Haitian Earthquake: Why their Blood Is on Our Hands
By Ted Rall
January 14, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- As grim
accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled
state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: "Haiti is the
poorest country in the Western hemisphere..." Gee, I wonder how that
happened?
You'd think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of
people rich.
How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American
colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA
staged coups d'état against every democratically elected president they ever
had?
It's an important question. An earthquake isn't just an
earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn't kill nearly as
many people as in Port-au-Prince.
"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the
buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in
an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay
together when they get shaken," notes Sandy Steacey, director of the
Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in
Northern Ireland. "In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes
that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."
When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival
are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn't
have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service
personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you
out, there's no ambulance to take you to the hospital--or doctor to treat you
once you get there.
Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined.
In Haiti this week, don't blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the
death toll is attributable to poverty.
So the question is relevant. How'd Haiti become so poor?
The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National
City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque
National d'Haïti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in
effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans. Five years later, President
Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on
"our" investment.
From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military
occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross
domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs.
Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for
a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.
The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947.
Still--why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of
Haiti's national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.
Whiners.
Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals,
civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life
François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Duvalier's brutal Tonton Macoutes
paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated
people to flee into exile. But think of the cup as half-full: fewer people in
the population means fewer people competing for the same jobs!
Upon Papa Doc's death in 1971, the torch passed to his even more
dissolute 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The U.S.,
cool to Papa Doc in his later years, quickly warmed back up to his
kleptomaniacal playboy heir. As the U.S. poured in arms and trained his army as
a supposed anti-communist bulwark against Castro's Cuba, Baby Doc stole an
estimated $300 to $800 million from the national treasury, according to
Transparency International. The money was placed in personal accounts in
Switzerland and elsewhere.
Under U.S. influence, Baby Doc virtually eliminated import tariffs
for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash predatory agricultural imports dumped by
American firms. Domestic rice farmers went bankrupt. A nation that had been
agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of
thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.
The Duvalier era, 29 years in all, came to an end in 1986 when
President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to whisk Baby Doc to exile in
France, saving him from a popular uprising.
Once again, Haitians should thank Americans. Duvalierism was
"tough love." Forcing Haitians to make do without their national
treasury was our nice way or encouraging them to work harder, to lift
themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, in this case, flipflops.
Anyway.
The U.S. has been all about tough love ever since. We twice
deposed the populist and popular democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. The second time, in 2004, we even gave him a free flight to the
Central African Republic! (He says the CIA kidnapped him, but whatever.) Hey,
he needed a rest. And it was kind of us to support a new government formed by
former Tonton Macoutes.
Yet, despite everything we've done for Haiti, they're still a
fourth-world failed state on a fault line.
And still, we haven't given up. American companies like Disney
generously pay wages to their sweatshop workers of 28 cents an hour.
What more do these ingrates want?
Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is
Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel
analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.
http://www.rall.com/rants.html
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Our Role in Haiti's Plight
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If we are serious about assisting this devastated land we must
MAKE OUR GOV stop trying to control and exploit it.
By Peter Hallward
January 13, 2010 "The Guardian" -- Any large city in the world would have
suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that
ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it's no accident that so
much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation
wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best
understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical
sequence.
The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes.
Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the
huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of
Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly
recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the
town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more
than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale
of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for
several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the
long-term impact is incalculable.
What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this
impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate
impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the
"poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the
direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in
world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
The noble "international community" which is currently
scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely
responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since
the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt
to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's
phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been
violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate)
was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an
internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and
left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently
maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification
force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available
study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and
56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day".
Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have
robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to
regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements
ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of
Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full
scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless
neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of
small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable
statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in
desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the
side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places
and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the
extent of the injuries they have suffered.
As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and
Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or
their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade
policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore
exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would
not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the
city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains
woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise
any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.
The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti
since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to
Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against
any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military
purpose. Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty
reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the
long-term patterns that continue to shape the distribution of international
"aid".
The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard
but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal
"reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people
from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis
then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending
emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the
self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious
about helping we need to stop trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify
its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for
at least some of the damage we've already done.
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