Haiti’s Misery Continues….

This also underscores that the mass struggle undertaken by the people of Haiti 25 years ago for the “uprooting” of Duvalierism remains uncompleted, with the conditions of oppression and capitalist exploitation upon which the US-backed dictatorship rested still firmly in place.

[Global: Haiti]

The US and France need a Black overseer collaborator to help run Haiti for foreign interests. The Haitian establishment arrested former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier this Tuesday, barely two days after he returned back to the country after twenty-five years in exile.

It must be noted that for 30 years the US-supported rule by the Duvaliers—first Francois “papa Doc” and then Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”—tens of
thousands of the Haitian people were murdered and tortured by the regime and its hated Tonton Macoutes secret police, while hundreds of millions of dollars were embezzled and funelled into the Duvalier family’s foreign bank accounts.

Duvalier returned on January 16th, which was to have been the date for the second round of Haiti ’s dubious and doubtful national elections. So now at this point the run-off elections has been postponed and put off until further notice.

Baby Doc’s arrival coincided with the Organization of American state (OAS) issuing a report that rejected the outcome of the first round of elections. The report said popular-singer-turned-politician Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly came in second—not third as he was officially recorded—beating Jude Celestin, the hand-picked successor and son-in-law of the incumbent President Rene Preval.

What is beyond doubt, is that the November 28th election itself was a complete farce, with barely 27% of the eligible voters going to the polls and just 22% of the voters having their votes counted. The controversy had spilled over into very violent clashes, with dissatisfaction over the election coalescing with the deepening popular anger over the abject failure of the Preval government and its backers in Washington and Europe to alleviate mass suffering, much less begin any real reconstruction.

One year after the overwhelming and destructive earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people of Haiti conditions for the masses of people have become even more intolerable as Haiti confronts a spreading cholera epidemic that has claimed at least 3,800 lives.

As for “Baby Doc” Duvalier it has been more than obvious and unambiguous that this former bloody dictator has hopes that the Haitian situation would become so dire that he could recoup some of his former political power.

The front-running candidate in last November’s poll, Mirlande Manigat, has deep ties to the old regime. She is the wife of Leslie Manigat, who served as an intellectual apologist and the political supporter of the Duvalier dictatorship before being installed as president in the wake of its
downfall by means of a fraudulent, military-run election back in 1988.

Martelly, the former compa singer who the OAS recommendation would make a contender in the run-off was reported by the Miami Herald to have been “closely identified with sympathizers of the 1991 military coup that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” and he has been accused of having participated in death squad operations against Aristide’s supporters.

During the course of the recent campaign, he spoke nostalgically of the Duvalier years.

More than half of the population of Haiti is under 21 and has no memory of the Duvalier years. What has to be considered that if the right-wing politicians are able to generate even a small amount of sympathy for “Baby Doc” it is because of the horrific conditions that have confronted the masses of the Haitian people in the 25 years since his ouster and the failure of the Lavalas movement identified with Aristide to find a way out of Haiti’s historic underdevelopment, backwardness and oppression.

Aristide the former slum priest, who had been strongly identified with the popular uprising that drove Duvalier from Haiti , became president as
result of the country’s first genuinely popular election back in 1990.

Just within eight months of Aristide inauguration, he was overthrown in a bloody September 1991 military coup backed by the administration of George H.W. Bush up in Washington. Aristide was restored to power just three years later as part of a settlement that was brokered by the Clinton administration that saw Aristide briefly returned to the presidential palace alongside an occupation of the country by 20,000 US troops. In return for Washington ’s support, Aristide agreed to implement a series of IMF-imposed policies that included sweeping privatizations, the opening up of Haiti ’s markets and cuts in state spending.

However, despite these policies, which meant deepening misery for the people, neither Washington nor the Haitian elite forgave Aristide for his
association with the mass popular movement that overthrew the Duvalier dictatorship.

In 2004, three years after Aristide had managed to return to power in an election, he was again overthrown in a US-backed coup and forcibly removed from the capital of Port-au-Prince Haiti . And once again, the US Marines occupied Haiti. That’s why today, it strains credulity to believe that neither the US nor French intelligence had any knowledge of Duvalier’s plans, given the massive surveillance, particularly related to air travel.

This also underscores that the mass struggle undertaken by the people of Haiti 25 years ago for the “uprooting” of Duvalierism remains uncompleted, with the conditions of oppression and capitalist exploitation upon which the US-backed dictatorship rested still firmly in place.

The liberating tasks posed by the mass uprising of 1985 and 1986 can be realized only by the Haitian masses carrying out an uprising to put an end to imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation in Haiti, for history is on the side of the Haitian people, but, not time.  


“Speaking Truth To Empower.”

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