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Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment
Long before a devastating earthquake hit in January 2010, Haiti was one of the most impoverished and oppressed countries in the world. However, in the late 1980s a remarkable popular mobilization known as Lavalas (“the flood”) sought to liberate the island from decades of US-backed dictatorial rule. Damming the Flood analyzes how and why the Lavalas governments led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were overthrown, in 1991 and again in 2004, by the enemies of democracy in Haiti and abroad.
The elaborate campaign to suppress Lavalas was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. It has left the people of Haiti at the mercy of some of the most rapacious political and economic forces on the planet.
Updated with a substantial new afterword that addresses the international response to the earthquake, Damming the Flood is both an invaluable account of recent Haitian history and an illuminating analysis of twenty-first-century imperialism.
The elaborate campaign to suppress Lavalas was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. It has left the people of Haiti at the mercy of some of the most rapacious political and economic forces on the planet.
Updated with a substantial new afterword that addresses the international response to the earthquake, Damming the Flood is both an invaluable account of recent Haitian history and an illuminating analysis of twenty-first-century imperialism.
512 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2007
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January 9, 2018
“The declaration of Haitian independence (in 1803) thereby dealt the myth of white supremacy a mortal and thus unforgivable blow. Arguably, there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” It became the inspiration for the Latin American and African liberation movements. Of the three great Revolutions of the late Eighteenth Century (US, France, Haiti), only the Haitian Revolution was really about equality for all. In 1697, the island of Hispaniola is turned into Saint-Domingue (French) and Santo Domingo (Spanish). In 1804, Sainte-Domingue is renamed Haiti (its original Arawak name) and declares itself independent of France. It’s the size of modern day Maryland. Napoleon, a known racist, loses 50,000 troops trying unsuccessfully to get Haitians back to being slaves. In 1825, France tells Haiti recognition (or freedom to not be slaves anymore) will cost 150 million francs. Haiti made the last payment in 1947. Dessalines took over Haiti after Toussaint in 1804, but Dessalines is executed before he can really achieve anything for the people. After his death began a vicious Haitian class war that continues to this present day.
The main thesis of this book is that Aristide’s two removals from power in 1991 and 2004 were for the same ‘crime’: the Haitian rich thought he was a threat to their way of life. He was a threat, not because he was a revolutionary, but because he believed in something more dangerous and more possible: practical steps towards piecemeal reform and political empowerment. He also represented the threat of Liberation Theology which Noam refers to as “a very significant change in modern history.” “Haiti is the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president – twice.” U.S. Army intelligence officers saw Liberation Theology as more dangerous than Labor or Communism. Of course. If you have Jesus standing again for peace, equality, or turning the other cheek – then you probably can’t have 800 military bases and unchecked neoliberalism, let alone capitalism. And Aristide had learned from Friere that the poor had to be fellow actors and join him making him a bigger threat. Haiti has deeper apartheid than South Africa; the elites despise the masses, and class is more important than race. The poor know that the elites have the guns, so non-violence has been the only path to victory for the Haitian poor, since the uprising of Peralte in 1917-18.
Haiti was meeting all its food needs until trade ‘liberalization’ began in the 80’s. Now, thanks to the U.S., Haiti now has to import one half of its food from the country that has invaded it the most. The ever- thoughtful U.S. flooded the Haitian market with cheap rice when it was noticed that Haiti was already self-sufficient in rice. When Noam says the U.S. operates under Mafia principles, he is right. Haiti is four times more open than the U.S. is, forcing Haitians to work for an appalling 11 cents an hour making T shirts for Disney and K Mart. The IMF says that in 2006, “55% of Haitian households survive on a daily income equal to 44 American cents.”
The violence during General Namphy’s reign (’86 to ’88) was considered “Duvalierism without Duvalier.” In just one year, Namphy’s team had “openly gunned down more civilians than Jean Claude Duvalier’s government had done in fifteen years.” The US, not wishing a level playing field, invested 36 million dollars of our taxpayer money trying to elect the sellout Bazin in 1990; even with that staggering amount of $, Bazin lost. Haitians knew who was really on their side and elected Aristide. And so, Aristide won, and “between 1990 and 2003 illiteracy probably fell from something like 65 percent to something closer to 45 percent.” “In 1990 there were only 34 secondary schools in Haiti; by 2001 there were 138.” Haiti was on track to reach 15 percent illiteracy by the end of 2004, when the first coup against Aristide happened. His party, Lavalas, never got a chance to really prove itself and all improvements by Aristide (after elected in 1990) stopped in 2004 (new schools, irrigation canals, literacy centers). The Haitian people were being punished by the U.S. for voting the wrong way in a free and fair election thus electing Aristide. In 2006, the Palestinians were also punished by the U.S. for voting the wrong way in their free and fair election electing Hamas. The US invaders of Haiti in 1994 protected the FRAPH paramilitary, Americans were there to disarm the people of Haiti, not disarm the thugs of the elite attacking the people. In the end, Aristide’s most popular action had been dissolving the Haitian Army (even a US General agreed it was the right thing to do).
Which Haitian leader was worst? First look at their actual death tolls: 50,000 dead under the Duvaliers (’57-’86), 700 to 1,000 dead under Namphy/Avril (1986-90), 4,000 dead under Cedras (1991-94), and 3,000 dead under Latortue (2004-2006). Aristide’s regime’s death toll? Jesse Helms could not find one killing by the 1991 administration. Aristide’s second chance at power from 2001 to 2004 had a death toll of ten. Against those ten, the US led coup alone against Aristide in 2004 had a death toll of “several thousand victims”. Given these facts, only a massive expensive disinformation campaign could have made Aristide look worse than his competition.
“The bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti is explicitly designed to pursue U.S. interests”. The U.S. starved Aristide regime of defensive weaponry like tear gas and riot shields - and starved the only helicopter in Haiti of parts through a convenient embargo originally not meant for Aristide which the US refused to lift. The Haitian police were always severely understaffed to begin with; the US has more than 10 times more officers per civilian. But on top of understaffing, as a result of clear US interference, those few Haitian police soon ran out of supplies and Aristide was soon overthrown. Then Latorue’s new government abandoned Aristide’s literacy program ‘overnight’ and jacked up food prices 400%, – in a country with “70 percent unemployment, Latortue fired several thousand public service employees.” While Lavalas was never given the funds to really help Haitians, Latortue was given the funds but made no pretense of helping the poor with them.
The 2004 coop against Aristide had new players beyond the US to muddy the questionable ethics of the action. Canada and France were happy to lend a hand in once again denying Haiti justice and its ability to manage itself as a sovereign nation, without continual condescending paternal-racist interference from pasty-faced white people. Aristide was kidnapped by a U.S. delta force escort and removed illegally from the country because the exceptionalist US still thinks itself (as all bullies do) as above the law. Every election since 1990, “has been won either by Aristide or by the person Aristide chose.” “At least 90 percent of the NGOs in Haiti are rife with corruption.” “Of all the money they (NGOs) send here, only 10 percent actually makes it to the ground.” According to Tim Schwarz, food aid since the 1980’s in Haiti, has been destroying the small farmers with the intentional dumping of U.S. surpluses – an intentional full-scale economic sabotage.
“It took the U.S. fifty-eight years to recognize Haiti’s independence” - Institutionalized racism in action.
The main thesis of this book is that Aristide’s two removals from power in 1991 and 2004 were for the same ‘crime’: the Haitian rich thought he was a threat to their way of life. He was a threat, not because he was a revolutionary, but because he believed in something more dangerous and more possible: practical steps towards piecemeal reform and political empowerment. He also represented the threat of Liberation Theology which Noam refers to as “a very significant change in modern history.” “Haiti is the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president – twice.” U.S. Army intelligence officers saw Liberation Theology as more dangerous than Labor or Communism. Of course. If you have Jesus standing again for peace, equality, or turning the other cheek – then you probably can’t have 800 military bases and unchecked neoliberalism, let alone capitalism. And Aristide had learned from Friere that the poor had to be fellow actors and join him making him a bigger threat. Haiti has deeper apartheid than South Africa; the elites despise the masses, and class is more important than race. The poor know that the elites have the guns, so non-violence has been the only path to victory for the Haitian poor, since the uprising of Peralte in 1917-18.
Haiti was meeting all its food needs until trade ‘liberalization’ began in the 80’s. Now, thanks to the U.S., Haiti now has to import one half of its food from the country that has invaded it the most. The ever- thoughtful U.S. flooded the Haitian market with cheap rice when it was noticed that Haiti was already self-sufficient in rice. When Noam says the U.S. operates under Mafia principles, he is right. Haiti is four times more open than the U.S. is, forcing Haitians to work for an appalling 11 cents an hour making T shirts for Disney and K Mart. The IMF says that in 2006, “55% of Haitian households survive on a daily income equal to 44 American cents.”
The violence during General Namphy’s reign (’86 to ’88) was considered “Duvalierism without Duvalier.” In just one year, Namphy’s team had “openly gunned down more civilians than Jean Claude Duvalier’s government had done in fifteen years.” The US, not wishing a level playing field, invested 36 million dollars of our taxpayer money trying to elect the sellout Bazin in 1990; even with that staggering amount of $, Bazin lost. Haitians knew who was really on their side and elected Aristide. And so, Aristide won, and “between 1990 and 2003 illiteracy probably fell from something like 65 percent to something closer to 45 percent.” “In 1990 there were only 34 secondary schools in Haiti; by 2001 there were 138.” Haiti was on track to reach 15 percent illiteracy by the end of 2004, when the first coup against Aristide happened. His party, Lavalas, never got a chance to really prove itself and all improvements by Aristide (after elected in 1990) stopped in 2004 (new schools, irrigation canals, literacy centers). The Haitian people were being punished by the U.S. for voting the wrong way in a free and fair election thus electing Aristide. In 2006, the Palestinians were also punished by the U.S. for voting the wrong way in their free and fair election electing Hamas. The US invaders of Haiti in 1994 protected the FRAPH paramilitary, Americans were there to disarm the people of Haiti, not disarm the thugs of the elite attacking the people. In the end, Aristide’s most popular action had been dissolving the Haitian Army (even a US General agreed it was the right thing to do).
Which Haitian leader was worst? First look at their actual death tolls: 50,000 dead under the Duvaliers (’57-’86), 700 to 1,000 dead under Namphy/Avril (1986-90), 4,000 dead under Cedras (1991-94), and 3,000 dead under Latortue (2004-2006). Aristide’s regime’s death toll? Jesse Helms could not find one killing by the 1991 administration. Aristide’s second chance at power from 2001 to 2004 had a death toll of ten. Against those ten, the US led coup alone against Aristide in 2004 had a death toll of “several thousand victims”. Given these facts, only a massive expensive disinformation campaign could have made Aristide look worse than his competition.
“The bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti is explicitly designed to pursue U.S. interests”. The U.S. starved Aristide regime of defensive weaponry like tear gas and riot shields - and starved the only helicopter in Haiti of parts through a convenient embargo originally not meant for Aristide which the US refused to lift. The Haitian police were always severely understaffed to begin with; the US has more than 10 times more officers per civilian. But on top of understaffing, as a result of clear US interference, those few Haitian police soon ran out of supplies and Aristide was soon overthrown. Then Latorue’s new government abandoned Aristide’s literacy program ‘overnight’ and jacked up food prices 400%, – in a country with “70 percent unemployment, Latortue fired several thousand public service employees.” While Lavalas was never given the funds to really help Haitians, Latortue was given the funds but made no pretense of helping the poor with them.
The 2004 coop against Aristide had new players beyond the US to muddy the questionable ethics of the action. Canada and France were happy to lend a hand in once again denying Haiti justice and its ability to manage itself as a sovereign nation, without continual condescending paternal-racist interference from pasty-faced white people. Aristide was kidnapped by a U.S. delta force escort and removed illegally from the country because the exceptionalist US still thinks itself (as all bullies do) as above the law. Every election since 1990, “has been won either by Aristide or by the person Aristide chose.” “At least 90 percent of the NGOs in Haiti are rife with corruption.” “Of all the money they (NGOs) send here, only 10 percent actually makes it to the ground.” According to Tim Schwarz, food aid since the 1980’s in Haiti, has been destroying the small farmers with the intentional dumping of U.S. surpluses – an intentional full-scale economic sabotage.
“It took the U.S. fifty-eight years to recognize Haiti’s independence” - Institutionalized racism in action.
August 17, 2014
There is a political party in Haiti called Fanmi Lavalas, roughly translated in to English as Waterfall Family, this is the Flood of the title of this book, the flood is the people. The damming is the attempt by the international community to stop the people having their day. I consider myself sceptical of developed nations interventions in third and developing world countries, and yet as I read this book by Peter Hallward even I was shocked at the lengths the US and France Mainly, but others as well, will go to in their desire to keep ordinary people down. George Bush’s government has been rightly vilified over the Iraq debacle, but little has been said about his forays in to Haiti (and he is by no means the first US president to do so).
Jean Bertrand Aristide has been twice elected, overwhelmingly by the people of Haiti, and he fights for them. Like Chavez, but less radical, or Castro but less comic (latterly), he is another nightmare for American imperialism. After trying the age old tactics of threatening people, shooting Aristide loyalists, bribing people, funding opposition groups and using NGOs as well as the mass media to smear Aristide they finally realised that nothing could shake the public faith in this quiet, humble priest of Port au Prince. On finally understanding this they decided to kidnap him in 2004. Once deposed already to international disgust in the early 90s, this was different. The international smear campaign was supported almost completely with even left-leaning organs of the press claiming Aristide was a human rights abuser, a communist or simply a murderer, none of which is true. Proven. The people whom the US and France came to support in all elections were themselves murderers, fraudsters and elitists whose entire politics was shaped to keep the income distribution as wide as possible in Haiti, following in the footsteps of the Duvalier family who lead Haiti with an iron fist right up to the 80s for over 30 years.
Upon the election of Aristide, political violence came to an immediate stop until the US backed overthrow in 1991. In 1994 when he returned after international outcry, violence stopped again although he was hamstrung by policies imposed on his government that stunted his ideas for true democracy. This book is deserving of the word “shocking” in every area. I don’t think I have read a book that has made me so angry. In this new edition there is an equally sickening afterword on the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Haiti which the elite classes with American help have used as an excuse to disenfranchise the Haitian people again. The US military intervention in this time is truly horrifying and utterly, utterly racist. Hallward has written a superb balancing to international narrative on Haiti, and now it seems that there is a possibility for Aristide to return, his party Fanmi Lavalas has been banned from taking part in elections, ostensibly because they would win, outright so it remains to be seen what he can do. However, like Nelson Mandela or Kwame Nkrumah, Aristide is the symbol of an entire nation’s struggle, and having him back in Port au Price will is vital for the progress of the people of Haiti in their struggle against darkness, the darkest darkness of “international diplomacy”.
Jean Bertrand Aristide has been twice elected, overwhelmingly by the people of Haiti, and he fights for them. Like Chavez, but less radical, or Castro but less comic (latterly), he is another nightmare for American imperialism. After trying the age old tactics of threatening people, shooting Aristide loyalists, bribing people, funding opposition groups and using NGOs as well as the mass media to smear Aristide they finally realised that nothing could shake the public faith in this quiet, humble priest of Port au Prince. On finally understanding this they decided to kidnap him in 2004. Once deposed already to international disgust in the early 90s, this was different. The international smear campaign was supported almost completely with even left-leaning organs of the press claiming Aristide was a human rights abuser, a communist or simply a murderer, none of which is true. Proven. The people whom the US and France came to support in all elections were themselves murderers, fraudsters and elitists whose entire politics was shaped to keep the income distribution as wide as possible in Haiti, following in the footsteps of the Duvalier family who lead Haiti with an iron fist right up to the 80s for over 30 years.
Upon the election of Aristide, political violence came to an immediate stop until the US backed overthrow in 1991. In 1994 when he returned after international outcry, violence stopped again although he was hamstrung by policies imposed on his government that stunted his ideas for true democracy. This book is deserving of the word “shocking” in every area. I don’t think I have read a book that has made me so angry. In this new edition there is an equally sickening afterword on the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Haiti which the elite classes with American help have used as an excuse to disenfranchise the Haitian people again. The US military intervention in this time is truly horrifying and utterly, utterly racist. Hallward has written a superb balancing to international narrative on Haiti, and now it seems that there is a possibility for Aristide to return, his party Fanmi Lavalas has been banned from taking part in elections, ostensibly because they would win, outright so it remains to be seen what he can do. However, like Nelson Mandela or Kwame Nkrumah, Aristide is the symbol of an entire nation’s struggle, and having him back in Port au Price will is vital for the progress of the people of Haiti in their struggle against darkness, the darkest darkness of “international diplomacy”.
April 20, 2008
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/04...
Review of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
by Ben Terrall / April 5th, 2008
Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
by Peter Hallward
Paperback: 488 pages
Publisher: Verso (April 7, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1844671062
ISBN-13: 978-1844671069
Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush Administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s democratically-elected government. Even human rights groups and left-leaning press that stood up against the Iraq war gave, and still give, Bush a pass on the horror he unleashed on Haiti by kidnapping President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Peter Hallward’s new book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment is a welcome corrective to the false impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it, “A brilliant politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece of very recent history that the U.S. press has either distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book I’ve read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in the world.”
Hallward, a UK-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in 2003 which involved daily reading of Le Monde and other French newspapers when he noted a systematic demonization of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas movement. He subsequently wrote one of the best long articles about the 2004 coup (”Option Zero in Haiti,” New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting information for a bill of indictment against the U.S., France and Canada, the coup’s principle backers, ever since. In the process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and self-described radicals who either through intellectual laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.
In his research, Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the past ten years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles ranging from Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures, buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country’s recent violence in the context of 200 years of “great power” hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.
Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti’s ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for “regime change” that even Iraq war opponents could embrace. After the first U.S.-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the U.S. was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, “Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide as a ‘psychopath and grave human rights abuser.’” But “neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would resurface at every turn.”
As Hallward painstakingly shows, left of center and liberal NGOs were all too willing to accept Washington’s destabilization program for Haiti. The smears and propaganda were well-funded and carried out in concert with “Democracy Enhancement” and similar programs of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other U.S. government agencies. The project recalled what the U.S. did to Nicaragua in the 1980s, as documented by political scientist William Robinson in his excellent study A Faustian Bargain.
Hallward notes that when it comes to “the supervision of human rights in the most heavily exploited parts of the planet … most of the ‘neutral,’ affluent and well-connected supervisors live at an immeasurable distance from the world endured by the people they supervise, and at a still greater distance from the sort of militant, unabashedly political mobilization that can alone offer any meaningful protection for truly universal rights.” The helps explain the ease with which Human Rights Watch took anti-Aristide propaganda at face value, then dragged their feet interminably (as did Amnesty International) when Aristide’s government was ousted and the rightist bloodbath began in earnest.
Hallward carefully wades through the accusations of human rights violations leveled at Aristide’s government. After an exhaustive examination, he can find no evidence that holds up. In many cases, he finds that the supposed abuses themselves were greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated.
Damming the Flood (lavalas means “flood” in Haitian Kreyol) is brilliantly written and extremely thorough in examining the players behind the 2004 assault on Haitian popular democracy and its horrific aftermath.
In the wake of the thousands killed and countless more tortured and raped, it is inevitable that many readers not versed in Haiti’s past would ask: Why? Hallward does a fine job of answering that question, addressing fundamental structural injustices enforced by U.S. foreign policy.
Aristide emerged as a priest in the tradition of liberation theology, which promotes a “preferential option for the poor.” In Hallward’s words: “All through the 1980s and early 90s [U.S. army intelligence officers] recognized that ‘the most serious threat to U.S. interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation theology.’ Nowhere did the counter-insurgency measures that the US and its allies devised in order to deal with liberation theology in the 1980s and early 90s fall more heavily than they did on the Haiti of Lavalas and the ti legliz (“little church” movement). It’s no coincidence that the most notorious assassin hired to terrorize Lavalas from 1990 to 1994, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, first began working for the CIA on a course designed to explain and contain the “extreme left-wing” implications of “The Theology of Liberation,” which Constant understood as an attempt ‘to convince the people that in the name of God everything is possible” and that, therefore, it was right for the people to kill soldiers and the rich.’”
Hallward continues, “Haiti is the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president — twice. If Aristide still remains the defining political figure in Haiti to this day it’s not because he represents a utopian alternative to the economic status quo, or because he embodies a demagogic charisma that threatens to stifle the development of democracy, or because his followers believe that he made no strategic mistakes. It’s because in the eyes of most people he is not a politician, precisely, but an organizer and an activist who remains dedicated to working within what he famously affirmed as ‘the parish of the poor.’ It was as such an activist that Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, and it was as such an organizer that he dedicated the rest of his political life to helping the popular mobilization deal with the new threats and the old antagonisms that soon emerged as a result.”
The priest turned president threatened to help Haiti’s poor enough to earn the eternal enmity of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats. His government was denied much-needed international funds (which in a more sane world would be reparations for past injustices, not loans or aid-with-strings-attached), and his poor followers demonized as chimeres, or “devils.” Instead of looking at the structural roots of the exploitation and ecological devastation to which the country has been subjected, foreign journalists took their sound bites from English or French speaking elites at odds with Lavalas’s commendable, and only moderately leftist, goal to raise the poor “from misery to poverty with dignity.”
The scant media coverage of Haiti that exists tends to continue centuries-old patterns of ignoring the perspectives of the poor majority. In Hallward’s words, what most English speakers get instead is repetition of “perhaps the most consistent theme of the profoundly racist first-world commentary on the island: that poor non-white people remain incapable of governing themselves.”
Though the UN “peacekeeping” mission, put in place in 2004 to legitimize the most recent coup, remains in Haiti, Hallward points to ongoing resistance from the poorest neighborhoods as evidence that the story is not over. While coup forces continue to dominate most ministries of the current government, the 2006 presidential election resulting in Haiti’s rulers conceding victory to Aristide’s former Prime Minster Rene Preval shows the unavoidability of some concessions to pressure from the poor majority.
For those who feel a debt to the people of Haiti for inspiring resistance to U.S. slavery, and for setting an example of the true potential of declarations of liberty espoused by the French Revolution, this book is an essential resource. Damming the Flood will inspire international activists to support the struggles of those Haitians who continue to stand up for their fundamental human rights. It should be widely read.
Ben Terrall is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Counterpunch, Lip Magazine, and other publications. He can be reached at: bterrall@igc.org. Read other articles by Ben.
Review of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
by Ben Terrall / April 5th, 2008
Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
by Peter Hallward
Paperback: 488 pages
Publisher: Verso (April 7, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1844671062
ISBN-13: 978-1844671069
Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush Administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s democratically-elected government. Even human rights groups and left-leaning press that stood up against the Iraq war gave, and still give, Bush a pass on the horror he unleashed on Haiti by kidnapping President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Peter Hallward’s new book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment is a welcome corrective to the false impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it, “A brilliant politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece of very recent history that the U.S. press has either distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book I’ve read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in the world.”
Hallward, a UK-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in 2003 which involved daily reading of Le Monde and other French newspapers when he noted a systematic demonization of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas movement. He subsequently wrote one of the best long articles about the 2004 coup (”Option Zero in Haiti,” New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting information for a bill of indictment against the U.S., France and Canada, the coup’s principle backers, ever since. In the process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and self-described radicals who either through intellectual laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.
In his research, Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the past ten years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles ranging from Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures, buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country’s recent violence in the context of 200 years of “great power” hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.
Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti’s ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for “regime change” that even Iraq war opponents could embrace. After the first U.S.-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the U.S. was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, “Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide as a ‘psychopath and grave human rights abuser.’” But “neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would resurface at every turn.”
As Hallward painstakingly shows, left of center and liberal NGOs were all too willing to accept Washington’s destabilization program for Haiti. The smears and propaganda were well-funded and carried out in concert with “Democracy Enhancement” and similar programs of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other U.S. government agencies. The project recalled what the U.S. did to Nicaragua in the 1980s, as documented by political scientist William Robinson in his excellent study A Faustian Bargain.
Hallward notes that when it comes to “the supervision of human rights in the most heavily exploited parts of the planet … most of the ‘neutral,’ affluent and well-connected supervisors live at an immeasurable distance from the world endured by the people they supervise, and at a still greater distance from the sort of militant, unabashedly political mobilization that can alone offer any meaningful protection for truly universal rights.” The helps explain the ease with which Human Rights Watch took anti-Aristide propaganda at face value, then dragged their feet interminably (as did Amnesty International) when Aristide’s government was ousted and the rightist bloodbath began in earnest.
Hallward carefully wades through the accusations of human rights violations leveled at Aristide’s government. After an exhaustive examination, he can find no evidence that holds up. In many cases, he finds that the supposed abuses themselves were greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated.
Damming the Flood (lavalas means “flood” in Haitian Kreyol) is brilliantly written and extremely thorough in examining the players behind the 2004 assault on Haitian popular democracy and its horrific aftermath.
In the wake of the thousands killed and countless more tortured and raped, it is inevitable that many readers not versed in Haiti’s past would ask: Why? Hallward does a fine job of answering that question, addressing fundamental structural injustices enforced by U.S. foreign policy.
Aristide emerged as a priest in the tradition of liberation theology, which promotes a “preferential option for the poor.” In Hallward’s words: “All through the 1980s and early 90s [U.S. army intelligence officers] recognized that ‘the most serious threat to U.S. interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation theology.’ Nowhere did the counter-insurgency measures that the US and its allies devised in order to deal with liberation theology in the 1980s and early 90s fall more heavily than they did on the Haiti of Lavalas and the ti legliz (“little church” movement). It’s no coincidence that the most notorious assassin hired to terrorize Lavalas from 1990 to 1994, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, first began working for the CIA on a course designed to explain and contain the “extreme left-wing” implications of “The Theology of Liberation,” which Constant understood as an attempt ‘to convince the people that in the name of God everything is possible” and that, therefore, it was right for the people to kill soldiers and the rich.’”
Hallward continues, “Haiti is the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president — twice. If Aristide still remains the defining political figure in Haiti to this day it’s not because he represents a utopian alternative to the economic status quo, or because he embodies a demagogic charisma that threatens to stifle the development of democracy, or because his followers believe that he made no strategic mistakes. It’s because in the eyes of most people he is not a politician, precisely, but an organizer and an activist who remains dedicated to working within what he famously affirmed as ‘the parish of the poor.’ It was as such an activist that Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, and it was as such an organizer that he dedicated the rest of his political life to helping the popular mobilization deal with the new threats and the old antagonisms that soon emerged as a result.”
The priest turned president threatened to help Haiti’s poor enough to earn the eternal enmity of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats. His government was denied much-needed international funds (which in a more sane world would be reparations for past injustices, not loans or aid-with-strings-attached), and his poor followers demonized as chimeres, or “devils.” Instead of looking at the structural roots of the exploitation and ecological devastation to which the country has been subjected, foreign journalists took their sound bites from English or French speaking elites at odds with Lavalas’s commendable, and only moderately leftist, goal to raise the poor “from misery to poverty with dignity.”
The scant media coverage of Haiti that exists tends to continue centuries-old patterns of ignoring the perspectives of the poor majority. In Hallward’s words, what most English speakers get instead is repetition of “perhaps the most consistent theme of the profoundly racist first-world commentary on the island: that poor non-white people remain incapable of governing themselves.”
Though the UN “peacekeeping” mission, put in place in 2004 to legitimize the most recent coup, remains in Haiti, Hallward points to ongoing resistance from the poorest neighborhoods as evidence that the story is not over. While coup forces continue to dominate most ministries of the current government, the 2006 presidential election resulting in Haiti’s rulers conceding victory to Aristide’s former Prime Minster Rene Preval shows the unavoidability of some concessions to pressure from the poor majority.
For those who feel a debt to the people of Haiti for inspiring resistance to U.S. slavery, and for setting an example of the true potential of declarations of liberty espoused by the French Revolution, this book is an essential resource. Damming the Flood will inspire international activists to support the struggles of those Haitians who continue to stand up for their fundamental human rights. It should be widely read.
Ben Terrall is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Counterpunch, Lip Magazine, and other publications. He can be reached at: bterrall@igc.org. Read other articles by Ben.
March 16, 2010
As a disclaimer, I didn't finish this book nor will I return to it anytime soon, but what I read really impressed me. Hallward is amazingly thorough in his research and the mess of details really piles up to paint a disturbing picture of how the US and other international entities have disrupted Haitian politics in an effort to keep it a deregulated source of cheap labor and new markets. If anything, the book was too full of details, grinding through each minor step of history where many could have been summarized, and this contributes to a lack of overarching narrative and analysis. However, I partially discount this critique, since I'm fairly certain Hallward moves toward more of a narrative at the end, and because his analysis of Aristide's rhetoric definitely runs contrary to the larger trend. Overall, other books about Haiti may be less intimidating and serve as better introduction, but none of them are as thorough a survey of the last two decades of American interventions, media manipulation, and the perils of neoliberalism.
February 27, 2017
A really amazing book - really puts together a ton of history and research to make a compelling case that basically anti-Aristide "grassroots movements" actually just represent the latest incarnation of Western neo-colonialism in Haiti. It's also fascinating how many parallels there are between Aristide in Haiti and Chavez in Venezuela (for example the concerted efforts of the media, funded by USAID et al., to demonize the leader as a demented psychopath). Like George Ciccariello-Maher's "We Created Chavez", however, I also feel like I don't know enough about the "mainstream" accounts of Aristide to really fully grasp the myths that this book is attempting to shatter. Otherwise I'd give it a full 5 stars.
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May 7, 2008Four years ago this month, Canada supported a discreditable act of regime-change in Haiti -- a chain of events that ended with the removal of a legitimate head of state. It's a useful incident to remember as politicians and military men put on their most earnest faces to justify Canadians dying for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.
Here is what's happening in that re-configured Haiti today:
read more ...
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/02/26/Ha...
Here is what's happening in that re-configured Haiti today:
read more ...
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/02/26/Ha...
October 24, 2013
Anyone interested in understanding the meaning of international aid should read this book. A real horror story about the unseen underside of consumer culture and the sickening lengths that global power will go to in order to preserve the status quo.
March 20, 2021
An absolute must read. A detailed account of how a tiny ruling class, along with help from their colonial allies, will stop at nothing to derail real progress for the people of Haiti. The afterword written in light of the 2010 earthquake is one of the more infuriating things I've ever read.
July 31, 2008
Hallward does an excellent job of explaining the complexities of Haitian history and politics over the past 50 years. He succeeds in presenting a unbiased account of Aristides rise to power - not an easy feat in a country where politics are polarised between the masses on the one hand and the small elite along with their US and French masters on the other. For a definitive understanding of Haiti over the past 50 years this book is it.
December 9, 2008
Really good, readable explanation of the conflict in Haiti that illuminates key strategies of the US in dealing with the global south and the intrinsic politics of capital.
December 5, 2020
Any astute observer of the political scene would do well to place Haiti in the forefront of attention. Ideologically speaking, Haiti is the most advanced nation on earth; it's no wonder we rarely hear anything good about this small country.
January 11, 2023
One of the most perspective altering books I've ever read. Absolutely amazing case study of neo colonialism and neoliberalism in action. I cannot read news about Haiti or the global south in general the same since I finished this.
November 11, 2020
4 stars for the intro & conclusion. I will return to this to make sense of democracy promotion.
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April 5, 2023Cba
Want to Read
August 23, 2017Un detallado relato de la «contención democrática» de la política radical en Haití: «Las trilladas tácticas de “fomento de la democracia” nunca se han aplicado con efectos más devastadores que en Haití entre 2000 y 2004». No se puede pasar por alto la ironía del hecho de que el nombre del movimiento político emancipatorio que sufrió esta presión internacional sea Lavalas, «inundación» en creole, el desbordamiento de los expropiados que inunda las comunidades valladas. Por eso resulta tan apropiado el título del libro de Hallward (Represar la inundación); inscribe los acontecimientos haitianos en la tendencia global de construir en todas partes nuevos diques y muros después del 11-S, enfrentándonos a la verdad de la «globalización», es decir, a las líneas de división interiores que la sustentan.
Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.170
No es muy conocido que uno de los organizadores de la rebelión haitiana era un predicador negro, esclavo, conocido como John Bookman, un nombre que aludía a su condición de literato, y (sorpresa, sorpresa) el «libro» al que se refería el nombre no era la Biblia, sino el Corán.
El año que soñamos peligrosamente Pág.69
Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.170
No es muy conocido que uno de los organizadores de la rebelión haitiana era un predicador negro, esclavo, conocido como John Bookman, un nombre que aludía a su condición de literato, y (sorpresa, sorpresa) el «libro» al que se refería el nombre no era la Biblia, sino el Corán.
El año que soñamos peligrosamente Pág.69
January 7, 2016
Unfortunately this book falls helplessly short of reality, serving as several hundred pages of pro-Aristide propaganda rather than an objective and accurate account of what really went on under Aristide. We get that Hallward is a liberal and that he blames the U.S. for Haiti's problems. We get that Hallward is a disciple of Aristide in the example of Paul Farmer. What we do not get is a balanced perspective. We get conspiracy theories based remnant of truth, and assertions made without ground. We do not get truth.
June 1, 2010
A slanted view of recent Haitian politics. Pro Aristide. Enjoyed learning more about government difficulties in this country that is essentially a model for modern slavery. The time is ripe, after the earthquake and with money flooding in, to make some changes. Haiti recognizes this and I'm hoping for the best.
January 11, 2011
Fascinating critique. The 2010 edition contains an Afterword commenting on the post-earthquake situation.
I was troubled by the amount of grammatical errors that made it into the book. It was fewer than ten, but enough to be unprofessional. Didn't detract from the work as a whole, though, which was incredibly well-researched.
I was troubled by the amount of grammatical errors that made it into the book. It was fewer than ten, but enough to be unprofessional. Didn't detract from the work as a whole, though, which was incredibly well-researched.
February 22, 2009
Hallward might not be a good philosopher as he wants us to believe but he is one of the best political minds. Wholeheartedly recommended!
October 29, 2010
A well documented and convincing history of U.S. destabilization of the Aristide government.
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