Latin America’s major nations have balked at an American plan to establish under the aegis of the Organization of American States a permanent committee to oversee the exercise of democracy in the hemisphere.
At first blush, one might infer from the reluctant countries’ reaction that they are less enthusiastic about the notion of democracy than the United States. These countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and Uruguay, have good reason to believe , however, that the truth of the matter can be located quite the opposite way around.
What they know (and most of us do not) is that the Bush Administration bore major responsibility in 2004 for the overthrow of democracy in Haiti, an OAS member state.
Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s lawful president, had been democratically elected twice, and by indisputably wide margins. With the encouragement of Washington, an emboldened band of anti-democratic thugs, bearing American arms and equipment, began in early 2004 making their way across the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, moving toward Port-au-Prince, the capital, burning, razing, killing as they went, town by petrified town.
Having abolished the national army ten years previous, President Aristide remained in the capital refusing to abandon the post to which he had been twice freely and fairly elected.
Had the United States issued a simple statement warning off the thugs, Haiti’s nascent and fragile democracy might likely have been preserved. Instead, hours before the coup’s denouement, with the thugs pressing down upon the capital, Secretary of State Colin Powell sent word to President Aristide that they were coming to kill him, and that were he to persist in refusing to leave Haiti, the United States would do nothing to help him.
On the evening of the coup’s culminating event, American soldiers in full battle gear abducted the President and his wife from their home and placed them aboard a white unmarked plane that bore the tail number of a defunct Midwestern small business. The Aristides were not told by the American soldiers where they were being taken, nor were they at any time allowed to raise their window shades to look out. Ground officials who witnessed the shuttered plane being re-fueled on a remote area of the tarmac in Antigua were told that the aircraft was private and carried no passengers.
Only sixteen hours later would the Aristides be informed that they were landing in the Central African Republic, a nominally independent former French possession that had undergone a military coup almost a year to the day before the American soldiers deposited the democratically elected President of Haiti and his wife there against their will.
Weeks following, U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Jamaican parliamentarian Sharon Hay Webster, Ira Kurzban, (a Miami lawyer) and I boarded a plane and flew visa-less to the Central African Republic. Ms. Hay Webster carried with her a formal offer from Jamaica to the Aristides of temporary asylum. Also aboard was Congresswoman Water’s husband, Sidney Williams, a former American Ambassador to the Bahamas.
We met, first, with President and Madame Aristide and then, an hour or so later, with President Francois Bozize, the army general turned president of the Central African Republic. Congresswoman Waters, our spokesperson, asked that the Aristides be allowed to leave with us to go to Jamaica. The Jamaican emissary of Prime Minister P. J. Patterson presented her government’s offer of temporary asylum. President Bozize said that he didn’t know whether or not he could release President Aristide and his wife. Congresswoman Waters then asked if the Aristides were being held prisoner and, if so, by what authority. President Bozize assured us that they were not being held prisoner, but that he could do nothing before talking to Washington and Paris. We repaired to the Aristides’ provisional quarters to wait, not knowing whether two of us, all of us, or none of us were prisoners. (I remember thinking at the time how ironic it was that a democratically elected president had been delivered by the United States into the hands of a man who had come to power via a military coup.)
At midnight, six hours after our arrival, we were allowed to leave the Central African Republic for Jamaica with President Aristide and his wife, Mildred Aristide.
The Aristides’ stay in Jamaica would last only a few weeks. Washington wanted them out of Jamaica and, indeed, out of the region.
During a telephone conference call which included Congressman Charles Rangel, Congressman John Conyers, Congresswoman Waters and me, an official of another OAS member state said that National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice had pointedly threatened several OAS member states against doing anything to assist President Aristide. Against the wishes of the Bush Administration, the President would eventually go with his wife and two young daughters to South Africa where they have lived in exile since.
Meanwhile, Haiti has been gripped by escalating turmoil. Thousands of pro-democracy Haitians have been killed. The Aristide government’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune, languishes without charge in jail, near death. Political kidnappings abound. Dregs of the brutal army that Aristide had dismantled have been reconstituted, resulting in massacres which some say have involved members of the United Nations peacekeeping force. Haitians who had stayed put during Haiti’s three democratic administrations have again begun to flee the country en masse. Those who remain have been caused to endure the unpopular rule of Gerard Latorture, an unknown, unelected, and malleable nonentity the United States plucked from Boca Raton, Florida, and imposed on the country before extracting its troops.
Put squarely, the American record in Haiti has been deplorable. No measure has the State Department spared in crippling democratically elected governments there - ranging from blocking loans for safe drinking water and health services approved by the Inter-American Development Bank, to inflaming the coup that destroyed the country.
No doubt, this has given pause to the hemispheric community and, not least, to Venezuela, whose democratically elected populist President, Hugo Chavez, the United States has made little secret of despising. Which brings us around to the larger point of all this. By now, the member nations of the OAS, fearful as they reasonably should be of the United States, know all too well how to extrapolate menace to themselves from the mean example the United States has made of Haiti. One can’t help but conclude that democracy is the least of what we have been fostering in the Americas.
Unalloyed toady-ism would seem closer to the mark.