US-backed coup overthrows Aristide

US congresswoman Maxine Waters received a call from Haiti on the same day. Aristide said "he was kidnapped; he said that he was forced to leave Haiti."

French radio station RTL interviewed a frightened old man in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, a man who said he was Aristide’s caretaker. He told RTL "the American army came to take [Aristide] away at two in the morning … the Americans forced him out with weapons."

This is a return of the terrible forces that have tormented Haiti for decades. The Duvalier’s, father and son, ruled Haiti with an iron fist until the mid-1980s. Aristide — a proponent of liberation theology — rose to power in 1990 with massive support from the urban poor, but was overthrown by a military coup in 1991 by some of the same people who are organizing against him today.

He was returned to power in 1994 with the support of the US army, after he agreed to free market reforms, a pledge he repeated during the 2000 elections in which he won a six year mandate.

This put Aristide in a cleft stick. By promising to implement a neo-liberal agenda, he condemned his people to even deeper misery. In doing so he lost his mass base, and came to rely more and more on armed gangs called "chimeres".

In this climate, the far right could again begin stirring up discontent with little fear that the masses would rally to Aristide, as they did to Chavez in Venezuela when a similar coup was attempted.

In 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative was created to reduce debt payments for the poorest countries in the world. To be eligible, a "country must be poor" and have "unsustainable debt".

Of course Haiti meets these criteria.

It is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its infant, juvenile and maternal mortality rates are the highest in the northern hemisphere. HIV/Aids and tuberculosis are now the leading causes of death among young adults. For children, the leading cause of death is polluted drinking water.

But the country was excluded from the initiative because, according to the World Bank, it hadn’t shown "a commitment to reducing poverty".

This is just a lie. Every time Haiti attempted to deal with its crippling problems, the US and its allies put up road blocks.

The US has veto power on the board of the Inter-American Development Bank. It vetoed loans to help supply clean water to Haitian kids, and to establish health clinics in the rural areas.

After the 2000 elections, the US, the European Union and international financing organizations froze aid to Haiti.

The hypocrisy is astounding. Under the Duvalier dictatorships, western "aid" money flowed readily into the country — most of it ending up in the pockets of Duvalier and his cronies.

But under a democratically elected president, that aid was reduced to a trickle.

Even a weakened and unpopular Aristide was seen as a potential threat. The US in particular wants all memories of the mass movement which propelled him to power to be buried.

So the country was first, burdened with a debt inherited from past dictatorships, and then refused aid to deal with the massive problems created by trying to service this debt.

Western troops are now pouring into the country. The US, Canada and France all have troops on the ground with more to come. This is not peacekeeping, it is colonialism. There is a centuries-long history of western intervention into Haiti, and this time like all the other times, it will not bring peace but more misery and more death.

The west is the root of the trouble, not the solution.

To bring peace to Haiti, we must demand that the US and its allies cut off all support to right-wing terrorist groups.

Haiti must have all its debt forgiven.

All pressure to institute neo-liberal reforms must be ended.

Haiti doesn’t need military aid — it needs food aid, medical aid, housing aid. But the tragedy is, that aid will be almost impossible to deliver to the people of Haiti, now that the power vacuum is being filled with US-backed thugs from the far-right.