By Dr. Jean Eddy Saint Paul, PhD, Brooklyn College (CUNY) — The Conversation — 27 August 2021
The powerful earthquake that struck Haiti on 14 August 2021 followed a long series of natural and human-caused disasters to rock the country. President Jovenel Moise was assassinated less than six weeks earlier, on 7 July — the latest of five Haitian presidents to be killed in office since the country’s founding in 1804. Power struggles and strong economic interests, both local and with other nations — mainly The United States — have motivated those assassinations. Throughout Haitian history, The US has been actively engaged in undermining the legitimacy of Haitian leaders who refused to bow to American imperialism.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s founding father, proclaimed independence from France on 1 January 1804 after a 12-year war. He was assassinated on 17 October 1806 by elites in his circle who disapproved of the power he had concentrated — and his death accelerated Haiti’s political disintegration. The $30 billion (in today’s currency) that Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed to pay France in 1825 as compensation for property losses during the war destabilized the country for generations. In 1915, the murder of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam offered The US the rationale to invade Haiti; on the same day as Sam’s assassination, Woodrow Wilson authorized the USS Washington to invade. The US occupied Haiti until 1934, during which time US officials altered Haiti’s Constitution to allow foreigners to become landowners, took control of Haiti’s customs agency and finances, and established a racially divided society that persists today. The US-trained Haitian military subsequently engineered many coups against Haitian leaders popular with locals but rejected by Washington — including supporting US-backed Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, whose Tontons Macoutes paramilitary group killed more than 60,000 Haitians. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown twice between 1991 and 2004 — first with CIA help in 1991, then again by a 2004 coup engineered by Washington and Paris. Under foreign influence, Haitian politicians have been unable to develop a stable society for their fellow citizens, and both Democratic and Republican US politicians have imposed on Haitian society a political leadership supportive of US interests but harmful to any nation-building project on the Caribbean island.