We need to remember that the very same imperialist powers intervening in Haiti once again have a long record of open support for one of the most brutal dictatorships in the history of humanity—the Duvalier regime. Under that tyranny, the infamous Tonton Macoutes death squads spread terror among the Haitian toilers, with the blessing of Washington and Paris. Many of the same brutal thugs associated with that reign of terror, and with the subsequent military regime that ousted the first Aristide government in a 1991 coup, are now leading another military coup against a “democratically elected president.”

There is no indication that Washington engineered the current military uprising. The forces the U.S. imperialists helped set in motion to unseat the Aristide administration have taken their own course, throwing the country into chaos and instability. Even though the U.S. rulers are now giving tacit support to the rebels, they are worried about being openly identified with a return to power of forces associated with the Tonton Macoutes, at a time when they are pushing to extend imperialist domination around the world in the name of “democracy.” The imposition of certain bourgeois democratic forms is not just the rationalization for the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. Washington has also expanded its military intervention in Colombia and is planning to use those bases as a beachhead for a possible assault on Venezuela on the pretext that the government of President Hugo Chávez there is “undemocratic.” So the U.S. rulers are trying to give the appearance of a “neutral” mediator between the Haitian government and the coup plotters. At the same time, Washington does not particularly care to keep the Aristide government in power and will do nothing to stop the rightist insurgents from taking over the capital if they amass the forces to do so.

The Aristide administration, a bourgeois nationalist regime that has relied time and again on imperialist benevolence and goon-like police violence against opponents, has helped lead working people once again to the wall. A victory by the rightist insurgents would be a big defeat for Haitian toilers. But working people in Haiti, or any other country for that matter, can’t look for a solution to the imperialist masters who bankrolled and propped up their henchmen over decades in the past. Only through the independent organization of working people into a proletarian party that can lead workers and peasants to carry out a successful social revolution will the toiling masses of Haiti rid themselves once and for all of the Tonton Macoutes—and all their modern incarnations dressed up as liberators or democrats or even socialists—along with the domination by their imperialist masters. In doing this they would be emulating the course taken by the workers and farmers of neighboring Cuba, who ousted the U.S.-backed Batista tyranny 45 years ago, ended imperialist domination, and opened the door to the socialist revolution in the Americas.

In the United States, Canada, France, and other citadels of finance capital, working people need to focus our fire on the ruling class in each of these countries and demand: Imperialist troops out of Haiti! End the country’s debt slavery—cancel Haiti’s foreign debt now!
 
 
Related articles:
Brutal, rightist forces take over half of Haiti  
 
 
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