in the 1993 murder of Justice Minister Guy Malory, yet kept him on their payroll until the return of Aristide in 1994." It subsequently emerged that the US government had in fact played a significant role in establishing and funding FRAPH. The investigative journalist Allan Nairn broke the story in an article published in The Nation in 1994. Nairn based his findings on interviews with military, paramilitary and intelligence officials in Haïti and the United States as well as Green Beret commanders and internal documents from the U.S. and Haitian armies. Nairn spoke directly with Constant himself, then being held in a Maryland jail, shortly before he was due to be deported to Haïti. According to Constant, he started the group that became FRAPH at the urging of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and that even after the U.S. occupation got under way in September 1994, "other people from [his] organization were working with the DIA", aiding in operations directed against "subversive activities". In February 1996, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) announced that it had obtained thousands of pages of newly declassified U.S. documents, which they claim revealed that the U.S. government recognized the brutal nature of FRAPH but denied it in public. Describing the attitude of US government officials, CCR lawyer Michael Ratner said "they were talking out of both sides of their mouth. They were talking about restoring democracy to Haïti, but at the same time, they were undermining democracy in the coup period – at times supporting a group that committed terrorist acts against the Haitian people." According to Ratner, U.S. suspicions of Aristide's leftist populism prodded them to seek support from even the most brutal anti-Aristide elements. Observers such as Ratner, Nairn and Lisa McGowan have argued that covert assistance to antidemocratic forces such as FRAPH was used to pressure Aristide into abandoning his ambitious program for social reform and adopt harsh economic reforms when the U.S. returned him to power. References Bibliography Grann, David. "Giving 'The Devil' His Due." The Atlantic Monthly, June 2001. Whitney, Kathleen Marie (1996), "Sin, Fraph, and the CIA: U.S. Covert Action in Haiti", Southwestern Journal of Law and Trade in the Americas, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (1996), pp. 303–332. External links Human Rights Watch article on FRAPH Amnesty International article on FRAPH Allan Nairn discusses Haiti, an interview by Anthony Arnove, Z Magazine, June 1995 Paramilitary organizations