Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti By Jeb Sprague (review)
Justin Podur
From: Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 15, Number 3, Winter 2014
Wealthy and powerful countries have a variety of mechanisms available to them to control the fates of peoples in poor countries. These are not mutually exclusive, and most of poor countries have experienced more than one of these types of interventions. The use of propaganda, targeting populations both in the periphery and the metropole, was studied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988, and since. The power of financial institutions in controlling the economies of dependent countries has been documented by many scholars, among them, for Haiti, Paul Farmer. US interventions specifically designed for electoral processes through State Department–sponsored organizations and others (called “democracy promotion”) have been analyzed by William Robinson and other scholars, including Nicholas Guilhot.
But when all of these mechanisms fail, there still exists the option of violence—overt or covert, through proxy or direct. One devastating catalogue of violent interventions by the US around the world since World War II is provided by William Blum.
Haiti, a Caribbean country of about nine million people, has been subject to particularly intense and malevolent attention from the US and its allies since the slave revolt in the eighteenth century that eventually won the country its independence. When it comes to “soft” intervention, Haiti has seen it all: carefully designed propaganda campaigns targeting the leaders of the popular movement; financial and economic intervention so extensive that the country’s budget is now controlled by international donors and its services provided by NGOs; political parties and associations trained, supervised and supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI).
The target of all of these interventions was Haiti’s democracy, and the popular movement, called Lavalas, that had struggled for it against decades of dictatorship, ultimately successfully. Lavalas had such deep roots, and its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was so popular in Haiti that none of the soft power deployed by the US could have stopped the movement from advancing its program: abolishing the army, establishing popular sovereignty and moving the population from absolute misery to poverty with dignity…
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