OAS mediators: Where do they want to lead Haiti?

Haiti Progres, This Week in Haiti,
Vol. 19, no 21, 8-14 August 2001

What we are seeing in Haiti today is a replay of what happened in Nicaragua in 1990, said Ben Dupuy, secretary general of the National Popular Party (PPN), in a radio interview last week. Washington gradually dismantled the Sandinista revolution through a combination of demanding endless concessions and negotiations, creating and funding an opposition front, and applying military pressure, thereby pushing the Sandinistas into flawed elections.

In July 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) came to power in a hugely popular revolution which overthrew the Somoza family dynasty. But almost 11 years later, on Feb. 25, 1990, the Sandinistas lost a Washington-demanded election to the National Union of the Opposition (UNO) after a decade in which Washington had funded and armed a Honduras-based contra force, largely composed of former Somozista soldiers, to wage a debilitating war against the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. had economically strangled the country with embargos and aid cut- offs.

It was one of the most fraudulent elections in the electoral history of America, or of any other part of the world, declared former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto. There was an enormous electoral fraud perpetrated by the United States. Fraud whereby something prevents the sovereign will of the people to be freely expressed (see Haoti Progrhs, Vol. 8, No. 12, 6/20/1990). In that sense, the fraud was not performed technically, D'Escoto explained, but rather through the economic and psychological torture of the country.

Today the parallels with Haiti are obvious. The Haitian UNO is the Democratic Convergence (CD) opposition front, funded at least $3 million from the U.S. government. Last weekend, former Haitian soldiers operating out of the Dominican Republic (today's Honduras) launched coordinated attacks against Haitian police stations (see Haoti Progrhs, Vol. 19, No. 20 8/1/2001), perhaps the opening salvo of a new contra war. The Dominican daily El Siglo reported last week that 300 former Haitian soldiers and policemen were involved in the new offensive, of which the Dominican government was aware. Meanwhile, Washington and the European Union have placed a de facto aid embargo on Haiti.

One other key player in this international operation to roll back the 1990 democratic nationalist Lavalas movement is the Organization of American States, which Cuba calls Washington's Ministry of Colonial Affairs. The OAS is playing the role of mediator between the CD and the government of President Jean- Bertrand Aristide. But this mediator is far from neutral.

Take, for example, the lead OAS negotiator to date, Luigi Einaudi, the OAS assistant secretary general. Aristide has generally considered Einaudi to be sympathetic to his government and an ally in his current wrangling with the CD.

But, in fact, Einaudi is a career U.S. diplomat who has zealously defended Washington's interests and crimes in Latin America, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, for over two decades.

On Aug. 3, the Miami Herald revealed that Einaudi was one of the U.S. officials who recruited Vladimiro Montesinos, the former spy chief of fugitive Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, to be an agent of Washington. The Central Intelligence Agency paid Montesinos $1 million a year over the past decade to fight drug trafficking, despite evidence that Montesinos was also in business with Colombian narcotraffickers, the Herald reported. Montesinos is now in jail in Peru as authorities conduct 168 criminal investigations into his former activities.

According to State Department documents, the U.S. Embassy in Lima identified Montesinos as a potential ally and took him to Washington in 1976 when he was an obscure army captain, the Herald reports. Despite Montesinos' low rank, he was brought to the United States from Sept. 5 to Sept. 21, 1976, and met with Robert Hawkins in the CIA's Office of Current Intelligence along with military officials and the State Department's longtime Latin America policy-planning chief, Luigi Einaudi... At that time, Einaudi was at the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, according to CovertAction magazine (Number 49, Summer 1994).

Einaudi went on to become in 1990 the U.S. Permanent Representative to the OAS, a post he held during the 1991-1994 Haitian coup, during which time he met Aristide. He was replaced in April 1993.

Luigi Einaudi is the classic good cop, a real diplomat who says different things to different people, depending on the circumstances. For example, in Dec. 1992, Einaudi began openly pushing for the Haitian coup to be taken up by the United Nations Security Council, the body which eventually provided the cover and legality for the second U.S. military intervention of Haiti on Sep. 19, 1994. But, well aware of the Haitian people's distrust of U.S. military intervention and trying to hide Washington's intentions, Einaudi declared: We accept the principle of nonintervention which is the cornerstone of the inter-American system.

But when addressing two House of Representatives subcommittees on May 1, 1990, Einaudi closed his remarks with a quote from Bernard Aronson, then Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs: The conventional wisdom holds that our historic mistake in Latin America has been interventionism. I would argue the opposite is true.

Luigi Einaudi also proved that he was ready to defend even the most naked U.S. aggression, such as the Dec. 1989 invasion of Panama. Before the House subcommittees, Einaudi criticized the unwillingness of OAS member governments to take the admittedly tough decisions involved, i.e. invasion of a sovereign state. y In OAS forums, Einaudi also regularly attacked Cuba, charging that its government can be said to repress human rights as a matter of official policy. He also argued that as long as Cuba and Fidel Castro remain obdurately Stalinist then the United States will oppose, and oppose strongly, Cuba's readmission to the OAS. He charged that the government led by Fidel Castro remains fixed in time, paralyzed by ideology and isolated by its leader from the great currents of history. He called on Fidel Castro to bow to this U.S. demand: Hold free and fair elections under international supervision. Would the U.S. allow international supervision of its own electoral farce last fall?

Finally, Einaudi is a veteran of the low-intensity war against the Sandinistas. For instance, during their invasion of Panama, U.S. troops mistakenly raided the Nicaraguan Embassy in Panama City on Dec. 29, 1989, an event very similar to the erroneous bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Nicaragua, which was the object of countless other U.S. aggressions, called for an extraordinary meeting of the OAS. But the U.S. and a handful of countries under its sway, like the newly liberated Panama, boycotted the meeting. The U.S. made an expression of regret, Einaudi said, so I consider that this extraordinary meeting, therefore, is useless.

Meanwhile, Einaudi borrowed a tactic from the thief who cries thief after committing a crime. Is Nicaragua prepared to give the Government of Panama and the international community assurances that it will comply with its international and hemispheric commitments and with the Central American peace accords, and that it will not supply arms to guerrilla and paramilitary forces in neighboring countries? Einaudi asked rhetorically. This question comes from an ambassador of a nation which, it has been repeatedly proven, is the foremost backer of death squads, paramilitaries, and contra forces around the world.

President Aristide and his Lavalas Family party have consistently underestimated the hypocrisy of U.S. officials like Luigi Einaudi and resolve of Washington to turn back Haiti's popular movement just as it did (with only partial success) in Nicaragua. A glance at history might help them see how the Nicaraguan formula and Einaudi's craft are once again being applied in Haiti today to protect U.S. interests