Some observers blame 
Haiti
’s upheavals over the last 20 years — including the current one — on the United States. 
For those who hold an even more sinister view, the United States engineered the 2004 downfall of the popularly elected Aristide. They say Aristide’s populist policies and inflammatory rhetoric panicked the rich Haitians who U.S. officials hope will lead the country’s economic rebirth. Aristide, they say, wanted the state to be the main force in development, lessening profits and political power for the business elite.
Ten days after the toppled president was flown out of the country on an American jet, Noam Chomsky, a linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy, wrote that President Bush’s “planners are . . . dedicated to undermining democracy and independence, and despised Aristide and the popular organizations that swept him to power with perhaps even more passion than their predecessors.” 
Robert Maguire, director of the Haiti Program at Trinity College, in Washington, D.C., agrees. He argues the United States saw Aristide as the biggest obstacle to Haiti’s progress and made its opposition to him a bigger priority than helping Haiti build a democratic system. “Continuance of the constitutional process” has been of ultimate importance to Haitians, he says. “But that’s out the window now. From here on in, if the Haitian people don’t like an elected president, they will mobilize to get rid of him.”
While members of Aristide’s political movement agree, some do not exempt Haitians from responsibility for the country’s woes. “The lack of education, poverty, underdevelopment — it’s our fault, too, as Haitians,” says the Rev. Gérard Jean-Juste, a Catholic priest in Port-au-Prince. “Haitians who own more than 40 percent of the goods of the country are selfish; they discriminate against their own brothers and sisters. Plus, they are not democratic.”
U.S. diplomats deny that Washington would try to undermine Haitian democracy. “The United States has been and will continue to be a firm supporter of democracy in Haiti. That is a cornerstone of our policy,” Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega told a Senate subcommittee following Aristide’s departure. Moreover, he added, “The United States has been and will almost certainly remain Haiti’s leading provider of economic aid.” 
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James Dobbins, former special adviser on Haiti during the Clinton administration, says recent U.S. interventions have been “well-motivated” but not “adequately sustained.” For instance, he notes, after Aristide was toppled by a military coup in 1991, the United Nations approved a U.S.-led intervention in 1994 to restore him to his elected presidency. But within a year, the United States had turned its peacekeeping mission over to the United Nations. 
And $1.2 billion in foreign aid that had been committed by the international community essentially dried up because of political turmoil that followed the restoration of Aristide to the presidency. 
A handful of experts on Haiti’s political crises criticize U.S. and Haitian political activists with equal vigor. McCalla, of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, says Washington has exhibited a historical preference for dictators, and over the past two decades has focused more on averting mass immigration than on helping improve the conditions that make Haitians flee.
Meanwhile, he adds, Haitians’ obsession with alleged U.S. misdeeds has proved self-destructive. For instance, a powerful anti-dictatorship movement in the 1970s and early ’80s, he says, “merged with the classic Haitian line about designs being cooked up abroad.” Partly as a result, Haitians never embraced a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program to help Haiti become the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” Had the plan succeeded, McCalla says, “Haiti would have been much better off.”
State Rep. Marie St. Fleur, D-Boston, who represents Boston’s large Haitian community, characterizes the Bush administration’s policy toward Haiti as “containment,” stemming in part from what she calls longstanding antipathy. “Haiti will never be forgiven for being the first, free, black republic in the hemisphere.”
Haitians, in turn, are responsible for failing to develop their own democratic culture, she adds. “When I talk to Haitians about politics, it’s so personality-driven,” she says. “They’re always looking for Martin Luther King, and that’s problematic.”
