Chapter 6: Haiti: The "practically insolvable problem" of establishing consensual domination
The experience of Liberia and Haiti shows that the African race are [sic) devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course there are many exceptions to this racial weakness, but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the negro problem practically insolvable.
-- US Secretary of State Robert Lansing, 1918 [1]
Cite Soleil (Sun City) is a name filled with bitter sarcasm. It refers to the vast shantytown slum just north of Port-au-Prince. Poverty here reaches absolute bottom, below which can only be death.' Barefoot children play on banks of muddy streams of raw sewerage or amidst toxic waste spills. A crippled man hasn't been able to get enough to eat for two days. A mother can't treat her baby's serious injury because of the cost of medical care. Despite these conditions, the most striking thing about Cite Soleeil is not its desperate poverty. Rather it is the hope that is surging here with the growth of the Lavalas mass movement and the election of radical priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
-- US visitor reporting from Cite Soleil, March 1991 [2]
As in the Philippines, Chile, and Nicaragua, the United States sustained an alliance in Haiti with a dictatorial regime, the Duvalier family dynasty, during much of the post-World War II period. By the early 1980s, the dictatorship was beginning to crumble under pressure from a burgeoning popular movement. Washington intervened to bring about a "transition to democracy." The first step, "preventative diplomacy," proved highly successful: Duvalier was removed from power in early 1986,in the face of a mass uprising, yet the Haitian state and, in particular, its coercive apparatus, the army, remained intact, and the elite order largely unaltered. But the second step, cohering elements of the Haitian elite around the transnational agenda and placing this elite in power through free elections, proved hopelessly elusive. The project fell completely out of Washington's control: it backfired, bringing to the Haitian presidency, through elections in 1990 organized and financed by Washington, the representative of the highly mobilized and belligerent popular classes, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "Preventative diplomacy" averted a revolutionary insurrection, but ironically the installation of a popular government and the initiation of a program of socioeconomic transformation was achieved through the very "democracy promotion" structures set up by Washington.
The military coup d'etat against Aristide in September 1991 represented a regression to outright dictatorship. For the Haitian majority, this military dictatorship represented a return to the suffering and tribulation endured throughout the nation's history. For the United States and the Haitian elite, it was a mixed outcome. On the one hand, the dictatorship was an embarrassing and destabilizing anomaly in an emergent transnational political system whose legitimization lay in polyarchy, and its coming to power; created a foreign-policy crisis for Washington. On the other hand, the new military dictatorship, not unlike Pinochet in Chile, showed an uncanny proficiency in cutting short the embryonic project of popular democracy and in demobilizing and resubordinating the popular classes. The September 1994 US invasion, conducted under the banner of restoring Aristide to power and democracy to the country, was the complex and paradoxical result of the failure of the project to modernize the traditional structures of power in Haiti and to stabilize elite domination. The goal of the invasion, despite appearances to the contrary, was to place back on track that project contra Aristide and the popular classes.
The attempt to facilitate a "transition to democracy" in Haiti is illuminating on several accounts. First, it took place after the Cold War, and after the string of transitions in the 1980s, demonstrating that the reorientation of US policy has been less a conjunctural response to events in that decade than a long-term transformation. Second, as analyzed below, it brings home the point made by Gramsci that effective hegemony (as distinct from mere domination) is exercised in both civil and political society (in "state and society"); achieving superordination in only one is insufficient, either for the popular sectors or for dominant minorities. Third, it lays bare the deep contra- dictions internal to the project of the transnational elite, a theoretical and practical issue which I take up in the concluding chapter.
Saint-Domingue: paradise and hell [3]
In 1492, Columbus landed on the northwestern coast of the island of Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti. The place he described as a lush tropical "paradise" was inhabited by up to three million Taino-Arawak Indians. The indigenous population were soon put to work as slaves, and within two generations the Taino-Arawak people had become extinct, the victims of massacres, overwork, European diseases, and despair. Diego Columbus, who was given abundant lands and Indian slaves by his brother Christopher, set up the first sugar plantation in Haiti. Diego Columbus not only introduced "King Sugar" into the Caribbean Basin, which soon became the principal world supplier of the sweet substance that tied the region into the emergent world system, but also first imported African slaves into Hispaniola when the supply of Indian labor became exhausted. Spanish colonial development was concentrated in the eastern two-thirds of the island, which would eventually become the Dominican Republic. The relative neglect of the western portion, now Haiti, made it possible for French competitors to establish influence. At the end of the seventeenth century Spain ceded to France, engaged in intense commercial rivalry with other expanding European powers, the western portion of the island, which was renamed Saint-Domingue by France. The colony soon became France's richest and the envy of other European powers.
With its fertile soils and the thousands of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo plantations set up by French settlers and administrators of the French monarchy, Saint-Domingue furnished two-thirds of France's overseas trade, employing one thousand ships and fifteen thousand French sailors. In addition, the colony, which came to be known as La Petite France (Little France), supplied half of Europe's consumption of tropical produce. The 800 sugar plantations in the Grande Ile ti Sucre (the Great Sugar Island) produced more than all the English Caribbean islands put together and the colony's overall trade is said to have outstripped that of the thirteen North American colonies.4 This colonial paradise, however, was sustained by the most brutal slavery in recorded human history. French planters calculated that replenishing slaves with new ones after several years brought in more profit than making outlays to keep slaves alive. At the height of its productivity, from the early to the late eighteenth century, slavery killed some one million Africans, and Saint-Domingue became one of the world's greatest markets for the African slave trade. By the 1780s, 40,000 French whites ruled over 700,000slaves and 28,000mulattos who were technically free but enjoyed limited rights. [5]
In 1791, Haitian slaves launched a revolt against French plantation owners, led by the famed Toussaint L'Ouverture. The revolutionaries had to face successive onslaughts not only from Napoleonic France, but from Spanish and British forces - reflecting the magnitude of the interests involved, and fierce European commercial rivalries. All were defeated at the hands of the Haitians. The only successful slave revolt in modem history led to the proclamation of the Haitian republic in 1804. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who became the revolutionary leader after Toussaint was captured and died in a French dungeon in 1802, adopted the ancient Taino-Arawak Indian name of Haiti, meaning "land of mountains," for the newly independent country. The establishment of the second independent republic in the New World and the first "Black Republic" had profound international repercussions. It inspired independence movements in Spanish America (Haiti, in fact, provided crucial support to Simon Bolivar), slave revolts throughout the Caribbean and the southern United States, and it decisively shifted the balance of power among European commercial rivals. The masses do, in fact, make history: the revolution led to the withdrawal of French ambitions in the New World, symbolized by the sale, shortly after losing Haiti, of the Louisiana territory to the United States, thus shoring up Britain and the United States as dominant powers in this period of capitalist world history.6
Independence, however, saw the replacement of the French elite with a new local elite, and led to chronic political instability, changes in government from one elite civilian or military clique to another through coups d'etat, palace revolutions, and armed revolts, and deep and violent racial tensions. Beneath the post-independence turmoil lay the failure of a century-long attempt at nation-building, a result of contradictions internal to the new republic and of continued outside intervention. This century-long period culminated in 1915 with the invasion by US marines and a subsequent nineteen-year occupation which would lay the basis for the ascension of the Duvalier dictatorship.
Haiti's complex historical experience has been little understood by outside commentators, whose simplistic and Eurocentric observations, usually tinged by (if not steeped in) racism, have led to notions that Haitians are somehow inherently prone to violence, corruption, authoritarianism, disorder, and disaster. The country's tragic history of perpetual misery and crisis is attributed to an unexplainable and ingrained inability of the Haitians to organize their affairs successfully. As late as 1957, for instance, New York Times, in an article commenting on the first few months of the Duvalier regime, explained: "With only a few exceptions, Haiti has been unfortunate in her political leadership ... This was inevitable in a country with an illiteracy rate of over 90 percent. The highly emotional people, who have little but tribal rule and superstition to guide their thinking, have been notoriously susceptible to demagogic political appeal. The political leaders by and large have approached their tasks with the utmost cynicism."7 These images of Haiti persisted in the 1990s, with the Haitian people projected internationally as an "AIDS-infested" population, a "boat people" fleeing (not analyzed and not understood) misery, a people living on "international handouts," and a "basketcase" in efforts at nationbuilding and development.
Haiti's troubled past can only be grasped in its historical and structural context through an analysis of the colonial state of Saint- Domingue, the circumstances in which the Haitian state came into being, the conditions under which it had to survive, and the resultant class and socioeconomic structure. Several factors stand out: the peculiar class and racial composition of the dominant groups; the complete fusion of elite rule with the state and the absence of any organized civil society; an entrenched culture of authoritarianism, corruption, and violence bequeathed by the Spanish, the French, and the Northamericans; and most of all, the crippling limits imposed on Haitians' ability to determine their own national conditions by the country's subordinate position in the world system. An analysis of Haiti belies "political culture" theories, which hold that a people's cultural patterns determine historic socioeconomic outcomes. To the contrary, Haiti is a striking demonstration that historic socioeconomic structures, production and class relations foment certain political cultures, not the reverse.
Slaves in Haiti were kept down by perhaps the most extreme and arbitrary terror known in modem history, which left deep roots for a culture of violence, a political culture which became self-perpetuating after independence with the need for the tiny elite to resort to permanent repression to sustain its rule in the face of enormous inequalities. The incredible wealth produced in, and syphoned out of, Saint-Domingue led to an extremely pronounced system of corruption. As one study by the London-based Latin America Bureau notes, the colony of Saint-Domingue was a volcano of irreconcilable conflicts and racial hatreds. "The economic system which reigned in Saint-Domingue was a predatory one based on an enslaved labour force and unequal trade relations. To keep the conflicts in check and ensure that the process of extracting wealth continued to function, a militarized and authoritarian state was developed, run by the Navy Ministry in France." In turn, French military officers and colonial administrators in charge of towns and districts eagerly took advantage to turn their power into profits and "shamelessly held the island's inhabitants to ransom, exacting tributes far higher than the official taxes." The chief sources of revenue of colonial administrators "were the sale of trading permits, land and decisions on property matters, and involvement in smuggling rackets." The study concludes: "These two features of the colonial system - authoritarian military power and extensive corruption - became so deeply entrenched in the colony that they survived through the following 200 years as permanent and essential features of Haitian life."8
Another key factor in explaining post-independence Haitian history was the virtual lack of any continuity between the old colonial economy, based on linkage to the world market through capital accumulation on slave plantations, and the post-independence economy, based on subsistence peasant production.9 The plantation system was broken up and lands parceled out to peasant smallholders, who over the generations further sub-divided plots among offspring. A process of capital accumulation internal to Haiti never really developed after the revolution. The elite did not engage directly in production but rather acquired wealth through international marketing of peasant production and usurious relations with peasants and small craft producers. As a consequence, rather than the production process, it was the Haitian state, extracting tribute from the peasantry from taxes, duties, and outright thuggery, that became the principal, and virtually only, source of wealth and power for the tiny Haitian bureaucratic and commercial elite. This explains the long-standing practice of ruling cliques to regard the state and government as their personal property, as well as the seemingly endless feuds and intrigues among the elites in and out of the army over which clique would hold the reins of the state - what Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot refers to as "state fetishism," and what an Althusserian structuralist might refer to as the "overdetermination" of the state in the Haitian social formation. The lack of a process of internal capital accumulation laid the material basis for a disjuncture between civil and political society and created a structural situation highly inpropitious to any variant of consensual domination.
Moreover, the threat of an independent Black Republic at a time when slavery still flourished in the Caribbean, the United States, and much of the eastern seaboard of Latin America, and when Africa was just being conquered and colonized, led the Great Powers that controlled world trade to castigate and isolate Haiti, for whom recognition was a precondition for entry into the world market. Not until 1825 did France recognize Haitian independence, and even then only on extremely onerous terms, requiring an indemnity of 150 million French francs - perhaps the only case in history in which the victor was forced to pay reparations to the vanquished. This "independence debt" placed a heavy burden on the Haitian economy, forced the country into mortgaging arrangements with French, and later US, banks, and was not repaid until 1922.10 The Vatican withheld recognition until 1860.The United States maintained a century-long de facto commercial embargo, refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, and did not establish diplomatic relations until 1886.11
The dynamics of race (or color) and class in Haiti is a further crucial historical factor. The mulattos, although they suffered discrimination under the white planters, also acted as a buffer between the French and the African slaves, and were able to acquire education, property, professional titles, and administrative experience. A substantial minority of their ranks even became slave and property owners themselves. Following the revolution, the white colonial elite was virtually banished from the country. In much of Latin America the "creole bourgeoisie," or the colonial elite, assumed. the reins of power with independence, and in Africa and Asia post-colonial ruling elites' power had deep historical roots in their native lands and cultures. In Haiti, however, there was no indigenous ruling elite at the time of independence. Class and nation formation proceeded on the most fragmentary basis possible. The mulatto population became a privileged stratum, a new bureaucratic and merchant elite dominating commerce and government. The legacy of French colonialism was thus a deep class divide expressed in ethnic terms between a mulatto elite and a mass of impoverished ex-slaves, along with a tiny black elite that came into existence with independence (the categories of "black" and "mulatto" should be seen sociologically as social constructs particular to Haitian society).
Finally, owing to the fusion between the Haitian elite and the state and the localized, subsistence nature of much of the economy, civil society remained underdeveloped - indeed, virtually non-existent - in Haiti. The elite exercised power through control of the state and through coercion, and thus never developed their own organs in civil society. It was not until the large-scale penetration of transnational capital began in the 1960s and 1970s that localized communities were sufficiently disrupted and integrated into a national formation that the masses began their own organizing in civil society beyond the local level. Indeed, the state was the impenetrable domain of the elite, and civil society that of the popular classes. Thus the struggle of the popular majority against the dominant groups took on the perfect expression of a struggle of civil society against the state, or as Trouillot puts it, "the state against the nation," rooted in the historica; disjuncture between civil and political society which reached its peak under Duvalierism. This also meant that when Washington stepped in in the 1980s to try and implement "democracy promotion" programs, US organizers discovered a civil society already densely organized by the popular classes and under the hegemony of these classes.
Haiti provides graphic empirical support for Andre Gunder Frank's thesis that those regions most intensively exploited during the formative years of the "modem world system" would later, owing to the very intensity of that exploitation and the structures it left behind, become the most backward, marginalized, and impoverished areas.12 From the wealthiest of all of Europe's overseas colonies, Haiti became, and has remained, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. In 1982, the country exported a mere $197 millions worth of goods, per capita income was $315, life expectancy stood at 48 years, infant mortality at 130 per 1,000, illiteracy at about 80 percent, malnutrition and undernourishment were endemic, and 74 percent of the nation's 6 million people remained in the agricultural sector. A full,74 percent of the rural population, and 55 percent of urban dwellers, were considered by the World Bank to live at or below the absolute poverty level. In that same year, 1 percent of the GNP went to public education and 0.9 percent to health, while the military consumed 8.3 percent of the GNP.13 The Haitian blood plasma scandal of the 1970s was a grizzly expression of how the powers that be in the world system have - literally - sucked the life-blood of the Haitian people. Such is the level of poverty that Haitians blood develops much higher levels of antibodies than most societies in the world, making it highly valued on the world market. In the 1970s, Haitian businessmen, in cooperation with transnational pharmaceutical and chemical firms, among them Armour Pharmaceutical, Cutter Laboratories, and Dow Chemicals, set up a thriving business by indiscriminately extracting blood plasma from poor Haitian donors for $3 a pint and reselling it abroad at $35 a pint.14
From the US marine occupation to the Duvalier dictatorship
Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French.
-- US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, after receiving a briefing on Haiti, 1912 [15]
The first republic in the New World, the United States, showed only contempt for the Black Republic. The Haitian revolution had inspired Gabriel Prosser's slave uprising in Virginia in 1800, and the Denmark Vesey uprising in 1822. The white government in Washington, which maintained the US slave system for nearly sixty years more, responded to the newborn Haitian republic with a policy of isolation and nonrecognition. When official relations were finally established in 1886, the black diplomat sent by Port-au-Prince was deemed socially unacceptable and instructed by the US government to remain in New York rather than Washington, D.C.16 Over the next few decades Haiti would acquire strategic importance for the nascent US empire because of the Windward Passage, a waterway shared with Cuba and considered vital to Caribbean and eastern US sea-lanes. Between 1857 and 1913 US Navy ships entered Haitian ports nineteen times to "protect American lives and property."17 The Spanish-American War was fought by the United States in part to gain control over the vital waterway.
Over 3,000 Haitians died fighting US marines who invaded the country in 1915 and stayed on for nineteen years.18 The marines were in Haiti as part of the Wilsonian project to install and stabilize elite regimes in the heyday of the young empire's effort to secure domination over the Caribbean Basin, considered the geopolitical springboard for worldwide expansion. In Haiti, however, the United States sent in a High Commissioner to directly rule the country, which became not a mere protectorate, but an outright colony. "The Haitians are negro for the most part, and, barring a very few highly educated politicians, are almost in a state of savagery and complete ignorance," wrote a State Department official in 1921.Therefore, "in Haiti it is necessary to have as complete a rule within a rule by Americans as possible."19 Nine years later, in 1930,the US charge in Haiti reported: "In general, while the Anglo-Saxon has a... profound conviction of the value of democratic government," the Haitians were unsuitable for democracy because they were, "in common with the Latin in general .. in the main directed by emotion rather than by reason" and is therefore "apt to scorn democracy."20
Operating with a vicious racism not felt in the country since the defeat of Napoleon's army, and with little understanding of the nation's peculiar history and social complexion, the white occupation force assembled political structures responsive to outside interests that only complicated endogenous political development. As noted above, by the 1820s, less than two decades after Haiti's independence, the mulatto and formally free elite, which represented 5 percent of the population, had come to control the reins of government and most of the nation's wealth. Thus began a century of conflict and accommodation between the mulatto elite and the small black upper and middle classes. La palitique de daublure, or "the politics of the understudy," took root in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in which a black president, responsive to the mulatto elite structure, often occupied the presidential palace and satisfied his own personal constituency through graft. But as the nation's indebtedness and impoverishment increased, lower class unrest and elite infighting began to undo the palitique de daublure, which had provided a modicum of stability. Between 1911 and 1915, seven presidents were overthrown. The unrest gave Washington the pretext it needed to intervene. The US occupation authorities further aggravated the racial and class divide by excluding all blacks from public life, placing the mulatto elite in power (the US High Commissioner installed four successive mulatto client-presidents), and transferring the economy to near total external control.
The occupation force established a customs receivership, took control of the nation's finances and of every ministry except justice and education, and rewrote the constitution to permit foreign ownership of property, long prohibited by the independent Haitians, who feared a return to complete foreign economic domination. The US official charged with drafting this constitution was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the time was pursuing numerous private investment schemes in Haiti.21 One of the US companies that set up operations was the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO). HASCO ran a large sugar estate and the country's one giant mechanized sugar mill. The country's sole railway connected the HASCO sugar mill to the port capital, Port-au-Prince, and was also in the hands of US investors. The principal shareholder and financial underwriter of this railway was the National City Bank of New York, which took over Haiti's Banque Nationale. Roger L. Farnham, the bank's vice-president, became the State Department's principal advisor on Haitian affairs during the early years of the occupation. General Smedley D. Butler, who had in 1909 led US forces in the intervention in Nicaragua, would later charge that the marines invaded Haiti as a bill collector for the National City Bank.22 With the occupation, the United States displaced its French and German rivals and became the principal external power, reorienting the Haitian economy towards dependence on the US market.
"The Marines perform a double function," explained a report by one US commission sent to investigate conditions in Haiti in 1926. "First, they protect the President from assassination; and second, they enable the American High Commissioner, Brigadier General Russell, to give the President authoritative advice."23 The occupation force instituted forced public labor to construct military roads and other works. Blacks were manacled like slaves, compelled to work for weeks with little or no pay and inadequate food and shot down if they attempted to escape.24 The US High Commissioner instituted severe press censorship (one proclamation forbad articles or speeches "reflecting adversely upon the American forces in Haiti") and detention without trial of dissidents, declared martial law for much of the occupation, militarized the entire country (US marine officers were appointed as administrators in every province and district and given near-dictatorial powers), and arbitrarily dissolved two rubber-stamp Haitian National Assemblies when deputies refused to carry out Washington's dictates. 25 The occupation force - exclusively white - introduced strict Jim Crow racial segregation in the country. No fewer than 147 brothels, hitherto unknown in Haiti, sprang up to cater for the decadent marines. The absolutely authoritarian and violent character of the occupation exacerbated the adverse local political culture.
The US marines disbanded the army and created a local gendarmerie staffed exclusively by mulatto junior officers under the command of US senior officers.26 The occupation force departed in 1934, and the Haitian army they left behind became the repressive and corrupt regulator of power and guardian of elite interests inside Haiti, while the country remained firmly under US domination. US interests were transmitted via the US ambassador to the mulatto elite which remained in office for another twelve years, until President Elie Lescot was deposed by a military coup. Lescot was replaced by a black president, Dumarsais Estime, but the army remained the backbone of real power, and overthrew him with US support. His military replacement, Colonel Paul Magloire, was thrown out of office in late 1956, leading to nine months of political chaos which saw five provisional governments and a one-day civil war that left several dozen dead. Thus the US occupation, far from resolving the crisis of elite rule, had aggravated it. This post-occupation instability laid the basis for the advent of Duvalierism, or what Trouillot refers to as a transition from authoritarianism to totalitarianism in response to the crisis of elite domination. Trouillot uses the term totalitarian as defined by Nicos Poulantzas, whereby dominant classes face a deep structural crisis, are unable to organize themselves politically, and face either the immediate threat of, or complete absence of, subordinate classes organizing and contesting political power. In distinction to mainstream political science notions of anti-democratic capitalist regimes as "authoritarian" and former Soviet-bloc regimes as "totalitarian," the term totalitarian is derived from "total" in the original sense meant by Mussolinists, whereby coercive domination pervades every aspect of social relations.
Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, through a cunning manipulation of the inauspicious blend of local politics and US power, had been quietly working his way into the power structure with the departure of the marines. The black Duvalier appealed to the "politics of the understudy" to win support from the mulatto elite. At the same time, he built support among blacks, who made up 95 percent of the population, through manipulation of the Noirist backlash that spread after the marines departed. Noirism, a form of cultural nationalism, was an ideology of the black middle and upper classes, denied participation in leadership, that stressed racial pride, African cultural revival, and black political rule, yet did not question basic elite structures,27 In this way, Duvalier squeezed an opening for a black elite and paved the way for a tenuous elite consensus that bridged the racial divide at the level of the dominant groups. Papa Doc was eventually elected president in 1957, with the backing of the army and with secret US support, in elections organized in the chaotic aftermath of Magloire's departure and mired in fraud and intrigue,28 Rather than facing a second election, Duvalier declared himself President for Life in 1964, promising a stable, long-term alliance between the black and the mulatto elite and foreign (US) interests. "It was a mutually satisfactory relationship," noted one observer, "they [the local elite and the United States] profited from his power, and he became more powerful from their profits."29 Just like Somoza, Duvalier thus achieved stable, although not consensual, domination.
If a modicum of elite consensus and US support was one girder of Duvalierism, its other was a combination of limited cooptation and a new black upward mobility for a chosen few, and the systematic, mass repression of the popular majority. Within days of assuming power, the first Duvalier initiated a wave of terror with few parallels in modem history, and which soon became permanent and institutionalized. At least 50,000 people are reported to have been executed by the Duvalierist regime between 1957 and 1985, hundreds of thousands were detained and tortured or disappeared, and another 1.5 million were driven into voluntary or forced exile.30 Duvalier used the 1957 election campaign to establish a patronage network, recruited directly from the lower classes, the chefs de section (a national network of rural sheriffs), and the houngans, or vodoun priests, based on personal loyalty, cronyism, extortion, and intimidation of opponents.31 The original members of this patronage network provided the basis for building the Volunteers of National Security (VSN), known throughout Haiti and the world as the Tonton Macoutes, the notorious paramilitary goon squads that terrorized the population.
Always the Machiavelli, Duvalier formed the Macoutes both as a counterweight to the army - as an insurance policy against a possible putsch to oust him - and as a highly efficient, if brutal and merciless, instrument of mass repression. The Macoutes reached into every layer and niche of society. Armed Macoutes were said to have outnumbered the army by two to one, while card-carrying VSN members numbered up to 300,000. "Duvalier's genius lay in how he designed their hierarchical structure, chose their social origins, and encouraged their recruitment in numbers so vast, they enabled him to survive every obstacle," noted one analyst. "The hierarchy was simple, a giant-bottomed pyramid with most Macoutes at the bottom and a few Duvalier fanatics as commanders. At the pinnacle, in absolute control was Duvalier himself. Socially, the Macoutes came from the most disadvantaged classes and regarded the VSN as their sole escape from the relentless misery and hard work that inevitably awaited them."32 The virtually all-black VSN thus insulated the Duvalier dynasty from the popular masses and also from any destabilizing elite intrigues, and at the same time provided the Duvaliers with a minimal social base; Macoutes could, and did, terrorize, extort money from, and just plain rob, any and every citizen, and thus the survival of 300,000 VSN members and their families in the lower classes came to depend on the survival of the Duvaliers.
As with Somocismo, Duvalierism was sustained by naked repression and a triple - if always tension-ridden - alliance between Duvalierist cronies, the Haitian elite, and the United States. To be sure, relations between the Duvaliers and Washington became highly strained at certain moments, particularly in the early years of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and under Jimmy Carter's "human rights" policy, when dictatorships blemished stated foreign-policy projects. In 1962, the CIA attempted unsuccessfully to organize a coup d'etat against Papa Doc similar to that which was successfully staged against the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.33 Although the incident led to a temporary suspension of economic (but not military) aid, shortly afterwards Washington saw the wisdom in long-term accommodation to Duvalier. US economic aid became the mainstay of the regime, while US military advisors providing training and weaponry for the army, the Tonton Macoutes, and later the counterinsurgency Leopard forces.34 These military forces successfully suppressed scattered guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes with direct US participation.35 When the ailing Duvalier's hand-chosen successor, his nineteen-yearold son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"), was sworn in upon his father's death in 1971 and appointed as the second "President for Life," the US ambassador, Clinton Knox, the only diplomat present at the ceremony, greeted the new unelected head of state by calling for an increase in aid to Haiti, while two US Navy warships stood offshore from Port-au- Prince to assure an orderly transfer of power.36 US economic and military aid continued throughout the duration of the regime, including under the Carter administration notwithstanding its human rights policy.37
Foreign capital had first entered Haiti in the late nineteenth century, when French, German, and US business began to invest in commerce, public utilities, and some agricultural concerns, but this investment was small-scale and sporadic. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the complete exhaustion of peasant holdings, the large-scale penetration of transnational capital, and the bounding of the country more closely to the international financial system, led to the gradual breakup of the peasant economy. The continuous subdivision of land, one of the most severe ecological crises in the world (due to deforestation), the theft and concentration of lands by Duvalierists and agro-exporting fractions of the elite, and the arrival of foreign agri-business in the 1960s and 1970s, led to massive urban migration and the semi-proletarianization of those remaining in the countryside.38 In turn, in the 1970s, Haiti was selected by the AID and the international financial agencies as a test-site in the Caribbean Basin for enclave manufacturing and industrial free-trade zones that signalled the beginnings of globalization (in 1981, the Reagan administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative, or CBI, would extend to the entire region the experiment set up a decade earlier in Haiti).39
Taking advantage of Haiti's abundant supply of cheap labor, some 240 transnational corporations poured into Port-au-Prince's free-trade zone in the 1970s and early 1980s, employing 60,000, mostly female, workers for a government-set wage of $2.70 a day. By the late 1970s, enclave manufacturing, almost exclusively of baseballs, lingerie, and electronic parts, came to account for about half the country's exports.40 The Duvalier regime provided the transnational corporations with a tax holiday of ten years, no restrictions on profit repatriations, and the suppression of all trade union activity. Haiti "has an authoritarian style of government," explained the founder of the Haitian American Chamber of Commerce, Stanley Urban, "but there are more freedoms and opportunities in private enterprise than in many Western-style democracies."41 While this type of assembly production contributed only marginally to government revenue and the number of jobs it created was insignificant in relation to the extent of unemployment and poverty in the country, the Duvalier regime boasted that Haiti was the coming "Taiwan of the Caribbean." A 1982 AID report asserted that it was "a real possibility" that Haiti would soon become developed through enclave industry assembling, and that the final goal was "a historic change to a greater commercial interdependence with the USA."42
US economic aid, directed toward bringing about the infrastructural and the technical-administrative changes necessary for assembly production, increased every year in the early 1970s, and quadrupled between 1975 and 1976 alone, reaching nearly $150 million in the latter year.43 Other "development programs" sponsored by the AID and the international financial agencies accelerated this restructuring of the Haitian economy. These included programs to shift agriculture from subsistence food to agri-business export production, a goal achieved, in part, by dumping surplus food on the Haitian market under the CBI's self-proclaimed "food security" program, which further undercut peasant production. Under these programs, 30 percent of cultivated land shifted from food production for local consumption to export crops. A 1985World Bank report stated that domestic consumption had to be "markedly restrained in order to shift the required share of output increases into exports [emphasis should be placed on] the expansion of private enterprises Private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported [over) public expenditures in the social sectors [and) less emphasis should be placed on social objectives which increase consumption." An AID report was candid: "AID anticipates that such a drastic reorientation of agriculture will cause a decline in income and nutritional status, especially for small farmers and peasants ... Even if transition to export agriculture is successful, AID anticipates a 'massive' displacement of peasant farmers and migration to urban centers."44
The CBI in the early 1980s and other "development programs" accelerated this structural process, along with its social repercussions and political consequences for the elite and for the masses. As part of these changes, corresponding to Haiti's insertion into the emergent global economy, Washington and the international financial agencies pressured Baby Doc into adopting a "liberalization" and "modernization" program involving an easing of political repression and greater fiscal and accounting responsibility. The Haitian elite became the local agents and managers of the transnational companies, signalling the alliance, still under authoritarian arrangements, of local and transnational elites.45 In particular, that fraction of the elite tied to transnational capital assumed greater importance within the dominant groups. The complete exhaustion of the peasant economy and the nascent process of capital accumulation and proletarianization provided the structural context for a growing popular movement against the dictatorship. Between the 1970s and the 1980s,absolute poverty in Haiti is estimated to have increased from 50 percent to 80 percent of the population.46 While the masses began to organize and demand popular democratization, new fractions of the elite tied to assembling and other external sector activities began to feel the need for a new political structure - elections, an efficient government, and so forth.
The Haiti case demonstrates the dialectic between globalization and social, cultural, and political variables. Transnational capital, helped along by its institutional agents (in this case, the AID and the World Bank), penetrates and disrupts local communities. The autonomy and cohesion of even the most remote or autonomous communities are undermined, dispersing populations into new roles connected to a national formation and international relations. Simultaneously, the communications revolution brings together these dispersed populations and creates intersubjectivities who push for social change and democratization. Trouillot documents the change in collective behavior among disrupted peasant communities and new urban clusters which became aware of the decadent opulence of the urban-based elite only after their seclusion had been eroded. Even the poorest and most remote of Haitian communities came to witness - and resent - the ostentation of the elite, whose wild parties and extravagant consumption, broadcast on Port-au-Prince television and "society" communications outlets for the purpose of elite families trying to impress and outdo one another, acquired a national projection through expanded communications. "With the new national roads and major improvements in telecommunications [required by transnational capital], Haiti had become a truly 'national space'," Trouillot points out. "Words and images meant to impress certain segments of the population now reached unintended audiences. In the streets of the provincial towns, despair turned into anger, and anger into defiance ... [popular sector leadership] undertook a systematic if modest politicization of the populace, infusing a civil discourse within the 'national space' newly created by increased centralization and improvements in transportation and telecommunications."47 What Trouillot should add is that this new national space was, in turn, linked to emergent transnational space.
The Haitian case also demonstrates how an authoritarian political system is unsuitable, on two accounts, for the global economy. On the one hand, the corruption and cronyism of traditional authoritarianism impedes the efficient and modernized technical-rational administration required for the operation of transnational capital. Every effort in the 1970s to "modernize" Haiti ran up, under Duvalierism, against the ingrained system of graft and corruption (to complicate matters, Haiti under Baby Doc became a major drug trafficking center). On the other hand, populations such as the Haitian peasantry, disrupted by capitalist penetration and incorporated into broader structures, begin to mobilize beyond their local concerns and demand democratization. Infrastructural and other projects under which capital accumulation takes place require not just the technical participation, but also the political and social incorporation, of elites, professional strata, and popular sectors.48 Washington attempted in Haiti, in the 1970s and early 1980s, to "liberalize" and "modernize" the regime without replacing the authoritarian system itself. Only when it became clear that this system could not resolve the two contradictions mentioned above did the United States turn to "democracy promotion." By that time, however, it was too late in Haiti for a smooth "transition to democracy."