2/19/2004

Haiti

Things in Haiti seem to be getting out of control since President Aristide has called to the attention the fact that some of the opposition leaders are former members of the now defunct army. Add to that the fact that this sort of events are never peaceful and you have things like the US trying to solve the problem.

The whole Haiti situation is a sad story given the fact that this year they are celebrating their 200 anniversary of being an independant country. In fact the first Latin American country to become independant. This was maybe a premonition of what has happened to Latin America. Even though that Latin America became free from the colonial empire of Spain, Portugal and other European countries, the region still has not become free from state oppresion. The master or the ruler or the king is not any more a nation like Spain or Portugal (that recently have improved so much, only if we could learn from them a little bit) the master is every nation state in Latin America that have become one way or another a symbol of the people, but rather a symbol of the ruling class. The individuals have not obtained in this 200 years major protections against the nation state.

Every country in Latin America, altough in varying degrees, suffer from the same problems, lack of the rule of law, excesive regulation, limitation of freedom and lack of political, civic or economic liberties.

Coming back to the case of Haiti, 200 years have not meant much, and most of the people in that country and in the region mistakenly believe that because we have democracy the government is legitimate. Mr. Aristide might have been elected democratically, but his actions and attitudes have undermined any vestige of democracy in his government. Its a great mistake what some leaders of the develop world have argued that to protect democracy the people of Haiti does not have the right to get rid of Mr. Aristide. Only when we stop believing in democracy as the utmost objective and rather see it as a means to achieve a peaceful transfer of power we will start building real societies in which the rights of the citizens are respected and everybody is treated as a human being within a framework of the rule of law and not the rule of a few.

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