In 1804 Haiti became the world’s first independent black republic following a successful slave revolution. Two hundred years later Haiti’s been devastated by neocolonialism, political violence, and placed under UN military occupation. This text seeks to delineate and contextualize the country’s recent history, from the coup d’état of 1991, the second multilateral coup d’état of 2004, both against President Aristide to the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the humanitarian occupation that followed.

Haiti has suffered decades of Hybrid Warfare with the most recent acts of this imperialist barbarism being the 2004 coup d’état by the U.S., Canada and France. Years later, Haiti remains a neocolonial crime scene, where a so-called “Core Group” of imperialist countries sponsors a government that inflicts ongoing structural and physical violence on the population. A growing body of investigative work explains how at the beginning of the 21st century the “international community” worked with the Haitian neocolonial elite to make a criminal and very successful assault on Haitian democracy. Back when the earthquake hit, the generosity that millions of people around the world showed towards Haitians, after the earthquake, have been scandalously used to bolster the neocolonial interests of the local and foreign elites who de facto run Haiti.

Political philosopher Peter Hallward refutes the imaginary that has been sold about the role of the “international community” in Haiti since 2000 revealing  how contemporary international forces such as international financial organizations, powerful foreign nation-states, multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in destabilizing regions for global corporatocratic networks. Thus the corporatocracy is the de facto rule of corporations in which power has been transferred from the State or from an authentic sovereignty to multinational corporations that synchronize with the CORE group countries.

Haitian government institutions as well as civil society were effectively paralyzed, long before the 2010 earthquake that reduced Port-au-Prince to rubble and has been resisting heroically the political violence the neocolonial administrators organize against them. Haiti’s 2004 coup has made every natural disaster and political crisis an opportunity to increase its hybrid warfare on the population while rewarding certain networks of big international capital to have control over the country’s territory, form of government and finances. This is Haiti’s central dilemma today, what Justin Podur calls the efficacy of the “new dictatorship”: without sovereignty, power refrains from all responsibility. Foreign donors, non-governmental organizations, shareholders and funders have the power to dictate economic and political policies that have deadly consequences in Haiti. Podur unmasks the stark reality of a supposedly benign international occupation, arguing that the denial of sovereignty is the root cause of Haiti’s problems. The problems of poverty cannot be solved with humanitarian aid.

Catastrophes with unpredictable long-term effects are the structurally necessary counterface of the process of techno-economic and political-military modernization within the framework of capitalist globalization according to the United States and its fellow CORE group nations, as catastrophes — be it real or fabricated — is the ideal scenario conducive to neo-colonizing interventions.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) are key players in the process of economic and political destabilization. While conducted under the auspices of an intergovernmental body, IMF reforms tend to support U.S. strategic and foreign policy objectives. The Washington consensus is manifested in the IMF’s austerity and restructuring measures throughout the world where their consequences are devastating, and even contribute to triggering social-political and ethnic conflicts. IMF monetary, economic, and financial reforms have often precipitated the downfall of democratically elected governments. In Haiti, the IMF has consistently sponsored austerity reforms since the Duvalier era. They have been implemented in several stages since Aristide’s first presidential victory in 1990. The military coup of 1991, which took place 8 months after the accession of Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, was partly the intention to reverse a whole series of progressive reforms of the Aristide government and re-establish the neoliberal political agenda of the Duvalier era.

According to China Mieville (2008) The 2004 invasion of Haiti shows that multilateralism can be just as effective as an imperial strategy, if not more effective than unilateralism. Haiti must fully remind us that the paradigm of multilateral intervention with its apparent legality does not represent an opposition to other strategies of imperial control such as unilateralism. Much of the liberal criticism of the Bush administration’s way of arguing its war on Iraq has taken a legal form. Such criticism has often implied that US unilateralism has been a neoconservative defining project and that multilateralism as contrasting is supposedly neither illegal nor objectionable. The overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrande Aristide in 2004 and the subsequent installation of UN-MINUSTAH to maintain a supposed peace in the country was a multilateral action of a model, which should be problematized.

Podur offers a contemporary Haitian political history of how a multilateral violation of Haitian sovereignty was organized and carried out. It draws on a wide range of academic, journalistic and human rights reports, as well as embassy cables published by Wikileaks, to document how in Haiti it became a laboratory experiment for a new kind of imperialism. Documenting how the post-coup government was quantitatively worse than Aristide, Podur meticulously notes the account of human rights aberrations committed by the US-backed post-Aristide coup regime, whose death squads purged the capital’s slums, in a campaign to demobilize and neutralize the popular Lavalas democratic movement that had twice brought Aristide to power. The Lavalas Movement of Haiti was born in the 1980s during the struggle against the Duvalier dictatorship and its legacy of neo-Duvalierist juntas.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was born in Port-Salut, Haiti, made his first studies at a Salesian school in Port-au-Prince and then attended the College of Notre Dame, from where he graduated in 1974. Subsequently, he took a novitiate course in La Vega, Dominican Republic, before returning to Haiti to study philosophy at the Grand Seminary of Notre Dame and psychology at the University of Haiti. After finishing his studies in 1979, he traveled to Europe and studied in Italy, Canada and Israel, he then returned to Haiti in 1983 to be ordained a Salesian priest.

In 1985, Jean-Bertrand Aristide became pastor of a poor parish in Port-au-Prince. In his work as a religious community leader, adhering to liberation theology, he organized and led a series of protest movements against the government of Jean Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc. An insurrection ended the government of Duvalier Jr. on February 7, 1986, following several factors, including the withdrawal of U.S. military and economic support for the Duvalier Family, intense internal protests that resulted in a military coup perpetrated by the head of the army, Henri Namphy. After his overthrow in February by his own military chief, Duvalier Jr (Baby Doc) and his family went into exile in France, whose government granted asylum to him and his family. For the next four years from 1986 to 1990, Haiti was ruled by a group of civilians and military officers who gravitated close to the former dictator’s spheres of power.

Jean-Betrand Aristide remained firm in his organizational work, leading large sectors of the Haitian people in the protests against the new phase of the neo-colonial and imperialist dictatorship, better known as “Duvalierism without Duvalier”. In 1988 the Salesian order of the Catholic Church, under pressure from the Haitian government, accused Aristide of inciting violence in the population against post-Duvalierism dictators and he was expelled from the religious institutional order. In December 1990, in the first free elections in Haiti since 1804, Aristide was elected president of Haiti.

The officially sanctioned historical narrative says that Aristide after his electoral triumph in 1990, was transformed into another brutal dictator, and that he was therefore overthrown in 1991, replaced by the US and the international community in 1994; to then perpetuate large-scale electoral fraud in 2000 and to become president of Haiti for the second time; until a popular movement finally overthrew him in 2004.

That whole narrative is a crass and laughable misrepresentation, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was and remains the key leader of the popular Lavalas movement that emerged in the 1980s. Lavalas means in Creolé “the avalanche”, the torrent of a broad process of mobilization of popular organizations and civil society that seek to build a new society of production, justice, participation and transparency. Lavalas poses a significant threat to the power of the Haitian neo-colonial administrativist elite backed by U.S. socio-economic networks and the global corporatocracy. A military coup under General Raoul Cedras in 1991 in response to Aristide’s electoral victory in 1990 left some 5,000 dead.

Five thousand (5,000) Lavalas supporters were killed while Aristide was in exile between 1991 and 1994, not counting the tens of thousands of deaths that have been attributed to the dictatorships of both Duvalier Sr. and Duvalier Jr. In 1994 Aristide, adequately neutralized from effectively exercising his mandate, was allowed to return to Haiti. October 15, 1994, marks the popular outcry that greeted President Jean Bertrand Aristide when he returned to Port-au-Prince, after the intervention of U.S. troops and coup elements in the Haitian Army. Thus ended three years of exile of the constitutional president, in Caracas and Washington, after the bloody coup d’état of September 1991, which as I mentioned earlier had an official balance of 5,000 dead. In the 1995 elections, René Préval was elected president for a five-year term. For the elections of 2000 Aristide, together with the Lavalas movement, they organized the population to comply with the economic, political and agricultural reforms that did not lead to materialize in the 90s. After winning a second election in 2000 despite extreme financial and political constraints, Aristide and the Lavalas movement still had unacceptable aspirations for Haiti from the point of view of the local neo-colonial administrative elite and corporatocratic socio-economic networks, thus in 2004 he was forcibly expelled from his country by the Marines. of the United States, as the culmination of a sustained legal and media campaign against him and his renewed Lavalas movement by (above all) the US, France, Canada and local Haitian elites.

The February 2004 coup d’état against the Haitian state saw the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, methodically followed by an occupation of Haiti by troops from the US, Canada and France, the former being quickly replaced by troops from the MINUSTAH mission of the United Nations mission, which has been exhaustively documented desperately by activists and the alternative media. In 2004, human rights lawyer Ezili Dantó of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network noted that the U.S. occupation of Haiti was not intended to protect civil rights in Haiti and stop government abuses under Aristide; rather, it was about preventing the democratically elected government from governing.

With Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of the Haitian presidency, international political-financial networks put politicians of their choice. From now on the next presidents of Haiti would be mere administrators of a corporatocratic neo-colony. Boniface Alexandre was appointed president after Aristide on February 29, 2004, followed by René Préval who was appointed on May 14, 2006, and finally Michel Martelly appointed president on May 14, 2011, all follow the same form of neo-colonial administrative government.

The core of the opposition for the 2004 coup, far from being the broad-based “civil society” movement as depicted in the international media, was a somewhat disturbing alliance between the old-school Duvalier-Macoutistas, right-wing officers who never pardoned Aristide for the dissolution of the army in 1995. and factory owners, such as Andy Apaid, a U.S.-Haitian citizen and leader of the Group of 184, a collective of business leaders supported by the U.S. Republican International Institute, ridiculously described in the mass media as a popular initiative.

The Group of 184 is a group of Haitian individuals and organizations in a variety of sectors, ranging from business and the media economy, who are united in their opposition to Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Fanmi Lavalas party. The name comes from the number of organizations in this group, and is often shortened to G184. It was created with the specific intention of opposing the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. It is led by André Apaid, a Haitian-American businessman. Despite being little more than a vehicle for a section of the narrow elite, the G184 has successfully represented itself (particularly foreign journalists from donor countries) as the representative organization of Haitian civil society as a whole. Andy Apaid as G184 leader was in coordination with former Secretary of State Colin Powell in the days leading up to the kidnapping and expulsion of President Aristide by U.S. forces on February 29. G184 brings together elite business organizations and religious non-governmental organizations and is also supported by the International Republican Institute (IRI), an organization founded in 1983 and funded by the United States government to carry out political programs internationally, as well as receive significant amounts of money from the European Union.

Former President Bill Clinton, who acts as the UN envoy to Haiti (and is part of these NGO capitalism networks of charity), and economist Paul Collier think Haiti needs to take advantage of its cheap labor. In other words, they think Haiti will solve its problems by opening more sweatshops. Of course neither calls them sweatshops, both speak of “production centres” but clearly they are clandestine exploitation workshops when reviewing working conditions.

The companies that own these workshops in Haiti have tax holidays (15 years in some cases) and massive subsidies. Apparel manufacturers want to establish manufacturing sectors according to George Sassine, head of the Haitian Industries Association. With Aristide out of power and the Lavalas movement fragmented, the new governments established by the multilateral order of capital returned Haiti to a government of massive clientelism of the government and the systematic impoverishment of the population. Crony capitalism is a term that describes an economy that thinks of itself as capitalist (and even defends supposed competition and the free market) in which success in business depends on a close relationship between entrepreneurs and government officials. Among its most common manifestations, one can mention favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, contracts with the government, government subsidies; crony capitalism consists of collusion between the agents of the international market and the assimilation of the nation-state. Post-Lavalas governments made international calls to sell Haiti as cheap labor. Planes and hotels are full of foreign investors looking to enter the post-earthquake reconstruction market. Cheap labor is insufficient as public policy and financial policy to develop a given country, such a paradigm produces poverty rather than providing inclusive circulation of capital.

The race to the bottom pits Haitian workers against workers in the neighboring Dominican Republic. CODEVI, an industrial park in the free zone of Ouanaminthe, in the Northeast Department opened on the border with the Dominican Republic about eight years ago, after the salaries of the same work in Dominican territory became too high. According to the director of CODEVI, Miguel Ángel Torres; “In the 2000s, customers of Dominican companies said salaries were too high. They said they couldn’t pay. What happened? CODEVI appeared. The benefits in Haiti are better than in other countries… we can compete with any company in the Dominican Republic” Located on the border with the Dominican Republic, it is one of the most important regions in cross-border trade. Foreign factory owners on Haitian soil remain vehemently anti-union.

International law was instrumental to the coup d’état. The National Association of Haitian Judges (ANAMAH) was an important tool of the US, Canada and France via the United Nations in removing Aristide from power in 2004. After Aristide’s tenure, ANAMAH did very useful work for the new regime, for example keeping many problematic legal cases in legal limbo. These jurists loyal to the United Nations are the perfect legal tool in a neo-colony like Haiti, monopolizing control of the political legal apparatus for corporatocratic networks. All of this happened with the broad support of the United Nations Security Council.

Although almost nothing is mentioned about this situation in the academic literature of political science and international law, there have been efforts by lawyers such as Brian Concannon, Marjorie Cohn and Ira Kruzban. International support was never total: both the African Union and Caricom, the Caribbean Community, opposed the coup (Caricom suspended Haiti’s membership after Aristide’s overthrow). However, the United Nations invasion has earned the active support of countries opposed to the Iraq war, and has seen enthusiastic collaboration from many Latin American states that in other contexts are considered progressive; in effect, the military operation is under the leadership of Brazil. Venezuela on the other hand, whose presidents both Chavez and Maduro have continually expressed support for Aristide.

International law made possible the coup d’état and the occupation that was executed through a multilateral financial-political logistics. On the one hand, the preparation of the coup was an opportunity for France and the United States to prepare for the coup. While the U.S. returned to working together efficiently after their disputes over the invasion of Iraq, and new and emerging colonial powers worked together to manufacture the demonization of Aristide along with Canada. All three nations collaborated in training right-wing paramilitaries in the Dominican Republic.

Years after the coup, sections of the Haitian people continue to demand the restoration of democracy. Defying police gunfire, illegal arrests and wholesale beatings. The elaborate campaign to suppress Lavalas was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. It has left the people of Haiti at the mercy of some of the most rapacious political and economic forces on the planet.

MINUSTAH has carried out more surgical attacks. (a) On 6 July 2005, 350 UN soldiers were deployed with the support of helicopters and armoured vehicles to Cité Soleil as part of a massive assault, killing a popular community organizer and Lavalas militant. (b) On 22 December 2006, MINUSTAH again assaulted Cité Soleil on an “anti-gang” justification (they were captured on camera to document the massacre), killing around 30 civilians, including children. The similarity of the UN military operations between July 6, 2005 and what happened December 22, 2006 in the same neighborhood, Cite Soleil is evident. The United Nations deployed hundreds of heavily armed men with armored vehicles. This is Multilateralism as Terror.

The vast majority of donations served as a deposit of free money aimed at financing the construction of infrastructure for the international personnel who would be in charge of this humanitarian occupation. It is worth noting that Western governments have insisted that aid funds for Haiti should be administered by non-governmental organizations and foundations rather than the Haitian government, which they consider to be “corrupt.” After the Earthquake of January 2010, people made donations to humanitarian organizations and non-governmental organizations did not realize that their contribution to the reconstruction of Haiti would be channeled towards the construction of five-star hotels to accommodate foreign business personnel. Their expectation was that the money would be used to provide food and housing for the Haitian people.

The Obama administration coordinated plans for the restructuring of Haitian society – in the interest of international capital what author Naomi Klein called the Shock Doctrine is an ongoing process; when capitalist powers use — or create — economic or natural disasters to impose neo-liberal programs, such as opening up national markets to multinational corporations, privatizing companies and institutions, and cutting the state minimum wage. Haiti has one of the world’s highest concentrations of NGOs. However, the large number of active groups in the country has not translated into effectiveness. This article attributes the inertia of non-governmental organizations to the deprivation of the rights of the Haitian people. Haitians do not have a representative government and no significant contribution has been made to reconstruction efforts or the distribution of aid funds. In addition, many NGOs are controlled by donors and foreign governments, sources that tend not to favor Haitian democracy.

Initially, the Obama administration used the name humanitarianism to deploy 20,000 troops and 17 warships to bolster the U.N. occupation in policing desperate people and to prevent an exodus of refugees. Médecins Sans Frontières complained at the time that this military response actually interferes with the distribution of humanitarian aid. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC Interim Haiti Recovery Commission) was established under U.S. control, which secured pledges of US$10 billion in donations. The Interim Haitian Recovery Commission (CIRH) is the planning body for Haiti’s recovery. To ensure that reconstruction is carried out efficiently, the U.S. Government coordinates all of its recovery assistance through the IACHR. The IACHR, however, has only collected 10 percent of the sums pledged. When and if they do collect donations, the U.S. aims to implement a neo-liberal plan to exploit cheap Haitian labor in factories, export-oriented plantations, and resorts; an economy of and for poverty. So what claims to be an effort, in Bill Clinton’s words, an effort to “build back better” is actually a ruse for the exploitation of Haiti.

Despite being home to the world’s highest density of non-governmental organizations per capita, Haiti was ravaged by a cholera epidemic with an official death toll of about 8,000. The cholera epidemic, now one of the worst in the world since Nepalese UN troops inadvertently caused it in Haiti in October 2010, is an example of this: despite a half-dozen studies, including that of the UN, which points directly to the UN latrines as the source and cause of the epidemic, the UN has refused to take any responsibility, let alone apologize for its gross negligence. Cholera spread in Haiti through latrines at the base of Nepalese UN troops, which flowed into the country’s main river. More than a million people still live in overcrowded camps on the same tarps they received in January 2011. A third of these camps still do not have a toilet of their own, and most Haitians do not have access to clean water. Advocates for Haitian victims of the cholera epidemic took the extraordinary brave step of suing the United Nations, claiming they were responsible for the introduction of the disease through contamination of the sewage from their barracks.

Cholera contamination and socio-economic violence inflamed the already widespread contempt for the almost endless occupation of UN MINUSTAH which lasted from June 2004 to October 2017 and that would mutate into BINUH soon after. This, followed by political elections funded and regulated by the international community, but denounced as illegitimate and fraudulent by Haitian civil society and supporters of the Lavalas movement. Haiti’s Electoral Council banned the party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the 2010 elections. The Fanmi Lavalas party, which remains a major party with the support of the urban poor in the capital, is one of 17 groups excluded from the February 2010 elections, as according to the electoral council, they submitted inappropriate documents.

The failures of charity capitalism, NGO aid system function as a laboratory to profit from disasters. Washington-led political-financial networks, the MFI and the multitudes of NGOs have been going to every place since the end of the Cold War to destabilize regimes that offer resistance to this broader agenda, the agenda of globalization as defined by Washington. Many famous non-governmental organizations act as an appendage of U.S. foreign policy, which in turn acts as an appendage of big finance capital.

When the U.S. State Department established its “human rights” NGO plan in the ’80s, historian James Peck (2011) notes that the idea was that they would sometimes offer toothless criticism of U.S. policy, so the public would think they were fair. It traces the development and usefulness of this doctrine through various U.S. administrations, as each has used human rights (and other idealistic reasons such as “democratization” and “humanitarianism”) to justify various U.S. interventions. It also strips away the comforting illusion that, more or less, U.S. foreign policy over the past forty years has been shaped by a dedication to human rights principles. He demonstrates how, on the contrary, successive administrations have captured the nomenclature of human rights and twisted it to US objectives.