Foreign intervention is part of colonial history in Haiti

(A woman named Madam Felix photographed in the mountains of Seguin, Haiti. | Photo by Bill Hamway on Unsplash)

Earlier this month, the United Nations voted to send police forces to Haiti. 

The U.N. claims that the “humanitarian” mission, to be led by Kenya, is necessary to fight gang violence on the island. Kenya, along with Western nations, was condemned across the African diaspora, especially following months of revolution across the continent.

At a meeting on September 22, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, stated that his administration would try to work with Congress and send $100 million as aid to Haiti. 

Days after the U.N. vote, a Kenyan court temporarily prevented the government from sending hundreds of police to the Caribbean country, arguing that the decision was illegal. The order will last through October 24. The court extended the ban on Oct. 24 until November 9.

The U.N. vote was made weeks after the Dominican Republic closed its borders with Haiti.

Construction of a canal along the border would help alleviate the drought happening in the northeastern Maribaroux plain in Haiti. Yet the Dominican president, Luis Abinader, claims that the border closures are necessary because of “the uncontrollable people who keep Haiti insecure, and who, due to their private interests, now also conspire against the stability of their government and the security of our water resources.”

Following the Western world’s lead, Abinader employs the racist and xenophobic language used by previous Dominican and U.S. presidencies to justify anti-Haitian policy and foreign involvement. Such framing stigmatizes and infantilizes, framing Haitians as responsible for their conditions and unable to organize or build themselves. This framing removes the onus from the countries and businesses directly exploiting/extracting human and natural resources and creating and profiting from Haitian instability and violence. 

The Black Alliance for Peace, an anti-imperial human rights project, writes:

We are told that the interest of the U.S. in Haiti is humanitarian, that the U.S wants to protect the Haitian people from ‘criminal gangs.’ Yet U.S. weapons have flooded Haiti, and the U.S. has consistently rejected calls to effectively enforce the UNSC resolution for an arms embargo against the Haitian and U.S. elite who import guns into the country. Moreover, when we speak of ‘gangs,’ we must recognize that the most powerful gangs in the country are subsidiaries of the U.S. itself: the United Nations Integrated Office (BINUH) and the Core Group, the two colonial entities who have effectively ruled the country since the U.S./France/Canada-backed coup d’etat of 2004.

The United States would not send millions to Haiti unless they received something in return. They are protecting their political and corporate interests.

Foreign intervention in Haiti, part of its colonial history with the United States and France, has always been profitable for Western nations and business interests. 

Haiti-U.S. Colonial History

It is crucial that we understand Haitian history to reject the colonial narratives we are sold, which prevent us from truly examining who gets rich off foreign interventions in Black countries like Haiti. 

An independent Haiti was the second country established, after the United States, in the Americas.

The Haitian people’s road to freedom was costly. They fought, from 1791 to 1804, against nations with larger armies funded by an extremely profitable slavery economy. Free Black people scared 19th-century capitalists who had gotten extremely wealthy off enslaving them. Anti-Haitian sentiment, solidified through policy worldwide, served as attempts to repress the revolutionary spirit in the Caribbean. 

In 1806, the U.S. banned trading with Haiti and refused to acknowledge the country’s independence. Between 1838 and 1922, Haiti paid French enslavers 112 million francs, over $500 million today in reparations for ending slavery. In Haiti: The Breached Citadel, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith writes, “In the 1880s, the United States sought to gain control of the island by other methods including an unsuccessful bid to establish a naval base at Môle-Saint-Nicolas and using Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian petty merchants to pressure French and German commercial interests on Hispaniola. Between 1857 and 1900, the U.S. Navy intervened nineteen times on behalf of U.S. business interests.” From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. invaded Haiti, and during the occupation, the U.S. wrote into the Constitution that non-Haitians had rights to lands and took control of the economy.

(Photo by Heather Suggitt on Unsplash)

Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat described in 2015 how after the official occupation, the U.S. still meddled in Haitian and Dominican politics. They left an army that protected U.S. interests after 1934; got involved in presidential elections; mapped out the Haiti-D.R. borders; and used U.S. bases in the D.R. to invade Haiti in the 1990s. In 1994, President Bill Clinton passed a policy that provided subsidies to farmers in Arkansas, which severely undercut rice production in Haiti. This led to the starvation of millions. 

In the last ten years alone, Haiti has faced a cholera outbreak, hurricanes, earthquakes, corruption, political assassinations, all directly caused by or connected to some kind of foreign involvement, from Christian missionary work to U.S. or French policy to voluntourism. Much of the reported stories and coverage we see about the Haitian crises often erase a history of foreign-caused violence and destruction in the country. There have been coup governments. An unelected president was assassinated. Another unelected president took power and refuses to hold elections.  

Haiti is also a mineral-rich country, and since it acquired its independence, there have always been efforts aimed at privatizing Haitian resources and lands. Canada and other countries have companies there, including U.S. company Newmont, the world’s largest mining company that produced just over $11 billion in 2020. 

Despite being mineral-rich, Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Hunger rates are high, with over 90% of some regions facing severe hunger. Misogynorisitic violence rises. Farmers are deeply impacted by the climate crisis. There are rising rates of femicide and xenophobic and racist violence of the Dominican government against Haiti. 

Examining Colonial History 

Examining Haiti’s colonial history, particularly U.S. interventionist policies enacted after the Haitian Revolution, is a crucial part of developing a critical analysis to understand what is happening on the island. The material conditions Haitians face in their lands are directly connected to the violence they, and other Black immigrants, face at the U.S. border, and it is sustained by foreign interventionist policy that justifies further militarizing and policing the country.

Violence is part of the geopolitical strategy of countries like the United States. Such policies see destabilization in Black countries as mere investment opportunities. We must examine why this is, why violence continues to be profitable, and why foreign powers instigate in Black and Brown lands. 

This will also help us to reject the revisionist narrative of mainstream media. 

From Haiti: The Breached Citadel: “Thus the task of scholars is to separate lasting truths from transitional situations and to delineate constraints and possibilities. In brief, scholars must work to understand Haiti, predict its future, and assess its potential.” 

We must understand how foreign influence destabilizes Haiti—how it has always destabilized. 

In solidarity,

-Olga