American Empire: The Torment of Haiti

This is American Empire, Splinter’s rolling series of articles exploring the power of the United States and the different ways it unleashes it upon the world. Read our other entries here.

There are times when the otherwise wild and feverish rants of Donald Trump, veering in and out of coherence, manage to elucidate the ways in which American elites actually see the world. His latest habit of peddling bullshit to dehumanize Haitian people, while vile and actively dangerous, is fundamentally just an uncouth expression of a longstanding, bipartisan American political tradition: tormenting Haiti and its people. Trump is just picking up the slack from a long line of cruelty that came before him.

Thousands of Haitians were deported from the United States when Trump was president, but the same is true of his successor. Unlike Trump, Biden has taken measures to prevent hundreds of thousands of Haitians already in the U.S. from being kicked out — for which he should be commended — but he has also pandered to the right by clamping down on asylum seekers more broadly. Haitian people, too, have been forced home under Biden, just as they had been under Trump, even as the current administration openly acknowledges how dangerous it is in Haiti right now.

There’s a cruel irony to it: persecuting Haitians for seeking a better life in America, as they flee conditions in their homeland the U.S. is largely responsible for creating.

Haiti is today a disaster zone, one of the poorest countries on Earth, where heavily armed gangs bearing weapons trafficked from the U.S. have taken over. Thousands of people have been killed by gang-related violence this past year, hundreds of thousands have been displaced, and rape has become a common tool of terror. Children are recruited into gangs, others are murdered, and schools are forced to close. Violence in farming regions has worsened an already critical food crisis, driving half the country’s population to the brink of starvation, while the Haitian police force, outnumbered and outgunned, is powerless to stop any of it.

The situation has become so dire that a strange international police force has been cobbled together and deployed to the country, tasked vaguely with helping the Haitian police to restore order. The mission is led by Kenya, whose police force has previously been marred by accusations of human rights abuses, but personnel from the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Chad and Jamaica are all involved, too. The United States, meanwhile, is providing most of the money for the mission — plus a few military planes — but it clearly doesn’t want to be seen as openly intervening, more recently calling for U.N. peacekeepers to be sent to Haiti instead. The U.S. is cagey about putting troops on the ground, because it has done so before and Haitians rightly fear the worst.

Before the Americans ever got involved in Haiti, though, it was the French who ran it as a colony, and it is they who set it up for the cycle of doom it is now trapped in. Saint-Domingue, as it was known then, was one of the world’s most lucrative colonies, exporting vast amounts of sugar, coffee and cotton extracted from the land by imported West African slaves. Saint-Domingue was the jewel of the French empire, but it all changed when, in 1791, the Haitian slaves rose up against their oppressors and, for 13 years, fought for their freedom. It proved to be the first successful slave revolution of modern times, and, in 1804, the independent nation of Haiti was declared.

France, wounded by the loss of its lucrative colony, refused to recognize the new nation for many years, finally changing its stance in 1825. It would acknowledge Haitian independence, but only on the condition that Haiti pay an enormous amount of money to make up for the loss of “property” that French slaveholders had endured as a result of the revolution. Faced only with the alternative of fighting a war with France, Haitian leaders had no choice but to accept, and, from its earliest days, the new nation was financially crippled. The debt hung over the country for 122 years, with a New York Times investigation estimating in 2022 that, once inflation and the consequent lack of productive investment into the Haitian economy was accounted for, the true cost of the debt was in the region of $115 billion, about eight times the size of the entire Haitian economy in 2020.

By the early 20th century, the newly imperial United States smelled blood in Haiti. Wall Street bankers, realizing there were riches to be extracted there, began investing in the country’s national bank, effectively gaining control over it and, therefore, the finances of the entire nation. American elites were growing rich off the backs of poor Haitians, but the situation was only to get worse. In 1915, under President Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. invaded, establishing a brutal occupation that would last for 19 long years.

The Americans bent Haiti to its will, imposing a system of forced labor known as corvée and opening its lands to foreign ownership, something which had previously been banned. American companies duly flooded in, taking advantage of the country’s natural resources and its reserves of cheap labor, safe in the knowledge that the U.S. military, should it need to, would unleash terror upon the population to keep things ticking along. American troops committed multiple atrocities, not only against Haitian rebels, but against civilians, too. People were murdered, tortured, and raped. Houses were set alight with inhabitants still inside, some people were buried alive, and others were hunted for sport. One man, Charlemagne Péralte, was killed and his half-naked corpse tied to a door and photographed. The image was then distributed to the population.

The end of the U.S. occupation in 1934 did not mark a new dawn of Haitian sovereignty. American businesses remained in the country, while the wider political and commercial interests of the U.S. were shored up in subsequent years by several military interventions and the propping up of brutal dictators who American leaders deemed sufficiently amenable. The United Nations, too, deployed “peacekeepers” to Haiti in 2004, and its forces that pulled out in 2017 were accused of raping underage girls and inadvertently causing a cholera epidemic that killed thousands. It is not for nothing that Haitian people are distrustful of foreign troops on their soil.

It’s not always necessary for the U.S. to send in the troops to exert an insidious sort of control.  America provides millions of dollars in aid to Haiti, which, on the face of it, might seem a perfectly decent thing to do. But the aid industry is toxic, and there are few places on Earth where that is more apparent.

When Haiti was hit by a massive earthquake in 2010, entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of people died and millions were left homeless. The disaster was reported extensively by the media, with harrowing images beamed all around the world. Ordinary people responded immediately with empathy, with literally billions of dollars being raised to go towards Haiti’s recovery. Some estimates suggest that nearly half of all American households donated to the cause.

Most of that money never made it into Haitian hands. Instead, it was funneled toward foreign NGOs and for-profit companies, who proceeded to enrich themselves, piss it away, or both. The American Red Cross, as just one example, managed to raise half a billion dollars on the promise that it would build homes, but a 2015 investigation by NPR and ProPublica found that, five years after the earthquake, the charity had built just six houses. Where the rest of the money had disappeared to was unclear.

Another particularly egregious misuse of American aid went into the construction of the Caracol Industrial Park, a massive sweatshop facility proposed before the earthquake but pushed through in its wake. Its grand opening in 2012 was a glamorous, suitably American affair, filled with famous faces looking for an earnest photo-op, including Ben Stiller and, of course, Sean Penn, a man who never lets an opportunity to show off his liberal benevolence pass him by. Headlining the event were the Clintons, Bill and Hillary both, each one delivering speeches to impress upon whoever was listening that this extraordinary sweatshop would save the Haitians.

What the smiling celebrities failed to mention that day was that hundreds of farming families had been forced from their homes to make way for the factory. They were promised compensation, but, naturally, it never came. The stars never mentioned who actually built the sweatshop, either, but it wasn’t locals. It was largely foreign, private contractors, flown in from abroad to do the job at far greater expense than local workers would have cost. Nor did they note the fact that the industrial park had been built hours away from Port-au-Prince, where the earthquake had been most damaging and where people needed the most help. But this project was never about helping people. It was about fulfilling the twisted dreams of neoliberal ideologues, who sought to take advantage of human misery to implant a workshop in Haiti, where cheap laborers could make cheap shit to make big money for exploitative companies.

The Clintons, so pivotal to the Caracol project, are unlikely to ever be heard speaking publicly about Haitians in quite as overtly racist a way as Trump. But rhetoric aside, they, too, have denied their humanity. The people of Haiti, in the eyes of American elites like the Clintons and Trump, are just cogs in the machine of American imperialism, things to be used, living on a land to be exploited. And so here we are today, with the country and its people permanently gripped by imperial-driven crises, and another foreign intervention being deployed. American interests, then, will be protected. Haitian people will suffer, and the cycle will continue.