The U.S. government is engaged in a systematic campaign to vilify and overthrow Haiti’s elected government. Millions of North Americans are either unaware of this assault or have swallowed a host of lies and distortions about Haiti being repeated regularly by the mainstream media.

This is the point of departure of Hidden from the Headlines: The U.S. War Against Haiti, a booklet recently published by the California-based Haiti Action Committee (HAC).

“Since the election of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2000, the United States has moved to sabotage Haiti’s fledgling democracy through an economic aid embargo, massive funding of elite opposition groups, support for paramilitary coup attempts, and a propaganda offensive against the Aristide government,” the authors write, noting that U.S. offensives against Iraq, Venezuela and Cuba are more well known. “Hidden from the headlines for years, this campaign has now become an open effort to destroy a progressive, popularly elected government.”

Smartly produced with graphics and photographs, the 16-page publication offers a concise riposte to the principal falsehoods that the mainstream media bandies about: that Haiti’s press is silenced, that the opposition is repressed, and that human rights are systematically violated. “The reality is that Haiti has largely eliminated the human rights violations of the dictatorship period and is now struggling with the human rights problems of a fledgling democracy,” the booklet states. “While political violence continues – egged on by the United States’ attempts to destabilize the Haitian government – there is no pattern of systematic state repression.”

Authors Laura Flynn, Pierre Labossière and Robert Roth outline how Washington has targeted the Haitian people through an economic aid embargo, which has contributed to less clean water, paved roads, and stocked clinics, more disease outbreaks, road accidents, and illiteracy. “Since December 2001, the Haitian gourde has lost 69% of its value and Haiti’s foreign reserves have shrunk by 50%, largely due to the embargo,” they write.

They also lay out why and how “the U.S. has spent millions to fund the ‘Democratic Convergence,’ an opposition group conceived and orchestrated by the International Republican Institute,” which is an arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The “Contra war against Haiti” by the opposition’s “armed wing,” a guerilla force made up largely of former Haitian soldiers based in the neighboring Dominican Republic, is also detailed.

Hidden from the Headlines sums up many of the Haitian government’s worthy accomplishments, which the U.S. corporate press effectively whites-out. “More schools were built in Haiti from 1994-2000 than between 1804 and 1994,” the authors point out, “many in rural areas where no schools existed previously.” They also cite progress made in agriculture, public transportation, infrastructure, health care, AIDS prevention and treatment, and defending children’s rights. “Clearly, these programs represent a progressive agenda, initiated under the most trying conditions,” the booklet says.

Perfectly designed as a publication you can stick in someone’s hand at a demonstration or the water cooler to clear up multi-faceted mystification, the booklet often speaks directly to misguided maximalists and progressives distracted by secondary issues, such as Aristide’s inevitable mistakes or shortcomings. “The United States is attacking Haiti’s government and popular organizations not because Haiti is a compliant partner, but precisely because it represents an alternative to globalization and corporate domination,” the HAC responds to doctrinaire critics.

“So much disinformation has been given to the broad American public, and also to solidarity organizations, that we felt we had to set the record straight,” said co-author Labossière, an agronomist and trade unionist. “In the corporate media, you don’t see the realities of Haiti reflected. Basically they give the right-wing’s version of events. But the public and solidarity community need the real story about what’s going on in Haiti.”

Individual copies or bulk orders of Hidden from the Headlines can be ordered for $1 apiece from the Haiti Action Committee at P.O. Box 2218, Berkeley, CA 94702. For more information, visit their website at www.haitiaction.net.

Last December, after a powwow with the International Republican Institute in Santo Domingo, the Haitian opposition returned to Port-au-Prince to establish the “Group of 184,” a supposedly broad front of “civil society” organizations modeled on similar anti-government coalitions in Chavez’s Venezuela and Allende’s Chile.

The head of the “184" today is André “Andy” Apaid, Jr., also head of Alpha Industries, one of the oldest and largest assembly factories in Haiti.

On Nov. 11, Haiti’s Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert confirmed that Apaid is indeed a U.S. citizen, a rumor which had been circulating since the industrialist’s emergence on the political scene. According to Privert, Apaid was born to Haitian parents in the U.S. and came to Haiti in 1976 as a foreign businessman on a visitor’s visa.

After five years, any foreigner can obtain Haitian nationality by naturalization under the Constitution’s Article 12, but “Andy” Apaid has never done this, according to the government.

Andy is following in the political footsteps of his father. As founder of Alpha Sewing in the 1970s, André senior was a close to dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and remains “a notorious Duvalierist,” according to Eric Verhoogen in the Multinational Monitor (April 1996). Apaid senior headed up the “civil society” (read: bourgeoisie) campaign to support the 1991-1994 military coup against President Aristide, which successfully eased U.S. sanctions on the export of goods from Haiti’s assembly sweat-shops.

“When asked at a business conference in Miami soon after the coup in 1991 what he would do if President Aristide returned to Haiti, Apaid [senior] replied vehemently, ‘I’d strangle him!’” Verhoogen wrote. “At the time, Apaid was heading up the United States Agency for International Develop-ment’s (USAID’s) PROMINEX business promotion project, a $12.7 million program to encourage U.S. and Canadian firms to move their businesses to Haiti.”

Andy seems as prone to gaffes as his dad. In a recent interview broadcast by the BBC Caribbean Service, he voiced support for rioters in Gonaïves who had torched government buildings. He also pulled a gun on demonstrators organized by the Batay Ouvriye union who tried to picket in front of his plant.