We may be seeing an uptick in news on Haiti in the American mainstream media in the coming months. We may even hear calls for US military intervention in the country. Haiti seems to be literally disintegrating into complete anarchy. Much of the capital Port au Prince has been overrun by gangs who make war on each other and who have driven much of the city’s slum-dwelling population from their homes. The country has been on the verge of complete disintegration for years, with most of the population living in severe poverty and oppressed by a staggeringly corrupt, reactionary political and economic elite propped up by the United States and its international allies.
France has played a particularly nefarious role in holding back Haiti’s development. Haiti, of course, was born in 1804 out of a 13-year rebellion by black slaves against France, the country’s colonial master. As a price for recognizing the country’s independence, France, in 1826, forced Haiti, under threat of naval bombardment of the country, to sign an agreement paying massive reparations to former French slaveholders. This “debt” was only paid off in 1947 and, in today’s dollars, measures in the tens of billions. The impact on Haiti’s historical development caused by this forced debt repayment to France was explored in a series of 2022 New York Times articles called the Ransom project. France’s ambassador to Haiti later admitted that Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide’s demand for France to pay Haiti back this debt played at least a partial role in France’s support for Aristide’s overthrow in 2004.
The United States has been the overwhelmingly dominant influence in Haiti’s political and economic development over the past century. The US military occupied Haiti from 1915-34. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, Haiti was under the control of the utterly barbaric and corrupt dictatorships of Dr. Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957-71) and his son Jean Claude, who was known as “Baby Doc”(1971-86). As late as 1961, the US was still providing Papa Doc with $6 million for his country’s budget; however, the dictatorship’s brutality was such a public relations nightmare that the US subsequently cut off direct financial assistance to it, in spite of its professed anti-communism. Direct financial assistance to Papa Doc was resumed by the Nixon administration in 1969 in return for Haiti opening up its country to US business investment. Under Baby Doc’s rule in the 70’s and 80’s, Haiti became a center for sweatshops with some of the lowest wages in the world. Any attempted union activity was met with violent repression. The Haitian population overthrew Baby Doc in February 1986 and he flew off to France on a US military plane. According to one Florida court case, Baby Doc stole $500 million while in power.
In 1990 Haiti had its first democratic election and Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected president by an over two-thirds majority. On September 30, 1991, the Haitian military overthrew Aristide and set up a violently repressive, narco-trafficking dictatorship. The Clinton administration agreed to use the US military to restore Aristide to power in 1994, but on condition that he accept an extreme neoliberal economic program for Haiti. Haiti had to eliminate almost all tariffs on rice imports, allowing cheap US rice to flood the country, furthering the destruction of its once self-sufficient rice industry. The destruction of Haitian agriculture increased the influx of peasants into the teeming urban slums of Port au Prince, furthering the overcrowding that helped lay the groundwork for the ghastly death toll in the capital during the country’s January 12, 2010 earthquake. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2010, Bill Clinton expressed regret over his policies towards Haiti, recognizing that efforts to open up Haiti to US rice exports had proved very harmful:
“It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake that I was party to…I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people.”
Aristide returned to the presidency in 2000. The Bush administration cut off most aid to the country, including from international financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank. It did increase aid to Aristide’s political opposition through the government-funded non-profit National Endowment for Democracy and its subsidiary the International Republican Institute. US aid helped destabilize the country and an armed uprising was launched against Aristide, backed by Haiti’s wealthy. The uprising included former members of the Duvaliers’ secret police, the Tonton Macoutes, and the FRAPH death squad which flourished during the 1991-94 military dictatorship. The leader of the uprising was Guy Phillipe, a former Haitian police officer whose involvement in drug trafficking later landed him in US federal prison. Aristide was flown out of the country on a US military plane, a transitional government was installed and a UN peacekeeping force led by Brazil landed in the country.
The UN peacekeeping mission (acronym: MINUSTAH) developed a bad reputation in the country. It conducted several massacres of Aristide’s supporters in some of Port au Prince’s poorer neighborhoods. Around 100 Sri Lankan soldiers among the peacekeepers were sent home after their involvement in a child sex trafficking ring was exposed. In 2010, the UN was the source of a cholera epidemic in the country. Many Haitian women were impregnated by UN soldiers who abandoned them once their military service ended.
The US on the other hand regarded UN peacekeepers (often called “blue helmets”) as the lynchpin of its efforts to provide “stability” to Haiti. In 2008, the US ambassador in Port au Prince cabled Washington warning that a “premature departure” of the blue helmets would lead to instability, causing a mass exodus of refugees out of the country, “a sharp drop in foreign and domestic investment, and “resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces.” The ambassadors’ remarks were a cogent expression of US policy toward Haiti which continues to this day. The polices are 1)contain the flow of Haitian migrants to US shores below a level that might cause domestic political problems in the US 2)support policies in Haiti which encourage free market economics and 3) work to prevent the emergence of “populist and anti-market economy political forces” such as that represented by Aristide’s Lavalas party which might demand a redistribution of Haiti’s wealth toward the country’s deeply impoverished majority.
The UN ended its peacekeeping mission in Haiti in 2017 and replaced it with a police training mission. The latter ran into controversy on November 30th of that year when they secured the perimeter of a Haitian college campus while Haitian cops under the command of Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier massacred at least 11 people on the campus. Barbecue subsequently barricaded himself in his home in Port au Prince where he engaged in a shootout with other cops. He apparently suffered no legal consequence for his actions and remained on the Haitian national police payroll for at least a year afterward.
Barbecue, of course, has subsequently morphed into Haiti’s most prominent gang leader. The American media has reported on his thugs butchering, raping, and robbing Haiti’s poor. He is sophisticated enough at public relations to claim that he is motivated only by starry-eyed idealism and humanitarian zeal for uplifting his fellow Haitians but the reality is a different story. Lost in the American media’s sensationalist coverage of Haiti’s marauding gangs is the fact that many of these gangs were first nurtured by different factions of Haiti’s US-backed political and economic elite to serve as henchmen for various nefarious enterprises. Barbecue, while a member of Haiti’s national police, appears to have served as a fixer for President Jovenal Moise and other Haitian politicians. He may have been involved in the attempted murder of a police informant related to the disappearance of a massive amount of cocaine and heroin that was initially discovered on a sugar boat that docked at a Haitian port in April 2015, an event in which high-ranking officials of the Haitian government were clearly involved. Some reports link him to the leader of a gang of thugs sent by the Moise government to massacre protestors in Port au Prince’s La Saline neighborhood in November 2018.
Also reportedly involved in the April 2015 sugar boat incident was Dmitry Herard, who became head of Haiti’s presidential guard until he was arrested for involvement in the July 2021 assassination of President Moise. Herard was reportedly a leading arms and drug trafficker in Haiti and a business partner of Carl Frederic Martin, a Haitian-American former US military officer. X-International, a firm run by Martin, was given a $73,000 contract by the Trump administration in November 2019 to provide riot control kits to Haitian police.
The Aid State
Most of the background I provide in the above paragraphs is taken from Jake Johnston’s outstanding new book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti. Johnston is a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Part of his book is based on interviews and government documents obtained from Wikileaks and Freedom of Information Act requests. A bigger portion of the book is based on his own on-the-ground investigations in Haiti. It is first-rate journalism and extremely well-written. Large parts of the book read like a novel. Most of the book offers in-depth coverage of events in Haiti from the horrific earthquake of January 2010 to the July 2021 assassination of President Moise. There is no better guide to learn how Haiti got to its current deplorable state than this book.
Johnston compares present-day Haiti to Afghanistan before the Taliban retook power in 2021. Both are examples of what he calls the Aid State: where billions of dollars from the US and other nations are funneled into a country to prop up a corrupt and deeply unpopular ruling elite with most of the population living in severe poverty. Both examples feature a non-functioning economy and a hollowed-out national government, with most of the latter’s functions being taken over by US nonprofits and for-profit corporations under contract from the US Agency for International Development(USAID) and other US government agencies.
Johnston notes that it is a damning indictment of the reconstruction effort following Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake, that for all the billions of dollars in aid that flowed into the country, Haiti’s severe economic inequality remained virtually unchanged. From 2011 to 2014, Haiti experienced something like an economic boom but it was entirely artificial: it was based on the spending on overhead (salaries, housing, etc) for the foreign aid contractors who flowed into the country after the earthquake. None of it had any long-term positive effect on Haiti’s domestic economy.
A major problem with US foreign aid is that it serves as a US government-subsidized device to open up foreign markets to US exports. For Johnston, a clear example of this in Haiti occurred when, after the 2010 earthquake, Monsanto offered the country 130 tons of hybrid and genetically modified seed for free. USAID promptly assigned the private contractor Chemonics International the responsibility for distributing the seed. What should have been a priority, according to Johnston, was the use of aid money to buy seeds and already harvested rice from local Haitian producers. That would have provided the local economy with a badly needed boost. Instead, Haitian farmers were lured into relying on Monsanto seeds, which they had never worked with before and would be forced to purchase in coming years, after receiving the initial free offering. Almost all food aid after the earthquake was imported into Haiti and not bought from domestic producers.
As mentioned above Bill Clinton apologized for his role in forcing Haiti to accept cheap rice imports from the US. But Johnston shows that Clinton’s policy toward Haiti as head of the UN reconstruction effort in the country was hardly different from the policies he pursued as president. He firmly aligned the UN reconstruction effort as well as the work of his private charity ventures, the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, with the goals of the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton, of course, was Secretary of State under Obama during the several years after the earthquake. Obama’s post-earthquake reconstruction policy in Haiti revolved around subsidizing the revival of Haitian sweatshops in the hope that they would approach the level of their heyday during the 1970s and 80s. Many sweatshop operators had ceased business in Haiti during the country’s political instability of the 1990s and 2000s.
The centerpiece of the sweatshop revival effort was the Caracol Industrial Park in Haiti’s north. Obama’s USAID offered massive US taxpayer subsidies to the South Korean conglomerate Sae-A to operate the park. Johnston notes that Sae-A was implicated in major labor abuses during its operation of Guatemalan sweatshops. He describes how a USAID contract to two firms for the construction of housing for Caracol workers resulted in approximately $80 million in cost overruns.
On the political front, the US was keen to use the earthquake as an opportunity to put reliably pro-US politicians in power in Haiti. Haiti’s president at the time of the 2010 earthquake was Rene Preval, a formerly close colleague of Aristide whom the US tolerated but considered unreliable. Haiti’s presidential election in late 2010 was won by the pop star Michel – “Sweet Mickey” – Martelly. The election was marred by considerable fraud and featured a turnout of only 21 percent of Haiti’s voting population. Many votes from Haiti’s rural areas were not counted–rural Haiti was the base of support for the Preval-backed candidate Jude Celestin. Johnston shows how all of Haiti’s subsequent elections have also been marred by substantial irregularities and similarly small levels of voter turnout.
The reaction of the US and its international partners to Haitian electoral fraud has been to downplay it. The essence of US concern for “stability” in Haiti was distilled in a 2015 communication quoted in Johnston’s book by Thomas A Shannon, Under-Secretary of Political Affairs in Obama’s State Department, reporting back to the State Department after a visit with Haitian business elites. Shannon reported that these businessmen believed that Martelly had created a good investment climate in Haiti. Unlike his predecessors Aristide and Preval, Martelly was good for business–and that was what pleased US officials.
Martelly’s pro-business policies encouraged US officials to paint him publicly as one of the most pure-hearted idealists of the modern age. They implied that he was only motivated as a politician by love for his fellow Haitians. Martelly had notable celebrity friends in the US and Europe including Wyclef Jean, Sean Penn and the Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova. In 2012 Hillary Clinton called him Haiti’s “chief dreamer and believer.” Underneath the public image, Martelly’s government engaged in massive corruption. Martelly’s personal wealth increased exponentially while in office. His brother-in-law, Kiko Saint-Remy, was reputed to be a drug trafficker. Much of the corruption during Martelly’s regime revolved around stealing from Petrocaribe, the Venezuelan aid program. Johnston shows that Laura Graham, head of the Clinton Foundation, privately objected to US support for Martelly, relaying to the State Department reports of Martelly’s corruption as well as pointing to Martelly’s autocratic political moves, such as canceling local mayoral elections so as to be able to appoint such officials himself.
Martelly was succeeded as president by Jovenal Moise. Johnston describes the solicitous attitude the Trump administration took toward Moise. When the head of the UN mission in Haiti issued some cautiously worded remarks applauding Haitian law enforcement’s investigation into Petrocaribe corruption, Moise threw a tantrum and the administration obliged him by supporting the removal of the UN official from the country. Trump increased financial assistance to Moise’s government in gratitude for its support for US attempts to isolate Venezuela in Latin America. Unfortunately for Moise, the latest phase of unrest in Haiti began in the summer of 2018 as fuel subsidies from Venezuela ended. The country entered a deep recession. Moise turned to the International Monetary Fund which demanded his government implement an austerity program in return for financial assistance. At the same time, revelations emerged about Moise’s personal involvement in looting Petrocaribe funds and massive stealing from Haiti’s government coffers. The country spiraled into extreme political instability (from which it has not yet recovered) with massive protests being met by violent repression, including the massacre of 71 protestors in Port au Prince’s La Saline neighborhood in November 2018. Trump stood by Moise all the while.
Haiti is a particularly depressing case, among all too many in the world. Its domestic business class is particularly backward. Johnston quotes Keith McNichols, a retired DEA agent, as estimating that at least two-thirds of Haiti’s wealthiest families are involved in drug trafficking. Haiti has long been a center for illicit narcotics. The Medellin Cartel had a major presence in the country during the 80’s and 90’s. Johnston observes that perhaps more than anything it was Aristide’s attempt to get rid of Michel Francois– the drug trafficking police chief of Port au Prince(and friend of Michel Martelly)– that convinced Haiti’s elite to support Aristide’s overthrow in September 1991. A business partner of Moise, a hotel owner, was implicated in drug trafficking in 2014. The case obviously affected powerful people within Haiti for the prosecutor investigating the issue fled the country in fear for his life and the hotelier disappeared, his body never found.
Haiti is currently undergoing a spiral of apocalyptic violence; prospects for recovery from it seem rather dim. It is imperative that the American people understand that their government’s support for “stability” by propping up corrupt and violent (but pro-business) elements in countries like Haiti leads to extreme instability for the vast majority of the populations in those countries. US policies have led to increased refugee flight out of Haiti seeking asylum on US shores–a topic Johnston’s book covers in modest detail. It seems unlikely that any detectable percentage of the US population will ever come to understand the true nature of their government’s policy toward Haiti. Nonetheless, Johnston’s book is an immensely high-quality effort to further that understanding.
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