Hatchet job on Haiti.

• Author: Rice, Michael
• Position: Letter to the Editor

Readers who may have been as confused as I by Steven Dudley's hatchet job on Haiti's President Jean-Bertrand Aristide ("Chronicle of a Coup," May issue) would gain some historical perspective by reading Paul Farmer.

Aristide became Haiti's first-ever democratically elected head of state in December 1990, with 67 percent of the vote in a field of twelve candidates. Instead of cutting this fledgling democracy some slack and some forgiveness of loans incurred by the preceding dictatorships, the U.S. has persistently...