Jean Bertrand Aristide told me the Generals ran Dope, Inc. on Haiti. Personally.
Sorry if the following is an old read. The thing held true then and holds true still…
I met Jean Bertrand-Aristide after he was deposed by the generals in the early 90s. He came to metro Detroit and spoke before the Cranbrook Peace Foundation.
The newspaper I then worked for didn’t see any reason for sending me to cover Aristide’s speech. The editors weren’t BFEE, but the events on a Caribbean island just weren’t “local” enough for their budget. So, I went on my own time.
The Cranbrook people were happy to see me. They wanted, of course, as much coverage as possible. So, they invited me and the other interested reporter types to have at him for an hour before his address.
I’m ashamed to report, at an important event in two nation’s larger media market, only a couple of CBC radio reporters out of Windsor and one local Detroit TV crew bothered to show. I was the lone print guy. Anyway…
Aristide answered every question asked in English or French. He also told us about life in Haiti, where there were four doctors to care for 4 million people. Another interesting stat: One percent of the population own 99-percent of the property. Gee. It's starting to sound like the U.S. of W.
I asked Aristide, "What can the United States do to help him restore democracy to Haiti?" Aristide said, "All President Bush had to do was pick up the phone, call the generals and say, 'Get out,' and they would quit.
So, all Poppy Doc Bush had to do to end the illegal coup that ended democracy in Haiti and return to power the first democratically elected leader of Haiti in 75 years would be to pick up the phone. Bush didn't and Aristide wasn't until Clinton sent the US Marines, many years and many Haitian lives later.
The reason for Bush Senior's inaction? Aristide said he didn’t know the answer, but he suspected Bush’s politics favored the landowners over the masses. (“Sounds familiar,” I then thought and still think today.)
Aristide said that the generals were deep into the wholesale cocaine importation business. Now who would be their partner in all that? Besides the wealthy landowners, for whom the Generals worked, I mean.
Here's what ConsortiumNews has to say:
America's Historic Debt to HaitiBy Robert Parry
February 10, 2006
As Haiti intrudes again on the U.S. consciousness with a new round of troubled elections, Americans see a violent, backward, poverty-stricken country run by descendants of African slaves. There are feelings of condescension mixed with a touch of racism.
But what few Americans know is that they owe this Caribbean nation a profound historical debt. Indeed, perhaps no nation has done more for the United States than Haiti and been treated as badly in return.
If not for Haiti – which in the 1700s rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere – the course of U.S. history would have been very different. It is possible that the United States might never have expanded much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
What altered this early American history was the Haitian slave uprising against France near the end of the 18th Century. This second great anti-colonial revolution in the New World both alarmed and ultimately benefited the leaders of the newly born United States.
At the time, Haiti – then known as St. Domingue and covering the western third of the island of Hispaniola – ranked as perhaps the richest colony in the world. Its carefully cultivated plantations produced nearly one-half the world’s coffee and sugar, and its profits helped build many of the grandest cities of France.
But the human price was unspeakably high. The French had devised a fiendishly cruel slave system that imported enslaved Africans for work in the fields with accounting procedures for their amortization. They were literally worked to death.
The American colonists may have rebelled against Great Britain over issues such as representation in Parliament and arbitrary actions by King George III. But the Haitians took up arms against a brutal system of slavery. One French method for executing troublesome slaves was to insert explosives into their rectums and detonate the bomb.
So, when revolution swept France in 1789, the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity” resonated with special force in St. Domingue. African slaves demanded that the concepts of freedom be applied universally, but the plantation system continued, leading to violent slave uprisings.
CONTINUED...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/020906.html History will not be kind to these war criminals and traitors. Nor will justice.