Economic Development in Ravaged Haiti: Is Democracy Really the Answer?

Barbara L. Bernier, writing in the immediate aftermath of the September 1991 coup, on whether democratization is the right instrument for economic development in Haiti. The article is a legal and historical argument rather than an economic assessment, and its value now is as a contemporaneous record of how the question looked before the outcome was known.

It sets the coup against what preceded it: fair and peaceful elections in which Haitians appeared to make a decisive change toward democratic rule and social justice, electing Jean-Bertrand Aristide as the country's first democratically elected president, with a presidential vote that contrasted sharply with the parliamentary races. On 30 September 1991 the military removed him, and the 6,000-man army and police carried out a campaign against his supporters, who were popular with Haiti's poor. More than 16,000 refugees fled the island.

The legal core is the litigation over those refugees. The district court found a substantial likelihood that the Haitian plaintiffs would prevail under the First Amendment right of association and counsel and under Article 33 of the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees; on appeal the United States argued they had no enforceable Article 33 rights because they had not reached US territory. The article also carries the longer economic history it argues from, including a Senate hearings estimate that 90 percent of Haitian business was controlled by Germans on the eve of the American intervention.