Crawling from the Wreckage (40 page)

That was last February, and as part of the process of trying to break Aristide’s support among the Haitian poor, the “interim government” installed by the U.S., France and Canada jailed Jean-Juste in July, on the implausible charge that he murdered a journalist. But the elections that might finally give the foreign intervention some legitimacy have just been postponed for the
fourth
time.

They said they were cancelling the vote on January 8 because of problems with the new electronic voting system, but the real problem is that they still don’t control a lot of the country. In particular, they still don’t control Cité Soleil, the seething shantytown that dominates Port-au-Prince, the ramshackle capital where a third of the 8.5 million Haitians live.

In Cité Soleil, Aristide is still considered the president. When United Nations troops in Haiti conducted a pre-dawn raid there last July, it turned into a five-hour firefight. The
UN
troops killed the five “gang members” they were allegedly after, but local residents saw the dead men as martyrs for Aristide and placed photos of the exiled president on their bodies. They did the same for the twenty other residents of the slum who they claim were killed by the “blue helmets”—and since then
UN
troops have rarely dared to enter Cité Soleil.

In fact, all foreigners associated with the military intervention in Haiti are potential targets. In the last ten days of December, three Chilean UN soldiers were wounded in the northern town of Plaisance, a Jordanian soldier was killed in Cité Soleil, and a Canadian soldier was shot dead near a checkpoint just outside the slum. On December 30, two employees of the Organization of American States, one Peruvian and the other Guatemalan, were kidnapped while driving near Cité Soleil.

Haiti is responding badly to foreign intervention because it is a real country with a tragic history. Haitians may have no money, little education and few prospects, but they actually know who they are.

They are a whole country descended from people who were kidnapped from Africa, heirs of the greatest slave rebellion in history two centuries ago. They are the survivors of an attempted genocide by Napoleon, whose strategy for reconquering France’s richest colony involved exterminating every black over the age of twelve and restocking Haiti with more docile slaves imported from Africa. They are also the victims of the long, sad aftermath of Haiti’s victory and independence.

With all the whites dead or fled, the enslaved former peasants from Africa inevitably ended up being dominated in independent Haiti by the so-called “mulattoes,” locally born ex-slaves, many of them mixed-race, who spoke good French and understood how business, government and diplomacy worked. The new mulatto elite created an army, recruited mostly from the black majority, whose main job was to keep other blacks under control and, generation after generation, they cooperated with foreigners to exploit their own fellow-countrymen.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest nurtured on liberation theology, became the hero of the poor black masses because he promised to end all that. He was elected president by a landslide in Haiti’s first free election in 1990, after the reigning dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, was forced into exile, but the unreformed army overthrew him the next year with the warm approval of the elder Bush administration, which saw him as a dangerous Marxist.

The Clinton administration used 24,000 American troops to put Aristide back in power in 1994, but discovered too late that he was a real revolutionary. Aristide disbanded the army on his return, and when the old elite started using gangs of ex-soldiers to defend their privileges, he used similar gangs recruited from amongst the poor to cow them. His policies were incoherent, his style more that of a demagogue than a democrat, and Haiti remained the poorest country in the Americas—but the poor still loved him. Especially after the U.S. overthrew him again.

The Republican-controlled Congress cut off U.S. aid to Aristide’s government in 2000, and the younger Bush administration revived U.S. links with the mulatto elite and their ex-military gangs after 2001. In early 2004, gangs of ex-soldiers launched a revolt that advanced to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince—and a U.S. official arrived at the presidential palace with a group of heavily armed Marines to escort Aristide to the airport.

Washington got diplomatic cover by persuading Canada and France to go along with the operation (they both felt the need to give Bush something after refusing to help him invade Iraq), and it got a 7,400-strong “peacekeeping force” out of the United Nations (which also felt the need to look helpful). But
CARICOM
, the association of Caribbean countries, still refuses to accept the U.S.-backed coup, and most poorer Haitians see the “interim government” as an American puppet and the
UN
troops as an occupying army.

Aristide, in exile in South Africa, still sees himself as the legitimate president of Haiti, and so do a lot of Haitians. They will not be allowed to vote for him even if the “interim government” does eventually manage to stage an election, but that means that nothing will be settled and the violence will not abate. Aristide may never return, but the old order cannot be restored.

That article was written in 2006, and not much has changed since, apart from the massive destruction of lives and infrastructure caused by the 2009 earthquake. Haiti is effectively run by the foreign military and foreign nongovernmental organizations present in the country, to the extent that it could be said to “run” at all
.

Aristide is still in exile, and it is to be doubted that things would improve much even if he did return. His intentions were good, but in power, he proved a very bad manager and a deeply divisive character. But at least he has not got religion
.

“Ortega is a tiger who has not changed his stripes,” warned U.S. ambassador Paul Trivelli before the former revolutionary leader won back the presidency of Nicaragua in the election on November 6. Retired U.S. Marine colonel Oliver North, who took the fall for president Ronald Reagan’s administration in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, showed up to warn that Ortega was as bad as Adolf Hitler. And Daniel Ortega just smiled and said: “Jesus Christ is my hero now.”

It’s déjà vu all over again as American leaders denounce the Communist
threat in Nicaragua and leftist Latin American leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez celebrate the rise of the “pink tide” in their region. Old images of the Sandinista revolutionaries and their “sandalista” foreign admirers—mostly left-wing youth who came to help the revolution by picking coffee beans and drinking lots of cheap rum—fill the media. Seventeen thousand foreign observers and a thousand journalists came to Nicaragua for the elections. But the whole drama was
Hamlet
without the prince.

Daniel Ortega was once a revolutionary leader, but that was a quarter-century ago. Now he is a populist politician as cynical as any of his opponents, and the likelihood that his election will make any difference to Nicaragua’s poor is slim.

The Sandinista revolution that overthrew the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979 might possibly have made some difference to the people at the bottom of society—and the bottom is a long way down in Nicaragua—if the revolution had been left alone to get on with the task. But it was the height of the Cold War and the U.S. didn’t want “another Cuba,” so the Reagan administration armed and financed an army of right-wing exiles, the “contras,” to wage a guerrilla war against the Sandinistas.

President John F. Kennedy’s similar attempt to strangle the Cuban revolution in its cradle ended in defeat and ignominy at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, but Ronald Reagan had more luck. He got around a congressional ban on U.S. government aid to the contras by turning a blind eye to White House aide Oliver North’s fundraising efforts, which involved selling U.S. arms to Iran with a secret markup that was then passed on to the contras. (When North got caught, Reagan escaped impeachment by claiming that he could not remember having been told about it.)

Ortega was elected president in 1984, but the constant attacks of the contras—between thirty thousand and sixty thousand Nicaraguans were killed in Reagan’s war—ensured that the Sandinistas never achieved any real transformation. It’s questionable whether they would have done so even without that distraction, for the leading Sandinista leaders were mostly well-intentioned middle-class boys radicalized by the brutality of the Somozas, but with little self-discipline and even less by way of a plan. There were kibbutz-style communal farms for peasants on land confiscated from the rich, and literacy classes for all, but the confiscations were almost random, and too often ended up in the pockets of Sandinista
leaders. When Ortega left the presidency in 1990, he bought the confiscated million-dollar mansion of a contra supporter, Jaime Morales, for two thousand dollars—and he still lives there.

Ortega never suspected that he would lose the presidency in 1990, so he invited the whole world to come and observe the election in which he and the Sandinistas were booted out by the disillusioned Nicaraguan voters. In three subsequent runs for the presidency, he never got more than 40 percent of the vote, although Sandinistas continued to control many courts, municipalities and unions. His road back to power, however, was paved by “the pact” of 1999, a flagrantly corrupt deal with then-president Arnoldo Aleman.

At the time, Ortega was facing the charge of having raped his stepdaughter and Aleman was embezzling huge amounts of money from the government. So the two men agreed to give themselves lifetime memberships to the National Assembly, which gave them both permanent immunity from prosecution. Ortega also got the threshold for a first-round victory in presidential elections lowered from 50 percent to 40 percent—or even to 35 percent, if the front-runner was five percentage points ahead of the next candidate.

“El pacto” didn’t save Arnaldo Aleman in the end. An outraged Congress stripped him of his legal immunity and he was given a twenty-year sentence in 2003 for stealing roughly one hundred million dollars from the Nicaraguan people. But a Sandinista-run court allowed him to serve his sentence at home on his ranch due to “health problems”—and the pact has now given Ortega the presidency with less than 40 percent of the vote. (Under the old rules, there would have been a second ballot, in which the 60 percent of Nicaraguans who didn’t want Ortega back would have united behind a single candidate, as they did the last three times.)

Ortega is back, but socialism isn’t. He now presents himself as a devout Catholic, and recently voted for an absolute ban on abortion. His vice-president is Jaime Morales, the former contra supporter, whose confiscated mansion he still lives in. And all the excited promises by Venezuela’s Chavez to support the new Nicaraguan revolution with cheap oil, and all of Washington’s threats to cut aid and trade to a neo-Sandinista Nicaragua, are just time-warp fantasies about what used to be. The revolution was cancelled long ago.

Actually, the whole damn thing is a mirage. I’m certainly not longing for the good old days of dedicated revolutionaries willing to kill and die in pursuit of their dreams of a society utterly transformed, but the current crop just aren’t serious. Chavez, for example
.

“I’m not a populist, I’m a revolutionary,” insisted Hugo Chavez at a press conference (that is, a four-hour monologue) in early November. But the Venezuelan president is in fact a populist, not a revolutionary—a populist with a great deal of money to hand out, thanks to the record oil prices of the past two years, so a Chavez victory in the presidential election on December 3 was never in doubt. The real question is what he is really doing with all that money and power.

Chavez rejoices in annoying the U.S. government with revolutionary rhetoric, regularly denouncing President Bush as “the Devil,” and when Washington responds with bluster and veiled threats it just fortifies his popularity at home. But so far, after eight years in power, he has attempted nothing that could be called a revolutionary transformation of Venezuelan society. In fact, the rich are just as rich as they ever were.

The lives of many of the poor have certainly gotten better under Chavez—much improved medical care, free literacy classes, subsidized grocery shops selling basic foods at cut prices, cheap start-up loans for businesses—but that is just oil income diverted straight into services for the poor. Even the seventeen thousand Cuban doctors provided by Fidel Castro to run the free clinics that have appeared all over the country fit the pattern, for Chavez pays Cuba for them with ninety thousand barrels per day of free oil.

There is nothing wrong with spending some of your oil income like this, especially if you think the price of oil will remain high for a long time, but it is not revolutionary. Rather, this is exactly how many oil-rich kingdoms with deeply conservative rulers ensure decent lives for their poorer citizens and political stability for themselves.

In Venezuela, it is now the political norm. The main challenger in this election, Zulia state governor Manuel Rosales, tried to outbid Chavez
by promising to issue special black debit cards (“Mi Negra”) with between $270 and $450 of credit on them to 2.5 million poor families. You can’t get much more populist than that.

So what, other than calling the United States bad names, qualifies Chavez as a “revolutionary”? He has gained power by perfectly legitimate democratic elections. He has taken almost nothing new into state ownership except for some—but very few—privately owned sugar plantations. The country still has a free press (95 percent of which opposes Chavez), and the middle class is doing so well that new car sales have tripled in Venezuela since 2004.

On a recent visit to Belarus, the last Communist country in Europe, Chavez expressed his deep admiration for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, but one suspects that Lenin would not have reciprocated. One even wonders what Chavez’s great pal Fidel Castro privately thinks of him. (Actually, I think I can guess: “A well-intentioned man, but an ideologically immature populist with a short attention span.”)