WIKILEAKS EXHUMED CABLES REVEAL:
HOW THE U.S. RESUMED MILITARY AID TO DUVALIER
by Kim Ives
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A chorus of outrage is building against former Haitian president
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier as he sits in the dock of a Haitian
court, charged with crimes against humanity during his 15-year rule.
However, the U.S. government remains strangely and completely silent.
A 40-year-old trove of diplomatic cables, newly unearthed by
WikiLeaks, helps explain why.
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Around midnight in the early morning hours of Jul. 23, 1973, a fire
broke out in the packed armory of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude
Duvalier’s National Palace.
Almost immediately, “President-for-Life” Duvalier and his Army Chief
of Staff, General Claude Raymond, telephoned the U.S. Embassy’s Deputy
Chief of Mission, Thomas J. Corcoran, to tell him about the fire and
ask for U.S. assistance in putting it out.
The destruction of Haiti’s large weapons cache became, in the
following days, the perfect excuse to resume the sale of military
weapons as well as military aid and training to the Duvalier
dictatorship, after it had been halted during the 1960s under the
notorious regime of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
Haiti Liberte has been able to reconstruct a clear picture of this
pivotal historical moment thanks to a new website constructed by
WikiLeaks called the Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy or PlusD. The
site enables searching of over 1.7 million State Department cables
from 1973 to 1976 which had been declassified and stored in the U.S.
National Archives, but which were all but inaccessible due to the form
in which they were kept.
Haiti Liberte is one of 18 media partners worldwide to which WikiLeaks
provided exclusive access to the PlusD search engine in early March,
prior to its unveiling for public use on Apr. 8. This article is one
of several which Haiti Liberte is planning based on the cables from
the 1970s.
“General Raymond and President Duvalier telephoned me at 0245 [2:45
a.m.] to report fire in National Palace and to request fire
extinguishers which we dispatched,” Corcoran explained in a Jul. 23,
1973 Confidential cable. “At about 0325 Foreign Minister [Adrien]
Raymond informed me fire was spreading throughout ammunition storage
including small arms and artillery ammo and beyond control of local
firefighting facilities.”
The U.S. immediately deployed a team of nine military fire-fighters
from its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They “acted without
regard for their personal safety in fighting the fire in an area in
which a large variety of explosive ordnance had been stored and
exposed to intense heat over a period of hours,” Corcoran wrote in a
Jul. 27, 1973 cable commending their valor.
On Jul. 24, 1973, the day immediately after the fire, Foreign Minister
Raymond “summoned” Corcoran and “presented [him] a list of ammunition
and mortars which GOH [the Government of Haiti] urgently desires to
purchase for the ‘maintenance of public peace, the tranquillity of
families and protection of property.’”
Adrien Raymond, “on instructions of President Jean-Claude Duvalier,”
urgently requested millions of rounds of ammunition for Haiti’s Army.
Among the largest items on the long list were 1.5 million 30 caliber
rounds for M-1 rifles, 800,000 rounds for 50 caliber machine guns,
600,000 5.56 mm rounds for M-16 automatic rifles, and 400,000 9mm
rounds for Uzi submachine guns. Duvalier also wanted dozens of mortars
and tens of thousands of mortar shells.
The Haitian Army had never waged war against any enemy other than the
Haitian people. Nonetheless, Corcoran and the U.S. Embassy’s military
attache called the list “reasonable” and “strongly recommend[ed]
approval of sale,” the cable said.
In the following weeks, Haiti’s military laundry list would grow in
length and breadth, asking not just for more ammunition but also for
weapons and supplies, including 38 and 45 caliber handguns, M-1
rifles, M-2 carbines, 30 and 50 mm machine guns, 60 and 81 mm mortars,
grenade launchers, cartridge belts, and high-capacity ammo clips.
On Jul. 25, 1973, Corcoran sent another Confidential cable where he
encouraged the State and Defense Departments “to take quickest
possible action” and make an “extraordinary effort to expedite paper
work” to reply favorably to Duvalier’s request because, among other
reasons, “the Haitian Government is prepared to pay for its
requirements, and there is no reason why the US should not get the
sale.” (Not long before, Haiti had bought weapons from Israel and
Jordan, as well as “from ‘fast-buck’ private arms dealers,” according
to Corcoran.)
Furthermore, Duvalier’s “request seems an excellent opportunity to
strengthen U.S. influence even more with the GOH... and to win the
goodwill of individual Haitian military officers,” Corcoran wrote in
the cable.
The U.S. had curtailed military aid and sales to Haiti after Francois
Duvalier expelled a U.S. Marine Mission from the country in 1963. But
following Papa Doc’s death in April 1971, his son “Baby Doc” inherited
the “Presidency for Life” and began to repair and improve relations
with the U.S., from which he wanted aid and investment.
Indeed, the sale was approved and the “GOH delivered to [the U.S.]
Embassy Sept. 19, 1973 check no. 163211 drawn on National Bank of
Republic of Haiti same date payable to USAFSA [United States Army
Forces in South America] in amount of dollars $273,411.40,” Corcoran
wrote in a Sep. 19, 1973 cable. The sale was equivalent to over $1.4
million in 2013 dollars.
Nonetheless, the U.S. was worried about appearances, and Corcoran
wrote in an Aug. 17, 1973 cable that “no, repeat no, USG [U.S.
Government] aircraft delivery [is] contemplated.” Instead the guns and
ammo arrived on two Pan Am charter flights on Sep. 26 and Oct. 1,
1973, the cables show.
Around the same time, the U.S. Embassy was also negotiating with the
regime for the sale of six “Cadillac-Gage commando armored cars,” two
of which would be used for the Leopards, an elite counter-insurgency
unit of the Haitian army.
The U.S. wanted to proceed with the sale of just four cars, the
request for which had been made in June, before the armory fire. The
Embassy wanted to finish with the pending ammunition and weapons sale
“before addressing [the] problem of [the] other two cars,” but
Duvalier had threatened to take his business elsewhere, namely to the
French, Corcoran explained in an Aug. 31, 1973 cable. He recommended
that “that State/Defense [Departments] reply gently to implied threat
to transfer order to French firm that financial outlay of that sort to
French company at time U.S. giving economic assistance to Haiti might
raise all sorts of questions.”
Military aid was also being resumed in this period. The “Embassy can
understand Haiti's exclusion from the list of countries eligible for
grant military training in the 1960s, owing to political conditions
prevailing at that time,” Corcoran argued in a Nov. 23, 1973 cable.
“However, times in Haiti have changed. The country has a new, young
president moving in some positive new directions.” He claimed that “in
the past few years, repression has been markedly and genuinely eased
in Haiti” and that the government was showing “political restraint”
and “a clear desire to do more for the economic development of the
country.”
Most importantly, “in international organizations, the new government
in Haiti has been a dependable, good friend of the U.S., for whatever
that is worth,” Corcoran wrote. “All these are positive tendencies
which it seems to us should be encouraged.”
This was “why we believe some grant military training for Haiti is
very much in our interests,” because, among other things, it provided
“the opportunity to establish some influence with the whole generation
of younger Haitian military officers who know nothing of the U.S..”
“In sum,” Corcoran concluded, “it seems illogical that Haiti... should
still be singled out for total exclusion from grant training programs
enjoyed by nearly every other nation of the hemisphere for many years
-- training which will contribute substantially to advancing a number
of our important interests in the region.”
Indeed, U.S. military aid was resumed, specifically to train units
like the Leopards, which was described by the National Coalition for
Haitian Rights in a 1986 report as“particularly brutal in dealing with
civilians.”
Researcher Jeb Sprague explains in his new book “Paramilitarism and
the Assault on Democracy in Haiti” that the Leopards were trained and
equipped “by former U.S. marine instructors who were working through a
company (Aerotrade International and Aerotrade Inc) under contract
with the CIA and signed off by the U.S. Department of State. Baby Doc
himself trained with the Leopards, forming particularly close bonds
with some in the force. A U.S. military attache bragged that the
creation of the force had been his idea. Aerotrade’s CEO, James Byers,
interviewed on camera, explained that he had ‘no trouble exporting
massive quantities of arms. The State Department signed off on the
licenses, and the CIA had copies of all the contracts. M-16 fully
automatic weapons, thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition,
patrol boats, T-28 aircraft, Sikorsky helicopters. Thirty-caliber
machine guns. Fifty-caliber machine guns. Mortars. Twenty-millimeter
rapid-fire cannons. Armored troop carriers.’ A handful of veterans
from this force would later serve, off and on, as key figures in
various paramilitary forces” which the U.S. used to carry out and
maintain coups against the governments of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide in 1991 and 2004.
Jean-Claude Duvalier, who returned to Haiti in January 2011 from a 25
year golden exile in France, is now technically under house arrest in
Haiti. An appeals court is receiving testimony and evidence from
witnesses charging that Duvalier must be tried for crimes against
humanity. Haitian and international human rights groups have
documented hundreds of cases of torture and extrajudicial killings and
imprisonments under Baby Doc’s 15 year rule from 1971 to 1986. In
January 2012, investigating judge Carves Jean dismissed the human
rights charges against Duvalier, arguing that the statute of
limitations had expired. The appeals court may overrule that decision.
About 7,000 of the 1.7 million secret diplomatic cables from 1973 to
1976 deal with Haiti. The cables “were reviewed by the United States
Department of State's systematic 25-year declassification process,”
WikiLeaks explains on its PlusD website. The cables were then “either
declassified or kept classified with some or all of the metadata
records declassified” and then “subject to an additional review by the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).” Those cables
released then “ were placed as individual PDFs at the National
Archives as part of their Central Foreign Policy Files collection.”
However, the cables in their PDF form “are actually quite difficult to
get to for the general public,” explained Kristinn Hrafnsson, a
spokesperson for WikiLeaks and a former Icelandic investigative
journalist, to Democracy Now on Apr. 8. “It’s very hard to access
them. So, in our view, the inaccessibility and the difficulty of
accessing them is a form of secrecy... so we found it important to get
it to the general public in a good searchable database.”
Twenty-five year old U.S. classified documents are supposed to be
reviewed and declassified every year. The public should therefore be
able to view classified documents as late as 1988. However, the
declassification process has only been done until 1976, meaning it is
12 years behind schedule.
Another reason that WikiLeaks established the PlusD database is
because “there has been a trend in the last decade and a half to
reverse previously declassified policy,” Hrafnsson explained. “A
policy set out, for example, by Clinton in the mid-'90s was, a few
years later under Bush, is reversed. It was revealed in 2006, for
example, that over 55,000 documents that were previously available had
been reclassified by the demand of the CIA and other agencies. And it
is known that this program continued at least until 2009. So, it is
very worrying when the government actually starts taking back behind
the veil of secrecy what was previously available.” The PlusD database
cannot be snatched back behind the veil.
The 1973 to 1976 cables cover the period that infamous Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger was in office under both Presidents Richard
Nixon and then Gerald Ford. WikiLeaks has therefore dubbed the trove
the “Kissinger Cables.” (After he left his post, Kissinger and his
wife visited Duvalier in Haiti.)
In 2011, WikiLeaks provided Haiti Liberte exclusively with about 2,000
secret U.S. cables related to Haiti dating from 2003 to 2010. They
came from a larger 250,000-cable trove, known as “Cablegate,” which
was anonymously provided to WikiLeaks by U.S. Corp. Bradley Manning.
He has been imprisoned in “pre-trial detention” some 1,050 days under
torture-like conditions. He is being court-martialed and may be
charged with treason, which can carry the death penalty. There is a
world-wide movement denouncing the U.S. government’s treatment of
Manning, who also gave to WikiLeaks a video showing a U.S. Apache
helicopter gunning down 12 civilians in Iraq in 2007, including two
Reuters journalists.
With the release of PlusD and the “Kissinger Cables,” WikiLeaks has
once again provided journalists and people around the world a glimpse
into the shrouded world of U.S. foreign policy. While Top Secret
cables are not available, the thousands of formerly Secret and
Confidential cables from the 1970s provide a clear look into how the
State Department fashioned its rationales for many outrageous policies
during that period, like the resumption of military aid to an
unelected, corrupt, and repressive dictator like Jean-Claude Duvalier.
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