A surge in gang violence in Haiti has led to the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. By massively using foreign aid to intervene in Haitian politics, the US government bears significant responsibility for Haiti’s current instability.
The 2010 Haiti earthquake led to devastating losses of life, shelter and livelihoods. More than two hundred thousand people died in the country, 1.5 million were left homeless and more than $7 billion in damage was suffered in the affected area. The scale of the destruction caused by the earthquake was offset by an influx of foreign aid. In the United States, fundraising for the crisis has reached unprecedented proportions, with some sources estimating that nearly half of all American families have donated to relief efforts.
However, much of this money has not been used to feed, house and support the financial recovery of Haitians. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, distributed 130 tonnes of genetically modified seeds – donated by chemical giant Monsanto – as part of a costly aid program for rural farmers. But Haitian farmers 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 the necessary food aid from local rice farmers, thereby boosting the rural economy.
In his new book, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti, Jake Johnston offers a history of a century of aid in Haiti. It shows that the Haitian earthquake, far from being a unique disaster, was an inflection point in the history of a country whose experience of occupation and foreign interference has often been concealed. under the guise of aid. Arguing forcefully against U.S.-style intervention that prioritized “stability” measures, he argues that Haiti needs self-determination to prosper.
Following a surge in gang violence in Haiti earlier this month – which led to the just-announced resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry – Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn spoke with Johnston for Jacobin on the origins of the current crisis, the fine line between aid and occupation, and the current and future prospects for Haitian state autonomy.
Sarah Van Horn: Can you talk about the U.S. interventions immediately following the 2010 Haiti earthquake?
Jake Johnston: The initial response from the United States and around the world was heavily militarized. The priority was to neutralize potential threats to national security: the waves of migrants leaving Haiti and attempting to enter the United States, as well as the fifty thousand endangered American citizens living in Haiti.
The main concerns were limiting this migration and evacuating American citizens, which required deploying as many military assets as possible to the region. There were large carriers and ships off the coast of Haiti and thousands of troops were arriving.
But most of them never set foot in Haiti: they stayed offshore, which was as much about preventing people from leaving Haiti as it was about providing something to those who were still there. Planes flying at low altitude broadcast in Creole: “If you are thinking of leaving the country, don’t do it. We will send you back immediately.” This is where American resources were going.
Despite the United States’ militarized approach, what happened after the earthquake was not an explosion of violence; they were Haitians coming together to help themselves. The first responders were not strangers. The first responders were Haitians helping their neighbors and communities, for example bringing food from rural communities to Port-au-Prince. Foreign interventions can often disrupt these local mutual aid formations.
Cal Turner: In the book, you explain how vulnerability to natural disasters and the outcomes of disaster response are strongly determined by politics and history. Could you talk more generally about aid in the event of natural disasters? How does it work and where does it fail?
Jake Johnston: There are many ways for foreign aid to enter a country. There is official bilateral aid: the type of money that comes from donor governments through agencies like USAID. There is also a broader humanitarian space fueled by private donations. Finally, there is an aid mechanism through major development banks, such as 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 which had no previous presence in the country – and American development companies. When we think of humanitarian aid, we often think of NGOs, but the reality is that bilateral aid is dominated by for-profit companies. It has been outsourced over the past few decades and USAID functions are now run and managed by private contractors who operate for profit. These are the biggest players who received funding from the US government after the earthquake.
Putting money in the hands of local people is not only effective in meeting 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 weaken local organizations, it will have long-term consequences.
The reality is that international aid has already had a huge impact on Haiti in previous decades. At the time of the earthquake, up to 80 percent of public services in Haiti were in the hands of the private sector: NGOs, development banks, private companies, religious groups, etc. State outsourcing had already occurred in 2010.
Sarah Van Horn: What was the priority in terms of aid after the earthquake, and why?
Jake Johnston: The overall priority was stability: stability rather than democracy, stability rather than development. This decision was rooted in the belief that stability could lead to these things.
But we must step back and ask ourselves: stability for whom? It was not for the Haitian people. It was for certain political and economic actors.
This manifested itself in different ways. The Caracol industrial park was the flagship reconstruction project immediately after the earthquake. Attracting a large foreign textile company to Haiti has become a priority for the United States and others in the international community.
But where was the Caracol industrial park ultimately built? In the north of the country, far from the area actually affected by the earthquake. This project was not a direct provision of aid to those affected by the earthquake.
This development has had an impact on other long-term aid projects. For example, there was a large U.S.-sponsored housing program in Haiti after the earthquake, initially designed to build houses for people displaced by the earthquake in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas. surroundings. But the only houses that were actually built were intended to house workers in 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 Port-au-Prince residents who were homeless. More than a million people have been displaced and homes are being built hours from here in the north.
Cal Turner: Could you provide a basic overview of 20th and 21st century Haitian history in relation to American intervention?
Jake Johnston: The The United States occupied Haiti for nineteen years starting in 1915. It radically reshaped Haitian society, consolidating power in the capital and creating the army, which rose to power after the occupation.
In the late 1950s, there was a quasi-election – certainly not free and fair or involving broad participation – of François Duvalier, which ushered in a three-decade dictatorship that the United States supported for many years . An important factor was Haiti’s proximity to Cuba. Duvalier was a staunch anti-communist, which is why the United States supported a dictatorship in Haiti as a counterweight to Fidel Castro in Cuba.
In 1986, the fall of Duvalier marked the beginning of a period of military governments and abortive electoral processes that culminated in the 1990 election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a liberation theologian, who came to power in a complete upheaval of expectations. He remained in power for nine months before being overthrown in a military coup.
The United States imposed an embargo on the military junta that came to power, but some members of that government were in the pay of the CIA and, following the coup, death squads were formed to terrorize the population – some of whose leaders also had connections with the CIA. Regardless of official policy, there were all these other mechanisms and tools with which the United States intervened in the government of Haiti.
L’administration [de Bill] Clinton sent troops to Haiti to restore deposed Aristide to power in 1994, and they were well received by the Haitian people. It seemed like it might create a new path forward.
But this is where other economic interventions also came into play, because Aristide’s return came with conditions. These conditions were the adoption of neoliberal economic policies, which had extremely damaging consequences for the Haitian state and people.
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, many U.S. officials who had worked to overthrow Aristide during his father’s administration returned to power and resumed the same model. The United States blocked loans from multilateral development banks like the Inter-American Development Bank and reduced its own aid spending on Haiti.
This culminated in the overthrow of Aristide in February 2004, where he was put on a US plane and sent into exile. He was kept in exile in South Africa under pressure from the US government and only returned to Haiti in 2011 – the administration [de Barack] Obama tried to pressure the South African government not to let him return to Haiti, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
We give aid to governments we like, we withhold aid from governments we don’t like: in this way we destabilize the political environment, harm some governments, help on other governments; build some, destroy others. This is how the United States uses the tools of soft power to intervene politically.
Sarah Van Horn: Could you tell us about how the aid was used to support U.S. military objectives? And what is the place of immigration?
Jake Johnston: The great irony is that our policies seem, on the one hand, to be strongly motivated by preventing 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 immediately after the 2010 earthquake, were also the two periods of greatest migration out of Haiti. We have to ask: are our policies aimed at preventing migration a total failure, or is preventing migration really not what the United States is motivated by?
In Haiti, it is believed that the United States simply wants to stop all migration from the country. But I think this misses the mark on an important point: the survival of the helping state, a gutted state that protects certain interests, depends on migration.
Haiti still relies more on remittances than on foreign aid. Without the ability to allow people to leave Haiti, the current state cannot continue. The state cannot provide for the people currently there, when tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people try to leave or leave every year.
The reality of what would happen if this floodgate were closed is also not in the interests of the United States. The United States’ interest is in preventing the domestic repercussions of a large migration wave, not the migration itself.
Cal Turner: In Aid State, you write about the importance of U.S. officials keeping Haiti out of the news. For what?
Jake Johnston: There are times when U.S. officials really want Haiti to be in the news for a variety of reasons. After the earthquake, we saw a large-scale relief effort from the United States. Former President Bill Clinton was the special envoy to the United Nations, and Hillary Clinton was very personally involved in the relief efforts.
When it became clear that these efforts were not that effective, they became a political liability in our country. We often find that foreign policy decisions are made for domestic political reasons. The real concern for U.S. officials is: “How does this affect our political future at home?” not: “What impact does this have on people on the ground in Haiti?” »
There is also a historical heritage here. All of this is happening against the historical backdrop of Haiti, which saw the first and only successful slave revolt, which created a constitution abolishing slavery in 1804, and which was not recognized by world governments for decades – in the case of the United States, not more than sixty years. We can view current events as a continuation of a long-standing policy of failing to give Haiti its rightful representation on the world stage.
Sarah Van Horn: How did the Haitian Revolution help lay the foundations for current humanitarian aid in Haiti?
Jake Johnston: One of the long-standing costs of the revolution is the ransom demanded by France and which the Haitian government agreed to pay in 1825. This debt weakened the country financially for more than a century. Obviously, this debt has a lot to do with what we see today in Haiti: underdevelopment, the weakness of the State.
There’s also another way this is directly related. When the Haitian government agreed to pay this indemnity to France in 1825, it needed revenue to do so. This pushed Haitian leaders to reestablish the exploitative plantation economy model in a post-revolutionary Haiti, a dynamic that has characterized the relationship between the Haitian people and the Haitian state ever since.
The Haitian state is not truly representative of the people or accountable to them, but it draws from its own population and feeds the rest of the world. What I have called the “aid state” is shaped by contemporary developments, but it is actually rooted in the same dynamics we have observed for over two hundred years, where the state does not respond at all. simply not to the Haitian people.
Cal Turner: How has the post-2010 earthquake period shaped Haiti’s current political climate?
Jake Johnston: We have to start with the electoral process of 2010. There were still a million people displaced by the earthquake. It was clear from the start that this was going to be a disaster: people were nowhere near their voting centers and no one knew if they would be able to vote if they lost their ID cards. But the United States and other donors had plenty of money left over from that sum — $10 billion pledged for relief and reconstruction efforts — and wanted a new government to work with in Haiti.
This vote was, predictably, a disaster: about 20 percent of the votes were never even counted, turnout was about 20 percent, and it was extraordinarily close. To clarify the situation, the Haitian government invited the Organization of American States [OEA]a regional body based in Washington but made up of all regional governments, on site to analyze the vote.
Without carrying out any statistical analysis, projection of missing votes, or complete recount of the votes that had been counted, the OAS recommended modifying the official results of the election, eliminating from the race the successor chosen by [le président sortant] René Garcia Préval, and place a political outsider, the popular musician Michel Martelly, in the second round of elections. The United States has threatened to suspend post-earthquake aid if the Haitian government does not accept these recommendations. Eventually, the Haitian government acquiesced and changed the results of these elections, introducing Martelly to the presidency, where he remained for the next five years.
Today, Haiti finds itself in a situation of extreme insecurity and political instability in the country. To understand where this comes from, we need to go back to 2010 and that electoral process, to the individuals that we, as external actors, helped put in power to lead this post-earthquake state and be in charge of these billions of dollars.
Sarah Van Horn: Could you talk about the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse? How does this relate to the conditions you describe in the book?
Jake Johnston: Broad sectors in Haiti, legal experts and human rights groups have argued that Moïse’s term ended in 2021. This question of whether the mandate of the president of Haiti ended or no is obviously up to the Haitians to decide. But in the first weeks of Joe Biden’s administration, a spokesperson for the US State Department said in a press briefing that the US believed Moses’ term would end in 2022 and not in 2021.
This was the American interpretation of the Haitian constitution – and it’s not just about this statement, but what this statement would indicate to actors in Haiti. Moïse might refuse to negotiate with the Haitian people, because international support is so deterministic in Haiti, or at least perceived to be so, that when you have it, you have the power to move forward on your own and not build the coalitions that are necessary for real governance.
Six months later, he was murdered in his home. I think the United States’ decision to provide unconditional support to Moïse certainly contributed to the conditions in which the president was killed.
It’s been two and a half years since this assassination, and we’re seeing the same thing happen again. Ariel Henry was appointed prime minister by Moïse just before his assassination. About two weeks after the assassination, the international community urged Henry to form a government. And lo and behold, in a few days, he was Prime Minister, and he has been ever since.
But there are no elected officials in the country, nor institutions to hold him accountable. If we truly want to support a Haitian-led solution, we must stop telling Haitians what an appropriate solution is.
Cal Turner: Do you see this dynamic reflected in the current political crisis in Haiti?
Jake Johnston: The multifaceted crisis that Haiti is experiencing is directly linked to these dynamics. At the heart of this situation is a broken social contract, a state that is unrepresentative and unaccountable to the Haitian people. For decades, foreign intervention has helped maintain a fundamentally untenable status quo. Today, state aid is collapsing – which was, of course, inevitable.
In recent decades, Haiti’s political class has become more receptive to foreign powers than to the Haitian people, but externally imposed legitimacy will never last. We see this very clearly with de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who owed his authority to foreign powers. By supporting this government, the United States and others have pushed Haiti into uncharted territory, with disastrous consequences for the population and made any resolution even more difficult to achieve.
At the same time, I don’t think we should view the collapse of the aid state as a problem in itself. Haiti has the opportunity to build something new, to build a state consistent 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 unfortunately, those who have benefited from the status quo will fight violently to protect their power.
*Jake Johnston is a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, ABC News, Boston Review, Truthout, the Intercept and elsewhere.
*Cal Turner is a writer based in Philadelphia.
*Sarah Van Horn is a writer living in Serra Grande, Brazil.
Jacobin 12 mars 2024
