Who removed Aristide?

Paul Farmer reports from Haiti

London Review of Books

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n08/print/farm01_.html

On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He
claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he
was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight,
he was told that he and his wife would be landing ’in a
French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found
himself in the Central African Republic.

An understanding of the current crisis requires a sense
of Haiti’s history. In the 18th century it became
France’s most valuable colonial possession, and one of
the most brutally efficient slave colonies there has
ever been. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was
the leading port of call for slave ships: on the eve of
the French Revolution, it was supplying two-thirds of
all of Europe’s tropical produce. A third of new
arrivals died within a few years.

Haitians are still living with the legacy of the slave
trade and of the revolt that finally removed the
French. The revolt began in 1791, and more than a
decade of war followed; France’s largest expeditionary
force, led by General Leclerc, Napoleon’s
brother-in-law, was sent to put down the rebellion. As
the French operation flagged, the slave general,
Toussaint l’Ouverture, was invited to a parley. He was
kidnapped and taken away to a prison in the Jura. In
Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian
Revolution,* Laurent Dubois tells Toussaint’s story in
a manner that reminds us of its similarities to the
current situation:

’Toussaint must not be free,’ Leclerc wrote to the
colonial minister in Paris at the time, ’and should be
imprisoned in the interior of the Republic. May he
never see Saint-Domingue again.’ ’You cannot hold
Toussaint far enough from the ocean or put him in a
prison that is too strong,’ Leclerc reiterated a month
later. He seemed to fear that the deported man might
suddenly reappear. His very presence in the colony, he
warned, would once again set it alight.

Toussaint died of exposure and tuberculosis in 1803.
Every Haitian schoolchild knows his last words by
heart: ’In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San
Domingo only the trunk of the tree of black liberty. It
will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous
and deep.’

In November 1803 the former slaves won what proved to
be the war’s final battle, and on 1 January 1804
declared the independent republic of Haiti. It was
Latin America’s first independent country and the only
nation ever born of a slave revolt. The Haitian
Revolution, Dubois writes, was ’a dramatic challenge to
the world as it then was. Slavery was at the heart of
the thriving system of merchant capitalism that was
profiting Europe, devastating Africa, and propelling
the rapid expansion of the Americas.’ Independent Haiti
had few friends. Virtually all the world’s powers sided
with France against the self-proclaimed Black Republic,
which declared itself a haven not only for runaway
slaves but also for indigenous people from the rest of
the Americas (the true natives of Haiti had succumbed
to infectious disease and Spanish slavery well before
the arrival of the French). Hemmed in by slave
colonies, Haiti had only one non-colonised neighbour,
the slaveholding United States, which refused to
recognise its independence.

Haiti’s leaders were desperate for recognition, since
the island’s only source of revenue was the sugar,
coffee, cotton and other tropical produce it had to
sell. In 1825, under threat of another French invasion
and the restoration of slavery, Haitian officials
signed the document which was to prove the beginning of
the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king
agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the
new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million
francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half.
The ’debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the
slaves when they deprived the French owners not only of
land and equipment but of their human ’property’.

The impact of the debt repayments - which continued
until after World War Two - was devastating. In the
words of the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars,
’the incompetence and frivolity of its leaders’ had
’turned a country whose revenues and outflows had been
balanced up to then into a nation burdened with debt
and trapped in financial obligations that could never
be satisfied.’ ’Imposing an indemnity on the victorious
slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money
that which they had already paid with their blood,’ the
abolitionist Victor Schoelcher argued.

By the late 19th century, the United States had
eclipsed France as a force in Haitian affairs. A US
military occupation (1915-34) brought back corvee
labour and introduced bombing from the air, while
officials in Washington created the institutions that
Haitians would have to live with: the army, above all,
which now claims to have the country ’in its hands’,
was created by an act of the US Congress. Demobilised
by Aristide in 1995, it never knew a non-Haitian enemy.
It had plenty of internal enemies, however.
Military-backed governments, dictatorships, chronic
instability, repression, the heavy hand of Washington
over all: this state of affairs continued throughout
the 20th century.

I learned about Haiti’s history while working on
medical projects on the country’s central plateau. When
I first travelled there in 1983, the Duvalier family
dictatorship had been in place for a quarter of a
century. There was no dissent. The Duvaliers and their
military dealt ruthlessly with any opposition, while
the judiciary and the rest of the world looked the
other way. Haiti was already known as the poorest
country in the Western world, and those who ran it
argued that force was required to police deep poverty.

By the mid-1980s, the hunger, despair and disease were
beyond management. Baby Doc Duvalier, named ’president
for life’ at 19, fled in 1986. A first attempt at
democratic elections, in 1987, led to massacres at
polling stations. An army general declared himself in
charge. In September 1988, the mayor of Port-au-Prince
– a former military officer - paid a gang to set fire
to a Catholic church as mass was being said. It was
packed with people, 12 of whom died. At the altar was
Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the nemesis of the
dictatorship and the army. Aristide was a proponent of
liberation theology, with its injunction that the
Church proclaim ’a preferential option for the poor’,
but liberation theology had its adversaries: members of
Reagan’s brains trust, meeting in 1980, declared it
less Christian than Communist. ’US policy,’ they said,
’must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the
"liberation theology" clergy.’

Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential
candidate took place against a background of right-wing
death squads and threatened military coups. He rose
quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock
plummeted in the United States. The New York Times,
which relies heavily on informants who can speak
English or French, had few kind words for him. ’He’s a
cross between the Ayatollah and Fidel,’ one Haitian
businessman was quoted as saying. ’If it comes to a
choice between the ultra-left and the ultra-right, I’m
ready to form an alliance with the ultra-right.’
Haitians knew, however, that Aristide would win any
democratic election, and on 16 December 1990, he got 67
per cent of the vote in a field of 12 candidates. No
run-off was required.

The United States might not have been able to prevent
Aristide’s landslide victory, but there was plenty they
could do to undermine him. The most effective method,
adopted by the first Bush administration, was to fund
both the opposition - their poor showing at the polls
was no reason, it appears, to cut off aid to them - and
the military. Declassified records now make it clear
that the CIA and other US groups helped to create and
fund a paramilitary group called FRAPH, which rose to
prominence after a military coup that ousted Aristide
in September 1991. Thousands of civilians were killed
and hundreds of thousands fled overseas or across the
border into the Dominican Republic. For the next three
years Haiti was run by military-civilian juntas as
ruthless as the Duvaliers.

In October 1994, under Clinton, the US military
intervened and restored Aristide to power, with a
little over a year of his term left to run. Although
authorised by the UN, the restoration was basically a
US operation. Then, seven weeks after Aristide’s
return, Republicans took control of the Congress, and
influential Republicans have worked ever since to block
aid to Haiti or burden it with preconditions.

The aid coming through official channels was never very
substantial: the US gave Haiti, per capita, one tenth
of what it distributed in Kosovo. It is true that, as
former US ambassadors and the Bush administration have
recently claimed, hundreds of millions of dollars
flowed into Haiti - but not to the elected government.
A great deal of it went to the anti-Aristide
opposition. A lot also went to pay for the UN
occupation, and Halliburton support services. There was
little effort to rebuild schools, the healthcare
infrastructure, roads, ports, telecommunications or
airports.

During his few months in office, Aristide, in part
because of the abolition of the Haitian army, became in
1996 the first elected civilian to see another elected
civilian - Rene Preval - succeed him as president of
Latin America’s oldest republic. Preval in turn became
Haiti’s first president ever to serve out his term, not
a day more or less. In November 2000, Aristide was
again elected by a landslide. But problems had already
arisen. In the local and parliamentary elections in
May, eight parliamentary seats were disputed and when
the political opposition cried foul, the US froze
international aid. The Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB), for example, had approved four loans, for
health, education, drinking water and road improvement.
Haitian and American sources have confirmed to me that
the US asked the bank to block the loans until the
electoral disputes had been worked out. Since seven of
the senators in question resigned in 2001, and the
other’s term expired shortly thereafter, that should
have been the end of the aid freeze, yet it continued
throughout Aristide’s tenure.

The State Department later claimed that the freeze was
decided on by a consensus of the members of the
Organisation of American States in something called the
Declaration of Quebec City. The declaration is dated 22
April 2001, and the letter from the US representative
asking that the loans not be disbursed was dated 8
April. To quote the conclusion of one of the few
journalists to find this scandal worthy of inquiry, ’it
would seem that the effort became concerted after it
was made.’

International financial institutions engaged in
discriminatory and probably illegal practices towards
Haiti. According to the London-based Haiti Support
Group,

Haiti’s debt to international financial institutions
and foreign governments has grown from $302 million in
1980 to $1.134 billion today. About 40 per cent of this
debt stems from loans to the brutal Duvalier dictators,
who invested precious little of it in the country. This
is known as ’odious debt’ because it was used to
oppress the people, and, according to international
law, this debt need not be repaid.

Yet in order to meet the renewed demands of the IDB,
the cash-strapped Haitian government was required to
pay ever-expanding arrears on its debts, many of them
linked to loans paid out to the Duvalier dictatorship
and to the military regimes that ruled Haiti with great
brutality from 1986 to 1990. In July 2003, Haiti sent
more than 90 per cent of all its foreign reserves to
Washington to pay off these arrears. As of today, less
than $4 million of the four blocked loans - which
totalled $146 million - has reached Haiti in spite of
many assurances from the IDB.

Even so it was not until last month that one could read
in a US daily newspaper that the aid freeze might have
contributed to the overthrow of the penniless Haitian
government. On 7 March, the Boston Globe wrote:

Today, Haiti’s government, which serves eight million
people, has an annual budget of about $300 million -
less than that of Cambridge, a city of just over
100,000. And as Haitians attempt to form a new
government, many say its success will largely depend on
how much and how soon aid will flow to the country
. . . Many of Aristide’s supporters, in Haiti and
abroad, angrily contend that the international
community, particularly the United States, abandoned
the fledgling democracy when it needed aid the most.
Many believe that Aristide himself was the target of
the de facto economic sanctions, just as Haiti was
beginning to put its finances back in order.

That the US and France undermined Aristide is not a
fringe opinion. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and
the African Union have called for a formal
investigation into his removal. ’Most people around the
world believe that Aristide’s departure was at best
facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’
Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council
staff under Clinton, recently said.

Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the
question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared
that France ’extorted this money from Haiti by force
and . . . should give it back to us so that we can
build primary schools, primary healthcare, water
systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in
interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that
France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This
figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw
the whole affair as a farce mounted by their
disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly
clear, were insulted or angered when the point was
pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.

Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21
billion was repeated again and again. The number 21
appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the
word ’restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the
bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would
replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things
that had been done in spite of the embargo and that
would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went
wild. The French press by and large dismissed his
comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his
case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint
l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not
discourage. ’Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’
Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ’and
Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from
outside interference.’

It’s usually easy to tell, in even the briefest
conversation about Aristide, how your interlocutor
feels about him. Opinion in Haiti is almost always
referred to as ’polarised’ in the US press, but this
isn’t true in every sense. Elections and polls, even
recent ones, show that the poor majority still support
Aristide. It’s the middle classes and the traditional
political elites who disagree about him, as well as
people like me: non-Haitians who, for whatever reasons,
concern themselves with that country’s affairs.

Between the coup that followed Aristide’s inauguration
and his return to Haiti, the coverage in the US was of
the same character as today’s. On 22 September 1994,
the New York Times ran a front-page piece called ’The
Mouse that Roared’. From it, we get a keen sense of
Aristide as irritant:

The Clinton crowd has had to work hard to justify him
to lawmakers who were unnerved by the October 1993
closed-door CIA briefing to Congress, in which the
intelligence agency offered information - later proven
false - that Father Aristide had received psychiatric
treatment at a Montreal hospital in 1980. Senator Jesse
Helms, Republican of North Carolina, left the briefing
and branded him a ’psychopath’ - a slur it has been
hard for Father Aristide to get over.

It would be convenient for the traditional Haitian
elites and their allies abroad if Aristide, who has
been forced to preside over unimaginable penury, had
been abandoned by his own people. But Gallup polls in
2002, the results of which were never disseminated,
showed that, despite his faults, he is far and away
Haiti’s most popular and trusted politician. So what is
to be done about the people who, to the horror of the
Republican right, keep voting for him?

The proteges of Jesse Helms have had more say in
Aristide’s fate than the Haitian electorate have.
Although US officials stated initially that he had been
’taken to the country of his choice’ at the end of
February, Aristide’s claim that he had no idea where he
was going seems more plausible. He had never been to
the Central African Republic before. About the size of
Texas and with a population of only three million, it
is subject to French military and economic interests. A
BBC story in March 2003 reported that the capital,
Bangui, was the world’s most dangerous city, while the
US advises its citizens not to travel to the country;
the US embassy was closed two years ago.

On the tarmac, Aristide thanked the Africans for their
hospitality, and then said: ’I declare in overthrowing
me they have uprooted the trunk of the tree of peace,
but it will grow back because the roots are
l’Ouverturian.’

The Bush administration appears to have put two men in
charge of Latin American diplomacy, and they’ve been at
it for a long time. As the ’special presidential envoy
to the western hemisphere’, Otto Reich is the top US
diplomat in the region, even though he has never
survived a House or Senate hearing; he was given the
post by Bush during a Congressional recess. In the
1990s, Reich was a lobbyist for industry (one
beneficiary of his work: Lockheed Martin, who have been
selling fighter planes to Chile); before that he had a
long record of government service.

During the civil war in Nicaragua, according to William
Finnegan in a New Yorker profile, Reich

headed a Contra-support programme that operated out of
an outfit called the Office of Public Diplomacy. The
office arranged speeches and recommended books to
school libraries, but also leaked false stories to the
press - that, for instance, the Sandinista government
was receiving Soviet MiG fighters, or was involved in
drug trafficking . . . The office employed army
psychological-warfare specialists, and worked closely
with Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, at the National
Security Council.

During the course of the Iran-Contra investigation, the
US comptroller general concluded that Reich’s office
had ’engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda
activities’. But by then Reich had been named US
ambassador to Venezuela, where he laid the groundwork
for future efforts to destabilise President Chavez. Not
all this activity is covert: less than a year ago,
Reich was on record welcoming a coup against Chavez,
and urging the State Department and opinion makers to
support the ’new government’. The only problem was that
the Venezuelan majority failed to fall into step, and
Chavez remained.

Last month, the Bush administration sent Roger Noriega
to Haiti to ’work out’ the crisis. Not everyone knew
who he was: Noriega’s career has been spent in the
shadows of Congressional committees. For the better
part of a decade, he worked for Helms and his allies,
and it’s no secret he has had Aristide in his sights
for years. US Haiti policy is determined by a small
number of people who were prominent in either Reagan’s
or George H.W. Bush’s cabinets. Most are back in
government today after an eight-year vacation in
conservative think tanks or lobbying firms. Elliot
Abrams, convicted of withholding information from
Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings, serves on the
National Security Council; Reagan’s national security
adviser John Poindexter until recently headed the
Pentagon’s new counterterrorism unit; John Negroponte,
former ambassador to Honduras, is now ambassador to the
UN. Jeanne Kirkpatrick is on the board of the
International Republican Institute, a body which has
been actively supporting the opposition in Haiti (my
sources suggest that it backed the demobilised army
personnel who provided the opposition’s muscle at the
beginning of the year, though it denies this).

The players on the Haitian side fall into one of two
categories: first, Haiti’s business elite, including
those who own the media, and then the former military
and paramilitaries - the people who were involved in
the 1991-94 coup. Some have been in jail since then for
murder, drug trafficking and crimes against humanity.
Today, every single one of them is out.

Among those released by the rebels is the former
general Prosper Avril, a leader of the notorious
Presidential Guard under both Duvaliers. Avril seized
power in September 1988, and was deposed in March 1990.
A US District Court found that his regime engaged in a
’systematic pattern of egregious human rights abuses’.
It also found him personally responsible for enough
’torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ to
award six of his victims a total of $41 million in
compensation. The victims included opposition
politicians, union leaders, scholars, even a doctor
trying to practise community medicine. Avril’s
repression was not subtle: three torture victims were
paraded on national television with their faces
grotesquely swollen, their limbs bruised and their
clothing covered with blood. He suspended 37 articles
of the constitution, and declared a state of siege.

The US started protecting Avril shortly after the 1994
restitution of Aristide. In November that year, the
then secretary of state, Warren Christopher, relayed to
the US ambassador intelligence reports that the Red
Star Organisation, under Avril’s leadership, was
planning a ’harassment and assassination campaign
directed at . . . Aristide supporters’. This
information was not passed on to the Haitian
authorities. In December, the Haitian police, acting on
their own information, sought to arrest Avril at his
home. Immediately after the police arrived, US soldiers
turned up and tried to dissuade them from making the
arrest. By the time they got in, Avril had fled to the
neighbouring residence of the Colombian ambassador.
Police searching Avril’s house found military uniforms,
illegal police radios and a cache of weapons.

He escaped to Israel but later returned to Haiti, where
his international and potential military support
deterred further attempts to arrest him. He founded a
political party, which has never fielded candidates in
an election but was invited by the IRI to participate
in developing an opposition to Aristide. In May 2001,
after US troops had withdrawn from Haiti, the police
finally seized the opportunity to execute Avril’s
arrest warrant. The successful arrest was greeted with
applause by the vast majority of Haitians and by human
rights and justice groups in Haiti, the US and Europe.
Amnesty International asserted that the arrest ’could
mark a step forward by the Haitian justice system in
its struggle against impunity’: ’the gravity of the
human rights violations committed during General
Avril’s period in power, from his 1988 coup d’etat to
his departure in March 1990, cannot,’ Amnesty said, ’be
ignored.’ France’s Committee to Prosecute Duvalier
concluded that ’the general must be tried.’ On 9
December 2003, the magistrate investigating the Piatre
Massacre in 1990, when several peasants lost their
lives, formally charged Avril with responsibility. He
was in prison awaiting the end of the pre-trial
proceedings when he was freed on 2 March - a few days
after Aristide was deposed.

The rebel leader Guy Philippe received training, during
the last coup, at a US military facility in Ecuador.
When the army was demobilised, Philippe was
incorporated into the new police force, serving as
police chief in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas and
in the second city, Cap-Haitien. During his tenure, the
UN International Civilian Mission learned, dozens of
suspected gang members were summarily ex ecuted, most
of them by police under the command of Philippe’s
deputy. The US embassy has also implicated Philippe in
drug smuggling during his police career. Crimes
committed in large part by ex-military policemen, are
often pinned on Aristide, even though he sought to
prevent coup-happy human rights abusers from ending up
in these posts.

Philippe fled Haiti in October 2000, when the
authorities discovered him plotting a coup with a
clique of fellow police chiefs. Since then, the Haitian
government has accused him of masterminding terrorist
attacks in July and December 2001, as well as lethal
hit-and-run raids against police stations on Haiti’s
central plateau. (Over the last two years, four of our
ambulances have been stolen, and members of our medical
staff have been held hostage.) Last month, Philippe’s
men bragged to the US press that they had executed
Aristide supporters in Cap-Haitien and Port-au-Prince,
and many have indeed been reported missing. ’I am the
chief, the military chief. The country is in my hands,’
Philippe boasted on 2 March, which triggered the
following response from Oscar Arias, the Nobel Peace
laureate and former president of Costa Rica: ’Nothing
could more clearly prove why Haiti does not need an
army than the boasting of rebel leader Guy Philippe
last week in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian army was
abolished nine years ago during a period of democratic
transition, precisely to prevent the country from
falling back into the hands of military men.’ Philippe
told the Associated Press that he would use his new
powers to arrest Haiti’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune,
and proceeded to lead a mob in an attack on Neptune’s
house. Philippe has been quoted as saying that the man
he most admires is Pinochet.

The list goes on. Louis-Jodel Chamblain was a sergeant
in the Haitian army until 1989 or 1990. He reappeared
on the scene in 1993 as the second in command of the
FRAPH. (Emmanuel ’Toto’ Constant, its leader, is now
living as a free man in Queens, New York.) Among the
FRAPH’s victims was Guy Malary, the justice minister,
ambushed and machine-gunned with his bodyguard and a
driver. In September 1995, Chamblain was one of seven
senior military and FRAPH leaders convicted in absentia
and sentenced to forced labour for life for their
involvement in the September 1993 execution of Antoine
Izmery, a well-known pro-democracy activist. In late
1994 or early 1995, he went into voluntary exile in the
Dominican Republic.

As for the traditional political elite, some have
wanted to live in the National Palace ever since the
time it was occupied by Papa Doc. Others may appear
more marginal but they have done their share of harm.
When, the other day, Vladimir Jeanty was shown
destroying artwork on public display in Port-au-Prince,
he was described as a ’pastor from the Party of God’.
In fact he is another perennial presidential candidate,
delighted to have the chance to burn precious artefacts
linked with voodoo and other aspects of Haitian culture
– and to do so in full view of the international press.

US-born Andre Apaid, known in the US press as ’the
leader of the civil society movement to oust Aristide’,
is the founder of a TV station and owner of a garment
manufacturing firm (a subsidiary of Alpha Industries)
that was prominently featured in news reports about
Disney’s sweatshop suppliers. Aristide’s relentless
push to raise the minimum wage above 72 gourdes a day -
about #1 - cut into the massive profits of the offshore
assembly industry. The US Congress has proposed
building new garment factories in Haiti and encouraging
American companies to contract out more sweatshop
labour - good news for Apaid.

At the other end of the social spectrum from Apaid are
the chimeres, the groups described in the foreign press
as armed thugs working for the Aristide government. But
who are the chimeres? Residents of Haiti’s slums, long
excluded from civil society, they ’were indeed
chimeras’, Madison Smartt Bell wrote. ’Ill fortune left
them as unrealised shadows . . . These were the people
Aristide had originally been out to salvage.’

The salvage operation came to an end last month as
’rebels’ continued to ’take cities’. I work in these
’cities’ and I saw the rebels’ modus operandi. They
came in, shot the police - who usually numbered no more
than two or three - and left. Only a similarly equipped
counterforce could have stopped them. The beleaguered
government appealed for help in the Security Council,
but this was delayed by the Bush administration -
delayed long enough for the government to fall, or be
pushed out.

Did the US and France have a hand in Aristide’s
removal? Were he and his wife being held against their
will? Most of Aristide’s claims, initially disputed by
US officials from Noriega to Donald Rumsfeld, are now
acknowledged to be true. His enemies’ claims that
Aristide met with officials in Antigua - Aristide said
they were not allowed to move from their seats - were
undermined by reports from Antigua itself. Noriega
acknowledged during a House hearing that Aristide did
not know of his destination until less than an hour
before landing in the Central African Republic. Even
CAR officials acknowledge that no Haitian authorities
were involved in the choice of destination.

Many more questions remain unanswered. We know that US
funds overtly financed the opposition, but did they
also fund, even indirectly, the rebellion, which
featured high-powered US weapons only a year after
twenty thousand such weapons were promised to the
Dominican Republic? Senator Christopher Dodd is urging
an investigation of US training sessions for six
hundred ’rebels’ in the Dominican Republic, and wants
to find out ’how the IRI spent $1.2 million of
taxpayers’ money’ in Haiti. Answering these and related
questions would take an intrepid investigative
reporter, rather than a physician like myself, working,
with some trepidation, in central Haiti. It would need
a reporter willing to take on hard questions about US
policies in Latin America. But about the return of the
military, there can be little doubt. In his first
public statement the man sworn in as Haiti’s new prime
minister announced that Aristide’s order to replace the
military with a civilian police force violated Haiti’s
constitution; he promised to name a commission to
examine the issues surrounding its restoration.

Footnotes

* Harvard, 347 pp., #19.95, April, 0 674 01304 2.

Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist, is Maud
and Lillian Presley Professor at Harvard Medical School
and author of The Uses of Haiti and Pathologies of
Power.