AGENT DE L'IMPÉRIALISME

Fall of Ariel Henry, disputed prime minister of Haiti

Agence France-Presse
March 12, 2024 

Ariel Henry, who has agreed to resign as prime minister of Haiti, came late to politics after a career as a neurologist (Valerie Baeriswyl/AFP)

Ariel Henry, a renowned doctor but controversial political leader who resigned on Monday, became prime minister of Haiti after the 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moise, but never managed to put an end to the violence and chaos in his country.

Moise selected Henry for the post just two days before he was killed by a group of mostly Colombian mercenaries.

Henry, 74, studied medicine in France and made a name for himself in Haiti as a neurologist.

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During his medical career, he headed the neurosurgery department of one of Haiti's most renowned private hospitals and taught in state universities in Port-au-Prince, only entering politics late in life.

In January 2015, president Michel Martelly named him interior minister, a position he held for less than eight months.

After a change in the head of government in September 2015, he was appointed minister of social affairs and labor for six months, before leaving the political scene for more than five years.

In July 2021, president Moise chose him as his seventh prime minister.

But just two days later, on July 7, Moise was assassinated in his residence.

The attack plunged the already fragile country into chaos and Henry did not even have time to officially take office.


After two weeks of uncertainty and under pressure from foreign embassies, he was finally installed as head of a government already suffering from a legitimacy deficit.

The investigation into the president's assassination only increased distrust of him: the night of the murder, Henry had several telephone conversations with one of the main suspects.

And in early 2022, CNN broadcast a recording attributed to a judge accusing Henry of having planned and financed the attack.


Henry dismissed the allegations as a "distraction" and said it was difficult to recall the names of everyone who called him that day and the nature of the conversations they had.

- Gangs extend control -

As civil society and part of the political opposition struggled to agree on offering an alternative, the prime minister retained control of the state, but without much impact in the face of the repeated and growing crises shaking the country.

Well before the death of Moise, criminal gangs had already extended their control over the country.

With gangs controlling a large part of the capital Port-au-Prince, preventing access to the offices of the prime minister, Henry had to organize ministerial meetings from his official residence.

On January 1, 2022, Henry was forced to flee under bursts of gunfire from a national ceremony marking the 218th anniversary of Haiti's independence in the city of Gonaives, which he said was an attempt on his life.

According to an agreement concluded in December 2022, Henry was to hold elections sometime in 2023 and then cede power to newly elected officials on February 7, 2024.

However, elections have not been held and Henry refused to step down, exacerbating the crisis and increasing questions over his legitimacy.

The country was without a president -- Moise was not replaced -- or parliament as all its lawmakers' terms had run out and national polls had not been held since 2016.

As the gangs extended their control, they formed an alliance with the declared aim of overthrowing the prime minister.

They attacked police stations, Port-au-Prince's airport and even prisons, freeing thousands of inmates.

On March 5, powerful gang leader Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier, a former policeman, warned the country was headed for "civil war" if Henry did not resign.

As the gangs launched their coordinated campaign of violence, Henry was on a visit to Kenya to sign an agreement for the deployment of Kenyan police to Haiti as part of a multinational mission supported by the United Nations and the United States.

His plane, prevented from landing back in Haiti, finally took him to the US island of Puerto Rico, from where he announced his resignation on Monday.

The United States, which was pushing with other countries for a political transition in Haiti, said he was welcome to remain if he wished to stay there.

Haiti’s Nightmare Is Made in America

by Ted Snider Posted onMarch 13, 2024

No stranger to nightmares, Haiti is descending into another one.

Armed gangs, many of whom grew in power and wealth during the current administration of Prime Minister Ariel Henry with whom they had collaborated, have engaged in turf wars that have internally displaced over 362,000 people, according to United Nations estimates. They engineered prison breaks, and on March 8, armed gangs surrounded the National Palace.

Haitian gang leaders have “demanded that the country’s next leader be chosen by the people and live in Haiti.” Henry was not elected. He was placed in power by the “Core Group,” made up of UN representatives, the United States, France, Canada, Spain, Germany, the Organization of American States, and the European Union after the assassination of President Jovenal Moïse. Gang leaders have demanded his resignation.

On March 11, Henry, who is stranded in Puerto Rico, finally announced that he would resign after repeatedly postponing elections. The announcement came after a meeting on March 11 of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM). Celebrations reportedly erupted on the streets of Haiti.

The United States, which has consistently backed Henry, had hoped he could survive to oversee the transition, but the chaos and brutality on the streets forced their hand. Without American support, the unpopular ruler had no way to survive.

Democracy in Haiti has meant never getting to choose your own leader. The United States and its partners have a long and terrible history of coups and interference in Haiti that have hijacked and undermined Haitian democracy. Haiti’s democratic wishes have long been snuffed out by the United States, and the people of Haiti have never had much say in whom they want to lead their country. In 1959, when a small group of Haitians tried to overthrow the savage U.S.-backed dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the U.S. military, which was in Haiti to train Duvalier’s brutal forces, not only helped locate the rebels but took part in the fighting that squashed them.

A quarter of a century later, when the people of Haiti longed to elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, the CIA, with the authorization of President Ronald Reagan, funded candidates to oppose him. In 1989, the United States undermined the Aristide government, and, immediately following the coup, supported the junta and increased trade to Haiti in violation of international sanctions. CIA expert John Prados says that the “chief thug” amongst the groups of militia behind the coup was a CIA asset. Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, agrees. Weiner says that several of the leaders of the junta that took out Aristide “had been on the CIA’s payroll for years.”

When the people of Haiti got the chance again and elected Aristide in 2004, the United States, with the help of Canada and France, crushed their choice, kidnapped Aristide, and sent him to exile in Africa. Aristide has said, “The coup of September 1991 was undertaken with the support of the U.S. administration, and in February 2004 it happened again, thanks to many of the same people.”

A secret cable recently obtained by The Grayzone appears to place a CIA officer in contact with “questionable individuals” identified in the cable as Haitians “with ties to coup plotters.” And France’s ambassador to Haiti at the time of the coup, Thierry Burkard, has revealed that “France and the United States had effectively orchestrated ‘a coup’ against Mr. Aristide…”

Henry, himself, had replaced the enormously unpopular Moïse, who had been illegally holding onto power and growing increasingly authoritarian under the protection of U.S. backing. Many in Haiti complained of Henry’s long rule without being elected. Supposedly installed as an interim leader, “with U.S. support,” Brian Concannon says, “Henry’s unconstitutional term as prime minister exceeded any other prime minister’s term under Haiti’s 1987 Constitution.”

Henry’s forced resignation offers Haitians a way out of the nightmare. He will step down after the establishment of a transitional presidential council and the appointment of an interim prime minister. The transitional council will reportedly include “representatives from several coalitions, the private sector and civil society, and one religious leader.”

But this way out of the nightmare only has a chance of succeeding if the United States reverses its historical course and does not block the road. The U.S. had sided with Henry in demanding international troops in Haiti to restore order. Others, with an eye on history, saw international troops as a way to prop up the Henry regime. Concannon raises the concern that American insistence on an international force “raises fears that the United States will… continue its policy of installing and propping up undemocratic regimes in Haiti.” That concern, he says, is intensified by American insistence that any new Haitian government must immediately welcome “a multinational security support mission.”

After the CARICOM meeting, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the U.S. will provide $300 million for a Kenyan-led multinational security mission to Haiti.

As Concannon has pointed out, the sovereignty, legitimacy, and popular acceptance of a government “allowed to form only if it accepts a U.S.-imposed occupation force originally designed to prop up a hated, repressive government” is in doubt.

Hopefully, the United States will allow Haitians to choose their own leader and honor that choice, and allow the new Haitian government to choose its own policy on restoring order and choose whether Haitians want an international force.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

What’s Going on in Haiti?

BAP Backgrounder: Haiti Behind the Headlines

by Black Alliance for Peace / March 12th, 2024

Haiti is in the headlines again and, as usual, the headlines on Haiti are mostly negative. They are also largely false. Haiti, they tell us, is overrun by “gang violence.” Haiti is “a failed state,” standing on the verge of “anarchy” and teetering on the edge of “collapse.” Haiti, they tell us, can only be stabilized and saved through foreign military invasion and occupation. We have seen these stories before. We know their purpose. They serve to cover up the true origins of the “crisis” in Haiti while justifying foreign military intervention and setting up an attack on Haiti’s sovereignty.

What is the reality behind the headlines? The reality is that the crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism. Those countries calling for military intervention – the US, France, Canada – have created the conditions making military intervention appear necessary and inevitable. The same countries calling for intervention are the same countries that will benefit from intervention, not the Haitian people. And for twenty years, those countries that cast Haiti as a failed state actively worked to destroy Haiti’s government while imposing foreign colonial rule.

On Haiti, the position of the Black Alliance for Peace has been consistent and clear. We reject the sensationalist headlines in the Western media with their racist assumptions that Haiti is ungovernable, and the Haitian people cannot govern themselves. We support the efforts of the Haitian people to assert their sovereignty and reclaim their country. We denounce the ongoing imperialist onslaught on Haiti and demand the removal of Haiti’s foreign, colonial rulers.

What’s Going on in Haiti?

• The crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism – but what does this mean? It means that the failure of governance in Haiti is not something internal to Haiti, but it is a result of the concerted effort on the part of the west to gut the Haitian state and destroy popular democracy in Haiti.
• Haiti is currently under occupation by the US/UN and Core Group, a self-appointed cabal of foreign entities who effectively rule this country.
• The occupation of Haiti began in 2004 with the US/France/Canada-sponsored coup d’état against Haiti’s democratically elected president. The coup d’etat was approved by the UN Security Council. It established an occupying military force (euphemistically called a “peacekeeping” mission), with the acronym MINUSTAH. Though the MINUSTAH mission officially ended in 2017, the UN office in Haiti was reconstituted as BIHUH. BINUH, along with the Core Group, continues to have a powerful role in Haitian affairs.
• Over the past four years, the Haitian masses have mobilized and protested against an illegal government, imperial meddling, the removal of fuel subsidies leading to rising costs of living, and insecurity by elite-funded armed groups. However, these protests have been snuffed out by the US-installed puppet government.
• Since 2021, attempts to control Haiti by the US have intensified. In that year, Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse was assassinated and Ariel Henry was installed by the US and UN Core Group as the de facto prime minister. In the wake of the assassination of Moïse and the installation of Henry, the U.S. has sought to build a coalition of foreign states willing to send military forces to occupy Haiti, and to deal with Haiti’s ostensible “gang” problem.
• The armed groups (the so-called “gangs”) mainly in the capital city of Haiti should be understood as “paramilitary” forces, as they are made up of former (and current) Haitian police and military elements.  These paramilitary forces are known to work for some of Haiti’s elite, including, some say, Ariel Henry (Haiti’s former de facto prime minister). It should also be noted that Haiti does not manufacture guns; the guns and ammunition come primarily from the US and the Dominican Republic; and the US has consistently rejected calls for an arms embargo.
• Moreover, as Haitian organizations have demonstrated, it is the UN and Core Group occupation that has enabled the “gangsterization” of the country. When we speak of “gangs,” we must recognize that the real and most powerful gangs in the country are the US, the Core Group, and the illegal UN office in Haiti – all of whom helped to create the current crisis.
• Most recently, Ariel Henry traveled to Kenya to sign an agreement with Kenya prime minister William Ruto authorizing the deployment of 1,000 Kenyan police officers as the head of a multinational military force whose ostensible purpose was to combat Haiti’s gang violence. But the US strategy for Haiti appears to have collapsed as Henry has been unable to return to Haiti and there is renewed challenge to the constitutionality of that deployment.
• The US is now scrambling for control, seeking to force Henry’s resignation while looking for a new puppet to serve as a figurehead for foreign rule of Haiti. While Haiti currently does not have a government, it has not descended into chaos or anarchy. The paramilitaries, it seems, are waiting for their orders to act, while the US strategy for Haiti is in crisis.

Why Haiti?

For BAP, the historic struggles of the Haitian people to combat slavery, colonialism, and imperialism have been crucial to the struggles of African people throughout the globe. The attacks on Black sovereignty in Haiti are replicated in the attacks on Black people throughout the Americas. Today, Haiti is  important for U.S. geopolitical and economic viability. Haiti is in a key location in the Caribbean for US military and security strategy in the region, especially in light of the coming US confrontation with China and in the context of the strategic implementation of the Global Fragilities Act. Haiti’s economic importance stems from what western corporations perceive as a vast pool of cheap labor, and its unexploited land and mineral wealth.

BAP’S Position on the Current Situation in Haiti

• BAP, as with many Haitian and other organizations, have consistently argued against a renewed foreign military intervention.
• We have persistently demanded the end of the foreign occupation of Haiti. This includes the dissolution of the Core Group, the UN office in Haiti (BINHU), and the end of the constant meddling of the US, along with its junior partners, CARICOM, and Brazil’s Lula.
• We have denounced the governments of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) (with the exception of Venezuela and Cuba), for supporting US plans for armed intervention in Haiti and the denial of Haitian sovereignty.
• We have denounced CARICOM leaders, and especially Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, for not only supporting US planned armed intervention in Haiti and offering their police and soldiers for the mission, but for also following US and Core Group dictates on the way forward in Haiti. Haiti’s solutions should come from Haitian people through broad consensus. CARICOM leaders cannot claim to be helping Haiti when they are acting as neo-colonial stooges of the US and the Core Group.
• We have denounced the role of Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, for not only continuing Brazil’s role in the Core Group, but for also leading the charge, along with the criminal US government, for foreign armed military invasion of Haiti. We remind everyone that it was Lula’s government that led the military wing of the 2004 violent UN occupation of Haiti. Brazil’s soldiers led the mission for 13 years (until 2017).
• In solidarity with Haitian groups, we have denounced the UN approved, US-funded, Kenyan-led foreign armed invasion and occupation of Haiti. We are adamant that a U.S./UN-led armed foreign intervention in Haiti is not only illegitimate, but illegal. We support Haitian people and civil society organizations who have been consistent in their opposition to foreign armed military intervention – and who have argued that the problems of Haiti are a direct result of the persistent and long-term meddling of the United States, the United Nations, and the Core Group.
• We demand US accountability for flooding Haiti with military grade weapons. We demand that the US enforce the UN-stated arms embargo against the Haitian and U.S. elite who import guns into the country.
• We will continue to support our comrades as they fight for a free and sovereign Haiti.

Long live Haiti! 

• First published in The Black Alliance for Peace

Debt, Dictatorship and Haiti’s Crisis: It

 Has Not Always Been This Way 

BY JEFFREY SOMMERS – PATRICK BELLEGARDE-SMITH

 APRIL 22, 2024
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Photograph Source: Voice of America – Public Domain

Social disorder. Prisons emptied of violent criminals by gangs looking to rebuild their ranks. Schools, hospitals, and pharmacies targeted for looting and frequently burned. Corpses left rotting in the streets for fear of succumbing to the same fate by attempts to remove them. The capital’s port was captured and ransacked, with famine threatening. Meanwhile, on Haiti’s northern coast, cruise ships still disgorge foreign tourists to the protected (with no shortage of irony) “Columbus Cove Beach.”

There’s no sugarcoating it — the collapse of order in Haiti and the activities by gangs in recent months to capitalize on the situation is bad.

Just as with the Middle East, we hear the refrain that Haiti “has always been like this.” Except it hasn’t. Haiti’s history has been both storied and challenged. Reasonably educated persons often juxtapose Haiti to the comparatively thriving Dominican Republic (DR), the neighboring country with which Haiti shares an island. The comparison hints at a defect of the former relative to its better-off neighbor. (The subtext sometimes is that race explains their different fates.) Yet a long view of Haiti reveals its current poverty relative to the neighboring Dominican Republic has been anything but constant — it only emerged in the past four decades.

No doubt a wide gap has opened up between the economic performance of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The DR’s per-capita GDP last year was roughly 700 percent larger than Haiti’s. But going back to 1960, the year where quality data on GDP for the two countries became available, Haiti’s per-capita GDP was (inflation-adjusted) $1,716, 25 percent more than the DR’s, then at $1,374.

Indeed, Haiti’s per-capita GDP in 1960 was even a hefty 67 percent larger than today’s rich South Korea, and far from the poorest country in the Americas. This was no one-off performance. The trend, which predated 1960, differed little up to 1980; the DR was then posting per-capita numbers 29 percent greater than Haiti’s, which still placed them in the same ballpark.

Rather than Haiti “always” being this way, it was 1981 that marked the start of its rapid decline.  The Dominican Republic maintained and even slightly accelerated its steady economic growth that had until then been at rough parity with neighboring Haiti. By contrast, Haiti’s precipitously dropped.

Economic Disaster

Why? One reason was the 1970s oil shock, which increased the price of black gold by tenfold that decade. Needing to recycle cash from windfall sales of oil deposited with them, banks extended loans to all comers. Haiti’s dictator, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier, gorged himself on loans, while investing too little of this cash to develop Haiti’s economy.

Meanwhile, the United States ended its inflation in 1980 with Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s monetary shock. This cured America’s inflation problem, but massively drove up the repayment costs of those 1970s loans around the world that had to be paid back in the now-inflated dollar.

Duvalier then made a series of lazy and disastrous bets for Haiti’s economy. He went hat in hand collecting foreign aid as cheap foreign credit evaporated, but this tranche of cash did little for Haiti’s economy. Next, he slashed taxes on export earnings and invited foreign companies to employ Haiti’s cheap labor for assembly factories. The model earned plaudits from the United States — but it did not provide much benefit to Haiti, as nearly all inputs came from abroad, tax receipts from the foreign investment were negligible, and wages were kept at subsistence levels.

Then, fearing a new swine flu, in 1986 the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1986 instructed Duvalier to slaughter Haiti’s chief source of protein: pigs. A small, hearty variety, Haiti’s pigs were perfectly suited to low-input peasant production. USAID tried replacing them with a large US variety requiring housing conditions many peasants might envy; these new pigs died. Absent their traditional source of protein, desperate Haitian peasants turned to felling trees to sell for charcoal, thus producing the now tragically familiar images of Haiti’s deforestation.

Political Upheaval and US Meddling

Political upheaval followed as Haitians worked to end their twenty-eight-year-old dictatorship. The United States sought to guide this process, forcibly at points, demanding a veto power over policy in Haiti.

In 1995, US president Bill Clinton instructed Haiti to drop its tariff on US rice (subsidized and chiefly grown in Arkansas) from 50 percent to 3 percent. Haiti’s rice production subsequently collapsed. Two decades later, Clinton apologized to Haiti for advancing this disastrous policy.

This coup de grace to Haitian agriculture led peasants in the hundreds of thousands to decamp from the countryside to Port-au-Prince. Impoverished and desperate, peasants built housing from cinder blocks in the capital. When Haiti’s big 2010 earthquake hit, these cinder-block dwellings were destroyed. Official estimates put deaths at over 200,000 and injuries at 300,000, with another 1.3 million displaced and widespread disease following the collapse of infrastructure, from which Haiti has yet to recover.

The above is to say that it indeed has not “always been this way” in Haiti, which once economically rivaled the now-successful Dominican Republic. Yet it would be too easy to blame all Haiti’s misfortunes the past half century solely on the US — Haitian elites have made their share of errors. And Haiti views some of its neighboring states with distrust. Recently, a summit meeting of Caribbean leaders met in Jamaica; the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leadership representing fifteen Caribbean states is now seen by many Haitians as a tool of bigger powers.

It did not help that behind the convening host at the most recent CARICOM meeting, prime minister of Jamaica Andrew Holness, stood the Canadian, French, and Brazilian flags, an odd choice given the states CARICOM represents. Notwithstanding that CARICOM’s intentions might be “pure,” suspicions remain. Foreign interventions have always resulted in long-term disasters while at best providing short-term relief.

On March 25, James B. Foley, the US ambassador to Haiti from 2003 to 2007, published an op-ed in the Washington Post asserting “Haiti’s dysfunction is a permanent condition” and calling for yet another military intervention. If there has been any “permanent condition” in Haiti, it has been foreign interventions, and not the despair currently being experienced in the country.

Meanwhile, a presidential collegium was offered at the Jamaica CARICOM conclave, but with no Haitian representation at the meeting. In past decades in Haiti, the Cour de Cassation — Haiti’s supreme court — would have sent a provisional president. That option seemingly was overlooked and with it, the sense that decisions will be made by Haitians rather than for them.

The Caribbean nations, particularly those that are members of the Commonwealth, are fiercely independent in their foreign policies vis-a-vis the United States, as many of their politicians are major intellectual figures. Their stance on Haiti comes from a position of concern; they acknowledge a shared history of resistance to imperialism. Yet today, one still cannot discount the observation made in February 1907 by Dantès Bellegarde, arguably Haiti’s best-known diplomat and one of its most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century: “The US is too close and God is too far.”

A version of this article first appeared in Jacobin.

Jeffrey Sommers is a professor of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, along with Senior Fellow at their Institute of World Affairs. He is also Senior Fellow at the Center for Political Economy at Babeș-Bolyai University. His work on austerity has found print in dozens of academic publications, and his op-eds have appeared in CounterPunch, Financial Times, the New York Times, Project Syndicate, the Guardian, the Nation, Social Europe and others. He also is the author of the book Race, Reality, and Realpolitik: U.S.–Haiti Relations in the Lead Up to the 1915 Occupation.

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He has authored and co-edited five books on Haiti, including The Breached Citadel, and served as president of the Haitian Studies Association. He has been featured in interviews by CNN International, NPR, and other major outlets.

Haiti’s Disintegration and US Foreign Policy

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

By Chris Green

April 14, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.





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.