn’t enforced.”
In brief, as the U.S. troops landed, if not before, no news desk or editorial office could have failed to be aware of what had been concealed for the three years of slaughter and terror: the sanctions were “a joke.” How much of a joke, they perhaps had not known until September 18. In a free press, all of this would have been featured, along with the obvious conclusions: neither the Bush nor Clinton administration had any serious intent of terminating the terror and restoring democracy. Investigative reporters would have gotten to work to smoke out the rest of the story (for example, the still-unreported trade). And columnists would have explained what it all means.
What in fact happened was rather different: solemn reiteration of the established truths about our noble goals and the failure of the draconian sanctions, coupled with warnings about intervening in conflicts that are none of our business. According to a data-base search, the AP story was reported on Tuesday, Sept. 20, by one journal in the country: Platt’s Oilgram News, which reported Texaco’s denials. The next day, the Wall Street Journal ran a brief item by an unidentified staff reporter at the bottom of an inside page, reporting Bentsen’s order for an investigation and a few of the facts. Similar reports, mostly short and on inside pages, appeared in local papers, but not the national press. All of this will have to come out sooner or later — perhaps, after the Haiti operation goes irremediably sour and the time comes for the excuses and evasions to be trotted out, Somalia-style. But when it mattered, the Free Press did its job in admirable fashion, once again.
As any serious commentator would also have observed, there is nothing new about the special treatment granted Texaco (we put aside the evasions about its competitors). One similar occasion took place just 50 years ago, when the Western democracies were seeking to undermine the Spanish Republic, which was then under attack by Franco’s fascist forces. The reason was their concern that the popular revolution that was one component of this three-sided struggle might spread; such concerns were put to rest shortly after by their associate in Moscow, who crushed the revolution by violence, fearing any manifestation of socialism and freedom even more than his Western colleagues. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “neutrality” stand was carefully crafted to deprive the Republic of arms and oil. His administration pressured suppliers (including foreign ones) to refrain from shipping materials, including shipments contracted earlier. FDR himself bitterly denounced one businessman who insisted on his legal right to continue shipments of airplanes and parts to the Republic. Though “perfectly legal,” his act was “thoroughly unpatriotic,” FDR declared, apologizing for his emotional outburst but adding that “I feel quite deeply about it.” Meanwhile, his government was never able to discover that Texaco, then headed by a fascist sympathizer, was violating its contracts with the Republic, diverting tankers already at sea to Franco, whom it continued to supply — in “secret,” except to small left journals which, somehow, were able to discover the facts about the illegal shipments hidden from the Roosevelt Administration and the press.11
In January 1994 testimony to Congress, reported here in July, the Director of the CIA had predicted that Haiti “probably will be out of fuel and power very shortly.” “Our intelligence efforts are focused on detecting attempts to circumvent the embargo and monitoring its impact.” Not only was the CIA “unable” to discover the “oil boom” that was occasionally reported by the press, but it was also unable to discover that the U.S. government, at the highest level, was fully aware that the CIA testimony to Congress was a complete falsehood, and had indeed tacitly authorized the violations of the embargo that the CIA couldn’t discover. Or, so we are supposed to believe, as we are now supposed to believe that the CIA is busily at work organizing support for Aristide.
3. Democracy and Capitalism
Whether Aristide is allowed to return in some fashion is anyone’s guess at the time of writing. If he is, it will be under conditions designed to discredit him and further demoralize those who hoped that democracy might be tolerated in Haiti. To evaluate what lies ahead, we should look carefully at the plans for the security forces and the economy.
The military and police forces were established during Woodrow Wilson’s invasion as an instrument to control the population, and have been kept in power by U.S. aid and training for that purpose since. That is to continue. As discussed here in July, the head of the OAS/UN mission through December 1993, Ian Martin, reported in Foreign Policy that negotiations had stalled because of Washington’s insistence on maintaining the power of the security forces, rejecting Aristide’s plea to reduce them along lines that had proven successful in Costa Rica, the one partial exception to the array of horror chambers that Washington has maintained in the region. The Haitian military, Martin observed, recognized that the U.S. was its friend and protector, unlike the U.N., France, and Canada. The generals continued their resistance to a diplomatic settlement, trusting that “the United States, despite its rhetoric of democracy, was ambivalent about that power shift” to popular elements represented by Aristide. They were proven right. As the matter is now rephrased, “At first, Father Aristide resisted having so many former soldiers in the police force, but Administration officials said they persuaded him to accept them,” so the New York Times reported on the eve of the invasion. This was one of the successes of the educational program designed for the “doctrinaire monomaniac.”12
The plans for the economy are detailed in a plan submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August, published by Alan Nairn in Multinational Monitor (July-August), with accompanying interviews. The Aristide government is to keep to a standard “structural adjustment” package, with foreign funds devoted primarily to debt repayment and the needs of the business sectors, and with an “open foreign investment policy.” The judicial system and other aspects of government are to be geared to “economic efficiency.” The plan states that “The renovated state must focus on an economic strategy centered on the energy and initiative of Civil Society, especially the private sector, both national and foreign.”
The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, describes the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors. The structural adjustment plan “is not going to hurt the poor to the extent it has in other countries,” he said, because subsidies for basic goods and other such interferences with capitalist democracy scarcely exist there anyway, so not too much will be cut. The Minister in charge of rural development and agrarian reform in the Aristide government was not even notified about the plan designed for this largely peasant society, destined to be returned to the track from which it veered after the unfortunate December 1990 election, a tragedy that will not happen again, if Washington is vigilant.
We may note, in passing, some of the features of contemporary Newspeak. “Economic efficiency” means profits for the few, crucially the foreign few, whatever the effect on the many. The concept “economic health” is a technical notion designed to measure profitability for investors, while excluding the health of the economy as far as the population is concerned. Thus the economy can be wonderfully healthy while the people are starving. “Civil Society” of course includes all sorts of nice things, but “especially” the private business sector, including foreign investors, who belong to the part of Haitian Civil Society on which the “renovated state” must focus. Democracy means that outsiders design plans without even troubling to inform the government that is to execute them.
The concept of “democracy” is also illustrated by the standard interpretation of the provision of the Haitian Constitution that provides for the elected President to serve a single five-year term. In his address to the nation to rally support for the intervention, President Clinton assured his audience that Aristide had proven himself to be a true democrat. “Tonight,” Clinton said, “I can announce that President Aristide has pledged to step down when his term ends in accordance with the Constitution” and to transfer power to a successor. That conclusion, however, goes well beyond the Constitution, which says nothing about how to calculate the President’s term when he has spent three years in exile while civil society is being decimated. One interpretation is that if reinstated, he should pick up where he left off, so that Aristide’s term has almost 4 and a half years to run. Another interpretation is that his period in exile is part of his term as elected President. People with some lingering taste for democracy will presumably tend towards the first interpretation. Without any exception that I can discover, U.S. commentators adopted Clinton’s anti-democratic interpretation. We have to go north of the border to read the obvious comment about “the three years of stolen democracy”: “By deducting them from, rather than adding them to, Aristide’s suspended presidency, a key political objective will be achieved,” namely, “a partial legitimization of the 1991 coup d’etat against Aristide” (Dave Todd, Southam News).13 The task of civilizing the troublesome priest has not been easy, and there is disagreement as to whether it has been accomplished, or whether he might still revert to his old ways, speaking up for the rights of poor and suffering people, even expressing elementary truths about the oppression of the poor by the rich (inciting “class warfare”) and the role of the U.S. in his country’s history (“anti-Americanism”). Close U.S. advisors claim to see much progress. Former Ambassador Robert White, who has consistently supported the elected government in Haiti, said: “I think the best thing that has happened to Aristide and his administration-in-exile is that they have had a crash course in democracy and capitalism, and come to understand that too much revolution scares away investors. Small countries can’t afford too much social experimentation.”14
It’s not clear whether these remarks are tongue-in-cheek, but taking them literally, they are on target. Aristide has been given a crash course in “democracy and capitalism,” as the terms are understood under prevailing doctrine. “Democracy” means that you do what you’re told and serve the powerful and rich, in silence — or better, politely expressing your gratitude for the opportunity. “Capitalism” means the same. The “social experimentation” that went too far is the programs that were highly praised by the Inter-American Development Bank and other international funding agencies, and that Axel Peuker of the World Bank describes today as a “rather conservative approach, financial and otherwise” — but too much for the Haitian rich, U.S. investors, Washington, and respectable opinion in the United States.
The reasons why this conservative approach went too far are expressed with clarity in a July 1994 position paper of 1400 priests and nuns in Haiti and the surviving Haitian human rights groups. “The constant factor in that brief period” of democracy “cannot be doubted,” they write: “it is, unquestionably, the emergence of the people of Haiti on the political scene of its country.” The technical term for this atrocity among Western liberal elites is “Crisis of Democracy,” a threat that must be confronted forthrightly if “democracy” is to be saved. The terror in Haiti, and the crash course in democracy and capitalism organized for Aristide in Washington, have been designed to drive such subversive thoughts out of people’s heads, for good.
Not everyone agrees that Aristide has learned his lessons. “He is a radical Roman Catholic priest who has fought with his church” — much as anti-fascist priests opposed their church under Mussolini and Hitler — “and often spewed anti-American statements,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “His stubbornness and independence continue to drive U.S. officials to distraction.” They expect better behavior from the lower orders. Senator Phil Gramm condemns Aristide as an “anti-American Marxist demagogue.” Particularly outrageous was his reticence about thanking his rescuers as they proceeded to restore the power of the army and the wealthy, perhaps allowing him to sit in a box for a few months to observe the process. New records may have been broken for supercilious arrogance and racism as the press reported the suffering that Washington had endured at his hands. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd described “the strain of trying for three years to restore Father Aristide to power even as he often openly griped about American policy” and failed to say “Thank you” with proper humility to “his benefactors” (“The Mouse That Roared Squeaks Back”). Congress mocked “the priest’s desire to return on his own terms rather than those dictated by Washington,” she reported. “He wants to stay up here” and enjoy “the good life,” Senator Larry Pressler said, echoing the concerns of President Clinton, reported by “those close to him,” about “whether Father Aristide had begun to enjoy his life as a celebrity exile.” Meanwhile liberal Representatives were “furiously demanding he show more gratitude,” that he “get real” (James Traficant). He should learn some manners, David Obey added: “The proper response from Aristide is not to second guess and nitpick. The proper response is two words, `Thank you’.” Aristide has still not learned his place. He has not learned that his job is to shuffle quietly with a friendly smile while thanking Massa for his kindness.
Aristide’s disgraceful behavior reinforced the fears expressed a few days earlier by political correspondent Elaine Sciolino, who worried that he might not “be the kind of leader who will make the Administration proud when he rides in on the backs of American soldiers” and who might even “turn on his liberators.” In its efforts to change the radical priest “From Robespierre to Gandhi,” the Clinton Administration — all dedicated Gandhians, like the New York Times — is “heartened…by his public statements that stress love rather than vengeance,” and his call to “let free enterprise and privatization reign.” “To help prepare Father Aristide for his return, Administration officials have tried to force feed him large doses of economics and theories of public administration.” While some feel that “he has really grown,” others are concerned that he might regress to what he was — when he was praised for the remarkable successes of his brief administration in cutting back corruption and state terror, reducing the bloated bureaucracy, organizing a reasonable tax system and setting the country’s financial affairs in order, while still trying to respond to the initiatives of the “remarkably advanced” array of grass-roots organizations (Lavalas) that gave the large majority of the population a “considerable voice in local affairs” and even in national politics (IADB, Americas Watch).15
It is in this precise sense that Aristide “failed politically when he was in there,” as explained by the Clinton’s special envoy Lawrence Pezzullo, replaced after his lying to Congress became too embarrassing; the outspoken advocacy of mass slaughter by Carter’s envoy to Nicaragua was never an embarrassment, nor was his record of trying to ensure that Nicaragua’s murderous National Guard would stay in power (that, after all, was a crucial part of the task of “restoring democracy” in Haiti too). Pezzullo made these remarks while reporting his “growing frustration” with the stubborn Aristide, who “was unwilling to make political compromises to broaden his political base” beyond the huge majority of the population. He even refused “to work with Parliament,” Pezzullo observed with horror — that is, with the Parliament that was able to stay almost entirely in the hands of the “enlightened” sectors of Civil Society, since the authentic civil society still lacked the resources to challenge the traditional system of oppression and violence (always cheerfully backed by Washington). “It was precisely Father Aristide’s estrangement from the elected Parliament, coupled with his chilly relationship with business leaders and the military, that led to his overthrow,” Pezzullo explained. Obviously, a bad character, though one could hardly expect more in a country “with no democratic traditions” — only with a vibrant and lively civil society that had, unexpectedly, constructed the foundations of a functioning democracy in which the rabble could actually take part in managing their own affairs.16
Aristide’s unwillingness to “broaden the political base” has become a kind of mantra, on a par with “Wilsonian idealism.” Like many other mindless propaganda slogans, the phrase conceals a grain of truth. Aristide has been unwilling to shift power to the “enlightened” sectors of foreign and domestic Civil Society and their security forces. He still keeps his allegiance to the general population and their organizations — who could teach some lessons to their kindly tutors about what was meant by “democracy” in days when the term was still taken seriously. It is intriguing to watch the process at work. Consider Peter Hakim, Washington director of the Inter-American dialogue, well-informed about the hemisphere and far from a ranting ideologue. While Aristide was elected by a two-thirds majority, Hakim observes, “in most Latin American countries, movement from authoritarianism to democracy tends to reflect a more broadly based consensus than is currently the case in Haiti.” It is true enough that from the southern cone to Central America and the Caribbean, the consensus is “broadly based” in the sense that sustained terror and degradation, much of it organized right where Hakim speaks, has taught people to abandon hope for freedom and democracy, and to accept the rule of private power, domestic and foreign. It hasn’t been easy; witness the case of Guatemala, just now attaining the proper broad consensus after many years of education. Hakim also surely knows the nature of the “consensus” at home, revealed by the belief of half the population that the political system is so rotten that both parties should be disbanded. And he knows full well what efforts are made to broaden government to include authentic representatives of the overwhelming majority of the population in Latin America, or by its traditional master.17
Aristide is not alone in being a slow student. U.N. envoy Dante Caputo resigned when the invasion was imminent, deploring the unilateral U.S. initiatives that displaced the United Nations entirely. “In effect,” he said, “the total absence of consultation and information from the United States Government makes me believe that this country has in fact taken the unilateral decision of acting on its own in the Haitian process,” so that the U.N. no longer has any role to play. Referring to Carter’s grand achievement, Caputo said: “they got a much weaker agreement with 60 military planes in the air than we got at the negotiating table” in July 1993. Cedras scoffed at that one, Caputo notes, and may well do the same this time, proceeding to “build a political force with Haiti’s ruling class, leaving most of the country’s current military and economic power base intact.” Caputo was too diplomatic to add that this contemptuous disregard for the United Nations is standard operating procedure, and is only to be expected of the world’s most powerful state, which has no reason to pay any attention to world opinion or international law, secure in the knowledge that whatever happens, its intentions will be deemed “certainly honorable” by its harshest critics among the respectable intelligentsia.18
4. Perspective
“Perspective” on what is taking place was provided in the New York Times by R. W. Apple, who reviewed the lessons of history. “For two centuries,” he wrote, “political opponents in Haiti have routinely slaughtered each other. Backers of President Aristide, followers of General Cedras and the former Tontons Macoute retain their homicidal tendencies, to say nothing about their weapons” — which the homicidal maniacs in the slums have cleverly concealed. “Like the French in the 19th century, like the Marines who occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, the American forces who are trying to impose a new order will confront a complex and violent society with no history of democracy.”
One takes for granted that the vicious terror and racism of the Wilson administration and its successors will be transmuted to sweet charity as it reaches the educated classes, but it is a novelty to see Napoleon’s invasion, one of the most hideous crimes of an era not known for its gentleness, portrayed in the same light. We might understand this as another small contribution to the broader project of revising the history of Western colonialism so as to justify the next phase.
Apple’s colleague David Broder, the renowned liberal columnist of the Washington Post, added further reflections. “The real danger is that US troops may be caught in an ongoing civil war between heavily armed gangs bent on revenge or determined not to yield power.” On one side of this bitter conflict, we find the unarmed peasants and slum-dwellers who dared to elect a populist President, “whose commitment to democracy is unproven” — or at least we find their mutilated corpses. On the other side, trembling in fear, stand the U.S.-armed and -trained military and police with the criminal gangs they have organized in the familiar Duvalierist style, and their backers and beneficiaries, the wealthy families who own the country together with their U.S. associates. Truly a cosmic struggle.
U.S. forces in Haiti are not the first to confont challenges and dilemmas of such severity. Similar problems were faced by the Soviet troops entering Prague in 1968, trying to mediate between the Stalinist security forces and the people calling for freedom and democracy, two “heavily armed gangs determined not to yield power.” Or the U.S. forces who liberated Buchenwald, and faced “the real danger” that the SS troops and the half-alive skeletons, each with their “homicidal tendencies,” might continue their “ongoing civil war.”
In the light of the threats so graphically depicted by the commentators in the national press, we can understand why “The first major arms raid by American troops was for searching not for weapons hidden by attaches, the armed thugs propping up Haiti’s military government, but for guns supposedly held by supporters of the man the Americans had come to put back in office, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide” (Kifner). The October 2 raid was based on information unearthed by U.S. Army intelligence. Its source was “a well-known attache,” “regarded locally as a drug dealer and paramilitary leader,” who directed U.S. forces to “a terrorist training camp stashed full of weapons” — which turned out to be a property owned by Katherine Dunham, where the raiders seeking to disarm the terrorists surprised a dance troupe practicing. Meanwhile the armed attaches who had broken up the anniversary celebration “were still lounging around their corner today by the Normandie Bar in the center of the city. No American soldiers were in the area.”
Lying behind the “comic aspects of the search,” Kifner observes, “lies a potentially serious problem for the American forces as they feel out their political role here. The army’s natural inclination is to protect property and order,” a difficult matter in “an extraordinarily bifurcated country, where a tiny elite, whose wealth is largely the product of exploitation and corruption, rules over desperately poor masses” — a situation not unrelated to policies and actions of the current liberators. It’s not too hard to imagine how the problem will be resolved. Basing himself on his analysis of the “ongoing civil war,” Broder offers further advice. Clinton should heed “the lesson of Vietnam,” he continues: “you don’t commit troops until the country is committed to the mission” — and you understand that no question can conceivably be raised about “the mission” — again, a stance that does not lack distinguished models. Now that “Clinton has followed the idealistic President Woodrow Wilson in sending American forces to Haiti,” we must recall that our last mission of mercy “lasted 19 years.” Disciplined intellectuals are not to recall the facts about that “idealistic” intervention and its aftermath, though Haitians remember them all too well.19
5. Restoring Civil Society
Both in Haiti and the U.S., those who matter understand what is happening well enough. “Senior U.S. officials have initiated large-scale business negotiations with some of the most powerful and wealthy Haitian supporters of the military overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” Kenneth Freed reported in the Los Angeles Times as U.S. forces were “supposedly engineering a new political environment to undermine the power of the same anti-democratic elite.” One case is General Shelton’s arrangements with Haiti’s influential Mevs family “about leasing a large waterfront plot for construction of fuel storage tanks and a pipeline.” It only makes sense, given that these leading coup backers had already built “a huge new oil depot here to help the army defy the embargo,” as the New York Times had reported earlier.
Parallel arrangements are proceeding with the other wealthy families that had financed fuel shipments, among other techniques to benefit from the “sanctions.” The “powerful Haitian clan” of the Mevs “has positioned itself well to keep doing what it does best — make money,” Jose de Cordoba reports in the Wall Street Journal. The Mevs had met with Aristide in Washington to induce him to “moderate his position and reach out to the tiny, mostly anti-Aristide, Haitian middle class” — an intriguing notion of “middle,” when we consider the proportion of those who own almost all the nation’s wealth. Inexplicably, the Mevs have been able “to build a huge tank farm to store fuel” during the embargo, backed by “loans guaranteed by Haiti’s Central Bank”; a fairly typical example of “free market” capitalism. They had “profited from their cozy ties to the Duvalier dictatorships,” and therefore found it easy to deal with the U.S., and to adapt to the form of “broadly-based democracy” that they see the Clintonites fashioning.
While still “nervous about Aristide,” the enlightened business sector is “counting on the Americans,” the London Financial Times reports. Reasonably enough. Unlike educated Americans, it is not sufficient for them to chant ritual phrases; to pursue their interests, they must attend to historical and institutional facts. This “baronial class” of “several dozen families,” generally light-skinned, recognizes that the military forces coming to “restore democracy” will prefer to deal with them — our kind of folks, after all, unlike the people rotting in the slums. It is “not surprising that the US should do deals with powerful interests,” as in the days of the Duvalier family dictatorship when these interests gained their power, benefiting from similar “deals” with the U.S. government and foreign enterprise while the population sank deeper into misery. Why should anything change, now that the traditional benefactors have returned?20
As for the Haitian military, they too expect to hold on to power, Larry Rohter reports in the New York Times. Realistically again. They too know their history, and are also aware that “There’s nothing in the [Carter-Cedras] agreement that details the future” of the puppet government that they established (U.S. Embassy spokesman Schrager). Schrager is referring to the Jonassaint government that the U.S. now treats with as much respect as General Cedras — though as far as is known, Jonassaint has not yet been invited by Jimmy Carter to teach his Sunday School class. Rohter asserts that “the Cedras camp managed to mislead the United States and its allies for three months and then defy them for nearly a year before reaching the accord with the Carter delegation.” Perhaps. They surely didn’t mislead anyone paying attention to what was going on in Haiti and Washington.21
Clinton’s policies have generally been praised as successful, and rightly so. They achieved what the U.S. has sought ever since the disaster of the free election of December 1990. The previous status quo has pretty much been restored, with one vital difference: civil society has been devastated, and its leading figure has (it is hoped) been trained to become more “pragmatic” and “realistic.” The way is clear towards restoring the power of the core sector of Civil Society: foreign investors and “enlightened” elements of the Haitian business community, those who are offended by the sight of mutilated corpses as they are driven by in their limousines, preferring that the poor waste away quietly, out of sight, while the remnants perhaps find a place in assembly plants where they may even survive the regimen of democracy and capitalism for a few years, if lucky.
The Clinton administration regularly complains that it has to walk a “fine line.” That’s true. U.S. military doctrine is unusual, perhaps unique, in holding that U.S. soldiers are not permitted to face any threat. If someone makes a gesture they see as dangerous, they are to call in massive force. Whatever one thinks of the doctrine, it at once disqualifies the U.S. from participation in any operation involving civilians. U.N. peacekeeping forces have radically different rules of engagement, as must any civilized country that participates in operations short of total war. There are cultural and historical reasons for U.S. doctrine, traceable to the Biblical sources that inspired our genocidal forebears and to a history of overwhelming power, contingencies that are likely to bring forth the most ugly features of any society.
It would not be very surprising, then, if the Haitian operations become another catastrophe, like Somalia, in which case respectable commentary will have to shift gear, though only slightly. It is not a difficult chore to trot out the familiar phrases that will explain the failure of our mission of benevolence in this failed society. Perhaps, with luck, the worst will be avoided as U.S. forces reinstate one of the two antagonists in the “ongoing civil war” between the two “heavily armed gangs bent on revenge or determined not to yield power” — the one that was protected by the tanks and armored cars as the other, with their “homicidal tendencies,” sought to demonstrate for democracy on September 30. Following the Guatemalan model, terror can be followed by USAID projects funding FRAPH terrorists as they construct alternatives to the social service sector that arose democratically, and is therefore intolerable to U.S. elites. In my July article on Haiti, I quoted (from the Washington Post) the leader of a now-clandestine pro-Aristide group, who predicted that “the Duvalierist system will continue, with or without the return of Aristide.” “The Duvialierists have many fine days ahead of them in this country,” another human rights worker said: “People are losing their ability to make things happen here, and it will take many years to reverse that under the best of circumstances.” That is how a “broad consensus” of the Pezzullo-Hakim type is established, as both of them understand full well. That is the lesson of “capitalism and democracy,” as interpreted by U.S. elites, who despise democracy only slightly more than free market discipline (for themselves).
6. A Parable for Our Times
The story of Haiti is far from over. Two hundred years of popular struggles in Haiti teach us a great deal about the commitment to freedom and justice and the depth of its roots. But as of today, Haiti stands almost as a parable of the 500-year record which, if honesty were imaginable, we would describe as a barbarian invasion in which a savage fringe of Western Europe conquered most of the world.
When Columbus landed in Haiti in 1492, it seemed to him a paradise. The extraordinary wealth of the island of Saint-Domingue, the richest colony in the world, was one of the foundations of France’s wealth and power. Having won its freedom, Haiti faced the bitter revenge of the great powers, the U.S. taking first place in seeking to crush the upstarts who called for freedom for all people — and forgetting the 1500 freed slaves from Haiti who had joined in the U.S. war of independence. The reasons were understood very well by French diplomat Talleyrand, who wrote to James Madison in 1805 that “The existence of a Negro people in arms, occupying a country it has soiled by the most criminal acts, is a horrible spectacle for all white nations,” particularly one that based its “free market” economic development on slavery to provide cheap cotton, and that was then engaged in exterminating or expelling the indigenous population. Talleyrand was formulating an early version of the “rotten apple theory” (in its public version, the “domino theory”), which has played a leading role in post-World War II history.
Haitian historian Patrick Bellegarde-Smith writes that “Haiti was the first nation in the world to argue the case of universal freedom for all humankind, revealing the limited definition of freedom adopted by the French and American revolutions.” Words worth pondering.
In 1915, as Woodrow Wilson was planning his “idealistic” operation to ensure that U.S. banks and businesses would take over Haiti’s financial and natural resources, historian William MacCorkle was still able to write that the island had “within its shores more natural wealth than any other territory of similar size in the world.” Whatever the truth of that estimate, little remained after Wilson’s forces had done their work — apart from profits for U.S. investors and a tiny clique of Haitian collaborators. “The U.S. occupation was supposed to ensure elite control of the Haitian peasantry and foreign control of the Haitian elite,” Bellegarde-Smith observes — to ensure control of Haiti by the central components of Haitian Civil Society, in the proper hierarchic relation. The extreme racism of the occupiers intensified the internal racism of Haitian society, and contributed in other ways to what some call “Haitian fascism.”
In one of the many sanctimonious displays that are currently defiling media and journals, New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter writes that “The Haitian ruling classes have always viewed their country’s poor as less than human,” something that makes the struggle “hard to comprehend” for Americans (“Compromise is American, Not Haitian”). He is right about the Haitian ruling classes, and is also right to imply that the idealistic Americans — “now back, still aspiring to do good works” — have not entirely shared the attitudes of the Haitian ruling classes. The Wilson administration was much more egalitarian, regarding all Haitians as less than human, not just the poor. As for the historical willingness of U.S. power to compromise, we need waste no words.22
Wilson’s Marines disbanded Haiti’s Parliament in 1918 when it refused to ratify the U.S.-imposed Constitution, which permitted purchase of Haitian lands by foreigners, and did not allow it to reconvene for twelve years. The occupier’s Constitution was “ratified” in a Marine-run plebiscite that did not even approach the dignity of fraud, another one of our contributions to this country with “no history of democracy,” where the current President’s “commitment to democracy is unproven.”
The atrocities of the idealistic mission, including aerial bombing of a Haitian city, finally reached home, eliciting public protest. A 1927 study of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom recounted such U.S. atrocities as burning men and women alive, summary execution of children, beating and torturing, machine-gunning of civilians, daily shooting of cattle and burning of crops, houses, mills, and so on. It came to be understood that atrocities are best left to local clients, as other imperial powers had long realized. Washington proceeded to create an army that “may have ended forever the possibility of an agrarian revolt against the central authority,” anthropologist Sidney Mintz observes, much as it did in the Dominican Republic next door at the same time, and in much the same way. Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes the establishment of “an army to fight the people” as the worst of the legacies of the occupation, which “left the country with two poisoned gifts: a weaker civil society and a solidified state apparatus.” Current plans simply continue the process, which has its counterparts through Latin America, and is firmly founded in explicit doctrine.
Haitian historian Dantes Bellegarde describes the period from mid-19th century to 1929 as one of ongoing peasant insurgency, finally defeated by the occupying army, with its overwhelming force advantage. In earlier years, insurgents could retreat into the interior beyond the range of naval bombardment, but the methods of aerial bombardment of civilians pioneered by Wilson, then extended by British imperialists, “rendered that tactic obsolete,” Bellergarde-Smith observes. The much-lauded infrastructure projects, such as road construction by forced labor, also served the purpose of centralization of power and pacification.
Since then the U.S. has run Haiti without much interference. The educational system, meanwhile, was taken over by other outsiders, primarily the Catholic church and U.S. Protestant organisations, who are not held responsible for the results, including some 80% illiteracy by 1988. The United States trained and armed the security forces, including the elite Leopard counterinsurgency units of the Duvalier dictatorships. “Development projects” initiated and funded by the U.S. accelerated the displacement of subsistence agriculture in favor of export crops and the agribusiness industry. Haiti was considered a fine place to invest, because a “skilled labor force with excellent work attitudes is abundant and available and at remarkably low cost” (Report of Haitian Assembly Industry Association to U.S. corporations). Ample terror was available to eliminate such deviations from free market principles as unions, minimal wage laws, and safety regulations. As democracy is restored by Clinton’s intervention, Aristide’s earlier proposal to increase the Haitian minimum wage has become a “non-issue,” World Bank official Axel Peuker observes, and other social measures are “not on the agenda,” he said, as we march towards “democracy and capitalism.”
Throughout this period “economic health” improved in the technical sense, along with starvation, infant mortality, and other human disasters, while real wages plummeted. By the early 1970s, people began to flee, as hundreds of thousands had under Wilson’s occupation, and as they do en masse elsewhere in the Caribbean domains of U.S. power — for unknown reasons. The refugees were forcefully returned under Carter, increasingly so under a Reagan-Duvalier agreement. The recent record is familiar.
Meanwhile ecological destruction continues as a consequence of development policies and prevailing systems of social control. Some analysts predict that the remaining forest cover may disappear in a few years, leading to erosion of the remaining fertile soils and disappearance of the water supply. Within our lifetimes, the paradise that Columbus found and that enriched Europe may become a desert, virtually devoid of life.23
It’s never too late to arrest that fate. If it comes about, the powerful will have no difficulty absolving themselves of any responsibility; those who have benefited from a good education can write the script right now. If it comes about, we will have only ourselves to blame.
Notes
1 Cooper, de Cordoba, WSJ, Oct. 3; David Beard, AP, BG, Oct. 3, 1994.
2 Kifner, NYT, Oct. 1, 2; Diego Ribadeneira, BG, Oct. 2; editorial, NYT, Oct. 2, 1994. Latell, see Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Common Courage 1994).
3 Nairn, Nation, Oct. 3, 1994.
4 Paul Quinn-Judge, BG, Sept. 8, 1994.
5 Greenhouse, NYT, Oct. 2; Paul Quinn-Judge, BG, Oct. 2. Reuters, “U.S. Haiti Role Criticized,” NYT, Sept. 27, a few buried lines; Peter Canellos, BG, Oct. 1, 1994. “Guatemala: Ex-dictator will control Congress,” Latinamerica press, Sept. 1, 1994.
6 Lewis, Sept. 30, 1994.
7 Branch, Op-ed, NYT, Sept. 25; Douglas Jehl, NYT, Sept. 22, 1994.
8 See my article in Z, May 1994.
9 Barbara Crossette, NYT, Feb. 5, 1992. Laurent Belsie, CSM, Sept. 27, 1994.
10 See my article in Z, July 1994.
11 See my “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” in American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon 1969), reprinted in part in James Peck, ed., Chomsky Reader (Pantheon 1988).
12 Steven Greenhouse, NYT, Sept. 19, 1994.
13 Clinton, NYT, Sept. 16; Todd, Telegraph Journal, New Brunswick, Sept. 17, 1994.
14 Randolph Ryan, BG, Sept. 25, 1994.
15 Robert Greenberger, WSJ, Sept. 22; Maureen Dowd, NYT, Sept. 22; Sciolino, Sept. 18, 1994. IADB, Americas Watch, see my article in Z, July, and sources cited.
15 Robert Greenberger, et al., WSJ, Sept. 19; Pezzullo, op-ed, Sept. 21, 1994.
17 Peter Grier, “US tightens the Screws on Haitian Elite,” CSM, June 24, 1994.
18 Calvin Sims, NYT, Sept. 22, 1994.
19 Apple, NYT, Sept. 20; Broder, BG, Sept. 20; Kifner, NYT, Oct. 3, 1994.
20 Freed, LAT, Sept. 24; de Cordoba, WSJ, Sept. 16; James Harding, FT, Sept. 27, 1994. See Z, July.
21 Rohter, NYT, Sept. 22, 1994.
22 Rohter, NYT, Sept. 25, 1994.
23 Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: the Breached Citadel (Westview 1990); Farmer, op. cit.; my Year 501 (South End 1993) and Z, July 1994. And sources cited.