Despite the plethora of articles written about Haiti over the past four years, most Haitians believe that the major US media outlets, with few exceptions, continue to see Haiti through the prism established by racist Hollywood movies since the ’30s. We are poor, dark, wild, weird; we are the bulwark of some black magic religion called “Voodoo”; and we have been led for 40 years by a megalomanic physician called Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. And, more recently, the CIA told us that Haiti’s president was a “psychopath.”
Max Frankel, the New York Times‘ Haitian correspondent during the early ’60s (and later the paper’s editor), rarely reported the atrocities of Francois Duvalier, who was fraudulently elected with the help of the CIA in 1957. He rarely said anything about US involvement in Haiti’s politics, as the agency diligently helped the Haitian despot “contain” Fidel Castro’s revolution in the Caribbean. Yet Frankel is heralded by many as one of the better reporters to cover the region at the time.
This silence, which was exactly the treatment that the US. government had wanted since US troops landed in Haiti in 1915, was not confined to the New York Times. Indeed, over the past 30 years, the muted coverage of Haiti has perhaps been best sustained by the Associated Press.
From the early ’70s through most of the ’80s, AP correspondent Art Kendal seemed to take his information routinely from a government-produced daily radio program called La Voix de la Republique d’Haiti. Haiti’s private radio stations were required to air this daily dose of Duvalier propaganda; Kendal didn’t have that excuse. Kendal, who was by training a schoolteacher, used to broadcast a news segment in English every night; to the few Haitians who could understand him, the content was virtually straight Haitian government official bulletins.
Since Haiti’s current crisis began, violence has been the main theme permeating most reports from the country. Though this emphasis has subsided somewhat in most publications since Aristide’s return, AP continues to exaggerate and sensationalize the violence of Haitian society. Granted, the Duvalier regime institutionalized political violence, but should a whole citizenry be stigmatized for the actions of a few?
Journalist Bernard Diederich, who recently retired after covering Haiti since 1957 for Time, the New York Times and many other publications, believes that reporters have always had a difficult time covering Haiti because of a culture that, though in the midst of Western civilization, appears alien to them.
“Lately the exotic has been gradually replaced by the violence committed by a few in a population of nearly 8 million crowding such a small place,” he said. Diederich, who was jailed by Francois Duvalier in 1963, feels that “many foreign journalists already assume that Haiti is a violent place simply because that is the image projected by the media whenever there is a political crisis there.”
“For my nearly 40 years living in Haiti, Florida, the Dominican Republic, Salvador, Nicaragua, I have never found a place where the people live more harmoniously than Haiti,” he added. Few reporters have ever pointed out that during the first segment of Aristide’s coup-interrupted presidency, the Haitian murder rate (political and non-political combined) was a small fraction of the US rate.
Covering the return of Aristide for the Village Voice in October 1994, I was astounded by the candidness of some foreign journalists as to the main reason they were in Haiti: to focus on violence. At the famous Hotel Oloffson, an ABC staffer, after speaking on the radio with his stringer, turned to me and said: “There is not much today. Not even one single body has been found in the streets.”
The ambassadorial view
It is evident that most foreign journalists in Haiti, who generally do not speak either French or Creole, receive their cues cues from the US State Department or the Pentagon.
In the spring of 1994, at the height of a campaign of murder and rape orchestrated by FRAPH (the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti), a terror group organized on behalf of Haiti’s military, several publications received unauthorized copies of cables originating from the US embassy—with the imprimatur of US Ambassador Leslie Swing. “Haiti is culturally violent,” the cables declared. “Rape was always accepted in Haitian society and women are learning to report it now mainly for political gains.”
The most telling evidence about this impious relationship between most of the major media and the US government over Haiti, came around the death of pro-military attorney Mireille Durocher Bertin on March 28, 1995.
On the afternoon of the murder, the US embassy, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House all released statements blaming the killing on Aristide’s interior minister, and alleging that many other members of Aristide’s entourage were accomplices. The following day, like choir boys, the major press reported the story with the same “political killing” slant.
When I arrived in Haiti the next week, I quickly learned that the driver of the vehicle carrying Bertin was a pilot who used to transport drugs from Haiti to Miami for the Bennetts (Baby Doc Duvalier’s in-laws) in the late ’70s. It is most probable that he was still working for Haiti’s military in the same capacity. Since the murderers, by all accounts, sprayed the driver’s side with bullets before they killed Bertin, it’s quite possible that the killing was a drug hit.
Two days after the story appeared in the Voice (4/11/95), I met AP‘s Michael Norton at the Port-au-Prince Holiday Inn. He told me that it was “great” that I explored the drug angle in the story, though “we [US correspondents in Haiti] were aware of it for some time.” When I asked him why he never wrote about it, he looked at me quizzically and retorted, “I live here.”
He was not kidding.
