In this instance, the U.S. government opted for the simpler recourse of summary asylum hearings followed by expedited deportation. But it learned the lesson of the Southern District Court's intervention. In the future, U.S. officials would take no chances, moving the detainment and processing of Haitian and Cuban refugees and enemy combatants offshore to Guantánamo, where they would remain beyond the purview of the American public and the reach of U.S. law. Or so, at least, they hoped.
Â
As
Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti
unfolded in district court, two simultaneous migrant exoduses were under way in the waters south of Florida. One, the Mariel Boatlift, entailed some 125,000 Cubans embarking
for Miami by boat from the port of Mariel, just west of Havana. The other remains largely unknown and unnamed: an exodus of tens of thousands of Haitians from diverse port towns and cities, most of them, too, hoping to make it to the Florida coast. The fate of the two groups could not have been more different. On the whole, the Cubans were welcomed to the United States, exiles from a Communist regime and sworn enemy of the United States; the Haitians were picked up at sea and returned to Haiti to face the autocratic tyranny of America's friend and the fierce foe of communism Jean-Claude Duvalier, François Duvalier's successor.
The Mariel Boatlift was a onetime deal. Conceived by Fidel Castro in 1980 to relieve a social and economic crisis, it was over in six months, halted by mutual agreement of Presidents Castro and Carter. By contrast, the Haitian exodus was spontaneous and open-ended. With political and economic conditions in Haiti in bad shape and unlikely to change, there was no anticipating an end to the exodus. Assuming office in January 1981, the Reagan administration felt compelled to act. The Haitian boaters jeopardized the nation's “welfare and safety,” the president announced that autumn. To protect the nation, Reagan authorized the U.S. Coast Guard to halt, search, seize, and destroy any Haitian vessel suspected to be transporting refugees to the United States. Formally, the Alien Migrant Interdiction Operation (AMIO) acceded to the UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which prohibited the return of refugees to a land in which they might be subjected to political or cultural persecution. According to the presidential order, passengers of seized vessels were to be transferred to U.S. Coast Guard ships and interviewed by INS officials to determine whether they had a “well-founded fear” of persecution if returned to Haiti. Those found to have such fear would be “screened in” to the United States, i.e., brought to Miami to file claims for political asylum. Those found to have no such fear would be delivered home. From the perspective of those who wanted to relieve the logjam of Haitian asylum seekers in Florida immigration courts, AMIO was a smashing success. In its first decade, twenty-eight of the approximately twenty-three thousand Haitians picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard made it to the United States. Of these, only eight were granted political asylum.
30
Just as they had during the previous decade, U.S. officials succeeded in keeping the number of Haitian asylum seekers in the 1980s so low by once again distorting political conditions in Haiti. INS interviews aboard the Coast Guard cutters were public, compromising, and cursory. Having issued detailed guidelines intended to safeguard the refugees, the INS ignored those guidelines virtually to the letter.
31
Moreover, a remarkable presumption underlay AMIO: namely, that the United States had the right to sweep international waters between Haiti and the United States for Haitian migrants no matter where they might be headed. Formally, Reagan's order of autumn 1981 authorized the apprehension of only those Haitians bound expressly for the United States; in fact, any Haitian found at sea became a charge of the United States. The audacity of the program was matched only by its destructiveness, as one Duvalier enemy after another was delivered back into the hands of his or her persecutors.
32
By the mid-1980s, with Haiti on the brink of famine, and 75 percent of Haitians living below the poverty line, a series of food riots erupted. As usual, Duvalier's security forces met the unrest with severe repression. Unusually this time, the Haitian people refused to back down. The murder of three young boys during an uprising in the city of Gonaïves in November 1985 sparked still wider protests that ultimately unseated Jean-Claude Duvalier. On February 7, 1986, amid persistent antigovernment demonstrations, the U.S. government airlifted Duvalier to France. It wasn't that the Reagan administration had wearied of Duvalier's repression; rather, it had become apparent that repression alone was no longer sufficient to keep a lid on popular unrest.
33
Haitians greeted Duvalier's departure with jubilation. For the first time in a generation, ordinary Haitians were free to, of all things, simply
talk
. One journalist described the exhilarating sensation of “a million people talking all at once and all of a sudden.” Instruments of civil societyânewspapers, radio stations, political partiesâsprang up as if overnight. Violence accompanied the celebration. After thirty years in power, the Duvalier state penetrated all aspects of Haitian society, and Haitians set about uprooting it with a vengeance. The most odious symbols of the state were the first to fallâthe Duvalier flag and the
Tonton Macoutes. No few Macoutes were hurriedly and brutally dispatched.
34
It is unfair to call a people who suffered as Haitians suffered under the Duvaliers naïve for reveling in their hard-won liberty. But with the U.S. government orchestrating the transfer of power, Haiti's liberation could not and would not last. Limited constitutional reform and a series of elections followed the change of government. But as in 1930s Cuba, the effect of these reforms was not to introduce liberal democratic governance to Haiti but to lend civilian veneer to ongoing military rule. From the U.S. perspective, liberal democracy was never the point. The point was a Haiti safe from “communism.” Under the new Conseil National de Gouvernement (CNG) and its leader the Duvalierist general Henri Namphy, that is exactly what Haiti and the United States got. As the U.S. government and press praised General Namphy for his perspicacity and moderation, the Haitian people decried what appeared to be a return to old ways.
When, in April 1986, a crowd of unarmed demonstrators descended on the torture chambers of Fort Dimanche prison, the army beat back the crowd, guns blazing, leaving eight protestors dead and scores wounded. “By the end of its first year in office,” according to one report, Namphy's regime “had openly gunned down more civilians than Jean-Claude Duvalier's government had done in fifteen years.”
35
The next year was no better. In July 1987, wealthy landholders in the town of Jean-Rabel repressed a peasant uprising, killing hundreds of so-called communists. Random murders accompanied the orchestrated massacres, prompting one journalist to observe, as the year drew to a close, “something strange and terrible is taking shape in Haiti.”
36
The U.S. government response to renewed violence in Haiti was slow and tepid. Confronted by evidence of slaughter, U.S. ambassador Brunson McKinley claimed to have “no proof of such killings.” Still another massacre in late November 1987 prompted the Reagan administration to formally suspend military aid to Namphy, though the CIA continued to funnel money his way to the tune of $1 million per year. By the end of the decade, U.S. intelligence officials appear to have been no more able to grasp the situation in Haiti than had the
State Department at its beginning. When, in November 1987, Haitian voters threatened to replace Namphy with the moderate human rights advocate Gérard Gourgue, Namphy suspended the new electoral council and declared a military dictatorship. The United States applauded. “The electoral council was being run by foreign leftists,” Ambassador McKinley announced; “Gourgue was at least a Communist front man, if not a Communist himself.”
37
The following year began with a spectacularly fraudulent election that introduced a period of extreme instability in Haiti, culminating in September with the Saint-Jean Bosco Massacreâan attack on the congregation of a nettlesome liberal Catholic minister by the name of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The desecrating of Aristide's church went too far for junior officers, who deposed Namphy while elevating yet another former Duvalier-era henchman, Brigadier General Prosper Avril. Avril followed his predecessor's script to the letter, governing by intimidation and extrajudicial killings. Inaugurated with the torture and public display of three dissidents in the autumn of 1989, Avril saw his reign come to a precipitous end the following March, after soldiers under his command killed a young schoolgirl while breaking up an antigovernment demonstration in the port of Petit Goâve. Avril resigned at U.S. insistence, his place taken by Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, a justice on Haiti's Supreme Court. The best that can be said of Pascal-Trouillot's brief but violent reign is that it served as the backdrop for Haiti's first free and fair democratic election. On December 16, 1990, by a margin far exceeding the estimation of U.S. intelligence officials, Haitians elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in a landslide, setting off a celebration to rival that which greeted the fall of the Duvaliers.
But just as in the aftermath of Jean-Claude Duvalier's demise, the popular celebration could not mask the resentment of Haitian elites. Even before Aristide was inaugurated early the next February, Roger Lafontant, a displaced Duvalier loyalist, launched a failed mutiny against Aristide's impending “communist dictatorship.” This time, supporters of the president-elect struck back, rounding up and killing Tonton Macoutes while destroying property belonging to Lafontant's sponsors. While there is no denying the lawlessness that followed Lafontant's mutiny, it hardly reached the level described by the U.S.
press, which, like the U.S. government, seemed determined to undermine the Aristide government before it even came to power. “Burned bodies, cannibalism and torched homes give an aura of madness to the capital,” wrote the Associated Press. “On Tuesday, two photographers took pictures of two men eating the flesh of a man who had been burned as hundreds of people looked on.” Such sensationalism distracted American audiences from confronting the crimes perpetrated by Haiti's displaced leaders as when, several days before the new president took office, arsonists set fire to an orphanage founded by Aristide, killing four children.
38
“Everyone who is anyone is against Aristide. Except the people”âthe words of a Haitian businessman complaining to a reporter in the autumn of 1991, just weeks before Aristide was deposed in a military coup. Indeed, elite Haitians had good reason to lament Aristide's rise to power. For the first time in the nation's history, the Haitian government committed itself not to consolidate and expand the influence of the rich and powerful but to promote the interests of the poor. Critics in Haiti and the United States pointed to a few notorious examples of elite persecution to discredit the new government, but in fact, Haiti's transition to civilian leadership was distinguished by tranquility and moderation. The Aristide government confiscated no property, and its supposedly rabid followers killed not a single member of the old ruling class.
39
Still, even moderate reform was too much for the opposition. On September 29, 1991, a group of Haitian Army officials launched a military coup, massacring a crowd mustered to protect the new president, while forcing Aristide's withdrawal from Haiti. This time, it was not the U.S. government that provided the means of exile but France, which sped the deposed president to Venezuela. At first the U.S. government publicly opposed the coup. Soon it changed its tune, blaming Aristide for his own downfall. Within days of coming to power, the military junta brandished papers allegedly documenting human rights abuses by the Aristide government. This was followed by “evidence” (fabricated with help from the CIA) that Aristide was mentally unstable, hence unfit for political office. Aristide was “a murderer and psychopath,” one CIA officer testified before a hearing convened by U.S. senator Jesse Helms.
40
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The resurgence of Haiti's old guard pleased U.S. business interests, which wanted nothing so much as a return of low minimum wages and minimal labor protections to Haiti. But the violence attending the coup had an unforeseen consequence, as a new wave of emigrants departed Haiti's shores. In one of his first acts upon taking office, Aristide had dismissed the notorious
chefs de section
, local heads of the Tonton Macoutes, who had terrorized the Haitian people for over a generation. Upon assuming power, Raoul Cédras, leader of the military junta, promptly restored the section chiefs. With zeal that would have shamed the Duvaliers, the section chiefs hunted down Aristide supporters and prodemocracy activists throughout the country. In one case emblematic of the failure of U.S. Haitian policy, thugs in search of an alleged Aristide supporter torched the dental office of the man's brother, Frantz Guerrier, killing Guerrier's daughter and mother, who had taken refuge in his basement. Unsated, the killers returned a few weeks later and murdered the dentist's wife.
41
In another case, soldiers seized a woman named Yolande Jean, who had been working to promote adult literacy. Pregnant at the time, Jean was taken to the notorious Service des Recherches Criminelles police station, headquarters of the sadistic colonel Michel François, where she was beaten unmercifully and ultimately lost her baby.
42