July 20, 2004
Did the Bush Administration Allow a Network of Right-Wing Republicans to Foment a Violent Coup in Haiti?
We speak with Max Blumenthal contibutor to Salon.com and author of a new investigative piece that examines the role of the United States in destabilizing the democratically-elected government of Jean Bertrand-Aristide through the International Republican Institute, a federally-funded, nonprofit political group backed by powerful Republicans close to the Bush administration.
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The IRI, a nonprofit political group backed by powerful Republicans close to the Bush administration, initiated the destabilization of Aristide’s government by imposing harsh sanctions, training Aristide’s political opponents and encouraging them to reject internationally-sanctioned power-sharing agreements. Haiti’s political crisis eventually escalated into violence until Aristide was overthrown in February of this year in what he calls a modern-day kidnapping in the service of a coup backed by the United States.
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MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, to tell you about Stanley Lucas, and he is the program officer for the International Republican Institute, or I.R.I.‘s Haiti program. I.R.I. is active in 50 countries worldwide on a mission to “promote democracy”. In many of their programs, through their means, what they have demonstrated is something quite different. They have demonstrated—I.R.I has demonstrated a penchant for backing opponents in regimes deemed hostile to the U.S. and specifically to conservative interests, and I.R.I.’s program in Haiti has been probably its most bellicose thanks to Stanley Lucas. In Haiti there’s two sectors of Haitian society that are the traditional obstructionists to progressive change. Number one, that’s the industrial sector of the mulatto elite who run the sweatshops and lead the civil society wing of Aristide’s opposition. And two, there’s the military, which guarantees the conditions by which the elite can operate their sweatshops. Aristide disbanded the military in 1995, so, you know, the military hates him. Stanley Lucas is a bridge between these two sectors. He was schooled in Haiti’s finest schools with members of the mulatto elite. At the same time, he comes from a wealthy land owning family close to the Duvalier regime, which ruled Haiti with an iron fist for decades. His family is close to the military. Two of Stanley Lucas’s cousins massacred—organized a massacre of 250 peasants, in 1987, who were protesting for land reform after the Duvalier regime crumbled. The massacre—it was a terrible massacre documented by Amnesty International and described to me by someone who witnessed it firsthand. You would think that someone from this background wouldn’t be able to get a position at a group like the International Republican Institute that promotes democracy. However, Stanley Lucas is a valuable asset to them. He is a judo master who allegedly trained the military in counter insurgency tactics after the Duvalier regime collapsed. He was hired in 1992, but I don’t know why he was hired. When I asked I.R.I.‘s communications director why he was hired, he refused to tell me why, or what his duties consisted of between 1992 and 1998. A lot of people I spoke to suspect that Stanley Lucas is a CIA asset, including former ambassador—former U.S. Ambassador in the region. So, when Stanley Lucas was hired in 1992, the country was controlled by a military junta called FRAPP, which had ousted Aristide in 1990—in the first coup in that country. Frappe was busy massacring thousands of Aristide supporters. One off the recorded sources, who lived with Lucas, working with Lucas, in Haiti, told me he saw documents indicating that while Lucas was working for I.R.I., he was being paid by Michelle Francois, who was a notorious FRAPP leader. Stanley Lucas is an impeccable dresser, a smooth operater and a lady’s man with a broad smile and childlike demeanor that will put his enemies at ease. You have behind that facade an evil man who has been given way too much power. In my piece, I compared him to Achmed Chalabi, because Stanley Lucas is a card-carrying Republican who managed to ingratiate himself with powerful Republicans in Washington. He lobbied for the opposition to Aristide and managed to tie quite a bit of funding to them and introduced a number of Aristide’s most virulent opponents to powerful Republicans in Washington. When I.R.I.‘s campaign to destabilize Haiti began in earnest in 1998 with a $2 million grant in mostly taxpayer money from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Lucas hosted some of Aristide’s most virulent opponents in political training sessions. What he did was he merged all of these disparate groups into one big party called the Democratic Convergence. Now, the Democratic Convergence is not a traditional political party, it’s more like the political wing of a coup, because the strategy that it took was to forego the democratic process entirely. Boycott elections and initiate what seemed like an endless sequence of provocative protests. Between 2000 and 2002, the Democratic Convergence rejected over 20 internationally sanctioned power sharing agreements which heightened the tension and provoked more violence. At the time, the U.S. Ambassador, who was named Brian Dean Curran, a Clinton appointee, who was a highly respected career diplomat, uncovered evidence that Stanley Lucas was the one encouraging the Democratic Convergence to reject the compromises and to stay out of the democratic process. When he presented this evidence to the U.S. Agency for International Development, and he asked them to block Stanley Lucas from the program, Bush’s Assistant Secretary for the Western Hemisphere, Roger Noriega, apparently stepped in, and within four months—Lucas was barred for four months, but after four months, he was back. So, when he—when Lucas returned to the program, he retaliated against Ambassador Curran. What he did was he spread salacious rumors in Port-au-Prince in—and in Washington about Curran’s personal life. If I repeated these rumors, it would make Dick Cheney look like Ward Cleaver. It’s unheard of for someone like Lucas to actually sabotage a U.S. Ambassador. Lucas threatened two embassy officials and told them they would be fired once the real—“Real” U.S. policy was implemented. In 2003, Curran was forced to resign in disgust because of Lucas’s activities and the fact that Bush administration seemed to give Lucas their tacit approval. A number of embassy officials I spoke to were removed from Haiti by Roger Noriega for opposing what Stanley Lucas was doing in part. So this whole sad episode that led up to the coup was allowed to occur because of Bush’s policy of studied neglect in South America.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2004/7/20/did_the_bush_administration_allow_aAND FROM YESTERDAY'S NYT ON MCCAIN'S IRI-INTERNATIONAL REPUBLICAN INSTITUTE:
Democracy Group Gives Donors Access to McCain
HONORS FROM THE CHAIRMAN Senator John McCain presenting Freedom Awards from the International Republican Institute to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2001; Condoleezza Rice, now the secretary of state, in 2004; and President Bush in 2005.
By MIKE McINTIRE
Published: July 28, 2008
As Senator John McCain waited to speak at the annual awards dinner of the International Republican Institute, a democracy-building group he has led for 15 years, lobbyists and business executives dominated the stage at a Washington hotel ballroom.
First up that night in September 2006 was the institute’s vice chairman, Peter T. Madigan, a McCain campaign fund-raiser and lobbyist whose clients span the globe, from Dubai to Colombia. He thanked Timothy P. McKone, an AT&T lobbyist and McCain fund-raiser, for helping with the dinner arrangements and then introduced the chairman of AT&T,Edward E. Whitacre Jr., whose company had donated $200,000 for the event.
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Today, with a budget of about $78 million and 400 employees working in 70 countries, the Republican institute has grown in size and stature. Its recent work has included organizing debates for candidates in Iraq, conducting a rare public opinion poll in Cuba and training political parties in Belarus.
Yet while the institute says its activities are nonpartisan and peaceful, left-leaning groups have long accused it of improper meddling in pursuit of a neoconservative agenda. A former American ambassador to Haiti has asserted that institute operatives undermined reconciliation efforts among Haitian political rivals, contributing to a coup in 2004. Two years earlier, the institute was criticized after its president at the time, George A. Folsom, praised a coup attempt against Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chávez.
Major staffing decisions and appointments are a board matter; as chairman, Mr. McCain has played a significant, often decisive, role. His early choices show an attempt to balance the demands of politics, professionalism and personal loyalty. Bucking party officials, Mr. McCain successfully pushed for R. Bruce McColm, a human rights expert who was not an active Republican, to replace Mr. Buechner. John Dowd, the senator’s personal lawyer in the Keating Five scandal during the savings-and-loan crisis, became the institute’s general counsel, and Mr. Craner became vice president.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/us/politics/28IRI.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
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