Low-Intensity Warfare in Haiti
An Interview with Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
by Mara Delt ****The first of two parts

Direct military assault is only one of several means which the U.S. employs to impose its will on nations throughout the Third World. Political destabilization, media demonization, proxy guerrilla harassment, diplomatic machinations, and economic sanctions are also weapons in Washington's arsenal. These are the tools of "low-intensity warfare," a topic on which Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is an expert. An assistant professor of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, Nelson-Pallmeyer is the author of numerous articles and books on U.S. foreign policy including "War Against the Poor: Low Intensity Conflict and Christian Faith" (Orbis Books 1991); "Brave New World Order" (Orbis Books 1992); and "School of the Assassins: The Case for Closing the School of the Americas" (Orbis Books 1997).

Haïti Progrès contributor Mara Delt interviewed Nelson-Pallmeyer on Dec. 14, just before the Dec. 17 attack on the National Palace, which can be categorized as just one more battle in the low-intensity war against the Haitian people.

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Mara Delt: What is low-intensity conflict?
 

Nelson-Pallmeyer: Low-intensity conflict is a U.S. military strategy for intervention in non-traditional settings. It's primarily directed toward countries in the so-called Third World or Two-Thirds World. It's a type of warfare that implies, or involves, not direct combat between soldiers, not a high technology warfare as you see in the bombing of Afghanistan or Iraq.... It's implemented through diplomatic channels, through economic leverage through institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank. It's basically designed to achieve objectives that are similar to war. You want a country to capitulate. You want a country to do what you want them to do, but you fight the war through non-traditional channels. 
 

Mara Delt: Does it follow a pattern or stages?
 

Nelson-Pallmeyer: There are typical things that you find in the package. This warfare strategy really emerged after the U.S. suffered a defeat in Indochina, and it was thoroughly tested in Central America in the 1980s. There you saw, for example, diplomatic aspects of warfare when the U.S. tried to isolate the country of Nicaragua. You saw the U.S. using diplomatic leverage on neighboring countries like Honduras to become a base of support for the Nicaraguan "Contras." There were economic aspects of the war, a kind of embargo against Nicaragua that prevented trade. There were economic, diplomatic efforts to try to isolate Nicaragua by getting their allies not to trade or provide aid. This also involved the use of debt as a kind of weapon. They used the indebtedness of neighboring countries, like Honduras for example, as leverage to get them to open up their country to be a base for their destabilization campaign against Nicaragua. 

At the same time they used the warfare against the Nicaraguan people to avert that country's capacity to put its economic resources towards development; resources were instead put into defense against the warfare. All those are aspects.

Another important aspect in Central America was psychological warfare, and that takes different forms as well. Sometimes psychological warfare can mean funding terrorism. The U.S., for example, created a CIA manual for the "Contras" in Nicaragua on how to maximize the psychological impact of terrorizing civilians. So it can take that form.

In the case of Haiti, what you see is just an attempt to wear down the population by holding up key economic aid, trying to create disenchantment with the government whose inclination is to try to meet the needs of the people. All those are standard practices. But in more recent cases the U.S. has preferred to intervene through its economic leverage, trying to shape countries' economic policies in ways that the U.S. prefers, but which often has a very negative impact on people on the ground.
 

Mara Delt: When you talk about capitulating to their goals, what is the U.S. objective then in the end?
 

Nelson-Pallmeyer: The U.S. objective is simply to control the economic decisions of a country. I argue in my writings that the preferred instrument of U.S. foreign policy from about 1945 to 1980 was military dictatorships. I would say that between 1980 and 1990 there were two tracks in U.S. policy. One was actually increasing support for repressive governments in Central America and elsewhere. But at the same time, you had a movement in the direction of utilizing debt as leverage, and, for the International Monetary Fund, structural adjustment programs became more important in the 1980s. Today, the U.S. prefers to exercise its power through economic channels. It wants a favorable investment economy. It wants to make sure that unions aren't strong. It wants to make sure that a country is not diverting its resources to the needs of its people, resources that are necessary for paying debt and doing other things. So what the U.S. wants is control, economic control, and it will use whatever leverage it has.

I would say, from my understanding of what's happening in Haiti, that the other thing the U.S. doesn't want is a progressive government in power. It wants a government more valuable to its own interests and power. Holding back the [$146 million] Inter-American Development Bank loan (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 37, 11/28/01) is a way of trying to force a change of government. The U.S. doesn't want authentic democracy. It wants democracy within various narrow channels that it dictates in terms of what economic choices are available to countries and peoples.
 

Mara Delt: People often ask what is the U.S. interest in Haiti. Why do they care about Haiti, what does Haiti have?
 

Nelson-Pallmeyer: That's a really good question. The same question was asked about Nicaragua and El Salvador. What's the big issue? El Salvador didn't have that many resources, Nicaragua didn't have a whole lot, and Haiti doesn't have a lot. But I think the U.S. really fears independent democracy because independent democracies are what the world desperately needs. By that I mean democracies that can really function, in which governments have the power to shape the economic decisions of their countries, to try to reorient their economic priorities to meet the basic needs of their people. In Haiti that doesn't cost the U.S. a lot. Whatever happens in Haiti isn't going to impact the U.S. a great deal. The same thing could be said about El Salvador, Cuba, or Nicaragua. But when you take those examples together and then you spread that model elsewhere and if, for example, Mexico had an authentic democratic government that would reorient resources -- that would be a challenge. 

There's a new mythology that guides the world today -- at least the world as created by U.S. policymakers -- and that is that globalization is good. What is not said is that globalization means corporate-led globalization. The reality is that corporate-led globalization is very good for about 20% of humanity, and it's very bad for probably half of humanity, and it puts the rest in very vulnerable positions. You could probably give me statistics on Haiti, but worldwide, about 3 billion people are living and dying on less than $2 a day. According to the UN, the three richest people in the world have assets greater than the gross domestic products of the 48 poorest countries combined. In that kind of world, any government which is really independent and which is going to try to redirect economic resources to meet the needs of the majority will be treated by the U.S. as an enemy because if that example were to spread to countries throughout the world (which in my view has to happen if we're going to respond to the issues of poverty), then that does become a problem for the U.S., for U.S. economic interests.
 

Mara Delt: The opposition in Haiti refuses to accept the results of recent elections and has since been working to create instability in the country. Is that a technique that the U.S. typically uses in all the countries? 
 

Nelson-Pallmeyer: Absolutely. You saw the exact same pattern in Nicaragua, for example. The U.S. first worked to destabilize the Sandinista-led government in Nicaragua and then poured millions of dollars into consolidating a right-wing coalition with a centrist face, and then communicated to the electorate -- through the invasion of Panama and an ongoing threat of continued warfare -- that if the people didn't vote properly they could expect ongoing sanctions and possibly a military invasion. 

We don't even have to go back to that earlier history of 1990. We can go back to the recent elections in Nicaragua where the U.S. ambassador basically said in newspapers and on television in Nicaragua that, if people voted for [Sandinista presidential candidate] Daniel Ortega, that would simply be unacceptable to the US.
 

Mara Delt: The U.S. ambassador said that publicly?
 

Nelson-Pallmeyer: Yes, basically. It was that blatant. The U.S. communicated in no uncertain terms that an electoral victory by Ortega would cause serious problems with U.S. relations. That, in my view, is a very clear intervention into the democratic process and that, in a sense, pre-determines an outcome. If a government had been elected in Nicaragua that the U.S. didn't like, then you would see a new stage kick in, similar to what Haiti is experiencing now. 

So, yes, this has been done and continues to be done, over and over again. In Haiti now, because Aristide was elected with a pretty overwhelming majority, I think the U.S. probably is trying to send a very clear message that Aristide will only be acceptable to the U.S. if he governs outside of his commitment to improve the living situation of the majority of people in Haiti. 
 

Mara Delt: The opposition continues to challenge the validity of recent local elections because Haiti has moved towards decentralization and that's where the power is, at the base, with the local representation. That's not in the interest of the opposition, and it's certainly not in the interest of the U.S..
 

Nelson-Pallmeyer: From what I can gather in Haiti, part of a classic low-intensity conflict strategy is that you really try to make the economy scream. You do that in part because you're trying to erode the base of popular support for the government that you don't like. So in this case, by holding up those loans, which would largely go to healthcare and water development and other things, the U.S. is squeezing the constituency that is probably most supportive of the Aristide government and the decentralized process that you just named. The whole purpose of the strategy is to create instability in the country and to eat away at, to erode, the popular base of a popular government. That's the purpose of the strategy.

(to be continued)

Introducing "Open Gate," 
An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
by Paul Laraque

A version of the following text was read by the author at the Poetry Project in Manhattan on Dec. 19, 2001. The event -- which featured readings by other Haitian poets including Max Manigat, Pierre-Richard Narcisse, Cauvin Paul, and Denizé Lauture, as well as North American poet Jack Hirschman -- spotlighted Open Gate, the first bilingual collection of modern Haitian Creole poetry available to English readers.

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It was in 1993. The Haitian military and civilian terrorists formed in the United States had already overthrown the freely elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his popular government. The new gangs massacred thousands of poor peasants and workers and did whatever they could to crush the democratic movement before it could object to capitalist exploitation and foreign domination. Thieves and murderers of Haitian descent were expelled from U.S. jails to Haiti, where they transferred the masses' wrath from the political arena to the social field. 

My youngest brother, Guy F. Laraque -- who was also a poet but not a militant like my other brother Franck and me -- was killed near his residence in Delmas, a suburb of the capital, Port-au-Prince, because his murderers needed his car for criminal activities. President Aristide was then in Washington D.C..

Alexander Taylor called me from Connecticut to ask what he could do to help. Alexander is the co-director of Curbstone Press, which had published my selection of French poems Camourade, translated into English by Rosemary Manno with an introduction by Jack Hirschman, my brother in poetry and in Marxism. I immediately thought of an anthology of modern Haitian poetry, both in French, the official language of my country, which we mastered to fight our masters, and in Creole, the mother tongue of the Haitian people, inherited from the African slaves. The slaves also created a new religion "vodou" (voodoo), a spiritual cement in their struggle for the abolition of slavery and the independence of Haiti, the first black republic in the world.

When I consulted Jack Hirschman, he wanted U.S. to concentrate only on modern Haitian Creole poetry. And that's how "Open Gate" was born.

From the almost 40 authors to the co-editors, from the two translators, Jack Hirschman and Boadiba, a female Haitian poet fluent in French, Creole and English, to the publishers Alexander Taylor, Judy Doyle and other members of Curbstone Press, this wonderful book is the result of extraordinary international teamwork. Today, we have with us a few of the poets who participated in this "groundbreaking anthology," as Martin Espada puts it. Unfortunately, we could not find Suze Baron, the only woman among the Haitian poets living here in the New York City. In a country dominated by men like Haiti, she is the symbol of the struggle against the triple discrimination inflicted on women on the basis of sex, color, and class. As the conscience of our people, we, the poets, reaffirm our solidarity with women, who represent in flesh and in spirit, a vital necessity and the beauty of the world.

Two days ago, on Monday, Dec. 17, a group of men, heavily armed, came from the Dominican Republic, our neighbor, to overthrow the Haitian government. The masses took to the streets, drove the traitors away, and sent a powerful message to the Haitian mulatto and black elite, and to both Washington and Santo Domingo: "No more military coups with the complicity of foreign powers." The government will probably take advantage of the situation but, actually, it is the victory of the people.

I would like to conclude with the following Creole verses translated into English by Jack Hirschman. They were written for my wife Marcelle Laraque, my life companion for 48 years and my main inspiration in poetry.
 

legzil san ou ta lanfè

ou rache-m lan bouch dezespwa

lan fredi ou pote chalè

ou se limyè lan fènwa.
 

exile without you would be hell

you pulled me from the mouth of despair

in the cold you bring fire

you're the light in the darkness
 

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"Open Gate," an anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry. Edited by Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman. Translated by Jack Hirschman and Boadiba. Published by Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson St., Windham, CT 06226 Tel: 860-423-5110.