Choke Hold on Haiti
Packer, George
After dark in Port-au-Prince the only people on the streets are the desperate, the vicious, and those with private cars. As my Haitian friend drove through the city center, he gave me a tour...
...The reek of the port entered through our open windows and then gave way, as we sped along the deserted boulevard, to a closer human stink...
...There was the burning by Lavalassian mobs the next day of Evans Paul's political headquarters and of the offices of a trade union that had launched a mass action against Aristide's failure to purge the civil service of Macoutes...
...There will have to be unity with elements of the bourgeoisie, the workers, the military—even some old Duvalierists...
...PANPRA's leaders no doubt saw Bazin as a responsible centrist who offered access to power, with the honorable notion of influencing his policies from the left...
...It's very near, but also very far...
...But Bajeux still can't leave the capital to meet provincial members without fear of an attack by some local officer or section chief...
...They admitted they have no economic program...
...In other words, where politics is so often such a dirty business, political organization itself falls into disrepute...
...So the choke hold on their lives has become the only symbol left of their hopes...
...Some of them won't be able to accept those terms...
...Print journalists haven't been harassed or killed in nearly the numbers radio journalists have...
...These are the kinds of picture that Haiti too easily induces—perhaps true pictures of the place, perhaps even the essential truth, but not the only one...
...Street kids...
...Corruption is not only a problem in the army high command and among the fantastically wealthy families...
...The line between resistance and despair wasn't always easy to draw in Haiti...
...SUMMER • 1993 • 303 Others, neighborhood organizers who spoke in angry, categorical terms, said that he was just another politician out for himself, that he meant nothing to the people of Cite Soleil...
...He is autocratic, stubborn, proud, a real petit bourgeois," I was told by a Haitian leftist close to Evans Paul, who had passed a document he co-authored on Haiti's political and economic future to President Aristide and never received a reply...
...The drama is a love affair of one man and the mass...
...And not to frighten the middle class," Edme concluded...
...but the firings and layoffs always seem to fall most heavily on unionized workers...
...In both cases the crowd was waiting for scheduled speakers to arrive...
...Ambitious title," he told me with a mischievous smile—and it is an ambitious document...
...His career has exposed him to several types of corruption, and as we spoke in his dim, windowless, air-conditioned office on a decaying downtown street he smiled a wild-eyed smile that seemed at once to ward off and express his despair...
...Schiller Marcelin, OGITH's general secretary, returned from an AFL-CIO seminar he'd attended in Washington to discover that in the eyes of FOS his new ideas made him a labor revolutionary...
...The Dominican border is a dividing line between green and brown...
...During the 1990 election, OGITH was courted by PANPRA, the democratic socialist party...
...In Haiti's Manichean terms, Aristide's return would represent the triumph of good over evil, but it's just those terms Haiti has got to escape if a democratic culture is to have any chance of taking root...
...There was his open disregard for the legislature, along with his willingness to tolerate a mass march of supporters on the parliament on August 12, 1991, when legislators, including some from the FNCD, were contemplating a no-confidence vote on the prime minister's government—a march that was meant to intimidate and succeeded...
...The coup nearly finished OGITH anyway...
...he was also a street agitator and wrote plays whose message of liberation earned him quick closings and several beatings at the hands of the army...
...In Cite Soleil, a group of boys poses for me under a mural of President Aristide...
...C est flou," Edmé said...
...The deep suspicion of politics is sometimes called marronage, the mentality of the runaway slaves who overthrew Haiti's colonial French masters...
...On the same day that I walked around Cite Soleil, I hired a driver to take me up into the hills of Petionville above the capital...
...Until a deep change in mentality takes place, Dalvius said, a sense of honest work and national purpose, "We don't deserve the attention of the international community...
...Productivity and price have increased, while their wages have remained stagnant...
...So there is a problem with SUMMER • 1993 • 301 transmitting their power to parties and leaders...
...And then there is the ubiquitous political magouille, of which a new example seems to pop up every week...
...And Aristide is seen as a threat—even I am...
...Repression follows certain patterns in Haiti, though it takes a while to understand them...
...In other words, they come from "the people," who in Aristide's imagery make up "Lavalas," a unified and mighty flood "that would sweep away all the dross, all the after-effects of a shameful past...
...We parked the car on the edge of a hill and got out to look at the city...
...Other things are disappearing besides trees and topsoil...
...But it's a way to consolidate myself, too...
...It was a coup by a class that was being destroyed...
...It speaks, in a difficult, technical French, of the need for various social contracts, of the relation between democracy and growth, of an investment policy that enriches Haiti rather than raping it, of the need to unleash market forces while creating corrective social measures, of the need to submit Haitian politics to economic rationality...
...We need to redefine the terms completely...
...Very little of the money is earned honestly...
...Corruption and Degradation La magouille—corruption, in the broadest sense—is as central a theme in Haitian life as class in England or rags-to-riches in the United States...
...Outside the National Palace, a three-domed vision in white where Aristide was inaugurated before ecstatic crowds and where the generals are now holed up behind their tanks, a beggar woman in rags fans her charcoal stove by the iron gate—black on white, misery framed SUMMER • 1993 • 297 against wedding-cake purity...
...Aristide, in spite of everything...
...From now on he will be known as a traitor...
...It's my own neighbors who might hire someone to get rid of me...
...But sooner or later they will have to come to the fore, because they are essential to the solution of what Andre Joseph, the exiled spokesman of the teachers union, called "the greatest problem in Haiti—how to construct a civil society, the rule of law, democratic structures where there has been no democratic tradition at all...
...It also holds all the risks that political compromise carries with the Haitian people...
...In his recent autobiography, postDuvalier Haiti becomes a morality tale in which almost the only proper names mentioned are his and the various generals, corrupt politicians, and Macoutes ranged against him...
...OGITH has close ties to another labor group — CNEH, the teachers confederation...
...In the armed forces, he told me, the corruption is general, almost universal...
...their son was born two weeks after the coup and so has never seen his parents' country...
...At some point the ideas of people like Roody 306 • DISSENT Haiti Edme will have to be heard by people who call themselves democrats...
...A country where the rich pay little in taxes, the state functions as their milk cow, government services are nearly nonexistent, and only money and connections can guarantee access to basic medical care: Haiti today is like the dream of the Reagan era fully realized...
...In the meantime, little activity took place—nothing that could be called organizing work...
...That one in the red cap pretending to study under the streetlight is another...
...Very few," he answered, "very few...
...The clean and the dirty, guns and salvation: in Haiti, once you cut through the tangle of Byzantine conspiracies and deals and rumors that have always constituted its official politics, things can be exhaustingly simple...
...A perverse one, since it fouled their own lives and worsened the atmosphere of degradation...
...I attended a meeting of OGITH's provincial leaders that was the organization's first since 1991...
...But in Haiti reasonable belief is easily undermined by zin, rumor, tales...
...As for the ordinary union work of organizing, the coup stopped it completely...
...The luxury cars are contraband...
...A Haitian businessman insisted to me that the first soldiers to enter the National Palace after Aristide's flight discovered the decapitated heads of his political enemies arranged in a circle around his bed...
...Around the time of the election there was a will for change without a political apparatus—so Aristide becomes understandable...
...The parties would turn it into another list...
...And they are finished...
...The point was the openness of the gesture itself...
...It's impossible that we should be what we are, impossible," said Gerard Dalvius, an ex-major in the Haitian army, a lawyer, and secretary of state for justice during Aristide's brief presidency...
...As my Haitian friend drove through the city center, he gave me a tour guide's narration of the night sights...
...To this day, among factions in Haiti and especially in the United States, and in the pages of the leftist paper Haiti Progres, the insinuations continue, despite the unwavering denunciations of the coup from day one by leaders like Evans Paul, despite the physical blows they've taken, despite the risks they continue to run...
...The sense that anyone could be an attaché shadows and poisons the most innocuous encounters...
...Criticize," said Roody Edmê, treasurer of the National Confederation of Haitian Teachers, "and they say: 'You don't like me?' " "Tolerance," said Andre Joseph, the union's spokesman exiled in Boston, "is not our strength...
...The corruption of the army and the state have reached a grotesque extreme...
...302 • DISSENT "I discussed the relation between the executive branch and the various elements and organizations of civil society...
...It will only make it possible for that struggle to begin again...
...In some ways the mentality of groupuscules persists to this day, and the conditions of the coup have entrenched it—whatever openness of debate and critical questioning began to take place while Aristide was president have shut off...
...Yet the extreme leftist French-language paper Haiti Progres sells openly and without trouble...
...And the people have put their complete trust in him alone...
...Only a few can resist...
...The people would suffer ten times this much," said the rural health worker, "if they could have him back...
...But with his return we have to get past the old slogans," Guiteau said, "the anarchic demands, to be more scientific, strategic...
...Attaches looked like neighborhood men, students...
...Before the opening curtain, a Frenchman came onstage to explain the connection between Cesaire's anticolonial polemics and the struggle for freedom going on outside the room where we were sitting...
...A couple hundred thousand people in there...
...We need political men in the middle of political organizations, not owners of parties...
...We discuss the question of the magouillards — the leaders of PANPRA, the unionist Manicy who took a job with the coup regime, the various Haitians of varying degrees of evil who in one way or another crossed the line between compromise and betrayal...
...At night it was common to hear bursts of gunfire from the poor neighborhood near my hotel...
...Aristide's exile from power, and the total repression of democratic activity within Haiti, have only reinforced his mythic stature...
...Some of them have reason to: I met businessmen in Miami who had left Haiti rather than do what it would take to make it in these circumstances...
...Politics, it's power, not feelings...
...Literacy and education partly explain this pattern: if Libete were written in French, its publisher told me, it couldn't be understood by poor Haitians who know the SUMMER • 1993 • 299 alphabet from church hymnals but not the language of higher education, nor could it be read aloud to groups of the illiterate...
...With such a population, discipline and order are unpleasant but necessary things...
...In 1987 Major Dalvius published a book called An Army for Democracy in Haiti...
...Some answered that his name was known to them but that was all...
...When you think of all the weaknesses a man has," he told me, "the hate he carries around in himself—I can't call them all traitors...
...To be heard...
...Forever...
...I saw that political groups have a limit, and the necessity for going beyond them, for tolerance, respect for law...
...You could become terribly cynical, but you need a certain suppleness of spirit, an openness, to be able to find common ground and have democratic discussions...
...You can't think beyond what's staring you in the face...
...A regime that lets senators make speeches in chamber during the day and shoots young activists in the bidonvilles at night is operating on two assumptions: that the world cares more about the former than the latter, and that the latter are more of a threat...
...A year and a half of embargo has made magouille a terrible temptation for some Haitians, and a year and a half of military rule has made the moral price for succumbing terrible as well...
...In a straw hat and dirty trousers, maybe...
...Its leaders are young men who struggled up from hard backgrounds and entered the union 304 • DISSENT movement through their jobs as electricians, clerks...
...soon the vision darkens into a generalized horror of "the people" in whose name Aristide speaks...
...Franchise Terrorism "Physically, Haiti is a country that's in the process of disappearing," a trade unionist in exile told me...
...But we need to avoid people with personal ambitions who want to become president to put it on their C.V...
...We need to give it content...
...Andrê Joseph, the exiled spokesman of the teachers union, described for me a conversation he had with Aristide during the 1990 campaign...
...The Creole word zenglendo describes anyone with a 298 • DISSENT gun, and it is used interchangeably with Macoute and attach...
...Later JeanPhilippe told me that this visit was his first contact with the company since the coup...
...in the extreme polarization since the coup, they almost seem irrelevant...
...Every compromise becomes a betrayal...
...Democracy has to be something in the mentality of all Haitians, based on universal principles...
...There was his failure to bring representatives from the various sectors of civil society into government jobs, his failure to change the traditional notion of bureaucracy as a milk cow...
...Even in a salary negotiation, to ask for five hundred and accept four hundred is considered a betrayal...
...SUMMER • 1993 • 307 "I hope —no, I'm confident," said Evans Paul, "that the behavior will change...
...It's thin...
...We stopped by the plant's administrative offices, where one of the Larco freres—lightskinned, like most of the Haitian elite— received me graciously...
...Because when this priest speaks—this priest so loved by the people—economic theories melt under the rays of his sun...
...But the poor Haitians who cannot afford, cannot even survive the tripling of prices told me that if the embargo means Aristide's return, they will continue to support it...
...They share an emphasis on building institutions of civil society and avoiding what Roody Edm6 of CNEH calls Haiti's "surpoliticization...
...Edmé fluttered his fingers and his eyes gleamed...
...In his acts, Aristide seems to believe in direct democracy," said Roody Edme of the teachers union when I met him and the union's general secretary, Carl-Henri Guiteau, at Guiteau's house in a middle-class neighborhood of Port-au-Prince...
...And we are persuaded of one thing...
...That sidestreet—closed off, too much garbage...
...It is subtle and honest and reflective, and as I was walking one hot noon through the mud and sewage of Cite Soleil, thinking of Roody and his document, I wondered what meaning it would ever have for the families whose houses are flooded with sewage after every rain, for the man hobbling on crutches alongside me whose leg was shortened four inches by soldiers' bullets the day after the coup, for the little children lining up for a free lunch of corn mush and beans...
...Those who never stole before," a driver told me, "steal now...
...We're now paying the consequences...
...It's normal that when the Haitian military has an enemy they are going to try to eliminate him It isn't a shock...
...And there are less obvious difficulties too: the tendency of rank and file to confide too much power in leaders, the lack of education among the leaders themselves or of a willingness to be questioned and criticized, the siren song of political parties seeking alliances with mass organizations...
...Within his area, the officer runs a gang of criminals that might include twelveand thirteen-year-old recruits...
...In the years after Baby Doc's downfall, Evans Paul formed a confederation of youth organizations and became an adamant opponent of the constitutional referendum and elections, sharing Aristide's view that they were manipulative tools in the hands of the U.S...
...One unlooked-for consequence of the coup has been the occasion it has given people like Edme, in their enforced idleness from political activity, SUMMER • 1993 • 305 to think about the democratic struggle over the long term...
...Paul's transformation from opponent to advocate of constitutional democracy, from activist to politician, from guerrilla playwright to foundation head, has traces of the opportunism that is Haiti's recurring political theme...
...Take the case of Pierre Manicy, leader of one faction of the Autonomous Central of Haitian Workers, the furthest level of Haiti's labor groups and the closest to Aristide...
...The audience of well-dressed light- and dark-skinned Haitians burst into fervent applause...
...From here the slum of Cite Soleil was a hazy blur of brown and yellow...
...As I paddled in the limpid water and watched the beachgoers drink and play Ping-Pong under palm trees that hid the ravaged hills, the teacher swimming near me said, "It seems like another country, doesn't it...
...Boys in Cite Soleil told me that on the day Aristide returns to Haiti, Port-au-Prince will be spotless...
...What if we'd done it...
...On the other hand, a high-strung priest chosen by 67 percent of the people as Haiti's first freely and fairly elected president...
...On the ground, the land looks worse...
...Everything " has some very specific referents, and they come up again and again in conversations with Haitian democrats who find themselves in critical support of the priestpresident...
...America has every right to do what it thinks is in its interest, as long as Haiti is in this state of degradation...
...The burst of articles have run their course, and Andre Joseph has begun to doubt their usefulness...
...Their position is tenuous, shot through with contradiction and temptation...
...To take power in Haiti is very easy...
...And yet he has created some real openings for democracy that no one else could create...
...Apparently attaches weren't regular theatergoers...
...Even a relatively benevolent employer like the Larco Freres Bottling Plant, which has modernized the factory, raised salaries, and built worker showers and a refectory after strikes, took advantage of the coup to break off all contact with the union and lay off 150 workers—all union members, according to OGITH...
...But you have to interpret what they told you," said the Lavalassian French priest...
...In these scenarios, the Haitian poor become a mindless appetitive mob, hell-bent on confiscation and revenge...
...It's a problem that often preoccupies Andre Joseph in his twenty-first story apartment in a North Cambridge housing project where the teachers union spokesman and his family have spent the past year and a half in exile...
...People in the union movement say he had severe money problems...
...The people watched pro-Aristide videotapes...
...It was carefully scheduled to coincide with the stay of Dante Caputo, the U.N...
...During a forty-five minute conversation one evening a Haitian leftist pointed out four attaches who passed his open door on the street...
...The Larco brother hastened to explain the lack and made a note of the request...
...We need a totally new politics...
...I realized, after the experience of democracy in 1991," he told me, "the difficulty of doing political work without a democratic mentality...
...It is remarkable that a U.S...
...Joseph's wife was having a difficult pregnancy in August 1991 when they came to Boston for treatment...
...The Haitian leftist close to Evans Paul, who calls himself revolutionary and not reformist, has run into the same barriers—revolutionary or not, he is middle class...
...And if the coup had failed," said a high FNCD official, "within a month the FNCD would have been destroyed by the Lavalassians...
...OGITH's Gesner Jean-Philippe raised the question of wages and was cut off: "That's not my area, I'm in charge of production...
...After years in the struggle against Duvalierism, after launching the most militant strikes of the post-Duvalier era, after bringing mass action to challenge the Aristide regime to purge the civil service of old Duvalierist functionaries and make way for union members, Manicy recently took a job in the Information Ministry of Prime Minister Marc Bazin, the coup regime's front man...
...Between the increasingly radical organizations populaires that have received the brunt of military repression in Haiti's slums and provinces and the institutional middle-class left of intellectuals, politicians, and trade unionists, there is a wary alliance in the face of a common enemy that will probably dissolve as soon as that enemy loosens its grip...
...You say the city has become very dirty," one told me...
...They were all of them politically aware, activist, and for one or two this drive up the coast from Port-au-Prince was their first view of the countryside since the coup...
...Not for my safety," he said, but to disarm the assumptions that his position in the union would create...
...After the coup we'd have been finished...
...What hurts is when the people who should be on my side do damaging things...
...We're not against the idea of union-party ties," said Gesner Jean-Philippe, OGITH's acting secretary general...
...They have to work at their own level, and not oversimplify...
...It's a legacy that might have hardened, even destroyed him, but somehow Joseph has preserved a fine critical intelligence that seems neither soft nor bitter...
...If I disagree, one wants to eliminate me...
...The insularity and intolerance of Lavalas are not only expressions of marronage, the justifiable wariness of the poor...
...But unions are too young and fragile now to preserve their independence...
...But you have to put the donkey on the computer...
...I know it theoretically—I haven't seen it...
...The higher we climbed the cooler the air grew, the lighter the skin color of the people we passed, the larger the modern concrete and glass houses that seemed poised to take off over the city...
...Immediately after the coup, partisans of Aristide spread the rumor that Evans Paul and the FNCD had engineered it...
...And it began to seem that this was simply a version of the waiting for Aristide that Haitians at home and abroad have been doing since September 30, 1991...
...I could cut you in on some things.' " Dalvius was discharged from the army...
...Everything crystallized in him...
...In other words, though he says that "Aristide's success came from not having had political ambitions," Evans Paul is no apostle of direct democracy...
...One result is that no reader of the New York Times or Miami Herald has even heard of Evans Paul or the FNCD...
...Garbage workers hadn't been paid in months, but Port-au-Prince's filth reflected more than a fiscal crisis or ordinary municipal neglect...
...Jean-Claude Bajeux, a leader of the center-left KONAKOM party, told me that when threats come he can place a call to General Cedras, the de facto ruler, "who respects me as a moderate and will call them off...
...little towns appear like oases, patches of rice fields and trees, tributes to the peasants' tenacity and to the scale of Haiti's deforestation...
...others, including trade unionists I spoke with whose credibility is very high, told of the American embassy personnel who tried to prepare them psychologically in advance of the coup...
...And many Haitians speak of him as the man to succeed Aristide as president...
...One politician spoke of the four hundred thousand Haitians forced into clandestinity and the hundred thousand who've become zenglendos...
...There was his appointment of an incompetent associate as prime minister, his creation of a cabinet of trusted intimates, his total exclusion of his electoral allies in the FNCD...
...The return of the president doesn't mean the return of democratic structures...
...When Haitian businessmen and professionals explain why they supported the coup in spite of their hatred of military regimes, they begin by arguing that Aristide was the second coming of Papa Doc...
...To be a killer is to be on the side of the military regime...
...But when it comes to politics I'm no choir boy...
...Why didn't you tell me?' this colonel said...
...mediator, who provided a certain safe cover as long as he was in Haiti...
...He became a lawyer and soon grew used to the sight of state prosecutors passing envelopes to judges at the tribunal...
...The wall is bullet-pocked, and the boys are part of a continual guard that protects the mural from military attack...
...Or take the case of PANPRA, the Nationalist and Progressive Revolutionary party of Haiti, an affiliate of the Socialist International and an important part of Haiti's moderate, organized left...
...But on the day of Aristide's inauguration," said my Haitian friend, remembering February 7, 1991, "you could drop your bread on the ground and pick it up and eat it...
...After the coup and Bazin's assumption of the prime minister's post, it found itself a junior partner in the military government...
...To create tolerance is much harder...
...The arguments of PANPRA leaders—that negotiation is the only solution, that one can influence the regime from within as well as without—are the arguments of reasonable people, but the tortuous locutions of their public statements betray an aversion to articulating the brutal truth that Haiti's democratic socialist party is in bed with fascists...
...Haitian businessmen talk about the forty-five thousand industrial jobs lost as a result of the embargo...
...Two days later, I interviewed him for the union and asked, 'What supports are you going to use in order to govern?' He answered, 'The people.' It had all gone in one ear and out the other...
...A few kept guns at home...
...For a great many Haitians the accusations alone were proof of the Bush administration's complicity...
...Franchise terrorism" is how a human rights expert put it: a system, mafia- or gang-like, of relations between higher-ranking officers and the lower ranks, extending into a civilian population of attaches, a term that broadly includes what's left of the Duvalierist Tontons Macoutes...
...It begins on the airplane from Miami: barely at cruising altitude, before the flight attendant has returned all the passports she collected in order to fill out the arrival cards of the illiterate passengers, before you've had time to take in the calm emerald Caribbean and then remember that it's a graveyard for thousands of Haitians, you're already descending over a piece of land that looks like the mountains of Utah...
...And his errors came out of the dynamic by which Lavalas reached power...
...At a commemoration in a Senate chamber of the sixth anniversary of Haiti's democratic constitution—one of the most violated in the world—opposition parliamentarians observed a moment of silence for the Haitians who died for freedom, and then took turns denouncing the constitutional abuses of the military regime...
...And PANPRA showed that the people were right...
...I asked him how many of the well-off people on the beach could be considered sympathizers of democracy...
...They have their little problems, and we have our big problems...
...Lavalas has inherited the mental habits of Haiti's left, formed during the dark days of the Duvaliers, surviving in small underground groups, given to sectarianism and dogma and sloganeering...
...In the meantime, Edme is trying to figure out how to disseminate those ideas in simpler form without losing the substance...
...From his exile Joseph has written numerous articles for a Haitian newspaper, using a pseudonym...
...I looked around the chamber, wondering why these citizens and leaders felt free enough from zenglendos to make public speeches against them...
...But as the BMWs and four-wheeldrive jeeps came flying around the bends in the road, I began to feel that few other elites occupy a country, feed off it, and yet don't even seem to belong to it, let alone take responsibility for it, as the Haitian rich do...
...embassy's political experts exchange coy looks of disapproval when his name comes up in conversation...
...And as the head of an organization—the FNCD —that had very public disputes with Aristide during his presidency, even a martyr can become suspect...
...But they also know that he said some critical things about Aristide, which makes them unsure about him...
...But out on the streets, boys hawking copies of a new pro-Aristide Creole newspaper called Libete have been beaten up by thugs...
...It's a problem of education—it's not something that can be done in one or two years...
...Drugs, contraband...
...One Sunday I went to a private beach with a group of Haitian professionals—a teacher, an artist, a gallery owner, a chemist...
...The lurid charges, and even the more substantive debate over Aristide's encouragement of mob violence and lynching, have obscured the very serious question of his role in the quest for Haitian democracy, his status as a democratic figure...
...They broke away from FOS, the leading confederation from the Duvalier period, after trying in vain to reform its antidemocratic practices...
...We Need a New Politics" As the negotiations for Aristide's return grind on through the spring of 1993, Haitians both in PortauPrince and in exile are starting to wonder how things will be the second time around— whether lessons will have been learned...
...That's the paradox, and that's why I say Aristide, malgre tout...
...They know Evans Paul as one of the three martyrs of All Soul's Day...
...But the people will if Aristide encourages them...
...They may start out as idealists, with a patriotic notion of service, but then they have children, they have responsibilities, there are great temptations, they could make tens of thousands of dollars...
...Those with "official" jobs, like the workers in the national brewery whom OGITH represents, try to negotiate with powerful industrialists like Michael Madsen who hardly recognize the union's existence and count on the army and state to intercede on their behalf...
...On the one hand, a military regime, supported by a rich elite, that has killed as many as three thousand people since the September 30, 1991 coup, that battens on drug and contraband money—a regime that is only the latest in Haiti's long tradition of tyranny backed up by money and guns...
...I no longer understand Haitians, I don't know them...
...At the same time that members of CNEH and other groups were rethinking the role of civil society, the elected mayor of Port-au-Prince and spokesman of the FNCD, in a multitude of hiding places, was rethinldng the role of political parties...
...The morning I spoke to him, his party's general secretary, Victor Benoit, was stranded up in Gonaves, a provincial hotspot, with a broken-down rental car...
...A couple of workers laughed when I asked how many bottles of Larco Freres soda a week they can afford to drink...
...If people remain rich," the driver said, "that doesn't matter to me...
...I'd like this document to be turned into a vision, for which you need civil structures that Haiti has never had...
...The mechanism of fear seems neither carefully controlled nor entirely random...
...This area on the left, by the water—no one goes there at night, it's absolutely certain you'll be killed...
...The water along the Haitian coast has turned beige with silt from the eroding rains...
...That one there has a gun in his backpack...
...A businessman once insisted to me that the Haitian elite's consumption is no more conspicuous than that of any other elite...
...Though Aristide's restoration, if or when it happens, will be a deliverance for Haiti's vast population of increasingly militant, increasingly desperate poor people, it won't end the country's democratic struggle...
...Instead of oversimplifying, Roody Edmé together with a dozen other Haitians has written a fifty-page document called "Mandate for a Change in History...
...What I want is for all the other people to have something to eat three times a day, a change of clothes, enough to send their children to school, a bed to sleep in that won't be flooded after every rain...
...At the French Institute of Haiti I attended a performance of a melodrama by the West Indian playwright Aimë Cesaire...
...Although most of the killing took place in the immediate aftermath of Aristide's overthrow, it has continued at a flow heavy and steady enough to induce widespread terror...
...Aristide felt total suspicion for them, for intellectuals...
...We don't have democratic cultural references or traditions," Guiteau explained...
...The week I arrived in March six bodies turned up, including those of two Baptist clergymen and a young activist from one of the left-wing political parties...
...The city was beautiful...
...It hovers around lives and reputations like a leering, scabby, sticky-fingered creature out of Virgilian personification—or, impersonally, like the sewage that threatens to bring you down all over the capital...
...He is now writing what will be his last, on the relation between democratic government and civil society...
...But whatever the outcome of the negotiations, and whatever the makeup of a second Aristide government, the problem of a political culture whose strength was never tolerance will remain to be resolved...
...This wall we're driving along, on the other side: La Saline...
...Along the road north from Port-au-Prince the bald hills are lunar...
...Ten-, fourteen-year-olds become attaches for money...
...And so in 1992 he formed an apolitical foundation whose goal is civic education about constitutional democracy...
...Aristide' s supporters are called Lavalassians...
...The middle-class Haitians who have staked their claim with democratic change are as isolated circumstantially from the poor as they are mentally from the ruling elite...
...But the pressures of population and poverty and policy have turned the one-third of Hispaniola that Haiti occupies into a desert...
...I mentioned goggles and earmuffs against the plant's flying glass and roaring machines...
...Trade Union Struggles The General Independent Organization of Haitian Workers (OGITH) claims eighteen thousand members in industrial unions, the public sector, and peasant cooperatives...
...Then the humidity hits you as a sensation of something unnaturally wrong: the island is tropical, it ought to be covered with trees...
...Magouille can mean an ordinary bribe, a deal between one politician and another, or a selling out in the smallest or largest way...
...Let them...
...Bajeux was on the phone explaining the urgency of the situation to someone at the rental agency and insisting another car be sent up to GonaIves to fetch the general secretary...
...Aristide's relation to Lavalas, his political movement, seems the natural extension of his own life work as priest, as shepherd to the flock...
...The priest was referring to the torture several democratic leaders suffered in 1989 at the hands of the dictator Prosper Avril's forces...
...The people in Haiti have always felt betrayed by politicians...
...Not dressed as I am...
...What if we'd gone in with PANPRA and Bazin...
...it tempts you into Manichean thoughts...
...I have contacts there, I work with some popular organizations, but I don't go there...
...Parts of those 300 • DISSENT hillsides are under feverish construction, while the city below grows fouler and fouler...
...To satisfy the fundamental demands of the people.' `To promote national sovereignty and dignity.' Intellectuals shouldn't simply mirror the feelings of the people and then transform them into slogans...
...According to a trade union leader, absolute loyalty and a cut of the profits are the price a junior officer pays to his superiors in exchange for control over a slice of urban or rural territory...
...A tragedy because Manicy, with this move, is forever lost to the democratic movement...
...I can't function as a politician without a democratic atmosphere...
...Professional salaries can't be their only source of income...
...The people from the bidonvilles, les miserables—they were the only true ones...
...But how many Gerard Dalviuses are there in Haiti...
...Much of Haiti's economy consists of the "informal sector" of peddlers and other small-time self-employed people whom it's nearly impossible to organize...
...I told him that I did it for the money, because I didn't want to speak of the politics...
...Though the two organizations became close, the labor group refused a formal alliance...
...In any case, Joseph decided not to discuss his pseudonymous article with Aristide...
...The precautions would be totally inadequate in the case of a concerted military effort to assassinate...
...If you want someone killed they'll do it for two dollars, a dollar...
...Among the Lavalassians, both here and in Haiti, when you ask about Aristide's mistakes you are told that everyone makes mistakes, and that mistakes are no reason to overthrow a government—as if your question were intended to justify the coup...
...Except for scattered kerosene lamps, the slum was pitch black...
...During the 1990 elections that brought Aristide to power, PANPRA threw its support behind Bazin, the "American" candidate, who was the early favorite before Aristide's surprise candidacy...
...So the distinction between political and common crime isn't easy to make, and most Haitians don't try...
...More garbage over there...
...They're too consumed with the political struggle and they'll be even more so after the president's return...
...Port-au-Prince is a small city," said Roody Edine...
...After Aristide's victory, PANPRA made overtures to the priest-president, but the party was rebuffed and maintained its alliance with Bazin...
...The coup was the ultimate betrayal...
...But the assumed ubiquity of killers in and out of uniform means that the risk comes from free-lance as much as officially sanctioned violence...
...Among its sources of funding are the Agency for International Development, which gave money for an illustrated FONDEM calendar but insisted that a cartoon soldier with his automatic weapon be removed...
...A man in Cite Soleil, one of the city's worst slums (or "bidonvilles"), told me that people were allowing the garbage to pile up and the canals to fill with slime as a gesture of protest, of refusal...
...He can like me, like my wife, we call him Titid, but after I leave . . . I don't know...
...One of his articles came to the attention of Aristide, who asked to be put in touch with the author...
...In the slums, small nutrition and development projects have ground to a halt now that foreign money passes through the coup regime...
...Eclmë mentioned one possible backer for radio or cassette dissemination: the non-profit Foundation for Development and Democracy, or FONDEM, whose president is none other than Evans Paul...
...It tempts all kinds of ordinary Haitians with all kinds of magouille...
...Like the pose of the boys under the mural in Cite Soleil, the attitude toward the waiting grows more messianic as the ordeal is drawn out...
...The bearded cigarette seller by your hotel drive—he's an attaché too...
...in both cases the speakers were late...
...By daylight Port-au-Prince, after a year and a half of military brutality and foreign embargo, was the dirtiest city I'd ever seen...
...At wages of five Haitian dollars a day and a cost of thirty cents a bottle, soda is a rare treat...
...Under Baby Doc he was a radio personality going by the nickname K-Plim (pronounced Ka-Plume...
...I had spent so much of my time in Haiti thinking about the obstacles to democracy that I was afraid I'd lost sight of the only one that really matters now...
...But his career has been one of the most remarkable in Haiti today, and it offers hope for the prospects of democratization itself...
...I'd like for it not to end up in a library, which is where the political parties would put it...
...When a Haitian man and a Canadian woman agreed to give me a ride from up the coast back into Port-au-Prince, the man automatically took out his identity card to show my host that he was trustworthy...
...And in Miami, where he endures an impoverished, sometimes hungry exile, Schiller Marcelin pointed out to me the consequences an alliance would have had...
...I leave my camera in the bag...
...Between Aristide and "the people," the whole array of emerging democratic organizations and leaders—the trade unionists, the political figures like Victor Benoit of KONAKOM and Evans Paul, the elected mayor of Port-auPrince and spokesman of the National Front for Change and Democracy (FNCD) that sponsored Aristide's candidacy—have all but disappeared...
...It's just a list of things...
...But as Paul told me, "We still need political men with political ambitions...
...Aristide and Democracy In the aftermath of the coup a propaganda war broke out over the nature of the Aristide government...
...It takes three weeks, one week, one day...
...Even now a Haitian businessman refers to him as a "terrorist," and the U.S...
...Ironically, the author—using his real name—had not long before tried to make contact with the president and been refused...
...It's not enough to speak of change," Edmé said in the garden of Carl-Henri Guiteau, the general secretary of CNEH...
...Joseph's willingness to understand the human motive behind the action might seem to some Haitians a dangerous relativism, an incipient magouille itself...
...Even today, with my practice, I could make millions if I wanted...
...It has been indiscriminate," one opposition figure told me, "even the groups that didn't support Aristide...
...When I asked a pro-Aristide French priest what made people like the leaders of PANPRA join the other side, he wasted no words over the ambiguities of compromise but simply rubbed his fingers together in the international gesture for money...
...I'm not sure," KONAKOM' s Jean-Claude Bajeux told me...
...It's not so much...
...He was summoned before a superior and asked why he had written it...
...Even before the coup, the difficulties of consolidating an independent labor organization in Haiti were enormous...
...To say none, to call it irrelevant, to accuse its authors of living in an imaginary country, seems to me the tragically wrong answer...
...agency has seen fit to support an undertaking of Evans Paul...
...He would have offered me a future job, I would have turned it down, it wouldn't have led to productive discussion...
...Between marronage and magouille there is an unbreachable divide...
...If members of democratic organizations set the conditions for honesty, accountability, transparence, then that should be the basis for admitting the magouillards...
...A political opponent automatically becomes a magouillard, and since objective truth is as elusive as it is undervalued in Port-au-Prince, the suspicion will stick...
...Haiti undermines your inclination toward nuance...
...He wondered if I had any suggestions to make...
...In the middle of downtown market streets, rotting papaya and orange rinds and scraps of paper and sludge accumulated into mounds as high as your head that blocked traffic to cars and all but the bravest pedestrians...
...That's their order...
...But in desperate times some poor people are corruptible for a few dollars...
...But in October 1990 everything changed when, according to many Haitians who know him well, he invented the charismatic candidacy of Aristide and marshaled the organizational skills of the FNCD behind it...
...As I look through the viewfinder I see that they have assumed the posture of devotees: kneeling, looking back and up toward the wall, mouths open in awe, arms out in adoration...
...Andre Joseph is the son of a human rights lawyer who was murdered in 1988 by twenty knife wounds...
...He seemed to agree that it was important...
...Jean-Claude Bajeux, a leader of KONAKOM, Haiti's other moderate socialist party, which has remained steadfastly opposed to the coup, explained the danger that magouille politique poses to democratization...
...See those boys standing there, with the shaved heads...
...The general secretary of the teachers union has contacts with groups in Carrefour Feuilles, the sprawling slum down the hill from his house, but he cannot go there himself—not only for fear of attaches and other criminals, but because his status as "bourgeois," as "reformist," makes him unwelcome...
...There are widespread reports that the handful of elite families who live in the steep breezy hills above sweltering Port-auPrince have been building private generators, wharves, airstrips to circumvent the embargo and profit from contraband...
...it once was...
...government...
...The coup would have happened," Edme said, "whatever Aristide did...
...It was my father, and of course I suffered...
...Its opponents in Haiti, as well as in the Bush administration, began to impugn Aristide's record on human rights...
...They sense the precariousness of their position, so they try to get it while they can...
...Such a country, he argued, couldn't afford not to begin the long-term process of creating the institutions of a democracy...
...The license numbers of illegally parked cars were read out...
...The party, not the personality of the man, should run things...
...The answer cuts off the discussion...
...When I was in the Cite Soleil slum, I asked young people living there what they thought of Evans Paul, who was elected their mayor overwhelmingly at the same time Aristide became their president...
...Since the coup, the military regime has set out to destroy the unions, the media, the more politically active schools and universities, the peasant groups, and the neighborhood organizations that make up the fragile shoots of a civil society in post-Duvalier Haiti...
...You have to remember," one union leader told me, "these are men in this struggle, not machines, men with feelings, hearts, families...
...The great irony of the embargo is that well-off Haitians are the ones who complain most bitterly about it...
...His unwillingness to consult, his sense of being the people's emissary, his failure to build institutions—it has all blocked democratic growth...
...A rural health care worker from the provincial town of Dessalines described the malnutrition and tuberculosis that have resulted from a black market trade in the few medicines that pass through the embargo and wind up in the hands of Haiti's rulers...
...He flipped through a pamphlet recently put out by the FNCD, Lavalas, and Aristide ' s presidential commission...
...All of the trade unionists, political figures, and local activists I spoke to were still, a year and a half after the coup, restricted in their movements to home and work, going out only in the daytime, seldom traveling through the city, let alone the countryside...
...Most had spent the first nine months under the regime confined to their houses or in hiding...
...Artists whose paintings, according to a gallery owner named Mireille Jerome, have become a favorite investment for wealthy Haitians because of the weak currency are now producing work with an eye toward its Miami resale value...
...At a meeting of hundreds of supporters in a church basement in Boston, at another in a storefront office in Miami's Little Haiti, the sense of a personal connection to the president they affectionately call "Titid," the sense of love, was palpable...
...But when you see Haiti for the first time its decay is so overpowering that you begin to think exactly the opposite: that to talk of such things is a luxury, maybe an irrelevance...
...An activist can carry around a tape recording that explains the Constitution in popular terms, but he can't play it for others without taking strong precautions...
...I showed it to KONAKOM and they had no real response...
...I toured the plant with Gesner Jean-Philippe and officials of the bottlers union and listened as workers described the overtime requests they can't refuse, sometimes two days and a night continuously with only three hours of break...
...The people never commit themselves to organizations...
...Throughout the city's hills and flats a gray liquid ran underfoot, and after nearly slipping to the ground several times I realized that it wasn't water but sewage...
...It is a real tragedy...
...There isn't a dynamic of discussion...
...And look at what their order is," said Schiller Marcelin, a trade unionist languishing in exile in Miami "They kill, they rape...
...The effects of corruption, Jerome said, are "unforeseen and unforeseeable...
...308 • DISSENT...
...As a result, all hope for change rides on a single man, a man who says he isn't a politician at all but a servant of the people...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
