A Good Bit of Wrasslin' with the Issue of Aristide

This book review from Znet appears to me to be the best attempt to put the alleged failures of twice-deposed Haitian president Jean-Betrand Aristide into context.

Alex Dupuy is an experienced and highly regarded scholar who has already written two other substantial books on modern Haitian politics. He has a sophisticated grasp of the workings of the
‘new world order’, of transnational capitalism and of contemporary forms of political and economic domination. Readers familiar with the recent work of analysts like David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein or William Robinson will find themselves right at home. His latest book is sure to appeal to people who are instinctively critical both of US imperialism and of the apparent degeneration of Aristide and the Lavalas movement that he led.

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What may be more controversial is Dupuy’s insistence that the primary responsibility for the end of democratic rule in 2004 nevertheless lies with President Aristide and members of his Fanmi Lavalas party. Like a good many other analysts who considered themselves sympathetic to the embryonic phase of the Lavalas project, Dupuy claims that whereas Aristide’s first administration was marked by a mix of authoritarian and democratic tendencies, his second administration was simply authoritarian through and through. ‘Aristide’s second term of office’, he writes, was ‘disastrous on all fronts -- political, economic, and social.’

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Dupuy mounts three main accusations against the twice-deposed president. First, he claims that Aristide contributed to the first coup, in 1991, by failing to do enough to placate his enemies within the Haitian economic and political elite. Second, he claims that by the time Aristide was re-elected in 2000 (if not by the time he returned to Haiti in 1994) he had abandoned his original principles and had become just another ‘all-too-ordinary and traditional president, who like all the others who came before him, was using state power for his and his allies’ personal gains’ (170). Third, as his corrupt administration began to encounter understandably agitated forms of political opposition, Dupuy claims that Aristide decided to arm gangs of his most impoverished and desperatesupporters (the infamous ‘chimès’) to intimidate his opponents.

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I’ll go through these three accusations in turn, paying particular attention to the first and the third.

Read the whole thing.