Aid, not Guns, for Haiti

By Joe Richard

Joe Richard is a Fine Print columnist.

Everyone is aware of the horrible social catastrophe the people of Haiti are facing after the 7.0 earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. The disaster will inevitably go down in history as one of the most destructive natural disasters of all time. But there are questions that the mainstream media haven’t been asking. Aside from the racist portrayals of Haitians as uncontrollable looters incapable of self-governance or self-control, virtually no one in the media has delved into the long history of U.S. involvement in Haiti, which sheds some light on why a natural disaster has turned into a social disaster worse than anything we’ve seen before.

Why is Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? Why does the immense majority of Haitians live on less than $2 a day? Why does the capital of Port-au-Prince (which is built on a fault line) have no building codes to regulate proper building construction like similar cities? Why is the Obama administration sending thousands of troops to Haiti, instead of serious economic and humanitarian aid? Why are U.S. warships surrounding the waters off the coast and refusing to allow anyone to leave the island?

The answers to all of these questions can be found in the long history of U.S. interventions in the first modern country to abolish slavery and establish a black republic.

Born in the midst of a heroic slave rebellion in 1791, the Western world viewed Haiti as a revolutionary example of popular liberation and thus a direct threat to the colonial powers (the young United States included) and to their economic interests in the hemisphere. From the very beginning of Haiti’s slave rebellion, U.S. congressmen, many of whom were slave owners, debated the intentional strangling of the country as an example to the rest of the populations of the Caribbean. And indeed, this is what happened.

Haiti is still burdened today by a debt to France for the expropriation of French property in 1791 (also known as slaves). Haitians continue to pay France for liberating themselves and deciding that they were indeed not human property, but rather human beings. In addition, in the last 200 years Haiti has endured several U.S. interventions to overthrow popularly elected governments, as well as the brutal weight of World Bank and IMF loans, which always come with strings attached.

The U.S. was responsible for backing the two bloody dictatorships of the Duvalier family from 1957 to the point when “Baby Doc” Duvalier was overthrown in 1986 in a massive popular uprising, but only after the U.S. military whisked him out of the country in possession of millions of dollars from the national treasury. Since then, popular movements in Haiti have fought for increases in the minimum wage, reforestation programs, expanding public services and ending the privatization of the public sector.

This has pitted the people of Haiti against their own insulated ruling elite and U.S. capitalism. Various U.S. administrations–including those of Clinton and George W. Bush, who most recently orchestrated a paramilitary coup in 2004 to oust Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the popular center-left president at the time–have acted as the armed bodyguard for multinational companies and Haiti’s ruling class while they plunder the natural resources of the country and rob the poor and working classes. Whether by direct military invasion (the Marines have been sent to Haiti several times in the last century) or through sanctions and economic destabilization, Haiti is a rich country that has been made poor by U.S. imperialism.

Obama is now continuing in the footsteps of his predecessors by ordering U.S. troops into Haiti to serve as an occupying military while offering Haiti’s current president a pittance of aid and more loans.

Nothing in this world is ever free. As Richard Kim at The Nation recently discovered: “The new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage, and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.”

As Americans, we should feel a certain compulsion to point out that U.S. imperialism has plenty of Haitian blood on its hands and will continue to until we do something about it.

A number of demands have been articulated that would be a good step toward achieving peace and justice for Haiti. As Ashley Smith, a writer for socialistworker.org, recently wrote: “First, we must demand that Obama immediately stop the military occupation of Haiti, and instead flood the country with doctors, nurses, food, water and construction machinery. Soldiers with guns will only make the situation worse. Second, the U.S. must also end its enforcement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s exile and the ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in elections. Haitians, not the U.S., should have the right to determine their government. Third, we must demand that the U.S., other countries and international financial institutions cancel Haiti’s debt, so that the aid money headed to Haiti will go to food and reconstruction, not debt repayment. And we must agitate for Obama to indefinitely extend Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the U.S.–and open the borders to any Haitians who do flee the country. Only through agitating for these demands can we stop the U.S. from imposing its Shock Doctrine for Haiti at gunpoint.”