[Marxism] "The bourgeoisie are the reason Aristide couldn't do anything"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

LA Times, March 5, 2004
In Aristide's Wake, a Land Long Divided by Class, Color Explodes
Looting and attacks on businesses and the rich could lead to deepening 
of the nation's poverty.

By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer

PETIONVILLE, Haiti — From the palm-shaded swimming pools and marble 
terraces of this wealthy suburb's hillside villas, the distant squalor 
of Port-au-Prince looks like a tranquil, opalescent coastal setting.

The lavish comforts enjoyed here by Haiti's small class of industrial 
kingpins inspired former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to label them 
"rocks washed by cooling waters," while his people, the impoverished 
masses in the slums below, were "the rocks in the sun, taking the heat."

In a populist drive to show the rich how poverty feels, Aristide once 
urged his followers to drag the rocks from the river into the inferno — 
a metaphorical appeal that lives on after his departure as armed 
supporters continue to loot and burn the businesses of the upper class 
in a frenzy of revenge.

"Aristide sold people that image, that we were the rocks in the water," 
said Michael Madsen, an industrialist of Danish descent who is the 
embodiment of the light-skinned elite whom Aristide demonized as Haiti's 
economic vampires.

"He told his people to take us out, to show us what it was like on the 
outside. Why didn't he encourage them to come themselves into the water? 
Because he was incapable of building anything. He only knew how to destroy."

Two days before Aristide stepped down, gunmen armed by his Lavalas Party 
broke into Madsen's Haiti Terminal port freight yard, he said, 
ransacking the offices to punish him for supporting the political 
opposition. It wasn't long before desperate slum dwellers began looting 
the shipping containers in the yard, which were filled with food, 
clothing and electronics.

In the torrent of reprisals unleashed against his perceived enemies in 
ideology, class and color as his power vanished, Aristide succeeded in 
sharing the pain of the poor with some of the elite that had never felt it.

But the strategy of sacking enterprises owned by Aristide's political 
opponents promises to only widen the social gap between the industrial 
dynasties that have controlled the economy for generations and the 
impoverished masses that will have even fewer jobs. As U.S. Marines 
patrolling the capital refuse to intervene to halt the looting, the 
damage could spread.

Aristide, who departed early Sunday, had long promised a "cleansing 
flood" — his party's translation of the Creole word lavalas, whose close 
French derivation more accurately means "deluge." The inundation of the 
last few days has wiped out the workplaces of thousands and perhaps the 
gains of the relatively few blacks who succeeded, under Aristide, in 
penetrating the so-called bourgeoisie.

How much longer the attacks on the rich will continue is uncertain, but 
the damage has dealt a staggering blow to an economy that was already 
the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and spiraling downward. At least 
$160 million in property has been destroyed, estimated Maurice 
Lafortune, head of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce.

The loss could represent half this devastated nation's private 
investment, said importer Sandro Masucchi, whose Honda auto dealership 
was looted and burned on the morning of Aristide's departure.

The roots of the mob rampage run deep in Haitian history.

The minuscule population of whites and mulattos — as those of mixed 
black-and-white ancestry are called in Haiti — thought to be no more 
than 1% of the populace of 8.5 million, has long occupied a 
disproportionate position in the equally tiny echelon of the wealthy.

That is a consequence of landownership dating to Haiti's 1804 
independence, when some offspring of French colonial masters and African 
slaves acquired property amid the panicked exodus of the Europeans after 
the slave revolt triumphed. With no redistribution of land, the haves 
and have-nots formed along racial lines. Color was so obsessively tied 
to status then that Haitians put names to 64 racial mixtures and 
assigned each a place on the social hierarchy.

In 1884, British Ambassador Spencer St. John wrote prophetically of the 
young state's racial fixation. "There is a marked line drawn between the 
black and the mulatto, which is probably the most disastrous 
circumstance for the future prosperity of the country."

Those now heading family empires insist that the color issue faded at 
the start of the last century, when the same waves of immigration that 
brought Irish, Italians and Germans to work in U.S. factories also 
infused fresh blood into Haiti. Business deals and marriage crossed 
racial lines sooner than in the United States, say the racially mixed 
third- and fourth-generation descendants of the immigrants.

During the 30-year dictatorship of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his 
son, Jean-Claude, the mulatto industrialists prospered and paid little 
heed to either the poverty that afflicted the masses or the repression 
of the Duvaliers' political opponents. The elite's protectors and 
political delegates were the generals of the Haitian National Army.

When Aristide rose to national prominence from his Catholic pulpit in 
the late 1980s, he embraced a socialist ideology equating ownership with 
exploitation and encouraged the homeless to build shantytowns on 
industrialists' land. He cast factory owners as modern-day enslavers for 
the paltry wages they paid, sowing discord in the workplace. Business 
owners were so angered that some backed the 1991 military coup that 
deposed Aristide.

That purported collusion with the army by a few of the most powerful 
families — the Brandts, the Mevs, the Accras — allowed Aristide to taint 
the entire industrial class as dictatorship's paymasters. He also 
dissolved the army and used jobs in the police force to reward political 
patronage, essentially destroying the security institutions and 
replacing them with armed bands of hungry street kids.

"The bourgeoisie are the reason Aristide couldn't do anything," said 
Katho Laguerre, a 21-year-old Cite Soleil slum dweller, gesturing toward 
the hills of Petionville above the capital. "The bourgeoisie have 
everything, and we have nothing. That's why Aristide said we could build 
houses here, that this was the living room of the people."

full: http://www.latimes.com/

--

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism