Haiti's Disintegration and US Foreign Policy

[Judi Lynn]

Review of Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti by Jake Johnston (St. Martin’s Press, 2024)
By Chris GreenApril 14, 2024Z Article

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.”

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