Exploiting Haiti

Horhey · Oct 18, 2020

CBS 60 Minutes Interview:

In 1991 U.S. Intelligence helped organize and began collaborating with Haiti's FRAPH death squad, whose leader, Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, worked for the CIA. Constant, who said that he started FRAPH at the urging of the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) to "balance the Aristide movement," also said that in 1994 "other people from my organization were working with the D.I.A.," aiding in operations directed against "subversive activities." Constant claimed that US. forces used FRAPH members for "crowd control" and also "to understand the neighborhoods, what Lavalas [the political movement of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide] is doing." Constant's assertion was confirmed by US. officials involved in Haiti.

Our Man in FRAPH - Behind Haiti's Paramilitaries - The Nation

Haiti under the Gun: How U.S. Intelligence Has Been Exercising Crowd Control - The Nation

US intelligence called Constant “a young pro-Western intellectual . . . no farther right than a Young Republican” even though his organization was, as sociologist William Robinson explains, a “well-organized instrument of repression, operating in a death-squad manner to continue the process of decimating popular sector organization” and “bent on preserving an authoritarian political system.” The organization “carried out much of the reign of terror that led to the killing of more than three thousand Haitian civilians in three years” and “shot into pro-democracy crowds celebrating Aristide’s planned return, killing eight people and wounding many others.”

The Clinton administration attempted to cover up its involvement with FRAPH after it restored Aristide to office. When FRAPH massacred pro-Aristide protesters, the US military raided FRAPH headquarters and seized internal documents, which Human Rights Watch said contained “intact evidence of death-squad crimes.”

The New York Times noted the Clinton administration’s “implicit fear that some documents might mention American intelligence links to members of the discredited former Government that ousted Mr. Aristide in a military coup in 1991.” The US’s refusal to return the documents was condemned by the United Nations’s independent human rights envoy to Haiti, who said he believed that “the US administration is trying to cover up some of its wrongdoing in that period.”

Haiti's Clinton Problem - Jacobin

The US’s support of FRAPH made for an apparent irony. Allan Nairn, a journalist for the Nation who won a Polk Award for his reporting on Haiti and the CIA, said that “many of the officials whom Clinton was claiming to be fighting were actually his employees.” Nairn observed that if “Clinton had simply cut them off, completely ended their support, the Haitian public itself most likely could have brought down the coup regime without a US occupation.” Even as the United States professed itself flummoxed as to how to restore Haiti’s democratically elected government, it continued to encourage the very forces that were preventing the restoration of that government.

Some were puzzled by “a contradictory US policy that publicly supports Aristide as ‘the people’s choice’ while privately grooming those who ardently oppose him.” After all, Clinton went so far as to invade Haiti in order to restore Aristide to power, so wasn’t covert support for the right-wing opposition somewhere between pointless and disastrous?

It was not. As Emmanuel Constant himself explained, the United States asked him to “balance” Aristide’s leftist movement, a task he took to with violent enthusiasm. By supporting the FRAPH, the United States increased its bargaining power in negotiations with Aristide. Returning Aristide to power was conditional on his agreeing to an austerity and privatization program, and through ensuring that Haiti remained divided between competing factions, the Clinton administration was able to ensure that Aristide would be compliant while in office, and not attempt to implement the radical redistributionist economic policies that the IMF and United States feared.

So Aristide was returned to office, but agreed to an austerity program that prevented him from taking Haiti in a social-democratic direction. The plan worked, and the Clinton administration got what it wanted from Haiti.
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See also: US "free market" policies designed to aid and develop Haitian sweatshops "have resulted in stolen lands, economic dependency, and less economic freedom."

https://fee.org/articles/usaid-forced-sweatshops-on-haiti/

WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day | The Nation