CIA paid off Haiti coup leaders

CIA paid off Haiti coup leaders

US officials have admitted that the Central Intelligence Agency paid key leaders of Haiti's military from the 1980s at least until 1991, when the army deposed elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a bloody coup.

An anonymous US official told the November 1 New York Times that "several of the principal players in the present situation were compensated by the US government".

Representative Robert Torricelli, a member of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committee, defended the CIA's actions. "The US government develops relationships with ambitious and bright young men at the beginning of their careers and often follows them through their public service", he said. (Torricelli is also the author of the notorious act which seeks to prevent companies in third countries trading with Cuba.)

Sources in the US Congress have also revealed that the CIA backed certain candidates in Haiti's November 1987 elections — which were cancelled after rightists murdered at least 34 people at polling places — and in the elections the army sponsored in January 1988 as a substitute.

The CIA disclosures followed the CIA's release last month of a document claiming that Aristide had been treated for manic depressive syndrome in Montreal in the early 1980s. On October 30, government officials announced that the document, which had been given wide publicity by Senator Jesse Helms and other US rightists, was probably a forgery. [Nicaragua Solidarity Network/Pegasus.]

From GLW issue 124