Greetings,
Good response.

I don't buy this whole Cocaine excuse the US is now advancing for staging a coup in Haiti. I feel this is a tactic to try to prevent Aristide from returning to Haiti. The article below gives some of the reasons they wanted Aristide out of Haiti.

- Ayinde

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Extract: Telling the imperialists to go to hell

By Stephen Gowans
March 10, 2004

That business people and professionals comprise the Democratic Convergence (or Democratic Platform) and the Group of 184, the main opposition groups that successfully sought to oust Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, should have been a tip off that Aristide's alleged democratic lapses weren't at the heart of the groups' enmity toward the reformist leader.

Aristide's committing the unpardonable sin of jacking up the daily (not hourly) minimum wage to $1.30 from 80 cents two years ago [1], and his doubling of the minimum wage in February [2], surely left opposition kingpins Maurice LaFortune, head of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, and Andy Apaid, a US national who owns a number of Haitian factories that depend on low-wage labor, seeing red -- literally and figuratively.

Cutting into profit margins by driving up wage rates from desperation-level to misery-level, and playing the "smile-f*****r" game -- "oh sure, we'll privatize these state-enterprises," but failing to carry through -- is hardly the kind of game someone who's already on shaky ground for expressing a distaste for capitalism ought to be playing if he expects to have a long and fruitful career in politics. And getting too close to Washington's Latin American bugbears Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez -- and demanding that France compensate Haiti for the crimes of colonialism -- didn't endear Aristide to powerful forces that could arrange his ouster as a matter of no great difficulty. A band of armed thugs streaming over the border, disruption and disorder, dead bodies littering the streets, and what could a humanitarian state do but intervene to restore order? And if order meant carting off the offending President, well then carting him off it would be. The next president, you can be sure, won't be jacking up minimum wages, and he'll quickly see to it that the demands the IMF has been making for years that state-owned enterprises be placed on the auction block are acceded to with alacrity. Otherwise, he too will be ushered out the door faster than you can say "don't f**k with us."

Many years ago, the recently deceased Marxist economist Paul Sweezy observed that the outstanding characteristic of reform movements was the progressive bartering away of principles for votes and respectability [3]. Aristide, to be sure, did his share of bartering, not so much for votes, but to assuage conservative forces, so they would leave him be. The other side of the coin of Sweezy's observation is that reformists who accept the capitalist frame of reference and don't barter zealously enough, don't last long. So there's more than a touch of naivety in the shock that attended Aristide's being swept from power. If you choose to live in the bull's pen and get in his way, expect to get the horns.

There's also more than a dollop of bulls**t in the sly innuendo that Aristide was a dictator, or the overt claim that Aristide was a despot who had worn out his welcome. He had worn out his welcome, that's certain -- but not with ordinary Haitians, 10,000 of whom took to the street to demand their President's return, lambaste the US for occupying their country, and to call Bush what he is -- a terrorist [4] (which proves that being poor and Haitian doesn't mean you don't know what's going on.) Aristide wore out his welcome with people like Maurice LaFortune and Andy Apaid, and with Washington too, where a new standard of judging the democratic credentials of foreign leaders has taken hold.

Aristide, remarked US Vice-President Dick Cheney "was democratically elected, but he never governed as a democrat," [5] the same charge leveled against Venezuela's Chavez, and earlier Yugoslavia's Milosevic, one the US uses in some form or other to dismiss opponents who insist unhelpfully on getting themselves elected and thereby making it tough to engineer their ouster as part of a moral crusade to deliver long-suffering foreigners from despots. So you stretch the truth as far as you can, to upset the rule of leaders of reformist governments who don't accept the rule of the IMF, or the logic of capitalism. "Oh yeah, he was elected, but he didn't rule like a democrat. He pissed off a lot of powerful business people, a lot of people who thought the country needed a good dose of economic reform, and you don't want to do that. That's not governing like a democrat."

But then the credibility of Dick "oh sure, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no doubt about it" Cheney should be a little suspect, to say nothing of his commitment to "governing as a democrat." Wasn't the Bush administration bursting with bon mots for Spain's Jose Maria Aznar for standing tough against democracy, when polls revealed that 91 percent of Spaniards were opposed to Spain backing the invasion of Iraq [6]? Aznar went ahead anyway, elected, but hardly governing like a democrat, at least not by any normal definition of the word democracy, but then normal definitions don't count in Washington where democracy really means "democracy for the few."

Aristide, who must of thought he could get away with governing without recognizing the inviolability of this definition, says he was kidnapped, by which he means forced from Haiti, flown overseas and dumped unceremoniously into the Central African Republic. Cheney and US Secretary of State Colin Powell say that's nonsense. So, who are you going to believe? Aristide, or Cheney and Powell? I seem to recall a time when a dispute over the question of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction came down to a challenge. Who has more credibility: Powell, Cheney, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, on the one hand, or...Saddam Hussein? If you voted for the first three, count it as a learning experience that guys with nice suits, a facility with language, impressive CVs, and healthy bank accounts, aren't, ipso facto, more truthful than reviled foreign leaders with swarthy skin, dark, heavy facial hair, and a penchant for military uniforms.

"These Americans who are pontificating about human rights and democracy would not recognize these things even if they hit them on the faces," observed Zimbabwe's Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, after the United States announced it was tightening sanctions on the poor African country for reasons it says has something to do with President Mugabe's democratic lapses, but as in Haiti, has more to do with the economics of capitalism. "So go tell the imperialists to go to hell [7]."

http://www.africaspeaks.com/haiti2004/2203.html