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Title: Democracy Enhancement
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: May-August, 1994
Language: en
Topics: democracy, US foreign interventions, Haiti
Source: Retrieved on 19th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199408__/
Notes: Published in Z Magazine.

Noam Chomsky

Democracy Enhancement

Part I

May, 1994

We are approaching the five-year mark since the fall of the Berlin wall,

which marked the definitive end of the Cold War. At last the United

States was freed from the burden of defending the world against Russian

aggression and could return to its traditional calling: to promote

democracy, human rights, and free markets worldwide. Standard doctrine

holds further that the promise has been fulfilled. Today “American

motives are largely humanitarian,” historian David Fromkin declares in

the New York Times Magazine. The present danger is excess of

benevolence; we might undertake yet another selfless mission of mercy,

failing to understand that “there are limits to what outsiders can do”

and that “the armies we dispatch to foreign soil for humanitarian

reasons” may not be able “to save people from others or from

themselves.”

The view is shared by the leading establishment critic of Cold War

policies, George Kennan, who writes that it was a historic error for the

US to reject any effort to negotiate a peaceful settlement of conflicts

with the Russians for 40 years; one of the benefits of the end of the

Cold War is that the clouds are finally lifting on these issues. Kennan

too counsels that we restrict our foreign engagements. We must bear in

mind that “it is primarily by example, never by precept, that a country

such as ours exerts the most useful influence beyond its border”;

countries unlike ours may undertake the grubbier pursuits. We must also

remember “that there are limits to what one sovereign country can do to

help another,” even “a country such as ours.” Others question that

stance on the grounds that it is unfair to deprive suffering humanity of

our attention, necessarily benevolent.[1]

To qualify for membership in respectable society, one must appreciate a

simple thesis: we are perfect. Therefore we need only ask what is the

right course for a saintly power, how best we may proceed to “save

people from others or from themselves” — not from us, surely. The tune

is, in fact, a very familiar one, an interesting topic for some other

time.

Like earlier angelic powers, we are able to recognize that there are

some flaws and errors in the record. But the sophisticated understand

that history can teach no lessons about our institutions and the ways

they have functioned, surely nothing about what may lie ahead. Review of

the historical record is nothing more than “sound-bites and invectives

about Washington’s historically evil foreign policy,” Brown University

professor Thomas Weiss writes with derision, hence “easy to ignore.”[2]

A perceptive comment, accurately discerning the most valued principles

of the commissar culture.

Discussion of the fashionable topic of the moral obligation of

humanitarian intervention — not a trivial question — is rarely tainted

by concerns about such matters. We do not, of course, counsel that Iran

should undertake humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, as it has offered

to do. Why? Because of its record and the nature of its institutions. In

the case of Iran — or anyone else — inquiry into these questions is

appropriate. But not for us, given our necessary perfection.

It follows that any departures from the path of righteousness can only

have been a reaction — perhaps excessive, though understandable — to

terrible dangers from which we defended ourselves, and more recently,

the entire civilized world. The Cold War provides the favored current

formula: any lapse in recent years is attributable to the cosmic

struggle with the Russians. Thus if experimental subjects for radiation

studies were chosen from Boston’s Fernald School for mentally retarded

children, not an elite prep school, that was unfortunate, but

understandable in the atmosphere of the Cold War, so it is alleged —

about as plausibly as in most other cases. And we have now “changed

course,” so that history may rest in peace.

At the critical extreme, we do find occasional notice of imperfection.

“There’s something troubling about the way we select our cases for

intervention,” Harvard historian Stanley Hoffmann observed in opening a

conference at Tufts university. He noted that there has been no

“international cry to intervene in ethnic bloodshed in East Timor,” the

Boston Globe reported. The example is instructive.[3]

Let us disregard the phrase “ethnic bloodshed,” not quite the term

applied to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq’s invasion of

Kuwait. That aside, some obvious questions come to mind: just who might

call for such intervention, and how should it proceed? By bombing

Washington and London, the main supporters of Indonesia’s aggression and

mass slaughter? Suppose that a commentator in pre-Gorbachev Russia had

found something troubling about Soviet intervention policy, wondering

why Russia did not intervene to prevent the imposition of martial law in

Poland or repression in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Would we even laugh?

How could Moscow intervene to bar the policies it actively supported?

These questions cannot arise, however, in our case, whatever the facts,

given our perfection. No one laughs.

Respectable British opinion is scarcely different. Writing in the

(London) Times Higher Education Supplement, Leslie Macfarlane, emeritus

politics fellow at St. John’s College in Oxford, recognizes that the US

and UK, “to their shame, failed to put pressure on President Suharto to

refrain from invasion” of East Timor. But the 200,000 or more deaths

“cannot be attributed to ‘the West’,” he adds, reproaching Edward Herman

for his calculations of the costs of Western state terrorism which

erroneously included this case: no “Western promotion or support for the

invasion and pacification of East Timor in the early 1980s [sic] is laid

at the West’s door,” Macfarlane instructs us with proper indignation.[4]

There is no need to review the facts, familiar outside of the doctrinal

system, which not only suppressed them with great efficiency as the

terrible story unfolded but continues to do so today. Right now, Western

oil companies are plundering East Timor’s oil under a treaty between

Australia and Indonesia, terror and repression continue unabated, and

new atrocities have been discovered from the very recent past, among

them, the slaughter of many people by Indonesian doctors in hospitals

after the November 1991 Dili massacre. But we must understand that the

news room is a busy place, and some things inevitably seep through the

cracks — in a remarkably systematic way. Who can be expected to notice

prominent stories in the British and Australian press, including even

the Guardian Weekly, widely circulated here? One wonders whether the

news room would have been too busy to notice Libyan robbery of Kuwaiti

oil under a treaty with Saddam Hussein, after he had occupied and

annexed the country.[5]

In the United States, public protest has hampered government support for

Indonesian atrocities, but not much. Congress cut off funds for military

training, but the Clinton Administration was undeterred. On the

anniversary of the US-backed Indonesian invasion, the State Department

announced that “Congress’s action did not ban Indonesia’s purchase of

training with its own funds,” so it can proceed despite the ban. Such

training has, after all, been quite successful in the past, including

the training of officers who took part in the highly praised slaughter

of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, as the

present government took power in 1965. Secretary of Defense Robert

McNamara took particular pride in that fact, informing LBJ that US

military assistance to the Indonesian army had “encouraged it” to

undertake the useful slaughter “when the opportunity was presented.”

Particularly valuable, McNamara said, was the program that brought

Indonesian military personnel to the United States for training at

universities. Congress agreed, noting the “enormous dividends” of US

military training of the killers and continued communication with them.

The same training expedited the war crimes in Timor, and much else.[6]

Plainly, it would be unfair to deprive the people of the region of such

benefits. That is exactly the position taken by advocates of US military

training, for example Senator Bennett Johnson. His evidence is a quote

from the Commander of the US forces in the Pacific, Admiral Larson, who

explains that “by studying in our schools,” Indonesian army officers

“gain an appreciation for our value system, specifically respect for

human rights, adherence to democratic principles, and the rule of law.”

For similar reasons, we must allow arms sales to Indonesia, so that we

can continue to have a constructive “dialogue” and maintain our

“leverage and influence,” so benignly exercised in the past, much as in

Latin America, Haiti, the Philippines, and other places where US

training has instilled such admirable respect for human rights.[7]

1. Defending Human Rights

With the support of Senate Democrats, the Administration was also able

to block human rights conditions on aid to Indonesia. Trade

Representative Mickey Kantor announced further that Washington would

“suspend” its annual review of Indonesian labor practices. Agreeing with

Senator Bennett, who is impressed by “the steps Indonesia has taken…to

improve conditions for workers in Indonesia,” Kantor commended Indonesia

for “bringing its labor law and practice into closer conformity with

international standards” — a witticism that is in particularly poor

taste, though it must be conceded that Indonesia did take some steps

forward, fearing that Congress might override its friends in the White

House. “Reforms hastily pushed through by the Indonesian government in

recent months include withdrawing the authority of the military to

intervene in strikes, allowing workers to form a company union to

negotiate labour contracts, and raising the minimum wage in Jakarta by

27%” to about $2 a day, the London Guardian reports. The new company

unions that are magnanimously authorized must, to be sure, join the

All-Indonesia Labor Union, the state-run union. To ensure that these

promising advances toward international labor standards would not be

misunderstood, authorities also arrested 21 labor activists.

“We have done much to change and improve,” Indonesia’s Foreign Minister

said, “so according to us there is no reason to revoke” the trade

privileges. Clinton liberals evidently agree.[8]

One effect of the activism of the 1960s was the pressure on Congress to

impose human rights conditions on aid, trade, and military sales. Every

Administration from Carter until today has had to seek ways to evade

such constraints. In the 1980s, it became a sick joke, as the Reaganites

regularly assured Congress (always happy to be “deceived”) that its

favorite assassins and torturers were making impressive progress.

Clinton is forging no new paths with his Indonesia chicanery.

Other tasks are proving harder, however, notably China, which must have

its Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status renewed by June. As I’ve

reviewed in earlier articles, China is not giving poor Clinton much help

in his endeavor to bypass the executive order that he issued imposing

human rights conditions — in “fear that Congressional Democrats might

otherwise have forced an even more stringent approach” through

legislation, Thomas Friedman reports in the New York Times, and because

Clinton “did not want to appear to be going back on another campaign

promise,” having “strongly criticized President Bush for ‘coddling’

China.”[9]

The problem arose again as Warren Christopher visited Beijing in March

to express Washington’s concerns on human rights, which, the State

Department hastened to explain, are quite limited — in fact, limited to

finding means to evade Congressional pressures. John Shattuck, US

assistant secretary of human rights, clarified to the Chinese leaders

that Clinton’s requirements for improvement are “very narrow,” that

pledges of progress may be enough: “What the president is looking for is

an indication of direction…that is generally forward looking.” Please,

please, give us some straw, so that we can respond to the needs of our

constituency in the corporate sector. The Chinese, however, seem to

enjoy watching their partners twist in the wind.[10]

As Christopher left for China, the Administration announced that it

would once again relax the sanctions on high technology transfers, this

time by allowing the Hughes Aircraft Company to launch a satellite from

China. This “gesture of good will toward Beijing” is one “part of the

strategy to engage China rather than to isolate it,” Elaine Sciolino

reported in the New York Times. Asked about this decision while China is

under pressure on issues of missile proliferation and human rights,

Christopher responded that it “simply sends a signal of even-handed

treatment.” The “good will gesture,” as usual, is directed towards a

leading segment of the publicly subsidized “private enterprise” system,

much like the “good-will gestures” announced at the Asia-Pacific summit

last November, which allowed China to purchase supercomputers, nuclear

power generators, and satellites despite their adaptability to weapons

and missile proliferation. The Pentagon also sent high officials with

Christopher “to discuss ways to upgrade the two countries’ military

relationship,” Sciolino reported, another part of the “strategy.”[11]

Christopher did not return empty-handed. At a White House session,

Thomas Friedman reports, he “presented a chart…showing that on many

fronts China was making some progress toward meeting the terms of the

President’s executive order, but that forward movement had been obscured

by the confrontational atmosphere of his visit.” On leaving Beijing, he

had stated that his discussions with the Chinese leaders were

“businesslike and productive.” “The differences between China and the US

are narrowing somewhat,” Christopher informed the press, though he “was

hard put to point to examples of specific progress on the vexed human

rights issue beyond a memorandum of understanding on trade in prison

labour products,” the London Financial Times commented. China did (once

again) agree to restrict exports from prison factories to the United

States.[12]

Such exports have greatly exercised Washington and the press, the sole

labor rights issue to have achieved this status. “U.S. Inspections of

Jail Exports Likely in China,” a front-page story by Thomas Friedman was

headlined in the New York Times in January. The Chinese “agreed to a

demand to allow more visits by American customs inspectors to Chinese

prison factories to make sure they are not producing goods for export to

the United States,” he reported from Beijing. US influence is having

further benign effects, “forcing liberalization, factory by factory,”

including contract, bankruptcy, and other laws that are “critical

elements of a market economy,” all welcome steps towards a “virtuous

circle.”

Unmentioned are a few other questions about economic virtue: horrifying

labor conditions, for example. Perhaps the case of 81 women burned to

death locked into their factory last November, which merited a few lines

in the national press in the midst of much euphoria about Clinton’s

grand vision of a free market future in the Asia-Pacific region. Or 60

workers killed in a fire a few weeks later in another foreign-owned

factory. Or the doubling of deaths in industrial accidents last year,

with over 11,000 just in the first eight months. “Chinese officials and

analysts say the accidents stem from abysmal working conditions, which,

combined with long hours, inadequate pay, and even physical beatings,

are stirring unprecedented labor unrest among China’s booming foreign

joint ventures,” Sheila Tefft reported in the Christian Science Monitor.

That problem is a real one: “the tensions reveal the great gap between

competitive foreign capitalists lured by cheap Chinese labor and workers

weaned on socialist job security and the safety net of cradle-to-grave

benefits.” Workers do not yet understand that in the capitalist utopia

we are preparing for them, they are to be “beaten for producing poor

quality goods, fired for dozing on the job during long work hours” and

other such misdeeds, and locked into their factories to be burned to

death. But we understand all of that, so China is not called to account

for violations of labor rights; only for exporting prison products to

the United States.[13]

Why the distinction? Simplicity itself. Prison factories are state-owned

industry, and exports to the US interfere with profits, unlike locking

women into factories, beating workers, and other such means to improve

the balance sheet. QED.

Accuracy requires a few qualifications. Thus, the rules allow the United

States to sell prison goods — for export: they are not permitted to

enter US markets. California and Oregon export prison-made clothing to

Asia, including specialty jeans, shirts, and a line of shorts quaintly

called “Prison Blues.” The prisoners earn far less than the minimum

wage, and work under “slave labor” conditions, prison rights activists

allege. But their products do not interfere with the rights that count,

so there is no problem here.[14]

The Clinton Administration “has been quietly signaling Beijing that if

it met Washington’s minimum human rights demands, the United States

would consider ending the annual threat of trade sanctions to change

China’s behavior,” Friedman reports. The reason is that the old human

rights policy imposed by Congressional (ultimately popular) pressures is

“outmoded and should be replaced.” This is a “major shift in policy

which reflects the increasing importance of trade to the American

economy.” The human rights policy “is also outmoded, other officials

argue, because trade is now such an important instrument for opening up

Chinese society, for promoting the rule of law and the freedom of

movement there, and for encouraging” private property.[15]

The hypocrisy is stunning, though hardly more than the “human rights”

policy that is now “outmoded,” which was always carefully crafted to

avoid endangering profits and to somehow “not see” huge atrocities

carried out by US clients under Washington’s sponsorship. Human rights

concerns have been a passion in the case of Nicaragua and Cuba,

subjected to crushing embargoes and terror. In such cases, trade is not

“an instrument” that induces good behavior. The criminals have to be

restored to their service role; if cynical posturing about human rights

contributes to that end, well and good. The same was true of the Soviet

empire, which also had to be returned to its traditional Third World

role, providing resources, investment opportunities, markets, cheap

labor, and other amenities, as it had for hundreds of years (an

essential feature of the Cold War since 1918, in the real world). Until

that end was achieved, trade was not “an instrument” to help lift the

chains. The same was true of China, until it began to open its doors to

foreign investment and control, offering wonderful opportunities for

profit — or in technical Newspeak, “jobs.”

2. Promoting Democracy

Our current vocation, as everyone knows, is promoting democracy. There

are many illuminating examples since the fall of the Berlin Wall freed

us from the Cold War burden.

The first, and one of the most revealing, is Nicaragua. Recall that just

as the Wall fell, the White House and Congress announced with great

clarity that unless Nicaraguans voted as we told them, the terrorist war

and the embargo that was strangling the country would continue.

Washington also voted (alone with Israel) against a UN General Assembly

resolution calling on it once again to observe international law and

call off these illegal actions; unthinkable of course, so the press

continued to observe its vow of silence. When Nicaraguans met their

obligations a few months later, joy was unrestrained. At the dissident

extreme, Anthony Lewis hailed Washington’s “experiment in peace and

democracy,” which gives “fresh testimony to the power of Jefferson’s

idea: government with the consent of the governed…. To say so seems

romantic, but then we live in a romantic age.” Across the spectrum there

was rejoicing over the latest of the “happy series of democratic

surprises,” as Time magazine expressed the uniform view while outlining

the methods used to achieve our Jeffersonian ideals: to “wreck the

economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted

natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves,” with a cost to us

that is “minimal,” leaving the victim “with wrecked bridges, sabotaged

power stations, and ruined farms,” and providing Washington’s candidate

with “a winning issue,” ending the “impoverishment of the people of

Nicaragua.”

It would be hard to imagine a more conclusive demonstration of the

understanding of “democracy” in the dominant political and intellectual

culture. It is inconceivable that the clear and unmistakeable meaning of

any of this should enter the respectable culture, or probably even

history.[16]

That interesting story continues. On March 15, US assistant Secretary of

State Alexander Watson announced that “With the conflicts of the past

behind us, the Clinton administration accepts the Sandinistas as a

legitimate political force in Nicaragua with all the rights and

obligations of any party in a democracy supposing that it uses only

peaceful and legitimate methods,” as we did through the 1980s, setting

the stage for a “fair election,” by US standards. The brief Reuters

report noted that “the United States financed the Contra rebels against

the Soviet-backed Sandinista government.” Translating from Newspeak,

Washington followed standard procedure, doing everything it could to

compel Nicaragua to abandon its despicable efforts to maintain a

nonaligned stand and balanced trade and to turn to the Russians as a

last resort, so that Washington’s attack could be construed as part of

the Cold War conflict raging in our backyard, now to be dispatched to

the category of irrelevance for understanding ourselves, or what the

future holds.[17]

Washington’s willingness to accept the Sandinistas as a legitimate

political force, if they mind their manners, cannot claim the prize for

moral cowardice and depravity. That is still held by Washington’s

display of magnanimity towards the Vietnamese, now permitted to enter

the civilized world, their many crimes against us put to the side

(though not, of course, forgiven) once US business made it clear that

the pleasure of torturing our victims must give way to the more

important task of enrichment of the wealthy.

The next example of our post-Cold War passion for democracy was the

invasion of Panama a month after the Berlin Wall fell, the first

exercise of humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era.

Operation Just Cause may have served as a model for Saddam Hussein

shortly after, the cheering section now quietly concedes. Bush’s

greatest fear when Iraq invaded Kuwait seems to have been that Saddam

would mimic his achievement in Panama. According to the account of

Washington planning by investigative reporter Bob Woodward, regarded as

“generally convincing” by US government Middle East specialist William

Quandt, President Bush feared that the Saudis would “bug out at the last

minute and accept a puppet regime in Kuwait” after Iraqi withdrawal. His

advisers expected that Iraq would withdraw, leaving behind “lots of

Iraqi special forces in civilian clothes,” if not armed forces as the US

did in Panama, while taking over two uninhabited mudflats that had been

assigned to Kuwait in the British imperial settlement to block Iraq’s

access to the sea (Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf). Chief of Staff Gen. Colin

Powell warned that the status quo would be changed under the influence

of the aggressors even after withdrawal, again as in Panama.

In a highly-praised academic study regarded as the standard current work

of scholarship on this “textbook case of aggression” and the reaction to

it, University of London historians Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh,

who labor to present the US-UK effort in the most favorable possible

light, conclude that “Saddam apparently intended neither officially to

annex the tiny emirate nor to maintain a permanent military presence

there. Instead, he sought to establish hegemony over Kuwait, ensuring

its complete financial, political and strategic subservience to his

wishes,” much as intended by the US in Panama, and achieved. Saddam’s

scheme “turned sour,” they continue, because of the international

reaction; to translate to doctrinally unacceptable truth, because the US

and Britain did not follow their usual practice of vetoing or otherwise

nullifying the international reaction to such “textbook cases of

aggression” as US-South Vietnam, Turkey-Cyprus, Indonesia-East Timor,

Israel-Lebanon, US-Panama, and many others.[18]

Operation Just Cause was presented as a “textbook case” of Washington’s

dedication to democracy — quite accurately, as it turned out. In the

latest of its annual reports on human rights (January, 1994), Panama’s

governmental Human Rights Commission charged that the right to

self-determination and sovereignty of the Panamanian people continues to

be violated by the “state of occupation by a foreign army,” reviewing US

army, airforce, and DEA operations in Panama, including a DEA agent’s

assault on a Panamanian journalist and attacks on Panamanian citizens by

US military personnel. The nongovernmental Human Rights Commission, in

its accompanying report “Democracy and Human Rights in Panama…Four Years

Later” added that democracy has meant nothing more than formal voting

while government policies “do not attend to the necessities of the most

impoverished” — whose numbers have significantly increased since the

“liberation.” Within a year after the invasion, Latin Americanist

Stephen Ropp observes, Washington was well aware “that removing the

mantle of United States protection would quickly result in a civilian or

military overthrow of [President] Endara and his supporters”– that is,

the puppet regime of bankers, businessmen, and narcotraffickers

installed by the occupying army. “Drugs and their rewards are more

visible today than in General Noriega’s time,” the Economist reports in

March, including hard drugs. A senior employee of the Panama Branch of

Merrill Lynch was one of those recently caught in a DEA operation as

they were laundering Colombian cocaine cash through Panama’s large

financial industry, the one real economic success story of the

“occupation by a foreign army.” “All they were doing is what almost

every bank in Panama does,” a local investigative reporter commented.

All exactly as predicted when the troops landed to restore the mainly

white oligarchy to power and ensure US control over the strategically

important region and its financial institutions.

An election is scheduled for May. Far ahead in polls is Perez

Balladares, the candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD),

the party of populist dictator Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega.

Balladares was Noriega’s campaign manager for the 1989 election that

Noriega stole, causing much outrage in the US because he was no longer

following Washington’s orders; when he was still a “good boy” in 1984,

he was lauded by Reagan, Shultz, et al. for stealing the election with

considerably greater fraud and violence. Balladares has learned his

lessons and should cause no problems.[19]

Other exercises of “democracy enhancement” in the region proceed on

course. In November 1993, Hondurans went to the polls for the fourth

time since 1980. They voted against the neoliberal structural adjustment

programs that have had the usual consequences. But the gesture is empty;

the rich and powerful will permit nothing else. “The voters have no real

options for improving their living standards which worsen every day,”

Mexico’s major newspaper Excelsior reported — familiar with “economic

miracles” in its own country. Three-fourths of those who went to the

polls “live in misery and are disenchanted with formal democracy.”

Hondurans’ purchasing power is lower than in the 1970s, before the gift

of “democracy” was granted by the United States while turning Honduras

into a military base for its war against Nicaragua and establishing more

firmly the rule of the generals. There are other beneficiaries, the

Honduran College of Economists points out: “a group of privileged

exporters and local investors linked to financial capital and

multinational corporations who have multiplied their capital” in a

country where “growing economic polarization is generating ever more

evident constrasts, between the rich who do not hide the ostentation of

their moral misery and the every more miserable poor.” “At least one of

every two dollars coming to Honduras has left in the last three years

[1991–93] to pay the interest on more than $3 billion foreign debt,”

Excelsior continues. Debt service now represents 40% of exports; and

though almost 20% of the debt was forgiven, it has increased by almost

10% since 1990.[20]

In March 1994, the “democracy enhancement” project reached El Salvador.

The elections conducted in the 1980s to legitimize the US-backed terror

state were hailed at the time as impressive steps towards democracy

(“demonstration elections,” as Edward Herman accurately called them).

But with the policy imperatives of those days gone, the pretense has

been quietly shelved. It is the 1994 elections that are to represent the

triumph of Washington’s dedication to democracy.

The elections are indeed an innovation in that at least the forms were

maintained, pretty much. “Tens of thousands of voters who had electoral

cards were unable to vote because they did not appear on electoral

lists,” the Financial Times reported, “while some 74,000 people, a high

number of which were from areas believed to be sympathetic to the FMLN,

were excluded because they did not have birth certificates.” FMLN

leaders alleged that more than 300,000 voters were excluded in such

ways, charging “massive” fraud. The left coalition presidential

candidate Ruben Zamora estimated “conservatively” that over 10% of

voters were barred. The UN mission downplayed the problems, but

independent observers were not convinced. “I used to give them the

benefit of the doubt,” the official British observer commented, “but it

comes to the point when you have to say it is bad faith,” referring to

the “bad administration” of the election by the governing ARENA party,

which received almost half the votes cast, and the UN mission

reaction.[21]

But the irregularities, whatever they may have been, do not change the

fact that the elections broke new ground at a formal level. There was no

blatant fraud or massive terror; rather, minor fraud against the

background of the successful use of terror and repression, with a narrow

aspect that received some attention, and a broader and more significant

one that did not.

In the 1994 elections, the US naturally supported ARENA, the party of

the death squads, a fact understood throughout though denied for

propaganda reasons. Partial declassification of documents has revealed

that much. It also illustrates once again why documents are classified

in the first place: not for security reasons, as alleged, but to

undermine American democracy by protecting state power from popular

scrutiny. In February 1985 the CIA reported that “behind ARENA’s

legitimate exterior lies a terrorist network led by D’Aubuisson and

funded by wealthy Salvadoran expatriates residing in Guatemala and the

United States,” using “both active-duty and retired military personnel

in their campaigns”; “death squads in the armed forces operate out of

both urban military headquarters and rural outposts.” The main death

squad, the “Secret Anti-Communist Army,” was described by the CIA as the

“paramilitary organization” of ARENA, led by the Constituent Assembly

security chief and drawing most of its members from the National Police

and other security forces. The military and police themselves, of

course, were the major terrorist forces, carrying out the great mass of

the atrocities against the civilian population, funded directly from

Washington, which was also responsible for their training and

direction.[22]

As the 1994 elections approached, there was a “resurgence in death

squad-style murders and death threats,” Americas Watch observed,

concluding that “no issue represents a greater threat to the peace

process than the rise in political murders of leaders and grassroots

activists” of the FMLN, assassinations that “became more frequent,

brazen, and selective in the fall of 1993.” These “injected a level of

fear, almost impossible to measure, into the campaign,” enhanced by

government cover-ups and refusal to investigate, part of a pattern of

violation of the peace treaty, to which we return. The government’s own

human rights office and the UN Observer Mission reported the “grave

deterioration in citizen security” made worse by “organized violence in

the political arena.” This proceeds against the backdrop of an

“astronomical rise of crime in post-war El Salvador,” Americas Watch

reports, and “reliable” evidence that the army and National Police are

involved in organized crime.[23]

The major political opposition, Ruben Zamora’s left coalition, not only

lacked resources for the campaign that was virtually monopolized by

ARENA, but was “unable to convince supporters or sympathizers to appear

in campaign ads because they fear retaliation from the right” (New York

Times). Terror continued at a level sufficient to give substance to such

fears. Among those who took the threat seriously was Jose Mar!a Mendez,

named El Salvador’s “Lawyer of the Century” by three prestigious legal

associations. He fled the country shortly after, threatened with death

unless he convinced the vice-presidential candidate of the left

coalition to resign.

Foreign observers were struck by the lack of popular interest in the

“elections of the century.” “Salvadorans Ambivalent Toward Historic

Poll,” a headline in the Christian Science Monitor read, reporting fear

and apathy, and concern that war will return unless ARENA wins. The

abstention rate, about 45%, was about the same as 10 years earlier, at

the peak of the violence. A “conservative political analyst” quoted by

the New York Times (Hector Dada) attributed the low participation “to a

deliberate disenfranchisment of voters and a sense of apathy among the

electorate.” As for those who voted, another analyst, Luis Cardenal,

observed that “the electorate voted more than anything for tranquillity,

for security.” “The war-weary populace bought the ruling party’s party

line, which equated ARENA with security and the left with instability

and violence,” Christian Science Monitor reporter David Clark Scott

added. That is plausible enough. Any other outcome could be expected to

lead to revival of the large-scale terror and atrocities.[24]

These assessments bear on the broader aspects of the successful use of

violence. Before the election, church and popular sources attributed the

“climate of apathy” to the fact that “hunger and poverty reign among a

population whose demands have received no attention, which makes the

electoral climate difficult” (Notimex, Mexico).[25] In the 1970s,

popular organizations were proliferating, in part under church auspices,

seeking to articulate these demands in the political arena and to work

to overcome hunger, poverty, and harsh oppression. It was that popular

awakening that elicited the response of the state terror apparatus and

its superpower sponsor, committed as always to a form of “democracy

enhancement” that bars the threat of democracy — by extreme violence, if

necessary, as in this case. Here as elsewhere, the programs of the

terrorist superpower were highly successful, leading to the “climate of

apathy,” the search for security above all else, and the general

conditions in which “free elections” become tolerable.

Recall the conclusion of Reaganite official Thomas Carothers, who

recognizes that the “democracy enhancement” programs in which he was

involved “inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic

change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power

with which the United States has long been allied,” maintaining “the

basic order of…quite undemocratic societies” and avoiding

“populist-based change” that might upset “established economic and

political orders” and open “a leftist direction.” Nothing has changed in

this regard.

A January 1994 conference of Jesuits and lay associates in San Salvador

considered both the narrow and broad aspects of the state terrorist

project. Its summary report concludes that “It is important to explore

to what degree terror continues to act, cloaked by the mask of common

crime. Also to be explored is what weight the culture of terror has had

in domesticating the expectations of the majority vis-a-vis alternatives

different to those of the powerful, in a context in which many of the

revolutionaries of yesterday act today with values similar to the long

powerful.”[26]

The latter issue, the broader one, is of particular significance. The

great achievement of the massive terror operations of the past years

organized by Washington and its local associates has been to destroy

hope. The observation generalizes to much of the Third World and also to

the growing masses of superfluous people at home, as the Third World

model of sharply two-tiered societies is increasingly internationalized.

These are major themes of the “New World Order” being constructed by the

privileged sectors of global society, with US state and private power in

the lead.

3. Rewarding Democracy

A particularly instructive illustration of the democracy enhancement

program in the region is Colombia, which seems to have taken first place

in the competition for leading terrorist state in Latin America — and,

to the surprise of no one familiar with “sound-bites and invectives

about Washington’s historically evil foreign policy,” has become the

leading recipient of US military aid, accompanied by much praise for its

stellar accomplishments.

In the March 1994 issue of Current History, Latin Americanist John Martz

writes that “Colombia now enjoys one of the healthiest and most

flourishing economies in Latin America. And in political terms its

democratic structures, notwithstanding inevitable flaws, are among the

most solid on the continent,” a model of “well-established political

stability.” The Clinton Administration is particularly impressed by

outgoing President Cesar Gaviria, whom it is now promoting as next

Secretary General of the Organization of American States, because, as

the US representative to the OAS explained, “He has been very forward

looking in building democratic institutions in a country where it was

sometimes dangerous to do so” and also “on economic reform in Colombia

and on economic integration in the hemisphere,” code words that are

readily interpreted.[27]

That it has been dangerous to build democratic institutions in Colombia

is true enough, thanks primarily to President Gaviria, his predecessors,

and their fervent supporters in Washington.

The “inevitable flaws” are reviewed in some detail — once again — in

current publications of Americas Watch and Amnesty International.[28]

They find “appalling levels of violence,” the worst in the hemisphere.

Since 1986, more than 20,000 people have been killed for political

reasons, most of them by the Colombian military and police and the

paramilitary forces that are closely linked to them; for example, the

private army of rancher, emerald dealer, and reputed drug dealer Victor

Carranza, considered to be the largest in the country, dedicated

primarily to the destruction of the leftwing political opposition

Patriotic Union (UP), in alliance with police and military officers. The

department in which Carranza operates (Meta) is one of the most heavily

militarized, with some 35,000 troops and thousands of police.

Nevertheless, paramilitary forces and hired killers operate freely,

carrying out massacres and political assassinations. An official

government inquiry in the early ’80s found that over a third of the

members of paramilitary groups engaged in political killings and other

terror in Colombia were active-duty military officers; the pattern

continues, including the usual alliances with private power and criminal

sectors.

More than 1500 leaders, members and supporters of UP have been

assassinated since the party was established in 1985. This “systematic

elimination of the leadership” of UP is “the most dramatic expression of

political intolerance in recent years,” AI observes — one of the

“inevitable flaws” that make it “dangerous to build democratic

institutions,” if not quite the danger that the Clinton Administration

wants us to notice. Other “dangers” were illustrated at the March 1994

elections, largely bought by the powerful Cali cocaine cartel, critics

allege, noting the history of vote-buying in this “stable democracy,”

the vast amounts of money spent by the cartel, and the low turnout.[29]

The pretext for terror operations is the war against guerrillas and

narcotraffickers, the former a very partial truth, the latter “a myth,”

Amnesty International concludes in agreement with other investigators;

the myth was concocted in large measure to replace the “Communist

threat” as the Cold War was fading along with the propaganda system

based on it. In reality, the official security forces and their

paramilitary associates work hand in glove with the drug lords,

organized crime, landowners, and other private interests in a country

where avenues of social action have long been closed, and are to be kept

that way by intimidation and terror. The Government’s own Commission to

Overcome Violence concluded that “the criminalization of social protest”

is one of the “principal factors which permit and encourage violations

of human rights” by the military and police authorities and their

paramilitary collaborators.

The problems have become much worse in the past 10 years, particularly

during President Gaviria’s term, when “violence reached unprecedented

levels,” the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) reports, with the

National Police taking over as the leading official killers while US aid

shifted to them. 1992 was the most violent year in Colombia since the

1950s, WOLA reported in early 1993, which proved to be still worse.[30]

Atrocities run the gamut familiar in the spheres of US influence and

support: death squads, “disappearance,” torture, rape, massacre of

civilian populations under the doctrine of “collective responsibility,”

and aerial bombardment. The specially-trained counterinsurgency and

mobile brigades are among the worst offenders. Targets include community

leaders, human rights and health workers, union activists, students,

members of religious youth organizations, and young people in shanty

towns, but primarily peasants. Merely to give one example, from August

1992 to August 1993, 217 union activists were murdered, “a point that

demonstrates the strong intolerance on the part of the State of union

activity,” the Andean Commission of Jurists comments.[31] The official

concept of “terrorism” has been extended to virtually anyone opposing

government policies, the human rights reports observe.

One project of the security forces and their allies is “social

cleansing” — that is, murder of vagrants and unemployed, street

children, prostitutes, homosexuals, and other undesirables. The Ministry

of Defense formulated the official attitude toward the matter in

response to a compensation claim: “There is no case for the payment of

any compensation by the nation, particularly for an individual who was

neither useful nor productive, either to society or to his family.”

The security forces also murder suspects, another practice familiar in

US domains. It is, for example, standard operating procedure for Israeli

forces in the occupied territories, passing with little notice among the

paymasters, who accept it as routine. Thus, the day before the Hebron

massacre of February 25, soldiers fired antitank rockets and grenades at

a stone house near Jerusalem, killing one Palestinian and wounding

another who were “accused by the army in the slaying of an undercover

agent” and other actions, the press casually reported.[32]

The plague of murder for sale of organs, rampant through the domains of

US influence, has not spared Colombia, where undesirables are killed so

that their corpses “can be chopped up and sold on the black market for

body parts” (AI). It is not known whether children are sold and killed

for organ transplants as in El Salvador, where the practice is

officially conceded; and according to extensive report, elsewhere in the

region.

As Human Rights groups and others observe, the Colombian model is that

of El Salvador and Guatemala. The doctrines instilled by US advisers and

trainers can be traced back directly to the Nazis, as Michael McClintock

documented in an important study that has been ignored. Colombia has

also enjoyed the assistance of British, German, and Israeli mercenaries

who train assassins and perform other services for the

narco-military-landlord combine in their war against peasants and

potential social activism. to my knowledge, there has been no attempt to

investigate the report of Colombian intelligence that North Americans

have also been engaged in these operations, or any notice of it, in the

mainstream.

Other similarities to Washington’s Salvador-Guatemala model abound.

Consider, for example, the case of Major Luis Felipe Becerra, charged

with responsibility for an army massacre by a civilian judge, who fled

the country under death threats days after issuing the arrest warrant

(her father was then murdered). But the warrants were not served,

because Major Becerra was then in the United States undergoing a

training course for promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel. Returning after his

promotion, Lt.-Col. Becerra was appointed to head the army’s press and

public relations department, despite a recommendation by the Procurator

Delegate to the Armed Forces that he be dismissed for his part in the

peasant massacre. In April 1993, charges against him were dropped. In

October, he was again implicated in a massacre of unarmed civilians.

Under the pretext of a battle against guerrillas, troops under his

command executed 13 people in a rural area; the victims were unarmed,

the women were raped and tortured, according to residents of the

area.[33]

But impunity prevails, as is regularly the case.

The story is that of Central America, Haiti, Brazil, indeed wherever the

Monroe Doctrine extends, along with the Philippines, Iran under the

Shah, and other countries that share an elusive property.[34]

Whatever could it be? Whatever it is, we are strictly enjoined not to

see it and to learn nothing from it.

A detailed 1992 investigation by European and Latin American church and

human rights organizations concludes that “state terrorism in Colombia

is a reality: it has its institutions, its doctrine, its structures, its

legal arrangements, its means and instruments, its victims, and above

all its responsible authorities.” Its goal is “systematic elimination of

opposition, criminalization of large sectors of the population, massive

resort to political assassination and disappearance, general use of

torture, extreme powers for the security forces, exceptional

legislation, etc…” (State Terror in Colombia). The modern version has

its roots in the security doctrines pioneered by the Kennedy

Administration, which established them officially in a crucial 1962

decision that shifted the mission of the Latin American military from

“hemispheric defense” to “internal security”: the war against the

“internal enemy,” understood in practice to be those who challenge the

traditional order of domination and control.

The doctrines were expounded in US manuals of counterinsurgency and low

intensity conflict, and developed further by local security authorities.

They benefited from training and direction by US advisers and experts,

new technologies of repression, and improved structures and

methodologies to maintain “stability” and obedience. The result is a

highly efficient apparatus of official terror, designed for “total war”

by state power “in the political, economic, and social arenas,” as the

Colombian Minister of Defense articulated the standard doctrine in 1989.

While officially the targets were guerrilla organizations, a high

military official explained in 1987 that these were only of minor

importance: “the real danger” is “what the insurgents have called the

political and psychological war,” the war “to control the popular

elements” and “to manipulate the masses.” The “subversives” hope to

influence unions, universities, media, and so on. Therefore, the State

Terror inquiry observes, the “internal enemy” of the state terrorist

apparatus extends to “labor organizations, popular movements, indigenous

organizations, opposition political parties, peasant movements,

intellectual sectors, religious currents, youth and student groups,

neighborhood organizations,” and so on, all legitimate targets for

destruction because they must be secured against undesirable influences.

“Every individual who in one or another manner supports the goals of the

enemy must be considered a traitor and treated in that manner,” a 1963

military manual prescribed, as the Kennedy initiatives were moving into

high gear.

The war against the “internal enemy” escalated in the 1980s as the

Reaganites updated the Kennedy doctrines, moving from “legal” repression

to “systematic employment of political assassination and disappearance,

later massacres” (State Terror). Atrocities escalated. A new judicial

regime in 1988 “allowed maximal criminalization of the political and

social opposition” in order to implement what was officially called

“total war against the internal enemy.” The use of paramilitary

auxiliaries for terror, explicitly authorized in military manuals, also

took new and more comprehensive forms; and alliances with

industrialists, ranchers and landowners, and later narcotraffickers were

more firmly entrenched. The 1980s saw “the consolidation of state terror

in Colombia,” the inquiry concludes.[35]

In its December 1993 study, America’s Watch observes that “most of the

materiel used by and training provided the Colombian army and police

come from the United States,” mainly counterinsurgency equipment and

training. A study of the “drug war” by the US General Accounting Office

in August 1993 concluded that US military officials have not “fully

implemented end-use monitoring procedures to ensure that Colombia’s

military is using aid primarily for counter-narcotic purposes,” an

oversight with few consequences, considering what falls under the rubric

of “counter-narcotic purposes.” Washington’s own interpretation of such

purposes was nicely illustrated in early 1989 when Colombia asked it to

install a radar system to monitor flights from the south, the source of

most of the cocaine for the drug merchants. The US government fulfilled

the request — in a sense; it installed a radar system on San Andres

island in the Caribbean, 500 miles from mainland Colombia and as far

removed as possible on Colombian territory from the drug routes, but

well-located for the intensive surveillance of Nicaragua that was a

critical component of the terrorist war, then peaking as Washington

sought to conclude its demolition of the “peace process” of the Central

American presidents (as it did, another fact unlikely to enter history).

A Costa Rican request for radar assistance in the drug war ended up the

same way.[36]

From 1984 through 1992, 6,844 Colombian soldiers were trained under the

US International Military Education and Training Program, over 2,000

from 1990 to 1992, as atrocities were mounting. Like their counterparts

elsewhere, they were thus able to “gain an appreciation for our value

system, specifically respect for human rights, adherence to democratic

principles, and the rule of law,” as Admiral Larson and Senator Bennett

explained. The Colombian program is the largest in the hemisphere, three

times that of El Salvador. US advisors are helping build military bases,

officially to “increase the battlefronts against the guerrillas and

narcotrafficking operations.” Four have been constructed, five more are

underway, according to the US Embassy. The real targets will be evident

from the record elsewhere in the region, or in Colombia itself.

Washington is also supporting the “public order” courts that operate

under conditions that severely undermine civil rights and due process.

Again, the parallel to El Salvador is obvious. One of the requirements

of the UN-brokered peace accord was that the Salvadoran government

dismantle the Supreme Court, largely an appendage of the death squad

apparatus run by the state and its private sector allies. The agreement

was ignored, like the requirement that the National Police, noted for

their brutality, be dismantled and replaced by a new National Civilan

Police (PNC) that is not under army control and includes the FMLN.

“Government figures…show that instead of phasing out the old national

police force as called for by the peace accord, it actually has

increased by about 2,000 men to 10,500,” the Chicago Tribune reported.

In further violation of the agreement, the ARENA government in 1992

transferred to the National Police 1,000 members of the Treasury Police

and National Guard, which were to be abolished because of their

notorious human rights abuses; former members were accepted to training

programs for the PNC, “an explicit violation of the accord,” Americas

Watch notes. The expanding National Police are considered responsible

for 35% of human rights violations reported to the UN observers in 1993,

“a larger share than any other force,” Americas Watch continues,

reviewing also a series of other government violations of the accords

designed to sustain the terror system, either in official or

“privatized” form. “Time is on the side of the government,” a UN

official observed: it is only necessary to hold out until the UN Mission

ends, and then the remnants of the peace accords can be completely

scrapped, going the way of the Central American peace accords of

1987.[37]

Since there is no interest here, El Salvador too proceeds towards a

“stable democracy,” though with “inevitable flaws,” such as those

already mentioned.

In July 1989 the State Department submitted a report entitled

“Justification for Determination to Authorize Export-Import Act

Guarantees and Insurance for Sales of Military Equipment to Colombia for

Antinarcotics Purposes,” the official cover story. The report states:

“Colombia has a democratic form of government and does not exhibit a

consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized

human rights.” Three months later, the UN Special Rapporteur on Summary

Executions, Amos Wako, returned from a visit to Colombia with severe

warnings about the extreme violence of the paramilitary forces in

coordination with drug lords and government security forces: “There are

currently over 140 paramilitary groups operating in Colombia today

[which are] trained and financed by drug traffickers and possibly a few

landowners. They operate very closely with elements in the armed forces

and the police. Most of the killings and massacres carried out by the

paramilitary groups occur in areas which are heavily militarized [where]

they are able to move easily…and commit murders with impunity. In some

cases, the military or police either turn a blind eye to what is being

done by paramilitary groups or give suport by offering safe conduct

passes to members of the paramilitary or by impeding investigation.” His

mandate did not extend to the direct terror of the security forces,

which far outweighs the depredations of its informal allies.

A few months before the State Department praise for Colombia’s humane

democracy, a Jesuit-sponsored development and research organization

published a report documenting atrocities in the first part of 1988,

including over 3000 politically-motivated killings, 273 in “social

cleansing” campaigns.[38] Excluding those killed in combat, political

killings averaged 8 a day, with seven murdered in their homes or in the

street and one “disappeared.” “The vast majority of those who have

disappeared in recent years,” WOLA added, “are grassroots organizers,

peasant or union leaders, leftist politicians, human rights workers and

other activists,” over 1500 by the time of the State Department

endorsement. Perhaps the State Department had in mind the recent (1988)

mayoral campaigns, in which 29 of the 87 mayoral candidates of the UP

were assassinated along with over 100 of its candidates for municipal

councilor. The Central Organization of Workers, a coalition of trade

unions formed in 1986, had by then lost over 230 members, most of them

found dead after brutal torture.

Recall also that in 1988, the more advanced forms of “maximal

criminalization of the political and social opposition” were instituted

for “total war against the internal enemy,” as the regime of state

terror consolidated. By the time the State Department report appeared,

the methods of control it found praiseworthy were being still more

systematically implemented. From 1988 through early 1992, 9500 people

were assassinated for political reasons along with 830 disappearances

and 313 massacres (between 1988 and 1990) of peasants and poor

people.[39]

The primary victims of atrocities were, as usual, the poor, mainly

peasants. In one southern department, grassroots organizations testified

in February 1988 that a “campaign of total annihilation and scorched

earth, Vietnam-style,” was being conducted by the military forces “in a

most criminal manner, with assassinations of men, women, elderly and

children. Homes and crops are burned, obligating the peasants to leave

their lands.” The State Department had a plethora of evidence of this

sort before it when it cleared Colombia of human rights violations. Its

own official Human Rights reports attributed virtually all violence to

the guerrillas and narcotraffickers, so that the US was “justified” in

providing the mass murderers and torturers with military equipment,

putting our taxes to good use.

That, of course, was the “bad old days” of 1989, when we were still

defending civilization from the Russian threat. Moving to the present,

matters become worse, for reasons explained by President Gaviria in May

1992. When questioned about atrocities by the military in the Colombian

press, he responded that “The battle against the guerrillas must be

waged on unequal terms. The defense of human rights, of democratic

principles, of the separation of powers, could prove to be an obstacle

for the counterinsurgency struggle.”[40]

During the Bush years, the US Embassy “did not make a single public

statement urging the government to curb political or military abuses,”

WOLA observes, while US support for the military and police

increased.[41] But now that liberal Democrats have taken over, the

Clinton Administration has called for a change in policy towards the

Colombian killers: more active US participation. For fiscal year 1994,

the Administration requested that military financing and training funds

be increased by over 12%, reaching about half of proposed military aid

for all of Latin America. Congressional budget cuts for the Pentagon

interfered with these plans, so the Administration “intends to use

emergency drawdown authority to bolster the Colombia account,” Americas

Watch reports. Congress, however, is continuing to interfere, taking

note of “continuing human rights abuses on a large scale” and imposing

conditions on US aid, which the Administration will have to find ways to

evade, with the usual formulas and devices. The Senate also urged the

Colombian Government to permit Red Cross access to police and detention

facilities, which it has generally denied.

The Human Rights organizations (Amnesty International, Human Rights

Watch) are committed to international conventions on human rights. Thus

AI reports open by stating that the organization “works to promote all

the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

and other international standards.” In practice, however, the commitment

is skewed in accord with Western standards, which are significantly

different. The United States, in particular, rejects the universality of

the Universal Declaration, amidst much posturing about our noble defense

of the sacred principle of universality and self-righteous denunciation

of the “cultural relativism” of the backward peoples who fall short of

our exalted standards. The United States has always flatly rejected the

sections of the Universal Declaration dealing with social and economic

rights, and also consistently disregards, ignores, and violates much of

the remainder of the Declaration — even putting aside its massive

involvement in terror, torture, and other abuses.

The Human Rights Groups say little about social and economic rights,

generally adopting the highly biased Western perspective on these

matters. In the case of Colombia, we have to go beyond these (in

themselves, very valuable) reports to discover the roots of the

extraordinary violence. They are not obscure. The president of the

Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of

Foreign Affairs Alfredo V squez Carrizosa, writes that it is “poverty

and insufficient land reform” that “have made Colombia one of the most

tragic countries of Latin America,” and are the source of the violence,

including the mass killings of the 1940s and early 1950s, which took

hundreds of thousands of lives. Land reform was legislated in 1961, but

“has practically been a myth,” unimplemented because landowners “have

had the power to stop it” in this admirable democracy with its

constitutional regime, which V squez Carrizosa dismisses as a “facade,”

granting rights that have no relation to reality. The violence has been

caused “by the dual structure of a prosperous minority and an

impoverished, excluded majority, with great differences in wealth,

income, and access to political participation.”

And as elsewhere in Latin America, “violence has been exacerbated by

external factors,” primarily the initiatives of the Kennedy

Administration, which “took great pains to transform our regular armies

into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death

squads,” ushering in “what is known in Latin America as the National

Security Doctrine,…not defense against an external enemy, but a way to

make the military establishment the masters of the game…[with] the right

to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine,

the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian

doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers,

trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the

establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists.”[42]

It is in this precise sense, no other, that the Cold War guided our

policies.

The results are an income distribution that is “dramatically skewed,”

WOLA observes, another striking feature of the domains of longstanding

US influence, from which we are, again, to learn nothing. The top three

percent of Colombia’s landed elite own over 70% of arable land, while

57% of the poorest farmers subsist on under 3%. 40% of Colombians live

in “absolute poverty,” unable to satisfy basic subsistence needs,

according to a 1986 report of the National Administration Bureau of

Statistics, while 18% live in “absolute misery,” unable to meet

nutritional needs. The Colombian Institute of Family Welfare estimates

that four and a half million children under 14 are hungry: that is, one

of every two children, in this triumph of capitalism, a country of

enormous resources and potential, lauded as “one of the healthiest and

most flourishing economies in Latin America” (Martz).[43]

The “stable democracy” does exist, but as what Jenny Pearce calls

“democracy without the people,” the majority of whom are excluded from

the political system monopolized by elites, more so as political space

has been “rapidly closing by the mid-1980s.” For Colombian elites, the

international funding agencies, and foreign investors, “democracy”

functions. But it is not intended for the public generally, who are

“marginalized economically and politically.” “The state has reserved for

the majority the ‘state of siege’ and all the exceptional repressive

legislation and procedures that can guarantee order where other

mechanisms fail,” Pearce continues, increasingly in recent years. That

is democracy, in exactly the sense of regular practice and even

doctrine, if we attend closely.

No discussion of “democracy enhancement” in the current era can fail to

consider Haiti, a sickening story that requires separate treatment,

particularly now, when Clinton Administration efforts to undermine

Haitian democracy have reached such a sordid level that even his allies

are deserting the ship. As of March, the latest revelation of Clintonite

deceit on “restoring democracy” to Haiti was the Congressional testimony

of Lawrence Pezzullo, the Secretary of State’s special adviser for

Haiti. Pezzullo was questioned about a plan “portrayed as a Haitian

solution spawned by weeks of tough negotiations in Washington among

disparate leaders of Haitian society,” Christopher Marquis reported in

the Miami Herald. The Clinton Administration had strongly supported the

plan as the optimal solution, representing Haitian democrats. It harshly

condemned Aristide for his intransigence in rejecting the plan — which,

true enough, ignored such minor matters as the return of the elected

President to Haiti and the removal of the worst of the state terrorists

from power. Pezzullo conceded that the plan had in fact been “spawned”

in the offices of the State Department, which selected the “Haitian

negotiators” who were to ratify it in Washington. Included among them

were right-wing extremists with close military ties, notably

Frantz-Robert Monde, a former member of Duvalier’s terrorist Tontons

Macoute and a close associate of police chief Lt.-Col. Joseph Michel

Francois, the most brutal and powerful of the Haitian state terrorists

(incidentally, another beneficiary of US training).

“In other words, the operation was a hoax” (Larry Birns, director of the

Council on Hemispheric Affairs), yet another effort to ensure that

democracy is “enhanced” in Haiti in the familiar way — without any

“populist-based change” that might upset “established economic and

political orders” and open “a leftist direction” (Carothers).[44]

I’ll save until next time the Haitian illustration of the “romantic age”

to which we have led suffering humanity.

Part II: The Case of Haiti

July-August, 1994

As discussed in Part I, the Reagan-Bush Administrations reluctantly

adopted “prodemocracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more

radical change,” and “inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of

democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures

of power with which the United States has long been allied” (Thomas

Carothers of the Reagan State Department). The leading idea is revealed

in the documents of USAID’s democracy project, which stress that the

U.S. supports “processes of democratic institutional reform that will

further economic liberalization objectives” — that is, entrenchment of

the service role.[45]

The reference to “the traditional structures of power with which the

United States has long been allied” has to undergo the usual

translation. The phrase “United States” refers to the “traditional

structures of power” at home. This is among the elementary truths that

are to remain unspoken, along with the fact that the policies for the

service areas merely adapt a conception of democracy that is to apply to

the home societies as well. Here the general public “must be put in its

place,” as Walter Lippmann explained in his progressive essays on

democracy long ago. The “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” are to be

only “interested spectators of action,” not “participants.” Their sole

“function” in a democracy is to choose periodically among the leadership

class (elections). Also unspoken is the fact that the “responsible men”

who manage the democratic society gain that status by virtue of their

service to “the traditional structures of power.” There is a very broad

consensus in the intellectual community, and of course the business

world, that the “ignorant and incapable mass of humanity” must not be

allowed to disrupt policy formation (Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State

Robert Lansing), that planners must be “insulated” from politics, in

World Bank lingo.

The “prodemocracy policies” in the service areas long antedate the

Reaganites, and have little to do with the Cold War, apart from

ideological cover. Accordingly, they should be expected to persist, as

they do. Among the cases reviewed in Part I, the most striking is

Colombia, which has become the leading human rights violator in the

hemisphere and the recipient of more than half of total U.S. military

aid and training, sent on its way with the usual acclaim for Colombia’s

democratic achievements as state terror mounts — all rising to new

heights under Clinton.

“Human Rights enhancement” marches on in parallel. In Part I, I reviewed

Clinton’s steps to evade congressional efforts to impose human rights

conditions on military aid and trade privileges for Indonesia and China,

and the concept of “human rights” itself, crafted to evade atrocities

that contribute to profit. In the weeks since, the China story took its

predictable course. “President Clinton’s decision to renew China’s trade

benefits was the culmination of a titanic clash between America’s global

economic interests and its self-image as the world’s leading advocate of

human rights,” Thomas Friedman’s lead article opened in the New York

Times, reporting the surprising outcome. Clinton did not merely endorse

the Bush Administration policies that he had caustically denounced

during the presidential campaign, but went well beyond them, deciding

“to delink human rights” completely from trade privileges.[46]

The Indonesia case sheds further light on the “titanic clash.” As

discussed in Part I, Clinton joined his predecessors and colleagues

abroad in ensuring the welfare of the Indonesian tyrants and murderers

and the foreign corporations that benefit from their rule, blocking and

evading congressional restrictions on military assistance. The issue was

quite narrow: whether to refrain from direct participation in Indonesian

atrocities at home and abroad. There was no thought of proceeding

beyond, to some action to deter some of the worst crimes of the modern

era.

The review in Part I was perhaps unfair in not mentioning that world

leaders do recognize some limits, and have indeed considered sanctions

against Indonesia. In November 1993, on behalf of the nonaligned

movement and the World Health Organization (WHO), Indonesia submitted to

the UN a resolution requesting an opinion from the World Court on the

legality of the use of nuclear weapons. In the face of this atrocity,

the guardians of international morality leaped into action. The U.S.,

U.K., and France threatened Indonesia with trade sanctions and

termination of aid unless it withdrew the resolution, as it did.

Traditional clients understand very well when a message from the

powerful is to be heeded.

Citizens of the free world were again fortunate to have the information

readily available to them; in this case, in the Catholic Church press in

Canada.[47]

Freedom of information can go only so far, however. On June 10, the

World Court was scheduled to take up the WHO request for an opinion,

despite a furious campaign by the U.S., U.K., and their allies to

prevent this outrage. The matter is of some importance. Even

consideration of the issue by the Court would be a contribution to the

cause of nonproliferation; even more so a decision that use of nuclear

weapons is a crime under international law — hence by implication,

possession as well. As of mid-June, I have found no word on the matter,

though the nonproliferation treaty is a topic of lead headlines,

particularly the threat posed to its renewal in 1995 by North Korea’s

alleged nuclear weapons program.

I barely mentioned one of the clearest tests of the Clinton vision on

“democracy enhancement”: Haiti. The case serves well to illustrate the

“prodemocracy policies” of the Reagan-Bush years, as Carothers

accurately describes them. We may ask, then, how things changed as the

New Democrats took command.[48]

1. The Legacy of History

Even the briefest glimpse of Haiti’s torment leaves impressions that do

not easily fade, beginning with the scene of desolation on approaching

the international airport. It is hard to remember that through the

18^(th) century the island was the richest and most profitable of the

Western colonies, and like today’s Bangladesh, had struck the European

conquerors as a virtual paradise. The Presidential Palace in

Port-au-Prince, dominating a large square, is flanked by the

headquarters of the military command and, at a slight remove, the

equally-dreaded police. The symbols of authority and violence stand in

impudent mockery of the misery that lies below them — “confirming the

permanence of power, a reminder to the people of their smallness in

regard to the state, a reminder to the executioners of the omnipotence

of their chief,” in the worlds of Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph

Trouillot, expressing the logic of the Duvalierists, Papa Doc and Baby

Doc, who ruled with brutal violence for 30 years.[49]

In the markets and slums below, it is barely possible to make one’s way

down alleys of mud and filth through teeming masses of people clad in

rags. Women struggle past with huge burdens on their heads, children try

to sell any miserable object, an occasional cart is dragged through mud

that is inches deep and puddles left by recent rains. Flies swarm over a

handful of vegetables and what might pass for fish. Peasants who have

trudged down from the mountains on ancient trails sit by their paltry

offerings, sleeping in the relics of shacks that line the alleys. In the

depths of Third World poverty, one rarely finds a scene so noxious and

depressing.

When I visited briefly a year ago, before the renewed terror, some

people in the marketplace were willing to speak in the presence of a

translator who was known and trusted, but only in circumlocution. The

eyes of the security forces are everywhere, they intimated by their

gestures more than their words. These were uniform: hunger, no work, no

hope — unless, somehow, President Aristide returns, though few dare to

articulate the phrase beyond hints and nods. Some do, with remarkable

courage, even after police torture and the threat of worse. It is not

easy to believe that such courage can long survive, even if the people

do.

U.S. relations with Haiti are not a thing of yesterday, and show no sign

of fundamental change. They go back 200 years, to the days when the

Republic that had just won its independence from Britain joined the

imperial powers in their campaign to quell Haiti’s slave rebellion by

violence. When the rebellion nevertheless succeeded, the U.S. exceeded

all others in the harshness of its reaction, refusing to recognize Haiti

until 1862, in the context of the American civil war. At that moment,

Haiti was important for its strategic location and as a possible dumping

ground for freed slaves; Liberia was recognized in the same year, for

the same reasons. Haiti then became a plaything for U.S.-European power

politics, with numerous U.S. interventions culminating in Woodrow

Wilson’s invasion of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where his

warriors — as viciously racist as the Administration in Washington —

murdered and destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery, dismantled the

constitutional system because the backward Haitians could not see the

merits of turning their country into a U.S. plantation, and established

the National Guards that held both countries in their grip after the

Marines finally left.

Wilson’s thuggery has entered history in two different versions: here

and there. In the U.S., the events figure in the amusing reconstructions

entitled “history” as an illustration of U.S. “humanitarian

intervention” and its difficulties (for us). Haitians have somewhat

different memories. “Most observers agree that the achievements of the

occupation were minor; they disagree only as to the amount of damage it

inflicted,” Trouillot writes under the heading “unhealed sores.” The

damage included the acceleration of Haiti’s economic, military, and

political centralization, its economic dependence and sharp class

divisions, the vicious exploitation of the peasantry, the internal

racial conflicts much intensified by the extreme racism of the occupying

forces, and perhaps worst of all, the establishment of “an army to fight

the people.” “The 1915–1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti,” he writes, “left

the country with two poisoned gifts: a weaker civil society and a

solidified state apparatus.[50]

A year ago, after enduring almost two years of renewed state violence,

grassroots organizations, priests in hiding, tortured labor leaders, and

others suffering bitterly from the violence of the security forces

expressed marked opposition to the plan to dispatch 500 UN police to the

terrorized country, seeing them as a cover for a U.S. intervention that

evokes bitter memories of the Marine occupation. If ever noted, such

reactions may be attributed to the fact that “even a benevolent

occupation creates resistance…among the beneficiaries” (Harvard

historian David Landes, writing about the Marine occupation). Or to the

deficiencies of people who need only a new culture and more kind

tutelage of the kind he provided as director of the USAID mission in

1977–79, Lawrence Harrison writes in a “think piece” on Haiti’s problems

in which the U.S. military occupation merits only the words: “And some

of the Marines abused their power.”[51]

Poor and suffering people do not have the luxury of indulging in fairy

tales. Not uncommonly, their own experience gives them a grasp of

realities that are well concealed by the intellectual culture. The usual

victims can not so easily dismiss the record of U.S. power, which leaves

little doubt that U.S. military intervention in Haiti would be the death

knell for any form of democracy that “risks upsetting the traditional

structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.”

Haitians who have lost all hope for restoration of democracy might

support a military intervention that could, perhaps, reduce terror and

torture. But that is the most that can be realistically expected.

The military occupation left the island under U.S. control and largely

U.S.-owned. The killer and torturer Trujillo took over the Dominican

Republic, remaining a great friend until he began to get out of hand in

the 1950s. In Haiti, Washington reacted with some ambivalence to the

murderous and brutal dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Francois Duvalier,

finding him a bit too independent for its taste. Nevertheless, Kennedy

provided him with military assistance, in line with his general program

of establishing firm U.S. control over the hemisphere’s military and

police as they undertook the task of “internal security” that he

assigned them in a historic 1962 decision. Kennedy also provided aid for

the Francois Duvalier International Airport in exchange for the Haitian

vote to expel Cuba from the OAS. When “Baby Doc” Jean-Claude took over

in 1971, relations rapidly improved, and Haiti became another “darling”

of the business community, along with Brazil under the neo-Nazi generals

and other right-thinking folk. USAID undertook to turn Haiti into the

“Taiwan of the Caribbean,” forecasting “a historic change toward deeper

market interdependence with the United States,” Trouillot observes. U.S.

taxpayers funded projects to establish assembly plants that would

exploit such advantages as enormous unemployment (thanks in part to

USAID policies emphasizing agroexport) and a workforce — mainly women,

as elsewhere considered more docile — with wages of 14 cents an hour, no

unions, ample terror, and the other usual amenities. The consequences

were profits for U.S. corporations and their Haitian associates, and a

decline of 56% in wages in the 1980s. In short, if not Taiwan exactly,

Haiti was an “economic miracle” of the usual sort.

Haiti offered the Reaganites yet another opportunity to reveal their

understanding of democracy enhancement in June 1985, when its

legislature unanimously adopted a new law requiring that every political

party must recognize President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier as the

supreme arbiter of the nation, outlawing the Christian Democrats, and

granting the government the right to suspend the rights of any party

without reasons. The law was ratified by a majority of 99.98%.

Washington was deeply impressed, as much so as it was when Mussolini won

99% of the vote in the March 1934 election, leading Roosevelt’s State

Department to conclude that the results “demonstrate incontestably the

popularity of the Fascist regime” and of “that admirable Italian

gentleman” who ran it, as Roosevelt described the dictator. These are

among the many interesting facts that might be recalled as neo-Fascists

now take their place openly in the political system that was

reconstructed with their interests in mind as Italy was liberated by

American forces 50 years ago. Curiously, all this escaped attention

during the D-Day anniversary extravaganza, along with much else that is

too enlightening.

The 1985 steps to enhance democracy in Haiti were “an encouraging step

forward,” the U.S. Ambassador informed his guests at a July 4

celebration. The Reagan Administration certified to Congress that

“democratic development” was progressing, so that military and economic

aid could continue to flow — mainly into the pockets of Baby Doc and his

entourage. It also informed Congress that the human rights situation was

improving, as it was at the time in El Salvador and Guatemala, and today

in Colombia, and quite generally when some client regime requires

military aid for “internal security.” The House Foreign Affairs

Committee, controlled by Democrats, had given its approval in advance,

calling on Reagan “to maintain friendly relations with Duvalier’s

non-Communist government.”

To justify their perception of an “encouraging step forward” in

“democratic development,” the Reaganites could have recalled the vote

held under Woodrow Wilson’s rule after he had disbanded the Haitian

parliament in punishment for its refusal to turn Haiti over to American

corporations under a new U.S.-designed Constitution. Wilson’s Marines

organized a plebiscite in which the Constitution was ratified by a 99.9%

vote, with 5% of the population participating, using “rather high handed

methods to get the Constitution adopted by the people of Haiti,” the

State Department conceded a decade later. Baby Doc, in contrast, allowed

a much broader franchise, though it is true that he demanded a slightly

higher degree of acquiescence than Wilsonian idealists, Mussolini, and

New Dealers. A case could be made, then, that the lessons in democracy

that Washington had been laboring to impart were finally sinking in.

These gratifying developments were short-lived, however. By December

1985, popular protests were straining the resources of state terror.

What happened next was described by the Wall Street Journal with

engaging frankness: after “huge demonstrations,” the White House

concluded “that the regime was unraveling” and that “Haiti’s ruling

inner circle had lost faith in” its favored democrat, Baby Doc. “As a

result, U.S. officials, including Secretary of State George Shultz,

began openly calling for a ‘democratic process’ in Haiti.” Small wonder

that Shultz is so praised for his commitment to democracy and other

noble traits.

The meaning of this call for democracy was underscored by the scenario

then unfolding in the Philippines, where the army and elite made it

clear they would no longer support another gangster for whom Reagan and

Bush had expressed their admiration, even “love,” not long before, so

that the White House “began openly calling for a ‘democratic process’”

there as well. Both events accordingly enter the canon as a

demonstration of how we “served as inspiration for the triumph of

democracy in our time” in those wondrous years (New Republic).

Washington lent its support to the post-Duvalier National Council of

Government (CNG), providing $2.8 million in military aid in its first

year, while the CNG, “generously helped by the U.S. taxpayer’s money,

had openly gunned down more civilians than Jean-Claude Duvalier’s

government had done in fifteen years” (Trouillot). After a series of

coups and massacres, Reagan’s Ambassador explained to Human Rights

investigators that “I don’t see any evidence of a policy against human

rights”; there may be violence, it is true, but it is just “part of the

culture.” We can only watch in dismay and incomprehension.

Haitian violence thus falls into the same category as the atrocities in

El Salvador at the same time, for example, the massacre at El Mozote,

one of the many conducted by U.S.-trained elite battalions — and one of

the few to be admitted to History, after exposure by the UN Truth

Commission. Given their origins in U.S. planning, these routine

atrocities must also be “part of the culture.” Or perhaps “There is no

one to blame except the gods of war,” as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of

the New York Times observed, reviewing the “fair-minded” account by Mark

Danner which “aptly denotes” the “horrifying incident” as “a central

parable of the cold war” for which blame is shared equally by

Salvadorans on all sides, murderers and victims alike. In contrast,

atrocities organized and directed by the Soviet Union always seemed to

have more determinable origins, for some reason.[52]

2. The Democratic Interlude

Haiti’s happy ascent towards Taiwan was deflected unexpectedly in

December 1990, when a real problem arose, unlike the terror and virtual

enslavement of workers that are just “part of the culture.” Washington

made a serious error, allowing a free election in expectation of an easy

victory for its candidate, Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official. To

the surprise of outside observers, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide was

elected with two-thirds of the vote (Bazin was second with 14%), backed

by a popular movement, Lavalas, which had escaped the notice of the rich

folk. Outside of properly educated circles, one question came to the

fore at once: What would the U.S. and its clients do to remove this

cancer?

President Aristide held office from February to September, when his

government was overthrown by a military coup, plunging the country into

even deeper barbarism than before. There are two versions of what

happened in the interim. One is given by various extremists who see

Aristide as the representative of a “remarkably advanced” array of

grass-roots organizations (Lavalas) that gave the large majority of the

population a “considerable voice in local affairs” and even in national

politics (Americas Watch); and who were impressed by Aristide’s domestic

policies as he “acted quickly to restore order to the government’s

finances” after taking power when “the economy was in an unprecedented

state of disintegration” (Inter-American Development Bank). Other

international lending agencies agreed, offering aid and endorsing

Aristide’s investment program. They were particularly impressed by the

steps he took to reduce foreign debt and inflation, to raise foreign

exchange reserves from near zero to $12 million, to increase government

revenues with successful tax collection measures (reaching into the

kleptocracy), to streamline the bloated government bureaucracy and

eliminate fictitious positions in an anti-corruption campaign, to cut

back contraband trade and improve customs, and to establish a

responsible fiscal system.

These actions were “welcomed by the international financial community,”

the IADB noted, leading to “a substantial increase in assistance.”

Atrocities and flight of refugees also virtually ended; indeed the

refugee flow reversed, as Haitians began to return to their country in

its moment of hope. The U.S. Embassy in Haiti secretly acknowledged the

facts. In a February 1991 State Department cable, declassified in 1994,

the number two person in the Embassy, Vicky Huddleston, reported to

Washington on “the surprisingly successful efforts of the Aristide

government,…quickly reversed after the coup” (reported by Dennis

Bernstein for Pacific News Service).[53]

Sophisticates in Washington and New York could understand that all of

this is illusion. As Secretary of State Lansing had explained: “The

experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of

any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government.

Unquestionably there is 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

unsolvable.”

A more acceptable version of Aristide’s months in offices is offered by

New York Times Haiti correspondent Howard French. He reported after the

coup that Aristide had governed “with the aid of fear,” leaning “heavily

on Lavalas, an unstructured movement of affluent idealists and

long-exiled leftists” whose model was China’s Cultural Revolution.

Aristide’s power hunger led to “troubles with civil society.”

Furthermore, “Haitian political leaders and diplomats say, the growing

climate of vigilantism as well as increasingly strident statements by

Father Aristide blaming the wealthier classes for the poverty of the

masses encouraged” the coup. “Although he retains much of the popular

support that enabled him to win 67% of the popular vote in the country’s

December 1990 elections, Father Aristide was overthrown in part because

of concerns among politically active people over his commitment to the

Constitution, and growing fears of political and class-based violence,

which many believe the President endorsed.[54]

Relation to fact aside, the analysis provides some lessons in Political

Correctness. Two-thirds of the population and their organizations fall

outside of “civil society.” Those involved in the popular organizations

and in local and national politics are not among the “politically active

people.” It is scandalous to tell the plain truth about the

responsibility of the kleptocracy for “the poverty of the masses.”

“Fears of political and class-based violence” are limited to the months

when such violence sharply declined, its traditional perpetrators being

unable, temporarily, to pursue their vocation.

These lessons should be remembered as Washington moves to construct a

“civil society” and “democratic political order” for this “failed state”

with its degenerate culture and people, quite incapable of governing

themselves.

In reality, the two versions of what happened during the democratic

interlude are closer than it may seem on the surface. The “remarkably

advanced” array of popular organizations that brought the large majority

of the population into the political arena is precisely what frightened

Washington and the mainstream generally. They have a different

understanding of “democracy” and “civil society,” one that offers no

place to popular organizations that allow the overwhelming majority a

voice in managing their own affairs. By definition, the “political

leaders” of such popular organizations have only “meager” democratic

credentials, and can therefore be granted only symbolic participation in

the “democratic institutions” that we will construct in accord with our

traditional “prodemocracy policies.” So the government and media have

been instructing us since the coup removed the radical extremist

Aristide and his Maoist clique.

These simple truths account for much of what has happened in Haiti since

Aristide’s election. Trouillot concludes his study by observing that “In

Haiti, the peasantry is the nation.” But for policymakers, the peasantry

are worthless objects except insofar as they can advance corporate

profits. They may produce food for export and enrich local affiliates of

U.S. agribusiness, or flock to the city to provide super-cheap labor for

assembly plants, but they have no further function. It is therefore

entirely natural that USAID, while providing $100 million in assistance

to the private sector, should never have provided a penny to the leading

popular peasant organization, the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP); and

that former USAID director Harrison should see no special problem when

MPP members are massacred by the military forces and should dismiss with

contempt its call for moves to reinstitute the popularly elected

President who was committed to “bottom-up” rather than “top-down”

democracy.

Similarly, it is hardly surprising that USAID should have denounced the

labor reforms Aristide sought to institute and opposed his efforts to

raise the minimum wage to a princely 37 cents an hour. Nor should we

find it odd that USAID invested massively in the low wage assembly

sector while wages sharply declined and working conditions fell to

abysmal levels, but terminated all efforts to promote investment as the

democratically elected government took office. Rather, USAID reacted to

this catastrophe by dedicating itself still more firmly to providing the

Haitian business community with what it called “technical assistance in

labor relations, development of a business oriented public relations

campaign, and intensified efforts to attract U.S. products assembly

operations to Haiti.” Given the unfortunate democratic deviation,

USAID’s task, in its own words, was to “work to develop sustainable

dialogue between the government and the business community”; no

comparable efforts for workers and peasants were needed when Haiti was

run by U.S.-backed killers and torturers. All of this conforms well to

USAID’s conception of “processes of democratic institutional reform” as

those that “further economic liberalization objectives.[55]

Similarly, there is no reason to be surprised that U.S. elites suddenly

began to show a sensitive concern for human rights and democracy just as

human rights violations precipitously declined and democracy (though not

in the preferred “top-down” sense) began to flourish. Amy Wilentz

observes that during Aristide’s brief term, Washington suddenly became

concerned with “human rights and the rule of law in Haiti.” “During the

four regimes that preceded Aristide,” she writes, “international

human-rights advocates and democratic observers had begged the State

Department to consider helping the democratic opposition in Haiti. But

no steps were taken by the United States to strengthen anything but the

executive and the military until Aristide won the presidency. Then, all

of a sudden, the United States began to think about how it could help

those Haitians eager to limit the powers of the executive or to replace

the government constitutionally.” The State Department “Democracy

Enhancement” project was “specifically designed to fund those sectors of

the Haitian political spectrum where opposition to the Aristide

government could be encouraged,” precisely as “prodemocracy policies”

dictate. The institutions and leaders that merited such support are just

the ones that survived the military coup, also no surprise.[56]

3. After the Coup

Wilentz reports further that immediately after the September 30 coup,

the State Department apparently “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,” who were

deemed proper recipients for aid, including military aid, “based on

unsubstantiated human-rights improvements.” Toronto Star reporter Linda

Diebel adds details. A “thick, bound dossier” on Aristide’s alleged

crimes was presented by the coup leader, General Cedras, to OAS

negotiators. On October 3, U.S. Ambassador Alvin Adams summoned

reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major U.S.

journals to private meetings where he briefed them on these alleged

crimes, reportedly presenting them with the “dossier” — which, we may

learn some day, was compiled by U.S. intelligence and provided to its

favorite generals. The Ambassador and his helpers began leaking the

tales that have been used since to demonstrate Aristide’s meager

democratic credentials and his psychological disorders.[57]

The approved version is reflected by coverage of human rights abuses

after the coup. As shown in a study by Boston Media Action, while the

military were rampaging, the press focussed on abuses attributed to

Aristide supporters, less than 1% of the total but the topic of 60% of

the coverage in major journals during the two weeks following the coup,

and over half of coverage in the New York Times through mid-1992. During

the two-week period after the coup, Catherine Orenstein reports, the

Times “spent over three times as many column inches discussing

Aristide’s alleged transgressions [as] it spent reporting on the ongoing

military repression. Mass murders, executions, and tortures that were

reported in human rights publications earned less than 4% of the space

that the Times devoted to Haiti in those weeks.” A week after the coup,

the Washington Post accused Aristide of having organized his followers

into “an instrument of real terror,” ignoring the 75% reduction in human

rights abuses during his term reported by human rights groups.[58]

While attention was directed to the really important topic of the

“class-based violence” of Aristide and the popular movements, the

U.S.-trained military and police were conducting their reign of terror,

“ruthlessly suppressing Haiti’s once diverse and vibrant civil society,”

Americas Watch reported. Though “Washington’s capacity to curb attacks

on civil society was tremendous, this power was largely unexercised by

the Bush administration,” which “sought to convey an image of normalcy”

while forcefully returning refugees. The terror is functional: it

ensures that even if Aristide is permitted to return, “he would have

difficulty transforming his personal popularity into the organized

support needed to exert civilian authority,” Americas Watch observed in

early 1993, quoting priests and others who feared that the destruction

of the popular social organizations that “gave people hope” had already

undermined the great promise of Haiti’s first democratic experiment.[59]

The coup and ensuing terror revived the flow of refugees that had lapsed

under Aristide. The Bush Administration ordered the Coast Guard and Navy

to force them back, or to imprison them in the U.S. military base in

Guantanamo until a court order terminated the shocking practices there.

During the presidential campaign, Clinton bitterly condemned these cruel

policies. On taking over in January 1993, he at once tightened the

noose, imposing a still harsher blockade. Forceful return of refugees

continued in violation of international law and human rights

conventions. Clinton’s increased brutality proved to be a grand success.

Refugee flow, which had reached over 30,000 in 1992, sharply declined

under Clinton’s ministrations, to about the level of 1989, before the

sharp decline under Aristide.[60]

The official story is that these are “economic refugees,” not victims of

political persecution who would be eligible for asylum. The onset of

poverty can be quite precisely dated: to the date of the coup. During

Aristide’s term, refugee flow was slight, skyrocketing after the coup

though economic sanctions were minimal. These oddities are noted by the

indispensable journal Haiti Info published in Port-au-Prince, in a

discussion of a cable circulated to high officials by U.S. Ambassador

William Swing. The 11-page cable, full of racist slanders, alleges that

“the Haitian left manipulates and fabricates human rights abuses as a

propaganda tool” and is “wittingly or unwittingly assisted in this

effort” by human rights organizations and the civilian monitors of the

UN and OAS missions; all “comsymps” in the terminology of an earlier

day. The Embassy dismissed with a sneer the reports of “the sudden

epidemic of rapes” on the grounds that “For a range of cultural reasons

(not pleasant to contemplate), rape has never been considered or

reported as a serious crime here.” The testimony of a man that his wife

was raped and that he was badly beaten under police custody,

corroborated by a foreign nurse, is dismissed because he chose asylum in

Canada (granted at once), avoiding the U.S. Immigration and

Naturalization Service (INS) — a transparent admission of iniquity.

Clinton’s Embassy attributes problems in Haiti to “a high level of

structural, or endemic, violence,” which, again, is just “part of the

culture.” Like the poverty that causes refugee flight, the “structural”

factors causing violence had an unexplained 8-month gap: during

Aristide’s tenure even his most vehement opponents, the USAID-supported

“human rights” advocates who moved quickly into power after the coup,

could compile only 25 cases of “mob violence” and four crimes that could

be considered political, a tiny fraction of the terror before, not to

speak of the atrocities that followed the coup.

Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, comments that the

cable reveals the “extreme antipathy for Aristide” in the Embassy and

its “willingness to play down human rights abuses to prevent a political

momentum to build for [Aristide’s] return.” It “reflects a dislike and

distrust of Aristide that has been widely felt in the Administration —

though voiced only privately,” Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino adds.

In reality, the dislike is quite public and widely reported, along with

the fact that it has sent a very clear message to the Haitian rulers,

military and civilian.[61]

As the Embassy cable was released, an experienced INS asylum officer in

Haiti went public with his charges that thousands of “egregious cases of

persecution” were rejected by the Haitian INS office, where the “entire

process” of asylum review “had been politicized” and under 1% of

legitimate petitions were accepted by racist and contemptuous officials;

similar accounts have been documented by human rights organizations, who

have also denounced the very idea that petitioners should have to

identify themselves to the murderers by appearing at the INS office. At

the same time, a “Top Secret” memo of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba

was leaked. Addressed to the Secretary of State, the CIA, and the INS,

the document complains about the lack of genuine claims of political

persecution in Cuba, contrary to policy needs. The usual silence

prevailed.[62]

Meanwhile refugees from Cuba receive royal treatment while Haitians are

returned to terror. That is nothing new. Of the more than 24,000

Haitians intercepted by U.S. forces from 1981 to Aristide’s takeover in

1991, 11 were granted asylum as victims of political persecution, in

comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans. In these years of terror,

Washington allowed 28 asylum claims. During Aristide’s tenure, with

violence and repression radically reduced, 20 were allowed from a

refugee pool perhaps 1/50^(th) the scale. Practice returned to normal

after the military coup and the renewed terror. As always, human rights

are understood in purely instrumental terms: as a weapon to be

selectively deployed for power interests, nothing more.

The democratically elected President will be acceptable to Washington

and elite opinion generally only if he abandons his popular mandate,

ceding effective power to the “moderates” in the business world. The

“moderates” are those who do not favor slaughter and mutilation,

preferring to see the population driven to agroexport and the low-wage

assembly sector. They constitute “civil society,” in the technical

sense. Since the coup, the U.S. has demanded that Aristide agree to

“broaden the government” in such a way as to place the “moderates” in

power. Insofar as he refuses to transfer power into these proper hands,

he is an “extremist” whom we can hardly support.

While these are the basic terms of respectable discourse, the spectrum

is not entirely uniform. It ranges from the far right, which is honest

and outspoken in its call for dismantling Haitian democracy, to the more

nuanced versions of the liberal Democrats. Taking a stand in the middle,

George Bush calls for abandoning Aristide because “he has become

unreliable” and even “turned on our president the other day” (May 1994).

Aristide should be dumped because his “undemocratic behavior…included

fostering violence against his opponents,” according to another noted

pacifist who has distinguished himself particularly for his dedication

to legality and democratic principle (Elliott Abrams).

Moving toward the liberal end, a Clinton official explained in the last

days of 1993 that “We’re not talking about dumping Aristide or about

military power-sharing. But we have two adversaries who don’t want to

compromise and we have to find enough of a middle to make a functioning

democracy,” marginalizing the extremists on both sides. The elected

President should be “restored to power, at least nominally,” World Peace

Foundation president and historian Robert Rotberg added; but also at

most nominally, as all understand. The Washington director of the

Inter-American Dialogue, Peter Hakim, urged in May 1994 that “the US

ought to separate out the notion of protecting human rights, and

reestablishing some semblance of society in Haiti, from restoring

Aristide to power.” “So it is only honest for the United States to tell

Father Aristide that he has little hope of returning to power without

making large political compromises,” as the Times editors phrased the

common understanding a few weeks later. In short, the traditional

“prodemocracy policies.”[63] The basic idea was outlined by Secretary of

State Warren Christopher during his confirmation hearings. Christopher

“expressed support for Father Aristide,” Elaine Sciolino reported, “but

stopped short of calling for his reinstatement as President. ‘There is

no question in my mind that because of the election, he has to be part

of the solution to this,’ Mr. Christopher said. ‘I don’t have a precise

system worked out in my mind as to how he would be part of the solution,

but certainly he cannot be ignored in the matter’.[64] With this ringing

endorsement of democracy, the Clinton Administration took charge.

Across the spectrum, it is taken for granted that we have both the right

and the competence to “establish some semblance of society” in Haiti,

whose people are so retrograde as to have developed a “remarkably

advanced” array of grass-roots organizations that gave the majority of

the population a place in the public arena. Plainly, they desperately

need our tutelage.

4. The Clinton Compromise

To much acclaim, Washington finally succeeded in compelling Aristide to

transfer authority to the “moderates.” Under severe pressure, in July

1993 the Haitian President accepted the U.S.-UN terms for settlement,

which were to allow him to return four months later in a “compromise”

with the gangsters and killers. He agreed to appoint as Prime Minister a

businessman from the traditional mulatto elite, Robert Malval, who is

“known to be opposed to the populist policies during Aristide’s seven

months in power,” the press announced with relief, noting that he is

“generally well regarded by the business community,” “respected by many

businessmen who supported the coup that ousted the President,” and seen

as “a reassuring choice” by coup-supporters.

Shortly after these happy developments took place, UN/OAS observers

reported, with little notice, that they were “very concerned that there

is no perceptible lessening of human rights violations,” and a few weeks

later, reported an increase in “arbitrary executions and suspicious

deaths” in the weeks following the UN-brokered accord, over one a day in

the Port-au-Prince area alone; “the mission said that many of the

victims were members of popular organizations and neighborhood

associations and that some of the killers were police,” wire services

reported.[65]

Expected to be a transitional figure, Malval resigned at the year’s end.

His presence did, however, serve a useful role for Washington and its

media, diverting attention to a “political settlement” while attacks on

the popular organizations and general terror mounted, Aristide’s

promised return was blocked, and new initiatives were put forth to

transfer power to traditional power centers (“broadening the

government”). Malval’s presence also offered the press a great method to

bring out Aristide’s unreasonable intransigence. He couldn’t even come

to terms with “his handpicked Prime Minister,” a phrase that ritually

accompanied the name “Robert Malval.” In a typical exercise, Howard

French opened a report of Malval’s resignation by writing: “Three days

after formally resigning, the handpicked Prime Minister of Haiti’s

exiled President lashed out this weekend at the man who appointed him” —

hammering home the message in the fashion that became so routine as to

be comical. Malval described Aristide as an “erratic figure” with a

“serious ego problem,” French continued, referring to his commitment to

restore the democratically-elected government.[66]

As the date for Aristide’s scheduled October 30 return approached,

atrocities mounted high enough to gain some attention, though no action.

Amidst reports of “terrifying stories” of terror, murder, and threats to

exterminate all members of the popular organizations, the Clinton

Administration announced that the UN Mission “will rely on the Haitian

military and police to maintain order” — that is, on the killers. “It is

not a peacekeeping role,” Secretary of Defense Aspin explained: “We are

doing something other than peacekeeping here.” Meanwhile, the press

emphasized the concerns of U.S. officials that Aristide “isn’t moving

strongly to restore democratic rights,” from his exile in Washington.

“Even as the situation has grown worse, foreign diplomats have

increasingly blamed Father Aristide for what they say is his failure to

take constructive initiatives,” Howard French wrote, using the standard

device to disguise propaganda as reporting.[67]

The stage was set for ignoring the October deadline, as the U.S. stood

helplessly by, unable to bring the uncompromising and violent extremists

on both sides to accept “democracy.”

Reviewing these mid-1993 developments, Ian Martin, who directed the

OAS/UN mission from April through December 1993, writes that one basic

problem was U.S. insistence on adding “a mostly American military

component to the negotiators’ proposals.” Aristide’s call for reducing

the Haitian army to 1000 men was rejected. “The Haitian high command,

for its part, sought U.S. assistance to ensure the army’s future.” The

generals trusted the U.S. and “mistrusted the U.N. and the proposal for

the Canadians and French, both more committed supporters of Aristide

than the United States, to take the lead in the police contingent. The

U.S. hoped to preserve the military — an institution it had often

assisted and in fact had created for purposes of internal control during

the American occupation of 1915–34.” Haitian army “resistance was

encouraged whenever they perceived that the United States, despite its

rhetoric of democracy, was ambivalent about that power shift” to the

popular elements represented by Aristide. There was no shortage of such

occasions.

The crucial signal, Martin and others agree, came on October 11, when

the USS Harlan County was scheduled to disembark U.S. and Canadian

troops at Port-au-Prince. The military organized “a hostile

demonstration of armed thugs,” Martin observes, and “instead of waiting

in the harbor while the Haitian military was pressured to ensure a safe

landing, the Harlan County turned tail for Guantanamo Bay,” leaving

officials of the UN/OAS mission “aghast”; they “had been neither

consulted nor informed of the decision by President Bill Clinton’s

National Security Council to retreat.” “The organizers of the Haitian

protest could hardly believe their success,” Martin continues. The

leader of the paramilitary organization FRAPH, responsible for much of

the terror, said that “My people kept wanting to run away, but I took

the gamble and urged them to stay. Then the Americans pulled out! We

were astonished. That was the day FRAPH was actually born. Before,

everyone said we were crazy, suicidal, that we would all be burned if

Aristide returned. But now we know he is never going to return.” The

military got the message too, loud and clear.

Perhaps they were even notified in advance. New York Daily News

correspondent Juan Gonzalez learned of the October 11 port demonstration

the day before at a Duvalierist meeting attended by U.S. Embassy

personnel. The following day, he asked in print: “How can two Daily News

reporters who have only visited Haiti on a few occasions learn

beforehand of secret plans to sabotage the landing of our troops, while

our vaunted officialdom claims it was caught flat-footed?” How indeed.

Another possible line of communication is suggested in a report by

Father Antoine Adrien, former head of Aristide’s religious order in

Haiti and a close associate. Just before the ship “turned tail,” he

informed the Catholic Church press that Haitian military officers had

not only attended training school in Fort Benning, Ga., in 1992, but

that “some were there as recently as the previous week” — October 1993.

“How are you going to tell those people they have no backing in the

United States?,” Father Adrien asked. That Haitian army officers

received training in the U.S. after the coup was confirmed in an

internal Pentagon document, including eight officers who started courses

in early 1992. The program they joined is designed to expose “future

leaders of foreign defense establishments” to “American values, regard

for human rights and democratic institutions,” according to the Defense

Secretary’s report to the President for 1993. Earlier graduates include

the leading killers in Haiti, Central America, and elsewhere.

What lay behind the decision to turn tail was explained by Deputy Under

Secretary of Defense Walter Slocombe, who “boasted at a cocktail party

that by turning back the U.S.S. Harlan County, he had helped save the

United States from a ‘small war’,” the Times reported six months later:

“He vowed that the Pentagon would not risk American soldiers’ lives to

put ‘that psychopath’ back in power.”[68]

While messages were coming through to the military, the Haitian people

were deprived of the one voice they longed to hear. “Senior Clinton

administration officials are embroiled in a fight over whether to

allow…Aristide to broadcast into the junta-ruled country using airborne

U.S. military transmitters,” Paul Quinn-Judge reported in May 1994. The

USIA is opposed, fearing that “the plan may violate international law,”

always a prime concern in Washington. USIA was also concerned that such

broadcasts “would provide Aristide with an uncomfortably direct means to

communicate with Haitians, who elected him by an overwhelming margin in

1990.” His oratory has been known to “create problems,” a classifed USIA

memorandum of May 23 noted, asking whether “we wish to have the

responsibility for having given him the means to broadcast whatever he

chooses to Haiti.” He might even challenge the U.S. publicly “the first

time we refuse to air something.” It wouldn’t even suffice to have him

submit his scripts in advance, because of the “highly nuanced language

and context” of a radio broadcast; who knows what thoughts this devious

creature might convey by his tone of voice? “Debate over the

idea…underscores the continuing ambivalence and nervousness with which

some senior officials view Aristide,” Quinn-Judge observed.[69]

After the military coup, the OAS instituted a toothless embargo, which

the Bush Administration reluctantly joined, while making clear that it

was not to be taken seriously. The reasons were explained a year later

by Howard French: “Washington’s deep-seated ambivalence about a

leftward-tilting nationalist whose style diplomats say has sometimes

been disquietingly erratic” precludes any meaningful support for

sanctions against the military rulers. “Despite much blood on the army’s

hands, United States diplomats consider it a vital counterweight to

Father Aristide, whose class-struggle rhetoric…threatened or antagonized

traditional power centers at home and abroad.” Aristide’s “call for

punishment of the military leadership” that had slaughtered and tortured

thousands of people “reinforced a view of him as an inflexible and

vindictive crusader,” and heightened Washington’s “antipathy” towards

the “clumsy” and “erratic” extremist who has aroused great “anger”

because of “his tendency toward ingratitude.”[70]

The “vital counterweight” is therefore to hold total power while the

“leftward tilting nationalist” remains in exile, awaiting the “eventual

return” that Bill Clinton promised on the eve of his inauguration.

Meanwhile, the “traditional power centers” in Haiti and the U.S. will

carry on with class struggle as usual, employing such terror as may be

needed in order for plunder to proceed unhampered. And as the London

Financial Times added at the same time, Washington was proving oddly

ineffective in detecting the “lucrative use of the country in the

transhipment of narcotics” by which “the military is funding its oil and

other necessary imports,” financing the necessary terror and rapacity —

though U.S. forces seem able to find every fishing boat carrying

miserable refugees. Nor had Washington figured out a way to freeze the

assets of “civil society” or to hinder their shopping trips to Miami and

New York, or to induce its Dominican clients to monitor the border to

impede the flow of goods that takes care of the wants of “civil society”

while the embargo remains “at best, sieve-like.”[71]

Meanwhile Washington continued to provide Haitian military leaders with

intelligence on narcotics trafficking — which they naturally used to

expedite their activities and tighten their grip on power. It is not

easy to intercept narcotraffickers, the press explained, because “Haiti

has no radar,” and evidently the U.S. Navy and Air Force lack the means

to remedy this deficiency.[72]

Under Clinton, matters only got worse. An April 1994 report of Human

Rights Watch/Americas documents the increasing terror and State

Department apologetics and evasions, condemning the Administration for

having “embraced a murderous armed force as a counterweight to a

populist president it distrusts.”

On February 4, 1992, the Bush Administration lifted the embargo for

assembly plants, “under heavy pressure from American businesses with

interests in Haiti,” the Washington Post reported, with its editorial

endorsement; the lobbying effort was assisted by Elliott Abrams, Human

Rights Watch noted. For January-October 1992, U.S. trade with Haiti came

to $265 million, according to the Department of Commerce.[73]

As Clinton took over, the embargo became still more porous. The

Dominican border was left wide open. Meanwhile, U.S. companies continued

to be exempted from the embargo — so as to ease its effects on the

population, the Administration announced with a straight face; only

exemptions for U.S. firms have this curious feature. There were many

heartfelt laments about the suffering of poor Haitians under the

embargo, but one had to turn to the underground press in Haiti, the

alternative media here, or an occasional letter to learn that the major

peasant organization (MPP), church coalitions, labor organizations, and

the National Federation of Haitian Students continued to call for a real

embargo.[74]

Curiously, some of those most distressed by the impact of the embargo on

the Haitian poor were the most forceful advocates of a still harsher

embargo on Cuba, notably liberal Democrat Robert Torricelli, author of

the stepped-up embargo that the Bush Administration accepted under

pressure from the Clintonites. Evidently, hunger causes no pain to Cuban

children, another oddity that passed unnoticed, along with the

U.S.-Haiti trade figures.

Clinton’s tinkering with the embargo also passed without comment here,

though the facts are known, and occasionally even leak through, as in a

tiny Feb. 13 Reuters dispatch in the New York Times reporting efforts of

human rights advocates to convince the President to observe the embargo.

“US imports from Haiti rose by more than half last year [1993],” the

Financial Times reported in London, “thanks in part to an exemption

granted by the US Treasury for imports of goods assembled in Haiti from

US parts.” U.S. exports to Haiti also rose in 1993. Exports from Haiti

to the United States included food (fruits and nuts, citrus fruit or

melons) from the starving country, which increased by a factor of 35

from January-July 1992 to January-July 1993. The federal government was

among the purchasers of the baseballs imported from Haiti (duty free),

stitched by women who work 11 hour days with a half-hour break in

unbearable heat without running water or a working toilet, for 10 cents

an hour if they can meet the quota (few can), using toxic materials

without protection so that the U.S. importer can advertise proudly that

their softballs are “hand-dipped for maximum bonding.” The manufacturers

are the wealthy Haitian families who supported the coup and have gained

new riches during the embargo, along with others profiting handsomely

from the black market, such as the fuel supplier for the U.S. embassy.

The “assembly zone” loophole, criticized by U.S. labor unions and at the

UN Security Council by France and Canada in January, was extended by the

Clinton Administration on April 25, 1994, four days after announcing

that it would seek to tighten UN sanctions; the latter announcement was

reported. On the same day, the U.S. Coast Guard returned 98 refugees to

military authorities, 18 of them at once arrested.

“The Clinton administration still formally declares its support for Mr

Aristide, but scarcely disguises its wish for a leader more

accommodating to the military,” the Financial Times reported, while

“European diplomats in Washington are scathing in their comments on what

they see as the US’s abdication of leadership over Haiti.”[75]

In his January 1994 testimony to Congress on “Threats to the U.S. and

Its Interests Abroad,” the Director of the CIA predicted that Haiti

“probably will be out of fuel and power very shortly.” “Our intelligence

efforts are focused on detecting attempts to circumvent the embargo and

monitoring its impact,” and “any indication of an imminent exodus.” The

“Threats to the U.S.” were contained with the usual selectivity and

skill. “Exodus” from the charnel house was effectively blocked, while

the press reported an “oil boom” as “diplomats expressed amazement at

the extent of the trafficking” organized by the Haitian and Dominican

armies, and the former assured reporters that “The military is not

concerned about fuel shortages; it has plenty.[76]

The Clinton Administration has scarcely departed from the prescriptions

outlined by the Washington Post and New York Times as it came into

office.[77] The preferred solution, John Goshko explained in the Post,

would “delay indefinitely” the return to Haiti of the “radical priest

with anti-American leanings” whose “strident populism led the Haitian

armed forces to seize power,” and would “allow Bazin or some other prime

minister to govern in his place.” Bazin was then prime minister under

army rule, but was having problems, because although “well-known and

well-regarded in the United States,” unfortunately “the masses in Haiti

consider him a front man for military and business interests.” A

replacement would therefore be needed to represent the interests of the

moderates. In the Times, Howard French indicated the scale of the

required delay: “In the past, diplomats have said the Haitian President

could return only after a substantial interim period during which the

country’s economy was revived and all its institutions, from the army

itself to the judiciary to health care and education, were stabilized.”

That should overcome the danger of Aristide’s “personalist and

electoralist politics.” But unfortunately, the troublesome priest has

been recalcitrant: “Father Aristide and many of his supporters have held

out for a quick return,” undermining the moderate course.

As understood on all sides, the “delay” need not be too long. Aristide’s

term ends in 1996, and he is barred from running again. By then military

terror should have sufficiently intimidated the population and

demolished popular organizations so that “free elections” can be

tolerated, as in the Central American terror states, without too much

fear of any threat to “civil society” from the rabble.

5. The May 1994 Reversal

Plans proceeded on course into early 1994. By then, the cynicism and

brutality of U.S. policy had become too blatant for the usual cover-up,

particularly after Clinton’s point man Lawrence Pezzullo revealed in

congressional testimony that the plan that the Administration had touted

as the product of negotiations among Haitian democrats, denouncing

Aristide for his intransigence in rejecting it (it made no provision for

his return), had in fact been produced by the State Department, which

brought to Washington selected Haitians to ratify it, among them

Duvalierist collaborators of the murderous police chief Col. Francois.

Something new was needed.

Pezzullo was replaced by William Gray, a more credible voice. In May

Clinton instituted a new and more humane refugee policy, which “will

mean the forcible return of 95 percent of boat people instead of 100

percent,” a Human Rights Watch Haiti analyst observed, pointing out that

“The US policy excludes people who are not high profile but are

persecuted nonetheless.” The new policy is just “window dressing,” the

national refugee coordinator of Amnesty International added.

But 5% of the boat people fleeing persecution is beyond what the United

States can be expected to handle. It will “devastate Florida,” a

Republican congressional staff member complained. Explaining a few days

later why the U.S. might have to invade, “Mr. Clinton saved his

strongest warning for what he described as ‘the continuous possibility’

that Haitians left poor and desperate under military rule would join in

a ‘massive outflow’ and seek refuge in the United States,” the Times

reported; the terms “poor and desperate” convey the doctrine that these

are economic refugees. Overcrowded and destitute, the United States

plainly cannot bear the burden of accepting refugees or even housing

them until their claims of persecution are rejected; and surely it has

no historical responsibilities in the matter. The President piteously

pleaded with other countries to help us in our plight.[78]

Curiously, the anguished debate over this issue missed the obvious

candidate: Tanzania, which had just then accommodated hundreds of

thousands of Rwandans, and could surely come to the rescue of the

beleaguered United States by accepting a few thousand more black faces.

On May 21, an embargo was announced which, for the first time, may have

some serious intent. The “assembly plant” exemption was quietly removed,

and the Dominican border was (at least briefly) closed. The long-known

involvement of the Haitian military in narcotrafficking was also

officially reported. “We’re not going to say, ‘Let the masses and the

middle class suffer, but the very wealthy don’t have to pay a price,” a

senior Administration official stated. “Even Wealthy Haitians Starting

to Feel Pinched,” a Times headline read, again letting out the real

story of the efforts to “restore democracy” during the 2 1/2 years since

the coup. Government statements and press reports tacitly conceded what

had always been clear: that the U.S. has the means, far short of

military intervention, to restore democracy in Haiti, but had no

intention of doing so, and still does not. What has always been required

is a clear declaration of intent to restore democracy, but that cannot

be given, because there is no such intent. The military and their

civilian allies understand that perfectly well.

In the following weeks, the U.S. banned commercial air flights and

financial transactions, while leaving crucial loopholes open. Personal

assets of the coup supporters were not frozen, so they can withdraw

funds from U.S. bank accounts at will and transfer money to banks

abroad, Administration officials acknowledged — a matter that may be

academic, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Kweisi Mfume,

observed, since “the dictators of Haiti have long ago moved their assets

in anticipation of this.” The sanctions also permit the families that

have long dominated the economy to hold on to the monopoly of the food

trade that is a major source of their wealth, including the Mevs family,

which is building “a huge new oil depot here to help the army defy the

embargo,” French reported, adding that “Washington’s hesitancy in taking

firm action against the business elite and the army is a result of a

long history of close ties and perceived common interests,” if not fear

of “a spate of embarrassing revelations made by Haitians in reprisal for

a crackdown.”

After sanctions were finally imposed in May 1994, a U.S. diplomat

conceded that the continuing failure to move against the richest

families has left “a perception out there of sending mixed messages and

having double agendas.” Other diplomats and Haitian experts agree that

the decision not to target key civilian supporters of the coup is yet

another mixed signal, noting particularly the relief granted the Mev,

Brandt, Acra and Madsen families, who “still have a role to play,” a

U.S. Embassy source informed the press, though they have made no effort

to disguise their support for the coup. Washington is “imposing

sanctions designed to strangle the country into restoring Aristide at

the same time they are telling the people who backed the coup and are in

business with the military in keeping Aristide out that they are free to

lead their privileged lives,” another diplomat said. Haitian Senators

who lead the anti-Aristide movement were not denied their permanent U.S.

resident status, including Bernard Sansaricq, who played a leading role

in installing the puppet civilian government with its new “president”

Emile Jonassaint, appointed to replace Aristide.[79]

Meanwhile, the serious work of undermining the basis for democracy

continues unhampered. By the time Clinton took office, as Americas Watch

reported, the terror had already decimated the popular organizations

that would allow Aristide “to exert civilian authority,” even if he were

eventually permitted to return. As Clinton finally agreed to sanctions

16 months later, Douglas Farah reported in the Washington Post that “the

army and its allies have damaged democratic institutions and grass-roots

organizations that had begun to grow in Haiti to such an extent that

they would take years to rebuild even if Haiti’s military leaders

surrendered power, according to diplomats and human rights monitors.”

“The Duvalierist system will continue, with or without the return of

Aristide,” the leader of a now-clandestine pro-Aristide group said, a

judgment endorsed by “a veteran human rights worker” who prefers

anonymity “because of numerous threats against his life.” “The

Duvialierists have many fine days ahead of them in this country,” he

said: “People are losing their ability to make things happen here, and

it will take many years to reverse that under the best of

circumstances.” Even nonpolitical community organizations have been

repressed, thousands of community leaders have been driven into hiding

along with hundreds of thousands of others, while over 4000 have been

murdered outright. The “massive terrorism,” Farah reports, is “aimed at

dismantling the last vestiges of organized support” for Aristide, while

the civilian allies of the army and police in FRAPH have “become a very

efficient machine of repression,” which will remain the only authority

even if Aristide were to return, the same human rights worker comments.

Members of the popular organizations interviewed in hiding have “applied

for political asylum at the U.S. Embassy and been denied.[80]

To ensure a smooth transition to the intended post-coup system, with the

“moderates” in charge and the Duvalierists preserving order, FRAPH and

USAID-funded groups linked to it are establishing a monopoly of social

services, so that “the poor who are compliant and docile get health

services,” a Haitian doctor explains. This is the “soft side” of

counterinsurgency, on the model of Guatemala and other terror states.

Meanwhile we are to ponder the question of whether Haitians “can muster

the maturity and cohesiveness to forge a working democracy” (Howard

French), or whether we must labor for decades in a (perhaps vain) effort

to overcome the defects — cultural, if not genetic — that had been

discerned by Wilson’s Secretary of State and Carter’s USAID director in

Haiti.[81]

As the Bush Administration prepared to hand over the reins, a senior UN

official observed that its dislike of Aristide was an open secret: “Two

lines about Haiti co-existed at the time. There was the line about

‘return to democracy,’ which was for public consumption. And then there

was a second line, spoken privately within the administration. And the

Haitian military knew it perfectly well.” A year later, after the Harlan

County affair gave birth to FRAPH, a French military adviser updated the

picture: “Do you know what the real problem is? The Americans don’t want

Aristide back, and they want the rest of us out” — “the rest of us”

being Canada, France and Venezuela, the other three of “Aristide’s

so-called Four Friends.”[82]

That this judgment is exactly right has been apparent throughout. It

should be clear, however, that the issue is not Aristide personally. The

problem is the forces he represents: the lively and vibrant popular

movements that swept him into office, greatly alarming the rich and

powerful in Haiti and their American counterparts, and teaching lessons

in democracy that have to be silenced, for who can tell what minds they

might reach?

[1] Fromkin, NYT Magazine, Feb. 27, 1994; Kennan, NYT, March 14, 1994.

[2] Boston Review, February/March 1994; I am flattered to be the chosen

target.

[3] Anthony Flint, BG, March 4, 1994.

[4] Macfarlane, review of Alexander George, ed., Western State

Terrorism, THES, June 26, 1992.

[5] On the new revelations, see various articles by John Pilger and Max

Stahl, who recently returned from Timor, among them, Pilger, “Horror

behind the West’s big wink,” Guardian Weekly, Feb. 27, 1994. A Pilger

film on BBC received wide coverage in Britain and Australia.

[6] Reuters, NYT, Dec. 8, 1993. 1965, see my Year 501 (South End), chap.

4.

[7] Bennett, letter, Nation, April 1994.

[8] Counterpunch (Institute for Policy Studies), Feb. 15, March 15;

Nicholas Cumming-Bruce, Guardian, Feb. 16, 1994.

[9] Friedman, NYT, March 24, 1994.

[10] Maggie Farley, BG, March 7, 1994.

[11] Sciolino, NYT, March 8, 1994.

[12] Friedman, NYT, March 24; Tony Walker, FT, March 15; Elaine

Sciolino, NYT, March 15, 1994.

[13] Friedman, NYT, Jan. 21, 23; Tefft, CSM, Dec. 22, 1993.

[14] Reese Erlich, CSM, Feb. 9, 1994.

[15] Friedman, NYT, March 24, 1994.

[16] For details, see my Deterring Democracy (Verso-Hill & Wang,

1991–2), chap. 10.

[17] World Briefs, BG, March 16, 1994.

[18] See my World Orders Old and New (Columbia, 1994), for sources and

details.

[19] Central America Report (Guatemala), Feb. 4, 1994; Ropp, “Things

Fall Apart: Panama after Noriega,” Current History, March 1993.

Economist, March 12, 1994. For more on these matters, see Deterring

Democracy, chap. 5; Year 501, chap. 4.

[20] Manlio Tirado, Excelsior, Nov. 27, 1993; Latin America News Update,

Jan. 1994; Env!o (UCA, Managua), Feb.-March 1994.

[21] Edward Oriebar, FT, March 22; Howard French, NYT, March 22.

[22] For a review of the declassified documents, see Human Rights

Watch/Americas (Americas Watch), El Salvador: Darkening Horizons, El

Salvador on the eve of the March 1994 elections, VI.4, March 1994.

[23] Ibid., for details.

[24] Howard French, NYT, March 6, March 22; Gene Palumbo, CSM, Jan. 20;

David Clark Scott, CSM, March 18, 22, 1994.

[25] Notimex, El Nuevo Diario (Managua), March 20, 1994.

[26] Juan Herna’ndez Pico, Envi’o, March 1994.

[27] Martz, “Colombia: Democracy, Development, and Drugs,” CH, March

1994; Steven Greenhouse, NYT, March 15, 1994.

[28] Americas Watch, State of War: Political Violence and

Counterinsurgency in Colombia (Human Rights Watch, Dec. 1993); Amnesty

International, Political Violence [In Colombia]: Myth and Reality (March

1994). Deterring Democracy, chap. 4.

[29] AP, BG, March 14, 1994.

[30] WOLA, The Colombian National Police, Human Rights, and U.S. Drug

Policy, May 1993. For details on the last three months of 1993, see

particularly Justicia y Paz, Comision Intercongregacional de Justicia y

Paz, vol. 6.4, October-Dec. 1993, Bogot.

[31] Comision Andina de Juristas, Seccional Colombia, Bogot , Jan. 19,

1994.

[32] AP, BG, Feb. 25, 1994.

[33] AI, Political Violence. Comision Andina, op. cit.

[34] McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft (Pantheon, 1992); see Year

501, chap. 10, for some discussion. See Deterring Democracy, chap. 4, on

mercenaries.

[35] El Terrorismo de Estado en Colombia (Brussels, 1992). On the

deterioration of the human rights situation in the 1980s, see also Jenny

Pearce, Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth (Latin American Bureau, London,

1990).

[36] Deterring Democracy, chap. 4.

[37] Nathaniel Sheppard, CT, Jan. 6, 1994. Human Rights Watch/Americas,

op. cit. David Clark Scott, CSM, March 23, 1994.

[38] Justicia y Paz, cited by WOLA, Colombia Besieged: Political

Violence and State Responsibility (Washington DC, 1989).

[39] For details on these and other atrocities, and the general

impunity, see references cited above and in Deterring Democracy, chap.

4. 1988–1992 estimate, El Terrorismo de Estado en Colombia.

[40] WOLA, Colombia Besieged; The Paramilitary strategy imposed on

Colombia’s Chucuri region (Jan. 1993).

[41] WOLA, Colombian National Police.

[42] Colombia Update, Colombian Human Rights Committee, Dec. 1989; see

Deterring Democracy, chap. 4.

[43] WOLA, Colombia Besieged. Children, Pearce, op. cit.

[44] Marquis, MH, March 9; Birns, COHA Washington Report on the

Hemisphere, March 7; Amy Wilentz, NYT op-ed, March 24, 1994.

[45] Cited by Robert Vitalis, “Dreams of Markets, Nightmares of

Democracy,” ms. 1994; Middle East Report, Spring 1994.

[46] NYT, May 27, 1994.

[47] Catholic New Times, 9 Jan. 1994; John Pilger, New Statesman and

Nation, June 3, 1994.

[48] Much of what follows appears in my introduction to Paul Farmer, The

Uses of Haiti (Common Courage, 1994), a rich and informative analysis of

what is happening and its backgrounds. For further discussion and

sources, see also my Year 501, chaps. 8–9.

[49] Haiti: State against Nation (Monthly Review, 1990).

[50] Ibid.; NACLA Report on the Americas, Jan/Feb. 1994.

[51] Haiti Info, May 23, 1993. Personal interviews, Port-au-Prince, June

1993. Harrison, “Voodoo Politics,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1993. For some

comments, see Farmer, op. cit.; his letter in response was refused

publication.

[52] NYT, May 9, 1994.

[53] For extensive discussion, see Haiti After the Coup: Sweatshop or

Real Development,” National Labor Committee Education Fund (New York),

April 1993, a report based on visits and research by U.S. labor union

factfinders, entirely ignored in the mainstream. Bernstein, Pacific News

Service, April 4–8, 1994.

[54] French, NYT, Oct. 22, 1991; Jan. 12, 1992.

[55] Haiti After the Coup.

[56] Wilentz, Reconstruction, vol. 1.4 (1992).

[57] Diebel, Star, Oct. 10, 1991; Nov. 14, 1993.

[58] Boston Media Action report, distributed by Haiti Communications

Project (Cambridge); Z magazine, March 1993. Orenstein, NACLA Report on

the Americas, July/August 1993.

[59] Americas Watch and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees,

Silencing a People (Human Rights Watch, 1993).

[60] USA Today, March 2, 1994.

[61] Haiti Info, May 21; Sciolino, May 9, 1994.

[62] Dennis Bernstein, Pacific News Service, April 4; Cuba Action,

Spring 1994.

[63] Bush, John Laidler, BG, May 13; Abrams, WSJ, May 6, 1994. Pamela

Constable, BG, Dec. 25; Rotberg, BG, Dec. 29, 1993. Peter Grier, CSM,

May 6; NYT, Feb. 21, 1994.

[64] NYT, Jan. 15, 1993.

[65] AP, BG, July 18, 27; NYT, July 26; Reuters, BG, July 27; Reuters,

BG, Aug. 12, 1993.

[66] NYT, Dec. 20, 1993.

[67] Pamela Constable, BG, Oct. 1; Steven Holmes, NYT, Oct. 1; WSJ, Oct.

1; Howard French, NYT, Sept. 22, 1993.

[68] Martin, Foreign Policy, Summer 1994. Gonzalez, NYDN, Oct. 12, cited

by Kim Ives, NACLA Report on the Americas, Jan./Feb., 1994. Patricia

Zapor, Birmingham Catholic Press, Oct. 15, 1993; Paul Quinn-Judge, BG,

Dec. 6, 1993. Elaine Sciolino, et al., NYT, April 29, 1994.

[69] BG, May 28, 1994.

[70] French, NYT, Sept. 27; Oct. 8, 1992.

[71] Canute James, FT, Dec. 10, 1992.

[72] Douglas Farah, WP weekly, Nov. 1–7, 1993.

[73] HRW and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Terror Prevails in

Haiti, April 1994. WP weekly, Feb. 17, 10, 1992 (Lee Hockstader,

editorial). See my “Class Struggle as Usual,” Letters from Lexington

(Common Courage, 1993); reprinted from Lies of Our Times, March 1993.

[74] Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, letters, NYT, March 3, 1994.

[75] Reuters, NYT, Feb. 14; George Graham, FT, Feb. 20, 1994. Report of

National Labor Committee Education Fund, Feb. 15; April 1994. See

Charles Kernaghan, Multinational Monitor, March 1994; Counterpunch

(IPS), April 1, 1994. Haiti Progres, April 27-May 3, 1994. Oil, Douglas

Farah, WP weekly, May 30, 1994. Note that the trade increases are not

attributable to the rescinding of the embargo from July to October 1993.

[76] Opening Statement, Director of Central Intelligence, U.S. Senate

Select Committee on Intelligence, Jan. 25, 1994. Howard French, NYT,

Feb. 14, March 13, 1994.

[77] WP, Dec. 20, 1992; NYT, Jan. 9, 1993.

[78] Peter Grier, CSM, May 16; Douglas Jehl, NYT, 1994.

[79] Drugs, Tim Weiner, NYT, April 22; Howard French, NYT, June 8, 1994.

Stephen Greenhouse, French, NYT, June 11, May 25; Pamela Constable, BG,

June 11; Kenneth Freed, LA Times, May 25, 1994.

[80] WP weekly, April 25, May 16, 1994.

[81] NACLA, Observers Delegation report, Jan. 1994; Report on the

Americas, Mar/April 1994; Haiti News Digest (Haiti Communications

Project, Boston), May 1994. French, NYT, June 6, 1994.

[82] Kate Doyle, World Policy Journal, Spring 1994; Linda Diebel,

Toronto Star, Nov. 14, 1993.