All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest today is Jeb Sprague.
He is studying for his PhD at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
He won the Project Censored Award in 2008 for an article co-authored with Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre from Port-au-Prince and has written for IPS News, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Z Magazine and numerous Haitian papers as well.
He's got a book that's called Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti.
Welcome to the show, Jeb.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott, I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, good.
I'm glad you're doing well and thank you very much for joining us.
This is very interesting stuff.
I read a few of your articles here and let's see.
Oh, it's not until next August that the book comes out.
That's too bad.
But I guess that'll give us a chance to reprise this whole interview then.
It'll come out a little bit before that, I think in around May.
Oh, OK, that's good.
OK, right on.
And again, it's called Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti.
And now I have to admit to you that my background knowledge on Haiti pretty much stops after the reign of Baby Doc Duvalier, you know, because I studied this in high school, I think was the last time I really learned the history of Haiti.
And of course, there was, you know, the whole reign of Aristide and then the coup and all this.
But my knowledge really breaks down in this story.
So I was hoping you could kind of, first of all, give us the background, work in the earthquake and all that stuff if you need to, and basically explain how politics in Haiti works.
And then we can get especially to these right wing paramilitary forces and perhaps America's role in them.
Yeah, yeah, I can start off with just giving you a brief historical background.
So Haiti and the only country directly bordering it, the Dominican Republic, the people living on in these areas.
This was also the this is the island of Hispaniola.
It was the first land discovered that Columbus landed on.
And so after the original indigenous people, the Arawak, were eliminated, basically what happened was European colonialists brought in slaves.
They were the the only people they could they could get to do the labor and the sugar field.
So they enslaved hundreds of thousands of black Africans, brought them over to to Haiti.
And in the late 18th century, you have slave revolution.
And by 1804, the Haitian people had gained their independence.
And in that struggle, something around 150 or 160,000 slaves were killed.
Fifty thousand French soldiers, what's been estimated at about 50,000 English soldiers as well, died.
And so you had a massive conflict on the island.
And and also as part of that, Haiti was the most lucrative slave colony in the world.
It was really the it was the jewel of the French empire.
And so after you have this successful slave revolution, the only successful revolution in history to found an independent country, the French basically they had a strong enough navy where they could blockade the country so the country would have no contact with the outside world.
And so the Haitians were forced their government after government was forced to pay money reparation to to their former to their former colonizer.
And this money went to the old slave owners.
And so by 1900, something like 85 percent of the Haitian government's budget was going to pay off, going to going to pay this foreign debt, quote unquote, foreign debt to France.
And so there's this long history of the country basically being starved of financial resources to build up any sort of public infrastructure.
And so flash forward.
So my book really is about the the capacity of the rich and powerful to do extreme violence against the poor.
And it looks into contemporary paramilitary violence.
But but how all this in contemporary form, how it came about was really starting back with the U.S. occupation of Haiti that that happened between 1915 and 1934, where you had U.S.
Marines landed in the country to basically protect U.S. business interests, you know, to to help them expand.
And in that occupation, something like 15000 Haitians were killed.
And what Haitian intellectual Patrick Ali called the poison gift.
Now, the poison gift was the the the new Haitian military that received close training by U.S.
Marines.
And they they made it into a force that could work along with these these section chiefs, these this sort of rural organized this these rural armed groups that work alongside the Haitian army and elite to repress the poor wanting wanting democracy in their country.
And so now moving decades forward into the 1950s, you know, after various movements, social movements to to for democracy and rights and justice, you have the Duvalier dictatorship rose in 1957 and Papa Doc was in power until 1971.
And then his son came into office and was in power until 1986.
And under their rule, they founded the Tonton Macoutes, which probably a lot of people have heard of, which was this very extreme, violent paramilitary organization that worked closely alongside the Haitian military to repress the people.
And they also founded a group called the Leopard Battalion, which was trained and funded in part by the by the CIA.
Now, somewhere in here, I have to wonder, is there did they even train for a pretended war with any kind of foreign power?
I mean, you think a Haiti, the last thing you think of is a bunch of foreign enemies that they would need an army to defend themselves from.
Or had they always just had this basically domestic internal martial law sort of role?
Yeah, that's a fascinating question, because in a country when it was first independent for a hundred years, yes, they faced repeated foreign intervention invasion.
But what happened was when the when the U.S. helped inform this military, it sort of continued the U.S. occupation, because even though the U.S. left, they had this allied force in in Haiti.
And I wonder, do they even pretend that this is about their national security, protecting them from foreign enemies at all?
Or is the military there just plain and simple has always been a domestic force?
They did under Duvalier, they they they they pretended like, OK, we need you know, we need this military.
There's a large Dominican military next door.
You know, what if the Cubans were to come after us?
We need our military to defend our country.
But then what happened was the military was, as your listeners can guess, was used to repress the people and maintain this kleptocracy where you have this tiny elite in office and, you know, these groups, groups around them hanging on their coattails.
And so and so so finally, when when when Baby Doc was thrown out of power in 1986, you have this sort of slow transition to democracy.
There's a few more short lived dictators after him.
But in 1991, you have Haiti's first freely elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who's elected and he comes in with this big platform of, you know, fighting corruption and and building literacy camps and centers and doing all sorts of things to help help the poor in the country that really challenged elite rule.
And so he was quickly overthrown in September of 1991, only seven and a half months after he was in office.
Sort of the people that Al-Saddam had received the wink from the first, the pop-up Bush's administration, which they call him in Haiti.
And and then but in 1994, Aristide was able to return to power with support of the U.S. and some of the international community.
And it was very it was very controversial.
Hold it right there, Jeb.
We got the music playing means we got to go out and take this break.
But it's very interesting stuff.
When we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about the history leading up to the situation as it stands now.
Brutal dictatorship.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jeb Sprague.
He's written all over the place about Haiti, and he's got a book coming out about their paramilitary forces.
And it's a story of American intervention and it's a story of domestic intervention to America intervening for the dictators, for the Democrats.
I guess, Jeb, I'd have to say, you know, up front without knowing too much about it, I'd be surprised if any of Aristide's social programs really worked or or did anything.
I mean, I guess if he was able to really extend political voting power, that kind of thing to the lowest level, that could probably make the most difference as far as democratization goes.
But when he was overthrown, when was he overthrown last?
In 2004.
In 2004.
And then was that just a George Bush operation or not?
Well, it is.
And it's also bigger than that.
And so, you know, after the first coup, you have around five, six thousand people killed and then Aristide was brought back.
His people were brought back, but they were severely restrained.
And the U.S., basically what they did was they integrated this group from the former military into Haiti's police.
And so that's kind of where my book starts off.
And what I show is that this group that was integrated into Haiti's police basically formed the core of a new paramilitary organization in 2000 and 2004 that launched this sort of insurrection against Haiti's democracy.
And they were really supported by these sort of sweatshop owners and these big wealthy people in Haiti and by some elites in the Dominican Republic right across the border because they didn't like the elected government in Haiti because the government had done away with the military and Dominican elites and military were afraid.
So you're saying that when Bill Clinton in 94, when he sent, I guess, the Marines to go and reinstall Aristide in power, he sort of made a compromise with those who had overthrown him that, OK, but we'll make we'll put your guys in charge of the police state there.
And then, of course, once they were strong enough, they went ahead and got rid of them again.
What happened was what happened was is that the dictatorship that came into power in 1991 after they overthrew Haiti's democracy is that they were so brutal and so violent that their backers in Washington could just know they had to change, change, change gears.
And so they were basically this huge campaign by Haitians, Haitians in America to bring in to bring back their elected government.
And so the government was brought back.
But the problem was it was severely restrained.
The World Bank, the IMS, they all came in there and started to force the government to drop tariffs on rice like that that protected their domestic rice industry.
And, you know, they manipulated their security and all these sorts of things.
So they they it you know, it was it was good that the dictatorship's violence stopped.
That happened between 91 and 94 was the only way to do it.
But at the same time, they they they also, you know, manipulated the situation there.
And so so then so my book basically looked at this this new paramilitary force from 2000 and 2004 and then what's happened after the earthquake and this sort of resurrection of political violence and then them running, running, running attacks into Haiti, killing a lot of people.
You know, I've interviews with victims of violence.
I I went into a private security, quote unquote, private security camp, which is run by paramilitaries.
They still have the Duvalier red and black flag.
Yeah, I read that article 30 minutes, 30 minutes outside of Port-au-Prince.
And the U.S. embassy still is in communication and from time to time works with with a lot of these people.
So it's a it's a scary situation.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm sorry.
I neglected to mention this, Jeb, in your introduction, which is your blog.
It's called Jebsprog.blogspot.com.
That's the address.
It's called Notes and Analysis and lots of very interesting stuff here.
I'll let you go on about that camp some more if you want.
And the paramilitaries, basically former military special forces types integrated with the police now or more and more.
And then I also wanted to point to this article, if I can find the one about where you quote, I don't know, a half dozen or more State Department documents from WikiLeaks about the American involvement step by step in the creation of these paramilitary groups.
And yet there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance in there, if I understood it right.
When I read it, it sounded sort of like the American tactic was to do this, but to try at the same time to limit the harm that was coming.
Not that they were very good at it, but they were saying they were the Americans were the ones imposing the limits on how many soldiers can be integrated into so many different police departments, that kind of thing.
Yeah, so yeah, you're talking about the period after the coup in 2004, the U.S. and the U.N. basically helped.
And so there was a new unelected government that came into office, the new dictatorship in 2004.
And so the U.S. and U.N. basically helped integrate these paramilitaries that had been attacking Haiti's democracy into the police force.
And so I found out that before WikiLeaks released everything that was public, we were able to get these documents that showed that they had integrated 400 paramilitaries into a police force.
And these are criminals that are integrated into the police.
So there's long term implications in doing something like that.
And then the other thing that I've gotten for the book that I think is valuable for documenting all this is that for the last few years, I had been filing Freedom of Information Act FOIA, which is a really important thing.
If anyone out there ever wants to do it, you can get a lot of interesting information from foreign embassies around U.S. embassies around the world.
I was able to get all of these FOIA documents from the embassy that basically detailed their communications with people in Haiti.
And you see, you know, how they're working with some of these new neo-duvalieres and some very sketchy situations.
Like I have one document about a CIA agent who is going into a Gonaive city and meeting with narco-trafficking police and this sort of stuff.
And now this guy Martelly, the current president, is he one of these baby doc types?
Well, so what happened was, I don't know if any of your listeners have ever heard of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, where she talks about how after big crises occur, like with Katrina and things like that, that what you have, you have these sort of vulture companies that go in and they're able to take advantage of this sort of drama.
And, you know, people aren't prepared to fight this off.
And they don't, you know, there's a crisis.
And so these companies can come in and take advantage of it.
And so that is what has happened after the earthquake.
And a lot of aid agencies have sort of worked in connection with this.
And so what happened was in 2011, in March of 2011, you had a very right-wing president elected in Haiti, which he only actually received 16.7 or possibly less of the registered voters.
Registered voters actually voted for him, 16.7 percent.
And what had happened was that Haiti's most popular party, Lavalas, had basically been banned from, they weren't allowed to take part in the election.
And so they had these real controversial elections that brought Martelly to office.
Now, what's happened is, is that the inner circle around Martelly, they're all the sons and grandchildren of the Duvalieres.
And so these, the old school dictatorship and their goons basically handed off the baton to their children and their grandchildren.
And they're the people that are around Martelly.
And so right now there's a campaign to revive Haiti's old military.
And so they can use that if they need to, to once again repress, repress the poor.
And one other, one other point I just want to say when you're talking about Aristide's government office, there were a lot of problems, but a lot of those were because of the severe destabilization against his government.
And there are, there's actually a really interesting study called We Will Not Forget, published by the Haiti Action Committee, where they document a lot of these things that were not really reported by the corporate media, but the literacy centers, public works, water works.
There was actually a major water, a pollution water program that was going to be built on the main river where cholera started when a UN soldiers had built these septic tanks that they weren't properly disposing of their waste.
And they were from, I think Nepal and I'm not sure, but one of those small countries above India and they had basically, that's what started cholera in the country.
Actually, hold it right there.
Let me ask you this, Jeb, can I keep you one more segment here?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cause I still got, you know, at least a handful of questions here.
We'll be back with Jeb Sprog talking about Haiti on Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jeb Sprog.
He's got a new book coming out in the spring called Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti.
And he's written a bunch of articles for Al Jazeera and all over the place, including his blog, Notes and Analysis at jebsprog.blogspot.com.
WikiLeaks reveal US and UN officials oversaw integration of ex-army paramilitaries into Haiti's police force was the headline I started reading there accidentally at jebsprog.blogspot.com.
And so, yeah, you know, I was going to ask you about that, but couldn't come up with context to bring it up, but you went ahead and brought it up right before we're going out to break there.
After the earthquake, the United Nations came to save the day and it wasn't the earthquake that gave everybody cholera.
It was the United Nations.
Yeah, so there's this after the coup in 2004, there was this multinational force that was set up in Haiti, MINUSTA, I forget the full name of the acronym, but it's the UN forces, troops from Jordan, from Nepal, from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, from all over the place.
Actually, I got roughed up by a few of them some years ago when I was taking photos, but it's, you know, it's been a pretty brutal force on the poor in that country.
And you see them, if you go there with their blue helmets going around with heavy weaponry, I think it's been cheaper to deploy them, for example, than to have like U.S.
Marines or something.
So we see that more and more in different areas around the world where UN occupation forces are deployed rather than troops from Western countries.
It's a cheap way to do that sort of thing.
Yeah, well, and it comes with extra legitimacy, too, because of those lovely baby blue helmets.
That means that they only mean well, no matter what.
Yeah, and also the other thing you see in Haiti is the government has been almost completely eroded and privatized.
And so the only real social safety net that a lot of people have are these NGOs and charity organizations.
And the problem with that is that there's no sort of long term sovereign ability for these people to, you know, to have things like health care and stuff.
Something like half of the surgeries are done by Cubans, Cuban volunteers that go to Haiti, which are sort of an unsung heroes that the press would never, ever talk about.
The fact that Cubans do the majority of surgeries in the country.
Another one of the one other real positive group is Partners in Health, which is an NGO.
It's one of the best NGOs that works in the country.
This doctor, Paul Farmer, works with and what they do is they they they work with the poor and they work with local governments to create like sovereign health centers where people can have have the long term ability to get to get care from doctors instead of just NGOs to come in with a grant for a year and then leave and close shop.
So it's a very different situation than a lot of than than we're used to, even though we have our own crisis around health care here and here in our country.
Yeah.
Well, you know, really, all this comes back down to, in a sense, whether there's any such thing as the law or not.
Obviously, we're doing a poor and poor job of pretending all the time here in the United States.
But, you know, there is a parliament in Haiti, right?
Does the average guy have a say in who sits in it whatsoever?
Does it have any power over the decisions of the prime minister and the president?
Yeah, the parliament has a lot of power in the country.
They're able to they can stop the president from deciding who the prime they need to support the president's nominee for prime minister.
And the prime minister really is the one that runs the day to day operations of the government in Haiti.
But the problem is, is that they have the CEP, which decides who can run an election.
So what they do is they just ban political parties that are too close with the with the poor masses in the country.
And so they always have these sort of transnationally oriented technocrats that are from aid agencies or they're with the right wing in the country.
And so that's a continuing occurrence.
And then what happens is when when the poor get together and they organize, then you see these periodic doses of violence that are that are unleashed upon them.
And that's another story that lots of times hasn't been too covered by the media.
What happens is that when journalists go to Haiti, if they speak any other language than English, they're going to speak French.
And most of the people that speak French in the country are the better off, the small middle class or elite.
And so the majority poor speak Creole.
And so and also journalists are wary to go into a lot of the slums in Haiti, as you can imagine.
So you don't really get the story from those people.
And when they get rounded up and slaughtered by paramilitaries, it's the story that lots of times doesn't isn't reported.
Right now, can you give us some specifics about the kinds of abuses we're seeing?
You say rounded up and slaughtered.
Is that going on right now or that was going on six weeks ago or what exactly are you saying there?
Between 2004, 2005, 2006, the paramilitaries were real active in the country, working alongside police.
Today, there's you have the UN and police forces more taking charge.
The paramilitaries are more running private security camps or they've been integrated into the police.
But what you what we've seen under Martelly is that he's used private security to actually break up a lot of these tent cities that have been set up for people after the earthquake, because what happened was then this is debated.
But some some people estimate that was sixty, seventy thousand people died in the earthquake.
There's also estimates as high as four hundred and fifty thousand.
So there's a lot of people that died in that earthquake and a lot of people, millions that were made around a million or more that were made homeless.
And so you have these vast tent cities that appeared in the country and a lot of aid agencies going in and trying to help.
But what what happened is these tent cities were built or they were set up on land owned by elites.
And so a year, year and a half after the earthquake, these elites are pressuring the police to go in and kick people off of their land.
And and there hasn't been any sort of mass housing, house building or any there hasn't been like a some sort of huge infrastructure project to build to build adequate housing for these people.
And so you see violence there with with camps being broken up.
But another positive story is that there's a story last week, for example, where in one of the biggest tent cities men have organized to they have these patrols like at night and during the day to stop armed groups.
And there was a group that had had rapes and committed violence against women.
And so you have these sort of collectives that are forming to to protect themselves.
And so that's a that's a positive, positive sign there.
Yeah, well, it sure seems like a tough situation.
It sure seems like, you know, whatever dastardly deeds are going on there, the Americans can always be counted on to back the worst, most powerful players against the regular people of that crappy little island where they're stuck.
Yeah, I would just add that this has a long history and we see it in a lot of other countries in Latin America, too, where I would just tell people to be very critical when you read about, for example, I was watching the Republican debate and they were attacking socialism in Latin America and all this sorts of stuff.
And I forget two of the guys that were saying that I don't know, especially is the worst.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if they've actually ever gone into like a poor neighborhood in Venezuela or who they really like to attack.
If you go into those poor neighborhoods, you'll see that there are the first time they have medical access.
And and they did actually, even though, you know, we are time and again in the media told to despise and hate the elected president of Venezuela.
He was actually elected.
And, you know, that those people's decision is they want to throw him out of office.
And I think we have to be very careful about sort of this long history of intervention in Latin America, like in Nicaragua in the 1980s, when Reagan supported the Contras, they committed something to kill something like 50000 people.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, even from the empire's point of view, all they've done is create all this blowback.
I mean, when they talk about socialism in South America, all they mean is they won't take IMF loans anymore.
They won't put their head in our noose for us anymore.
All right.
Anyway, I'm sorry we're all out of time, but I thank you very much for your time.
Jeb Sprague, everybody.
Check out his blog, Notes and Analysis at Jeb Sprague dot blogspot dot com.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
