Catastrophe in Haiti: The natural and not-so-natural factors

While the earthquake which struck Haiti in January was clearly a devastating one, it cannot wholly explain why the country was so completely overwhelmed by the disaster. The answer, argues Ashley Smith, is that in addition to the long-known natural faultline along which the quake occurred, there has been a second faultline - US imperial policy towards Haiti.

A DEVASTATING earthquake, the worst in 200 years, struck Port-au-Prince on 12 January, laying waste to the city and killing untold numbers of people. The quake measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, and detonated more than 30 aftershocks, all more than 4.5 in magnitude, through the night and into the next morning.

The earthquake toppled poorly constructed houses, hotels, hospitals and even the capital city's main political buildings, including the presidential palace. The collapse of so many structures sent a giant cloud into the sky, which hovered over the city, raining dust down onto the wasteland below.

According to some estimates, more than 100,000 people may have died, in a metropolis of 2 million people. Those who survived are living in the streets, afraid to return inside any building that remains standing.

Around the world, Haitians struggled to contact their family and friends in the devastated country. But most could not reach their loved ones since phone lines were down throughout the country.

One person who did reach relatives, Garry Pierre-Pierre, editor and publisher of the Brooklyn-based Haitian Times, stated, 'People are in shock. They're afraid to go out in the streets for obvious reasons, and most of them can't get inside their homes. A lot of people are sitting or sleeping in front of the rubble that used to be their homes.'

President Ren‚ Pr‚val issued an emergency appeal for humanitarian aid. He described the scene in Port-au-Prince as 'unimaginable. Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them. All the hospitals are packed with people. It's a catastrophe.'

The weak Pr‚val government was unable to respond to the crisis, and the United Nations - which occupies Haiti with close to 9,000 troops - was completely unprepared to manage the situation. Many UN leaders and troops died in buildings that collapsed, including their own headquarters.

International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said that 3 million out of Haiti's 9 million people would need international emergency aid in the coming weeks just to survive. The UN, US, European Union, Canada and countless non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have promised humanitarian aid.

Government incapacity and more

While most people reacted to the crisis by trying to find a way to help or donate money, US Christian Right fanatic Pat Robertson stooped to new depths of racism. He explained that Haitians were cursed because they made a pact with the devil to liberate themselves from their French slave masters in the Haitian revolution two centuries ago.

The corporate media at least reported that shifting tectonic plates along a faultline underneath Port-au-Prince caused the earthquake - and that Haiti's poverty and the incapacity of the Pr‚val government made the disaster so much worse. But they didn't delve below the surface.

'The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti,' Canadian Haiti solidarity activist Yves Engler said in an interview. 'They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why.'

Why were 60% of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault-line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second faultline - US imperial policy toward Haiti. The US government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The faultline of US imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.

During the Cold War, the US supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier and then Baby Doc Duvalier - which ruled the country from 1957 to 1986 - as an anti-communist counterweight to Castro's Cuba near by.

Under guidance from Washington, Baby Doc Duvalier opened the Haitian economy up to US capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Floods of US agricultural imports destroyed peasant agriculture. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to labour for pitifully low wages in sweatshops located in US export processing zones.

In the 1980s, masses of Haitians rose up to drive the Duvaliers from power - later, they elected reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be president on a platform of land reform, aid to peasants, reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers.

No love lost for Aristide

The US in turn backed a coup that drove Aristide from power in 1991. Eventually, the elected president was restored to power in 1994 when Bill Clinton sent US troops to the island - but on the condition that he implement the US neoliberal plan - which Haitians called the 'plan of death'.

Aristide resisted parts of the US programme for Haiti, but implemented other provisions, undermining his hoped-for reforms. Eventually, though, the US grew impatient with Aristide's failure to obey completely, especially when he demanded $21 billion in reparations during his final year in office. The US imposed an economic embargo that strangled the country, driving peasants and workers even deeper into poverty.

In 2004, Washington collaborated with Haiti's ruling elite to back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported Aristide. The United Nations sent troops to occupy the country, and the puppet government of G‚rard Latortue was installed to continue Washington's neoliberal plans.

Latortue's brief regime was utterly corrupt - he and his cronies pocketed large portions of the $4 billion poured into the country by the US and other powers when they ended their embargo. The regime dismantled the mild reforms Aristide had managed to implement. Thus, the pattern of impoverishment and degradation of the country's infrastructure accelerated.

In 2006 elections, the Haitian masses voted in long-time Aristide ally Ren‚ Pr‚val as president. But Pr‚val has been a weak figure who collaborated with US plans for the country and failed to address the growing social crisis.

In fact, the US, UN and other imperial powers effectively bypassed the Pr‚val government and instead poured money into NGOs. 'Haiti now has the highest per capita presence of NGOs in the world,' says Yves Engler. The Pr‚val government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through their chosen international NGOs.

'US-backed UN occupation'

The real state power isn't the Pr‚val government, but the US-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with - or turned a blind eye to - right-wing death squads who terrorise supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.

The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters - severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.

Instead, they merely police a social catastrophe and, in so doing, have committed the normal crimes characteristic of all police forces. As Dan Beeton wrote in NACLA Report on the Americas, 'The UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began.'

First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have used the coup and social and natural crises to expand the US's neoliberal economic plans.

Under Obama, the US has granted Haiti $1.2 billion in debt relief, but it hasn't cancelled all of Haiti's debt - the country still pays huge sums to the Inter-American Development Bank. The debt relief is classic window-dressing for Obama's real Haiti policy, which is the same old Haiti policy.

Tourist trap

In close collaboration with the new UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, Obama has pushed for an economic programme familiar to much of the rest of the Caribbean - tourism, textile sweatshops and weakening of state control of the economy through privatisation and deregulation.

In particular, Clinton has orchestrated a plan for turning the north of Haiti into a tourist playground, as far away as possible from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince. Clinton lured Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing $55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050.

From there, Haiti's tourist industry hopes to lead expeditions to the mountaintop fortress Citadelle and the Palace of Sans Souci, both built by Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of Haiti's slave revolution.

According to the Miami Herald: 'The $40 million plan involves transforming the now quaint town of Milot, home to the Citadelle and Palace of Sans Souci ruins, into a vibrant tourist village with arts and crafts markets, restaurants and stoned streets. Guests would be ferried past a congested Cap-Ha‹tien to a bay, then transported by bus past peasant plantations. Once in Milot, they would either hike or horseback to the Citadelle...named a World Heritage site in 1982...'

Ecotourism, archaeological exploration and voyeuristic visits to Vodou rituals are all being touted by Haiti's struggling boutique tourism industry, as Royal Caribbean plans to bring the world's largest cruise ship here, sparking the need for excursions.

So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti's great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.

At the same time, Clinton's plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labour available from the urban masses. The US granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.

Clinton celebrated the possibilities of sweatshop development during a whirlwind tour of a textile plant owned and operated by the infamous Cintas Corp. He announced that George Soros had offered $50 million for a new industrial park of sweatshops that could create 25,000 jobs in the garment industry. Clinton explained at a press conference that Haiti's government could create 'more jobs by lowering the cost of doing business, including the cost of rent'.

As TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now!: 'That isn't the kind of investment that Haiti needs. It needs capital investment. It needs investment so that it can be self-sufficient. It needs investment so that it can feed itself.'

One of the reasons why Clinton could be so unabashed in celebrating sweatshops is that the US-backed coup repressed any and all resistance. It got rid of Aristide and his troublesome habit of raising the minimum wage. It banished him from the country, terrorised his remaining allies and barred his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular in the country, from running for office. The coup regime also attacked union organisers within the sweatshops themselves.

As a result, Clinton could state to business leaders: 'Your political risk in Haiti is lower than it has ever been in my lifetime.'

Thus, as previous US presidencies have done before, the Obama administration has worked to aid Haiti's elite, sponsor international corporations taking advantage of cheap labour, weaken the ability of the Haitian state to regulate the society, and repress any political resistance to that agenda.

These policies led directly to the incapacitated Haitian state, dilapidated infrastructure, poorly constructed buildings and desperate poverty that combined with the hurricanes and now the earthquake to turn natural disasters into social catastrophes.

With funds and political space, Haitians would be finally able to begin shaping their own political and economic future - the dream of the great slave revolution 200 years ago. -  IDN-InDepthNews              u

Ashley Smith is a writer and activist from Burlington, Vermont, USA. He writes frequently for Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review. The above is excerpted by IDN-InDepthNews from an article that first appeared in http://socialistworker.org on 14 January 2010.

*Third World Resurgence No. 233, January 2010, pp 31-33