Fall From Grace

I’ve known Jean-Bertrand Aristide since 1986, though we’re not on speaking terms right now. In Haiti in the old days, his enemies pointed trembling fingers at me, accusing me of being responsible for his rise to power. Now his supporters are also pointing, accusing me of being responsible for his downfall. But they’re wrong on both counts.

I met Aristide by accident. I had wanted to meet a Catholic bishop for an article I was writing in the heady, crazed days immediately following Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s overthrow in 1986, but the bishops in Haiti weren’t talking to the press back then. When I explained to my Haitian fixer that the church was stonewalling me, he had an idea.

“I know who you can see,” he said, and he drove me careening in my rented car to St. Jean Bosco, a little white and blue church in the La Saline shantytown, a pit of misery on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

“You can meet this guy,” my guide told me as he walked me into the courtyard.

“But who is he?” I asked -- I was on deadline.

“Oh, he’s good,” my guide said. “Just wait.”

So began the first of my many long waits for Aristide. When the parish priest finally emerged into the courtyard, I was unimpressed. He appeared to be almost a child -- tiny, google-eyed and bespectacled. He looked like a cross between E.T. and Poindexter, and yet he was appealing. When he sat on the cloister balustradeter, his feet didn’t touch the ground as he swung his legs, speaking in perfect French about the future of Haiti. I asked him about his role in the fall of Duvalier, against whom he had been preaching for some time.

“What we are doing is trying to get a better life,” he said, gesturing to a group of young men who stood eagerly around us, smiling and nodding. “To you, what we have in Haiti may look like a new government, a new face, new symbols. But to us, we see Duvalier’s face when we look at [the leader of the interim junta]. What we have now is Duvalierism without Duvalier.... This is not the end of the affair, not by a long shot.” He was focused and intense.

Aristide led an unusual life: He slept only four hours a night; conducted perpetual meetings with friends, parishioners, supporters, journalists; ate on the fly; never drank. The digital wristwatch he had then went off every half hour, and he was still never on time. He loved music and wrote poetry. In public, he was vituperative and fiery and bitter, but he had a wicked sense of humor.

Aristide was the only religious figure I ever encountered who regularly made his listeners laugh. These were hungry people from the slums, sitting on hard benches in the oppressive Haitian heat, squished shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh -- and still they were laughing. He could turn anything into a metaphor and use it for his own ends: A big black moth flying blindly around the apse was the old regime. In a country renowned for its speakers and its storytellers, its jokes and parables and proverbs, he was a brilliant Creole orator, perhaps the greatest of them all.

A few months after my article was finished, I began work on a book about Haiti and returned to live there. There was no question in my mind that Aristide was central to the country’s future and would be central to my book as well. You could sense destiny all around him; ambition and righteousness were his guides. He was a beacon in troubled, complicated times.

Haiti was in terrible turmoil in the years following Duvalier’s ouster, and Aristide seemed to be at the center of every event; he was the climax, the catharsis, the denouement. He was the national lightning rod.

Several times there were assassination attempts that forced him into hiding. Each time, he was at first incommunicado. And then, when he reappeared, he was frail, skeletal, weak, a sight that caused grandmothers to weep and faint. Even if his injury was as small as a scratch on the knee, he worked it -- limping and supported on either side by congregants.

He was a victim, he played the role brilliantly and Haitians empathized, because in their poverty and hunger, their joblessness and political disenfranchisement, they identified with a victim.

Aristide also saw something positive in the assassination attempts: His surviving them had convinced people that he was somehow protected. “They believe that I can’t be hurt,” he told me. “It makes a hired killer a little reluctant to take me on.... The odds are, he thinks, that I will survive, and he will be punished. He thinks there is a powerful force keeping me safe.”

“Is there?” I asked him.

He smiled. “You be the judge.”

I believe now that the powerful force protecting him at the time was the passionate backing of the Haitian people.

Not much more than a year after that conversation, St. Jean Bosco was attacked by thugs with guns and machetes while Aristide was leading a Mass. At least 13 parishioners were killed, and Aristide was whisked away by representatives of the church. It was almost impossible to ascertain his whereabouts. When I finally did, it was impossible to communicate with him.

As is the case today, it was hard to tell whether it was he himself who had fled from the violence into hiding or whether it was the powers above him who had buried him away to shut him up. At these moments of crisis in Aristide’s life, thousands poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince to support him, in unmistakable demonstrations of his political potential. On the street he was known as a prophet, a martyr, a saint -- a leader.

Like many others, I thought back then that I had found the Martin Luther King Jr. of Haiti, someone who would be a thorn in the side of the regime forever, who would hold power to account. His voice was the only one loud enough, brave enough and pointed enough to be heard over the political confusion and violence engulfing the country.

Then, in 1990, Aristide changed the equation. In a sudden move that caught almost everyone by surprise, he declared that he would be a candidate in the upcoming presidential elections. Up until the moment of his announcement, he had been absolutely against what he called “imposed” elections. “The Haitian people,” he said after one earlier aborted election, “should never have been led into this electoral trap from which there was finally no exit but a bloody death.” His candidacy shook my faith in him. It seemed his ambition had led him to a decision that his better self had always warned against.

Aristide insisted that everything he did was in service of the Haitian people. Thus, anyone who criticized him -- personally or politically -- was shunned as an enemy of the people. (For the last four years, because of things I’ve written questioning his actions, I have fallen into this depressing category.) He was quick to justify his ambition and his methods, and the dramatic, tragic story of the Haitian people from 1990 on became inextricably intertwined with the dramatic, tragic narrative of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

It proved impossible for Aristide to switch comfortably from opposition leader to president. As president, it was much harder for him to have the give and take with average Haitians that had been his daily political bread. Giving up his ministry, marrying and having children brought him down from an exalted position in the average Haitian’s eyes to the level of a mortal politician. It was also impossible for him to hold power to public account, because he was now power. In addition, the art of compromise and consensus did not really excite Aristide: He was suspicious of other people’s motives. He undoubtedly felt justified in his suspicions after the 1991 coup d’etat that forced him into exile.

In another world, Aristide’s story might have had a happy ending after his triumphant return to Haiti and political power in 1994. So why didn’t it? His character flaws, while a factor, cannot begin to account fully for the depths of the debacle that we have just witnessed in Haiti. Although he was a major player in his downfall, he certainly does not bear full responsibility.

Aristide’s long-standing identification with the people, and his sway over them, turned him into an irresistible target for the powerful groups that ultimately conspired to bring him down: the Haitian elite, the political class, the business community, the exploiters of Haitian labor, conservatives in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. One of Aristide’s favorite jokes was: “Why is Washington such a safe place?” Answer: “No American Embassy.” The punch line made him laugh and take off his glasses and shake his head. In the end, these were the groups that worked tirelessly to remove Aristide from the national scene.

The gold wristwatch that replaced his faithful Casio, and the big white suburban house that is now in ruins, are indicators of how -- in many small, incremental ways -- Aristide moved away from his power base. But it was a still-polarized Haiti -- self-destructive and dependent on the whim of the hardhearted outside world, a country Aristide did not know how to cure -- that, after lifting him up so high, took him down.