Why
US Troops Are Occupying Haiti
By Richard Dufour
and Keith Jones
06 April 2004
World Socialist Web Site
The World Socialist
Web Site has received several letters from readers asking why the Bush
administration has deployed US troops to occupy Haiti. Typical were
the following two comments:
I dont
dispute your reporters overall fact finding and analysis on Haiti,
wrote GW. But what I cant fathom, digest or whatever, is
why France, the US, etc. would go to such lengths on this hapless, resourceless
country, when the imperialists have so much bigger fish to fry at this
moment?
Wrote a second reader:
In Iraq it is obviously the oil, not love of humanity, which guides
US policy. But what does Haiti have?
That oil was a key
motivation for last years invasion of Iraq is a basic truth that
the US political establishment and corporate media have sought to hide
with a litany of lies about weapons of mass destruction and Sadam Husseins
ties to al-Qaeda. From its first days in office, the Bush administration
began searching for a suitable pretext for military action aimed at
seizing control of the worlds second largest oil reserves.
Haiti, by contrast,
did not figure high on the Bush administrations list of foreign
policy concerns, let alone targets for military action, in January 2001
or even January 2004. The prevailing attitude of US business and political
leaders toward Haiti has been one of callous indifference as exemplified
in Secretary of State Colin Powells talk of Washingtons
Haiti fatigue.
The small Caribbean
island-republic has been so decimated by decades of imperialist oppressionmuch
of the population is illiterate and malnourished and what little infrastructure
exists is crumblingthat despite far and away the lowest wages
in the Western hemisphere, Haiti has failed to attract significant foreign
investment over the past two decades and most of the off-shore assembly
operations that were established in the early and middle 1980s have
closed down or moved elsewhere.
The basic truth
that US foreign policy expresses the predatory interests and ambitions
of Wall Street should not be taken to mean, however, that the drive
to secure natural resources and markets are its only determinant. Even
in the case of the invasion of oil-rich Iraq, other factors were at
play. These included, US imperialisms attempt to bolster its position
vis a vis its European and East Asian rivals by securing a stranglehold
over the worlds oil resources and the Bush administrations
attempt to use the war as a means to divert the attention of the American
people from mounting social and economic problems at home.
As we shall show
below, the current US military occupation of Haiti is aimed at upholding
the USs role as the principal economic, military and geo-political
power in the Caribbean region; ensuring that the turmoil in Haiti does
not cut across the Bush administrations agenda; and establishing
a government in Port-au-Prince even more pliant to Washington and Wall
Street.
The greater Caribbean
region, with its geographical proximity to the United States and major
assets like the Panama Canal and Venezuelan oil, has long been pivotal
to US foreign policyfrom the turn of the last century when it
became the launching pad for Americas ascent as an imperialist
power, to the Cold War conflict with the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy
over Cuba in the 1960s, and the bloody counter-insurgency interventions
in Central America in the 1980s.
Here is not the
place to retrace the bloodstained history of US-Haitian relations. But
it is impossible to understand the reasons for the current US occupation
or why the country has been reduced to such wretched poverty without
recognizing that Haiti has been in US imperialisms grip since
at least 1915, when Marines invaded the island-country. That occupation,
which lasted till 1934, had three principal objectives: to thwart German
designs on Haiti; to bolster the USs hold on the Panama Canal;
and to reorganize Haitis state and political economy so US companies
could benefit from its agricultural resources and cheap labor. (For
much of the eighteenth century, Haiti was arguably the worlds
most profitable colony).
US troops would
return in the 1990s, but throughout the intervening six decades Haiti
remained in the USs shadow. For more than a quarter-century Washington
sustained the bloody Duvalier dictatorship. Indeed, the Duvaliers and
the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua were viewed by Washington
as pillars of its Cold War strategy in the Caribbean region.
Containing the fallout from the collapse of the US-sponsored Duvalier
dictatorship
Since 1986, the
pivot of US foreign policy toward Haiti has been to try to contain the
fallout from the collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship and above all
prevent any challenge to the countrys socio-economic orderthe
markets and investments of US firms, but also the property of their
allies and clients, the Haitian bourgeoisie.
Initially, Washington
hoped to accomplish a surgical removal of Duvalier, creating a new pro-US
regime that would both enjoy greater popular legitimacy and support
the dismantling of the state-owned companies, state-licensed export
and import monopolies, and tariff barriers the Duvaliers had used to
promote a thin layer of crony capitalists.
But Washingtons
attempt to find a new stable political basis for maintaining the prevalent
conditions of abject poverty foundered in the face of the popular ferment
unleashed in the toppling of the Duvalier regime. The first four post-Duvalier
years saw a series of military strongmen and civilian figureheads come
and go as the working class and peasantry resisted state repression
and kept pushing for a better life.
In 1990 Washington
insisted that Haitis next government be chosen through elections.
US policy-makers felt confident that they could manipulate the process
to the benefit of their preferred candidate, former World Bank official
Marc Bazin, and thereby give Haitis new-made-in-the US government
greater legitimacy in the eyes of the Haitian masses and world opinion.
But the more Washington touted Bazin, the more Haitis poor, who
had not forgotten the thirty years of American support for the hated
Duvaliers, grew suspicious of him.
It is within this
context that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest who had emerged
in the mid-1980s as a leading figure of the struggle against the crumbling
Duvalier regime and the following military juntas, abruptly reversed
his previous calls for a boycott of the US-made elections.
He ran as the presidential candidate of a broad coalition of business
leaders and grassroots organizations known as Lavalas (flood in creole),
coupling promises of wide-ranging social reforms with appeals to the
private business sector and calls for a marriage between
the people and the army. Aristides landslide victory took Washington
completely by surprise.
Undoing the results of the 1990 elections
The next fourteen
years of American policy toward Haiti can be summarized as an unrelenting
attempt by Republican and Democratic administrations to undonot
without bitter divisions within the US ruling elite over the appropriate
meansthe results of the 1990 elections, the first time a Haitian
president had been chosen not by Washington or the countrys venal
bourgeois elite but by Haitis poor majority.
The first attempt
came in September 1991, a mere eight months after Aristide took office,
in the form of a bloody coup led by General Raoul Cédras which
enjoyed de facto support from the Bush senior administration. A wave
of terror was then unleashed by the military and CIA-backed paramilitary
death squads in the poor neighborhoods of the capital where support
for Aristide remained strong. Thousands of Haitians tried a desperate
escape on board overcrowded boats sailing for Florida, only to be denied
refuge on US soil by American officials. Rather they were incarcerated
en masse in makeshift refugee camps at the US base of Guantanamo, Cuba.
In the initial period
after the 1992 US elections, the new Democratic administration took
no serious steps against Haitis military junta and, notwithstanding
Clintons previous criticisms of the inhumane treatment of Haitians
fleeing the Cédras dictatorship, even maintained the refugee
policy of Bush Sr. A 1993 attempt to bring in unarmed United Nations
peace keepers on board a US Navy ship was prevented by rock-throwing
mobs of Cédras supporters in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. This,
coupled with the Somalia fiasco the same year, convinced the Clinton
administration that the continuation of the Cédras regime was
damaging the international prestige of the United States and subjecting
the Clinton administration to ridicule from its domestic opponents.
Even then, it took
another full year for the Clinton administration to push Cédras
out. The intervening time was used to extract further pledges of loyalty
from Aristide, who had responded to the 1991 coup by proclaiming that
the only force to which the Haitian masses could turn in opposing Cédras
and his supporters in Haitis traditional political and economic
elite was Washington.
In exchange for
the Clinton administrations restoring him to power, Aristide firstly
agreed there should be no extension of his five-year presidential mandate
even though he had spent three years of it in exile; secondly promised
to incorporate leading members of the business elite and the old Duvalier
political machine into his government and thirdly gave a written pledge
he would carry out IMF-mandated privatizations of state companies and
cuts in social spending.
In other words,
Aristide was flown back in September 1994 in the baggage of a 20,000-strong
US occupation force as little more than a political reincarnation of
Marc Bazin, the US candidate he had defeated in the 1990
elections.
Nevertheless, Aristides
return was bitterly opposed by the Republican Party. Its far right elements
such as Senator Jesse Helms, for many years the chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, denounced Aristide as a mentally deranged
communist. This expressed most crudely the sentiments of those elements
of the US ruling elite who would capture the White House in the 2000
elections. For them any infringement on the right to pile up obscene
levels of private wealth by plundering the planet is tantamount to high
treason. If such elements couldnt be reconciled to an administration
headed by such a proven defender of US imperialism as Bill Clinton,
they certainly werent about to tolerate US support for a de-frocked
priest who had gained a mass following among Haitis poor by denouncing
US imperialism.
Aristide managed
to survive longer than the Clinton administration probably planned for.
He maneuvered to have his protégé René Préval
chosen as his partys presidential candidate in the 1995 election
campaign. Préval won, then went on to impose a sweeping program
of privatizations, mass layoffs in the public sector and the abolition
of state subsidies on food and transportation.
While Haitis
constitution bars two consecutive presidential terms, Aristide was eligible
to run again in December 2000, which he did successfully, a reflection
not so much of continuing popular enthusiasm for his Lavalas party as
the deep popular hostility to the traditional ruling elite.
This elite, for
its part, was incensed at its continued political marginalization. Because
of Haitis poverty and backwardness, control of the state apparatus
has long been the principal source of enrichment and thus the focus
of the most intense power-struggles. But the vehemence of the traditional
elites opposition to Aristide was also rooted in his previous
association with a popular challenge to their privilegesthe call
for a redistribution of wealth in favor of the countrys poor.
The Republican Party
establishment likewise remained bitterly hostile to Aristide. It considered
his restoration to be one of Clintons crimes and held
Haiti up as the number one exhibit in its campaign against the so-called
folly of US-led nation-building. Aristides promotion
of warm bilateral relations with Cuba and subsequently the Venezuelan
government of Hugo Chavez, also incensed the Republican right, as well
as Floridas anti-Castro Cuban exile community, which has come
to exert such a disproportionate influence in the formulation of US
government policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean basin.
The Clinton administration
responded to Lavalas sweep of the May 2000 elections by once again
trying to force Aristide to include representatives of the traditional
elite in the government, so as to make it even more subservient to Washington.
Some relatively minor violations of democratic procedure were declared
gross electoral fraud and steps taken to block hundreds of millions
of dollars in loans and aid to Haiti.
Bolstered by this
move and by Bushs theft of the 2000 elections, Haitis right-wing
opposition forceswith political and financial backing from the
International Republican Institutetried to take the offensive.
Soon after Bush came to power they initiated a campaign to unseat Haitis
newly elected president, going so far as to designate their own president
of Haiti, as part of a scheme to win international recognition for a
parallel government.
But to their dismay,
the expected support from Washington didnt materialize. Bush administration
officials doubted that opposition had sufficient popular support to
topple Aristide, an assessment confirmed by the oppositions decision
not to stand a candidate against him in the 2000 elections. More importantly,
Washington had other more pressing concerns: first among them, its plans
to invade Iraq and the need to fabricate a suitable pretext.
The Bush administration,
therefore, chose to contract out the task of regime change in Haiti
to US-dominated regional bodies such as the OAS (Organization of American
States) and Caricom (the Caribbean Community). To tie Aristides
hands and push him further right, aid to Haiti was tied to his ceding
opposition leaders key positions in the government. Aristide repeatedly
bowed before the OASs demands. For example, he quickly agreed
to annul the contested election of nine Lavalas senators. But the right-wing
opposition refused these concessions and the OAS responded by demanding
that Aristide do more to facilitate a power-sharing agreement.
The toppling of Aristide and the US occupation of Haiti
By the end of 2003,
the Aristide government was mired in corruption and presiding over a
deepening economic and social crisisa crisis exacerbated by the
cut-off of foreign aid and for which it had no solution except state
repression and the mobilization of lumpen-criminal elements based in
the slums of Port-au-Prince.
Emboldened by Aristides
mounting unpopularity and the rallying to its side of sections of the
professional middle class that had previously supported the government,
Haitis traditional business and political elite launched a new
drive to bring down the government. Although claiming majority support,
they refused to cooperate in the organization of new legislative elections
and instead mounted a destabilization campaign aimed at pressuring the
Bush administration to intervene.
Initially, the Bush
administration resisted the oppositions appeals for it to invade
Haiti and maintained the previous policy of pressing for a power-sharing
agreement. Not only were US military forces stretched thin due to the
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration was increasingly
under threat from the unravelling of the lies it used to justify the
Iraq war and by mounting economic problems.
But whilst it viewed
the Haitian crisis as an unwanted distraction, the Bush administration
could not ignore the political turmoil that its longstanding campaign
to subvert Aristides government and restore the unfettered domination
of its Haitian clients had produced in the island-republic.
Two weeks after
Defence Secretary Rumsfeld declared that there were no plans to deploy
US troops to Haiti, Bush ordered the third US military occupation of
the country in the past century.
Why this reversal?
The administration
feared chaos in Haiti could lead to a mass exodus of impoverished and
terror-stricken Haitians that would destabilize the Caribbean region
as a whole. Their first concern was the impact a refugee exodus would
have on Florida, a key battleground in the coming presidential elections.
But Washington also feared a further shock to the Dominican Republic.
An important site of US assembly operations, the Dominican Republic
has been rocked over the past year by an economic crisis, including
the failure of the countrys third largest bank, and mounting social
struggles.
An even more important
reason to dispatch US troops to Haiti was to ensure that the anti-Aristide
coup gave rise to a government tailored to Washingtons specifications.
The Bush administrations
readiness to use a rebel force led by thugs of previous dictatorial
regimes to oust Aristides government was causing considerable
international dismay and further undermining the Bush administrations
claims to be acting on the world arena, and especially in Iraq, as a
force for democracy. By dispatching US troops to Haiti when the rebels
were at the gates of Port au Prince, but after Aristide had been hustled
from the country, the Bush administration could claim to be overseeing
a constitutional handover of power. Moreover, Washington wanted to ensure
that the rebels did not unleash a reign of terror so horrific as to
fatally undermine the new regime or at the very least strip it any international
legitimacy. In pressing for Aristide to quit Haiti, US diplomatic and
military personnel themselves repeatedly invoked the threat of a rebel
bloodbath.
A further reason
for the dispatch of US troops was the need to reassert US predominance
in the Caribbean, if only to calm criticism from within the US foreign-policy
establishment. Alarm bells had been set off in many a Washington think
tank and New York editorial office when the French government took the
initiative in demanding that Aristide resign and announced its readiness
to deploy French troops once he was forced from office. The French soon
made clear that their aim was to assist and placate Washington, not
cut across US interests. Nevertheless, there was pointed commentary
in leading papers and journals that the Bush administration was failing
to give proper attention to minding the USs traditional backyard.
Last but not least,
the US military intervention in Haiti must be seen within the context
of growing concern in Washington over the growth of opposition to Wall
Street and to IMF-imposed liberalization across Latin America.
Last week, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee,
General James T. Hill, the head of the US militarys Southern Command,
observed: The security picture in Latin America and the Caribbean
has grown more complex over the past year. ... Some leaders in the region
are tapping into deep-seated frustrations over the failure of democratic
reforms to deliver expected goods and services. By tapping into these
frustrations, which run concurrently with frustrations caused by social
and economic inequality, the leaders are at the same time able to reinforce
their radical positions by inflaming anti-US sentiment.
There is a now a
debate in Washington over the objectives and duration of the current
US military occupation of Haiti. The Bush administration is eager to
contract out the job of propping up the new pro-US government, and may
well be willingnow that international attention has been turned
elsewhereto see the rebels incorporated into Haitis security
forces.
However, the nature
of imperialist oppression is that it repeatedly produces failed
states to which US troops must be dispatched to ensure US economic
and geo-political domination and the perpetuation of a grossly unjust
and outmoded social order.