The occupation of the country implemented by Washington opened the way for big US capital eager to extend their control over the sugar cane plantations and other sources of wealth.

Washington, in particular, took care to secure its investments by establishing an impressive police force with the task of guaranteeing order and peace but above all the defence of the interests of its capital. However, it is important to reiterate that the reasons for the US military occupation did not only concern the strictly commercial aspect but also the strategic military aspect due to the fact that, following the opening of the Panama Canal, Haiti had assumed an extremely privileged position for the control of the routes that passed through the Caribbean Sea. Securing control of the island would have guaranteed the United States the power to maintain the security of the Caribbean routes.
The American occupation, which ended in 1934, however, gave the Haitians a country with some more infrastructure but with an economy in tatters. A country literally on its knees that would soon force its inhabitants to migrate to nearby Santo Domingo to find work in the sugar cane plantations. Competition with local workers and a deep-rooted racist spirit resulted in ethnic cleansing that caused 20,000 Haitian victims by the Dominican army.

François Duvalier, also known as Papa Doc, was the president of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971. File archive

The corpses collected from a small river that flows on the border between the two countries led those who wanted to keep the memory of that vile extermination alive, to rename the waterway with the name of Riviére du Massacre.
The economic crisis in Haiti lasted until the 1940s. Furthermore, the end of the US occupation led to a resumption of conflict between mulattoes and blacks with the army beginning to take on an increasingly marked role in the political life of the country.
In 1946, Dumarsais Estimé, a supporter of the black cause, rose to the presidency but his commitment to remedying the country’s inequalities was strongly opposed by both the mulatto elite and the army, both supporters of a corrupt government. In 1949 a military junta led by Paul Magloire deposed the President in office, grabbing power and maintaining it until the 1957 elections which decreed the rise of Francois Duvalier, known as the “Doc Pope”. The latter, who presented himself to his electorate with a rather exotic program, imbued with mystical, racist and nationalist elements, governed in a dictatorial manner supported by US military and financial aid. In 1964 he declared himself President for life and upon his death in 1971, he was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc”.
The period mentioned was truly terrible for Haiti which transformed into a deadly place where ethnic confrontation became increasingly bloody and exacerbated. Those were the years of violence, looting, torture, human burnings and hangings practiced by the paramilitaries of the “Tonton Macoutes”, a death squad created by “Papa Doc” to eliminate his political opponents and all those who dared to put his regime in a bad light. They were almost three decades of theft, corruption, state terrorism, persecution, torture, poverty, and social marginalization throughout the country. This series of factors caused a popular uprising in 1986 which, in addition to throwing the country definitively into chaos, forced the President into exile. Power passed into the hands of the army and the presidency was entrusted to Henry Namphy, a lieutenant very close to Duvalier who was also ousted in the following years by another coup d’état.

Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed “Baby Doc” was the President of Haiti from 1971 until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in February 1986. File Archive

However, the dismissal of Jean-Claude Duvalier “Baby Doc” did not lead to the suppression  of the Tonton Macoutes paramilitary group which, while still active, recycled itself in more death squads, and then later merged into the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In the meantime, a popular movement of Catholic origin led by Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a spokesperson for liberation theology, began to make headway in the country. Father Aristide became an important voice for most of Haiti’s poor; a popularity that pushed him to go beyond his mission and take to the field, running for leadership of the country with a new formation he founded himself, the “Front National pour le Changement et la Démocratie”.
In 1991 Aristide, defeating Marc Bazin – the US-backed candidate and former World Bank official – in free elections with 67% of the votes, won the presidency of Haiti. However, despite his success, the new president lasted only a few months in office since on 29 September 1991 he was overthrown in a military coup and was consequently exiled, first to Venezuela and then to the USA. According to the theories of careful observers, it would seem that the reason for this coup was to be found in the intense anti-drug campaign that the President had tried to implement and in his opposition to neo-liberal policies. A few years later, Aristide was allowed by Bill Clinton (recently elected President) to return to his homeland. In the meantime, the pressure exerted by the international community, together with Resolution no. 940 of the United Nations Security Council of 31 July 1994, convinced the military regime to resign while US troops were deployed in Haiti by order of Clinton. Returning to his homeland, Aristide was able to continue his mandate on the condition, however, of carrying out the economic program of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), terms and conditions which he accepted and which allowed him to return to Haiti with 20,000 US soldiers in stand-by for the transition where he remained in power until the 1996 elections when he was succeeded by René Préval. He regained office in the 2001 elections but, only a few years later, in 2004, he was eliminated again by a new coup d’état that broke out in the midst of a political crisis that forced him into exile.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the 1990–91 Haitian general election, with 67% of the vote. He was briefly president until a September 1991 military coup. Aristide was president again from 1994 to 1996 and from 2001 to 2004. He was ousted in the 2004 coup d’éta. Photo: Daniel Morel

It is easy to understand how the end of Aristide’s Presidency was part of a very broad geopolitical, geostrategic and geoeconomic logic. In fact, Aristide, although initially accepting the IMF’s conditions, had however refused to implement the privatization of companies and moved the geopolitical centre of gravity towards the south, establishing a network of relationships with the governments of Chàvez and Castro. Furthermore, his range of action did not stop at the continent alone. The President, in fact, began to court the new poles of power.
Following the coup, Resolution No. 1542 was approved by the United Nations Security Council whose purpose was to train the Haitian National Police force and to provide peace and security for the population. Thus, a Provisional Multinational Force (FMP) was sent to the country, initially formed by the United States, France, Canada and Chile and which, upon the expiry of its mandate, was replaced in 2004 by a special mission, the MINUSTAH (Mission of the Nations United for the Stabilization of Haiti). (Open Photo: Presidential Palace. Photo: Daniel Morel)
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The year 2017 saw the end of the MINUSTAH special mission made up of around 7,000 soldiers belonging to an international force provided by 19 states  most of them Latin American.

In addition to the failure to obtain the results it should have achieved, it was tainted by serious scandals linked to episodes of sexual violence and a cholera epidemic, attributable to the Nepalese contingent, which devastated the country already affected by the 2010 earthquake whose very strong earthquake of magnitude 7.0 – with an epicentre located about 25 km south-west of the capital – caused approximately 222,517 victims and left 2.3 million people homeless and housed in tent cities or other makeshift homes. According to experts, the earthquake, which was quite atypical in nature, appears to have been caused by a vertical shift of the tectonic plates along a hitherto unknown fault. This atypicality, also revealed by the fact that earthquakes in the region are the result of horizontal displacements of the plates, has led scholars from the University of Miami to suppose that the earthquake could have been triggered by a series of geological phenomena that affected the area, including the deforestation of the mountains west of the capital Port Au Prince and the hurricanes that hit the region in 2008. In the opinion of experts, in fact, the heavy rains would have accelerated the process of soil erosion facilitated by deforestation with the consequence that the eroded mass, from the mountains towards the epicentre, could have created pressure on the earth’s crust such as to generate vertical sliding.

The 2010 earthquake caused approximately 222,517 victims and left 2.3 million people homeless and housed in tent cities or other makeshift homes. File swm

But in addition to the terrible earthquake of 2010, what made the conditions of the local population even more terrifying and precarious was the impact of Hurricane Matthew which in 2016 overwhelmed the country with unprecedented violence and gusts of wind of up to 200 kilometres per hour, causing the deaths of hundreds of people and the loss of thousands of homes. Subsequently, in 2021, a new earthquake caused the death of a further 2,247 people, facilitating the return of cholera and the new food crisis which still dramatically affects the population today. In fact, according to the results of an estimate produced by the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), the problem has reached exorbitant and unmanageable peaks with almost five million people – about half the country’s population – barely managing to feed themselves. However, it should be clarified that the food crisis is not a contingent situation, but has a substantially structural nature and is caused by countless factors including food aid programs and land grabbing which, over the years, by flooding the country with food produced by agribusiness companies and by grabbing the lands of small farmers, not only have they not solved the problem but have, on the other hand, weakened local agriculture and changed the eating habits of the inhabitants.

Poverty affects as many as 80% of the population. 123rf

Among the areas most affected by the food famine are the Artibonite valley – the breadbasket of the country – where armed groups have taken control of agricultural land and stolen crops, the rural areas of Grand’Anse in the south and several poor neighbourhoods of the capital, including Croix des Bouquets and Cité Soleil, which saw pockets of catastrophic hunger in late 2022.
Closely connected to the issue of hunger is poverty, which affects as many as 80% of the population, and the difficulty in accessing water due to the absence of structures capable of managing the resource, with the immediate consequence of the proliferation of pathologies. resulting from these critical issues (in fact, some data show that 90% of Haitian children suffer from water-borne diseases and intestinal infections). Then there is the problem of AIDS, respiratory infections, meningitis, typhoid and the lack of health infrastructure. Furthermore, 47% of the population over 15 years of age are illiterate and almost 75% of the houses are made of tin, wood and cardboard, and have no sanitation facilities. In addition to the extreme conditions of poverty and destitution, the country is also burdened by unprecedented levels of violence practised by criminal gangs under whose control large portions of the population live in daily worsening conditions. F.R.

It is the poorest and most unfortunate country in Latin America. Countless robberies and political and natural disasters have characterized its existence. Today the country is dominated by extreme violence, corruption and a political crisis. We retrace the painful journey of a people who in history were the precursors of anti-slavery and anti-colonialist struggles throughout the region.

In the precious Caribbean Basin, within the Antilles archipelago, lies the small Republic of Haiti, a country made up of two peninsulas whose total extension is just 27,750 km2 and which occupies the western part of the island of Hispaniola, bordering to the east with the Dominican Republic.
Its predominantly mountainous territory – made up of two mountain ranges between which a smaller chain is interspersed – is home to a population of 10,033,000 inhabitants, of which 95% are of African origin while the remainder are white or mixed-race.

Map: 123rf

Known as one of the poorest and most unfortunate countries on the entire continent due to the countless robberies and disasters it has had to endure throughout its existence, Haiti is also renowned for the creativity of its artists and for having been the precursor country of antislavery and anticolonialism throughout the region, the latter an aspect which made the colonial states of the 19th century perceive it as a dangerous threat. In fact, the country, from being a flourishing Spanish and French colony to which thousands of slaves were deported to be used in the cultivation of sugar cane to replace the natives who had become extinct due to the oppression practised by Spanish slavers, was the second American Republic after the United States to declare its independence in 1804, as well as the world’s first black republic.

General Toussaint Louverture. He is known as one of the “Fathers of Haiti”. The New York Public Library.

This independence, which can also be attributed to the high organizational capacity of its people, led it in the following years to side with the liberator Simon Bolivar, using men, money and armaments, in the campaign for the emancipation of South America from the North. For this reason, Bolivar spoke out by saying “Americans from the South owe a lot to Haitians for supporting the emancipatory process”. These were, in the opinion of many historians, the reasons that caused France, England, Spain and the United States to condemn and rein in the country which now represented a real threat within the sub-continent whose main economic driving force was represented precisely by slavery. In this regard, the phrase uttered by the then American president Thomas Jefferson according to which “Haiti is a bad example” was lapidary. This concern did not appear far-fetched in light of the geographical position which makes Haiti, like other Central American and Caribbean countries, a sort of “hinge state” between South and North America. There is no doubt, in fact, that its very geographical position has conditioned the country, condemning it to continuous economic instability, a prelude to unspeakable and unstoppable social dramas.
As proof of this, we only have to remember that in the so-called “hinge states”, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the major and decisive battles for the conquest of strategic, economic and financial spaces were fought between the European powers and the United States.
The United States, in particular, intervening heavily and militarily in local political life, worked to oust the European powers by virtue of the presence of substantial investments, concentrated in the production and export of agricultural tropical products, especially bananas. The consistency and importance of this capital were such as to severely limit national sovereignty. Hence the epithet “Banana Republic”.

The façade of the old United Fruit Building. New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo: Infrogmation

These were the years of the UFCO (United Fruit Company) better known as the “Green Octopus” which, due to its way of acting and its excessive business behaviour, had created a very powerful economic empire throughout the Central American and Caribbean region. Practically a sort of State within the States with police power in the territories it owns, controlling strategic sectors such as the local railway networks existing in the host country, the ports, the merchant navy, the most important banks, telephony and radio broadcasters, as well as the public procurement sector. Regarding the latter, particular attention was paid to the railway sector and the construction of railways which often served as a trailblazer for the penetration into Central American and Caribbean territories for the acquisition of new plantations.
Finally, if we consider that the budgets of this company, or of its counterparts, were higher than the state budgets of the countries where they operated, we can understand the capacity for pressure and conditioning that the governments of that area were forced to undergo. The action implemented by these companies was the result of a well-defined strategy designed by the Washington government, today known as “dollar diplomacy”, aimed at developing an intense policy of promoting and expanding financial influence in the Caribbean Basin and Central America through considerable government support for US entrepreneurs. Dollar diplomacy, however, was absolutely no alternative to the use of more brutal pressure or even of force itself.
In fact, it can easily be argued that economic strategy and repressive strategy went side by side and overlapped. It must be said, however, that in both cases these operations were masked by the American civilizing and charitable purpose aimed, at least officially, at adjusting the imbalances in local finances.

The American Soldiers arrived in Haiti in 1915. File Archive.

This vision grew immeasurably under the presidency of Wilson who, demonstrating a blind and boundless faith in the democratic and constitutional mechanisms of the US system, nourished an ethical and paternalistic vision towards Latin American governments which led him to use force and the sending of marines in the face of the rise of unconstitutional governments according to Washington’s parameters.
The logic just described is the one that pushed Washington to intervene in Haiti in 1915, to quell the popular uprisings that led to the overthrow of the government in office. Under the pretext of defending the interests of US citizens present on the island, American troops continued to station themselves in the country for a further eighteen years after the restoration of stability. Thus, under the pressure of the military occupation, Haiti was forced to sign an agreement whose duration was set at ten years, by which the appointments of the financial consultant, the person in charge of health control, as well as than that of public works were reserved to the United States. The Caribbean country also undertook in consideration of the occupier, not to cede portions of territory to other foreign powers and not to sign treaties that could “compromise independence”. Also in that period, a constitution strongly inspired by the US government was launched. In other words, despite the absence of official status, the country was effectively transformed into a protectorate of the United States. (Open Photo : Daniel Morel)
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Haiti today finds itself in an extremely precarious situation. The country is dominated by extreme violence, corruption and political crises.  Added to this are the crises generated by natural phenomena, such as drought and earthquakes which have catastrophically struck the island in the last 15 years.

The high level of violence that takes place at the hands of over 200 armed gangs and armed groups fighting each other accentuates the critical issues exponentially, making the country ungovernable. Suffice it to consider that since the beginning of 2024, more than 360,000 people have been displaced in the country due to the violence, and now struggle to access sufficient food, while the loss of jobs and income has affected two thirds of families. UNICEF data shows that 2.7 million people, including 1.6 million women and children, live in areas under the effective control of armed gangs and children are involved in episodes of violence every day, being killed or injured. This involvement is also dictated by the child recruitment activity that the gangs carry out to swell their ranks; in fact, according to UNICEF, half of the armed groups in Haiti currently have children in their ranks.

Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, an influential Haitian gang leader. Photo VOA

Since the beginning of the year, more than 2,500 people have been killed, injured or kidnapped in a new wave of violence that has swept through much of the country, generating a context determined by the desire for affirmation of the “G9 An Fanmi” an alliance between the nine most powerful gangs led by former police officer Jimmy Chérizier, also known as “Barbecue”, a nickname which he apparently earned by charring his victims and who today constitutes an important player in the balance of power in the country.  Jimmy Chérizier is also believed to be responsible for the massacre of 2018, a year after the departure of the UN Blue Helmets from Haiti, which occurred in the slums of La Saline and which cost the lives of more than 70 people, including women and children. At the time, Chérizier was an officer of an elite force tasked with fighting gangs but from which he was subsequently expelled only to be recruited by President Moïse who armed and equipped him to control the poor neighbourhoods in order to avoid anti-government riots.

Jimmy Chérizier. He was armed and equipped by the government to control the poor neighbourhoods in order to avoid anti-government riots. Photo VOA

The alliance that Chérizier had the ability to forge between local gangs, better known as the gangsterization of Haiti, was useful for local politicians to control their areas of competence. A balance that, however, was called into question with the killing of President Moïse in July 2021, creating a power vacuum which threw the country into a new phase of instability. The gangs began to operate autonomously, gaining control, which they still maintain, of new areas of the capital, of strategic infrastructures, including roads, ports and airports and of food, electricity and fuel distribution services, extremely worsening the living conditions of the population and the security of the country. Since fuel is the basis of the power supply of many structures, including hospitals, the interruption of supply generates the constant interruption of these services with the respective consequences that also derive from it for the survival of patients. The fuel disruption caused by the gangs also led to the closure of banks, and shops and the switching off of mobile phone antennas, causing the isolation of the country. Today, many gangs have their headquarters in the capital’s slums where they compete for territory and even decide which non-governmental organizations can enter to provide basic services to the population.

President Jovenel Moïse was killed in July 2021 creating a power vacuum. (Pres.Office)

Although sanctioned by the United Nations in September 2022, “Barbecue” is continuing to threaten the country, unleashing, as evidenced by the episodes of last March, attacks on police stations, courts and prisons, causing 2000 prisoners to escape. These actions were aimed at forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, appointed by President Jovenel Moïse shortly before his assassination in 2021 and who was supposed to leave office at the beginning of February 2024, but also at thwarting the agreement signed in the first ten days of February that Henry signed in Kenya to define the methods of sending a new Kenyan-led security mission already approved in October 2023 by the United Nations Security Council and which provides for the presence of around a thousand police officers to counter the criminal gangs.
The state of emergency led to the birth of a Transitional Presidential Council in April established thanks to the support of CARICOM member countries which will have the task of leading Haiti towards stabilization in order to be able to call new elections by 7 February 2026. The Council, which took office in April followed by the resignation of President Ariel Henry, will be required to appoint a new head of government and a cabinet, as well as coordinate the arrival of the multinational security force. And all of this in the catastrophic context, to say the least, of an extremely frayed social fabric where the gangs, in addition to constituting a threat, still represent an actor on the ground and, as such, demand a place of representation at the negotiating table. (Open Photo: iStock/chinterlang)

Filippo Romeo