[R-G] Narco News: Five Questions About Haiti and the Coup Attempt

[Tim Murphy]

February 19, 2004
www.narconews.com

The Narco News Bulletin

Five Questions About Haiti and the Coup Attempt

Echoes of Venezuela 2002 Are Heard Across the Caribbean

By

Al Giordano


Not being a Creole or French speaker, nor having any experience in the
island nation of Haiti (this French-Creole speaking country shares the isle
of Hispaniola with the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic), I’m going to
abide by the advice I so often give to others:

That when we don’t speak or read the language in any given land, we have to
be very cautious and careful not to pretend that we know what is happening
in those places.

That’s especially true during times of crisis when the Commercial Media,
governments, and the financial interests behind them both, start spinning
their paintbrushes onto the public canvass. As we saw during the coup
attempts in Venezuela of 2002, these are the moments when confusion reigns,
when urban legends are reported as “fact,” when lies travel halfway around
the world before the truth can put its pants on, and even the spin doctors
get caught up in the whirlpool of the cesspool of the press pool.

In recent hours, the Pentagon has announced it is sending a team of military
advisors into Haiti. On the same day, the State Department issued an
advisory for Peace Corps members and other Americans to leave Haiti. The
rumor mill is at a fever pitch.

Take this statement from U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher,
yesterday, when asked by an alert reporter about Jeremy Bigwood’s findings
of U.S. government money spent on behalf of coup proponents in Venezuela:

“As far as the facts of the matter, we have spoken many times before about
our assistance to democracy in Haiti—excuse me—our assistance to democracy
in Venezuela.” – Richard Boucher, U.S. State Department spokesman

Oops! That Freudian slip – confusing the documents that show coup-provoking
activity in Venezuela by Washington with U.S. policy toward Haiti – tells us
a lot more about how Washington views current events in Haiti than most of
what press-spinner Boucher said intentionally.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-California) returned this week from her
second trip to Haiti in fifty days, and implored that “the international
press must discontinue the practice of repeating rumors and innuendos and
begin to spend quality time learning the truth and writing the truth about
what is really going on in Haiti.”

Haiti – a nation that celebrates its bicentennial this year – has suffered
30 coups in 200 years. In that context, when President Jean Bertrand
Aristide tells reporters that he will die before being pressured to resign,
given his history as a social fighter, it’s probably a safe bet to believe
him: “We cannot continue to move,” he says, “from one coup d’état to
another.”

So let’s begin, before the 31st coup d’etat gains traction, asking the
questions to help us learn and write that truth.

It’s no secret that the Bush administration – with its extremist Latin
America policy chiefs and their obsessive fear of a red planet – doesn’t
like Aristide, the Canadian-educated former Catholic priest, and historic
leader of the poor. But in its final year, the Clinton administration turned
on Haiti, too, imposing an economic embargo against an already impoverished
country that has been continued by Bush. Proponents of the embargo raise
different reasons for it: alleged fraud in May 2000 congressional races,
unwillingness to abide by conditions imposed by the International Monetary
Fund and other global banking entities, and one of the questions that must
be asked is “what is the agenda, really?” Is it simply to make an example of
a small nation to warn other Latin American countries that they had better
fall in line with impositions from above? After all we’ve seen this same
trend in U.S. policy for three years now regarding Venezuela, Argentina, and
Brazil, all relatively large and resource-rich countries, and also regarding
a smaller, poorer, country, Ecuador where the policy has already succeeded
in turning the president against his indigenous electoral base and toward
obedient compliance with the dictates of the North.

Of course, the law of unintended consequences kicks in, especially with
Haiti, as even AP reporter George Gedda acknowledged yesterday when writing
about Haiti:

Among the congressional dissenters a decade ago was Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.
“Aristide may have won an election, but he’s not likely to win a medal for
promoting true democracy,” Helms thundered on the eve of the invasion.

Nowadays, many in the administration – and in Haiti – would agree with
Helms.

Aristide’s government has accomplished little but, then again, he has
received minimal support from Washington, which contends that he has
violated democratic norms. Assistance from the United States and other donor
countries has been limited in recent years to food and other forms of
humanitarian aid.

“They’ve cut off aid to the government and starved them of resources,” says
James Dobbins, a former State Department Haiti expert. “They’ve gone to the
opposite extreme of the Clinton administration.”

Jimmy Carter is an authority on that subject. Between April and September of
1980, the Carter White House allowed 125,000 Cuban refugees to land in
Florida. Carter was blamed for arrival of so many unwelcome visitors, and
Ronald Reagan won the state handily that November.

And many analysts believe Clinton lost the only election of his life in 1980
because a number of Cuban refugees were sent to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas,
where some rioted. He won back the Arkansas governorship in 1982.

The Bush White House, not surprisingly, wants disgruntled Haitians to stay
put and not flee to Florida, especially in this election year. As the
presidential balloting in 2000 showed, how Floridians vote is no small
matter.


While it’s obvious that Washington’s policy was to sabotage the Aristide
government, now it’s not very clear exactly what the Bush administration
wants. But as for what is happening with this coup attempt in Haiti this
week, I have some questions that I hope readers and others who do speak the
language and have experience in the country can help answer.


Five Questions

1. What Is at Stake?

Follow the money: What resources would the coup-plotters gain control over
by taking the government? The CIA World Fact Book says of Haiti’s economy:

About 80% of the population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of all
Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of
small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of the
economically active work force. Following legislative elections in May 2000,
fraught with irregularities, international donors – including the US and
EU - suspended almost all aid to Haiti. The economy shrank an estimated 1.2%
in 2001 and an estimated 0.9% in 2002. The contraction will likely intensify
in 2003 unless a political agreement with donors is reached on economic
policy. Suspended aid and loan disbursements totaled more than $500 million
at the start of 2003.

The industrial sector of the Haitian economy is only 20 percent of its $10
billion annual Gross Domestic Product, and is made up of “sugar refining,
flour milling, textiles, cement, light assembly industries based on imported
parts,” and its agricultural products, to which 30 percent of the economy is
based, are “coffee, mangoes, sugarcane, rice, corn, sorghum; wood,” in other
words, no big ticket item like petroleum or rare minerals.

Which brings me to the next question


2. Is This a Battle for Control of Narco-Trafficking?

Haiti has no luxurious resources to covet, and, as the CIA Fact Book also
acknowledges, it has a very poor infrastructure, low education levels, an
inadequately trained workforce, and less than eight million people
 so that
leads to the next obvious question: Where does the drug trade – where the
big money exists – fit into this conflict?

Haiti is not a drug producer nation either, but, as Michael Ruppert wrote
back in May 2000, Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican
Republic, is in “a key strategic position in between the drug producing
countries of South America – especially Colombia – and the largest single
importation center for illegal drugs in the United States, New York City.”

Ruppert noted in 2000 that the Dominican Republic was favored over Haiti by
narco-traffickers and Washington alike. But do current attempts to topple
the government of Haiti foretell a new importance for the western side of
the island to cocaine transport routes, the narco-traffickers, and the
bankers who launder their money?

3. Do Aristide Defenders Want Foreign Intervention or Not?

This is a tense little question with big consequences for other debates in
other regions. Haiti’s ambassador to Cuba says yes, calling for an
international police force set up by the Organization of American States.

But Stan Goff, a veteran of past US military intervention in Haiti, writing
last weekend in Counterpunch, said that “there is an attempt to start a
civil war in Haiti, engineered in the United States of America and supported
by its lapdogs in Caricom and the Organization of American States.”

So, do we trust OAS to send cops or troops or not? Can any foreign force be
trusted? If so, which?

Or are there alternative paths to preserving the democratically elected
government? What about, for example, helping the elected Haitian government
to defend itself? As Maxine Waters notes:

President Aristide disbanded the military when he returned to office and has
a police force of only 5,000 for a country of 8 million people. The United
States aborted its efforts to support and train the new police force and
currently has a ban on selling guns and equipment to Haiti. This policy
effectively denies Haitian law enforcement officers the essential equipment
that they so desperately need to maintain order and enforce the rule of law.

And, regarding narco-trafficking, the Congresswoman adds:

President Aristide has given the United States special authority to assist
with drug interdiction efforts by allowing the United States to interdict
drugs in Haitian waters. The government of Haiti does not have the resources
needed to wage a tough and consistent war against drugs, and the president
of Haiti is begging the United States for assistance to eliminate drug
trafficking.

Which brings us to the next question


4. How Can Washington Justify its Economic Embargo Policy Any Longer?

There are a lot of mixed messages from the State Department, from the IMF,
from the International Development Bank, and others, as to why this economic
embargo still stands. Is the Bush administration really going to make its
stand in Haiti over alleged election fraud in Congressional races? That
might be a tough sell for him this year in 49 states not named Florida. If
not that, what is the justification? And how do Authentic Journalists force
clearer answers out of Washington and these other international entities?

5. Who Is Financing the Paramilitary Coup Operations?

The elected government may not count with well equipped and trained police,
but the paramilitary coup backers, photographed in recent days armed with
fancy assault weapons, financed their effort somehow. Where are they getting
their money?

Where there are paramilitary troops, there is always contraband. To what
extent are the coup plotters in Haiti financed by narco-trafficking money?
Is this a repeat from Bush Senior’s funding Nicaraguan contra fighters with
cocaine trafficking proceeds? Is a certain U.S. Senator who led that
investigation going to touch this one now that he’s running for president?

And what about governments that have outside interests in Haiti: Not just
Washington, but also France, Canada, the Dominican Republic, and others. Are
they financing, covertly, the paramilitaries? And how do we find out what
forces are financing the coup attempt?

Let’s begin with those five questions, and the various questions that they
raise. Copublishers are invited to comment in The Narcosphere. Others can
send email answers and tips to publisher at narconews.com. I’ll be inviting
some journalists and investigators who know a lot more about these
questions, and about Haiti, than I do, to accept copublisher accounts in
exchange for their labor answering these urgent questions.

Enter the Narco Sphere here:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/2/19/22126/0185

publisher at narconews.com

www.narconews.com

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