Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

AS HAITI APPROACHES ITS 200th anniversary of independence
from France, it is struggling to discard deeply rooted legacies
of centralized government based on authoritarian rule
and of politics predicated upon elitism, cronyism, and exclusion.
Historically, the Haitian state has ignored the need to
develop institutions and to enact programs required to
advance the nation's well-being, and to be accountable to citizens.
Haiti's leaders have neglected to build political institutions
with a numerically significant or sustained citizen
involvement. Rather, since independence in 1804, the country's
governments, led by military strongmen, charismatic leaders
and/ or elites whose interests were shared by the army,
generally have done little more than seek to maintain power
and prey upon those over whom they exercised such power.
Particularly vulnerable to state-sponsored predation and political
exclusion have been the urban poor and the country's
demographic majority: its peasants.
From the February 1986 demise of the twenty-nine-year
Duvalier family dictatorship up to the September 1994 international
intervention that dislodged a brutal de facto military
regime, Haiti's deeply dichotomized political system experienced
a period of profound transition (see table 24 and table
25, Appendix). Characterized by constant turmoil and protracted
violence, these eight years witnessed a struggle between
two largely juxtaposed groups with fundamentally different
visions of their country's future. Supporters of Haiti's traditional
political power structure—often simply referred to as
mahout and composed of the army and other henchmen, and
their allies among the political and economic elites—sought to
maintain the status quo or, under international and domestic
pressure, to accept at least cosmetic change. Traditionalists
were challenged by a cacophony of voices calling for social,
economic, and political reform. Those voices were led by individuals
who emanated principally from community and religious
groups, and the middle-class nongovernmental
organizations and professional associations of Haiti's increasingly
organized civil society. These new political actors saw the
Ayiti Libere (Liberated Haiti) of 1986 as an opportunity to end
authoritarianism, to democratize and decentralize the state,
and, as such, to provide political access to the largely disenfran-
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