Death in Haiti: A Blow Against Democracy

As you drive up to Jean-Rabel, on the dilapidated highway through Haiti’s northwest province, it’s not always easy to distinguish the emaciated people--standing motionless in their drought-devastated fields--from the sad, plucked twigs of the few trees that remain on the barren land. Haitians call this dusty, famine-ridden place the “Far West.” This was Jean-Marie Vincent’s parish, the place he worked in and tried to change before he was brutally murdered last Sunday in Port-au-Prince.

These starving peasants were his congregation and, over the years, he helped them gain a degree of literacy and begin demanding at least a minimum of human rights from the rich farmers whose illegitimately deeded lands the peasants had cultivated for generations.

Land reform, labor organizing, financial advancement for the peasant: Vincent’s recipe for the future was not a brew that sat well on the landholders’ stomachs. In 1987, two large landholding families reportedly conspired to put an end to Vincent’s organizing. One fatal day, 300 members of the peasant groups he worked with were macheted, shot and stoned to death by hired thugs, their bodies hurled into the ravines that surround Jean-Rabel. Vincent and the nuns and lay people who assisted him were run out of town.

But like other tireless heroes who have been involved in Haiti’s progressive movement since the mid-1970s, Vincent kept on with his calling. He would come and go from his order’s Port-au-Prince residence, driving in his Trooper to peasant meetings. (So many peasants involved in land reform and other programs had been forced to the capital by the end of 1987 that much of the organizing went on there, semi-clandestinely.)

This big, cherubic man was the soul of Christian optimism--cheerful, direct and virtually twinkly and dimpled in the face of enormous odds. But he was also rigorously intelligent, a skillful diplomat and go-between who knew how to make things work in Haiti in conditions of extreme penury. In this, he was so different from many political figures there--who only know how to buy and bribe people, how to betray, how to sow discord, to make things fall apart.

Conscientisation. This is a word you heard often in Haiti in the years between the 1986 fall of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier and the 1991 fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It means consciousness-raising, and it was the primary method used by Ti Legliz, the progressive wing of the Roman Catholic Church in Haiti and the backbone of Haiti’s popular movement, to help Haitians understand their predicament and take charge of their lives. Vincent’s work--and Father Aristide’s work, and the work of the hundreds of clerical and lay people in the Ti Legliz--was all about conscientisation, about meetings, analysis, literacy and (in Haitian Creole) tet ansanm, or solidarity (literally, “heads together”), which was the name of Vincent’s peasant organization in Jean-Rabel.

Unfortunately, conscientisation is the bane of Haiti’s tiny upper class, which already understands the predicament of the Haitian peasant and the Haitian slum dweller, and the Haitian houseboy, and the Haitian maid, and the tire-repair man, the nursemaid, the mother of nine, the factory worker, the basketry weavers and microchip assemblers, the brassiere stitchers and the baseball crafters, the clothing workers and all the desperate Haitians whose predicament makes the life of the elite just a little bit nicer, a little bit plus aise, a little easier.

Vincent had long been a target for harassment by killers financed by the elite. In 1987, after the Jean-Rabel massacre, he was among four priests (including Aristide) ambushed along the national highway at night during a blinding rainstorm. They only escaped because the cool-headed Vincent, in the midst of all the rock throwing and machete wielding and guns going off, noticed a hole in the road block and got the driver to go through it. He was always threatened, and in the last few weeks had received many warnings that he would be next.

This is the most significant assassination since the coup against Aristide. In fact, it is probably the most important killing since the fall of Duvalier. The other two best-known figures killed (among the thousands murdered since the 1991 coup by the Haitian military and its elite patrons) were symbolic leaders: Antoine Izmery, financier of Aristide’s campaign, and Guy Malary, Aristide’s justice minister. Both those killings were warnings to Aristide and his political backers. The assassinations were attacks on the Aristide presidency and the idea of democracy. They were of short-term use, intended to stop Aristide from returning to Haiti on the day that had been set by a series of negotiations. And they worked.

But Vincent’s killing has longer-range goals. It’s a naked attempt to cut off the lifeline of the peasants and put an end to the work of Ti Legliz in the northwest and elsewhere where Vincent was still patiently working. It’s an attempt to rip apart the fragile network of people in the countryside and the cities, a network that Vincent was shoring up during these days when the Haitian crisis seems--one way or another--to be coming to a head. Its effect is to put a huge hole in the Cabinet that Aristide will be able to rely on when, and if, democracy is restored.

It would be nice if Vincent were alive to see the U.S. State Department using his murder as another pretext for a possible intervention. No doubt he would laugh it off--he was always one for irony. But it is all the old policies of the U.S. government in Haiti--its attempt to destabilize the peasants’ movements; its parallel programs that seduce people away from real peasant collectives with bigger offers of money and aid, and most of all, its seemingly unending support of the Haitian economic elite and military--that led, in the grand scheme of things, to Vincent’s death. (Vincent might also--as other Haitians did--find wry amusement in the fact that the State Department spokesman repeatedly got his name wrong, amid the flood of refugees from Cuba, and called him “Jose-Maria Vincent.”)

But desgraciadamente, Padre Vincent cannot be here today. Instead, his corpse, the heart blown away by five rapid-fire bullets, lies waiting for a small funeral in the chapel of his order’s residence. If the military jackboot did not lie so heavy on the neck of the Haitian people, Vincent would have his funeral mass sung in the cathedral with tens of thousands attending. Instead, his friends are reduced to a virtually clandestine rite.

For so long, the clergy has been spared assassination because of Haitians deep respect for the church, and their rooted faith. Indeed, though bungled attempts have been made on the lives of other clerics, Vincent is the first Catholic priest assassinated in Haiti’s long battle of attrition. If the United States and the international community do not continue putting sinew into their diplomatic and economic threats against the military junta, one fears he will not be the last.