Haiti under the eagle

Haiti under the eagle

January 26, 2010

AS THE U.S. media describes the devastation of Haiti by the January 12 earthquake, they typically leave out any mention of the disaster visited on the island for many decades beforehand—the long and bloody role of the U.S. government intervening to protect and promote its interests in what is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Since the 1900s, the U.S. viewed Haiti as a key part of maintaining its dominance in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 1915, the U.S. military began a 19-year occupation of Haiti that only came to an end after a massive rebellion against the U.S. presence. The U.S. was forced to leave—but after 19 years during which it claimed it was there to "uplift" the Haitian people, it left behind a 98 percent illiteracy rate, an economy dependent on one crop, coffee, and a large U.S.-trained military with practice at repressing domestic rebellions.

That military would later play a key role in upholding the Duvalier dictatorships, so even when U.S. forces weren’t physically in Haiti, American influence was still felt. But after the downfall of the Duvaliers, the U.S. returned to more direct methods of imposing its domination, including in its campaign against the democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Here, we print excerpts from a featured article by Helen Scott that appeared in the International Socialist Review in May-June 2004, titled "Haiti Under Siege: 200 Years of U.S. Imperialism." This excerpt begins with the rise of the Duvalier regime in the 1950s.

Illustration of the capture of Fort Riviere by U.S. Marines (D.J. Neary)

The Duvalier regime

BY THE 1950s, the conflicts exacerbated by the U.S. occupation came to a head in Haiti, as the peasantry, already drained to such an extent that it was at or below subsistence level, was hard hit by another collapse in the international coffee market. A series of short-lived governments was unable to offer any solution other than increased taxation and repression.

In 1957, a campaign of military terror was unleashed on the suffering population. That year, a decree banned "drawings, prints, paintings, writings or any other mode of expression of thought aimed at undermining the authority of the state," and another outlawed the wearing of khaki or "or any other cloth of that shade"—the army was instructed to open fire on anyone wearing light brown or olive green.

In this context, François Duvalier won the presidential election in September 1957. Using the rhetoric of noirisme, Black nationalism, he promised to redistribute the wealth out of the hands of the light-skinned elite to the Black majority. In fact, once in power, he favored the very elite he claimed to despise.

Duvalierism thus led to an extreme social polarization between a wealthy minority on the one hand, and the impoverished bulk of the population on the other. The only wealth he redistributed was from the pockets of the poor via the state coffers into the pockets of his henchmen and lackeys.

As Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot puts it, Duvalier "formalized the crisis" of Haiti. He attacked all national institutions that could support an opposition; shut down the press; purged the Catholic Church, schools and colleges; cracked down on the unions; punished his critics with torture and execution and rewarded his followers from his slush funds; and created a climate of terror through random violent attacks by the military. He built "a maniacal private security force," a new plainclothes body of armed thugs, the dreadful tonton-makout or Tontons Macoutes.

What you can do
Donations and aid are desperately needed in Haiti. Here are some organizations with connections to the grassroots movements in the country.

The Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, organized by the solidarity organization Haiti Action, delivers resources directly to grassroots organizations. It was founded in 2004 after the coup d’etat that forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of office.

For more information, including a telephone contact, go to the Canada Haiti Action Network Web site.

The Zanmi Lasante Medical Center is located in the Central Plateau of Haiti and delivers health care through a network of clinics. The health center survived the earthquake and delivering aid to the disaster zone. You can donate to the center through the U.S. non-profit organization Partners in Health.

SOPUDEP is a pioneering school in Petionville. The resources of the school and its teachers are being mobilized to assist the neighboring population. You can support the school via the Canadian-based Sawatzky Family Foundation.

While "Papa Doc" Duvalier, as he came to be known, was not installed by the U.S. government—and at times, especially during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, was not on good terms with it—his regime ultimately survived and thrived on U.S. support. This was because Duvalier proved himself very useful to U.S. imperialism in two major ways.

First, he unconditionally supported U.S. capital. In the first four years of his regime, for example, the American Reynolds Mining Company, with a monopoly on Haitian bauxite mining, paid a mere 7 percent of its earnings to the Haitian state. Exports controlled by the U.S.—sisal, sugar cane, copper and bauxite—increased.

Second, during the Cold War, Duvalier acted as a bulwark against communism, a counterweight against Cuba. He proved his anti-communist credentials by destroying the Haitian Communist Party, Parti Unifié des Communistes Haitiens or PUCH (Unified Party of Haitian Communists), and then pursuing a witch-hunt against the left. As Trouillot writes:

[Duvalier’s government] physically eliminated, imprisoned or forced into exile hundreds of progressive intellectuals, writers, professors, journalists, and union and peasant leaders. The vast majority of these people had no contact with the PUCH or with any other political organization. In ideological terms, most of the victims were barely what U.S. nomenclature would describe as left of center.

From then on, Haiti became a firm ally of the U.S. Nelson Rockefeller visited to pay his respects to Papa Doc, and when his son Jean-Claude Duvalier inherited the presidency, U.S. vessels patrolled Haitian waters to make sure the inauguration wasn’t interrupted.

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From neoliberalism to Lavalas

JEAN-CLAUDE Duvalier, who came to power in 1971, played just as important a role for imperialism’s next phase, neoliberalism. He opened up the economy to light industry and oversaw the development of assembly plants that offered cheap, non-unionized labor to manufacture clothing and other goods for U.S. companies.

In the coming decades, neoliberalism would transform the nation, accelerating the decline of the peasant system of agriculture, causing hundreds of thousands to flee rural poverty for the cities. The poor crowded into slums like Cité Soleil outside Port-au-Prince, where more than 200,000 people live in shacks without electricity, water or sewers.

The period of the Duvaliers’ rule was also one of increased international "aid," largely in the form of loans from the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, and North American and Western European governments. The corrupt regime siphoned off much of the money, and very little was invested in development.

Between 1973 and 1980, Haiti’s debt increased from $53 million to $366 million, while the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty increased from 48 percent in 1976 to 81 percent in 1985. Loans were contingent on an economic orientation on agricultural exports and the assembly industry—"The American Plan"—which ruined Haiti’s peasant farmers while benefiting only U.S. and Haitian corporate elites.

But after a decade in which a minority continued to enrich itself, while the majority was battered, Haiti’s majority again rose up to fight against its enemies at home and abroad. In the late 1980s, a mass movement developed, using the church and radio stations to organize an opposition to the Duvalier regime and to the conditions brought on them by American imperialism and global capitalism.

Despite repression, tens of thousands took to the streets until, in 1986, they ousted Jean-Claude Duvalier. Gage Averill’s eyewitness account conveys the jubilant mood:

As the news of Duvalier’s exile spread throughout the country, throngs took to the street, stripping trees of their branches and hoisting them high in the air as symbols of renewal. Crowds sang the French version of Burns’ "Auld Lang Syne," a song of parting that takes on sarcastic overtones when bidding farewell to a humiliated or despised ruler.

The people of Haiti, free of Duvalier, talked of dechoukaj—Haitian Creole for uprooting—which meant pulling the old regime up by the roots. A popular song of the time, declared, "Wo, uproot them/We’re uprooting all of the bad weeds/in order to unite"—and the poor did just that.

According to Greg Chamberlain, writing in the journal NACLA:

Dechoukaj ruled the land as Haitians administered a people’s justice, looting the villas of the rich, lynching Tontons Macoutes and staging strikes and sit-down protests to drive Duvalierists out of their jobs and into hiding.

The Macoutes’ new national headquarters was turned into a school; some cabinet ministers handed back their salaries; communist historian Roger Gaillard was named head of the university; the Cité Simone slum, named for Duvalier’s mother, was renamed after the Church’s Radyo Soley; and women marched to demand their rights for the first time in Haitian history.

By the end of the decade, the movement consolidated into Lavalas—which means cleansing wave or flood—and the slogan "alone, we are weak, together, together we are a flood" rang loud in the streets. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a radical priest and activist for the rights of the poor, emerged as a leader. In 1990, he was elected on a reform platform by a 67.5 percent majority—in a contest that had 14 candidates—and Haiti’s majority celebrated their seeming liberation across the nation.

Just nine months later, however, a military coup was launched, funded by the nation’s seven richest families and orchestrated by Duvalierist thugs. Aristide was driven out of the country. The coup regime took its revenge on the population with mass arrests, assassinations, torture, rapes and atrocities for the next three years.

In September 1994, U.S. troops again entered Haiti. The goal of this invasion, the official story goes, wasn’t to repress but to liberate the Haitian people, remove a military regime and reinstate a democratically elected president living in exile in the U.S. "Operation Restore Democracy" was to be the poster child of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. This was to be a "humanitarian intervention."

The real goal of this invasion was to protect the interests of U.S. imperialism.