In 2004, a group of murderous gangsters who called themselves The Cannibals led an insurrection against Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. US President George W. Bush immediately, swiftly sided with The Cannibals, now renamed, more palatably, “The National Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti.”
Bush sent 1,000 US Marines who, like the assassins last week, broke into the quarters of the newly-elected President and, according to a frantic call from his wife to a US Congresswoman, seized Aristide and gave him a choice: resign or die. Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest, chose life. He was then kidnapped by the Marines and taken to a French colony in Africa.
(Later, Aristide told Oakland attorney Walter Riley that the Marines seized the book he was reading, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and asked if I could replace it. I did.)
We can’t understand the tragedy of Haiti, how it became our Hemisphere’s basket case, without understanding who put Haiti in the basket: the colonial and financial powers who locked the nation in political-economic shackles for half a millennium…up through to this week.
Let’s take a random walk through the history of Haiti’s defenestration.
* In 1791, Toussaint Louverture led the world’s one and only successful mass rebellion of the enslaved that, in 1804, birthed the founding of the sovereign nation of Haiti.
— source gregpalast.com | Greg Palast | Jul 19, 2021