The State Department and I

So finally the whole COHA-Haiti drama appears to be over. More than a month after my piece on Préval was published, the article was taken down from COHA's website due to the negative responses to my criticism of the Aristide government. (Remember, the piece wasn't even about Aristide but Préval.) COHA's director (my boss), Larry Birns, wrote an apologetic piece praising the criticism of me and disassociating himself and the organization from my views. Meanwhile, my original piece is all over the internet anyway, which, for better or for worse, cannot be erased. All in all, I'm happy with the ending. COHA did what it believed was necessary to preserve its reputation, and I had the opportunity to stand by my work. There are two sides to any story, and maybe this was the best possible compromise.

Most interesting, however, was NarcoNews' response to Birns' piece. (NarcoNews, if you remember, put out the original criticism of my work.) In the piece--which, overall, was complimentary of Birns' retraction (and COHA itself) but critical of the writing and editing process that goes on at COHA--the writer, Dan Feder, couldn't resist attacking my work again calling it "...another report full of dishonest rhetoric and innuendo better suited to the State Department than a critical organization purportedly committed to the defense of democracy in the Carribean and Latin America."

Talk about a loaded sentence fragment! First, if Feder believes all of my work was dishonest rhetoric and innuendo, then he might as well check the 99% of my article that dealt with my analysis of the current state of democracy in Haiti, which no one at NarcoNews has addressed. And if anyone's guilty of biased rhetoric and innuendo, that would be the radical, ideologically driven folks at Narco and not me.

Second, and most interestingly, was the comparison between my work and that of the State Department and the suggestion that the State Department isn't committed to democracy. As someone who would love to one day work at the State Department to help promote democracy in our own hemisphere and elsewhere, could I have received a better backhanded compliment? Rather than post online ramblings forever (which is what the people Narco seem content to do), I hope to to be in a position in which I can actually impact international society and support both the strengthening of democracy and America's reputation abroad. What better place to do that than in the State Department?

So thanks, NarcoNews. You might not have realized it, but you made my day. It's only a few Metro stops and a quick transfer from COHA's office to the State Department's headquarters so, hey, you never know.

The Beauty of the First Amendment

As some of you might know, I've been interning for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs for a short while now. The Council (or simply COHA) aims to provide its readership with a sense of what is going on in the Western Hemisphere--from Canada to Chile--politically, economically, and socially. So far, it's been an incredible experience; I've learned an incredible deal about what goes into producing internationally reputable work on a subject I'm interested in, and I recently published my first piece for COHA, something which I was very excited about.

It's titled "Préval of Haiti--A Provisional Report Card: Grade B+" and goes into a fair amount of detail analyzing the current state of the Haitian government and the status of democracy and democratic institutions there. In doing so, I aimed to provide a bit of context to set the stage for the Préval government. I hoped to show the bleak landscape that awaited Préval after his election a year ago. Both heads of state (President Aristide, who was ousted in a coup, and Prime Minister Lartortue, who ran an interim government following that coup) failed miserably at their jobs. Neither garnered the respect of the international community, and both are considered miserable failures.

A week after the piece went up, a quick Google search led me to an article in the radical Narco News--this one a direct rebuttal to my own article. In it, the writer, Joe Emersberger, ignores the main point of my article (that Préval has done an infinitely better job of leading a government that is much more democratic in practice than did either of the past two leaders). Instead, he focuses on how I characterize the Aristide and Latortue regimes: "Citing no evidence, Glenwick equates Aristide to Latortue by writing that Aristide’s time in office was an 'equally rocky period.'" First and foremost, I’d hope that citing Haiti’s rigged elections in 2000 that led the United States, Europe, and the International Community in general to withdraw aid would be enough evidence. Second, the folks at Narco seemed to be under the impression that I came down easy on Latortue; in describing his term, I wrote of the “hundreds—if not thousands—of opposition party members [who] were murdered.” I don’t know what Emersberger thinks, but that’s not exactly high praise in my book.

Neither Aristide nor Latortue were quality leaders. In fact, they were far from it. Both had dictator-like moments, and neither reflected the democracy that is a fundamental part of the Haitian constitution. It was not my goal to determine which ruler was worse than the other; they both were extremely flawed, governed poorly, and did not gain the respect of many people outside of their own party. All I intended to convey was the fact that Préval had a lot of work to do. How that is interpreted is up to the reader, but I believe I did my job. Lastly, my piece was about Préval, not Aristide or Latortue. For the people at Narco to not even mention the focus of my article is a disservice to their own credibility and, more importantly, their readership.

Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing. It’s what has separated our country from so many others for so long and is one of the biggest reasons why I am so proud to be an American. Do I support Narco News’s right to criticize my article? Absolutely. Do I agree with Emersberger’s criticism? No, and I believe that his criticism is severely flawed, misconstruing my minor points and ignoring my main ones.

P.S. My newest piece, on microcredit in Latin America, is now up on http://www.coha.org/. Let the criticism (and maybe even some praise?) begin!