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PROMOTING POLYARCHY: GLOBALIZATION, U.S. INTERVENTION, AND HEGEMONY

Chapter 6: Haiti: The "practically insolvable problem" of establishing consensual domination

The experience of Liberia and Haiti shows that the African race are
[sic) devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius
for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency
to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization
which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course there are
many exceptions to this racial weakness, but it is true of the mass, as
we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the
negro problem practically insolvable.
-- US Secretary of State Robert Lansing, 1918 [1]

Cite Soleil (Sun City) is a name filled with bitter sarcasm. It refers to
the vast shantytown slum just north of Port-au-Prince. Poverty here
reaches absolute bottom, below which can only be death.' Barefoot
children play on banks of muddy streams of raw sewerage or amidst
toxic waste spills. A crippled man hasn't been able to get enough to
eat for two days. A mother can't treat her baby's serious injury
because of the cost of medical care. Despite these conditions, the most
striking thing about Cite SoleH is not its desperate poverty. Rather it is
the hope that is surging here with the growth of the Lavalas mass
movement and the election of radical priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
-- US visitor reporting from Cite Soleil, March 1991 [2]

As in the Philippines, Chile, and Nicaragua, the United States sustained
an alliance in Haiti with a dictatorial regime, the Duvalier
family dynasty, during much of the post-World War II period. By the
early 1980s, the dictatorship was beginning to crumble under pressure
from a burgeoning popular movement. Washington intervened to
bring about a "transition to democracy." The first step, "preventative
diplomacy," proved highly successful: Duvalier was removed from
power in early 1986,in the face of a mass uprising, yet the Haitian state
and, in particular, its coercive apparatus, the army, remained intact,
and the elite order largely unaltered. But the second step, cohering
elements of the Haitian elite around the transnational agenda and
placing this elite in power through free elections, proved hopelessly
elusive. The project fell completely out of Washington's control: it
backfired, bringing to the Haitian presidency, through elections in 1990
organized and financed by Washington, the representative of the
highly mobilized and belligerent popular classes, Father Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. "Preventative diplomacy" averted a revolutionary insurrection,
but ironically the installation of a popular government and the
initiation of a program of socioeconomic transformation was achieved
through the very "democracy promotion" structures set up by Washington.

The military coup d'etat against Aristide in September 1991 represented
a regression to outright dictatorship. For the Haitian majority,
this military dictatorship represented a return to the suffering and
tribulation endured throughout the nation's history. For the United
States and the Haitian elite, it was a mixed outcome. On the one hand,
the dictatorship was an embarrassing and destabilizing anomaly in an
emergent transnational political system whose legitimization lay in
polyarchy, and its coming to power; created a foreign-policy crisis for
Washington. On the other hand, the new military dictatorship, not
unlike Pinochet in Chile, showed an uncanny proficiency in cutting
short the embryonic project of popular democracy and in demobilizing
and resubordinating the popular classes. The September 1994 US
invasion, conducted under the banner of restoring Aristide to power
and democracy to the country, was the complex and paradoxical result
of the failure of the project to modernize the traditional structures of
power in Haiti and to stabilize elite domination. The goal of the
invasion, despite appearances to the contrary, was to place back on
track that project contra Aristide and the popular classes.

The attempt to facilitate a "transition to democracy" in Haiti is
illuminating on several accounts. First, it took place after the Cold War,
and after the string of transitions in the 1980s, demonstrating that the
reorientation of US policy has been less a conjunctural response to
events in that decade than a long-term transformation. Second, as
analyzed below, it brings home the point made by Gramsci that
effective hegemony (as distinct from mere domination) is exercised in
both civil and political society (in "state and society"); achieving
superordination in only one is insufficient, either for the popular
sectors or for dominant minorities. Third, it lays bare the deep contra-
dictions internal to the project of the transnational elite, a theoretical
and practical issue which I take up in the concluding chapter.

Saint-Domingue: paradise and hell [3]

In 1492, Columbus landed on the northwestern coast of the island of
Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti. The place he described as a lush
tropical "paradise" was inhabited by up to three million Taino-
Arawak Indians. The indigenous population were soon put to work as
slaves, and within two generations the Taino-Arawak people had
become extinct, the victims of massacres, overwork, European diseases,
and despair. Diego Columbus, who was given abundant lands and
Indian slaves by his brother Christopher, set up the first sugar plantation
in Haiti. Diego Columbus not only introduced "King Sugar" into
the Caribbean Basin, which soon became the principal world supplier
of the sweet substance that tied the region into the emergent world
system, but also first imported African slaves into Hispaniola when the
supply of Indian labor became exhausted. Spanish colonial development
was concentrated in the eastern two-thirds of the island, which
would eventually become the Dominican Republic. The relative
neglect of the western portion, now Haiti, made it possible for French
competitors to establish influence. At the end of the seventeenth
century Spain ceded to France, engaged in intense commercial rivalry
with other expanding European powers, the western portion of the
island, which was renamed Saint-Domingue by France. The colony
soon became France's richest and the envy of other European powers.

With its fertile soils and the thousands of sugar, coffee, cotton, and
indigo plantations set up by French settlers and administrators of the
French monarchy, Saint-Domingue furnished two-thirds of France's
overseas trade, employing one thousand ships and fifteen thousand
French sailors. In addition, the colony, which came to be known as La
Petite France (Little France), supplied half of Europe's consumption of
tropical produce. The 800 sugar plantations in the Grande Ile ti Sucre
(the Great Sugar Island) produced more than all the English Caribbean
islands put together and the colony's overall trade is said to have
outstripped that of the thirteen North American colonies.4 This colonial
paradise, however, was sustained by the most brutal slavery in
recorded human history. French planters calculated that replenishing
slaves with new ones after several years brought in more profit than
making outlays to keep slaves alive. At the height of its productivity,
from the early to the late eighteenth century, slavery killed some one
million Africans, and Saint-Domingue became one of the world's
greatest markets for the African slave trade. By the 1780s, 40,000
French whites ruled over 700,000slaves and 28,000mulattos who were
technically free but enjoyed limited rights. [5]

In 1791, Haitian slaves launched a revolt against French plantation
owners, led by the famed Toussaint L'Ouverture. The revolutionaries
had to face successive onslaughts not only from Napoleonic France,
but from Spanish and British forces - reflecting the magnitude of the
interests involved, and fierce European commercial rivalries. All were
defeated at the hands of the Haitians. The only successful slave revolt
in modem history led to the proclamation of the Haitian republic in
1804. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who became the revolutionary leader
after Toussaint was captured and died in a French dungeon in 1802,
adopted the ancient Taino-Arawak Indian name of Haiti, meaning
"land of mountains," for the newly independent country. The establishment
of the second independent republic in the New World and the
first "Black Republic" had profound international repercussions. It
inspired independence movements in Spanish America (Haiti, in fact,
provided crucial support to Simon Bolivar), slave revolts throughout
the Caribbean and the southern United States, and it decisively shifted
the balance of power among European commercial rivals. The masses
do, in fact, make history: the revolution led to the withdrawal of French
ambitions in the New World, symbolized by the sale, shortly after
losing Haiti, of the Louisiana territory to the United States, thus
shoring up Britain and the United States as dominant powers in this
period of capitalist world history.6

Independence, however, saw the replacement of the French elite
with a new local elite, and led to chronic political instability, changes in
government from one elite civilian or military clique to another
through coups d'etat, palace revolutions, and armed revolts, and deep
and violent racial tensions. Beneath the post-independence turmoil lay
the failure of a century-long attempt at nation-building, a result of
contradictions internal to the new republic and of continued outside
intervention. This century-long period culminated in 1915 with the
invasion by US marines and a subsequent nineteen-year occupation
which would lay the basis for the ascension of the Duvalier dictatorship.

Haiti's complex historical experience has been little understood by
outside commentators, whose simplistic and Eurocentric observations,
usually tinged by (if not steeped in) racism, have led to notions that
Haitians are somehow inherently prone to violence, corruption, authoritarianism,
disorder, and disaster. The country's tragic history of
perpetual misery and crisis is attributed to an unexplainable and
ingrained inability of the Haitians to organize their affairs successfully.
As late as 1957, for instance, New York Times, in an article commenting
on the first few months of the Duvalier regime, explained: "With only
a few exceptions, Haiti has been unfortunate in her political leadership
... This was inevitable in a country with an illiteracy rate of over
90 percent. The highly emotional people, who have little but tribal rule
and superstition to guide their thinking, have been notoriously susceptible
to demagogic political appeal. The political leaders by and large
have approached their tasks with the utmost cynicism."7 These images
of Haiti persisted in the 1990s, with the Haitian people projected
internationally as an "AIDS-infested" population, a "boat people"
fleeing (not analyzed and not understood) misery, a people living on
"international handouts," and a "basketcase" in efforts at nationbuilding
and development.

Haiti's troubled past can only be grasped in its historical and
structural context through an analysis of the colonial state of Saint-
Domingue, the circumstances in which the Haitian state came into
being, the conditions under which it had to survive, and the resultant
class and socioeconomic structure. Several factors stand out: the
peculiar class and racial composition of the dominant groups; the
complete fusion of elite rule with the state and the absence of any
organized civil society; an entrenched culture of authoritarianism,
corruption, and violence bequeathed by the Spanish, the French, and
the Northamericans; and most of all, the crippling limits imposed on
Haitians' ability to determine their own national conditions by the
country's subordinate position in the world system. An analysis of
Haiti belies "political culture" theories, which hold that a people's
cultural patterns determine historic socioeconomic outcomes. To the
contrary, Haiti is a striking demonstration that historic socioeconomic
structures, production and class relations foment certain political
cultures, not the reverse.

Slaves in Haiti were kept down by perhaps the most extreme and
arbitrary terror known in modem history, which left deep roots for a
culture of violence, a political culture which became self-perpetuating
after independence with the need for the tiny elite to resort to
permanent repression to sustain its rule in the face of enormous
inequalities. The incredible wealth produced in, and syphoned out of,
Saint-Domingue led to an extremely pronounced system of corruption.
As one study by the London-based Latin America Bureau notes, the
colony of Saint-Domingue was a volcano of irreconcilable conflicts and
racial hatreds. "The economic system which reigned in Saint-Domingue
was a predatory one based on an enslaved labour force and
unequal trade relations. To keep the conflicts in check and ensure that
the process of extracting wealth continued to function, a militarized
and authoritarian state was developed, run by the Navy Ministry in
France." In turn, French military officers and colonial administrators in
charge of towns and districts eagerly took advantage to turn their
power into profits and "shamelessly held the island's inhabitants to
ransom, exacting tributes far higher than the official taxes." The chief
sources of revenue of colonial administrators "were the sale of trading
permits, land and decisions on property matters, and involvement in
smuggling rackets." The study concludes: "These two features of the
colonial system - authoritarian military power and extensive corruption
- became so deeply entrenched in the colony that they survived
through the following 200 years as permanent and essential features of
Haitian life."8

Another key factor in explaining post-independence Haitian history
was the virtual lack of any continuity between the old colonial
economy, based on linkage to the world market through capital
accumulation on slave plantations, and the post-independence
economy, based on subsistence peasant production.9 The plantation
system was broken up and lands parceled out to peasant smallholders,
who over the generations further sub-divided plots among offspring.
A process of capital accumulation internal to Haiti never really developed
after the revolution. The elite did not engage directly in production
but rather acquired wealth through international marketing of
peasant production and usurious relations with peasants and small
craft producers. As a consequence, rather than the production process,
it was the Haitian state, extracting tribute from the peasantry from
taxes, duties, and outright thuggery, that became the principal, and
virtually only, source of wealth and power for the tiny Haitian bureaucratic
and commercial elite. This explains the long-standing practice of
ruling cliques to regard the state and government as their personal
property, as well as the seemingly endless feuds and intrigues among
the elites in and out of the army over which clique would hold the
reins of the state - what Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot
refers to as "state fetishism," and what an Althusserian structuralist
might refer to as the "overdetermination" of the state in the Haitian
social formation. The lack of a process of internal capital accumulation
laid the material basis for a disjuncture between civil and political
society and created a structural situation highly inpropitious to any
variant of consensual domination.

Moreover, the threat of an independent Black Republic at a time
when slavery still flourished in the Caribbean, the United States, and
much of the eastern seaboard of Latin America, and when Africa was
just being conquered and colonized, led the Great Powers that controlled
world trade to castigate and isolate Haiti, for whom recognition
was a precondition for entry into the world market. Not until 1825 did
France recognize Haitian independence, and even then only on extremely
onerous terms, requiring an indemnity of 150 million French
francs - perhaps the only case in history in which the victor was forced
to pay reparations to the vanquished. This "independence debt"
placed a heavy burden on the Haitian economy, forced the country
into mortgaging arrangements with French, and later US, banks, and
was not repaid until 1922.10 The Vatican withheld recognition until
1860.The United States maintained a century-long de facto commercial
embargo, refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, and did not establish
diplomatic relations until 1886.11

The dynamics of race (or color) and class in Haiti is a further crucial
historical factor. The mulattos, although they suffered discrimination
under the white planters, also acted as a buffer between the French and
the African slaves, and were able to acquire education, property,
professional titles, and administrative experience. A substantial minority
of their ranks even became slave and property owners themselves.
Following the revolution, the white colonial elite was virtually
banished from the country. In much of Latin America the "creole
bourgeoisie," or the colonial elite, assumed. the reins of power with
independence, and in Africa and Asia post-colonial ruling elites' power
had deep historical roots in their native lands and cultures. In Haiti,
however, there was no indigenous ruling elite at the time of independence.
Class and nation formation proceeded on the most fragmentary
basis possible. The mulatto population became a privileged stratum, a
new bureaucratic and merchant elite dominating commerce and government.
The legacy of French colonialism was thus a deep class divide
expressed in ethnic terms between a mulatto elite and a mass of
impoverished ex-slaves, along with a tiny black elite that came into
existence with independence (the categories of "black" and "mulatto"
should be seen sociologically as social constructs particular to Haitian
society).

Finally, owing to the fusion between the Haitian elite and the state
and the localized, subsistence nature of much of the economy, civil
society remained underdeveloped - indeed, virtually non-existent - in
Haiti. The elite exercised power through control of the state and
through coercion, and thus never developed their own organs in civil
society. It was not until the large-scale penetration of transnational
capital began in the 1960s and 1970s that localized communities were
sufficiently disrupted and integrated into a national formation that the
masses began their own organizing in civil society beyond the local
level. Indeed, the state was the impenetrable domain of the elite, and
civil society that of the popular classes. Thus the struggle of the
popular majority against the dominant groups took on the perfect
expression of a struggle of civil society against the state, or as Trouillot
puts it, "the state against the nation," rooted in the historica; disjuncture
between civil and political society which reached its peak under
Duvalierism. This also meant that when Washington stepped in in the
1980s to try and implement "democracy promotion" programs, US
organizers discovered a civil society already densely organized by the
popular classes and under the hegemony of these classes.

Haiti provides graphic empirical support for Andre Gunder Frank's
thesis that those regions most intensively exploited during the formative
years of the "modem world system" would later, owing to the
very intensity of that exploitation and the structures it left behind,
become the most backward, marginalized, and impoverished areas.12
From the wealthiest of all of Europe's overseas colonies, Haiti became,
and has remained, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and
one of the poorest in the world. In 1982, the country exported a mere
$197 millions worth of goods, per capita income was $315, life
expectancy stood at 48 years, infant mortality at 130per 1,000, illiteracy
at about 80 percent, malnutrition and undernourishment were
endemic, and 74 percent of the nation's 6 million people remained in
the agricultural sector. A full,74 percent of the rural population, and 55
percent of urban dwellers, were considered by the World Bank to live
at or below the absolute poverty level. In that same year, 1 percent of
the GNP went to public education and 0.9 percent to health, while the
military consumed 8.3 percent of the GNP.13The Haitian blood plasma
scandal of the 1970s was a grizzly expression of how the powers that
be in the world system have - literally - sucked the life-blood of the
Haitian people. Such is the level of poverty that Haitians blood
develops much higher levels of antibodies than most societies in the
world, making it highly valued on the world market. In the 1970s,
Haitian businessmen, in cooperation with transnational pharmaceutical
and chemical firms, among them Armour Pharmaceutical, Cutter
Laboratories, and Dow Chemicals, set up a thriving business by
indiscriminately extracting blood plasma from poor Haitian donors for
$3 a pint and reselling it abroad at $35 a pint.14

From the US marine occupation to the Duvalier dictatorship

Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French.
-- US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, after receiving a briefing on Haiti, 1912 [15]

The first republic in the New World, the United States, showed only
contempt for the Black Republic. The Haitian revolution had inspired
Gabriel Prosser's slave uprising in Virginia in 1800, and the Denmark
Vesey uprising in 1822. The white government in Washington, which
maintained the US slave system for nearly sixty years more, responded
to the newborn Haitian republic with a policy of isolation and
nonrecognition. When official relations were finally established in
1886, the black diplomat sent by Port-au-Prince was deemed socially
unacceptable and instructed by the US government to remain in New
York rather than Washington, D.C.16Over the next few decades Haiti
would acquire strategic importance for the nascent US empire because
of the Windward Passage, a waterway shared with Cuba and considered
vital to Caribbean and eastern US sea-lanes. Between 1857 and
1913 US Navy ships entered Haitian ports nineteen times to "protect
American lives and property."17 The Spanish-American War was
fought by the United States in part to gain control over the vital
waterway.

Over 3,000 Haitians died fighting US marines who invaded the
country in 1915 and stayed on for nineteen years.18The marines were
in Haiti as part of the Wilsonian project to install and stabilize elite
regimes in the heyday of the young empire's effort to secure domination
over the Caribbean Basin, considered the geopolitical springboard
for worldwide expansion. In Haiti, however, the United States sent in a
High Commissioner to directly rule the country, which became not a
mere protectorate, but an outright colony. "The Haitians are negro for
the most part, and, barring a very few highly educated politicians, are
almost in a state of savagery and complete ignorance," wrote a State
Department official in 1921.Therefore, "in Haiti it is necessary to have
as complete a rule within a rule by Americans as possible."19 Nine
years later, in 1930,the US charge in Haiti reported: "In general, while
the Anglo-Saxon has a... profound conviction of the value of democratic
government," the Haitians were unsuitable for democracy
because they were, "in common with the Latin in generaL .. in the
main directed by emotion rather than by reason" and is therefore "apt
to scorn democracy."20

Operating with a vicious racism not felt in the country since the
defeat of Napoleon's army, and with little understanding of the
nation's peculiar history and social complexion, the white occupation
force assembled political structures responsive to outside interests that
only complicated endogenous political development. As noted above,
by the 1820s, less than two decades after Haiti's independence, the
mulatto and formally free elite, which represented 5 percent of the
population, had come to control the reins of government and most of
the nation's wealth. Thus began a century of conflict and accommodation
between the mulatto elite and the small black upper and middle
classes. La palitique de daublure, or "the politics of the understudy,"
took root in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in which a
black president, responsive to the mulatto elite structure, often occupied
the presidential palace and satisfied his own personal constituency
through graft. But as the nation's indebtedness and
impoverishment increased, lower class unrest and elite infighting
began to undo the palitique de daublure, which had provided a
modicum of stability. Between 1911 and 1915, seven presidents were
overthrown. The unrest gave Washington the pretext it needed to
intervene. The US occupation authorities further aggravated the racial
and class divide by excluding all blacks from public life, placing the
mulatto elite in power (the US High Commissioner installed four
successive mulatto client-presidents), and transferring the economy to
near total external control.

The occupation force established a customs receivership, took
control of the nation's finances and of every ministry except justice and
education, and rewrote the constitution to permit foreign ownership of
property, long prohibited by the independent Haitians, who feared a
return to complete foreign economic domination. The US official
charged with drafting this constitution was Assistant Secretary of the
Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the time was pursuing
numerous private investment schemes in Haiti.21 One of the US
companies that set up operations was the Haitian American Sugar
Company (HASCO). HASCO ran a large sugar estate and the country's
one giant mechanized sugar mill. The country's sole railway connected
the HASCO sugar mill to the port capital, Port-au-Prince, and was also
in the hands of US investors. The principal shareholder and financial
underwriter of this railway was the National City Bank of New York,
which took over Haiti's Banque Nationale. Roger L. Farnham, the
bank's vice-president, became the State Department's principal advisor
on Haitian affairs during the early years of the occupation. General
Smedley D. Butler, who had in 1909 led US forces in the intervention in
Nicaragua, wl;mld later charge that the marines invaded Haiti as a bill
collector for the National City Bank.22 With the occupation, the United
States displaced its French and German rivals and became the principal
external power, reorienting the Haitian economy towards dependence
on the US market.

"The Marines perform a double function," explained a report by one
US commission sent to investigate conditions in Haiti in 1926. "First,
they protect the President from assassination; and second, they enable
the American High Commissioner, Brigadier General Russell, to give
the President authoritative advice."23 The occupation force instituted
forced public labor to construct military roads and other works. Blacks
were manacled like slaves, compelled to work for weeks with little or
no pay and inadequate food and shot down if they attempted to
escape.24 The US High Commissioner instituted severe press censorship
(one proclamation forbad articles or speeches "reflecting adversely
upon the American forces in Haiti") and detention without
trial of dissidents, declared martial law for much of the occupation,
militarized the entire country (US marine officers were appointed as
administrators in every province and district and given near-dictatorial
powers), and arbitrarily dissolved two rubber-stamp Haitian National
Assemblies when deputies refused to carry out Washington's dictates.
25 The occupation force - exclusively white - introduced strict Jim
Crow racial segregation in the country. No fewer than 147 brothels,
hitherto unknown in Haiti, sprang up to cater for the decadent
marines. The absolutely authoritarian and violent character of the
occupation exacerbated the adverse local political culture.

The US marines disbanded the army and created a local gendarmerie
staffed exclusively by mulatto junior officers under the command of
US senior officers.26The occupation force departed in 1934, and the
Haitian army they left behind became the repressive and corrupt
regulator of power and guardian of elite interests inside Haiti, while
the country remained firmly under US domination. US interests were
transmitted via the US ambassador to the mulatto elite which remained
in office for another twelve years, until President Elie Lescot was
deposed by a military coup. Lescot was replaced by a black president,
Dumarsais Estime, but the army remained the backbone of real power,
and overthrew him with US support. His military replacement,
Colonel Paul Magloire, was thrown out of office in late 1956, leading to
nine months of political chaos which saw five provisional governments
and a one-day civil war that left several dozen dead. Thus the US
occupation, far from resolving the crisis of elite rule, had aggravated it.
This post-occupation instability laid the basis for the advent of Duvalierism,
or what Trouillot refers to as a transition from authoritarianism
to totalitarianism in response to the crisis of elite domination. Trouillot
uses the term totalitarian as defined by Nicos Poulantzas, whereby
dominant classes face a deep structural crisis, are unable to organize
themselves politically, and face either the immediate threat of, or
complete absence of, subordinate classes organizing and contesting
political power. In distinction to mainstream political science notions
of anti-democratic capitalist regimes as "authoritarian" and former
Soviet-bloc regimes as "totalitarian," the term totalitarian is derived
from "total" in the original sense meant by Mussolinists, whereby
coercive domination pervades every aspect of social relations.

Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, through a cunning manipulation of
the inauspicious blend of local politics and US power, had been quietly
working his way into the power structure with the departure of the
marines. The black Duvalier appealed to the "politics of the understudy"
to win support from the mulatto elite. At the same time, he
built support among blacks, who made up 95 percent of the population,
through manipulation of the Noirist backlash that spread after the
marines departed. Noirism, a form of cultural nationalism, was an
ideology of the black middle and upper classes, denied participation in
leadership, that stressed racial pride, African cultural revival, and
black political rule, yet did not question basic elite structures,27 In this
way, Duvalier squeezed an opening for a black elite and paved the
way for a tenuous elite consensus that bridged the racial divide at the
level of the dominant groups. Papa Doc was eventually elected
president in 1957, with the backing of the army and with secret US
support, in elections organized in the chaotic aftermath of Magloire's
departure and mired in fraud and intrigue,28 Rather than facing a
second election, Duvalier declared himself President for Life in 1964,
promising a stable, long-term alliance between the black and the
mulatto elite and foreign (US) interests. "It was a mutually satisfactory
relationship," noted one observer, "they [the local elite and the United
States] profited from his power, and he became more powerful from
their profits."29 Just like Somoza, Duvalier thus achieved stable,
although not consensual, domination.

If a modicum of elite consensus and US support was one girder of
Duvalierism, its other was a combination of limited cooptation and a
new black upward mobility for a chosen few, and the systematic, mass
repression of the popular majority. Within days of assuming power,
the first Duvalier initiated a wave of terror with few parallels in
modem history, and which soon became permanent and institutionalized.
At least 50,000 people are reported to have been executed by the
Duvalierist regime between 1957 and 1985, hundreds of thousands
were detained and tortured or disappeared, and another 1.5 million
were driven into voluntary or forced exile.30 Duvalier used the 1957
election campaign to establish a patronage network, recruited directly
from the lower classes, the chefs de section (a national network of rural
sheriffs), and the houngans, or vodoun priests, based on personal
loyalty, cronyism, extortion, and intimidation of opponents.31 The
original members of this patronage network provided the basis for
building the Volunteers of National Security (VSN), known throughout
Haiti and the world as the Tonton Macoutes, the notorious paramilitary
goon squads that terrorized the population.

Always the Machiavelli, Duvalier formed the Macoutes both as a
counterweight to the army - as an insurance policy against a possible
putsch to oust him - and as a highly efficient, if brutal and merciless,
instrument of mass repression. The Macoutes reached into every layer
and niche of society. Armed Macoutes were said to have outnumbered
the army by two to one, while card-carrying VSN members numbered
up to 300,000. "Duvalier's genius lay in how he designed their
hierarchial structure, chose their social origins, and encouraged their
recruitment in numbers so vast, they enabled him to survive every
obstacle," noted one analyst. "The hierarchy was simple, a giantbottomed
pyramid with most Macoutes at the bottom and a few
Duvalier fanatics as commanders. At the pinnacle, in absolute control
was Duvalier himself. Socially, the Macoutes came from the most
disadvantaged classes and regarded the VSN as their sole escape from
the relentless misery and hard work that inevitably awaited them."32
The virtually all-black VSN thus insulated the Duvalier dynasty from
the popular masses and also from any destabilizing elite intrigues, and
at the same time provided the Duvaliers with a minimal social base;
Macoutes could, and did, terrorize, extort money from, and just plain
rob, any and every citizen, and thus the survival of 300,000 VSN
members and their families in the lower classes came to depend on the
survival of the Duvaliers.

As with Somocismo, Duvalierism was sustained by naked repression
and a triple - if always tension-ridden - alliance between Duvalierist
cronies, the Haitian elite, and the United States. To be sure, relations
between the Duvaliers and Washington became highly strained at
certain moments, particularly in the early years of Kennedy's Alliance
for Progress and under Jimmy Carter's "human rights" policy, when
dictatorships blemished stated foreign-policy projects. In 1962, the CIA
attempted unsuccessfully to organize a coup d'etat against Papa Doc
similar to that which was successfully staged against the Dominican
dictator Rafael Trujillo.33 Although the incident led to a temporary
suspension of economic (but not military) aid, shortly afterwards
Washington saw the wisdom in long-term accommodation to Duvalier.
US economic aid became the mainstay of the regime, while US military
advisors providing training and weaponry for the army, the Tonton
Macoutes, and later the counterinsurgency Leopard forces.34 These
military forces successfully suppressed scattered guerrilla movements
in the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes with direct US participation.35
When the ailing Duvalier's hand-chosen successor, his nineteen-yearold
son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"), was sworn in upon his father's
death in 1971 and appointed as the second "President for Life," the US
ambassador, Clinton Knox, the only diplomat present at the ceremony,
greeted the new unelected head of state by calling for an increase in aid
to Haiti, while two US Navy warships stood offshore from Port-au-
Prince to assure an orderly transfer of power.36 US economic and
military aid continued throughout the duration of the regime, including
under the Carter administration notwithstanding its human
rights policy.37

Foreign capital had first entered Haiti in the late nineteenth century,
when French, German, and US business began to invest in commerce,
public utilities, and some agricultural concerns, but this investment
was small-scale and sporadic. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that
the complete exhaustion of peasant holdings, the large-scale penetration
of transnational capital, and the bounding of the country more
closely to the international financial system, led to the gradual breakup
of the peasant economy. The continuous subdivision of land, one of the
most severe ecological crises in the world (due to deforestation), the
theft and concentration of lands by Duvalierists and agro-exporting
fractions of the elite, and the arrival of foreign agri-business in the
1960s and 1970s, led to massive urban migration and the semiproletarianization
of those remaining in the countryside.38 In turn, in
the 1970s, Haiti was selected by the AID and the international financial
agencies as a test-site in the Caribbean Basin for enclave manufacturing
and industrial free-trade zones that signalled the beginnings of globalization
(in 1981, the Reagan administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative,
or CBI, would extend to the entire region the experiment set up a
decade earlier in Haiti).39

Taking advantage of Haiti's abundant supply of cheap labor, some
240 transnational corporations poured into Port-au-Prince's free-trade
zone in the 1970s and early 1980s, employing 60,000, mostly female,
workers for a government-set wage of $2.70 a day. By the late 1970s,
enclave manufacturing, almost exclusively of baseballs, lingerie, and
electronic parts, came to account for about half the country's exports.40
The Duvalier regime provided the transnational corporations with a
tax holiday of ten years, no restrictions on profit repatriations, and the
suppression of all trade union activity. Haiti "has an authoritarian
style of government," explained the founder of the Haitian American
Chamber of Commerce, Stanley Urban, "but there are more freedoms
and opportunities in private enterprise than in many Western-style
democracies."41 While this type of assembly production contributed
only marginally to government revenue and the number of jobs it
created was insignificant in relation to the extent of unemployment
and poverty in the country, the Duvalier regime boasted that Haiti was
the coming "Taiwan of the Caribbean." A 1982 AID report asserted
that it was "a real possibility" that Haiti would soon become developed
through enclave industry assembling, and that the final goal was
"a historic change to a greater commercial interdependence with the
USA."42

US economic aid, directed toward bringing about the infrastructural
and the technical-administrative changes necessary for assembly pro-
duction, increased every year in the early 1970s, and quadrupled
between 1975 and 1976 alone, reaching nearly $150 million in the latter
year.43Other "development programs" sponsored by the AID and the
international financial agencies accelerated this restructuring of the
Haitian economy. These included programs to shift agriculture from
subsistence food to agri-business export production, a goal achieved,
in part, by dumping surplus food on the Haitian market under the
CBl's self-proclaimed "food security" program, which further undercut
peasant production. Under these programs, 30 percent of
cultivated land shifted from food production for local consumption to
export crops. A 1985World Bank report stated that domestic consumption
had to be "markedly restrained in order to shift the required share
of output increases into exports [emphasis should be placed on] the
expansion of private enterprises Private projects with high economic
returns should be strongly supported [over) public expenditures in the
social sectors [and) less emphasis should be placed on social objectives
which increase consumption." An AID report was candid: "AID
anticipates that such a drastic reorientation of agriculture will cause a
decline in income and nutritional status, especially for small farmers
and peasants ... Even if transition to export agriculture is successful,
AID anticipates a 'massive' displacement of peasant farmers and
migration to urban centers."44

The CBI in the early 1980s and other "development programs"
accelerated this structural process, along with its social repercussions
and political consequences for the elite and for the masses. As part of
these changes, corresponding to Haiti's insertion into the emergent
global economy, Washington and the international financial agencies
pressured Baby Doc into adopting a "liberalization" and "modernization"
program involving an easing of political repression and greater
fiscal and accounting responsibility. The Haitian elite became the local
agents and managers of the transnational companies, signalling the
alliance, still under authoritarian arrangements, of local and transnational
elites.45 In particular, that fraction of the elite tied to transnational
capital assumed greater importance within the dominant groups. The
complete exhaustion of the peasant economy and the nascent process
of capital accumulation and proletarianization provided the structural
context for a growing popular movement against the dictatorship.
Between the 1970sand the 1980s,absolute poverty in Haiti is estimated
to have increased from 50 percent to 80 percent of the population.46
While the masses began to organize and demand popular democratiza-
tion, new fractions of the elite tied to assembling and other externalsector
activities began to feel the need for a new political structure -
elections, an efficient government, and so forth.

The Haiti case demonstrates the dialectic between globalization and
social, cultural, and political variables. Transnational capital, helped
along by its institutional agents (in this case, the AID and the World
Bank), penetrates and disrupts local communities. The autonomy and
cohesion of even the most remote or autonomous communities are
undermined, dispersing populations into new roles connected to a
national formation and international relations. Simultaneously, the
communications revolution brings together these dispersed populations
and creates intersubjectivities who push for social change and
democratization. Trouillot documents the change in collective behavior
among disrupted peasant communities and new urban clusters which
became aware of the decadent opulence of the urban-based elite only
after their seclusion had been eroded. Even the poorest and most
remote of Haitian communities came to witness - and resent - the
ostentation of the elite, whose wild parties and extravagant consumption,
broadcast on Port-au-Prince television and "society" communications
outlets for the purpose of elite families trying to impress and
outdo one another, acquired a national projection through expanded
communications. "With the new national roads and major improvements
in telecommunications [required by transnational capital], Haiti
had become a truly 'national space'," Trouillot points out. "Words and
images meant to impress certain segments of the population now
reached unintended audiences. In the streets of the provincial towns,
despair turned into anger, and anger into defiance ... [popular sector
leadership] undertook a systematic if modest politicization of the
populace, infusing a civil discourse within the 'national space' newly
created by increased centralization and improvements in transportation
and telecommunications."47 What Trouillot should add is that this
new national space was, in turn, linked to emergent transnational space.

The Haitian case also demonstrates how an authoritarian political
system is unsuitable, on two accounts, for the global economy. On the
one hand, the corruption and cronyism of traditional authoritarianism
impedes the efficient and modernized technical-rational administration
required for the operation of transnational capital. Every effort in the
1970s to "modernize" Haiti ran up, under Duvalierism, against the
ingrained system of graft and corruption (to complicate matters, Haiti
under Baby Doc became a major drug trafficking center). On the other
hand, populations such as the Haitian peasantry, disrupted by capitalist
penetration and incorporated into broader structures, begin to
mobilize beyond their local concerns and demand democra tization.
Infrastructural and other projects under which capital accumulation
takes place require not just the technical participation, but also the
political and social incorporation, of elites, professional strata, and
popular sectors.48 Washington attempted in Haiti, in the 1970s and
early 1980s, to "liberalize" and "modernize" the regime without
replacing the authoritarian system itself. Only when it became clear
that this system could not resolve the two contradictions mentioned
above did the United States turn to "democracy promotion." By that
time, however, it was too late in Haiti for a smooth "transition to
democracy."

Preventative diplomacy in Haiti: removing Duvalier from power

Washington maintained cordial relations with the Duvalier dictatorship
in the early 1980s, while simultaneously trying to clean up the
regime and continue the free-market policies begun the previous
decade. During this time mass popular unrest was increasingly in the
face of us support for dictatorship. The "modernization" and "liberalization"
measures had led, by the early 1980s, to several attempts by a
handful of elite opponents of the regime, many of whom were former
Duvalierists themselves, to organize small political parties and other
opposition groups, among them the tiny but vocal Social Christian and
Christian Democratic parties. However, much of the anti-Duvalier
movement was led not by traditional political parties, much less by
that tiny fraction of the elite opposed in principle to authoritarianism,
but by the popular sectors which had begun in the late 1970s a feverish
organization at the grassroots level, often under the loose leadership of
grassroots clergy and laypeople from the Catholic Church despite
strong support from the church hierarchy and the papal nuncio for
Duvalier. Among this grassroots Catholic leadership, Father Jean-
Bertrand Aristide, the Salesian priest who had been excommunicated
from the Catholic Church for his outspoken opposition to Duvalier,
criticism of US policy, and promotion of liberation theology, was
quietly becoming one of the leading voices of the downtrodden
Haitians.

In 1985 localized protests which had been steadily expanding in
frequency and scope erupted into nationwide demonstrations. The
Haitian masses, from that moment on, began a virtually permanent yet
largely uncoordinated uprising that would culminate with the ouster
of Duvalier in February 1986. A reassessment in Washington, and
concomitant shift in US policy to "preventative diplomacy/" took place
in 1985. In that year, economic aid was reduced and Washington/s
public stance on human rights in Haiti suddenly changed. The State
Department quietly informed Duvalier officials that Washington expected
"free elections, a free press, and genuine improvements in
human rights observance" before former aid levels could be restored.49

When Duvalier made dear that he would not step down voluntarily,
Washington turned to orchestrating his removal. US embassy officials
contacted army Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Henri Namphy.50 In turn,
Namphy recruited Col. Williams Regala, inspector of the armed forces.
The two/ in consonance with US embassy activities, began garnering
support among key members of the elite in and out of the security
forces and important Tonton Macoutes. Wrote one insider sympathetic
to the elite-US machination:

The conspiracy that took shape ... was predicated on the inescapable
realization that Jean-Claude Duvalier had to go. But after Duvalier,
who would rule Haiti, and how? The key issues related to the
conditions of Duvalier's replacement. .. Namphy and Regala, with
their military and civilian allies and the American officials who
encouraged them, all agreed in principle that no new dictator would
replace the old one and that democratic elections would be held as
soon as possible. In the interim a provisional government would
oversee the difficult period of transition. " None of those who led it
[the conspiracy) were revolutionaries, or even interested in profound
social change... Friendly Americans, including Ambassador Clinton
McManaway, Jr., gave them that reassurance [that Washington supported
the putsch) and went even further. The US could also be
counted on to help them in the ouster and its aftermath... The
conspiracy to force Duvalier out was given impetus by surging
popular protests, as throughout Haiti oppressed people rose up
against Jean-Claude, his government, and the very nature of their
daily existence under Duvalierism.51

A key turning point came when the powerful Haitian Industrialists
Association (ADIH) issued a statement in January 1986 calling on
Duvalier to step down and for "democratic structures" to replace him,
citing popular unrest as a grave danger to "chances for attracting
future investment."52 The ADIH represented that fraction of the elite
tied to the transnational economic concerns that had poured in in the
previous two decades, and which was now deeply concerned that the
popular-sector uprising could bring down the whole social order. Its
break with Duvalier represented the irreversible separation of the elite,
except for the Duvalierist inner circle of cronies, from the dictatorship.
The ADIH statement coincided with the announcement by the State
Department that $26 million in undisbursed economic aid was to be
immediately suspended.53 The conspirators and US officials were in
near round-the-clock contact, including regular meetings between
Namphy and Ambassador McManaway, who also sustained continual
telephone communication with Duvalier himself over the terms of his
departure from the country.54 By this time, all of Haiti was in mass
insurrection. Hundreds of thousands of people were attacking
Macoute and army posts all over the country, sacking businesses,
taking over towns, controlling roads, and nearly paralyzing the capital.
In January 1986, US warships were stationed near Port-au-Prince and
military planes and other reinforcements were placed on alert on the
US mainland:55 an integral element of coercive diplomacy is the use or
threatened use of military force to back up diplomatic posturing. As
with Marcos one year earlier, it finally became clear to Duvalier that
his only choice was to step down. In the pre-dawn hours of February 7,
the Duvalier entourage was accompanied to the airport under a USFrench
diplomatic escort and flown into exile in France on a US Air
Force jet.

While the army and Macoutes carried out numerous massacres, in
the final months of the insurrection key army commanders involved in
the plan of "preventative diplomacy" ordered soldiers not to fire on
demonstrators, in a tactical maneuver meant to place pressure on
Duvalier to step down. For a brief period, the army as an institution
was tactically aligned with the popular majority against the dictatorship,
as part of the anti-dictatorial polarization and convergence of
diverse sectors, a situation which, not unlike the Philippines, gave the
appearance that the army was an ally of the democratic aspirations of
the poor majority. This was one key distinction between Haiti in early
1986 and Nicaragua in the final months of its 1979 revolutionary
insurrection: in Nicaragua the National Guard remained loyal to
Somoza to the very end, and thus the coercive apparatus of the state
disintegrated with the demise of the dictatorship (in addition, the
Haitian insurrection was a largely unarmed insurrection). In Haiti, the
separation of this apparatus from the dictatorship meant its preservation.
Another key distinction, owing to Haiti's distinct history and
circumstances, was that the Haitian masses lacked an organized and
unified political leadership (whether popular or elitist) ready to seize
state power itself. The anti-Duvalier role of the army explains why, in
the early morning hours of February 7, when hundreds of thousands of
Haitians took to the streets in jubilation over Jean-Claude's pre-dawn
departure, they hoisted many a Haitian soldier on their shoulders and
shouted such slogans as "long live the army."

But beyond this tactical convergence, the army's strategic objective
as an institution was that of preserving the social order. The honeymoon
between the army and the people would be extremely shortlived.
Six hours after its installation, the new military junta issued its
first decree, imposing an immediate and unlimited curfew, and
detained hundreds of people - the junta's response to the jubilation
that had broken out at once throughout the country.56Almost immediately
after the dictator's departure, mass protests began against Duvalierism
without Duvalier. Over the next five years, Haiti experienced a
national power vacuum and became immersed in a cauldron of
turmoil - workers' strikes, demonstrations and conventions of opposition
groups, shifts in the government, arrests and shootings, mass
protests and massacres - as contending interests fought it out and
political constellations took shape.

From Duvalier to Aristide: the aborted transition to polyarchy

Elites in the state versus popular classes in civil society

The removal of Duvalier was one phase in a Haitian "transition." The
second phase involved two simultaneous processes: one was the
cultivation of a modernized Haitian elite with its own political parties
and civic groups; the other was countering and neutralizing the
influence of the mass and popular organizations that were already
flourishing in civil society. Accomplishing this second phase would be
extremely difficult. The Haitian elite had a scant presence of its own in
civil society, lacked internal cohesion, and demonstrated little interest
in forsaking the politics of power plays and patronage for polyarchic
competition in its own ranks, much less traditional graft for a process
of "honest" capital accumulation in which its relation to a free market,
rather than extortion, would be its source of privilege, as called for by
the transnational elite agenda.

An even greater challenge was to wrest influence from popular
sectors. The correlation of forces favored popular hegemony in civil
society by the time the "transition to democracy" began, even though
the state remained a bastion of the dominant groups, firmly under
elite-US control. The post-Duvalier struggle of the popular classes
against the elite took the near-perfect form of a struggle of civil society
against the state, or what Trouillot calls "state against nation." This
unique situation was explained by factors particular to Haiti's own
"deep" structural history: the character of the dominant and subordinate
groups, the state, the economy, and so on. But it was also due to
the more recent history of the Duvalierist "totalitarian" period: by
eliminating political parties, trade unions, media, the rule of law, and
every arena of "private" initiatives and activities which Gramsci
considered to be the pillars of civil society, Duvalierism eliminated
virtually all state-civil society linkages (this was not, it should be
noted, the case in the Philippines, Chile, or Nicaragua). This led the
popular sectors to seek out new forms of organization based on loosely
organized popular and civic groups operating largely outside of the
traditional political arena. In particular, neither the elite nor left and
popular forces had significantly developed political parties as mediating
links between the state and civil society. The anti-dictatorial
uprising was not under any unified or coherent leadership or organized
national movement of any political stripe.

Each side, therefore, faced enormous challenges. For the United
States and the Haitian elite, particularly its transnational kernel organized
in the ADIH, tied to the international financial institutions and/
or to the network of US "democracy promotion" agencies that
streamed into the country after Duvalier's departure, the challenge was
how to simultaneously cultivate elite constituencies that would forsake
the old authoritarian patterns for the culture of polyarchy and neutralize
the influence of the popular classes. But which representatives of
the elite were not tinged by Duvalierism and corruption? And how
could Washington juggle its requirement for the army to assure
internal order in the face of a growing mass movement for popular
change with the need to overcome Duvalierist authoritarianism?
Clearly, the process would be gradual, incremental, and long-term,
and would be accomplished through political and ideological competition
with popular groups as well as through direct state repression. For
this purpose, the United States broadly employed economic, military,
and political aid in the post-Duvalier period.

For the popular majority, the challenge was how to dismantle the
deeply entrenched structures of Duvalierism, resist the ferocious repression
that was unleashed within days of Duvalier's departure, and forge
a viable popular project in a chaotic and uncertain milieu. "What Haiti
represented in the aftermath of Duvalier's flight," noted Latinamericanist
scholar James Ferguson in 1987, "is not a post- but a pre-revolutionary
society." He continued: "Already, the slum-dwellers of Port-au-
Prince, Cap Haitien and Gonaives have organized their own committees
and action groups. Already, too, the peasantry of every department
are beginning to forge links around common problems of rural underdevelopment
and exploitation, thus breaking down the traditional
obstacle of regional parochialism."57 The depth, breadth, and scope of
this grass roots activity between Duvalier's ouster and the 1991 coup
d'etat was truly astonishing. A vibrant popular democracy was being
constructed at the local level, a spontaneous process of bottom-up
democratic development, what Gramsci called "expansive hegemony."
One first-hand report by an international delegation noted:

Until the September 1991 coup, Haiti boasted an abundance of
peasant associations, grass-roots development projects, trade unions,
student organizations, church groups and independent radio stations...
Known broadly as "popular organizations," the members of
these groups came mostly from the country's vast poor majority...
While many international observers of Haiti bemoan its lack of
economic development, its civil society was remarkably advanced. In
contrast to many other countries emerging from dictatorial rule,
where pluralism among political parties was not matched by social
and ideological diversity, political parties in Haiti were among the
least developed parts of civil society. Rather, the strength of Haitian
civil society lay in its breadth and diversity outside the narrow realm
of electoral politics. This development allowed Haitians a considerable
voice in local affairs, even as their ability to influence national
politics was limited by an unrepentant army intent on preserving the
spoils of power.58

Thus the elite remained in control of the state and nominally in
charge of the country, but the popular majority came to occupy and
control civil society. Preventative diplomacy had succeeded in preserving
the formal structures of power, but this majority was developing
a sense of its own power, irrespective of the eventual outcome of any
election.

Duvalierism without Duvalier; popular democracy without the state

Baby Doc's departure left intact many of the structures of the dictatorship,
including the hated Tonton Macoutes and the army. In fact, as
one insider to the "preventative diplomacy" plan noted: "An integral
part of the plan was for the post-Duvalier government to protect the
Macoutes in return for their cooperation [in removing Duvalier],
exempting them from judicial prosecution for crimes committed under
Duvalier and guarding their physical safety as much as possible."s9
Following Duvalier's departure, the army, although it formally disbanded
the Macoutes, began a process of integrating Macoutes into the
armed forces and also allowing them to regroup and resurface, while
the junta, led by Namphy, blocked all but a handful of attempts to
bring Duvalierists to trial (after the 1991coup, those few who had been
tried and imprisoned were released).60

This Duvalierism without Duvalier was sustained by the United
States as Washington set about to guide a "transition to democracy."
Economic assistance to Haiti jumped from $55.6 million in 1985 to
$77.7 million in 1986and $101.1 million in 1987,61while the NED and
the AID launched "democracy promotion" and "electoral assistance"
programs to mount electoral machinery and develop elite civilian
constituencies inside Haiti. Most importantly, the Defense Department
and the CIA sustained the military forces of Duvalierism with a
security assistance program. Within two weeks of Duvalier's exit, the
United States gave the military government $500,000in anti-riot gear.62
In July 1986, the US Congress approved $4 million dollars in "nonlethal"
military aid to the Haitian army.63 In early 1987, the Pentagon
sent in twenty military advisors.64Simultaneously, the CIA set up and
funded a National Intelligence Service (SIN) in the Haitian military.
When this covert program was revealed several years later, in 1993,
CIA officials claimed the unit was intended to fight narcotics trafficking.
Yet narcotics trafficking, which had become rampant under
Jean-Claude, was run mostly by the military itself and leaders of the
unit were also central figures in the drug trade. In practice, the unit
had little to do with drug interdiction, and instead acted as an
instrument of political repression and as a channel for establishing
contacts between Washington and key military and political figures in
the post-Duvalier political landscape. These same figures would
emerge as important leaders and supporters of the 1991 coup. [65]
Among those on the CIA payroll was Lieut.-Gen. Raoul Cedras, who
led the 1991 coup, and other key members of the junta that took over
after Aristide. During the 1986-1991 period the CIA-ereated SIN unit
"produced little narcotics intelligence," but, stated one US intelligence
officer, its members "committed acts of political terror against Aristide
supporters, including interrogations and torture" (among courses
taught to SIN trainees were "The Theology of Liberation" and "Animation
and Mobilization").66

Meanwhile, the Haitian masses, emboldened by their victory over
Duvalier and new-found sense of power, demonstrated a burst of
creativity and grassroots activity. Thousands of popular community
councils sprung up in slums throughout Port-au-Prince and other
cities. They engaged in political mobilization, human rights activities,
literacy and adult education programs, improvement and self-help
projects. In the countryside, peasant leagues, which had been organizing
since the 1970s, now burgeoned, demanding land, credits, the
removal of local bosses, and so forth. The process of exorcizing
Duvalierism became known as dechoukaj, meaning "uprooting" in
Creole, or, as the slogan went, "we cut down the tree, but we haven't
got rid of the roots." The process, portrayed abroad as lawless Haitian
mobs obstructing the construction of democracy, was actually a highly
selective targeting of those individuals who had committed the worst
atrocities and whom the government refused to prosecute.67 Alongside
uprooting the old, new social relations flowered in civil society, based
on a new-found sense of hope, community, and collective identity.

This loss of fear on the part of the popular sectors, the sense of selfconfidence
and hope in place of desperation and passivity, instilled a
deep trepidation in the elite and their US backers. Yet US officials
pinned their hopes - indeed, displayed an almost blind faith - in a
successful electoral process and on repression in the interim to hold
back the popular avalanche. With their eyes on elections scheduled by
the junta for November 1987, well-known opponents and supporters
of Duvalier from the elite set up their own parties. With few exceptions,
traditional political parties, when they existed at all, were barely
more than arrangements of convenience among a self-aggrandizing
leader, his clients, and followers. Some 200 such parties were formed in
1987, either by old-guard politicians and "former" Duvalierists or by
the new technocrats and career politicians that had emerged during the
"liberalization" and "modernization" period and were being groomed
by US political aid programs (see below). None of these parties had ties
to the grassroots popular movement, which continued to distrust the
formal political arena. Some two dozen of these parties named candidates
as the elections approached.68

The November 22, 1987 elections, however, were canceled by
Namphy's junta on election-day morning, after the army opened fire
on civilians at polling stations, killing at least thirty-four and wounding
hundreds more. The election-day massacre was not an attempt to
prevent a popular electoral victory - neither Aristide nor any other
prominent figure from the grassroots popular movement were candidates.
Rather, it was an outcome of the lack of consensus among the
elite, the fear among the army and the still prevalent Duvalierists of
any change that could come through elections, and the extreme
difficulty of any orderly transition to polyarchy in Haiti's environment.
After the bloody massacre, Washington formally suspended military
aid, but the covert CIA assistance to the security forces did not stop.69
In fact, Washington continued to work closely with the military
government. Repression by the new military junta once again became
systematic and institutionalized. The strength of authoritarian forces,
and of authoritarianism ingrained in the state itself, begat a series of
coups and counter-eoups over the next few years, against the backdrop
of chronic elite infighting and state repression of the popular movement.
The Namphy regime and those which succeeded it through the
1991 inauguration of Aristide were responsible for more civilian deaths
than Baby Doc managed in fifteen years?OYet US officials downplayed
or entirely ignored the systematic violation of human rights that
continued, and escalated, under the post-Duvalier regimes. Asked by
human rights organizations shortly before the 1987 elections about
reports of routine abuses, US ambassador Brunson McKinely said, "1
don't see any evidence of a policy against human rights." True, he
said, there was violence, but it was just "part of the political culture." [71]

Between 1987 and 1990, three coups took place and another scheduled
election was canceled. Namphy was followed in early 1988 by
Leslie Manigat who became president in unconstitutional elections
boycotted by over 90 percent of the population. When Manigat made
preliminary moves to loosen military control over the presidency, he
was promptly sent into exile by Namphy, who took over the presidency
for himself in June 1988, only to be overthrown by General
Prosper Avril in a bloodless coup three months later. In November
1989, newly appointed US ambassador Alvin P. Adams, Jr., arrived in
Port-au-Prince. Adams, a former USIA officer in Vietnam and member
of the NSC under Kissinger, soon became a familiar face in Port-au-
Prince, shuffling from one meeting with Haitian factions to another,
conducting political and electoral negotiations, and reminding the
military regime that its relations with Washington depended on it
carrying through the "transition."72 When it appeared that Avril might
waver in a resumption of the electoral process, it was Adams who
personally convinced him in March 1990 to step down.73 Avril was
replaced in the presidency by Supreme court Justice Ertha Pascal
Trouillot. Behind the scenes, the US Embassy placed additional pressure
on the military to allow new elections, which were subsequently
scheduled for December 1990.

As the 1990 elections approached, the grassroots movement burgeoned
into a popular revolt against the traditional structures of power
and corruption. The issue of electoral participation became a point of
contention. Many organizations, especially the grassroots church
groups, argued that the establishment of local councils, local empowerment,
and regional structures of participatory democracy was more
important than national elections and the formal political process. In
1986, dozens of organizations close to the grassroots church groups
formed the Liaison of Democratic Forces. In 1987, these and other
groups expanded into a loose coalition known as the Democratic
Movement. Shortly afterwards, a total of 284 national and local grassroots
organizations came together to form the National Congress of
Democratic Movements (KONAKOM). Two other multi-sectoral coalitions
were formed in 1987, the Group of 57 and the National Popular
Assembly (APN).74 The grassroots base of the Catholic Church, and
particularly the Ti Legliz (literally, the "Little Church," or Christian
Base Communities), played a major role in the popular movement,
providing loose organizational structures and networks and the broad
ideological umbrella of liberation theology's "preferential option for
the poor" - an ecclesiastical enunciation of popular democracy.

Most towns and cities boasted umbrella organizations which
brought together hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of individual
community councils. In turn, most of these urban, district, and provincial
groups banded together into loosely structured national federations,
such as the National Alliance of Popular Organizations. In the
rural areas, the poor peasantry was becoming an organized social force
with its own identity for the first time in Haitian history. Peasant
leagues that had sprung up locally joined together into decentralized
regional federations, and then, in 1991, into a loose national coalition,
known as the National Peasant Movement of the Papaye Congress,
which brought together the powerful Tet Kole movement of the northwest,
the Papaye Peasant Movement of the central plateau, the Trou de
Nord Peasant Organization of the northeast, and the Sunrise Peasant
Movement of the southeastern provinces, among others.75 These
peasant leagues, in turn, joined forces with local development groups
in rural social, development, and empowerment projects.

One important link between the urban and rural groups was the
Autonomous Federation of Haitian Workers (CATH), which had
sprung up in the 1970s among workers in the industrial-free trade
zone, led by the veteran trade unionist and anti-Duvalier militant Yves
Richards. The CATH had been banned by Duvalier in 1980 but
reemerged publicly in 1986. It practiced an activist and communitybased
trade unionism, bringing together some forty workers' unions
with some two dozen urban neighborhood committee federations and
twelve peasant associations. Importantly, therefore, Haiti's poor
peasant majority allied with other popular sectors in a broad national
front for popular democratization, thus avoiding what anthropologist
Eric Wolf has identified in other studies of peasant revolts as rural
parochialism or manipulation by outside elite interests.76

In turn, specific sectoral organizations, including women's, youth,
and student groups, proliferated. The Haitian Women's Solidarity
(SOFA) formed itself in 1986, with branches throughout the country,
for the advocacy of equal rights and social justice for women. Regional
women's groups, such as the Determined Women collective in Jacmel,
which organized collective boutiques, literacy instruction for women,
and meetings to discuss issues of politics and gender equality, also
flourished. Youth, which had been most active in the anti-Duvalier
uprising, and later in the transition period, formed the Youth Coordinating
Committee, tied to Christian Base Communities, and other
national, regional, and local groups. Then there was the militant
National Federation of Haitian Students, bringing together university
and vocational school students, and the Students' Concerns organization,
which brought together high-school students nationwide.

A remarkable transfer of the functions of the state from the government
to the organized population began to take place: self-governing
committees and action groups in urban and rural areas functioned
outside formal state structures. Many were identified with the Ti Legliz
and others with the CATH, but even more were local and autonomous,
creating their own forms of representative leadership and laying the
groundwork for radical social transformation. They set up clinics and
schools, dug irrigation ditches, constructed silos for grain storage and
opened roads connecting agricultural communities to previously inaccessible
markets, eliminating the role of exploiting middlemen and a
source of urban elite profits. These peasant groups established agricultural
cooperatives and collective labor teams, occupied state lands,
redistributed private properties and refused to pay rent to large
landowners whose land they worked - all of this while state power
remained firmly in the hands of the elite and their United States
backers.

The outspoken and charismatic Aristide had emerged as the leading
voice for change and the unifying symbol of the popular mass movement.
Consequently, he was targeted for repeated assassination attempts,
including the September 1988 attack on his church, which was
burned to the ground by Tonton Macoutes as army units sat by idly
watching. Twelve parishioners were killed and seventy-eight
wounded. Aristide escaped unharmed and was forced underground.
A year later, when Aristide was expelled from the Salesian order, he
opened and ran an orphanage in Cite Soleil, a sprawling Port-au-
Prince slum. US officials showed nothing but contempt for Aristide
during the 1986-1990 period. The US Embassy monitored his every
movement and US diplomats portrayed him as a dangerous demagogue
and an "extremist" bent on opposing the democratic process.77

By 1990, groups from the KONAKOM, the Group of 57, the APN,
and other coalitions had effectively joined forces, forming what
became known as the Lavalas movement, literally meaning "avalanche"
or "flood," or more figuratively, "the cleansing flood." The
Lavalas movement was not a political party. Nor was it an organized
leftist movement. It was a semi-spontaneous and loosely organized
popular "civic uprising" from within civil society. It brought together
hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of poor Haitians from the
teeming slums of Port-au-Prince and other cities together with the
impoverished rural population. Lavalas became the political and
electoral expression of all Haitians who aspired for a fundamental
break with the old order. Aristide had by now become the leader of
Lavalas and the most popular figure in Haiti. "Aristide and the poor
are one," became the slogan. One would have expected any outside
power truly interested in promoting democracy in Haiti to have given
technical or organizational support to this highly representative force
as a most authentic expression of "people's (demos) power (cratos)."
However, the United States was out to promote polyarchy in Haiti, not
popular democracy. This meant cultivating elite constituencies (described
by the United States as "the moderates," or the "center") and training
them in the art of formal democratic procedure. So, as the US funded
and guided the development of electoral structures, it simultaneously
bypassed the popular democracy movement and instead built up the
civic and political organizations of the Haitian elite.

US political aid programs between 1986 and 1990

The NED initiated activities in Haiti in 1985 with a program handled
by the CIPE to strengthen the technocratic sectors of the elite tied to
transnational capital and organized in the ADIH. After Duvalier's
ouster political aid programs were expanded dramatically. The NED
spent several million dollars between 1986 and 1990 to organize and
fund a series of political parties, trade unions, professional associations,
human rights groups, and elite clearing-houses. These included: the
Haitian International Institute for Research and Development
(IHRED); the Human Resources Development Center (CDRH); the
Haitian Center for Human Rights (CHADEL); the Association of
Journalists; the mostly conservative Catholic Church hierarchy; Celebration
2004;and two conservative trade union federations,78

The IHRED and the CDRH functioned as clearing-houses for efforts
to coalesce an elite that could promote the transnational project,
establish its own civic organizations, and penetrate civil society. The
IHRED became active in Port-au-Prince and other cities, while the
CDRH focused on the rural areas. Established by an AID grant in 1985,
the CDRH operated a full-time staff of about forty people in Haiti, and,
according to one AID document, focused on influencing grassroots
groups and on organizing "rural professionals and the elite."79 The
methods used were similar to those documented in the chapter on
Nicaragua: identifying potential leaders among the elite; organizing
them institutionally around US-funded groups with interlocking
boards; imparting training sessions in "democratic" and free-market
ideology; utilizing the multiplier effect to recruit and train mid-level
and local leaders; and providing these interconnected networks with a
political action capacity, communications skills, and the material
resources to develop a social base.

The IHRED was created in 1986 at the behest of the USIA and
directed by Leopold Berlanger, a conservative Haitian technocrat and
well-known figure from the mulatto upper class.80 Its Board of
Directors and its larger Advisory Council brought together many of
the prominent leaders of the business and political technocratic elite
who had begun to organize in the late 1970s and early 1980s period of
"liberalization" and "modernization." Over the next few years, the
IHRED fostered a loose formation known as the "Democratic Center,"
which incorporated the leaders and cadres of the string of NED-funded
groups and other elite organizations then under development, and set
about to counter Lavalas influence. The IHRED sponsored seminars
and colloquia, research activities, and communications and media
programs, facilitated the creation of "local leadership councils," and
conducted training workshops for professionals and elite leaders,
acting as a centripetal think-tank and clearing-house in an effort to
bring together a network of political and civic leaders from outside of
the Lavalas movement and tied to the elite.8t The IHRED also
participated in intensive "party-building" and "civic education" campaigns
in the 1987-1990 period, which were financed with approximately
$2 million from the NED and the AID and supervised by the
NOI and the NRI, as well as by the ADF and the IFES (the latter
groups had also administered US programs in Nicaragua).82 In these
"party-building" activities, leaders from US-sponsored "democracy"
programs in the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, and elsewhere were
brought into Haiti to impart advice and share experiences, demonstrating
again how US "democracy promotion," as an expression of
transnationalized politics, acts as an "integrating mechanism" for
cross-national elite blocs in the South. The NDI and the NRI brought
together ten political leaders from the elite, who became known as the
Group of Ten. "Haitian participants [in NDI-sponsored party-building
seminars] included representatives from 'The Group of Ten,' a centrist
grouping that meets periodically under the auspices of the Haitian
International Institute for Research and Development," explained one
NED document.83 A US Embassy document advising the NED on
which political leaders to select for "party-building" seminars cautioned
that Yves Richards, the leader of the militant CATH, "is a
Marxist extremist; anti-US," and should be excluded.84

The Group of Ten included Leslie Manigat, Louis Dejoie Fils,
Gregoire Eugene, Colonel Octave Gayard, Hubert Deronceray, Rockefeller
Guerre, and Marc Bazin, among others, all well-known conservative
political figures from the elite and most of them tainted by former
association with the Duvalier regime, yet touted by Washington as
"the leaders of the post-Duvalier democratic movement."85 Most of
these people proved to be more interested in personal ambition that in
a coherent political program, and went on to become presidential
candidates in the aborted 1987 elections. As the 1990 elections approached,
the NRI and the NDI funded a total of sixteen political
parties, most formed in Baby Doc's "modernization" and "liberalization"
period or through the NED programs in the post-Duvalier
period, and none of them from the Lavalas movement. "What unites
these disparate parties is a common belief in private enterprise, fiscal
responsibility and economic reform as well as a detailed plan for how
to bring it all about," explained the NRI.86Of these parties, ten fielded
candidates, most of which garnered less than 1 percent of the votes in
the 1990 elections (see below).87 The coalition that ran Aristide as its
candidate and won nearly 70 percent of the vote, the National Front
For Democracy and Change (FNDC), did not receive any funding from
the NED.

Among the organizations to emerge from the party-building efforts
was the Movement to Install Democracy in Haiti (MIDH), which was
headed by Bazin. Bazin was the quintessential representative of the
New Right technocrats of the new mold promoted by the NED, the
AID, and other institutions of the transnational elite. A World Bank
official, Bazin had served briefly as Jean-Claude Duvalier's finance
minister in 1981, sent in by the international financial agencies as part
of the process of "liberalization" and "modernization." Bazin was to
oversee fiscal and monetary reforms and clean up the country's
accounting. He resigned after serving only five months and returned to
the World Bank, finding it impossible to push through economic
reforms in the quagmire of corruption, and he thus enjoyed respectability
among the Haitian public.88 Bazin, a colleague of Berlanger and
a member of the IHRED Advisory Council, was back in Haiti after
Duvalier's departure, and soon became Washington's preferred candidate
for the December 1990 elections.89 As the IHRED helped cultivate
his base, other organizations funded by the NED and the AID
cultivated constituencies for his presidential bid. According to one US
businessman tending to his investments in Haiti during this time, "US
neutrality in the electoral process was only theoretical:' Bazin was
"adequately financed by the US embassy in Port-au-Prince to build a
political machine:' He was provided by Washington with the funds
and guidance "to campaign throughout most of Haiti's 19 political
departments ... His campaign included US-style advertising - posters
plastered on walls in most towns and the capital, plus radio speeches
and television time."90

The NED-funded human rights organization CHADEL was headed
by Jean-Jacques Honorat, a former minister of tourism under Duvalier.
Following the September 1991 coup d'etat, Honorat was chosen as
figurehead prime minister by the military, while the CHADEL released
a torrent of criticism of Aristide's human rights performance to justify
the military takeover. Honorat himself said the Aristide government
was responsible for its own overthrow. "The coup was provoked by
the comportment of those in power, " he said. "It was a reaction by the
social body politic, and force had to be exerted by the only part of the
social body with arms: the army."91 (After Honorat resigned as figurehead
prime minister in June 1992 the regime appointed Bazin to the
post.) Washington had selected CHADEL for support despite the fact
that several prestigious and internationally prominent human rights
organizations already existed in Haiti. These included the League of
Former Haitian Political Prisoners, the Fran.;ois LaFontant Human
Rights Committee, and the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations,
a national coalition of local and regional groups, among
others, all of which were bypassed in the US funding because of their
links to the popular movement and the difficulty in manipulating them
from the outside.92

The Association of Haitian Journalists was founded in 1955 and
maintained a close association with the USIA. It brought together
journalists working in the Duvalierist state-run media outlets and was
closely associated with the dictatorship.93 Celebration 2004 (that year
will mark the 200th anniversary of Haitian independence) was formed
by several Haitian professionals in the diaspora who returned to Haiti
following Duvalier's ouster. Between 1986 and 1990, it played a role
similar to Via Civica in Nicaragua - the "civic component" of a national
"democracy" network, involving "civic education" programs, "getout-
the-vote" drives and media campaigns. In addition, Celebration
2004 focused on organizing women and youth, given the absence of any
elite women's or youth organizations that could operate on their own.94

The trade union programs were considered crucial because workers
in the enclave assembly industries and rural workers' unions had
become among the most militant and an important base of the Lavalas
movement. The NED spent some $2 million, via the FfUI, on the
Federation of Unionized Workers (FOS), while the AID funneled
additional monies through the AIFLD. This was the smallest of three
trade union federations in Haiti. It was set up in 1984 with Duvalier's
support and funding from the AIFLD, and was the only one which had
been allowed to ftmction legally under Baby Doc. Its president was
Joseph Senat, who was also a member of the board of the IHRED. The
State Department, at the request of several chief executive officers of
US-based transnationals operating in Haiti's free-trade industrial zone,
had directly requested AIFLD involvement in 1984 "because of the
presence of radical labor unions and the high risk that other unions
may become radicalized."95 The "radical labor unions" to which the
State Department referred was the CATH, which was tied to the
Lavalas movement and had launched a campaign to raise the
minimum wage. Yet another NED program went to fund and organize
several peasant organizations which set out to compete with the
Papaye Movement and other peasant groups.

Apart from these NED programs, the CIA, in addition to the SIN
program, conducted other clandestine programs to establish ties with
Haitian political and military leaders.96 In early 1990, the 001 allocated
$10 million for the 1990 elections. Some of these funds were channeled
through the NED, another portion was given directly to the Provisional
Electoral Council, and yet another to several electoral observer groups,
including Carter's organization, and NDI-Ied observer teams.97 According
to the US game plan, by the time the December 1990 vote
arrived, the elite should have developed enough to be able to field
several credible candidates, articulate a national development program,
and attract enough internal support to gamer winning candidates that
would enjoy a minimum enough social base and enough international
recognition to legitimize the new government as the culmination of the
"transition to democracy." But this scenario did not unfold. Elite
constituencies in civil society remained sparsely developed between
1986 and 1990 - indeed, virtually negligible - and could not fulfill their
role in electoral mobilization, much less in holding back the Lavalas
tide. The US program, nevertheless, did generate enough interest
within the elite for it to support Bazin's candidacy. More importantly,
the very organizations and individuals tapped by the 1986--1990 US
programs surfaced as the core organized opponents of the Aristide
government, and later as important backers of the 1991 coup.

The 1990 elections and the 1991coup d'etat

Distrust of formal political parties and of an electoral process controlled
from above - a military junta supported by the United States -
led the popular groundswell to reject over twenty candidates from the
elite as the December 1990 elections approached. Instead, several
dozen groups associated with the Lavalas movement formed a centerto-
left electoral coalition, the FNDC, and asked Aristide to run as its
candidate. The Catholic priest at first declined, but in October, just two
months before the vote, finally accepted the nomination, under strong
pressure from the Lavalas movement organizations. Within days of his
nomination, 2 million Haitians, who had earlier shown little interest in
the electoral process, rushed to register, bringing the number of
registered voters almost overnight from 40 to 90 percent of the voting
age population. Despite US support for Bazin and the complete
absence of external support for the Lavalas movement, Aristide swept
the elections with 67.5 percent of the popular vote. Bazin, who outspent
Aristide 20-1,98 captured 14.2 percent of the vote. A third
candidate, the populist Louis Dejoie, won 4.8 percent (the remainder
was shared among another eight parties, seven of them NEDfunded).
99

Taking place in the post-Cold War era, and without formallinks to
traditional political parties (of the left or otherwise), much less to any
foreign powers, the popular revolt in Haiti in the late 1980s constituted
a new and innovative form of social mobilization. As the first experiment
with meaningful social change and popular democracy after the
end of the East-West conflict, the triumph of the Lavalas uprising
represented not only a new option for the Haitian majority but also
new hope for the Third World - a model in which popular sectors
organized in civil society take primacy over the state. In the words of
many observers, this was the first political revolution since the end of
the Cold War. [100] And it was one whose democratic legitimacy could
not possibly be called into question.

The tasks faced by the new government were overwhelming: reorganizing
a chaotic and praetorian state, applying sanctions to army
officers for past abuses, responding to the demands of the hemisphere's
poorest population, and addressing one of the worst ecological crises
in the world - the near complete deforestation and soil depletion of the
tiny country. At the time of his inauguration, Aristide said, "Our major
goal for the coming years and our basic program of action is to go from
extreme poverty to a poverty with dignity by empowering our own
resources, the participation of the people, and not expecting much
from abroad." Aware that his administration had to operate within the
constraints of an anti-democratic state and bureaucracy and an ancien
regime not yet dismantled, Aristide declared: "1 will not be president of
the government, I am going to be president of the opposition, of the
people, even if this means confronting the very government I am
creating."IOIThe brief period before the new administration's mandate
was cut short did not allow for any essential change in the social
structure. Among the programs undercut by the coup was a national
literacy campaign and an agrarian reform that would have set limits on
the size of property holdings, channeled resources to poor peasants and
redistributed available lands. A program was in the planning stages to
institutionalize participatory structures alongside the formal government
apparatus. Although he was making only symbolic gestures,
Aristide himself took a salary cut of 60 percent and tried to reduce other
top government salaries. He fired and replaced all Duvalierist holdovers,
and rid state enterprises of corruption, which increased state
revenues and also reduced the ability of the elite to engage in its timehonored
graft. The reform program also called for retaining strategic
public enterprises under state control as a source of public income for
redistributive measures and raising the minimum wage. A crucial
measure Aristide did implement was the elimination of the rural
sheriffs (the chefs de section), an essential component of the Duvalierist
structures and a pillar of traditional power relations in the rural areas.

Under the Aristide government, popular organizations redoubled
their activities and attracted new members. After 500 years of oppression,
the Haitian people had finally found their voice. For eight fleeting
months, Haitians had become the collective subjects of their own social
reality. The hegemony won by the popular sectors in civil society in the
1980s was snowballing into a pre-revolutionary situation: representatives
from these sectors, as in Chile in 1970-1973, now had one foot in
the formal state apparatus. The situation was approximating that of
"dual power." Despite the mild reformist character of Aristide's
program, all the ingredients for a unique social revolution were
present. The elite and the United States acted before those ingredients
could brew.

The 1990 elections underscore that the new political intervention
enters into play with local forces in intervened countries which are
often beyond external control. The new strategy implies risks for the
United States, namely, uncertain outcomes and no guarantee of
success. The Chilean and the Philippine situations approximated the
Haitian, as regards the departure of a dictatorship and US efforts to
assure that a pliable centrist alternative replaced the ancien regime. In
the first two countries, however, the United States was able to interface
with local forces in such a way that it obtained the preferred outcome.
In Haiti, the United States was not able to secure its preferred outcome,
owing in large part to Haiti's unique historic conditions and to the
structural limits to a polyarchic system presented by the absence of an
elite grounded in a process of internal capital accumulation. Until
Aristide entered the race, Bazin had been seen as a shoo-in for what
was to be an election with a small voter turnout and international
certification as "free and fair." Aristide was therefore the unexpected
and unwanted outcome of the "transition to democracy" that the
United States had so arduously tried to facilitate - an uninvited guest
at the table Washington was trying to set. Aristide's rise .to power was,
to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, a "fluke" in the political system the
United States was trying to implant in Haiti.

The US government demonstrated a pattern of increasing hostility
and disapproval toward Aristide's govemment.102 The Bush administration
approved but then withheld the disbursement of $84 million in
economic aid because the Aristide government had failed to meet
several conditions attached to the aid package, among them, certification
by Washington that human rights were being respected (the
previous military regimes suffered no such withholding of economic
aid despite their gross human rights violations), and Aristide's plan to
raise the minimum wage from $3 to $5 a day, criticized by the AID as a
measure that would discourage foreign investment and undermine the
enclave assembly sector.103 In addition, US officials launched a campaign
to denigrate Aristide's personal integrity and the legitimacy of
his government. Alleged human rights violations became the centerpiece
of this campaign. Aristide's brief term was "the first time in the
post-Duvalier era that the United States government has been so
deeply concerned with human rights and the rule of law in Haiti,"
noted Amy Wilentz, a Haiti specialist. The State Department "circulated
a thick notebook filled with alleged human rights violations"
under Aristide - "something it had not done under the previous rulers,
Duvalierists and military men; they were actually praised by Washington
... [which] argued for the reinstatement of aid - including
military aid - based on unsubstantiated human rights improvements
... "104 This "thick notebook" was compiled by Jean-Jacques
Honorat, whose human rights organizations, CHADEL, was the recipient
of massive NED funding. [105]

Cedras and other coup leaders were figureheads for an alliance of
old-guard forces in the army and the elite, who, having tolerated
Aristide for eight months, feared that any further consolidation of the
first democratic regime in the country's history would irreversibly
threaten their interests. The Washington Office on Haiti circulated a list
of a dozen businessmen said to have spent more than $40 million to
back the COUp.l06Haiti is not only one of the poorest countries in the
world, but also one which registers some of the sharpest contrasts
between wealth and poverty. An estimated 3,000 extended families
comprise the Haitian elite, including a reported 200 millionaires. This
elite lives in luxury air-conditioned villas in the cool suburbs in the
hills above Port-au-Prince, complete with tennis courts, swimming
pools, carefully tended gardens and armies of servants. Another 10
percent of the population, the country's middle and professional
classes, are reported to earn an average of $90,000 annually. The
remaining 90 percent, with a per capita income of a little more than
$300, live in conditions of total destitution and squalor. The World
Bank reported in 1981 that, of an estimated population of 6 million, just
24,000 people own 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and 1 percent of
the population receives 44 percent of national income but pays only 3.5
percent in taxes.107 Under such conditions, even a minimal plan of
social reform - such as was drawn up by the Aristide government -
strikes at the very heart of the elite's interests.

Redistributive reforms in themselves were not necessarily a threat to
transnational interests. Recall the point made in chapter 1 that tensions
and contradictions often checker the relations between dominant
groups in intervened countries and the transnational elite operating
under Washington's overall leadership. However, the popular social
movement which was consolidating and fusing with the state under
Aristide's government was, in fact, a deep threat, not just to the social
order in Haiti, but to a worldwide project whose purpose is to
subordinate popular majorities to the "logic of the minority." There
was thus a perverted and tension-ridden convergence of interests
between the tiny Haitian elite's exaggerated social privileges and the
defense of the social order itself. Although some reform measures
(such as subordinating the military to civilian authority) are actually
part of the transnational agenda in other countries and under other
conditions, Aristide's program was rigorously resisted by the Haitian
elite and the United States. The difference between these measures in
Haiti and similar measures taken with the approval of the transnational
elite in other countries is that, in Haiti, their effect was to
embolden and hasten the mobilization of the popular majority, which
was now seeking a viable formula for becoming a sovereign majority,
while in other countries such measures merely make elite political rule
and the economy stronger and more efficient. What was at stake for
the transnational elite in Haiti was not economic interests (such as
those that Allende's government threatened in Chile), but the social
mobilization from below and the dangerous "demonstration effects"
this could generate in the Caribbean and the Third World in general. In
defense of transnational hegemony, the United States was forced to
rely on, and ally with, historically underdeveloped and vice-ridden
dominant groups in a national formation which lacked the structural
basis for a polyarchic political system.

There is no documented evidence of direct US involvement in the
COUp.1OWBhat the evidence reveals is that those sectors cultivated by
US political, economic, and military aid programs from 1986 to 1990
formed the key constituency of the new dictatorial regime - the NEDAID
political elite, the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie tied to
the assembly sector and other transnational economic activities, and
the army and security forces. Moreover, evidence indicates that US
officials knew of the coup before it was underway and chose for tactical
reasons not to intervene to try to prevent it,l09and once consummated,
the coup was incorporated into the the larger US strategy, as discussed
below. There need not be direct conspiratorial linkages between Washington
and the coup-makers, and empirical evidence of intentionality
in US policy regarding the coup is not relevant to the underlying
analytical and theoretical issues at hand. First, Haiti's experience bears
out Gramsci's argument that hegemony is "consensus backed by
armour," such that latent coercion becomes activated when consensual
mechanisms of domination either break down or cannot be established.
Relations of domination, in Haiti as elsewhere, are, in the last instance,
relations of force. Second, given the inability to establish consensual
domination, US programs and policies placed great importance on
strengthening, and also on emboldening, the coercive apparatus of the
Haitian state.l1O The resurgence of authoritarianism in Haiti was a
spasm of self-preservation of the social order induced by the very logic
of the US-transnational project; the reactionary Caesarist outcome to
the dominant groups' crisis of authority.

Beyond the lack of evidence that Washington had a direct role in the
coup, some of the evidence suggests, to the contrary, that US policymakers
were developing an alternative three-pronged strategy for
undermining popular democracy in Haiti. First, fundamental social
transformations would be prevented by withholding US aid, by
applying other pressures, and by allowing the global economy and the
country's dependence to impose their own constraints. A $26 million
AID program to nurture a policy development capacity among the
local private sector and its ability to interface with the Aristide
government had already been launched.111Second, there would be a
major expansion of political aid and "democracy promotion" programs,
with the aim of gradually accomplishing over a prolonged
period what could not be achieved during 1986-1990 - the development
of an elite organized around a program of polyarchy and neoliberalism,
able to mount its own project in civil society and challenge
Lavalas hegemony. Third, the state apparatus itself, particularly such
countervailing powers as the legislature, local government councils,
and the security forces, would be strengthened and space would be
opened up in this way for the elite to exercise influence over both the
state and the popular masses.

The clearest indication of this strategy came in May 1991, when the
State Department approved a massive $24 million Democracy Enhancement
Project program, to be managed by the 001 and designed
to hasten the organization, institutional influence, and the communications
and political action capacity of elite and anti-Aristide constituencies.
Recipients of these funds were the same groups the NED had
funded in previous years as well as a host of new groups from those
sectors of the Haitian political spectrum where opposition to Aristide
could be encouraged. The project included an important legislative and
local government component, including advisors and programs to
train and guide members of the National Assembly. This component
must be understood in the particular Haitian context. The constitution
approved in 1987 under which Aristide took power had severely
reduced executive strength and given important powers to the legislature.
At the time, this was seen by US legal experts who advised the
drafters of the constitution as a mechanism best suited for developing
polyarchy in Haiti, since it would disperse power among the highly
fragmented elite and its numerous ambition-driven leaders, and also
curb the tradition of a centralized and all-powerful presidency.1l2 The
popular movement, with scant enthusiasm in elections except for the
vote it gave to Aristide, showed little interest in the legislative
elections. As a result, the Assembly remained the domain of the elite
after the 1990 vote (anti-Aristide parties won 60 percent of the seats in
the Chamber of Deputies and 52 percent in the Senate). Ironically, the
legislature, and the constitution itself, became an ideal juridical
weapon in limiting the Aristide government's ability to implement its
program - a situation remarkably similar to that of Chile under
Allende, except under very different international conditions. Strengthening
the Assembly under the pretext of "democracy enhancement"
became a means of shifting formal institutional power from Aristide's
mass constituency to the elite and of blocking implementation of
Aristide's program. And after the coup, it allowed the legislature to
playa counterrevolutionary role.

"The Democracy Enhancement Project has been designed to
strengthen legislative and other constitutional structures, including
local governments, as well as independent organizations which foster
democratic values and participation in democratic decision-making,"
stated a highly revealing AID document:

Pursuit of this [Democracy Enhancement Project] goal is based on
three critical assumptions: 1) the democratically elected Government
will endure and carry out its mandate according to the terms of the
1987 Constitution; 2) the US Government will have access to and
influence with the GOH [Government of Haiti]; and 3) an aggressive
project of the kind recommended will make a difference to the
durability and effectiveness of the country's evolving democracy ...
The project has been designed with a built-in flexibility to respond to
the changing social, institutional and political context for democracyenhancement
activities ... The project constitutes our principal effort
to advance the overriding objective of US policy towards Haiti ... The
design provides for a number of entry points to different institutional
"actors" in the democratic scene, with the recognition that some will
evolve more quickly than others ...

This [the program] must also be accomplished within the atmosphere
of strong nationalism, to avoid any sense of a donor or interest
group being disruptive of what the rhetoric describes as "the will of the
people" ... Given current sensitivities, the new relationships must be
approached judiciously to mitigate against possible "anti-American"
backlash. At the same time, we must not be timid in the pursuit of key
foreign policy objectives which our project is designed to serve.113

The document went on to note that "the absorptive capacity [of the
National Assembly, the electoral council and local government bodies]
is in question" - meaning that elite constituencies were not in a strong
position to exercise an organized influence in these formal state
structures, and that state-civil society linkages needed to be strength-
ened under the mediation of groups cultivated through the US political
aid program. It identified three broad areas for US intervention: (1)
"Civil society development, consisting of funding 10 to 15 Haitian
independent sector organizations"; (2) "Local government development,"
consisting of funding "2 to 3 Haitian independent sector
organizations and activities to link local government and civil society
interest groups"; and (3) "Institutional development, with emphasis on
developing plans for participating independent sector organizations to
sustain programs." The same recipients of NED funding in the 1986-
1990 period were among the specific organizations selected for
funding, as well as several new groups, including the Haitian Federation
of Aid to Women, the Haitian Lawyers' Committee, the Haitian
Bar Association, the Center Petion-Bolivar (a new elite think-tank),
and the Integral Project for the Reinforcement of Democracy in Haiti
(PIRED). The State Department chose this latter organization, set up
entirely with US funds and by US organizers, as an "Umbrella
Management Unit" to oversee the entire $24 million program inside
Haiti.tt4 The AID gave the NDI and the NRI new monies to continue
"party-building," and also set up a Consortium for Legislative Development
to oversee the work conducted by NED-funded US groups
(sub-grantees) with Haitian parties and members of the National
Assembly. The AID reported in the wake of the coup d'itat that it had
spent $13 million of the $24 million in the course of Aristide's
presidency. The Democracy Enhancement Project was frozen in the
aftermath of the coup, and then resumed in late 1992.115

The military interlude: the attempted destruction of civil society

The key question following Aristide's ouster was how US policymakers
would respond to the coup. Here was a government elected in
free and fair elections organized and paid for by the United States and
scrutinized by the international community perhaps more meticulously
than the Nicaraguan vote of February 1990.Aristide was the unwanted
and unexpected outcome of the "transition to democracy" that the US
had tried to guide. But formal support for a military coup at a time
when Washington was promoting tightly managed "free elections"
around the world as the cornerstone of its new political intervention,
was simply out of the question. Demonstrating consistency in Haiti
was important. Support for the Haitian coup could embolden militaries
in Latin America and elsewhere to attempt takeovers, thus undermining
the fragile structures of a transnational polyarchic political
system then emerging in the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian case
became a test for policymakers. Infighting broke out in Washington
over post-coup policy. From Aristide's ouster in September 1991 to the
September 1994 invasion that restored him to office, Washington
became involved in a complex and sometimes contradictory effort to
resolve its dilemma in Haiti in a manner compatible with its overall
"democracy promotion" strategy.116

Washington publicly condemned the coup, declared that it would
continue to recognize Aristide, and supported limited economic sanctions
imposed by the OAS. At the same time, the Bush administration
claimed that the coup-makers had a legitimate grievance in their
argument that the Aristide government had violated human rights.
Bush officials "have begun to move away from unequivocal support
they have voiced for the ousted Haitian President," reported the New
York Times a week after the coup. "With this shift, the officials, who
had said his reinstatement was necessary for the hemisphere's democracies
to resist a comeback of military rule, are now hinting that Father
Aristide is at least in part to blame for his fall from office.,,1l7In fact,
international human rights monitoring groups had reported that
human rights violations in Haiti during Aristide's tenure actually
decreased significantly. These groups praised the progress made under
Aristide in human rights, noted that not one human rights abuse was
attributable to the Aristide administration itself, in distinction to the
previous regimes, and that most abuses were committed by the
security forces which he did not control.118

The US concern in Haiti, as elsewhere, was not human rights but
how the issue of human rights could be manipulated in diverse
manners to further foreign-policy objectives. The unsubstantiated
charges were a thinly veiled disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting
the Aristide government's international legitimacy and his
own integrity - the continuation, in the post-eoup period of hostilities
toward Aristide dating back to the mid-1980s, and which became,
during his brief tenure in office, a campaign to portray his government
as repressive, incompetent, and ideologically extreme. Aspects of this
disinformation campaign were publicly exposed several years later, in
late 1993,when the CIA was forced to admit that it had fabricated ana
disseminated false reports that Aristide had undergone psychiatric
treatment, was "clinically manic-depressive, prone to violence and an
unreliable supporter of democratic reform."119 Such "black propaganda,"
or "character assassinations," as they are termed in official
intelligence jargon, are standard components of destabilization campaigns.

The campaign to blemish Aristide's international stature was one
aspect of a broader post-coup US strategy. There were two initial
positions in Washington: those arguing for efforts to legitimize an elite
civilian alternative to the Aristide government-in-exile, and those
favoring the restoration of Aristide. Over the next few years, these two
initial positions merged into a more complex, if at times contradictory,
strategy of seeking to undermine the possibility of implementing
popular democracy in Haiti, yet continuing formal recognition of
Aristide as the legitimate head of state. This strategy had two complementary
and mutually reinforcing aspects. One was searching for a
formula under which Aristide would return as a powerless and largely
ceremonial president, under various euphemisms of "power sharing,"
"reconciliation," and a "consensus government," which would give
significant quotas of power to business and political elites who enjoyed
no popular mandate yet controlled important levers of the country's
economy and the state apparatus. Aristide would thus return with his
institutional power so diluted, and the power of the coup-makers and
their civilian backers so enhanced, that it would be impossible for his
government to fulfill its own political agenda and that of the popular
majority. Simultaneously, Washington explored the possibility of installing
and legitimizing a new elite civilian regime in Port-au-Prince -
a scenario which could be held up as blackmail to the Aristide
government-in-exile should it reject the terms imposed on it for its own
restitution. The other aspect was the repression and demobilization of
the popular classes inside Haiti, a process which the new military
regime carried out with brutal efficiency. These two aspects went
together like hand and glove: the longer the coup's supporters were in
power, the more beaten down and disoriented the population became,
the better organized the anti-popular constituencies (both polyarchic
and authoritarian) became, and the more elusive the goals of popular
democratization and social transformation became. This strategy involved
a series of highly duplicitous diplomatic undertakings whose
ostensible purpose was to restore Aristide to office, first under OA5-
mediated negotiations, then through the UN, and finally under direct
State Department mediation. US actions also included a refugee policy
broadly condemned as inhumane and illegal, an ineffective and
unenforced embargo, the resumption of political aid to anti-Aristide
"democratic" constituencies inside Haiti, and the continuation of the
CIA campaign to discredit Aristide.

Within days of Aristide's forced exile, the legislature declared his
office vacant and named a mulatto old-guard member of the elite,
Supreme Court president Joseph Nerette, as interim president, and
Jean-Jacques Honorat as provisional prime minister. The OAS opened
negotiations between Aristide and Honorat's de facto government.
Embassy officials in Port-au-Prince drafted a memorandum on the eve
of the OAS negotiations, at the request of the junta, which provided
guidelines for the de facto regime's negotiating team, drawn from anti-
Aristide forces in the Haitian legislature. And although the new regime
in Port-au-Prince was not officially recognized by Washington, US
ambassador Alvin Adams accompanied its delegation to the negotiating
table as an informal advisor.12o The embassy document stated:

other points of the deal should surely include some of the following:
that if A [Aristide] returns it would not be until some time later
(months away); that he could be impeached and sent back out; that
time was permitted to enact new laws limiting some of his outrageous
behaviours and that of his followers; that the Prime Minister become
the real power of the government; that the Prime Minister be given
adequate economic support to secure his position; that no Lavalas
people be included in the new Government ... If A refuses to deal or
refuses what Q.A.S. considers a reasonable deal, he is finished ...
What is needed is a comprehensive, sustained and very discrete
approach to US policy-makers and the US media that will balance off
and negate the propaganda of the Lavalas organization.121

The OAS-mediated talks culminated in an agreement in February
1992 in which Aristide would return in exchange for an amnesty for
the coup-makers, recognition of all legislation passed by the Assembly
after the coup, and the selection of a new prime minister with
legislative approval, instead of one appointed freely by Aristide, as
called for by the constitution. The appointment of the prime minister
was crucial, because the constitution placed most executive power in
the office of the prime minister, not the presidency; the latter's power
rested in the president's mandate to appoint a prime minister of his or
her choice. Nevertheless, the military and the anti-Aristide legislators
reneged on the accord at the last minute, making clear that they
considered unacceptable the mere presence of Aristide in Haiti, where,
even without much presidential power, he would be the leadership
figure around which the Haitian masses could rally. Instead, the
parliament approved an alternative plan for a "consensus government"
that bypassed Aristide and appointed Bazin as prime minister
in June 1992. Washington attempted briefly to legitimize the Bazin
regime, threatening to withdraw their recognition of Aristide if he did
not negotiate with Bazin.122 However, Bazin, like Honorat before him,
was unable to win enough legitimacy to exclude Aristide from a
solution or to move the country towards internal stability.

Intermittent negotiations ensued over the next few years, under the
joint auspices of the UN and the State Department. A familiar pattern
emerged: demands for new concessions were placed on Aristide in
exchange for retaining international recognition. "In two years of
negotiations," noted Haiti analyst Kim Ives, "the putschists have given
up nothing of their usurped power, and the legitimate government has
traded away almost everything."123 The popular government in exile
was caught in a pernicious Catch-22. If it rejected an unfavorable
settlement, it faced the loss of international legitimacy. In the new
world order, this legitimacy is a prerequisite to any nation's social and
economic participation in global society, yet that legitimacy is increasingly
conferred by those who control the levers of the global economy,
through control over transnational communications media, allocation
of resources, and so forth. Sustaining recognition as the legitimate
government of Haiti therefore required that Aristide's team play the
game of "off-again, on-again" negotiations with the military dictatorship,
mediated by international organizations pliant to US manipulations.
On the other hand, making continual concessions, each more
weakening than the previous, meant forfeiting any chance of bringing
about fundamental social change in Haiti, and, for the Aristide government,
the loss of its legitimacy and authority within its own mass
constituency. The popular movement became increasingly disillusioned
with its government-in-exile and frustrated over a negotiations
process managed by transnational actors, showing no signs of resolving
the situation, and bearing no relation to their daily reality of
repression and struggle. The alternatives of sustaining authority
among its own mass base by withdrawing from the international
negotiations charade, or returning to Haiti under international auspices
only to immediately resume the popular project under the status quo
ante, could well have led to the loss of all legitimacy internationally
under the argument that it was attempting extra-constitutional, extra-
institutional forms of social change, and thus a future coup or international
sanctions would become "legitimate." Behind the criticism of the
Aristide team's strategy are deeper theoretical issues often overlooked
by critics of Aristide. The loss of international legitimacy and isolation
from world markets that transnational forces are capable of imposing
can just as easily suffocate any revolutionary project as could the
tenuous strategy that Aristide pursued of trying to walk the tightrope
of popular democracy internally and legitimacy internationally. It is
not at all clear that the popular struggle in Haiti would have been
better off had Aristide simply refused to cooperate in any way with
Washington.

As this diplomacy unfolded, at least 3,000 Haitians were executed by
the regime in the first few weeks after the coup, and hundreds - or
thousands - more over the next several years. Tens of thousands were
detained, tortured, and maimed, and several hundred thousand more
went into hiding or fled the country. Following the coup, the Macoutes
rapidly reorganized and the military government initiated a systematic
campaign of repression which human rights groups reported to be
worse than at any time since the Duvalier era.124The notorious chefs de
section posts, abolished by Aristide, were reinstated by the military. All
but pro-regime media outlets were closed, meetings banned, unions,
peasant leagues, and other popular organizations dissolved, leaders
"disappeared," and elected representatives in local and regional government
structures dismissed and persecuted.

While the diplomatic charade bought time, the military regime was
accomplishing precisely what could not be done either with Aristide in
power or under any polyarchy regime nominally respecting traditional
civil liberties and political rights: the destruction of the organs of the
popular classes in civil society and the resubordination of the Haitian
masses through the only effective instrument for this purpose under
Haitian conditions - direct, widespread, and systematic repression.
One international human rights report (echoing many such reports)
affirmed that "the goal of the repression is two-fold: first, to destroy
the political and social gains made since the downfall of the Duvalier
dynasty; and second, to ensure that no matter what Haiti's political
future may hold, all structures for duplicating those gains will have
been laid waste."l25 While the "ethnic cleansing" that took place in
Bosnia in the early 1990s shocked the world, this lesser known but no
less brutal process of "class cleansing" of Haitian civil society took
place following the coup. This was a process remarkably similar to
Chile under Pinochet and to the other Southern Cone dictatorships, yet
with the goal of compacting it into a period of a few short years. Once
the popular leadership was decimated, its organizational structures
shattered, and the masses sufficiently terrorized, it would be "safe" to
dismantle the coup government, with or without Aristide's return.

That the United States did not participate directly in this unprecedented
wave of repression (for that matter, neither did it participate
directly in Marcos's, Pinochet's, or Somoza's repression, and even
sometimes criticized that repression) is not relevant to the analytical
point. Most of the coup leaders and members of the junta that directly
conducted the systematic repression, and the political figures such as
Honorat and Bazin that tried to legitimize a post-Aristide order, had
long since established extensive relations with Washington through the
CIA and the DIA, the NED, and other programs. And Haitian army
officers, in fact, continued to receive training after the coup in US
military facilities.126 "Virtually all observers agree that all it would take
is one phone call from Washington to send the army leadership
packing," noted the New York Times a year after the coup. But given
"Washington's deep-seated ambivalence about a left-ward tilting nationalist.
.. United States diplomats consider it [the army] a vital
counterweight to Father Aristide, whose class-struggle rhetoric threatened
or antagonized traditional power centers at home and
abroad."127

The US refugee policy, condemned by human rights organizations
and the UN as blatantly racist and a violation of both US and
international law, also fed into this strategy. The exodus of refugees
out of Haiti under the Duvaliers and subsequent regimes had ground
to a halt the moment Aristide was elected, but then recommenced
within days of the coup. The Bush administration strengthened a
forced US repatriation program in place since 1981, denounced by
Aristide as a "floating Berlin wall," and a policy ratified by the Clinton
administration. Human rights groups documented a blatant distortion
by US officials of evidence that repatriated Haitians suffered persecution,
and pointed out that US embassy officials even informed the
Haitian army of the whereabouts of those refugees whom it repatriated,
thus making them even more susceptible to persecution. A
sharp escalation of death squad-style killings coincided with Washing
ton's decision to repatriate Haitians, and those repatriated were
subjected to systematic repression.128

Right-wing political and paramilitary organizations tied to the army,
the de facto regime, and US intelligence services, sprang up in the postcoup
period. In late 1993, CIA and DIA officials in Haiti encouraged a
Haitian official from the SIN (the CIA-run clandestine unit), Emmanuel
Constant, to organize these groups into the Front for the Advancement
and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) in order to "balance the Aristide
movement" and conduct "intelligence" against it.129 The FRAPH
added a new element to the Haitian political scene that served the antipopular
agenda in the short run but complicated the long-term
transnational elite agenda for Haiti. It became a well-organized instrument
of repression, operating in a death-squad manner to continue the
process of decimating popular sector organization, yet also constituted
the political institutionalization of forces bent on preserving an authoritarian
political system. FRAPH leaders were not only on the CIA
payroll but were also integrated into post-coup, and later post-invasion,
US political and economic aid programs.130

A concomitant aspect of post-coup US strategy was to provide
enough of a lifeline for the military regime to survive ..Following the
coup, the OAS imposed an economic embargo on Haiti. But the
embargo, with numerous loopholes, was largely ineffectual (in sharp
contrast to total embargoes against Nicaragua, Chile, Cuba, Panama,
Iraq, and elsewhere, which were implemented with devastating effectiveness).
Two days after the coup, Washington vetoed the Aristide
government's request to have a hearing at the UN security council,
arguing instead that the OAS was the appropriate forum to address a
matter internal to the Western Hemisphere. As a result, the embargo
was hemispheric and not worldwide in scope. The embargo restrictions
were breached by exporters and importers not only from Europe, but
from the United States and Latin America. Oil tankers and freighters
not flying flags from OAS member-states kept Haiti well supplied with
petroleum and other goods until the UN finally imposed international
sanctions in 1993; even then, the sanctions were limited to oil and arms
deliveries.131More significantly, in February 1992 the Bush administration
unilaterally relaxed the embargo to exclude all goods produced in
the free-trade zone, as well as other goods claimed necessary to protect
Haitians from losing their jobs. As a result, while the image of a US
government engaged in active diplomacy to isolate the military dictatorship
was propagated, trade between the United States and Haiti
actually flourished and registered a sharp increase under the dictatorship.
According to US Census Bureau figures, US trade with Haiti
jumped from $316.2 million in 1992 to $375.6 million in 1993.132

In late 1992,the $24 million Democracy Enhancement Project, which
had been suspended following the coup, was resumed. New programs
included a resumption of funding for political parties, and a program,
jointly managed by the NDI and the NRI, to "promote the consolidation
of democracy in Haiti by assisting Haiti's civilian and military
leaders to develop mechanisms to integrate the Armed Forces of Haiti
in to civilian society." The program "proposes to establish a broad
civil-military relations program with senior members of the Haitian
government," stated one document.l33 Another NED program,
handled by the CFD, was the creation of a new private-sector organization
in Haiti, the Center for Free Enterprise and Democracy (CLEO). In
early 1994, the CLEO organized a two-week "strike" of private-sector
commercial and industrial enterprises to demand the lifting of the
embargo. The CFD also conducted a "legislative development"
program to continue training and advising members of the Haitian
parliament. Yet another NED program established and funded a group
called the Development and Democracy Foundation, which promptly
launched a campaign whose slogan was "democracy is discipline."
The AID funded a string of newly created community centers known
as Centers for Health and Development, headed by the wealthy
businessman and Bazin colleague, Reginald Boulos. These Centers
were placed in charge of distributing AID-donated food and charitable
goods, and were criticized by popular groups as outlets intended to
replace the grassroots neighborhood councils and as vehicles for "getout-
the-vote" and other "civic" campaigns in future elections.134

The 1994 US invasion: reinforcing political society as an instrument of the elite

In analytical abstraction, what unfolded in Haiti between 1991 and
1994 was an all-sided war of attrition against the Haitian people,
attuned to the unique context of Haiti. US diplomacy and economic,
political, and military aid, the transnational communications media,
continued economic activity by transnational capital inside Haiti, the
Haitian state, the elite, and the military regime, all converged. The
complete dilution of the formal power of the popular Haitian majority
within the state (both during Aristide's tenure and after his ouster) was
being accompanied by the neutralization through repression of the
capacity of this majority to mobilize in civil society in pursuit of its
interests. The interim status quo could not be sustained because it
failed to meet the two requirements of legitimacy and being a basis for
long-term stability. Apart from intentionality on the part of individual
actors, public pronouncements made by US officials, and even specific
policy actions (none of which should be seen as underlying causal or
explanatory factors in historical outcomes), the historical outcome was
moving precisely towards that which met the interests of the United
States and the Haitian elite: the defeat of a project of popular democracy
in Haiti. By mid-1994 either a return of Aristide or his permanent
exile looked like creating a no-win situation for popular democracy in
Haiti.

The October 1994 invasion was intended to place back on track the
decade-long effort to stabilize elite polyarchic rule in Haiti, once the
military interlude had thoroughly transfigured the political, social, and
economic variables, internally and internationally, to the point where
Washington could resume this effort even with Aristide in the presidency.
135From the coup until mid-1994, US policy failed to persuade
the coup-leaders to step down because it was not designed to do so.
During this period, US strategists began to fathom just how difficult it
would be to carry through the transnational project for Haiti. The
undertaking would be very long term and policy goals would have to
be gauged over a period of many years. Policymakers set about to
devise a long-term strategy to achieve lasting results, independent of
how the short-term crisis was resolved. "Hope for quick breakthroughs
is being revised to consider a longer-term process of institution
building," noted one US official in 1993. "This is the central political/
economic context for the US-Haitian relationship in the 1990s. US
policy response needs to address both the complexity of the underlying
problems and the relatively long time frame for achieving results."136
In a redefined time-frame, Aristide's return under controlled conditions
became a requirement of resuming the overall project. The postcoup
strategy was unsuccessful in legitimizing an alternative to
Aristide, while the Haitian elite and military rulers proved utterly
intransigent regarding his return. The transnational elite had begun to
play Aristide's return as their "stability card." "We in the US have
misunderstood the Aristide question, which isn't an issue of the evil
military versus the good Mr. Aristide," stated the president of the
International Industrial Exporters Inc., a major transnational contracting
firm operating in Haiti. "Mr. Aristide isn't any more the
answer to Haiti's problems than is the military. But his return to power
is worth the cost of the US military incursion if it fosters a resumption
of free trade and the sale of US goods and services."137 The road to
stability in Haiti necessarily passed through Aristide.

After undertaking a policy reassessment in May 1994, the Clinton
administration imposed effective economic sanctions for the first time,
which finally squeezed the elite, and utilized the threat of a military
action as a high-risk gamble in coercive diplomacy. These measures
were intended to apply pressure on the elite to compromise with
Aristide in a "power-sharing" arrangement in the short term to get the
US policy back on track in the medium and long term. The threat of an
invasion was at first intended to be only that - a threat. But once the
threat was made without the intended effect on Port-au-Prince, Washington
ran the risk of losing credibility if it did not follow through,
US options began to dwindle, and a foreign-policy crisis developed.
The economic squeeze and diplomatic momentum leading up to the
invasion, and the invasion itself, drove a wedge between the elite and
the military, and convinced enough of the elite of the need for
Aristide's return to establish a solid elite base of support for the
invasion. As with the military interlude, policymakers incorporated the
invasion, once the plans were drawn up, into the larger, long-term
strategy as a powerful instrument to further overall goals in Haiti.

True to the original script, Aristide returned as a largely lame-duck
president required constitutionally to step down after elections scheduled
for December 1995, having spent the vast majority of his presidency
in exile. And by having been returned to office by US marines,
he was beholden to the very same foreign power that had consistently
sought to defuse the popular project he led. The Lavalas movement
was forced to accept the piper of US military intervention, thus leaving
policymakers in a much stronger position to call the Lavalas movement's
- and the country's - political tune. The jubiliation expressed by
Haitian masses as they took to the streets to welcome the invading
marines reflected a momentary and tactical convergence between
Haiti's popular majority and US policymakers almost identical to those
between the Haitian army and the people, and the Philippine army
and the people, in the immediate aftermath of those dictators' departures.
The invasion had the image of a clash between a liberating
foreign force and a corrupt local ruling class, hut it was the sealing of a
long-term pact between that foreign force and the Haitian elite.

At all times, the focus of invasion itself was to control the Haitian
population during the brief power vacuum following the the departure
of the military regime. If the military were to fall before US forces and
programs were in place, said one US army psychological operations
official, "the people might get the idea that they can do whatever they
want."l38 For this purpose, Jimmy Carter led a delegation in advance
of the invasion to work out with Cedras what in military parlance is a
"permissive entry." The Carter-eedras deal called for a "peaceful,
cooperative entry of international forces into Haiti, with a mutual
respect between the American commanders and the Haitian military
commanders."139 The essence of the deal, stated Secretary of State
Warren Christopher, was twofold: (1) to keep Cedras in power until
October 15, the date Aristide was to return under US military escort,
while the US occupation force was "inserted," and (2) to ensure that "a
general amnesty will be voted into law by the Haitian Parliament."140

The goal was to separate the Aristide government from the popular
movement, and to thoroughly penetrate, take control of, and reorganize
Haitian political society, and elites operating therein, through
massive new US economic, political, and military aid programs that
would inundate the country under the canopy of the occupation and
the legitimacy afforded to these programs by Aristide's return. "The
task," said one AID report, was to "substantially transform the nature
of the Haitian state."141Post-invasion economic reconstruction aid was
a powerful instrument in class restructuring, encouraging the formation
and ascendance to internal leadership over the elite of the
transnationalized fraction, whittling away at remnants of crony capitalism,
and constructing a neo-liberal state. A month before the invasion
at a meeting in Paris between the Aristide transition team and
representatives from the AID, the World Bank, the IMF, and other
mulitlateral, bilateral, and private lenders, a five-year $1.2 billion
multilateral and bilateral (mostly US) aid package for Haiti was
approved. As in Nicaragua, the vast part of these monies was to go to
paying the country's foreign debt arrears, to strengthening the private
sector, and financing infrastructure and other amenities for foreign
investors. Most of the funds would bypass the Haitian government
itself and instead be handled directly by the AID and the private
sector.142

Conditions for the disbursal of these international resources were
many times more stringent than in the pre-coup period, and in the
completely redefined environment the Aristide government could not
hope to resist outside impositions. It called for across-the-board neoliberal
restructuring, including privatization, trade liberalization, the
lifiting of price and other controls, the reduction of public-sector
employment by 50 percent, a further contraction of already pitiful
social service spending, a commitment not to raise the daily minimum
wage, and so forth. The international funders expected to see "a
government of reconciliation" [read: power-sharing between Aristide's
team and the elite) that could "guarantee stability and a sound
economic environment," said one official at the meeting.143 Even the
most mild reforms it had proposed before the coup were absent from
the Aristide government's post-invasion social and economic policies.
"You have to understand, the world has changed in these three years,"
said Aristide official Father Antoine Adrien. "What was good in 1991
is not necessarily good in 1994."144Adrien was, in effect, acknowledging
the tremendous advance made in reinforcing political society as
an instrument of the elite as a result of the military interlude, the
invasion, and the conditions attendant upon Aristide's return. His
comment expressed the Aristide team's decision - taken under overwhelming
constraints and limited options - to abandon pre-coup plans
to try to transform political society to conform to popular hegemony
won by the masses in civil society.

In the weeks following the invasion, personnel from the Pentagon,
the AID, the USIA, the Treasury, and other agencies organized into a
"Civic Affairs Ministerial Advisory Team," fanned out to virtually all
government ministries as "advisers" to the restored government, in an
almost instant penetration of the Haitian state for the purpose of, in the
words of one US official, achieving "the full merging of their [the
ministries'] plans with AID."145The invasion itself acted structurally
and economically to strengthen the technocratic fraction of the elite.
Leaders of the fraction quickly moved into formal institutional positions
in the ministries or into the leadership of the countless programs set up
by the occupation forces. Held to ransom by the conditions attendant
upon his restoration, Aristide turned over key cabinets and areas of the
Haitian state to the tiny transnational kernel, including the central
bank, the ministries of commerce, public administration, public works,
and the treasury, as well as the prime ministership itself, which was
given to Smarck Michel, a prominent businessman and leading representative
of the fraction.146"Businessmen [had) been clamoring for a
prime minister able to oversee a new economic plan acceptable to the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and top business leaders
here," reported the New York Times upon Michel's appointment, adding
that the program enunciated by Michel "reads like an IMF primer."147

Placed into key posts from which it could implement policies
formulated in transnational forums abroad and in private-sector policy
planning institutes and elite clearing-houses set up inside Haiti by US
political aid programs, the embryonic kernel became a transmission
belt through which the transnational agenda would be imposed on
Haiti via key organs of the Haitian state. All this achieved a hastened
externalization of the state and subordinate linkage to emergent
transnational state apparatuses - a process which had not been able to
go forward, despite US efforts, either under the earlier authoritarian
regimes or the pre-coup Aristide tenure. According to this script, the
restored government, held ransom by a transnational elite and its
structural and direct (political-military) power, would bear all the
political cost of neo-liberalism and see its own legitimacy eroded,
while a transnational kernel would be quietly cultivated under the
shield of the popular government itself.

According to the plan, political society would still remain shielded
by a coercive apparatus, which was to be preserved and reorganized,
first through the Carter-eedras deal and the subsequent amnesty for
the military, and second, by submitting the unwieldy Haitian army to
the "Panama model." The plan was to reduce the army from 7,000 to
1,500 troops, and to create a civilian police force of about 7,000 officers
(many simply transferred from the old army to the new police) to
handle internal "law and order." Military "retraining" was launched
by the US government's International Criminal Investigations Training
and Assistance Program (ICITAP).The ICITAP was created in 1986 "to
fortify the development of emerging democracies in the Western Hemisphere,"
run by the Justice and State Departments, and staffed by the
FBI and diverse local and federal US police agencies, as part of the
development of a transnationalized "democracy promotion" apparatus
within the US state,148 The new Haitian police force was to be
subordinate to elite-US authority, not as prone to indiscriminate
violence, and better versed in focused surveillance, selective repression,
and more "benign" methods of control over popular mobilization.
Aristide himself called for the constitutional elimination of the army, a
plan which, at the time of writing (mid-1995) was strongly opposed by
the elite and Washington. Even if the army was formally abolished, a
"Panama model" police force would be an adequate instrument of
coercive social control in defense of a legal order which sanctified and
codified the juridical relations of the existing social order, including its
property relations.

New political aid programs were launched almost immediately
following the invasion and dwarfed in relative size and scope anything
that had been implemented earlier - in Haiti or in any other country of
the world. Up to $85 million in "Democracy Enhancement" and
"Democratic Governance" programs was allocated to expand earlier
NED and AID programs with civic and political groups, to create and
support a slew of new groups, to an "Institution-Building Initiative," a
"Social Reconciliation and Democratic Development" program, an
"Electoral Assistance" project, and so on.I49While the Aristide government
struggled to maintain some influence over the military plank of
the US post-invasion plan, it practically gave up any attempt to resist
these political intervention programs. "We really can't fight this huge
machine," said a transition team member. ISOUS Deputy Secretary of
State Strobe Talbott was more to the point: "Even after our exit in
February 1996 we will remain in charge by means of the USAID and
the private sector." [151]

Conclusion: the failure to establish consensual domination in Haiti

No social order can sustain itself indefinitely on the foundation of
organized state power. As Gramsci argued, the inclination of dominant
groups to revert to repression and violence is a sign not of strength but
of weakness. Despite the complete penetration and capture of political
society it achieved, the US reliance on the military regime for three
years to carry forward the project, and the invasion as the US evocation
of organized transnational force, were paradoxical signs of the protracted
failure of the US-transnational project in Haiti.

In the revised "long-haul" strategy, the capture of political society
was to provide a trampoline for the gradual and incremental pacification
of civil society through political intervention. The plan called for
dividing the Lavalas coalition, according to one AID memo, by
weaning away and winning over "responsible elements within the
popular movement."152The objective was to transform Lavalas from a
mass popular-left bloc that united middle and professional strata with
the poor majority, into a center-to-Ieft bloc that would incorporate
those same middle and professional strata along with a portion of the
poor, under the leadership of an embryonic transnational kernel. This
new hegemonic bloc would gradually dilute the original Lavalas
project of its popular content. If enough of the mass base could be
coopted into this bloc, then a "center" could cohere, and grassroot
leaders unwilling to abandon the project of popular democracy would
be marginalized politically and ideologically rather than by repression.

But the Haitian masses remained the wild card in the deck. If US
political intervention specialists could not exorcize the culture of
authoritarianism and clientelism from the elite, neither could they
exorcize what had become a deep-rooted culture of resistance among the
poor majority. Emboldened by the removal of the military regime,
Haitians resumed their struggle for popular democracy following the
invasion. Thousands of grassroot leaders came out of hiding, rural and
urban networks were rearticulated and re:::tctivated,and civil society
again became a beehive of popular organizing, intensely resistant to
US-elite penetration and control. Despite the tens of millions of dollars
that poured in following the invasion to organize anti-Lavalas constituencies
and candidates, Lavalas and independent candidates representing
grassroot organizations swept the 1995 parliamentary and
local elections, throwing a new monkey wrench into the gears of the
US project, to the frustration and chagrin of US officials. Without
conquering civil society, the elite project for hegemonic order in Haiti
would remain elusive and the crisis of authority would continue.

On the other hand, the popular classes would never be able to
realize their own project of popular democracy without conquering
and transforming the state. Some in the Lavalas movement criticized
Aristide and his administration for confusing the "fluke" of the 1990
electoral victory with the possibility of bringing about fundamental
changes in the social order through the elite-oriented political structures
set up by the US-sponsored "transition to democracy," and
argued that basic social change could only be brought about by the
same mass mobilization that brought Duvalier down. "Rather than
judging his electoral victory as a fluke, Aristide has tried to universalize
the tactic into a political strategy of trying to beat the system at its
own game," argued one Haitian analyst. "The question: has the US
government lured Aristide into a new, hopelessly rigged game by
letting him think he can win again?"153

Not surprisingly, the dilemmas faced by the popular sectors following
the coup led to increasing infighting and fissures under the
Lavalas umbrella and, after the invasion, to formal splits. The middle
and professional strata that contributed the core of the institutionalized
FNDC leadership and occupied posts in the legislature and the govern
ment (what some critics called the "Lavalas bourgeoisie") had begun
to operate within the logic of polyarchy and in defense of privilege.
Unable or unwilling to commit what Amilcar Cabral referred to as
"class suicide," they began to distance themselves from the Lavalas
mass base and popular leadership even before the military interlude.l54
Following the invasion, popular sectors created the Lavalas Political
Organization (OPL). Instead of joining the OPL, many from the
"Lavalas bourgeoisie" chose to remain in the FNDC and the earlier
KONAKOM organization, which became formal parties of their own,
and even incipient power-bases for ambitious middle-class leaders to
participate in polyarchic competition. This gradual fragmentation of
Lavalas should be seen within the theoretical argument made in
chapter 1 that democratization movements usually become transformed
from majoritarian social struggles to class struggles once the
polarizing conditions of a disintegrating authoritarianism give way to
more complex and multidimensional struggles over the nature and
reach of the democratization process. The further popular classes push
the process, the more dominant classes, elites, and privileged strata
taper off, fall out of the movement, and even become opponents.

The Haiti case demonstrates the contradictions between polyarchy
and popular democracy. "In attempting to bring his Lavalas movement
into government, Aristide confronted state institutions that had
always represented the power of wealth, privilege, and violence,"
noted Haitian sociologist and Aristide official Jean Casimir, referring to
Aristide's pre-coup period in office. "In such an environment, politics
was a difficult enterprise... The accountability that the population
demands has irritated many elected officials, even some of Aristide's
supporters [the "Lavalas bourgeoisie"]... The Haitian parliament
represent[ed] a cross section of the intelligentsia, not simply the
traditional elites that previously controlled the state machinery ...
These parliamentary representatives tend[ed] to operate according to
the conventions of the formal political system."155 But when the
popular majority used its mobilizing capacity to try to force the state to
respond to its interest - in conformity with the model of popular
democracy, which posits a state subordinated to and controlled by
majorities who have gained hegemony in civil society - then this
majority lost its legitimacy (outside of Haiti) because it transgressed
the procedures of "representative democracy," In early August 1991,
the parliament began to consider a vote of no confidence against
Aristide's appointed prime minister, Rene Preval. Believing that oppo-
sition to the prime minister was an attempt to usurp Aristide's
mandate, angry Lavalas crowds surrounded the parliament, assaulted
two legislators and threatened several others. At the technical level, the
legislators, and not Haiti's popular masses, were acting "legally" and
"constitutionally." The "harassment" of the parliament by "mobs"
was the initial event which precipitated the internal crisis culminating
in the coup d'etat.

A breach in the constitutional procedures of polyarchy in the
interests of popular democratization and basic social change required
moving beyond the legitimizing parameters of low-intensity democracy.
Aristide recognized as much on the eve of his overthrow,
declaring: "This is a political revolution, but it's not a social revolution.
Now we are trying to achieve a social revolution. If we don't do that,
the political revolution will not go anywhere."156 (For such comments,
he would later be accused of bringing on his own downfall.) "It is not
really that Aristide advanced too rapidly or not rapidly enough in his
reform project," noted Casimir. "Rather, the project itself - built
around the enfranchising of the oppressed in Haiti - inevitably
produced a reaction."157 Low-intensity democracy served well as an
instrument to contain, within the parameters of the existing social
order, the demands of subordinate majorities. The efforts of this
popular majority to transform society in its interests, once its representative
won the presidency, ran up against polyarchy's "constitutional"
limitations. It was no wonder that the Democracy Enhancement Project
placed so much emphasis on strengthening legislative and other
"constitutional structures." When the Haitian masses attempted to
transgress these formal structures, whose levers were still controlled by
an elite unresponsive - indeed, antagonistic - to the demands of the
majority, their actions were brandished as "anti-democratic" and
extra-legal ("mob rule" became the buzzword) - and could be delegitimized,
less within Haiti than at the international level. And in the era
of the transnationalization of political systems, each nation requires for
its survival that its internal political system be legitimized in the
international arena (said legitimization deriving from functioning polyarchy).

This, in turn, underscores another theoretical point: effective hegemony
is won by a bloc which conquers both civil society and the state.
Either control of the state alone, or dominance in civil society alone, is
not sufficient to construct a stable hegemonic bloc. As Casimir noted,
"Haiti is really the juxtaposition of two societies, one forced to live
without the state, even against the state, and one that is associated
with the state machinery ... This manifestation of anarchism in the
proper meaning of the word - a society that previously had not known
the state and that suddenly lays its hands upon the state apparatus -
has threatened entrenched interests in Haiti and confused other
countries in the region."158 This "confusion" goes a long way in
explaining endemic infighting in both the Bush and Clinton administrations
over Haiti policy and the see-saw diplomacy of officials from
Washington, from other hemispheric governments, and from international
organizations, during the 1991-1994 military interlude, as well
as the continued feeling of frustration and disorientation experienced
by US officials after the invasion. The underlying point is that
hegemony, whether it is exercised by dominant minority groups or
popular majorities, is not a viable form of rule unless the groups which
are to exercise their sovereignty control both the state and civil society.
Hegemonic rule is exercised in an extended state. Political and civil
society are, in Gramsci's Hegelian phrase, "moments" in the same
process. Yet in Haiti, the popular sectors could not wrest the state from
the elite, and the elite could not wrest civil society from the popular
sectors. Neither side could forge a viable hegemonic bloc within the
country.159

Relatedly, Haiti demonstrates that the transnational elite project of
establishing polyarchy and neo-liberalism, under conditions such as
those presented in Haiti, runs up against the struggle for popular
democratization and fundamental change in the social order. The
impossibility of stabilizing the transnational project in Haiti in the
short to mid-term forced the US to deny legitimacy to the different
post-coup regimes and to continue conferring legitimacy upon Aristide
right up until 1995. Moreover, polyarchy, or consensual domination,
requires a bourgeoisie that formulates a political discourse on the basis
of an economic foundation of capital accumulation. Such accumulation
was historically absent among the Haitian "merchant bourgeoisie" and
presented a weak, dysfunctional basis upon which to try and implant
polyarchy. This, in turn, leads back to the issue raised in chapter 1, and
which I touch on in the concluding chapter: the relationship between
democracy and capitalism, or democracy and modes of production.
Similarly, despite three years of intense repression followed by a
dramatic escalation of internal political intervention after the invasion,
the popular classes could not be stamped out or coopted. The military
interlude and the invasion solidly clenched political society for the
transnational elite, but did little to overcome the historic disjuncture
between political and civil society. The prospect in 1995 for achieving
anything closely resembling a hegemonic bloc in Haiti under a
polyarchic elite was close to nil. The Haitian people have proved deftly
intelligent in their own collective mass actions, and there is no evidence
to conclude they will be pacified into consensual domination. "State
against nation" could, at best, lend itself to a highly transient and
unstable standoff, and at worst, to new cycles of Caesarism. Thus we
see in Haiti contradictions internal to the transnational elite project
which the new political intervention, as an instrument to facilitate that
project, is unable to overcome. The pro-Aristide slogan which gained
popularity after the coup, "democracy or death," was highly instructive:
the Haitian downtrodden majority had appropriated the legitimizing
symbols and discourse of the transnational elite project.
Ongoing crisis is the most likely forecast in the complex Haitian
scenario.

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