Remaking Haiti under occupation
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from foreign governments, 30 percent from corporations. WB in the 1980s. In addition, public utilities were to be Haiti is now the target of a modified World Bank (WB) privatized; tariffs on foreign goods dropped, which has The devastation brought by Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake was seen as an opportunity for U.S. policy makers to reshape Haiti as one big underutilized sweatshop. To insure that its corporate agenda succeeds—M16 in hand—the Obama administration scandalously blocked international humanitarian aid by giving top priority to an occupation force that reached 20,000 US troops (see www.socialistaction. org, February 2010).
When asked how long the troop presence would last, U.S. Army Lieutenant General Ken Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it.” Thirty-three cents of every U.S. aid dollar to Haiti goes to military aid. This is the fourth U.S. occupation of the country. In solidarity with Haiti, we must demand U.S./UN troops out now! On the ground before the quake were some 400 Cuban doctors. That number has increased to 1200. None carry weapons.
The quake death toll now exceeds 200,000, with one million homeless. The threat of diseases like malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, and dengue fever are exacerbated by still decomposing bodies and the onset of the March rainy season.
Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity, wrote, “When you look at the architecture in Chile you see buildings that have damage, but not the complete pancaking that you’ve got in Haiti.” Unlike Chile, there are no Haitian building codes. In contrast, the 8.8 intensity earthquake that hit Chile on Feb. 27 claimed 279 lives. Decades of U.S. support to the corrupt ruling elite sealed the doom of tens of thousands in Port-au-Prince who live in shacks in vast slums. Paul Vilme, an unemployed teacher and actor in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, told the Brooklynbased Haiti Liberté newspaper, “We are not at war. Why all the big guns? Why all the big tanks? Are they showing off or are they up to something? We need engineers, architects, equipment operators, people with shovels, not M16s.”
New York photographer and activist Tony Savino was in Port-au-Prince during the last week of February. Savino told Socialist Action, “I visited about a dozen encampments around Port-au-Prince. The vast majority didn’t have tents and all complained about not getting food or potable water. “I’ve heard five different reports from colleagues of American doctors who flew to Port-au-Prince with suitcases full of medicine and they were turned away at the airport by the U.S. military. The aid is not reaching the people ... no aid or practically none actually reaching the people is beyond all expectations. That’s genocide.” Much so-called aid will go to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Haiti, of which there are 3000. Critics say NGOs function as a political counterweight to the Haitian government and a means of co-opting worker/ peasant movements. Some 70 percent of NGO funding is plan based on the low-wage international assembly industry, supported by UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon and UN envoy Bill Clinton. The WB plan is known in Haiti as “the death plan” or “the American plan.” The post-quake plan will be presented at a March 31 conference in New York.
Ki-moon wrote in The New York Times (March 31, 2009), “My special adviser on Haiti, the Oxford University development economist Paul Collier, has worked with the government to devise a strategy … with particular emphasis on the country’s traditional strengths—the garment industry and agriculture.”
The New York Times also lauded Collier’s recommendations in its Feb. 1 editorial, “Thinking About a New Haiti.” It echoed Collier’s view that Haiti should “encourage investments in industries like garment-making and tourism.” Collier originally wrote a Haiti study for the International Monetary Fund, the WB’s financial hit squad on debt repayment. Collier wrote, “Haiti is the only low-wage economy in the region.”
Haiti’s $3.05 a day minimum wage is lower than any country in the area, less than half the Dominican minimum wage; 78% of Haiti’s population lives on less than $2 a day. Unemployment in the capital is as high as 80%. The assembly sweatshop model was promoted by the already destroyed Haitian domestic rice production. WB plans were accelerated by Bill Clinton in 1994 by an agreement signed by deposed Haitian President JeanBertrand Aristide in exchange for the U.S.-led UN occupation that returned Aristide to power.
David Wilson, who was in Port-au-Prince during the earthquake and a co-author of “The Politics of Immigration,” writes, “The leading proponents of development through sweatshops have been liberal Democrats in the United States. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus pushed hard for HOPE and HOPE II, the 2006 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act and its 2008 extension; these acts make the plan possible by giving preferential treatment to U.S. imports of apparel assembled in Haiti. … Bill Clinton provided much of the PR for the plan” (mrzine. monthlyreview.org/2010/wilson040310).
Last summer, a labor-based struggle erupted for a minimum wage increase to 250 gourdes a day [$1 is about 40 gourdes]. In the end, Haitian President Rene Preval bowed to pressure from Bill Clinton to increase the minimum to 125 gourdes in 2009 and 200 gourdes in 2012. The 125 gourdes is worth less than half of the minimum wage in 1980 under U.S. backed dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. n