NRO Weekend, February 3-4, 2001
Aristide in Haiti
On the election of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

From Selden Rodman's "First Test for Democracy," NR, February 11, 1991

ather Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the 37-year-old priest who won an overwhelming victory in the free and fair presidential election of December 16, will, after all, be inaugurated on February 7, thanks to the army's unprecedented turning back of Gerard Lafontant's attempted coup on January 7. The armed forces, led by General Herard Abraham, are playing a role unique in Haiti's violent history: defenders of democracy.

Perhaps the best way to look at the election of the fiery young apostle of liberation theology is to be thankful that "Titide's" margin of victory was so substantial it could hardly be disputed. The presence of 1,500 observers from the OAS, the UN, and other agencies, clearly identified by their blue-and-white uniforms at the polling places, made General Abraham's promise to avoid the horrifying election-day massacre of three years ago comparatively easy to fulfill.

The American government had backed Aristide's principal opponent, moderate Marc Bazin, so liberally and openly that Bazin-a former finance minister and World Bank official-could never recover from the obloquy of being tagged "the American candidate" and won a bare 12 per cent of the vote.

At a press conference at the posh Hotel Montana the day after the election, the faces of American officialdom were grim. Undersecretary of State Bernard Aronson, Ambassador Alvin Adams, and a former governor of South Dakota (whose claim to fame was that he had visited Haiti before) headed the American contingent of observers. They began by solemnly assuring the president-elect of their support. This conventional statement was in marked contrast to the joyous singing and dancing of Haitians celebrating their victory in the streets around the hotel. Inside, it was a wake, almost a death-watch. Questions such as why the Embassy had supported Bazin, and above all why Lafontant had been permitted to re-enter Haiti from Miami and thus provide leadership to the Tonton Macoutes, whose organization under Papa Doc Duvalier he had established, were blandly sidestepped. (Nor was the Embassy more forthcoming after the attempted Putsch three weeks later.)

Several months ago, I asked Aristide, who had already survived three attempts on his life, what he intended to do if and when he became president. "Haitians are slaves!" he told me, "Above all, we must not accept money from abroad…. If Americans really want to help us, they will demand the

immediate trials of Claude Raymond army commander under Papa Docl, Clovis Desinor Baby Doc's finance minister , and the remaining leaders of the Macoutes."

If he did not include Lafontant, the Macoutes' first chief, that was only because the subject of his return had not yet come up. When he did return, this past June, Provisional President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot did not even try to block his entry, as she had that of the moderate Duvalierist, former President Leslie Manigat. (Manigat slipped in anyway by getting the courts to rule in his favor, which they would hardly have dared do in the case of the hated Lafontant.) But once Lafontant was back in Haiti, and failed to get the Electoral Council's permission to run for the presidency, Aristide had the field pretty much to himself.

Aristide, in addition to his mass following in the capital's slums, was supported by most Haitian intellectuals, by those among the returning diaspora who applauded the young priest's promise of vengeance against the Duvalierists, who had ruined them, and by many of the Lebanese merchants who were now suffering from the new openness to contraband (including drugs) along Haiti's hundreds of miles of rugged, unpoliced coast. Pere Aristide's fiery speeches over Radio Soleil, his incitements to rebellion from one end of mountainous Haiti to the other, and the alliances he had formed with dissident peasant communes as far away as northeastern Hinche and westernmost Jeremie give him far-flung support.

The election of a Marxist president of Haiti may make it difficult for the Bush Administration to hold to its avowed intention to support democracies abroad, especially among the volatile, poverty-stricken small nations of this hemisphere. Among them Haiti, with its teeming populations in Cit6 Soleil and La Saline living like beasts on refuse, is the worst. During the month before the election our Embassy had been obliged to kick in twice: once to remove mountains of health-threatening garbage blocking the streets, and again to help subsidize the import of enough oil to provide electricity for Haiti. There has been no road repair for years. And the dollar, still officially worth five gourdes, was bringing eight. You support tiny Kuwait," an indignant Haitian intellectual said to me after the press conference at the Hotel Montana, "so why not Haiti with its eight million blacks on your very doorstep?"

Can fences be mended? Only if Pere Aristide swallows his pride, his Marxism, and his anti-Americanism (understandably inflamed by our Embassy's support for the "bourgeois candidate," Bazin), and with rare Christian humility takes counsel from his tormentors (us). Where else can he go? Certainly not to Moscow, which is in the process of phasing out its million-dollar-a-day subsidy to Cuba.

And what will Pere Aristide do at home? His only known program, thus far, is to impose a high tariff on all imports (like Dominican sugar and American rice) that compete with home-grown produce, and to "repatriate" funds that businessmen, taking his threats of expropriation seriously, have banked abroad-an impossibility. The president-elect certainly won't get much help from Rene Theodore, leader of the minuscule Communist Party, who criticized him during the campaign for being too radical. Nor will he get much support from the Church: he was thrown out of the Salesian order several years ago for his radical politics, and he will be automatically disowned by Rome as well once he takes office in defiance of ecclesiastical law.

Will the army support Aristide? During the election the army's conduct was impeccable — in marked contrast to its massacre of voters at the polling places on November 29, 1987. The problem is in the middle to high officer ranks, from lieutenants to generals; Duvalierists are still very strong in these ranks, and may be expected to stop at nothing to prevent the swearing in of a man who has threatened to annihilate them. If Lafontant's well-armed bullies attempt a second coup, more successful than the first, only an immediate airlift of Marines to Haiti could be counted on to checkmate them. But will the State Department, which facilitated the Macoute chieftain's re-entry last June, be expected to act decisively against him now (especially given the more pressing need for Marines elsewhere) and in support of a Marxist leader whose anti-Americanism is on record?