1963–1967: (The Year Ten and Its Ironies: The International Commission of Jurists Condemns Duvalier, Haiti the Only Nation with No Growth, and the Reformist …

1963–1967: (The Year Ten and Its Ironies: The International Commission of Jurists Condemns Duvalier, Haiti the Only Nation with No Growth, and the Reformist Goals That Mocked Their Own Fulfillment): In August 1963, the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists pronounced that the rule of law in Haiti had been supplanted by a reign of terror, that Haiti had become the poorest country in Latin America through the incompetence and corruption of its government, and that Duvalier’s dictatorship was unique among authoritarian regimes for lacking even the pretense of an ideology — its sole purpose was to place the country under tribute to those in power. Four years later, in September 1967, the commission sharpened its verdict: the systematic violation of every article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights appeared to be the only policy assiduously pursued by the Caribbean Republic, the Life President more concerned with suppressing real or imaginary threats than with governing, leading his nation toward political, social, and economic collapse. Yet the Haitian situation confounded reformist liberals precisely because Duvalier’s Haiti met — while simultaneously mocking — every goal the Alliance for Progress had advanced for Latin American development. Civilian supremacy over the military? No one was more civilian or more supreme than Dr. Duvalier. Land reform? Pétion and Boyer had completed the first agrarian reform in the Western Hemisphere within thirty years of independence. A docile, non-feudal Church with a native hierarchy? Haiti had it. Self-development? Duvalier pointed to Cambronne and Duvalierville and the millions raised by the MRN. Popular redress against a selfish elite? No elite in Latin America save Cuba’s had been so thoroughly chastened. The grotesque irony — that a regime which satisfied every formal criterion of the development orthodoxy while producing the hemisphere’s most abject poverty — exposed what Fanon had diagnosed as the fundamental fraud of the postcolonial state: the forms of liberation emptied of their substance, the vocabulary of progress deployed as the instrument of regression, each reformist goal achieved in a manner that guaranteed its own negation.