Haiti: The first free nation (Part 2)
In part 2, we look at Haiti's current history of imperialist intervention (from 1990 on).
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This is part 2 of this long essay. Click here to read part 1, which talks about Haiti’s history as the first successful slave revolt.
The facts so far are thus:
Haiti is a rich and fertile land.
Haitians have had to fight dearly for their freedom, and have not been allowed it fully ever since 1825.
There is a long history of foreign involvement in Haiti aimed at exploiting its labor-power and extracting its natural wealth towards the imperial core.
By being kept poor by the aforementioned two conditions, Haiti was never able to completely defend itself against foreign meddling, and this ‘weakness’ is used to justify more meddling.
In 1934, US troops left Haiti as the order of the day of the US empire was not iron grip colonialism anymore, but instead a more indirect (though just as harsh) rule from a distance. Collaborating dictators were installed through coups in several countries, nominally ruling for themselves but always strangely following Washington’s interests to a T. This was more effective in the new imperialist stage of capitalism for a variety of reasons.
Such was the case with “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his Tontons Macoutes paramilitary group. Duvalier seized power in 1957 and established a pro-US dictatorship marked mostly by oppressive tactics against his own population. Extrajudicial killings, the use of torture, arbitrary arrests, and the cruel treatment of prisoners were common in Duvalier’s Haiti.
Throughout both Duvalier’s rules, Haitian Forces received military training from the United States, with U.S. personnel present on the island to train a force loyal to Duvalier which became notorious for human rights abuses. They also received arms and other military supplies which were then used against the Haitian population. A coup was attempted in 1958 against Duvalier, with the U.S. materially supporting Duvalier against it.
In exchange, businesses were able to import cheap coffee and sugar from Haiti to sell in U.S. stores. The Haitian economy was liberalized to attract foreign investment (read: foreign ownership of land). Import tariffs to the island were removed, allowing US companies to import equipment needed for production on the cheap. The Duvaliers reduced state control over industries as well as labor protections. U.S. companies were able to find cheap labor in Haiti, which is still the case to this day — garment workers in Haiti earn approximately 6.78 USD equivalent per day, which is lower than the neighboring Dominican Republic (10 USD), Jamaica (8 USD), Antigua and Barbuda (24 USD) and Grenada (22 per day).
Under President Clinton, USAID workers pushed for Haitian workers to abandon their rural towns and move to the city centers, strengthening a proletariat. However, with proletarianization also comes unemployment, i.e. the reserve army of labor. This migration was engineered: as workers rushed to the cities, limited employment did not keep up with the influx. Workers thus competed for any opportunity; this kept wages low for U.S employers implanted in Haiti.
Duvalier’s son took over in 1971 and ruled until 1986, still with U.S. military and economic support, and still collaborating with Washington fully. The US Air Force escorted Jean-Claude Duvalier (the son) from Haiti to France in February 1986 to protect him from the popular rebellion that ousted him from power. Afterwards, Henri Namphy led a military regime under which he continued the Duvaliers’ policies. A series of coups happened, with Namphy leading three of them to retain power.
We must understand Haiti’s entire history to this day as one continuous process. Like many other so-called “poor” nations, they are not lacking resources: they’re simply overexploited. Everything from labor to natural resources is kept cheap so that it can be exploited and sold to us in the imperial core at a price tag of 5$.
The playbook is very simple and remains simple, and I’ve written about it before.
Destabilize a country,
install a comprador dictator who will dirty his hands for you,
privatize and liberalize the economy, and
swoop in once everything is destroyed to “rebuild” what worked, at a ‘fair’ market rate, of course.
To defend this system means to inevitably fall into gross racism: justifications as to why Haiti “remains” poor and can’t seem to get out of its crises point the finger at the wrong cause so as not to examine this imperialist relation: “Haitians simply don’t have high IQs!” “They just don’t want to work hard!” “They’re not very educated, what can you expect?”
But it was “uneducated” plantation workers who threw out the French and stopped their invasion. We have two choices: either we admit honestly that we like having cheap treats and refuse to see the blood-soaked system required to create those. Or, we realize that there is a hidden cost to bringing us those cheap goods, and from there can start to do something against it.
Such accusations are not new against Haitians (and indeed against many other nationalities). During the Duvalier dictatorships, stories in the media painted refugees fleeing death squads were painted as ‘economic migrants’, and with it came the usual accusations of ‘foreigners’ wanting to steal the meager economy of the richest country at the time, the United States of America. Some choice quotes from The Conversation:
In September 1963, the first boatload of Haitian refugees landed in Miami. But instead of finding freedom, all 23 Haitians were denied asylum and sent back to Haiti by the U.S. immigration authorities.
In the 1980s, during the HIV crisis, U.S. health officials wrongly labeled Haitians as high-risk carriers of the virus, reinforcing harmful racial and ethnic stereotypes.
Why was such stigma attached to Haitians? Since the United States supported the Duvaliers, it was beneficial to send Haitian refugees back to Haiti so they could work for Chiquita or the GAP to make cheap clothes. It was of course accompanied by a broad stigma, not unlike the stigma Haitians face today or Asian-Americans faced following the COVID epidemic (with hate crimes surging several hundred percentage points). In the 80s, after the HIV label was spread out, Haitians in the U.S. lost their jobs and found it hard to regain employment or a place to live.
End of the Duvaliers
The Duvaliers dictatorship ended in 1986, but their legacy remains in Haiti.
Rice is a staple food in Haiti and has been cultivated since 1806. Haiti was self-sufficient in its rice production up until 1980. However, after the floods in 1970, U.S. companies began to send shipments of rice to Haitian markets, underselling local farmers with the subsidized crop and putting them out of business. Under the Duvaliers and their successor President Namphy, cheap “Miami rice” was further exported to Haiti — owing to the 0% import tariffs — and flooded the Haitian market. Farmers protested in 1987 and blocked highways and ports, but this influx continued through smuggling operations.
This policy aimed to condemn Haiti to perpetual poverty, making the country and its people unable to feed themselves, ensuring they would instead always be dependent on imports from the U.S. This was directly orchestrated under President Clinton.
Under U.S. intervention, Haitian markets were forcibly opened up to foreign ownership (the basics of imperialism), and some years after the initial dumping of surplus rice, the American Rice Corporation rushed in to secure Haiti’s rice market and rebuild it in its image.
As Thomas Sankara once said when faced with the same situation in Burkina Faso:
Those who come with wheat, millet, corn or milk, they are not helping us. Those who really want to help us can give us ploughs, tractors, fertilizers, insecticides, watering cans, drills and dams. That is how we would define food aid.
In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected President of Haiti with 67% of the popular vote. This marked the first democratically-elected President of Haiti in quite a while.
One of Aristide’s plans was to bring back local and self-sufficient rice production to the island. Aristide also wanted to raise the minimum wage in Haiti, but U.S. influence was already too strong and the plan failed. By the end of 1991, he was ousted in a coup led by General Raoul Cédras. He and another leader in the coup had been trained in the U.S.
In 1994, President Clinton deployed 20,000 U.S. troops in the country in what he called Operation Upholding Democracy (side note: I always find these names extremely funny), ostensibly against the coup government — it shouldn’t seem strange that Washington did not support the coup against Aristide; it happens at times (this was the case in Russia and Cuba for example) that the US initially supports both sides of a conflict hoping that they will be able to capture whoever comes out victorious, but then find themselves unable to get through to the new ruler, in which case they will stage another coup or intervention to replace him.
One year earlier, CIA-backed death squads killed scores of Aristide's supporters. I highly recommend this article as further reading on the history of U.S. crimes in Haiti: New York Times series The Ransom absolves capitalism for Haiti’s oppression.
We are not quite sure why the U.S. eventually sided with Aristide in 1994 as he was working against their interests. At least, public information doesn’t seem to be available regarding this sudden change of heart. It’s possible they thought they could turn Aristide to their side if they brought him back and avoid a refugee crisis depopulating the island.
Regardless, Aristide returned to power by October 1994 and ruled until 2004 (under two new terms) when another coup deposed him.
The U.S. came back again — would you believe it — and kidnapped Aristide himself, taking him to the Central African Republic.
With this sudden power vacuum, an interim government was set up, established under Prime Minister Gérard Latortue who had been living in Florida before his appointment. His government was supported by the United States, Canada, and France.
At the same time, the United Nations got involved. Under the MINUSTAH mission, which had been heavily encouraged by the US, a contingent of Brazilian troops (the bulk of it) was sent to “restore order” in Haiti. Haiti, of course, had no say in the matter of whether their national sovereignty should be violated or not. Notably, the Brazilian troops were sent to Haiti during Lula’s first term.
MINUSTAH was not well-received by Haitians. There were many accusations of sexual assault made by locals against MINUSTAH, and the mission was even responsible for a cholera epidemic that killed more than 10,000 Haitians. So-called “peacekeepers” were criticized for excessive and arbitrary use of force against the “gangs” that were cited as the reason for the mission. The UN forces only left the country in 2017.
The thing with “gangs” is that recent history shows that it’s not as simple as simply killing gang members until they stop. There is a reason people join gangs, and there is a reason gangs find recruits: they provide survival opportunities, and in many places also provide services that the state has been unable or unwilling to provide.
The word “gang” often conjures an image of immoral criminals, whose only reason for existing is their own enrichment through criminal means. This image is exploited during such interventions to convey the urgency: even today in 2024, we hear about the “cannibal” gangs of Haiti that steal, rape and kill — but we somehow never heard that from the Duvaliers. These accusations are not new; the “cannibal” trope draws on the history of voudou in Haiti, the African roots of the Haitian population, and of course their war of independence.
But in Haiti (and elsewhere), “gangs” provide basic community services, such as security or the distribution of food and water. They also organize communities for collective action, provide jobs, and stimulate the local economy.
Of course, not all ‘gangs’ are equal — some are only out there to enrich themselves. But in the same vein, not all gangs can be put into the same box as the mainstream media does to justify foreign intervention.
In the absence of a working government, is a gang really a “gang”, or parallel governance?
Gangs are highly relevant today again, with figures like ex-police officer Jimmy Chérizier or Gabriel Jean-Pierre making the news. The two figures lead opposing gangs who, in late 2023, banded together against a possible further military invasion. This time, the invasion was led by Kenyan troops requested at the behest of the U.S. — and once again, Haiti’s opinion on the matter was not considered.
They did not come out of nowhere. After President Jovenel Moïse's assassination in 2021, the USA installed Ariel Henry as leader of Haiti. In 2022, Henry and the OAS called for another invasion of Haiti — the aforementioned Kenyan troops. Moïse himself had been supported by the USA and Biden’s administration. His term had officially ended in February 2021, but he clung to power with death squads patrolling the streets until his assassination in June.
Haiti is a nation that has never been given a chance to develop, a nation that was punished for daring to succeed in its revolt. While politicians repeat harmful and debunked stereotypes that Haitians are “eating cats” (a delicacy in some parts of Western Europe if you didn’t know by the way), they never once ask why Haitians are leaving the country in search of better opportunities — they cannot, because to do so would mean to recognize that all US Presidents since independence have influenced Haiti in various ways to create crises in their interests.
The accusations of eating pets are of course dangerous and purposely so — and we must remind the reader that there is no evidence or basis for that claim. But it becomes even more malicious when one remembers that it was the United States who destroyed food self-sufficiency in Haiti.
Whatever comes out of this military operation and the next ones that will undoubtedly be tried against Haiti, we must understand that further foreign meddling in Haiti will not solve any of its problems but only exacerbate them. The actual working approach, which countries like China have shown us when dealing with their own terrorist problems (ETIM in Xinjiang), is not to indiscriminately bomb, arrest, and kill terrorists — but to provide their base of recruitment with economic opportunities such that they will not feel like they have to join these groups to survive. Crime is an expression of generational poverty, which is solved accordingly with economic development.
The very first step for anyone who wants to truly help Haiti is to recognize that 200 years of occupation have not solved anything and that Haitians must be listened to when they tell the world what they actually need. It is not for London or Washington-based think tanks to decide what must happen to Haiti.
But the point for imperialists is not to stabilize Haiti and help it develop the tools to deal with its internal problems; the point is to keep it subservient to keep labor cheap, and natural resources readily available.
Racist attacks against Haitians continue and have never left the media. As an imperialized nation, there are many parallels between Haiti and other countries in crisis such as Palestine or Syria. There too, many lies are propagated to diminish the role imperialism plays in keeping these countries poor, destabilized, and disunited. Failings of the state are blamed on their issues, while behind the curtain billions of blood money, and weapons transit — whether in Haiti, Syria, or “Israel” — to keep a certain status quo alive. The media then regurgitates these stories, painting the US-baked dictators as men of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ while they freely exploit the chaos to commit acts of ethnic cleansing that are swept under the rug.
Much like al-Jolani today was invited to act out a glowing interview on CNN, ditching his turban and long beard that may scare viewers (but not ditching the videos of him beheading children in Syria), so were the Duvaliers likewise positively represented in the media — here in a very soft interview for French channels that made him look like a measured and even altruistic grandfather figure.
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Caitlin I really appreciate your newsletter and find it very informative. With that being said, WHERE in Western Europe are people eating CATS?
The New World Disorder of Bush The Elder, First Butcher Of Baghdad, was gangsters in the rubble, “in Haiti (and elsewhere), “gangs” provide basic community services, such as security or the distribution of food and water.”