57 - Haiti: Mayhem Close to Our Shores, II

Happy Memorial Day to all

            My last post linked Haiti’s rampant gangs and its dysfunctional government to the pernicious influence of drugs, drug smuggling, and drug profiteering -  a calamitous tsunami of anarchic criminality that has consumed the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country since at least 2017. (Haiti’s annual GDP per capita in 2021 was $1050.) Successive governments, I said, had connived with and enabled a powerful gangster culture to flourish, originally for electoral purposes.

            I also congratulated last week’s multi-part New York Times series for revealing in detail how Haiti’s development had been retarded by reparations (recompense! for overturning France’s slave regime) that it paid to Paris throughout the nineteenth century. (Haiti won its freedom from slavery and France in 1804, after an off-and-on eight year battle led first by Toussaint L’Ouverture and then by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion.) That tribute delivery was followed by an American occupation that began with the looting of gold from the Haitian treasury by Wall Street moguls, further deterring Haitian economic advances. The payments to France had long been known, but the Times added important new details.

The Times estimated that Haiti’s current 11 million people might have been richer by billions today if neither the French nor the Americans had robbed Haitians of so much cash for so long. (The Times suggested that somewhere between $21 and $115 billion worth of investments were lost to Haiti, “eight times the size of Haiti’s entire economy in 2020.”) Conceivably, a wealthier nation might have entered the twenty-first century less discombobulated, better governed, and more able to resist the rise of organized gangsters.

            But there is much more that explains Haiti’s current weakness.  The United States occupied and ruled Haiti for nineteen years in the first half of the twentieth century and controlled its finances for a further thirteen years – until 1957.  Throughout those decades, Washington should have been preparing Haiti for self-rule by strengthening its educational and health systems, by training leaders, by demonstrating how a great modern democracy could act as a benevolent trustee-uncle for a poor and not yet fully mature nephew.  After all, because of slavery in America, Washington had effectively shunned the infant nation in the years before the U. S. Civil War, traded as little as possible with the then coffee-growing island, and dishonored its revolution while honoring our own.

            The Times said that the American occupation had occurred because President Wilson’s advisors and Wall Street financiers feared that the French and Germans might intercede to collect debts that Haiti owed to them, thus breaching the Monroe Doctrine and invading Washington’s sphere of influence in the Caribbean as World War I was underway in Europe.  That is reasonably correct, omitting the contributing reality that between 1908 and 1915 (when Washington invaded) Haiti endured seven presidents and twenty uprisings and attempted insurrections. Guillaume Sam, the last of the seven, massacred all of the persons he had imprisoned in Port-au-Prince for political reasons.  A crowd then tore Sam limb from limb.  So Wilson had a plausible excuse, if not a motive.

            The Times also (maybe it is still coming) said too little about the actual results of the long years in which the United States ruled Haiti, subdued protests and several revolts, and ended up doing far too little to entrench the rule of law, foster broad-based political participation, or instill an ethos of enlightened democratic procedure. Washington failed to advance the interests of the Haitian people or to prepare them and their subsequent leaders for the vicissitudes of the remainder of the century.

            Long ago, in one of my earlier books (Haiti: the Politics of Squalor, Houghton Mifflin, 1971), I wrote about the American occupation in order to prepare readers for a dissection of the dictatorship of François (Papa Doc) Duvalier, which occupied much of the rest of the study.  “President Wilson and William Jennings Bryan, his first secretary of state, were unusually fearful of strategic embarrassment in the Caribbean,” I explained. “They persuaded themselves that interference and intervention in the affairs of smaller countries represented a legitimate exercise of American power if the implicit and explicit aims of each intervention were demonstrably progressive.” When Wilson finally gave the order to invade in July 1915, he called it a “humanitarian” response “to the total collapse of indigenous abilities to maintain law and order.”

            The Americans unsurprisingly had “laid the groundwork for a fairly typical colonial enterprise, with its usual poorly thought out mixture of idealism, paternalism, and benevolent and not-so-benevolent brutality, reliance upon coercion, hypocrisy, and double standards of conduct and morality.”

            That humanitarian response triggered decades of authoritarian rule through local collaborators and a refusal to do much to uplift Haitians as citizens and people. The U. S. did build roads (using forced labor) and bridges, installed telephones, and established a well-managed alien administration, but one biased against darker-skinned Haitians. As I wrote, “Of all the factors that vitiated the accomplishment of American ameliorative agricultural, educational, and medical objectives…prejudice…proved the most damaging.” Most of the American occupiers, at all levels, were Southerners. They erected a color bar in a country that had successively revolted against similar constraints. One American official, whom I quoted at length, said that Haitians were “absolutely savage under the skin….”  

            Nineteen years of imperial rule “might conceivably,” I concluded, “have proved sufficiently long to have demonstrated the efficacy of [modern] political institutions….American tutelage could have wrought impressive changes in the methods of Haitian…government.” Moreover, “by ruling arbitrarily…and by failing to involve Haitians in any significant way, the Americans offered [Haitians] no model of political responsibility.”

            Ultimately, the result of the failed American occupation, ended in 1934, were successive presidencies filled by the light-skinned elite Haitians whom the U. S. had favored, followed by the state’s capture in 1957 by a dark-skinned, more authentic Haitian – Papa Doc.  His rapacious dictatorship lasted until his death in 1971, and was continued by his son Jean-Claude, “Baby Doc,” until he fled before mobs to France in 1986. 

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Salesian priest whom the U. S. favored, solidly won an election in 1990, but was ousted in 1991 by Haitian officers.  Washington managed to bring him back to power in 1994, forcefully intervening against Haiti’s then military rulers and ensuring that Aristide could complete his presidential term in 1996. He returned to the presidency in 2001 for three more years, a second military coup removing him again and sending him into exile in Africa.  By this time, Washington suspected that Aristide was in league with drug traffickers from Colombia. (He now lives quietly in Port-au-Prince.)

            It is time for Washington to help Haiti right itself through massive financial assistance, help with policing, help with slowing and then stanching drug trafficking, and much more.  Aristide has demanded hefty reparations from France. A progressive humanitarian endeavor initiated by Washington is also long overdue.  Given the desperate difficulties now inflicting Haiti, and massive out-migration, we should behave generously and soon.