Upholding a coup: Haiti’s New Dictatorship
Upholding a coup: Haiti’s New Dictatorship
Haiti’s New Dictatorship by Justin Podur, reviewed by James O’Nions
James O’Nions
May 2013
In 2004, the elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was kidnapped by US marines and flown to the Central African Republic. It was a coup of the kind tried unsuccessfully in Venezuela two years earlier and successfully in Honduras in 2009. The institutional structures put in place by the coup regime, including the UN troops occupying the country, still remain despite several elections.
Why did all this happen with relatively little international fuss? Podur’s book explains in forensic detail the role of international media, NGOs, the UN and other actors in misrepresenting Aristide’s government and upholding the coup and subsequent dictatorship. It’s an important book not just for Haiti itself, but also because it illustrates how modern imperialism works. Parts of the narrative find echoes all over the world, from the coup in Guatemala in 1954 to Iraq post-2003.
Aristide is a Catholic priest and exponent of liberation theology. From his parish in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince he became a focal point for the democracy movement under the Duvalier dictatorship. He later founded Lavalas, a progressive political organisation that gained widespread support in Haiti’s poor neighbourhoods. His disinclination to follow the neoliberal dictats emanating from Washington was all the excuse the US needed to support his removal.
By 2004, Haiti was experiencing a low-level war between Aristide’s government and paramilitary groups made up of former members of the Haitian army (which Aristide abolished) and Duvalier’s informal death squads, tacitly backed by Haiti’s business elite. Allegations of human rights abuses and corruption against Aristide, spread but never substantiated by the international media, helped muddy the water when the US actually removed him. Human rights organisations funded by USAID also played their part in creating a climate where few Latin American countries challenged the coup and a UN mission, MINUSTAH, was quickly brought in with a mandate to use lethal force.
More:
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/upholding-a-coup-haitis-new-dictatorship/
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