/image%2F1034110%2F20221028%2Fob_0c2a43_thumbnail-13.jpeg)
HAITIAN HISTORY, VENEZUELA AND WHITE MEN'S FEARS
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195146905/qid=1079842032/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-4006561-4479011?v=glance&s=books
NOTES
[28] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Caribbean/Uses_Abuses_Haiti.html
[29] http://www.democraticunderground.com/top10/02/84.html
[30] http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/haiti0304.php
[31] http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/course/unitone/short.htm
[32] http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/collectiveliberation/beyond.html
[33] http://www.straybulletins.com/LMB/weblog/archive/000758.html
[34] http://www.thirdworltraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomskyOdonian_Haiti.html
[35] http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/grann.htm
[36] http://www.hotsprings.org/things_to_do/historic_hotsprings/
[37] http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/edit14.html
_____________________
This is particularly relevant to Haiti. The Haitian Revolution that culminated in the first Black Republic on January 1, 1804, was fought against three imperial powers, including Napoleon's armed forces, by rebel slaves. These slaves out-generaled, out-administered, and out-fought the European giants, smashing the myth of white supremacy. This struck terror into the American South, where the fear of Black rebellion was a constant obsession. Turmoil in Haiti is always portrayed by the American mainstream press in a way that explains as little as possible, so as to reinforce the impression of amorphous chaos – read: Black deviance and incapacity for self-governance. That tactic has distracted the television-drugged US public from yet another coup attempt afoot, the second in less than two years, in Venezuela. I have read dozens of articles over the last few days on both Haiti and Venezuela, and none of them mentions race or racism as a factor in these coup attempts. This is an elephant in the living room. Unfortunately, most Americans in the living room
have been blindfolded.
have been blindfolded.
In 1994, just before the United States launched the invasion of Haiti that became my last deployment, Paul Farmer published an excellent book called The Uses of Haiti.[28] He described America's horrifically successful Haitian policy of blaming the victim while continuing to strangle him. For instance, it's often pointed out that Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince is overpopulated, jerrybuilt, and afflicted by almost irremediable drainage and waste-disposal problems. Huge numbers of peasants continually leave the countryside in search of work in the city, forming overcrowded, sprawling bidonvilles (shantytowns) with little or no potable water or electricity. But mainstream American papers rarely go on to explain what drives this process : as foreign agribusiness disrupted the Haitian sharecropping system, land enclosure and mechanization(as well as terrible soil erosion) forced more and more people off the land and into the cities to seek work that was not available except to a very few(accounting for the criminally low wages paid in Port-au-Prince by foreign manufacturers). Paradoxically, the Artibonnite valley which grows enough rice to feed Haiti ships most of its product abroad to get export dollars, and the US ships(taxpayer subsidized) rice into Haiti at prices most Haitians can ill afford.
So Haiti is strangled by the Washington economic consensus(neoliberalism), then blamed for not getting its act together, because most Americans haven't a clue what these international trade policies are or how they work.
And that's just the economic assault. The biggest fear of the right wing and its para-political gangs is a strong effort by the Haitian state to establish the rule of law within its sovereign territory. This becomes incredibly difficult when weapons and equipment for the police are embargoed, and the 75% urban unemployment rate forces large numbers of people into various criminal enterprises to survive.
In the wake of the latest coup, Haiti is an utter legal shambles.
[Aside: Though this is often overstated inside Haiti, the country has become one of many regional stepping stones for drug-running operations in this hemisphere. This will now get considerably worse, since many of the FRAPH hoodlums were deeply involved in drug trafficking. Just as South-Central Los Angeles was chosen as the CIA's ideal market for its Contra-funding crack-cocaine bakesale, we can reasonably expect that Haiti will now be prized by those same forces for the same reasons. It's now a stateless milieu whose legal infrastructure has been so degraded that it offers political criminals a path of least resistance.]
This process has served as an important ideological pillar for white supremacy in the United States. From slavery to Jim Crow, to the de facto segregation that easily survived the Civil Rights Movement, white America has profited from racist ideology and the economic crimes it was invented to legitimize. Haiti's successful slave revolution at the dawn of the 19th Century shook that ideology, and prompted economic and political attacks by both France and the United States.
As Paul Farmer and other critics have shown, the message of the American press remains essentially racist and colonial; Haiti is subtly but unmistakably represented as inscrutably mad, animalistic, diseased, and deviant.
Ever since Nixon managed the Republican Party's displacement of the Democrats as the party of white supremacy, Republicans have taken a special responsibility for putting Haiti in its place. Just after Aristide's ouster, Florida Republican Mark Foley, in a CNN exchange with the priceless Maxine Waters, said the US will help Haitians learn how to run a government and “how to grow crops.” A white f--king rich man from Florida, whom the website Democratic Underground named Number Two on its Top Ten Conservative Idiots list, is talking about teaching Haitians how to grow crops![29]
Note that the US-selected heir apparent in this coup is a white Haitian, Andre Apaid a Duvalierist sweatshop tycoon who has an American passport.[30] The last US appointee after the last coup d'etat was light-skinned Raoul Cedras. This is a reflection of the still complicated class-race interfusion in Haiti, but also of a comfort threshold among American patrons – which would include craven opportunists like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Race serves class: Duvalier came to power using a nationalistic appeal to black consciousness(“ noirisme ”), and ruled in behalf of the nationalistic big landowners in Haiti, whose way of life was threatened by US-sponsored capitalist agriculture(as opposed to the semi-feudal sharecropping system that enriched these grandons (big landowners). That mechanized capitalist agriculture was introduced to Haiti under the rule of the US Marine occupation from 1915-1934, as was the brutal Haitian National Guard, whom Duvalier distrusted and many of whom participated in a failed coup attempt against Duvalier(supported by the CIA). It was in response to the political unreliability of the Haitian armed forces that Duvalier developed the Gestapo-like Tonton Macoute militia to impose by terror a political discipline not only on the population but on the armed forces until he could redevelop its leaders and members into a force more consistently loyal to him.
It was the Tonton Macoute that gave Duvalier his fierce reputation, and which Duvalier would eventually use on behalf of US interests, when he and the US later mended their fences in exchange for his massacre of leftists in Haiti and his regional support of US “anti-communist” efforts.
Duvalier's authoritarian brutality then served him to control the Haitian population, as well as serving US interests in the region. It also had the added benefit in the US, unintended by the noiriste despot, of providing ideological support to white supremacy by reinforcing notions of Black brutishness.[31]
White privilege and white supremacy are still embraced at some level by the majority of the white US population.[32] This embrace is not always the same as it was – unconcealed and unabashed – under Jim Crow or in South Africa during Apartheid. More often it is coded, socially inscribed through the erasure of history, ideologically inscribed as erasure of the social construction of individual agency(personal responsibility, etc.), and psychologically inscribed with Negrophobia – the personal internalization of racial stereotypes that regards Black male bodies as predatory, Black female bodies as hypersensual, and Black intellect as inferior. This is one of the foundation stones of Republican Party success.[33]
I know some on the left will take me to task for emphasizing race by insisting that class is the deeper issue, but I don't buy it. When we can extricate the two in any but a theoretical way, I'll give this class-over-race argument another listen. White supremacy has been and remains a pillar of Euro- American power, and not in some merely discursive way that “divides and conquers” workers, though that's certainly part of it. And imperialism is the issue, too, rationalized through notions of the “white man's burden.”
Bush the Elder and Clinton on Haiti
During the 1992 election, Bill Clinton excoriated George W. Bush for his incarceration of Haitian refugees in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Playing to his Black audience, whom Clinton would betray in his later policies at every turn, Clinton also pointed quite justifiably to the hypocrisy of allowing white Cubans automatic entry into the US, while indefinitely detaining black Haitians.[34]
The coup of a year earlier was proceeding apace with its slaughter of Aristide loyalists and grassroots organizers, and CIA complicity in the coup was becoming gradually more visible with a leak here and a whisper there.
Then the economy tanked after George H. W. Bush had made his famed “read my lips” remark, and Bill Clinton was elected.
Faced with the reality of Haiti's desperation and the volume of refugees fleeing the Cedras-Francois regime, and faced with the reality of Florida politics and the possibility of 100,000 or more penniless people crashing onto its shores, Bill Clinton's first foreign policy embarrassment was being forced by his circumstances to treat the Haitians even more harshly than the Bush regime had.
My own unit in 1993 was preparing for an invasion of Haiti to re-install a reined-in Aristide, but the debacle in Somalia put the whole plan on hold for a year. While Haitians had originally elected Aristide because of his opposition to predatory neoliberal policies, Clinton now convinced Aristide to support those same policies in order to stop the killing. Clinton knew very well that a US invasion would not be accepted by the people of Haiti without Aristide – their first democratically elected President, whom they now saw as a symbol of their aspiration for genuine independence.
Aristide was to be re-installed on October 30, 1993, according to an agreement between Cedras and Clinton called the Governor's Island accords (please see: http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dossec/1993/9310/931011dossec.html). The USS Harlan County, carrying the military and State Department facilitators, arrived in Port-au-Prince on October 11 th. But the officials who were designated to meet the craft had been replaced by a handful of FRAPH thugs(some of them drunk) waving pistols and threatening to fire on anyone who disembarked. So the USS Harlan County, an American warship, was turned about and sent home by a band of intoxicated bullies with Colt.45s. This was a tremendous foreign policy embarrassment for President Bill Clinton, who was at a loss to explain the situation to the public.
This bizarre incident was rendered even more fantastic by the nonchalant presence of the American John Kambourian on the docks, unafraid and unthreatened by the ostensible anti-American gang. Kambourian was leaning on his vehicle with a kind of Delphic smirk throughout this whole weird interlude. Documentary film maker Katherine Kean was on hand and secretly videotaped him.
Kambourian was the CIA's man on station. He had been sitting in the car with UN representative Vickie Huddleston, and the FRAPHists made a kind of show of banging on the hood and shouting, “Kill whites!” for the cameras. Neither Huddleston nor Kambourian seemed alarmed, nor did Huddleston attempt to leave. It was only later, when they didn't realize Kean had a running camera, that Kambourian exited the car to catch some air and suppress a smile at the little performance. The FRAPH, after all, were Kambourian's boys. In dissecting the current coup, we will see that the FRAPH is back in Haiti, and that this year they provided the paramilitary terrorism that precipitated the forcible removal of Aristide… again.
Present during the 1993 USS Harlan County fiasco was the chief of the FRAPH, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant. Only later would the public learn that Constant was on the CIA payroll before, during, and after the 1991 coup d'etat. Little wonder Kambourian was so comfortable relaxing outside during the Harlan County “riot.” Constant was taken in by the United States and now lives in Queens, NY collecting Happy Meal toys and(by many accounts) spending happy hours with his local cocaine dealers. His threats to expose his CIA relations pressured the US into protecting him from extradition.[35]
Note that in this episode the CIA was subverting its own Director. There is no indication that R. James Woolsey, the newly appointed DCI was complicit in Kambourian's fake riot; in fact, it would be surprising if he were. He was a Clinton appointee, and like the next Clinton DCI, John Deutch, he served on the Boards of Directors of various big Defense contractors. The transparently orchestrated sabotage of Clinton's Haiti policy was probably the work of the field agents within the CIA who move up to become station chiefs. By and large, their politics are racist and reactionary, if my own association with them is any indication. I never once met an exception. They are certainly nothing like the Tom Clancy caricatures we see in the movies. I invite readers to read my own accounts in Full Spectrum Disorder – The Military in the New American Century (Soft Skull Press, 2004) http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-12-3. This Republican bias, which included a Jesse Helms-like aversion to both Haiti and Aristide, was prevalent among white officers in the military during the 1994 invasion, and among white Special Operations personnel.
Bush the Elder – former Director of Central Intelligence – had his vengeance on Bill Clinton with the Harlan County incident. Clinton was likely reluctant to call anyone's bluff on issues related to the CIA, because he himself was vulnerable on his own complicity in another CIA operation, which we have mentioned earlier: Iran-Contra. His was not a central role, but given the cocaine politics of the Agency in its efforts to destroy the Sandinistas, it was more than a little discomfiting.
CLINTON, COCAINE AND CONTRAS
Bill Clinton comes from my Mom's home town, Hot Springs, Arkansas. In his campaigns, he said he was from Hope, Arkansas, where his own mother lived for a while, partly because Hope sounds so cool in a political campaign, and partly because Hope is only famous for its very excellent watermelons. Hot Springs was for years a Southern gambling mecca, teeming with every kind of hustle one might imagine, and a favorite getaway for organized crime figures. All the gambling except Oaklawn Racetrack has disappeared now, and the town is trying with only partial success to reinvent itself in the midst of a statewide economic crisis. Drug-addicts, fishermen, Wiccans, criminals, hillbillies, artists, doddering retirees, and militia-types still co-exist there in a kind of slow-motion cultural free-for-all. This may account for Clinton's chameleon-like capacity to protectively color himself.[36]
Back in 1985, when I was working in El Salvador, Bill Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas. In that capacity, he consented to let a little airport at Mena(an hour and a half west of Hot Springs, near the Oklahoma border) be used by CIA contract-pilots who were… shipping cocaine north and guns south. The exact nature and level of his role remains in question, partly because of a river of disinformation from right-wing ideologues.[37] The result has been the almost complete disappearance of the Mena story from public discourse; liberals associate it with right-wing lies, so they won't touch it. But like Waco, another fascist cause celebre, there really was something that was terribly wrong done there, and there is probably plenty to cover up. Certainly it would disincline Clinton to go after the CIA.
HAITI INVASION – CLINTON AND BUSH FACTIONS
Instead, in 1994, he invaded Haiti, and on October 15 th of that year, Aristide returned. Members of both parties have desired Aristide's ouster since he won the 2000 election, and while the Democrats lean toward the comprador-technocrats of the Haitian elite, the Republicans prefer the FRAPH-macoutes.
It would be Bush and the FRAPH that would help the phony Haitian “opposition” to finish its four-year coup. It would also be Bush, with Otto Reich on point, who would attempt to support the failed coup in Venezuela, and who is trying now to set up another.
The interests of the Republicans diverge from those of the Democrats based on their constituencies. Both parties are run by elites who want to see the removal of Aristide and others who have the capacity to mobilize their population. But where Democrats would prefer something that looks like a success story – along with managed elections and other trappings of “progress” – Republicans, as the party that still employs its latter-day version of the Southern Strategy, want to see Haiti in chaos. They will put on the mask of paternalistic sympathy while they continue to impose dysfunction, but they need Haiti to continue to serve as an example of Black incapacity for self-governance – which reinforces their white supremacist appeal to the Helms wing of the party. There is, in my opinion, a kind of imperfect comparison that can be made between Haiti and the American South that sheds further light on American-Haitian ruling class relationships.
[.
And that's just the economic assault. The biggest fear of the right wing and its para-political gangs is a strong effort by the Haitian state to establish the rule of law within its sovereign territory. This becomes incredibly difficult when weapons and equipment for the police are embargoed, and the 75% urban unemployment rate forces large numbers of people into various criminal enterprises to survive.
In the wake of the latest coup, Haiti is an utter legal shambles.
[Aside: Though this is often overstated inside Haiti, the country has become one of many regional stepping stones for drug-running operations in this hemisphere. This will now get considerably worse, since many of the FRAPH hoodlums were deeply involved in drug trafficking. Just as South-Central Los Angeles was chosen as the CIA's ideal market for its Contra-funding crack-cocaine bakesale, we can reasonably expect that Haiti will now be prized by those same forces for the same reasons. It's now a stateless milieu whose legal infrastructure has been so degraded that it offers political criminals a path of least resistance.]
This process has served as an important ideological pillar for white supremacy in the United States. From slavery to Jim Crow, to the de facto segregation that easily survived the Civil Rights Movement, white America has profited from racist ideology and the economic crimes it was invented to legitimize. Haiti's successful slave revolution at the dawn of the 19th Century shook that ideology, and prompted economic and political attacks by both France and the United States.
As Paul Farmer and other critics have shown, the message of the American press remains essentially racist and colonial; Haiti is subtly but unmistakably represented as inscrutably mad, animalistic, diseased, and deviant.
Ever since Nixon managed the Republican Party's displacement of the Democrats as the party of white supremacy, Republicans have taken a special responsibility for putting Haiti in its place. Just after Aristide's ouster, Florida Republican Mark Foley, in a CNN exchange with the priceless Maxine Waters, said the US will help Haitians learn how to run a government and “how to grow crops.” A white f--king rich man from Florida, whom the website Democratic Underground named Number Two on its Top Ten Conservative Idiots list, is talking about teaching Haitians how to grow crops![29]
Note that the US-selected heir apparent in this coup is a white Haitian, Andre Apaid a Duvalierist sweatshop tycoon who has an American passport.[30] The last US appointee after the last coup d'etat was light-skinned Raoul Cedras. This is a reflection of the still complicated class-race interfusion in Haiti, but also of a comfort threshold among American patrons – which would include craven opportunists like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Race serves class: Duvalier came to power using a nationalistic appeal to black consciousness(“ noirisme ”), and ruled in behalf of the nationalistic big landowners in Haiti, whose way of life was threatened by US-sponsored capitalist agriculture(as opposed to the semi-feudal sharecropping system that enriched these grandons (big landowners). That mechanized capitalist agriculture was introduced to Haiti under the rule of the US Marine occupation from 1915-1934, as was the brutal Haitian National Guard, whom Duvalier distrusted and many of whom participated in a failed coup attempt against Duvalier(supported by the CIA). It was in response to the political unreliability of the Haitian armed forces that Duvalier developed the Gestapo-like Tonton Macoute militia to impose by terror a political discipline not only on the population but on the armed forces until he could redevelop its leaders and members into a force more consistently loyal to him.
It was the Tonton Macoute that gave Duvalier his fierce reputation, and which Duvalier would eventually use on behalf of US interests, when he and the US later mended their fences in exchange for his massacre of leftists in Haiti and his regional support of US “anti-communist” efforts.
Duvalier's authoritarian brutality then served him to control the Haitian population, as well as serving US interests in the region. It also had the added benefit in the US, unintended by the noiriste despot, of providing ideological support to white supremacy by reinforcing notions of Black brutishness.[31]
White privilege and white supremacy are still embraced at some level by the majority of the white US population.[32] This embrace is not always the same as it was – unconcealed and unabashed – under Jim Crow or in South Africa during Apartheid. More often it is coded, socially inscribed through the erasure of history, ideologically inscribed as erasure of the social construction of individual agency(personal responsibility, etc.), and psychologically inscribed with Negrophobia – the personal internalization of racial stereotypes that regards Black male bodies as predatory, Black female bodies as hypersensual, and Black intellect as inferior. This is one of the foundation stones of Republican Party success.[33]
I know some on the left will take me to task for emphasizing race by insisting that class is the deeper issue, but I don't buy it. When we can extricate the two in any but a theoretical way, I'll give this class-over-race argument another listen. White supremacy has been and remains a pillar of Euro- American power, and not in some merely discursive way that “divides and conquers” workers, though that's certainly part of it. And imperialism is the issue, too, rationalized through notions of the “white man's burden.”
Bush the Elder and Clinton on Haiti
During the 1992 election, Bill Clinton excoriated George W. Bush for his incarceration of Haitian refugees in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Playing to his Black audience, whom Clinton would betray in his later policies at every turn, Clinton also pointed quite justifiably to the hypocrisy of allowing white Cubans automatic entry into the US, while indefinitely detaining black Haitians.[34]
The coup of a year earlier was proceeding apace with its slaughter of Aristide loyalists and grassroots organizers, and CIA complicity in the coup was becoming gradually more visible with a leak here and a whisper there.
Then the economy tanked after George H. W. Bush had made his famed “read my lips” remark, and Bill Clinton was elected.
Faced with the reality of Haiti's desperation and the volume of refugees fleeing the Cedras-Francois regime, and faced with the reality of Florida politics and the possibility of 100,000 or more penniless people crashing onto its shores, Bill Clinton's first foreign policy embarrassment was being forced by his circumstances to treat the Haitians even more harshly than the Bush regime had.
My own unit in 1993 was preparing for an invasion of Haiti to re-install a reined-in Aristide, but the debacle in Somalia put the whole plan on hold for a year. While Haitians had originally elected Aristide because of his opposition to predatory neoliberal policies, Clinton now convinced Aristide to support those same policies in order to stop the killing. Clinton knew very well that a US invasion would not be accepted by the people of Haiti without Aristide – their first democratically elected President, whom they now saw as a symbol of their aspiration for genuine independence.
Aristide was to be re-installed on October 30, 1993, according to an agreement between Cedras and Clinton called the Governor's Island accords (please see: http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dossec/1993/9310/931011dossec.html). The USS Harlan County, carrying the military and State Department facilitators, arrived in Port-au-Prince on October 11 th. But the officials who were designated to meet the craft had been replaced by a handful of FRAPH thugs(some of them drunk) waving pistols and threatening to fire on anyone who disembarked. So the USS Harlan County, an American warship, was turned about and sent home by a band of intoxicated bullies with Colt.45s. This was a tremendous foreign policy embarrassment for President Bill Clinton, who was at a loss to explain the situation to the public.
This bizarre incident was rendered even more fantastic by the nonchalant presence of the American John Kambourian on the docks, unafraid and unthreatened by the ostensible anti-American gang. Kambourian was leaning on his vehicle with a kind of Delphic smirk throughout this whole weird interlude. Documentary film maker Katherine Kean was on hand and secretly videotaped him.
Kambourian was the CIA's man on station. He had been sitting in the car with UN representative Vickie Huddleston, and the FRAPHists made a kind of show of banging on the hood and shouting, “Kill whites!” for the cameras. Neither Huddleston nor Kambourian seemed alarmed, nor did Huddleston attempt to leave. It was only later, when they didn't realize Kean had a running camera, that Kambourian exited the car to catch some air and suppress a smile at the little performance. The FRAPH, after all, were Kambourian's boys. In dissecting the current coup, we will see that the FRAPH is back in Haiti, and that this year they provided the paramilitary terrorism that precipitated the forcible removal of Aristide… again.
Present during the 1993 USS Harlan County fiasco was the chief of the FRAPH, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant. Only later would the public learn that Constant was on the CIA payroll before, during, and after the 1991 coup d'etat. Little wonder Kambourian was so comfortable relaxing outside during the Harlan County “riot.” Constant was taken in by the United States and now lives in Queens, NY collecting Happy Meal toys and(by many accounts) spending happy hours with his local cocaine dealers. His threats to expose his CIA relations pressured the US into protecting him from extradition.[35]
Note that in this episode the CIA was subverting its own Director. There is no indication that R. James Woolsey, the newly appointed DCI was complicit in Kambourian's fake riot; in fact, it would be surprising if he were. He was a Clinton appointee, and like the next Clinton DCI, John Deutch, he served on the Boards of Directors of various big Defense contractors. The transparently orchestrated sabotage of Clinton's Haiti policy was probably the work of the field agents within the CIA who move up to become station chiefs. By and large, their politics are racist and reactionary, if my own association with them is any indication. I never once met an exception. They are certainly nothing like the Tom Clancy caricatures we see in the movies. I invite readers to read my own accounts in Full Spectrum Disorder – The Military in the New American Century (Soft Skull Press, 2004) http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-12-3. This Republican bias, which included a Jesse Helms-like aversion to both Haiti and Aristide, was prevalent among white officers in the military during the 1994 invasion, and among white Special Operations personnel.
Bush the Elder – former Director of Central Intelligence – had his vengeance on Bill Clinton with the Harlan County incident. Clinton was likely reluctant to call anyone's bluff on issues related to the CIA, because he himself was vulnerable on his own complicity in another CIA operation, which we have mentioned earlier: Iran-Contra. His was not a central role, but given the cocaine politics of the Agency in its efforts to destroy the Sandinistas, it was more than a little discomfiting.
CLINTON, COCAINE AND CONTRAS
Bill Clinton comes from my Mom's home town, Hot Springs, Arkansas. In his campaigns, he said he was from Hope, Arkansas, where his own mother lived for a while, partly because Hope sounds so cool in a political campaign, and partly because Hope is only famous for its very excellent watermelons. Hot Springs was for years a Southern gambling mecca, teeming with every kind of hustle one might imagine, and a favorite getaway for organized crime figures. All the gambling except Oaklawn Racetrack has disappeared now, and the town is trying with only partial success to reinvent itself in the midst of a statewide economic crisis. Drug-addicts, fishermen, Wiccans, criminals, hillbillies, artists, doddering retirees, and militia-types still co-exist there in a kind of slow-motion cultural free-for-all. This may account for Clinton's chameleon-like capacity to protectively color himself.[36]
Back in 1985, when I was working in El Salvador, Bill Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas. In that capacity, he consented to let a little airport at Mena(an hour and a half west of Hot Springs, near the Oklahoma border) be used by CIA contract-pilots who were… shipping cocaine north and guns south. The exact nature and level of his role remains in question, partly because of a river of disinformation from right-wing ideologues.[37] The result has been the almost complete disappearance of the Mena story from public discourse; liberals associate it with right-wing lies, so they won't touch it. But like Waco, another fascist cause celebre, there really was something that was terribly wrong done there, and there is probably plenty to cover up. Certainly it would disincline Clinton to go after the CIA.
HAITI INVASION – CLINTON AND BUSH FACTIONS
Instead, in 1994, he invaded Haiti, and on October 15 th of that year, Aristide returned. Members of both parties have desired Aristide's ouster since he won the 2000 election, and while the Democrats lean toward the comprador-technocrats of the Haitian elite, the Republicans prefer the FRAPH-macoutes.
It would be Bush and the FRAPH that would help the phony Haitian “opposition” to finish its four-year coup. It would also be Bush, with Otto Reich on point, who would attempt to support the failed coup in Venezuela, and who is trying now to set up another.
The interests of the Republicans diverge from those of the Democrats based on their constituencies. Both parties are run by elites who want to see the removal of Aristide and others who have the capacity to mobilize their population. But where Democrats would prefer something that looks like a success story – along with managed elections and other trappings of “progress” – Republicans, as the party that still employs its latter-day version of the Southern Strategy, want to see Haiti in chaos. They will put on the mask of paternalistic sympathy while they continue to impose dysfunction, but they need Haiti to continue to serve as an example of Black incapacity for self-governance – which reinforces their white supremacist appeal to the Helms wing of the party. There is, in my opinion, a kind of imperfect comparison that can be made between Haiti and the American South that sheds further light on American-Haitian ruling class relationships.
[.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195146905/qid=1079842032/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-4006561-4479011?v=glance&s=books
NOTES
[28] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Caribbean/Uses_Abuses_Haiti.html
[29] http://www.democraticunderground.com/top10/02/84.html
[30] http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/haiti0304.php
[31] http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/course/unitone/short.htm
[32] http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/collectiveliberation/beyond.html
[33] http://www.straybulletins.com/LMB/weblog/archive/000758.html
[34] http://www.thirdworltraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomskyOdonian_Haiti.html
[35] http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/grann.htm
[36] http://www.hotsprings.org/things_to_do/historic_hotsprings/
[37] http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/edit14.html
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