Ian M. MacIsaac: Fear and loathing across Haiti: then, too, but especially now

  I have an article on Michele Bachmann to write, but occasionally one’s sense of justice can be so violated that a joke run for president just doesn’t seem important enough to write about at the moment.

  One of these moments came for me this week. Wikileaks released a series of U.S. diplomatic cables concerning the Caribbean nation of Haiti. The lion’s share of the cables concerned the US-backed 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s perhaps first truly honest leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the leftist Haitian political party, Fanmi Lavalas, which Aristide founded almost thirty years ago and led for many years. In particular the cables concerned the recent exclusion of Fanmi Lavalas from the country’s April presidential election this year, an event which brought the weakness of Haitian electoral democracy to the forefront once again in what U.S. ambassadors called "emasculation of the [Haitian] opposition."