Reply #14: Aristide said "NO" to US Corporatism. [View All]

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The U.S. occupation was a tragedy of errors that have now become all too familiar: failures to disarm elements of the coup regime or to safeguard strategic sites, channeling all aid money to U.S. contractors who lined their own pockets, and hog-tying the new government with requirements that the nation's economy be surrendered to U.S. investors. Aristide refused. The United States withheld aid and began funding opposition groups, and their contra army, under the guise of "democracy enhancement."


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One doesn't have to wander far from the Associated Press wires to find abundant information about the United States' enthusiastic long-term "intervention" in Haiti. The so-called "democratic convergence" that has dogged Aristide's elected government is, in fact, a tiny group of malcontents who are working with elements of the Bush administration to turn Haiti into one vast sweatshop zone.

Having been soundly rejected in every election in which they've run against Aristide's grass-roots "Lavalas" party, they've used millions of U.S. tax dollars to organize street demonstrations, buy up radio and television stations, and, most recently, field a vicious army of thugs, styling themselves the "Cannibal Army," who have attacked police stations and set about occupying Haitian cities.

All this has been funded from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the guise of its falsely so-called "Democracy Enhancement" program. USAID has long been notorious for channeling money to the tiny pro-business elite and its armed goons. It was USAID money that helped a CIA agent persuade Emmanuel (Toto) Constant to organize the murderous FRAPH in 1991. That terrorist organization was responsible for some 5,000 murders in the wake of the military coup that removed Aristide from his first term as elected president. Constant now lives as a real estate agent in Brooklyn, thanks to the protection of the U.S. State and Justice departments

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Much more must read:

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4634298.html