President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to withdraw troops in 1933. And, in 1956, Francois Duvalier won Haiti's presidential election, created a totalitarian dictatorship, declared himself president-for-life in 1964, and ruled until 1971 when he died.
Francois' heir, Jean-Claude Duvalier, ruled Haiti until 1986, when a popular uprising led him to flee the country for France. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a reformist priest, won the presidential election in Haiti with a two-thirds majority. Election turnout was high and the election was widely perceived as one of the most honest elections in Haiti's history.
But, the CIA and the U.S. would not allow Aristide to govern with popular support. They had to interfere in Aristide's plans to work to eradicate poverty.
ARISTIDE MEETS THOSE SEEKING TO CREATE A CAPITAL-FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT IN HAITI
Contrary to the story delivered by the corporate media in America, Aristide did not rig the elections in 2000. Nor did he unleash violent militias on political opponents. And, he did not bring the Haitian economy to a "point of collapse" and his people to "the brink of humanitarian catastrophe" either.
All the problems with Aristide occurred because the U.S. and free market interests refused to let Aristide prevent the "indiscriminate privatization of state resources" and stick "to his guns over wages, education and health" even though he accepted "a series of severe IMF structural adjustment plans."
On October 31, 1991, the Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People (FRAPH) overthrew the Haitian government while Aristide was on a UN visit in New York. A repressive regime ruled and massacred hundreds if not thousands of dissidents until 1994 when the U.S. led a UN intervention to put Aristide back in power. (The leader of FRAPH later admitted to being supported by the CIA.)
William Blum, author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions wrote, "the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend-because of all their rhetoric about "democracy"-that they supported Aristide's return to power in Haiti."
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