Homeland Security

On February 28, 2004, I managed to fight my way through frantic crowds at the Toussaint L'Overture International Airport in Port-au-Prince to board my scheduled flight back to Miami. The general panic grew out of the near-certainty of an impending coup d'etat against the democratically elected and still popular government of Haiti's President Jean Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas Party. The coup was planned and conducted with the direct assistance of the United States Department of State and Aristide was effectively kidnapped by US armed forces at his Tabarre residence on the next evening, February 29. US Marines were summarily posted throughout the capital to protect the Haitian coup-making class from the wrath of millions of Haitians who were conducting angry demonstrations throughout the city (which were never covered by the US press).

This irrefutable fact of a US-engineered and supported coup against a democratically-elected government, at a time when the administration was spouting off about midwifing "democracy" in Iraq, became the basis of a debating ambush I successfully employed against neocon think-tanker Patrick Clawson the following November. This was also around the time that facts were coming to light -- for those who didn't already know -- about US complicity in the 2003 attempted coup against another democratically-elected and popular government, that of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. I ran a comparative analysis READ FULL ARTICLE