Haiti

D

Occupation by the United States

The financial chaos that grew out of political corruption and economic underdevelopment led to Haiti’s economic dependence on foreign lenders. In the early 20th century, the United States was worried about increasingly insistent demands from France and Germany that they be allowed to assume control of Haitian finances. Nor could the political situation have been worse. Haiti’s tyrannical president Guillaume Sam was dragged from his sanctuary in the French Embassy on July 28, 1915, and torn to pieces by a mob. That day the United States invaded Haiti, and a military occupation began.

Haiti was forced to accept a treaty granting the United States control over customs receipts and authority to carry out reforms. The United States employed a high-handed policy during the military occupation, actually writing a new Haitian constitution (its author was Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy). Although the occupation authorities often abused the powers given them, which later led to the appointment of a civil high commissioner, the work of U.S. officials, both military and civilian, accomplished certain reforms: financial chaos was eliminated, the budget was balanced, payments on debts were promptly made; taxes were readjusted; graft was diminished; and a program of public works (often using coerced peasant labor), sanitation and public health, education, and agricultural development was instituted.

The occupation was resented across the spectrum of Haitian society and was a constant target of guerrilla offensives and peasant uprisings. Led by Charlemagne Péralte, a peasant army called the Cacos attempted to overthrow the puppet president, Sudre Dartiguenave, in 1919. Later that year Péralte was ambushed and killed by marines; he soon became, for Haitians, a martyr of the republic.

As a consequence of continuing Haitian opposition and of the recommendations of a commission appointed by U.S. president Herbert Hoover, withdrawal of the marines was eventually begun and the Haitians given more control. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” policy, the last marines left in 1934, and the intervention was terminated officially in 1935. With the payment of the balance of a loan made by the United States in 1922, U.S. fiscal control of Haiti ended in 1947.

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E

Post-Occupation Developments

Sténio J. Vincent, a lawyer and editor, was president of Haiti from 1930 to 1941. He tried to improve conditions and to modernize agriculture, but he cared little for civil liberties. Vincent was succeeded by Élie Lescot, who continued Vincent’s authoritarian type of rule and was forced out of office in 1946 by a military coup. Later in 1946 a new congress elected under the supervision of a military junta chose Dumarsais Estimé, the first black president since the U.S. military government had put the administration in the hands of the mulatto elite in 1915.

Estimé developed and tried to implement a program of social reform and Haiti’s first labor and social security laws. During most of his term in office he also provided probably the widest degree of civil liberties that the country had ever seen. There was freedom of the press, and several opposition political parties were permitted to function openly. Estimé’s continuing efforts on behalf of the black masses engendered strong political opposition. This rose to fever pitch when, late in 1949, Estimé sought to have the constitution changed to permit his own reelection. In May 1950 a military junta forced Estimé to resign.

After a few months of provisional government, General Paul Magloire, a member of the junta that had ousted Estimé, was chosen president in an uncontested election. His six-year regime was a dictatorship marked by considerable corruption, but he continued some of the social measures of the Estimé regime, including its programs in the areas of education and workers’ housing. At the end of 1956, however, Magloire made the same mistake as his predecessor and attempted to remain in office beyond his constitutional term. The result was a general strike backed by the workers and shopkeepers of Port-au-Prince that ended Magloire’s regime in December 1956.

F

The Duvalier Regime

During the first nine months of 1957 Haiti experienced a bewildering series of government juntas and provisional presidents. In September 1957 the army organized elections. François Duvalier, a physician, was the only candidate the military allowed to conduct a campaign.

Duvalier soon established a personal dictatorship. At his bidding, the legislature imposed a state of siege, and later authorized him to rule by decree. In this period Duvalier organized the Tontons Macoutes, an unofficial armed force under his personal control, to intimidate his opposition. Despite his complete disrespect for the law, Duvalier received considerable help from the U.S. government, which hoped to see him restore a semblance of stability to post-occupation Haiti. Apparent internal stability was achieved, but by the exercise of unprecedented repressive measures. Civil liberties and freedom of the press were nonexistent. Trade unions were outlawed, and the union leaders fled into exile or were imprisoned.

In a fraudulent election in 1961 Duvalier won another six-year term as Haiti’s president, and in 1964, under a new constitution, he made himself president for life. During the 1960s he intensified the repression, leading the United States in 1963 to cut off all U.S. aid to Haiti. Meanwhile, the economy stagnated, and thousands of Haitians emigrated. Duvalier portrayed the situation as one of a beleaguered black Haiti facing up courageously to a variety of national and racial opponents. His claims on behalf of national sovereignty, together with his support of Vodun and his part in creating a new black upper class, won him a degree of support from some sectors of the Haitian population.

In 1971 the legislature of Haiti amended the constitution to permit Duvalier to name his successor. As a result, when Duvalier died later that year, his 19-year-old son, Jean Claude, was sworn in as president-for-life. Jean Claude Duvalier, known as Baby Doc, did little to modify the dictatorship that his father, Papa Doc, had established. He did release some political prisoners to improve Haiti’s relations with the United States and other countries, attracting in the process increasing amounts of much-needed foreign aid. The money, however, was of no benefit to the mass of Haitians because all available foreign currency went to the ruling elite for deposit in foreign bank accounts and for the purchase of imported luxury goods. As a result of rising opposition, Duvalier fled Haiti in early 1986; a junta succeeded him.

Toward the end of the 1970s political repression in Haiti increased again, with an intensification of the torture of political prisoners. An increasing number of Haitians, as many as 4,000 a month, sought refuge by fleeing by boat to Florida. The exodus was briefly stemmed in September 1981, when the U.S. government, which backed the Duvalier dictatorship, ordered the interception and return of the refugees, claiming that they were escaping only poverty and did not meet the U.S. qualifications for political refugees. Nevertheless, thousands of boat people soon began again to flee Haiti.

By 1984 steadily worsening economic conditions in Haiti led to the first anti-Duvalier riots as crowds of hungry people looted food warehouses in many provincial towns. Many Catholic and Protestant clergy adopted a stance of outspoken opposition to Duvalier and used church-controlled radio stations to agitate against the government. By the end of 1985 there were widespread demonstrations against Duvalier. Finally, the U.S. government abandoned its support of Duvalier and moved to force him from power. On February 7, 1986, a U.S. fleet surrounded the harbor of Port-au-Prince and Duvalier was finished. A U.S. Air Force plane flew him and his family into exile in France. On Duvalier’s departure the government was taken over by the army and a national governing council.

G

After Duvalier

Haiti adopted a new constitution in 1987, which restored the bicameral legislature and sharply limited the powers of the central government. An independent council was set up to conduct elections in 1987, but the army prevented the council from functioning. On election day soldiers massacred voters and canceled the elections. Early in 1988 the army staged a fraudulent election and named a civilian, Leslie Manigat, as president. Four months after Manigat took office and attempted to reform the military, he was ousted in a coup.

Lieutenant General Prosper Avril emerged from a subsequent power struggle as Haiti’s president. It soon became clear that Avril intended only to consolidate his own power. Avril muzzled the media and suspended parts of the 1987 constitution. Renewed political unrest, sparked by deteriorating economic conditions, led Avril to resign the presidency and flee in March 1990.

Internationally supervised elections in December 1990 resulted in a victory for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest and an advocate for socialism. As president he attempted to clean up the government, reform the military, and stop the use of Haiti as a transshipment point for smuggling cocaine. The army and the tiny upper class soon set about plotting his overthrow. He was toppled in September 1991 in a bloody military coup led by Brigadier (later Lieutenant) General Raoul Cédras, whom Aristide had appointed chief of staff, and Cédras’s right-hand man, Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Joseph Michel François, head of the police. The United States, the United Nations (UN), and the Organization of American States (OAS) refused to recognize the new government in Haiti, although prominent Americans including the U.S. ambassador to Haiti spoke sympathetically about Cédras, who, it was admitted in November 1993, had been on the CIA payroll since 1986.

H

The Cédras-François Dictatorship

The new rulers established a climate of terror that was to last almost three years. People believed to support Aristide—that is, the vast majority of Haitians—were subject to kidnapping, arrest, beating, torture, and murder. Tens of thousands of terrified people took to the sea in small boats to seek political asylum, but the U.S. government mobilized its naval forces to intercept them and return them to the Haitian police.

In late 1991, after U.S. courts ruled that such summary return violated international law, refugees were placed in detention at Guantánamo Bay, a U.S.-occupied enclave in Cuba. After administrative interviews most were declared “economic refugees” and returned to Haiti, although some eventually were allowed U.S. entry. In 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court permitted President George Bush to resume summary return of political refugees. This practice continued through 1993, notwithstanding Bush’s replacement by Bill Clinton who, in his election campaign, had denounced Bush’s policy as “cruel” and “illegal.”

During this political struggle, the United Nations imposed sanctions against Haiti to pressure the military to withdraw. In 1993 Cédras and a UN/OAS mediator devised an agreement to allow Aristide to return to power and grant an amnesty to the military rulers. Aristide reluctantly signed the accord. The UN embargo was then lifted, permitting the junta to stockpile oil, arms, and ammunition. Cédras and François refused to step down, and the UN imposed broader sanctions.

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