According to journalist and writer Yves Engler:
“On January 31 and February 1, 2003, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government organized the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” to discuss that country’s future. No Haitian officials were invited to this assembly where high-level US, Canadian and French officials decided that Haiti’s elected president “must go”, the dreaded army should be recreated and that the country would be put under a Kosovo-like UN trusteeship.”3
Just over a year after this pivotal meeting of the three Western states in Canada, the democratic government in Haiti was overthrown, President Aristide had been kidnapped and exiled to the Central African Republic, hundreds of Fanmi Lavalas’s (FL) supporters were killed, immediate occupation of Haiti by 2,000 Western troops (latter replaced by the United Nations’ military intervention), repression against grassroots organizations, filling of the jails with political prisoners and abandonment of the FL government’s investment in education, job creation, healthcare, public services and preoccupation with increasing the minimum wage.4
The anti-democratic assault on the laboring classes in Haiti has resulted in the banning of the Fanmi Lavalas party from serving as an electoral instrument of the people as well as the execution of initiatives by elite forces to co-opt opportunistic elements within this political organization.5 Charlie Hinton, an organizer with the Haiti Action Committee, has documented the different ways that the current Michel Martelly regime in Haiti is pursuing a path toward dictatorship.6 People of good conscience across the world, especially those in the Americas, should develop or strengthen their ties of solidarity with popular organizations within Haiti’s working-class and peasantry.