28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series
After overthrowing the 30-year Duvalier dictatorship on Feb. 7, 1986, a historic mobilization – the Lavalas movement (meaning “the flood” ) came into power in 1991, headed by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When the U.S. and Haitian ruling class tried to reestablish a neo-Duvalierist dictatorship by overthrowing President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Oct. 12, 1991, mass mobilizations happened both in Haiti and the U.S. Some 100,000 Haitians crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and tied up traffic in Manhattan for hours to protest the coup. That was the beginning of a three-year mobilization, in Haiti and its diaspora, which forced the U.S. to return Aristide to Haiti in October 1994.
The Lavalas movement was able to create the beginnings of land and wealth redistribution and re-open national industries. They distributed tens of thousands of reintroduced Creole pigs to Haitian farmers which reversed the 1980 U.S. International Development Agency [USAID] extermination policy to prevent Haitian farmers from competing with pig farmers in the U.S. Lavalas administrations also created hundreds of community stores and restaurants which sold food at discount prices. All of these attempts to improve the material conditions of the Haitian people were met by violence and interference from US Imperialism.
A military junta ruled until 1994, when the Clinton administration intervened. Unable to ignore Aristide’s legitimacy, globalizing elites—from the United States and elsewhere—worked to manage a political transition from a military to a civilian government, a transition in line with the neoliberal doctrines of the day. Those doctrines included: 1) privatize state-run enterprises like the telephone company, flour mill, and cement factory; 2) reduce taxes, duties, and wages to suit foreign investors; 3) cut social spending and insure regular debt payments to foreign banks; and 4) foster an export-oriented economy.
The Lavalas movement of the 1990’s still inspires a free and sovereign Haiti, able to determine its own path. In recent years, we have seen mass mobilizations against Ariel Henry’s call for foreign intervention in 2022, workers strikes against in 2023, 2024, and 2025 against poor working conditions and low wages, peasant movements against land theft, and organizations like MOLEGHAF have called strongly for unified uprising against the American imperialist death project. “Long live Haiti and the resistance of the popular masses!”