Chronicle of a coup.

AuthorDudley, Steven

In Haiti, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government was falling, you got the feeling that everyone thought he could be president.

Take Eddy Joseph, small-town schoolteacher with thick cheeks and a wide smile. Joseph's only political experience was his run for mayor in the small town of St. Marc just a few years ago. He lost. But in the revolt that swept through the country a few days earlier and eventually forced Aristide from power, Joseph saw an opportunity. And in a man with a microphone, Joseph saw a thrum.

"Are you an international journalist?" he poked me in the chest as I walked the debris-ridden streets of the port city of Gonaives, the place where Haiti's rebellion got its spark. After I answered in the affirmative, Joseph straightened his sharp red tie, brushed the dust from his dark blue suit and tricolored sash, and centered his black sailor's cap.

"It's a pleasure for me to be here, in front of the international world to talk about myself and to say what do I think about the problem of Haiti," he began, speaking forcefully into the microphone.

"Well, as you can see here, in this poster, my name is Eddy Joseph," he continued, before slipping into third person. "Eddy Joseph is a patriot, clean and competent, and he says that before uprooting the rotten post, we have to prepare the new post."

Aristide is gone from Haiti now, if not done. After being forced out by the United States, the former Haitian president made several dramatic calls to the press saying he'd been abducted by U.S. Marines. This may have been true. The Marines took over Haiti twice in the last century, once for about twenty years.

But what was also true was that Aristide wasn't a very good democrat. Long before the United States dragged him to the airplane on February 29 and packed him to the Central African Republic, Aristide had lost his luster.

He began his career as a popular priest and was Haiti's first democratically elected president in 1990. His bio is impressive: An orphan who became a priest prodigy (in addition to Creole, he speaks French, German, English, and Spanish), he developed into a stirring liberation theologian who rose to the presidency of this small Caribbean country. Along the way, he fought the Duvalier family dictatorship and several military juntas, he convinced the most powerful nation in the world to send 23,000 troops to restore him to power after being ousted in a military coup, and he seduced the foreign media to write his fairy tale, and he persuaded the international community of donors to give money in large bundles. Aristide was a ray of hope for a country that had ceased to function: 90 percent of the land is deforested; health conditions are some of the worst in the world; corruption is endemic.

But hope quickly gave way to despair. By many accounts, Aristide had rigged legislative elections in 2000; he'd armed his supporters with automatic weapons and used them to intimidate and assassinate his opponents; he'd constructed a system of patronage that included his wife (she became the owner of the second largest cellular phone company in the country). Meanwhile, he'd bought shares of several media companies for himself and sent his thugs to attack the media outlets that were against him.

There are, of course, defenders of Aristide...

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