Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy by Robert Fatton, Jr. (review)

92 The Latin Americanist Fall 2004 is, as often, in the details. Jurgen Buchenau UNC-Charlotte Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy . By Robert Fatton, Jr. Lynne Rienner, 2002.23713. $19.95. Robert Fatton’s book is a welcome relief from the mix of amnesia, recycled stereotypes, and ignorance about popular thoughts and action that characterizes most mainstream commentary on Haitian society. Though not intended as a primer for the events of February and March, 2004, Haiti’s Predatory Republic clearly traces the roots of the current crisis in electoral politics, neoliberal economics, and sustained destabilization tactics by the U.S. government. Building on the foundations of Haitian political science, democratization theory, and extensive archival and fieldwork sources, Fatton focuses most of his attention on the past 15 years during which the Haitian popular movement coalesced under the sign of Lavalas and since then has struggled to sustain a democratic opening. Superficially, the current crisis is about the failure of that struggle to deliver fair polling in the May 2000 parliamentary elections. Fatton explores exhaustively the electoral process and allegations of voting fraud, and the short version is that voting was free and fair, but Fanmi Lavalas (Aristide’s party) manipulated the counting process in seven of eight contested Senate seats in order to pre-empt a second round of polling. As an explanation for the current crisis, though, the debate over the 2000 elections is superficial because senators holding the disputed seats subsequently resigned, and in any event none of the disputed races affected the legislative balance nor was there ever a question that Fanmi Lavalas would not win a legislative majority. Moreover, throughout the period following the disputed elections, Fatton documentsAristide’s willingness to compromise and re-run them, and this is not something he was forced into recently by the rampaging coup forces, but something he has expressed repeatedly since early 2001. On a more profound level, though, Fatton shows how electoral politics is, in fact, at the root of the current crisis, because the mere presence of a populist leader such as Aristide challenges the Book Reviews 93 status quo of decades and centuries. Fatton draws on the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Alex Dupuy, Etzer Charles and others to sketch a view of the predatory state assembled over the years by traditional business and political elites. Writing about Aristide’s first term and the challenge it presented to this predatory state, and centuries of brutal class division in Haiti, Fatton poses the following question: In reality, a democratic consensus for a radical transformation of Haitian society was impossible given that the stark demarcation of class had historically generated a politics of ferocious struggles rather than civil compromises. The question really was, and still is, Would the Haitian dominant class be prepared to accept electoral defeat and relinquish its power to radical populist forces without resorting to a preemptive coup? (84). Following his re-instatement under the protection of U.S. marines in 1994, Aristide succumbed (though not as completely as his enemies have maintained) to the “authoritarian temptation” (I 25) associated with Haitian leadership. Lavalas politicians, meanwhile, entered the narrow space of the predatory state and succumbed to its fractious, zero-sum game of politique du ventre or politics of the belly designed to ensure personal enrichment within conditions of material scarcity (13). While this line of commentary is pessimistic, and suggests how deeply the Haitian democratic movement has conformed to a pre-existing “dictatorial habitus” (17-18), it does help shift the current focus away from a singular, fruitless obsession with Aristide and toward larger social dynamics in which Aristide is only one factor. Fatton also traces the impact of neoliberal economics in undermining democratization in Haiti. In theory, Aristide has remained a strong, left-oriented critic of neoliberalism, but in practice, ever since his rise to the presidency in 1991, he has acquiesced to neoliberal measures. This created enemies to the left and right within the Haitian political class (some felt betrayed and others wanted him to go further), but it did not initially cause trouble with the poor. Shrinking the state bureaucracy-one aspect of neoliberalism-was easy to...