The US literally took over the country’s central bank, occupied the country for a period of over a decade, and forced it to pay a huge percentage of it’s national income for that period to US banks to repay a debt that it never fairly acquired in the first place (admittedly, one that the US had basically taken over from France, which had forced it on Haiti in the first place, which is one of the reasons I also named France as a contributor in one of these replies). The country was prevented from using this revenue to invest in itself for a significant chunk of time, and that kind of investment has compounding effects that would have made the country at least somewhat better off had it not been basically robbed of it’s income at gunpoint. As things like organized crime thrive under an environment of poverty and desperation, it isn’t that unreasonable to think that the gangs would be less severe a problem had this development been allowed to occur.
That would be much more compelling, except for the fact that Haiti was poor and unstable even before France imposed the debt, and that subsequent regimes, including US-friendly and US-hostile, did nothing to improve the situation. Haiti’s issues are far more fundamental than “The US reduced and redirected investment in the Haitian economy while extracting debts owed to US investors back in the 1910s-1940s”.
Obviously, this is ignoring the moral issue of the occupation of Haiti (which is, of course, an atrocity), as the discussion is currently centered around responsibility for modern Haitian poverty and instability.
The debt was imposed some 30 years after the Haitian Revolution, if memory serves. Taking on the (punitive and ridiculous) debt was the condition for France recognizing Haiti’s independence, though it had been de facto independent for a generation.
Yeah and before that Haiti was a French slave plantation. Poor goes without saying, unstable of course once the few owners who lived there lost their backup.
Yeah, Haiti was swimming against the current from the start. There are a large number of other factors, most of them bad. And most of them related to its origins as a slave plantation and its unsteady road to independence.
My primary point is just that Haiti minus US involvement would be unlikely to fundamentally look much different than Haiti plus US involvement. We (the US) are responsible for a good deal of suffering in Haiti’s history, but the underlying problems are much more integral.
Haiti gained independence through a slave uprising. It makes sense that they would start off poor, but it’s deliberate Western interference that kept them down. Now it can be argued that this is so long ago it shouldn’t matter anymore, but these things are very much subject to the butterfly effect. Poverty generates poverty and the country was directly robbed of the ability to improve for 122 years, and faced with decolonization that left them with a power vacuum and political instability. And it’s not like US intervention stopped then. The US and France are about 80% responsible for Haiti’s modern situation; not to say they’d have necessarily been a developed country but they wouldn’t be this bad.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not saying decolonization is a bad thing, but decolonization without care for the colony’s post-decolonization government is setting it up for failure. See: Botswana, whose modern prosperity is a direct result of not having to deal with this.
The US and France are about 80% responsible for Haiti’s modern situation; not to say they’d have necessarily been a developed country but they wouldn’t be this bad.
I guess this is really where we come into conflict. I’m in agreement with everything else, but this ends up as “The broken fingers and the .50 cal through my heart are about 80% responsible for my death.”
The US is a piece of the puzzle, but not really a fundamental one. The situation’s not like Cuba.
In any case, we are certainly in agreement that Haiti was dealt a bad hand from the start, and the entire ‘system’ of colonial international relations in the 19th century bore its full weight against them, with France in particular being vindictive towards its former colony; and the entire post-WW1 system being ‘designed’ (for lack of a better word; I dislike the implication that larger-scope intentions were involved in its creation instead of an ad hoc mess) to privilege importers of raw resources, rather than exporters. And that US exploitation didn’t help Haiti’s situation in the least. A vulture picking at a man not-yet-dead.
The US literally took over the country’s central bank, occupied the country for a period of over a decade, and forced it to pay a huge percentage of it’s national income for that period to US banks to repay a debt that it never fairly acquired in the first place (admittedly, one that the US had basically taken over from France, which had forced it on Haiti in the first place, which is one of the reasons I also named France as a contributor in one of these replies). The country was prevented from using this revenue to invest in itself for a significant chunk of time, and that kind of investment has compounding effects that would have made the country at least somewhat better off had it not been basically robbed of it’s income at gunpoint. As things like organized crime thrive under an environment of poverty and desperation, it isn’t that unreasonable to think that the gangs would be less severe a problem had this development been allowed to occur.
That would be much more compelling, except for the fact that Haiti was poor and unstable even before France imposed the debt, and that subsequent regimes, including US-friendly and US-hostile, did nothing to improve the situation. Haiti’s issues are far more fundamental than “The US reduced and redirected investment in the Haitian economy while extracting debts owed to US investors back in the 1910s-1940s”.
Obviously, this is ignoring the moral issue of the occupation of Haiti (which is, of course, an atrocity), as the discussion is currently centered around responsibility for modern Haitian poverty and instability.
Haiti didn’t exist before France’s debt AFAIK.
The debt was imposed some 30 years after the Haitian Revolution, if memory serves. Taking on the (punitive and ridiculous) debt was the condition for France recognizing Haiti’s independence, though it had been de facto independent for a generation.
Yeah and before that Haiti was a French slave plantation. Poor goes without saying, unstable of course once the few owners who lived there lost their backup.
Yeah, Haiti was swimming against the current from the start. There are a large number of other factors, most of them bad. And most of them related to its origins as a slave plantation and its unsteady road to independence.
My primary point is just that Haiti minus US involvement would be unlikely to fundamentally look much different than Haiti plus US involvement. We (the US) are responsible for a good deal of suffering in Haiti’s history, but the underlying problems are much more integral.
Oh I see. Then let me change my stance a bit:
Haiti gained independence through a slave uprising. It makes sense that they would start off poor, but it’s deliberate Western interference that kept them down. Now it can be argued that this is so long ago it shouldn’t matter anymore, but these things are very much subject to the butterfly effect. Poverty generates poverty and the country was directly robbed of the ability to improve for 122 years, and faced with decolonization that left them with a power vacuum and political instability. And it’s not like US intervention stopped then. The US and France are about 80% responsible for Haiti’s modern situation; not to say they’d have necessarily been a developed country but they wouldn’t be this bad.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not saying decolonization is a bad thing, but decolonization without care for the colony’s post-decolonization government is setting it up for failure. See: Botswana, whose modern prosperity is a direct result of not having to deal with this.
I guess this is really where we come into conflict. I’m in agreement with everything else, but this ends up as “The broken fingers and the .50 cal through my heart are about 80% responsible for my death.”
The US is a piece of the puzzle, but not really a fundamental one. The situation’s not like Cuba.
In any case, we are certainly in agreement that Haiti was dealt a bad hand from the start, and the entire ‘system’ of colonial international relations in the 19th century bore its full weight against them, with France in particular being vindictive towards its former colony; and the entire post-WW1 system being ‘designed’ (for lack of a better word; I dislike the implication that larger-scope intentions were involved in its creation instead of an ad hoc mess) to privilege importers of raw resources, rather than exporters. And that US exploitation didn’t help Haiti’s situation in the least. A vulture picking at a man not-yet-dead.