The real story behind the earthquake
Until the beginning of this year, Haiti was better known as the title of a song from the Arcade Fire. But to understand its onfolding tragedy, we have to understand its past.
Photo coutesy of Logan Abassi / The United Nations.
A narrative is unfolding in the Caribbean. Haiti, “bankrupt, barren, misruled and ravaged by nature and human violence”, is devastated by an earthquake. This “failed state, crippled by the legacy of misrule, corruption and debt” has one advantage; “its geographical location in America’s backyard”. Cue heroic intervention; the Western world rides to the rescue. The only debate left to be had is whether our deliverance of aid can be improved upon.
To understand why 200,000 people will die, it is necessary to understand why Haiti is gripped by poverty. According to The Independent, it is due to an overreliance on foreign aid, which has limited the ability of the elite to “plug the gap” in the private sector. A catalogue of sins can be found in The Times; death squads, dictatorships, corruption, coups, and mismanagement have made the first free black republic the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. For Pat Robertson, Haiti’s destitution originates in its pact with the devil.
This narrative has been carefully filtered, so that western crimes are expunged from history. This is not the product of a conspiracy, but a confluence of social, political and market pressures that forbid the tarnishing of our collective self image. We are, after all, the good guys, and it is this story the media must tell. Sadly, it is a fiction.
The population of Port-au-Prince swelled from 50,000 in 1950 to 2 million today, due to the systematic dismantling of the agricultural sector, via a combination of neoliberal trade policies and international political pressures. American agribusiness has long demanded the right to dump its surplus on its impoverished neighbour, crippling local rice production, and IMF policies have transformed Haiti into the global sweatshop. Industrial development requires a captive urban workforce, and it is these desperate migrants that built their shacks on the hillsides. By definition, they were too poor to lay solid foundations.
The United States brutally occupied Haiti from 1915 – 1934. For the next 57 years dictatorships governed via extreme violence, all the while supported by the international community, which appreciated their concern for ‘foreign interests’. Those that escaped were illegally repatriated. In 1991, Aristide was elected to power, promising a transition from “absolute misery to dignified poverty.” He was overthrown by “democratic forces” supported by the United States, and only restored on the condition that he agree to IMF austerity measures. Elected to power again in 2000, he was overthrown by paramilitaries four years later, and forced into exile by US marines. Since then, a Brazilian lead UN mission has pacified the population with extreme brutality.
The earthquake has drawn our cameras to this tragic country. If the stories they relayed awoke us to the consequences of our actions, then a future brighter than the past could be salvaged from the rubble. Instead, we are told a tale of daring deeds in a historic vacuum, a human tragedy that shifts papers and shields us from our complicity. In this narrative we are the protagonists, and the Haitians the blundering victims awaiting our solicitude.
Topics: Politics
Really great.