Image by TopSphere Media.
Some people say the definition of insanity is repeating the same action but expecting a different result.
In the lead up to the 20th anniversary of a Canadian coup and two weeks after an illegitimate leader ignored a self-imposed deadline to depart, Ottawa put up $80 million to pay for a foreign intervention into Haiti.
At the recent G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Brazil Melanie Joly announced $80 million to pay for an international policing mission to Haiti. The money is on top of $40 million previously announced for a quasi-UN military mission. In a statement Joly claimed Canada financing the Kenya-led force organized by Washington was a “Haitian solution” to the country’s troubles. “Canada believes in Haitian-led solutions to the political, security and humanitarian crises and remains committed to working with Kenya and other international partners to support a successful deployment of the Multinational Security Support mission,” she declared.
Canada’s announcement comes two weeks after Prime Minister Ariel Henry ignored the date, February 7, he’d previously announced for his departure after nearly three years of unconstitutional rule. Selected by the US- and Canada-dominated Core Group, Henry has little constitutional or popular legitimacy. Now, he’s ignoring his self-imposed date to leave.
Ostensibly about security, the Kenya mission is at least as much about protecting Henry and the undemocratic order the foreign powers depend on.
In Haiti history does repeat itself, the first time a tragedy, the second time a farce.
Henry was a member of the foreign-created ‘Council of the Wise’ that appointed the prime minister after the US, France and Canada ousted elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide 20 years ago this week. After a multi-year foreign backed campaign to destabilize his government, US Marines forced Aristide onto a plane in the middle of the night on February 29, 2004, and deposed him 8,000 km away in the Central African Republic. When Aristide was forced out, reported American Forces Press Service, “a team of [Canadian] JTF2 commandos… secured the International airport”.
Thirteen months earlier the Canadian government brought top US, French and OAS officials together for a private two-day gathering to discuss Haiti’s future. No Haitian officials were invited to the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” conference where they reportedly discussed ousting the elected president and putting the country under UN trusteeship. Ottawa’s role in overthrowing Haiti’s most popular ever government is the penultimate case of 20 coups detailed in my and Owen Schalk’s just released Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy.
The coup led to a decade and a half long foreign military occupation. The disastrous UN mission, which introduced cholera to the country, made it difficult to generate support in the hemisphere for another mission to Haiti. Washington wanted Canada to lead the foreign force but the Canadian military was opposed. Ottawa pressed other countries in the hemisphere to join with limited success. Ultimately, Washington was forced to look further afield to find a country to lead a mission that is UN approved but not funded by the international organization.
While no CARICOM country was willing to lead the mission, Canada’s been pushing Caribbean countries to participate. Canadian troops are currently training soldiers from the Bahamas to go to Haiti. At this week’s CARICOM summit international development minister Ahmed Hussen promoted participation in the mission. Hussen said, “Canada’s commitment to promoting security, stability, and development in Haiti remains steadfast. Today, alongside CARICOM leaders, we discussed how we will continue to be there for Haitians.” In Guyana Hussen also met privately with the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She said the meeting was to “discuss our mutual commitment to advancing peace and security in Haiti.”
On Sunday hundreds marched on the Canadian embassy in Port-au-Prince. Denouncing Canada‘s promotion of a new foreign intervention, some protesters burnt tires. One man declared that “Canada, the US and France are preventing Haiti’s development.”
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
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.
How US “Foreign Aid” Has Helped Destabilize Haiti
By Jake Johnston, Sara Van Horn , Cal Turner March 14, 2024Source: Jacobin
A surge of gang violence in Haiti has now led to the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Through its heavy-handed use of foreign aid to intervene in Haitian politics, the US government bears significant responsibility for Haiti’s ongoing instability.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti meant a devastating loss of life, shelter, and livelihood. More than two hundred thousand people in the country died, 1.5 billion became homeless, and upward of $7 billion worth of damage was incurred across the affected area. The massive scale of the earthquake’s destruction was met by an influx of foreign aid. In the United States, fundraising for the crisis reached unprecedented proportions, with some sources estimating that nearly half of all US families donated to the relief efforts.
Much of this money, however, did not go to feeding, sheltering, and supporting the financial recovery of Haitians. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, distributed 130 tons of genetically modified seeds — donated by chemical giant Monsanto — in a costly relief program aimed at rural farmers. Haitian farmers, however, didn’t need foreign seeds: they needed money. And for a fraction of the cost of the USAID program, foreign donors could have purchased all necessary food aid from local rice producers, jumpstarting the rural economy.
In his new book, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti, Jake Johnston offers a century-long history of aid in Haiti. He shows that the Haitian earthquake, far from a singular disaster, was an inflection point in the history of a country whose experience of occupation and foreign interference has often been cloaked in the guise of aid. Arguing forcefully against the US-style intervention that has prioritized “stability” measures, he makes the case that Haiti needs self-determination to thrive.
In the wake of a surge of gang violence in Haiti earlier this month — leading to the just-announced resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry — Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn spoke with Johnston for Jacobin about the origins of the current crisis, the fine line between aid and occupation, and the present and future prospects for autonomy for the Haitian state.
Sara Van Horn
Can you talk about US interventions in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti?
Jake Johnston
The initial response from the United States and across the world was heavily militarized. The priority was neutralizing potential national security threats: the waves of migrants leaving Haiti and trying to enter the United States, and the fifty thousand endangered US citizens living in Haiti.
The primary concerns were limiting that migration and evacuating American citizens, which required pushing as many military assets as possible into the region. There were big carriers and boats off the shores of Haiti and thousands of troops coming in.
But most of them never actually set foot in Haiti: they stayed offshore, which was as much about stopping people from leaving Haiti as it was about providing anything for the people that were still there. Low-flying planes would broadcast in Creole: “If you’re thinking about leaving the country, don’t do it. We’re going to send you right back.” That’s where US resources were going.
Despite the US’s militarized approach, what happened after the earthquake was not an outbreak of violence; it was Haitians coming together to help themselves. The first responders were not foreigners. The first responders were Haitians helping their neighbors and their communities — bringing food from rural communities into Port-au-Prince, for example. Foreign interventions can often disrupt those local mutual aid formations.
Cal Turner
In the book, you talk about how vulnerability to natural disasters and outcomes of disaster response are heavily determined by politics and history. Could you talk about aid for natural disasters more generally? How does it work, and where does it fall short?
Jake Johnston
There are many ways that foreign assistance can enter a country. There is official bilateral assistance: the type of money that comes from donor governments through agencies like USAID. There is also a broader humanitarian space driven by private donations. Finally, there is a mechanism of aid through big development banks, like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Aid after the earthquake largely bypassed the Haitian government and local institutions and went to foreign NGOs — many of whom did not have a prior presence in the country — and US development companies. When we think about humanitarian assistance, we often think about NGOs, but the reality is that bilateral aid is dominated by for-profit companies. It’s been outsourced over the last few decades, and the functions of USAID are now managed and run by private contractors that operate for profit. These were the biggest players that received US government funding after the earthquake.Low-flying planes would broadcast in Creole: ‘If you’re thinking about leaving the country, don’t do it. We’re going to send you right back.’ That’s where US resources were going.
Getting money into local hands is not just effective in terms of responding to the needs on the ground — because the people on the ground know what they need — but it also stimulates the local economy. If you bypass and undermine local organizations, that’s going to have long-term impacts.
The reality was that international aid had already had a huge impact on Haiti in prior decades. At the time of the earthquake, up to 80 percent of public services in Haiti were in private hands: NGOs, development banks, private companies, religious groups, and so on. The outsourcing of the state had already happened by 2010.
Sara Van Horn
What was prioritized in terms of aid after the earthquake, and why?
Jake Johnston
The priority overall was stability: stability over democracy, stability over development. That decision was rooted in a belief that stability can lead to those things.
But we have to take a step back and ask: Stability for whom? It wasn’t for the Haitian people. It was for certain political and economic actors.
This manifested in a few different ways. The Caracol Industrial Park was the flagship reconstruction project right after the earthquake. Luring a large foreign textile company into Haiti became a priority for the US and others in the international community.
But where did the Caracol Industrial Park end up being built? In the north of the country, far from the actual area impacted by the earthquake. This project wasn’t a direct delivery of aid to people affected by the earthquake.
This development impacted other aid projects down the line. For example, there was a large US-sponsored housing program in Haiti after the earthquake, initially designed to build homes for people displaced by the earthquake in and around Port-au-Prince. But the only houses that were actually constructed were for housing workers at the new industrial park in the north of the country.
This was a political priority for the United States, which contrasted with the needs of people on the ground in Port-au-Prince who couldn’t get a roof over their heads. More than a million people had been displaced, and houses were being built hours away in the north.
Cal Turner
Could you give a basic overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Haitian history in relation to US intervention?
Jake Johnston
The US occupied Haiti for nineteen years starting in 1915. It drastically reshaped Haitian society, consolidating power in the capital and creating the military, which rose to power post-occupation.
In the late 1950s, there was a quasi election — certainly not free and fair or involving widespread participation — of François Duvalier, which ushered in a three-decade-long dictatorship that the US supported for many years. One important factor was Haiti’s proximity to Cuba. Duvalier was a staunch anti-communist, so the US backed a dictatorship in Haiti as a counterweight to Fidel Castro in Cuba.
In 1986, the fall of Duvalier ushered in a period of military governments and aborted electoral processes that culminated in the 1990 election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a liberation theologian, who came to office in a total upset of expectations. He lasted nine months in office before he was overthrown in a military coup.
The US imposed an embargo on the military junta that came to power, but some members of that government were on the CIA payroll, and in the aftermath of the coup, death squads formed to terrorize the population — some of the leaders of which also had relations with the CIA. Regardless of official policy, there existed all these other mechanisms and tools with which the US interfered with the government of Haiti.François Duvalier was a staunch anti-communist, so the US backed a dictatorship in Haiti as a counterweight to Fidel Castro in Cuba.
The [Bill] Clinton administration sent troops to Haiti to restore the ousted Aristide to power in 1994, and they were welcomed by the Haitian people. It looked like this might create a new path forward.
But this is where other economic interventions also came into play because the return of Aristide came with conditions. Those conditions were the adoption of neoliberal economic policies, which had extremely damaging implications for the Haitian state and people.
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, many of the US officials who had worked to overthrow Aristide during his father’s administration came back to power and returned to the same playbook. The United States blocked loans from multilateral development banks like the Inter-American Development Bank and reduced their own aid outlays to Haiti.
That culminated in the February 2004 overthrow of Aristide, where he was put onto a US plane and flown into exile. He was kept in exile in South Africa through the pressure of the US government and didn’t return to Haiti until 2011 — the [Barack] Obama administration tried to pressure the South African government to not let him return to Haiti but ultimately was unsuccessful.
We give aid to governments we like, we take aid away from governments we don’t like: in this way, we destabilize the political environment, hurt some governments, help other governments; build some up, tear others down. This is how the US uses the tools of soft power to intervene politically.
Sara Van Horn
Could you talk about how aid has been used to support US military objectives? And where does immigration fit in?
Jake Johnston
The great irony is that our policies seem on the one hand to be very motivated by trying to prevent migration, and yet it is our policies that are also overwhelmingly responsible for creating migration. The two periods of greatest international investment in Haiti, the 1980s and directly following the 2010 earthquake, were also the two periods of highest migration out of Haiti. You have to ask: Are our policies to prevent migration a total failure, or is preventing migration not really the US’s motivation?
In Haiti, there’s this belief that the US just wants to stop all migration from the country. But I think that misses the mark in one major way, which is that the survival of the aid state, a hollowed-out state protecting certain interests, depends on migration.
Haiti is even more reliant on remittances than foreign aid. Without the valve of allowing people to leave Haiti, there’s no way the current state stands. The state cannot provide for the people that are there now, and that’s with tens to hundreds of thousands of people trying to leave or leaving every year.
The reality of what would happen if that valve was shut off is also not in the US interest. The US interest is in preventing the domestic blowback from a big wave of migration, not migration itself.
Cal Turner
In Aid State, you write about the importance for US officials of keeping Haiti out of the news. Why?
Jake Johnston
There are times when US officials very much do want Haiti in the news for various purposes. After the earthquake, we saw a high-profile aid effort from the United States. Former president Bill Clinton was the United Nations special envoy, and Hillary Clinton was very personally involved in the relief efforts.
As it became clear that those efforts weren’t going so well, they became a political liability back home. We often see foreign policy decisions being made for domestic political reasons. The real concern for US officials is, “How does this affect our political future back home?” not, “How does this impact the people on the ground in Haiti?”
There is a historical legacy here too. All of this is happening in the historical context of Haiti, which saw the first and only successful slave revolt, which created a constitution that abolished slavery in 1804 and was not recognized by world governments for decades — in the case of the United States, not for more than sixty years. We can see current events as a continuation of a long-standing policy of not giving Haiti its due representation in the world arena.
Sara Van Horn
How did the Haitian Revolution help lay the groundwork for the current aid state in Haiti?
Jake Johnston
One long-standing cost of the revolution is the ransom that France demanded and that the Haitian government agreed to pay in 1825. This debt financially weakened the country for well over a century. Obviously, that debt has a lot to do with what we see in Haiti today: the underdevelopment, the weakness of the state.
There’s also another way that it’s directly related. When the Haitian government agreed to pay this indemnity to France in 1825, they needed revenue to do so. This pushed Haiti’s leaders to reinstate the exploitative plantation economy model in a post-revolution Haiti, a dynamic that has characterized the relationship between the Haitian people and the Haitian state ever since.
The Haitian state is not actually representative of or accountable to the people but extracts from its own population and feeds the rest of the world. What I’ve termed the “aid state” is shaped by contemporary developments, but it is really rooted in the same dynamic that we’ve seen for over two hundred years, where the state is simply not responsive to the Haitian people.
Cal Turner
How did the post-2010-earthquake period shape Haiti’s current political climate?
Jake Johnston
We have to start with the 2010 electoral process. There were still a million people displaced from the earthquake. It was quite clear from the beginning that this was going to be a mess: people were nowhere near their voting centers, and nobody knew whether they were going to be able to vote if their ID cards had been lost. But the United States and other donors had a lot of money riding on this — $10 billion pledged to the relief and reconstruction effort — and wanted a new government to work with in Haiti.
That vote was, predictably, a mess: something like 20 percent of the vote was never even counted, the participation rate was around 20 percent, and it was extraordinarily close. To clarify the situation, the Haitian government invited the Organization of American States [OAS], a regional body based in Washington but composed of all the regional governments, into the country to analyze the vote.The US threatened to withhold postquake aid if the Haitian government didn’t accept these recommendations. Ultimately, the Haitian government acquiesced and changed the results of that election.
Without doing any statistical analysis, projection of the missing votes, or a full recount of the votes that had been counted, the OAS recommended changing the official results of the election, removing [incumbent president] René Garcia Préval’s chosen successor out of the race, and placing a political outsider, the popular musician Michel Martelly, into the runoff election. The US threatened to withhold post-earthquake aid if the Haitian government didn’t accept these recommendations. Ultimately, the Haitian government acquiesced and changed the results of that election, ushering Martelly into the presidency, where he remained for the next five years.
Today Haiti is in a position where there’s extreme insecurity and political instability in the country. To figure out where this came from, we have to look back to 2010 and that electoral process, to the individuals we as outside actors helped put into office to run that post-earthquake state and be in charge of those billions of dollars.
Sara Van Horn
Could you talk about the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse? How is it linked to the conditions you describe in the book?
Jake Johnston
Large sectors in Haiti, legal experts, and human rights groups argued that Moïse’s mandate came to an end in 2021. This question of whether or not the president of Haiti’s mandate ended or not is obviously for Haitians to determine. But in the first weeks of Joe Biden’s administration, a US State Department spokesman said at a press briefing that the US believed that Moïse’s term ends in 2022, not 2021.
This was the US interpreting the Haitian constitution — and it’s not just about that statement, but what that statement would indicate to players in Haiti. Moïse could refuse to negotiate with people in Haiti, because international support is so deterministic in Haiti, or at least perceived as such, so that when you have it, you’re empowered to go ahead on your own and not build the coalitions that are necessary for real governance.
Six months later, he was assassinated in his home. I think the decision of the US to provide unconditional support for Moïse certainly contributed to the conditions surrounding the president when he was killed.
It’s been two and a half years since that assassination, and we’re seeing the same thing take place again. Ariel Henry was named prime minister by Moïse right before his assassination. About two weeks after the assassination, the international community urged Henry to form a government. Lo and behold, within a few days he was prime minister, and he has been prime minister ever since.
But there are no elected officials in the country, no institutions, to hold him accountable. If we actually want to support a Haitian-led solution, we’ve got to stop telling Haitians what an appropriate solution is.
Cal Turner
Do you see these dynamics reflected in the current political crisis in Haiti?
Jake Johnston
The multifaceted crisis on display in Haiti is directly related to these dynamics. At the heart of this is a broken social contract, a state that is unrepresentative of and unaccountable to the Haitian people. For decades, foreign intervention has helped to prop up an inherently unsustainable status quo. Now, the aid state is collapsing — which was, of course, inevitable.
In recent decades, Haiti’s political class has become more responsive to foreign powers than to the Haitian people, but legitimacy imposed externally will never last. We can see this quite clearly with the de facto prime minister Ariel Henry, who owed his authority to foreign powers. By propping up this government, the US and others have pushed Haiti into uncharted territory, with disastrous consequences for the population and made any resolution that much more difficult to achieve.
At the same time, I don’t think we should see the collapse of the aid state as inherently a problem. Haiti has an opportunity to build something new, to build a state in line with the ideals that animated the founding of the world’s first black republic. In many ways, the fight today is between putting the train back on the tracks, so to speak, and building something new. And, sadly, those who have benefitted from the status quo are going to violently fight to protect their power. 
