Claudette Antoine Werleigh. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Volume 49, Issue 9, November 1993.
After 29 years of dictatorship, Haiti embraced its first freely elected president in 1990. But the man chosen in that venture toward democracy, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted in September 1991 by a military coup.
In an attempt to punish the military junta and return democracy to Haiti, the Organization of American States (OAS) imposed trade sanctions on the country in November 1991. The sanctions were maintained only half-heartedly by many OAS members.
In May 1993, the United Nations got on board, when the Security Council instituted an embargo on oil and weapons sales. Only then did the military begin to negotiate. As this is written, Aristide was scheduled to return to Haiti on October 30. In recognition of the agreement, the OAS and United Nations lifted their sanctions August 27.
However, as this issue went to press, violence against members of the still-forming Aristide government continued, and the Security Council was considering imposing sanctions once again.
Although the sanctions are history, at least for now, it’s useful to examine what impact, if any, the OAS sactions had on resolving the crisis. The key to resolving any problem is strong-willed determination. Unfortunately, in the case of sanctions against the military junta in Haiti, this essential piece was missing. The U.S. government in particular had no political will to abide by the OAS embargo. In stark contrast, when the administration wanted to halt the flow of Haitian refugees and Florida, they deployed a naval flotilla of effectively block all Haitian boats from reaching U.S. shores.
Background of the crisis
Although it was the first black republic in the new world and the first country where a slave revolt was successful, Haiti never became a cohesive nation. Haitian society has always been extremely divided. Furthermore, for both internal and external reasons, the economic structure of the country remained the same as it had been under colonial rule. Coffee replaced sugar as the main export, and a new group of rulers—this time Haitians—replaced the former colonial masters. Even though Haiti had become independent in 1804, its economic dependence on foreign countries continued to increase. In addition, when the U.S. Marines departed in 1934 after occupying Haiti for 19 years, they left behind the so-called “Garde d’Haiti” (Haitian Military Guard), later known as the “Forces Armes d’Haiti,” to protect U.S. interests and safeguard the status quo.
Well-to-do Haitians do not invest much in Haiti. For reasons possibly related to unstable political conditions, they prefer to transfer most of their money to private accounts in the United States or Europe. Most Haitians have no reliable water supply, little access to health services, and scarely any food. As a traveler put it some years ago, “Never was heaven on earth [the lifestyle of the rich] so close to hell [the living conditions of the poor].”
The country has been mismanaged since its foundings. While a tiny minority has been exporting the wealth of the country and living la dolce vita, Haitian peasants have been struggling to provide food for the local market, maintain their families at a subsistence level, and produce goods for export on top of all that.
The conditions in which Haitian peasants work (on tiny pieces of land often on mountainous terrain, with obsolete tools, no technical assistance, and no access to credit or to better seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers) have caused agricultural production to decline year after year. Meanwhile, the population has grown. The heavy pressure on the land, combined with the above factors, could not but generate a profound crisis in the Haitian economy.
During the 1980s, an attempt was made to diversify the Haitian economy. Foreign investors were offered attractive terms to encourage the investment of foreign capital in light industry. But the lack of roads, electricity, and water prevented enough investment to reverse the state of the economy. In addition, foreign investors were granted a 10-year tax exemption, so new factories did not significantly increase Haiti’s internal revenue.
International aid could have made a difference, since a variety of projects were under-taken under bilateral and multilateral agreements. Unfortunately, a lack of vision and political will combined with corruption among Haitian leaders made it very difficult to obtain steady, tangible results.
The population’s growing discontent brought political unrest to the country. As strikes multiplied, a number of important factories closed their doors and moved quietly to the Dominican Republic and Central America. This was easy, since most of them had not invested in infractructure: pramity materials were shipped from the United States and could easily be directed elsewhere. Manufacturers had come to Haiti to take advantage to cheap labor and the so-called stability provided by dictatorial regimes. As these factors changed, so did the will to stay in Haiti.
Voting repression out of office
Sick of dictatorship, the Haitian people sought to reverse their fate. They engaged in a nonviolent struggle to implement a new society. It was not an easy fight.
The elections of 1990 have been internationally recognized as fair and democratic. With massive participation by the population (90 percent of the electorate voted), Jean-Bertrand Aristide, now 40, won with 67 percent of the vote. The choice of Aristide was a vibrant “No!” to the old order, with its macoutes, repression, extortion, and lack of accountability. It was a deliberate call for a new order—equal opportunity in employment, education, health care, and justice.
During the seven months of Aristide’s presidency, he did not have the time—nor could he have been able—to make the dream of the Haitian people become a reality. However, under his government people regained their dignity and confidence. Most felt that they had become active members of their society. Hope flourished anew.
It is this process that the military coup of 1991 brought to a halt.
The coup precipitates sanctions
The coup was carried out by the Haitian military with financial backing from Haiti’s elite. Aristide was into exile. The violence that followed has taken an estimated 3,000 lives and forced an additional 300,000 people into hiding within the country. About 45,000 refugees fled Haiti by sea.
As he went into exile, President Aristide asked the OAS for help. But he made it clear that he did not want military intervention. When the foreign ministers of the Western hemisphere met in October 1991, they agreed to impose economic sanctions and refrain from intervening militarily.
The OAS message was directed as much to the armed forces of other countries in the region as to the Haitian army. The message? That in this new era of democracy, no military coup to overthrow a duly elected government would stand.
Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s economy is dependent on the outside world for fuel, industrialized products, even food. The OAS believed that the lack of imported goods would force the coup leaders to agree to negotiations. The argument stands in theory; but did the OAS have the structure to implement and control the embargo? Probably not, since the OAS had to call on each individual member to respect it. Did all the countries really agree on the embargo? In principle, yes. But were all the political and economical groups in the respective countries ready to sacrifice some economic gains for the ideal of freedom and democracy in Haiti? No.
A porous embargo
One thing is certain: once comfortably installed in power, the Haitian military and its puppet government used bribery and corruption to maintain the influx of goods. It wasn’t difficult. It was enough for a boat to fly a Nigerian flag (countries in Africa are obviously not members of the OAS) to be free to enter Haitian ports. Fuel was imported from the Dutch Antilles. Planes landed every night at the international airport.
As early as February 1992, the United States yielded to pressure from business interests in Haiti and the United States and partially lifted the embargo to allow in goods for the assembly industry.
Of course, European countries were not bound by the embargo. Besides, it was often argued that the embargo contradicted some legal or technical aspects of the Lome Convention between Haiti and the European Economic Community. Even countries that are full members of the OAS, including Panama, Venezula, and Colombia, openly violated the embargo.
Echoing Aristide, even Oscar Ramirez-Ocampo, the first OAS special envoy to Haiti, said that the embargo—which he had previously called the “major weapon” in the effort to restore democracy—”has been violated systematically, evoking mockery and undermining the credibility and effectiveness of the measures” to return Aristide to power.
The border with the Dominican Republic was the primary channel for good coming into Haiti. After initially denying this, the Balaguer government admitted that it allowed trade “for humanitarian reasons.”
Assigning blame
Those who advocated lifting sanctions generally echoed Balaguer, saying the embargo hurt the poor and was destroying the economy of the poorest country in the hemisphere. It’s true that the poor in Haiti were deeply hurt. It is also clear that the economy of the country deteriorated further. But it was the coup and not he embargo—which expressely excluded basic necessities such as food and medicine—that was the cause of suffering.
The repression that prevailed after the coup caused hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes and jobs. As a result, peasants could not work their land, and many technicians were not able to use their skills.
In many cases, peasants were forced to sell everything they owned—from cattle to land—at very low prices to pay bribes to the military to avoid being mistreated or jailed. The return of local section chiefs, who extort money from the rural population by imposing arbitrary taxes at vending posts, mills, and roads leading to market, wiped away any incentive to invest in the economic well-being of Haiti.
The desire to make money by all means—legal or illegal—and a lack of price controls or any mechanism to protect consumer led to skyrocketing prices.
Shortly after the sanctions were imposed in November 1991, for example, the country experienced an apparent scarcity of fuel. In fact, this “shortage” may have been caused by simple hoarding or by rationing by the major fuel distributors. With the exception of this period, fuel and other goods were plentiful. For all practical purposes, there was no real embargo.
Effects of the coup
The embargo was a consequence of the coup, so it is not correct to attribute the economic disruption to the embargo. A careful examination of the coup’s effects will show the real causes of the ensuing economic disruption.
* Agricultural goods. A few weeks after the coup, scarcity of fuel had a strong and immediate impact on traffic. Transportation prices doubled or tripled, causing some small farmers to keep their produce. This may have caused some scarcity in Port-au-Prince, the main consumer of these goods. But that same fact produced artificial surpluses in some rural areas. It also caused a surplus, in some local markets, of goods that were usually exported. It’s safe to say that for a while, mainly in November 1991 when the embargo was more strictly applied, people in the countryside had more food to eat than usual. This phenomenon could have had a positive impact on the health conditions of the rural poor, had it lasted. Also, the repression in Port-au-Prince and other major cities caused many people to migrate to the countryside, where they shared the rural food surplus.
* Manufactured goods. While people in the countryside could not sell some of their products and therefore had to consume them, their access to manufactured goods such as soap, oil, and kerosene became more difficult both because of the high price of transportation and because their incomes and had diminished. The migration to the countryside didn’t have the positive effects it could have, since most of the agricultural products were shared for immediate consumption and not sold. However, some products prepared locally were used as substitutes for imported goods.
* Class. The coup affected different social classes in different ways. Industrial workers were affected immediately by the political crisis: more than 30,000 people lost their jobs. Because the embargo was partially lifted by the United States for the assembly industry, the cause of those lost jobs must be found elsewhere.
An even greater number of workers belonging to the “informal” sector (such as shoe repairers and street vendors) have had to slow down or cease their activities.
Shortages of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides have a ruthless impact on agriculture and farmers. In many places, peasants resorted to eating seeds intended for planting.
The number of employees in the public sector has increased since September 1991, essentially because of political reasons.
Scarcity of fuel has been the most crucial problem for businessmen in the private sector; however, a lot of people have managed to make more money during the same period.
* Overall economy. The crisis caused a distortion of the Haitian economy. The embargo was the pretext used by some businesses to increase their prices in anticipation of possible shortages. Price changes were made even for products in stock long before the economic sanctions were imposed. The prices of products not included in the embargo, such as food and medicine, also increased. Rumors about the unavailability of some products (mainly fuel) caused people to panic, buying and storing them at almost any cost. A gallon of fuel cost $10-20.
Such phenomena exacerbated the decrease in agricultural and industrial production, and caused the gourde—the local currency—to further deteriorate. In September 1991, U.S. dollar equaled 7.65 gourdes. Less than a year later, in March 1993, a dollar equaled 13 gourdes.
For obvious political reasons, the de facto authorities created new jobs for members of the political parties National des Impots (Internal Revenue Service) collected less revenue from the wealthy. As a result, the budget deficit has increased.
Political repression against grassroots organizations and local leaders has forced many skilled farmers to move. Meanwhile, their land is either abandoned, worked on poorly by other members of the family, or divided into smaller pieces in order for the family to survive. It’s estimated that between 400,000 and 500,000 people have been displaced, causing agricultural production to further decline. The military and its allies have systematically destroyed or stolen silos, tools, and equipment. Technicians have been prevented from offering their services to the unskilled, and cooperatives have been closed.
Smuggling, bribery, and corruption, which had slowed down during the seven months of Aristide’s presidency, openly resumed as a normal way of life.
Drug trafficking increased tremendously after the coup. This rise not only brought U.S. dollars to the economy but also helped maintain the military and the de facto regime in power. Money from the drug traffic is probably the main source of foreign currency. In spite of the embargo, new tanks, weapons, and ammunition, as well as non-lethal aid such as military uniforms, found their way to the Haitian military during the sanctions period.
Embargo: anbago or anaba gwo?
Although the sanctions were never applied seriously, the entire crisis nearly wrecked the economy. The Haitian people, with their keen political wit, even made a pun: instead of talking about the anabgo (Creole for “embargo”), they said anba gwo, which means “under the heel of the rich and powerful.” Although the exclusion and marginalization of the majority of the population has led to the present poverty, it’s far easier to blame the economic crisis on the embargo.
In the case of Haiti, it will probably never be easy to evaluate precisely what damage was a result of structural factors and what was an effect of the political crisis; what was done by the unprecedented repression and what can be attributed to corruption and mismanagement. The lack of reliable data complicates the matter. The embargo was a sensitive issue, where cold judgement was affected by personal, political, emotional, and class factors.
What would have worked? Freezing the assets of the coup leaders, revoking their visas immediately, and truly isolating the de facto government would have brought the military and coup leaders to the negotiating table in a matter of weeks, leading to a quick resolution of the crisis.
In the end, such a sensible course was not followed. As noted at the beginning, the OAS sanctions, weak in conception and weakly executed, failed. It was the Clinton administration, embarrassed by its policy reversal regarding Haitian refugees, which used its clout to finally raise the embargo issues before the United Nations. The Security Council then imposed a complete oil embargo on Haiti in May. That action brought the military to the negotiating table.