President Obama announced that Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will head the fundraising efforts for Haiti after the earthquake that took the lives of an estimated 200,000 people. Haiti, already in an impoverished country, has been seemingly flattened of all hope for recovery and prosperity. About his decision to use his presidential predecessors to help, Obama stated, “These two leaders send an unmistakable message to the people of Haiti and the world. In a moment of need, the United States stands united.”
This is an interesting choice of words by the president. It seems that he used this natural disaster as an opportunity to put our country’s choreographed harmony on display. This must be the reason; otherwise, why would he choose two men who had more to do with Haiti’s poverty over the last 20 years than anyone else?
At least at the beginning of the 20th century, Haiti was certainly on better footing than it’s been on in this decade. President Woodrow Wilson viciously invaded Haiti in 1915 after Haiti refused to accept a US written constitution which granted US corporations the right to buyout Haitian land. The orders to the marines were to "protect American and foreign" interests although the public face of the deployment was to restore peace and order to the country. The parliamentary system was exterminated at gun point when the marines went in. The marines then ran a referendum and their candidate, won by 99.9 percent, with five percent of the population participating. Historians estimate that about 20,000 people were killed and near slavery was restored. The country was then left in the hands of a brutal domestic national guard, similar to that of Russia, until the first democratic election of 1990.
There was then a US supported military coup (backed by former President George H. W. Bush) in Haiti in 1991 that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power. In 1994, Clinton allowed the elected president to return upon a promise to not challenge the dominance of Washington and to leave office in 1996. Aristide, as a condition of his return, had to agree to adopt the program of the defeated US candidate from the 1990 election, a former World Bank official, who only received 14 percent of the vote. In what Clinton called the “liberation of Haiti”, he strangled the country by imposing economic sanctions which decimated the export industry. Eighty percent of the population lives under the poverty line and 54 percent in abject poverty.
After Aristide was forced out, his successor, Rene Preval, was simply an obedient puppet to the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment program that crippled employment and further impoverished domestic rice farming.
Aristide’s party, the Fanmi Lavalas party, came back into power in May 2000 with a decisive victory which the US refused to accept. The US then cut off any aid it was giving at the time, and when Aristide himself won a democratic election later in 2000, the Bush administration sunk in its fangs. For the next three years Haiti was starved by the blocking of international aid and cutting of funding. After not being able to endure any longer, the Haitian elite with US backing started a social uprising against Aristide, and the US intervened yet again, seizing Aristide and shipping him into exile in Africa.
The elections of 2006 excluded most of the Fanmi Lavalas candidates and Preval was reelected. He once called himself a “twin” of Aristide, but now simply voiced Wall Streets and the IMF’s demands for leverage.
This is a very sprinkled history of the extent of Clinton and Bush’s maliciousness against Haiti. This "great liberation" of the country our presidents made into the sweatshop of the Caribbean leaves much to be improved on. It is an insult for Obama to send these two men as representatives of the United States and its citizens. They have shown throughout their turns at power that the only thing that is in harmony in regards to Haiti is the nightmarish policies that have consistently chipped away at this now broken country.
