How the US Press Missed the Story
By HEATHER WILLIAMS
"The fact that the group in charge of Haiti policy today in the State Department has been literally gunning for Aristide since before his initial election as a champion of democracy in 1990 has been left all but unmentioned by the US press."
Now that bodies are littering the streets of Cap Haitien and Port Au Prince, major print news outlets have seen well enough to send a handful of cameramen and correpondents to send back news of the crisis. Even so, the campaign of violence that has finally ousted Haitian President Aristide has been investigated and reported to the American public with appalling indolence. The official reasoning appears to be that if Haiti is the hemisphere's eternal basket case-a dismal repository of poverty where there is no future-- how on earth could its past possibly matter?
But those who view Haiti's current violence as merely one of an eternal humanitarian crisis in temporary overdrive miss the story. It is no simple tale of a corrupt regime collapsing under the weight of popular anger and bad management. A cursory glance at events of the last fourteen years suggests that the fall of the Aristide regime was a foregone conclusion at the entrance of President George W. Bush and the installation of a cabal of appointees with a grim record of utilizing official and covert channels to destabilize uncooperative governments in the Western Hemisphere.
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The point is not that the public has been lied to by the government. Governments lie, particularly this administration. The point is that even those on the left who are indignant about systematic misinformation elsewhere have not bothered to jog their memories on Haiti to smell the sulfur emanating from this episode,. The press apparatus reporting on the Caribbean is either too broken or too racist to remember that Haiti's anguish is connected to forces quite beyond poor judgment or even bad will by President Aristide. The ease with which armed thugs have upended a civilian regime, eliciting only murmurs of disquiet from onlookers abroad who ought to know better is cause for worry. Surely zealots in charge of U.S. foreign policy have taken note. If it's this easy to destabilize Haiti ,Cuba will unquestionably appear a more viable target for direct intervention in the not-so-distant future.
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full at -
http://www.counterpunch.org/williams03012004.html