Another Bush Brings Hell to Haiti

This week, the Bush administration added another violent “regime change” notch to its gunbelt, toppling the democratically elected president of Haiti and replacing him with an unelected gang of convicted killers, death squad leaders, militarists, narcoterrorists, CIA operatives, hereditary elitists and corporate predators – a bit like Team Bush itself, in other words.

Although the Haiti coup was widely portrayed as an irresistible upsurge of popular discontent, it was of course the result of years of hard work by Bush’s dedicated corrupters of democracy, as William Bowles of Information Clearinghouse reports. Bushist bagmen funded the political opposition to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, smuggled guns to exiled Haitian warlords, and carried out a relentless strangulation of the county, cutting off long-promised financial and structural aid to one of the poorest nations on earth until food prices were soaring, unemployment spiked to 70 percent, and the broken-backed government lost control of society to armed gangs of criminals, fanatics and the merely desperate.

Meanwhile, Haiti was forced to pay $2 million a month on debts run up by the murderous <U.S.-backed> dictatorships that had ruled the island since the American military occupation of 1915-1934. The Haitian press, controlled by cronies of the former dictators, supplied the lazy American media with reams of stories about Aristide’s “tyranny.” These were swiftly followed by thunderous denunciations from the Bush Regime. Wholesale murders of government officials and Aristide partisans by Bush-backed opposition gangs were, of course, demurely ignored – as were Aristide’s own condemnations of violence by his supporters. The old reliable “madman” trope was also brought out for an airing, with constant press drumbeats about Aristide’s “mental instability.” (America’s designated targets are always “deranged monsters,” although sometimes, when they prove politically useful again, they miraculously recover their wits, like Libya’s Moamar Gadafy.)

The ostensible reason for Bush’s deadly squeeze play was Haiti’s disputed elections in 2000. That vote, only the nation’s third free election in 200 years, was indeed marred by reports of irregularities – although these were not nearly as egregious as the well-documented hijinks which saw a certain runner-up candidate appointed to the White House that same year. There was no question that Aristide and his party received an overwhelming majority of legitimate votes; however, out of the 7,500 offices up for grabs, election observers did find that seven senate results seemed of dodgy provenance.

So what happened? The seven disputed senators resigned. New elections for the seats were called, but the opposition – two elitist factions financed by Washington’s favorite engines of subversion, the Orwellian-monikered “National Endowment for Democracy” and “International Republican Institute” – refused to take part. The government broke down because the legislature couldn’t convene. When Bush came in, he tightened the screws of the international blockade of the island, insisting that $500 million in desperately needed aid could not be released unless the opposition participated in new elections – while he was simultaneously paying the opposition not to participate.

The ultimate aim of this brutal pretzel logic was to grind Haiti’s destitute people further into the ground and destroy Aristide’s ability to govern. His real crime, of course, was not the Florida-style election follies or the reported “tyranny.” Are you kidding? Bush loves that stuff – witness his eager embrace of the nuke-peddling dictatorship of Pakistan, the human-boiling hardman of Uzbekistan, the torture-happy tyrant of Kazakhstan, the drug-running warlords of Afghanistan, and so forth.

No, Aristide did something far worse than stuffing ballots or killing people – he tried to raise the minimum wage, to the princely sum of two dollars a day. This move outraged the American corporations – and their local lackeys – who have for generations used Haiti as a pool of dirt-cheap labor and sky-high profits. It was the last straw for the elitist factions, one of which is actually led by an American citizen and former Reagan-Bush appointee, manufacturing tycoon Andy Apaid.

Apaid was the point man for the rapacious Reagan-Bush “market reform” drive in Haiti. Of course, “reform,” in the degraded jargon of the privateers, means exposing even the very means of survival and sustenance to the ravages of powerful corporate interests. For example, the Reagan-Bush plan forced Haiti to lift import tariffs on rice, which had long been a locally-grown staple. Then they flooded Haiti with heavily subsidized American rice, destroying the local market and throwing thousands of self-sufficient farmers out of work. With a now-captive market, the American companies jacked up their prices, spreading ruin and hunger throughout Haitian society.

The jobless farmers provided new fodder for the factories of Apaid and his cronies. Reagan and Bush chipped in by abolishing taxes for American corporations who set up Haitian sweatshops. The result was a precipitous drop in wages – and life expectancy. Aristide’s first election in 1990 threatened these cozy arrangements, so he was duly ejected by a military coup, with Bush I’s not-so-tacit connivance.

Bill Clinton restored Aristide to office in 1994 – but only after forcing him to agree to, yes, “market reforms.” In fact, it was Clinton, the privateers’ pal, who instigated the post-election aid embargo that Bush II used to such devastating effect. Aristide’s chief failing as a leader was his attempt to live up to this bipartisan blackmail. As in every other nation that’s come under the IMF whip, Haiti’s already-fragile economy collapsed. Bush family retainers like Apaid then shoved the country into total chaos, making it easy prey for the warlords whom Bush operatives – many of them old Iran-Contra hands – supplied with arms through the Dominican Republic, the Boston Globe reports.

When Aristide called for an international force to stem the terrorist attack, Bush refused. When Aristide agreed to a deal, brokered by his fellow leaders in the Caribbean, that would have effectively ceded power to the Bush-funded opposition but at least preserved the lineaments of Haitian democracy – Apaid and the boys turned down the offer, with the blessing of their paymasters in Washington, who suddenly claimed they had no influence over their recalcitrant hired hands. When Aristide asked for American protection as the rebel gang closed in on the capital, Bush refused.

Instead, Aristide was told by armed American gunmen that if he didn’t resign, he would be left to die at the hands of the rebels. Then he was bundled onto a waiting plane and dumped in the middle of Africa. Within hours, the Bush-backed terrorists were marching openly through Port-au-Prince, executing Aristide’s supporters.

Guess they won’t be asking for two dollars a day now, eh? Mission accomplished!

Exactly two hundred years ago, Haitian slaves overthrew their French masters – the first successful national slave revolt in history. What Spartacus dreamed of doing, the Haitian slaves actually accomplished. It was a tremendous achievement – and the white West has never forgiven them for it. In order to win international recognition for their new country, Haiti was forced to pay “reparations” to the slaveowners – a crushing burden of debt they were still paying off at the end of the 19th century. The United States, which refused to recognize the country for more than 60 years, invaded Haiti in 1915, primarily to open it up to “foreign ownership of local concerns.” After 19 years of occupation, the Americans backed a series of bloodthirsty dictatorships to protect these “foreign owners.”

And still it goes on. Now Bush, just like his father, has overthrown Aristide, and for the same reason: he represented a threat to their “natural order” – unchecked rule by thuggish elites, gorging on the toil and blood of others. Terrorism, despotism, torture, WMD trafficking: all of these can countenanced, even embraced. But the alternative offered, imperfectly, by Aristide – democratic, capitalist, but with “a prejudice for the poor,” as enjoined by the Gospels – this evil can never be tolerated.

CHRIS FLOYD is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor to CounterPunch. His CounterPunch piece on Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorist attacks came in at Number 4 on Project Censored’s final tally of the Most Censored stories of 2002. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com

 

Chris Floyd is a columnist for CounterPunch Magazine. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com. His twitter feed is @empireburlesque. His Instagram is www.instagram.com/cfloydtn/.