Why hasn't there been more of an international (or American) effort to stabilize Haiti, given its location in the Caribbean Sea?

They are an independent nation, so the US influence is limited. We do send money, as far as I’m aware, but it’s funneled directly into the corrupt government’s coffers. What would you suggest as an alternative?

Simply put, the entire Island of Hispanola has been adjudged unworthy of being bothered with or about by those with an actual chance to improve the long term prospects for the people unlucky enough to be born there. The country is allowed to limp from crisis to crisis with indifference until some inexcusable embarrassingly avoidable catastrophe spurs action from those places noted for sensationalist journalism. It’s the charity of embarrassment.

Remember Papa Doc and his son? Have a read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Duvalier

It has been a dictatorship run by crazy men.

@ibstubro It is a problematic colonialist viewpoint to think there should be an “effort to stabilize.”

There have been efforts of many sorts over the years, including a lot of humanitarian aid after hurricanes and especially after the earthquake 6 years ago.

But what would you have other countries do beyond food, shelter, and infrastructure assistance?

This is an issue far beyond Haiti. One could say the same for many third world countries. At what point do countries in trouble become colonies being told what to do?

And really, its location does mean that much to anyone.

Haiti’s worth a careful look from those of us who probably believe it impossible that we devolve toward that nation’s situation. The crumbling infrastructure here and clearly declining standard of living are not exactly harbingers of prosperity. There ARE big lessons in Flint for those who pay attention.

I wonder the same about Detroit from time to time.

Haiti is ignored like so many other places. The US does have to deal with illegal immigration from there to some extent, but overall, I would guess it’s not given much consideration.

What should we do? Take it over? Give more money than we already do? Provide education? Birth control? Food? Are you really worried about Russia taking it over? I don’t think we worry about that so much. Maybe I’m wrong.

That is an excellent question. @Seek very succinctly answered the question. However, the devil is in the details of the Haitian story. When I got back from working the 2010 Haitian earthquake, I wrote a paper on the country. Below is the opening:

In The Heart of Darkness

Since its inception in 1804, the Republic of Haiti has had forty-three presidents. The first was assassinated in his first year in office. The second committed suicide. There have been four assassinations and five others have died in office; two in their first year of service. One was executed after due process while still serving and another twenty-three were overthrown in either military coups or popular revolutions. Only nine have been able to serve out their terms relatively unmolested, four of which were under the protection of the U.S. Marines.

In the thirteen years between 1902 and 1915, there were nine Haitian presidents, eight violent and successful revolutions, and three assassinations in the same amount of years. All three presidents were assassinated in their first year in office. One, Cincinnatus Leconte, was blown to smithereens along with the Presidential Palace. Another, Tancrede Auguste, was poisoned. The funeral was interrupted when two generals began fighting at the gravesite over his succession.

And yet another, Vilbrun Sam, with revolutionaries bearing down on him from the north, took refuge in the French Embassy when the people of Port-au-Prince exploded in rage after he had his chief of prisons slaughter 162 political refugees the day before. They burst through the doors, dragged him into the street, beat him mercilessly, and while he was still alive, impaled him on the spikes of the embassy’s wrought iron fence. Then they tore him to pieces a mano. As if Haiti didn’t have enough troubles during this period, the director of the National Bank fleeced the treasury of over a million dollars. Three former cabinet ministers were his accomplices. Each one eventually became President of the Republic.

Germans owned most of the important public utilities and German shipping carried the bulk of Haiti’s trade. When Haiti entered into a ruinous loan from the Kaiser, the U.S. sent in the Marine Corps to prevent Haiti from allowing Germany to build a naval base at Cap Hatien at the dawn of the First World War. This began the sometimes brutal U.S. occupation that lasted for the next nineteen years ending when Roosevelt brought them home in 1934. It also began the longest period of stability Haiti had ever known, lasting 27 years. The next four presidents were able to serve out their full terms.

>>>>>>>

In 1957, with financial support from the U.S., François “Papa Doc” Duvalier was elected president. A paranoid megalomaniac, he soon assumed dictatorial powers. His 14 year regime is remembered as one of the most brutal of modern times. At his death in 1971, his son, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, became “president” and his regime like his father’s, was marked with corruption, the imprisonment, torture and killing of political opponents and “politically unenthusiastic citizens” for the next 15 years. The U.S. government supported the Duvaliers, with information, arms and money, as an alternative to the perceived leftist tendencies among the Haitian population.

Under the Duvaliers and afterward, Haiti became a source of cheap manufacturing owned and controlled by American and European businesspersons. Today, the average daily wage for a Haitian laborer working in a T-shirt factory is $1.75. The main source of income for a government worker is bribery.

When I was working on a Disaster Medical Assistance Team in Port au Prince in January, 2010, drug shipments via helicopter drops from the American and French aircraft carriers just offshore suddenly stopped. The airspace had been officially shut down. The government official who required a bribe to officially keep the airspace open had died of a heart attack and none of the orgs knew who to bribe to get them open again. We were doing amputations on infants without anesthesia for about ten hours before former US Presidents Clinton and G. W. Bush arrived on the same plane, made Dr. Paul Farmer (my org’s top man) United States Ambassador to Haiti without Portfolio and things like badly needed medications and potable water began to move again.

The government needs to be replaced. But they have no traditions of good government. The government therefore needs to be replaced until a new generation of Haitians who are educated and properly screened and appointed. Then and only then, can they eventually have free elections of their own people and expect services with minimum corruption. But nobody wants to do that. It’s a pain in the ass, and a lot of American and European industries, both large and small, will lose a lot of money.

That’s why.

^^edit: ...his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier…

Excuse me, but Haiti is one of my favorite subjects. So, I’m going to finish this properly:

I would like add that none of the tragedy described above happened in a vacuum. Haiti was the richest colonial possession in the Western Hemisphere at the time of the slave revolt in 1802 that resulted in her loss to France as a possession and the first official republic to be run by black people, all former slaves. The European and American reaction, Haiti’s potential trading partners, was to boycott and blockade the island from commerce and trade. Even during wartime between these nations, the one thing they could agree on was that Haiti’s population was to be starved into non-existence. This enforced international isolation resulted in great need quickly leading to early turmoil and a breakdown of society which Haiti has never really recovered.

The racial motivations behind this, including the fear that black slave revolts could spread to other Caribbean colonies and even the US, are blatantly evident in the language used in the newspapers and government documents at the time. Even during wartime between these nations, the one thing they could agree on was that Haiti’s population was to be starved into non-existence. This enforced international isolation resulted in great need quickly leading to early turmoil and a breakdown of society which Haiti has never really recovered.

As time went on, the greater powers softened their Haitian policies – the lure of cheap Haitian commodities became too tempting and they began trading exploitatively with the now desperate, corrupt Haitian government. Haiti essentially signed away rights to her natural resources through successive, severely one-sided treaties with American and European companies by the mid-to-late-19th century. The result is that this one-time emerald jewel in the blue bed of the Caribbean, this former cornucopia of natural wealth, is now denuded of its forests, its natural resources, and any tradition of good government to the extent that today Haiti is listed as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Our extension of the Monroe Doctrine under TR Roosevelt, referred to as the Roosevelt Corollary, intensified our hands-on interest in Haiti at the time of the building of the Panama Canal. The Corollary was that America, in order to protect the canal, must extend it’s sphere of influence as far north as Cuba and as far south as Venezuela. As a ‘civilized nation,’ the United States had, in the president’s judgment, a duty under the Monroe Doctrine to intervene in the internal affairs of unruly, unstable neighbors. The construction of a canal through Panama gave added weight to the preservation of the Monroe Doctrine.

“As TR informed Congress in 1905, ‘as a mere matter of self-defense, we must exercise a close watch over the approaches to this canal; and this means that we must be thoroughly alive to our interests in our Caribbean Sea’. Secretary of State Root agreed with his president, writing to a friend in 1905 that ‘the inevitable effect of our building the Canal must be to require us to police the surrounding premises.’ Later, Roosevelt privately wrote to Root, ‘… we must show those Dagos and Darkies that they will have to behave decently’” –_A Companion to Theordore Roosevelt,_ edited by Serge Ricard, Wiley & Blackwell, London (2011), pp. 289–290.

So, American involvement in Haitian affairs intensified -at the exclusion of other foreign powers under the unilaterally codified Monroe Doctrine. At the dawn of WWI, Haiti became involved in a ruinous loan from Imperial Germany which included German rights to build a substantial naval base at Cap Hatien. Wilson sent in the Marines and the American occupation of Haiti began. There soon developed a dependency on cheap Haitian goods and services by American business. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled out the troops in 1934, the businessmen stayed behind. By this time Haiti had long been an oligarchy, managed by the ruling class supported by American and European business interests.

Things intensified again in the early 1950’s when the Soviet Union began making serious incursions into Latin American and Caribbean politics. When Cuba fell to communists in 1959, support for brutal right-wing regimes in the area by the US State Department became almost fanatical. Communism, for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution, was on America’s doorstep. This American fear produced such dictators as the Duvaliers as described in my first post above.

The Solution

Haiti has two very large obstacles keeping them from political and economic health. (1) One is deep poverty. (2) The other is the lack of a tradition of good government. The second problem must be solved in order to solve the first.

Haiti has been run by the same small group of families for generations now. These families control everything of value and have done well by selling Haiti’s natural resources and rights to manufacture in Haiti to the highest bidders in the international marketplace. The problem is that none of this wealth reaches the general population, so these families essentially bleed their own country and their fellow citizens white in their tradition of greed. Inside the country, they control every important political position and sell influence and rights to locals and foreigners alike. A politician who won’t take a bribe is soon found dead as this rocks the boat. So, even in the unlikely event that an honest leader can be elected in this mendacious environment, all the functionaries beneath him are corrupt and the administration will soon fail.

I believe this was the case with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest first elected as president with the intention of establishing Social Democracy in Haiti in 1991.

Wikipedia:
“Jean-Bertrand Aristide (born 15 July 1953) is a Haitian politician who became Haiti’s first democratically elected president. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a Roman Catholic parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies to become a priest of the Salesian order. He became a focal point for the pro-democracy movement first under Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and then under the military transition regime which followed. He won the Haitian general election between 1990 and 1991, with 67% of the vote and was briefly president of Haiti, until a September 1991 military coup. The coup regime collapsed in 1994 under US pressure and threat of force (Operation Uphold Democracy). Aristide was then president again from 1994 to 1996 and from 2001 to 2004. However, Aristide was ousted in a 2004 coup d’état, in which one of his former soldiers participated. He accused the United States of orchestrating the coup d’état against him with support from Jamaican prime minister P. J. Patterson, among others. Aristide was later forced into exile in the Central African Republic and South Africa. He finally returned to Haiti in 2011 after seven years in exile.”

I believe that Aristide initially had the support of the US, but when his reforms caused too much instability, especially disrupting international business interests, the US turn a blind eye to his removal by military coup. When Aristide was elected a second time, the US stood by once again as the military deposed him. The third time Aristide was elected, the US took an active part in his removal because, once again, he enacted his reforms so quickly as to disrupt business and, possibly more importantly, the status quo of the oligarchy – the people international business can rely on to sell Haiti cheap.

The oligarchy lives very well. They have been sending their children off to the best educational institutions for almost one hundred years now. They return from places like Harvard and Oxford prepared to run the family business of selling off Haiti to the highest bidder, put their booty in offshore accounts and investments, and live well in places like Biaritz, Cannes and Cap Antibes. They are well-acquainted with other super-rich internationals and mingle among them seamlessly. Nothing is too good for them. Meanwhile, their fellow citizens lack potable water and enough food to feed their children.

I know what I would do if I was King of the World. What would you do?

Your dissertation is worthy of publication!

@stanleybmanly I agree with you and @CWOTUS that there is a lesson in this for us. Haiti is what happens to the other 99% when 1% finally own it all. Don’t expect humanitarianism. Don’t expect justice. And certainly do not expect to have a voice. We are far from the Haitian extreme, but since the 1960’s we have been trending toward precisely what Haiti has become. The difference is, we are voluntarily giving up our democracy and wealth to an oligarchy whom we generally envy. We like to tell ourselves that, unlike the lowly Haitians, we are “merely temporarily embarrassed millionaires” (Steinbeck).