The Haiti Crisis: Aristide Is Not the Issue

BY BILL FLETCHER, JR.

One of the biggest mistakes people have made looking at
the recent Haitian crisis has been to focus on the
person of President Bertrande Aristide. This may sound
odd since, after all, he is the one who was overthrown.
What took place this February was not simply the ouster
of an individual, however, but the termination of
constitutional rule. Thus, whether someone happens to
oppose or support President Aristide is secondary. The
primary question is whether it is permissible to
overthrow a genuinely elected leader other than via
legal and constitutional procedures.

Following the coup, many progressives reacted,
understandably, by defending President Aristide-the-
person. But this misses the point about the coup’s
upending of constitutional rule. It also fails to
address the complications that President Aristide found
himself facing as a result of the conditions that he
accepted when he was returned to power in 1994.

At that time, the U.S. government imposed on President
Aristide a set of conditions that were the equivalent
of handcuffing him. He was expected to adopt, almost
wholesale, the economic approach that has come to be
known as the Washington Consensus. This included the
elimination of thousands of civil service positions and
the advancement of a privatization agenda. The United
States and multilateral lending institutions demanded
this approach of the poorest country in the Western
Hemisphere, one emerging from a history of political
despotism and neo-colonialism. For better or for worse,
President Aristide accepted these parameters.

The difficulty for President Aristide, however, is that
sections of his base were unwilling to accept such
conditions. They were thirsting after the Aristide who,
upon his initial election in 1990, had promised a
redistribution of wealth and the articulation of a
politics defined not by the Haitian wealthy elite, but
by the Haitian majority—its poor.

In some respects, then, it is appropriate to see the
post-1994 Aristide as a political character buffeted by
contending political waves. On the one hand, his bases
among the historically dispossessed protested against
privatization and demanded that Aristide carry forward
his promised reforms—and were in some cases able to
halt neoliberal efforts. Sections of this base became
disenchanted, feeling that Aristide had either gone
back on his word or was not moving forward quickly
enough. In some cases there were more serious
criticisms about alleged human rights abuses by the
government and its failure to investigate them.
Nevertheless, it appears that the bulk of his base
remained loyal to him and to his party, Famni Lavalas.

The other wave was from the political right. It was a
wave generated from both Washington and from the
Haitian elite. This wave saw in Aristide, even the new-
and-improved Aristide after 1994, a person too far to
the left and an unstable political element. Aristide’s
efforts to change the conditions of the Haitian poor
through improvements in health care, education, and
roads were viewed as a threat to the dominance of the
rich and powerful.

Thus, President Aristide went too far to the right to
satisfy important sections of his base (and in some
cases demoralizing them), but not far enough to the
right to satisfy the Bush administration and the
Haitian elite.

The coup against Aristide, then, must be understood not
in isolation, but as the culmination of activities that
really began the minute he was re-elected in 2000.
Destabilization efforts by the U.S. government, active
U.S. support for the creation of a so-called civil-
society opposition, and eventually the invasion of
Haiti by an armed band of criminals and murderers were
all part of a process designed to ensure that Haiti
would return fully to the fold of the U.S. empire and
its minions in Haiti.

There are many lessons that we in the United States
must learn from this entire debacle, but perhaps the
most important one is that the actions of our
citizenry, or our inactions, help determine whether the
space in which countries of the global South operate is
one in which dreams can be realized, or one in which
nightmares must be suffered.

Bill Fletcher, Jr., is the president of TransAfrica
Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit educational
and organizing center formed to raise awareness in the
United States regarding issues facing the nations and
peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. He
can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.