Haiti’s Fallible Hero

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president of Haiti, was deposed in February 2004 by several converging forces. Armed insurgents—a combination of criminal gangs and former army officers, some of them convicted human rights abusers—swept through the north of the country almost unopposed. Key members of Haiti’s tiny economic elite supported the insurgents and mounted a concerted political campaign against Aristide both inside and outside the country. Well-placed people in the governments of the United States, France and Canada colluded with the president’s opponents, and others were indifferent to his fate. Having been warned that a “bloodbath” was about to occur and that foreign powers would do nothing to stop it, Aristide resigned shortly after midnight on February 29. He was flown into exile on a U.S. military aircraft.

Aristide’s forced resignation was a disgrace—a betrayal of the hopes awakened among Haitians after the fall of the dictatorship under...