If you watched September's presidential debate (or even if you didn’t), then you’re probably aware that former President Trump accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the pets of the people” living in Springfield, Ohio. 

It’s not the first time Trump has targeted Haitian people. In 2017, he said that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” at a meeting with his staff in the White House. In another meeting with senators in 2018, he referred to Haiti, along with El Salvador and African nations, as a “shithole” country. And the “immigrants-eat-pets trope," familiar to many Asian Americans, is hardly new. “This is very old racism,” author May-lee Chai tweeted last month, saying she’d heard it as a child.

But this latest attack on Haitians is particularly vile because many on the Right are targeting Haitians in large part because of the state of their country—its political instability, gang violence, and poverty. But United States foreign policy has done immeasurable harm to Haiti, and Haitian immigrants are fleeing conditions that our government helped to create. Americans need to know the history of Haiti not just to understand why conditions there are so dire but also to understand how this kind of anti-Haitian racism has been normalized in our culture.

content warning: racial slurs

Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance was the first to drag this nasty rumor from the obscure corners of the internet into mainstream politics, posting about it the day before the debate. There was zero evidence of Haitians eating cats in Springfield: Not only did Springfield police say they’d received no reports of cat consumption, but in the following days, the woman whose claim was initially spread on Facebook by a neighbor acknowledged that “I don’t have any proof” that it happened. She also said that she’d heard the story from “a friend” (not the Facebook poster) who’d heard it from “a source that she had” who (get this) was not the owner of the cat. 

Even the intrepid gumshoe Christopher Rufo, who offered “a $5,000 bounty to anyone who can provide… verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio,” had to settle for a grainy video, taken by an anonymous person over a year ago, of what might be a cat, but looks more like a chicken, atop a grill that allegedly belonged to an African man in Dayton.

But even after the cat claims were thoroughly refuted, Vance has continued to spread them, even encouraging followers to “keep the cat memes flowing.” And when pressed about it by CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance explicitly said that he was willing “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”

Speaking a week after Trump targeted Springfield on the debate stage, Republican Governor Mike DeWine said that the town had received “at least 33” bomb threats, including at two elementary schools, a middle school, and two hospitals. One Haitian woman reported having her car windows bashed in and having her vehicle doused with acid. A squadron of Proud Boys—the fascist militia group that was involved in the January 6 riot—was filmed marching around the town. And the Ku Klux Klan distributed threatening fliers around the town calling for the “mass deportation” of Haitians. Springfield’s city hall has also had visits from the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, which has taken credit for helping to spread the rumors about Haitians eating pets as early as this summer. One community activist told the Haitian Times, “Many families are starting to think of leaving Springfield after last night, and some kids aren’t even going to school because of fear of being attacked.” In October, a month after the debate, the New York Times reported that “many immigrants are still shaken, reordering their daily routines and reconsidering whether to stay where they feel unwanted and unsafe.” The report continues: 

In the streets and stores, strangers have hurled insults at Haitians. The tires on their cars have been slashed overnight. Some shoppers have meowed at Haitians in supermarket aisles, according to Haitians, community leaders and immigrant advocates. […] “Everybody is staying inside,” [Sadrac Delva, a Haitian father of two] said, except to go to school, commute to work or shop for groceries. “I can’t remember the last time we went to church,” he said. “I talk to a lot of friends who are very scared, too.”

Trump and Vance have been successful at whipping up hatred of Springfield’s Haitian immigrants to the point where now even mundane actions committed by a Haitian person can be treated as national news. Just days after the debate and the resulting Cat Panic, the New York Post published an article with the headline “Post witnesses Haitian motorist making illegal turn in Springfield, Ohio, smashes into mom driving with autistic daughter.” The photo published by the Post reveals the accident to have been a mild fender bender, and the text reveals that nobody was hurt. This is the sort of incident that probably would not have made the local news had the driver been white. But because the person involved was Haitian, the story not only became fodder for a national paper, but one that they used—along with some other instances of Haitians getting into traffic accidents that every other group of people also experiences—to draw the conclusion that “Haitian drivers are a hazard in Springfield.”

Let’s leave aside that the most recent traffic data actually shows that the number of traffic accidents has been declining as more Haitian immigrants have moved in. Picking out isolated instances of bad behavior to make broad generalizations is the sort of thing that you could do to demonize any group of people. For instance, if someone were to pick out some cases of white men committing mass shootings, we’d all understand that it would be absurd to then generalize that all white men are dangers to society, and it would be even more absurd to use it to justify deporting them. But Haitians have not been granted that same courtesy.

While the lurid tales of Haitians abducting house pets have gotten the most attention, it’s been merely the highest crest on a veritable tidal wave of dehumanizing rhetoric directed towards Haitian people. Vance has also doubled down on other bullshit claims, including that migrants were leading to increases in “communicable diseases like TB and HIV”¹ (something the Department of Health says is not true) and claimed that a child was “murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” (The child was killed in a car accident, not “murdered,” and the driver was in the country legally.) After Vance was corrected by a reporter at a Trump rally and told that most Haitian immigrants were actually in the country legally, he pronounced that he didn’t care: “If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien.” Granting temporary protected status to immigrants is a totally legal thing for the president to do and is something presidents in both parties have used—and it’s something that Vance, a trained lawyer, is well aware of.

Across Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), Haitians were described in terms every bit as dehumanizing as the Jewish victims of Nazis. One post that received over a million views and 30,000 likes stated, “I've got this crazy theory that Haiti is a sh*thole because it's full of Haitians and that any place you fill with Haitians is gonna have similar issues.” 

This attitude was expressed at the highest level of Republican politics, too. Donald Trump Jr., during a podcast with Charlie Kirk, spoke about Haiti’s problems being the result of its “demographic makeup,” and “average IQ,” saying “If you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world.” He was referring to an idea, spread widely online, that Haitians have an “average IQ” of 67. This claim originates with an infamous proponent of scientific racism, Richard Lynn (who is cited extensively in Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve), and was found to be completely made up.

Many have unapologetically described Haitians as something less than human: “When people engage in barbaric behavior—like eating pets—you’re not ‘dehumanizing’ them for opposing it. They dehumanized themselves,” wrote William Wolfe, who served as a Pentagon official during the Trump administration. In an effort to show that the Cat Rumors had merit, many conservatives, including Benny Johnson, shared a video of Springfield’s white population talking about their Haitian neighbors. The video was clearly intended to make Springfield’s white population appear sympathetic and put upon, but the very first interaction it depicts is a Black man walking out of his home and waving to a white man who responds: “Don’t wave at me, you sorry fucking sand monkey!” (The interviewer laughs.) And after a group of Haitians attempted to file charges against Trump and Vance for their false claims, Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana posted an unhinged rant to his official account: “Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters. […] All these thugs better get their mind right and their asses out of our country before January 20th.” Note the language here. As Jonathan Katz, a former Haiti correspondent for the Associated Press, recently said in an interview on the Current Affairs podcast, there’s “a particularly gross, insidious, and pervasive anti-Black and anti-Haitian” racism in the U.S. “It's not an accident that [people] are focusing on Haitians in particular,” he said. Katz also explained that there’s a 

sort of American pop culture demonization of [Vodou]—it's African, it's foreign—and [people] just sort of take aspects of it, or not even real aspects of it, just imagined aspects of it. There is animal sacrifice in Vodou. It's generally goats and chickens and things like that. [...] [But] it is not stealing people's pets to do so. So what you're doing there is you're taking a sensationalized, demonized, and stigmatized understanding of a religion, you're applying it to all Haitians and sort of mixing it all together and then using that as an excuse for racism.

All of this is made even more frightening in light of Donald Trump’s promise to send the military into American neighborhoods to round up 15 million people, put them in concentration camps, and deport them—something he has promised will be a “bloody story.” He has used eugenic rhetoric to describe the mission: citing mangled DHS statistics to claim that thousands of migrants in the U.S. are “murderers,” He has stated that “a murderer, I believe this; it's in their genes. And we've got a lot of bad genes in this country right now.”

What we’ve witnessed over the past month from Republican politicians is nothing less than a concerted campaign of blood libel designed to justify the ethnic cleansing of a heavily stigmatized—and, to them, undesirable—population. It has been beyond distasteful, dishonest, or "extreme," as Kamala Harris put it during her debate with Donald Trump. It is outright, undisguised fascism. While Republicans have not been shy about their intentions for all immigrants, I do think that the discussion of Haitians that we’ve seen recently has been distinct in its barbarity. Ironically, the people who have spent the most time portraying Haitians as fundamentally less than human have in the process revealed themselves to be thoroughly incurious troglodytes.

Perhaps the most emblematic clip that went viral online was spread by Jeremy Kauffman, a leader in New Hampshire’s Libertarian Party (who was also one of the main spreaders of the myth about Haitians’ IQs). He shared a video of poor Haitian women making “dirt cookies” for their hungry children and quipped, “I'm sure you're thinking: how will we be able to enjoy Haitian dirt cookies without more immigration?” His instinct, and the instinct of many other right-wing influencers, was to treat people dealing with hunger as evidence of Haitians’ inherent savagery and inferiority. But a person with a modicum of curiosity (or, God forbid, empathy) might inquire further about why Haitians are so poor that some of them have been left with no choice but to consume dirt to survive. After all, we should no more call “savage” Haitians who have been subjected to man-made poverty and are thus making dirt cookies than we should Gazans suffering from man-made genocide and eating animal feed to ward off starvation because they are denied humanitarian aid by Israel.

When Haiti makes the news, it is usually due to some sort of calamity its people are facing. Most recently, Haiti has been ravaged by a gang war that has caused more than 578,000 people—over 5 percent of the total population—to flee since 2021. Beyond the threat of daily violence, Haitians have faced the danger of famine and epidemic disease: As of March, nearly half the population was facing food insecurity, and a May report from UNICEF found that six in ten hospitals were “barely operational,” allowing deadly diseases like cholera and malaria to spread and go untreated.

But in media coverage, Haiti’s suffering is often decontextualized, painted as a sort of inevitable tragedy. It is common to hear Haiti described with words like “poor,” “dangerous” and “unstable.” For instance, one 2019 CNN article about the struggle of children in the neighborhood of Cité Soleil near the capital of Port-au-Prince begins by stating that “Staggering poverty, political instability, and natural disasters have long plagued Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” The conditions of poverty are described in great detail: “Gang warfare, overflowing sewage and protests mar the streets. Children are often unable to attend school or receive adequate food, water or medical care.” None of these are inaccurate statements. But, devoid of historical context, these stories leave one to wonder why other parts of the Western Hemisphere have been able to develop while Haiti remains in chronic instability. Without historical context, it becomes easy to assume that the Haitian people are to blame for the state of their country—or worse, that they are simply incapable of governing themselves competently (a form of racism that we see applied to other Black people, such as South Africans). But an examination of its centuries of history reveals that at every turn, Haiti’s development has been stunted by Western powers.

How the West Underdeveloped Haiti

Haiti, like other small and dependent nations in the Southern Hemisphere, has long existed to serve the wealthy—if not the wealthy of Haiti, then those of Europe or North America. Haiti exists to provide its clients with tropical produce, raw materials, or cheap labor. Outside of their country, Haitians are useful for cutting cane, cleaning buildings, or driving cabs. Of all the uses of Haiti, these have been the most constant.

—Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 1994

Haiti is unlike any other nation on the planet in that it is the first and only nation founded by a successful slave revolt, which began in 1791. The French colony of Saint-Domingue was known as one of the most brutal and exploitative colonies in Transatlantic Slave Trade. At its height, the colony was importing more than 40,000 enslaved people from Africa per year, and near the end of the 18th century, the colony accounted for more than a third of the total Atlantic slave trade. The living conditions were beyond inhuman. As historian Paul Cheney wrote:

The sugar plantation existed for the sake of production, and the lives of its inhabitants were systematically subordinated to that goal: each year, the typical Saint-Dominguan estate had to replace between 5 and 10 percent of its slave population because of vanishingly low birthrates and short life expectancy.²

Slaves on Saint-Domingue plantations lived in desperate poverty and squalor, but their toil made a small stratum of French planters fabulously wealthy. By the 1780s, the Guardian says, “Haiti exported 60 percent of all the coffee and 40 percent of all the sugar consumed in Europe: more than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined.” When, after nearly a century of bondage, Haiti’s enslaved finally rose up and overthrew their masters, France was not eager to lose such a lucrative colony. Resistance to France was a long, bloody affair that dragged on for more than a decade and cost hundreds of thousands of lives—many of them the former slaves fighting for liberation. In 1802, after large parts of the former colony had come under the control of revolutionary general Toussaint Louverture, Napoleon sent the largest fleet in French history to restore French control of the island and reimposed slavery (giving France the ignoble distinction of being the only country to reinstate slavery after it had been abolished). He was ultimately driven out and Haiti would declare itself an independent republic in 1804. 

But it was independence in name only. None of the globe’s preeminent empires recognized Haiti’s right to self-determination. President Thomas Jefferson—a Virginia plantation owner who’d owned hundreds of slaves over his lifetime—“pursued a policy to isolate Haiti, fearing that the Haitian revolution would spread to the United States,” a State Department document says. The fledgling nation had nowhere to turn for help as France’s slavemasters demanded compensation for the “property” they’d lost. France issued Haiti an ultimatum requiring it to pay 150 million francs—accompanied by more than 500 ships looming ominously in Haiti’s harbor, threatening to re-invade and reimpose slavery. This was an indemnity that Haiti had no means of paying. As the New York Times wrote in its 2022 feature, “The Ransom,” about the effects of this debt: “The amount was far beyond Haiti’s meager means. Even the first installment was about six times the government’s income that year, based on official receipts documented by the 19th-century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin.” Not only was the principal too much for the young nation to pay, but the French king set out with the goal of ensuring that the loans Haiti used to pay off the debt would be from French banks. 

It would take more than 100 years for Haiti to pay off its "double debt" to France. And according to the Times, which conducted the first estimate of the double debt’s impact on Haiti:

We found that Haitians paid about $560 million in today’s dollars. But that doesn’t nearly capture the true loss. If that money had simply stayed in the Haitian economy and grown at the nation’s actual pace over the last two centuries—rather than being shipped off to France, without any goods or services being provided in return—it would have added a staggering $21 billion to Haiti over time, even accounting for its notorious corruption and waste. For perspective, that’s much bigger than Haiti’s entire economy in 2020.

The lunacy and backwardness of this should be emphasized. The people of Haiti had already had their labor stolen from them for a hundred years with no compensation. Now, as they tried to forge ahead as their own nation, they’d be forced to marshal precious resources that could have otherwise been put towards education, infrastructure, and agriculture to pay off the people who would have kept them in chains if they’d had the choice. Had Haiti been allowed to develop normally, economists estimated, “the country could have mirrored the growth rates of its neighbors across Latin America.”

Haiti is Black, and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being Black. . . After Haiti had shaken off the fetters of bondage, and long after her freedom and independence had been recognized by all other civilized nations, we continued to refuse to acknowledge the fact. . . and treated her as outside the sisterhood of nations. — Frederick Douglass, 1893

In his famous book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” Guyanese historian Walter Rodney argued that “A[n]... indispensable component of modern underdevelopment is that it expresses a particular relationship of exploitation: namely, the exploitation of one country by another.” Haiti is one of the foremost examples of that thesis. Under the threat of force, Haiti oriented its entire economy not around developing self-sufficiency but towards paying off this debt. According to two Haitian historians cited by the Times, “By 1911, $2.53 out of every $3 Haiti took in from coffee taxes, its most important source of revenue, went to paying debts held by French investors.” And problems that plague Haiti today—like its massive deforestation problem, which makes it uniquely vulnerable to hurricanes—can be traced back to its sale of large amounts of timber to the French to pay off their debt. It took Haiti until 1888 to pay off just the principal on their ransom to France. But in order to finance many of the payments, they were forced to take out predatory loans from French and American banks that continued to suck resources from their economy. According to historian Alex von Tunzelmann, quoted by the Guardian:  

By 1900, Haiti was spending about 80% of its national budget on loan repayments. It ­completely wrecked their economy. By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the place was basically destitute and trapped in a ­spiral of debt.

Beginning in the 20th century, the United States became the dominant exploiter of Haiti. As the First World War raged in Europe, the interventionist Woodrow Wilson administration launched a little-remembered occupation of Haiti, sending hundreds of Marines to the country. It was justified as a means of countering German influence and “re-establishing peace and order,” as the country had fallen into political upheaval in prior years. But as the Haitian author Guy Ferolus puts it in a documentary for Haïti Inter, “In reality, the mission had other objectives: To occupy the country and lay hands on its public finances for the benefit of New York's banking establishment.” The invasion had been urged by Wall Street. Upon arrival in 1914, U.S. Marines removed $500,000 worth of gold from Haiti’s national bank, loaded it into crates, and shipped it off to New York for “safe-keeping.” Within days, it was in the vault of the National City Bank, now known as CitiGroup—which would suck up a quarter of Haiti’s revenue in the form of debt payments over the next decade. (The amount Haiti paid to the City Bank was five times the amount they spent on their public school system.)

The U.S. launched a full-scale invasion and took control of Haiti’s entire financial system in an arrangement that Paul Farmer—who served as a U.N. deputy special envoy to the country during the Obama administration—describes in his book The Uses of Haiti as “more stringent than the legal trappings of other Latin American occupations of the time.” Farmer writes that the U.S. took control of Haiti’s customs houses—giving it control over all imports and exports—and all of Haiti’s government outlays. When Haitian legislators attempted to resist, the U.S. dissolved its parliament and forced through a referendum that allowed foreign investors to own land in Haiti for the first time since the Revolution. Then-Major Smedley Butler, who oversaw America’s unpaid forced labor system in Haiti, later became a fierce critic of U.S. imperialism and wrote that he’d “spent most of [his] time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism...” Of Haiti, he wrote that he’d “helped make” the country “a decent place for the National City Bank Boys to collect revenues in.” The U.S.’ occupation of Haiti lasted 19 years, during which, as Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat wrote for the New Yorker:

[F]ifteen thousand Haitians were killed. Any resistance to the centralized, U.S.-installed puppet governments was crushed, and a gendarmerie—a combination of army and police, modelled after an occupation force—was created to replace the Marines after they left.

But even after the Marines departed its shores at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, American fingerprints were still all over the nation’s fate. The government left behind in Haiti was “beholden to U.S. interests” as Farmer puts it, and as the Cold War ramped up, the U.S. would put its thumb on the scale to ensure that Haiti rooted out socialism ruthlessly. Following World War II, Haiti was ruled by a succession of deferential pro-Western leaders. The only modest exception was the labor leader Daniel Fignolé, who was allowed to be chief executive for all of three weeks before being shipped out by the military in favor of the U.S.’ man, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. He and his successor, his son named Baby Doc, governed as dictators for a combined three decades. According to Farmer: 

During his first four—and his bloodiest—years in power, Duvalier received $40.4 million from Washington, much of it in the form of outright gifts. “Papa Doc” took to appropriating USAID trucks to haul peasants to his rallies—an act betraying considerable assurance that the United States might be embarrassed, but would not cast him off.

While exact numbers are hard to come by, it is estimated that Duvalier’s secret police and paramilitary group—colloquially dubbed the Tonton Macoutes (meaning “bogeymen with sacks”)—killed anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 people while torturing, beating, raping, and disappearing countless more.

The U.S. was well aware of Duvalier’s cruelty and not only provided financial support but military support to prop up his dictatorship. In the 1960s, U.S. Marines once again landed in Haiti with an order from the Undersecretary of State, saying, “the most important way you can support our objectives in Haiti is to help keep Duvalier in power so he can serve out his full term in office, and maybe a little longer than that if everything works out.” Duvalier’s Haiti became a hub for American corporations to assemble goods at rock-bottom rates. It “offered enormous benefits for offshore assembly—generous tax holidays, a franchise granting tariff exemption, tame unions, [and] a minimum wage that was but a tiny fraction of that in the United States,” Farmer writes. All the while, the Duvaliers personally looted the impoverished country—at times they embezzled as much as 80 percent of the international aid that the nation received. And when Baby Doc was finally forced out in 1986 following a popular revolt, he left with an estimated $900 million.

After the ouster of Duvalier, Haiti held its first-ever democratic elections in 1990. With major support from its poor Black population, the country overwhelmingly chose Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a left-wing Catholic priest steeped in the tradition of "liberation theology" who’d helped to lead the democratic movement against Duvalier’s regime. Attempting land reforms and wage increases while speaking openly about the West’s exploitation of Haiti and demanding an end to it, Aristide immediately ran afoul of Haiti’s business elite and was tarred as a dangerous radical in the American press. Perhaps the last straw was a thundering speech he gave to the U.N. on September 25, 1991, in which he spoke about the Caribbean’s “struggle against colonialism” and called for “a new social contract.” It’s a speech that I recommend reading in full to get a true sense of Aristide as an orator and a political force. But if any passage best sums it up, it’s this one:

In Haiti, victims of international exploitation have difficulty getting enough to eat because they themselves are being ground by the axes of international exploitation. In the arms race, the nations of the world are devoting to it more than $500 billion a year, or $1.4 billion every day. Only 15 days of such expenditure could eradicate hunger from the planet for many years.

 

The tragedy of hunger arises not out of lack of food but out of a lack of social justice. Work, more work, always work – this is what man needs if he is to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. It has been noted that if the amount being spent on building a B-1 bomber were to be spent on constructing dwellings, 70,000 jobs would be created.

Less than a week later, Aristide’s residence was attacked by the military, which massacred friends and supporters. Aristide was kidnapped and taken before Brigadier General Raoul Cédras, who declared, “I’m the president now,” sending Haiti’s true president into exile in Venezuela. Cédras was the quintessential Latin American dictator preferred by Uncle Sam. He had been trained by the CIA-run “School of the Americas," which also geared up Nicaraguan Contras and many other U.S.-backed dictators and paramilitary groups that terrorized Latin America during the latter half of the 20th century. And like the Contras, who carried out numerous massacres of innocent people, Cédras’s FRAPH death squads—themselves crawling with CIA assets—are estimated to have killed more than 5,000 men, women, and children in an effort to root out Aristide’s supporters.³

While publicly deploring Haiti’s descent back into autocracy, the administration of George H.W. Bush began to take the line, echoed by dutiful scribes in the mainstream press, that Aristide was an autocrat and that he had brought the coup upon himself by “blaming the wealthier classes for the poverty of the masses,” in the words of the New York Times’ Howard W. French. Behind the scenes, the Bush administration was involved in negotiations between Aristide and the new military regime but dragged its heels as the military eliminated Aristide supporters from the government—this was despite objections from Senator Ted Kennedy and members of the Congressional Black Caucus. In another column, French wrote: “Despite much blood on the army’s hands, United States diplomats consider it a vital counterweight to Father Aristide, whose class-struggle rhetoric [...] threatened or antagonized traditional power centers at home and abroad.” 

The coup also created a refugee crisis, as mostly young supporters of the democratic government fled the country. Of the nearly 25,000 who sought political asylum in the United States (which was their legal right), exactly eight were granted such status by the U.S. Instead, most of the “boat people” who arrived in the U.S. were deported back to Haiti or left to languish in squalid conditions at Guantánamo Bay. Most infamously, the U.S. detained 230 HIV-positive asylum seekers in the camp. With only meager medical attention offered, many of them developed full-blown cases of AIDS. On the campaign trail in 1992, Bush’s opponent Bill Clinton used the treatment of Haitian asylum seekers to paint his opponent as cruel and pledged to “give them temporary asylum until we restored the elected Government of Haiti.” After becoming president, he immediately reversed that policy, continuing forced repatriations and detainment at Gitmo indefinitely. However, following pushback from the Congressional Black Caucus, Clinton launched "Operation Restore Democracy" in 1994, which restored Aristide to power, ending Cédras’s “reign of terror.” But Aristide’s return had to be on America’s terms: Death squad leader Emmanuel Constant was given protection in the U.S. rather than tried for war crimes, which many Haitians wanted. And as Nathan J. Robinson wrote for Jacobin: 

Returning Aristide to power was conditional on his agreeing to an austerity and privatization program, and through ensuring that Haiti remained divided between competing factions, the Clinton administration was able to ensure that Aristide would be compliant while in office and not attempt to implement the radical redistributionist economic policies that the IMF and United States feared. So, Aristide was returned to office but agreed to an austerity program that prevented him from taking Haiti in a social-democratic direction. The plan worked, and the Clinton administration got what it wanted from Haiti.

In an effort to give Arkansas farmers a place to dump their excess produce, the Clinton administration also forced Haiti to drop tariffs it had placed on U.S. rice, which crippled its domestic agricultural sector. Nearly two decades later, Clinton would admit his regret in a (rather self-centered) apology: “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.” 

On the political level, Haiti functioned for about the next ten years as something resembling an actual democracy, though the U.S. still took economic advantage of the country. Aristide handed over power in 1996 at the end of his term—marking the first peaceful transfer in the nation’s nearly 200-year history. He then returned to power in 2001 with overwhelming public support, which furrowed brows in Washington. Per an op-ed in Responsible Statecraft:

U.S. leaders did not like the direction Haiti’s restored democracy took. They particularly resented President Aristide challenging the United States by trying to raise the minimum wage for workers sewing Americans’ clothes, defying “small government” dogma by increasing government investment in education and healthcare, speaking out against the unjust international order, and demanding $21 billion from France as restitution of the “independence debt” that France extorted in 1825.

Aristide’s promise of reparations roused the people of Haiti. “What beautiful schools, universities and hospitals we will be able to build for our children!” he was recorded saying. “How much food we will have in abundance!” As multiple French ambassadors would later acknowledge in interviews with the New York Times, Aristide’s call for reparations prompted them to set about removing him from power once again. On the day George W. Bush came into office in 2001, the U.S. cut off multilateral development assistance to Haiti, which caused another debt crisis, huge inflation, and a collapse in living standards, which fueled unrest and eventually rebellion. In 2004, as anti-government rebel groups were closing in on Port-au-Prince, French and American diplomats pushed Aristide to flee once more. The U.S. warned him that if he did not, he’d likely meet a similar fate to Chile’s Salvador Allende—who was killed in a U.S.-backed military coup in 1973. Aristide said after the fact that “The threats were clear and direct: ‘Either you resign, or you can be shot!’” Aristide fled the country again, this time for good, on a U.S. chartered plane to the Central African Republic. As Thierry Burkard, then the French ambassador to Haiti, told the Times, having Aristide out of office⁴ “made our job” of dismissing reparations “easier.” Over the next decade, as Aristide remained popular in Haiti, the U.S. worked overtime to prevent him from ever returning to power, including pursuing flimsy drug trafficking charges against him and pressuring South Africa, where he’d ended up in exile, to keep him there.

After Aristide’s departure, unrest in Haiti only got worse. U.N. peacekeepers were called in to keep order but instead inflicted disease and trauma on the population. First, U.N. peacekeepers inadvertently brought cholera to Haiti, starting a devastating outbreak that would kill thousands of people throughout the 2010s. On top of that, the peacekeepers were later found to have committed numerous acts of sexual abuse, often against minors. And contrary to their mission, which was to protect civilians from police violence and attacks from gangs, peacekeepers carried out their own acts of violence—most infamously, in 2005, the raid on the neighborhood of Cité Soleil, which strenuously resisted both the coup against Aristide and the U.N. occupation, resulted in more than 200 civilians being killed. By 2008, Haiti’s food production had also been steadily dropping, sparking shortages. The New York Times unhelpfully wrote that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.” But in reality, America’s import policy was coming home to roost. Being undercut by American rice and sugar growers, Haitian farmers found themselves out of work and fled to the cities, which drove down supply. Amid all of these problems, mass protests and riots broke out. 

In 2009, under the new Obama administration, Hillary Clinton became the secretary of state, and the “redevelopment of Haiti” was one of her top priorities. She viewed the project, in the words of Jonathan Katz, as “the proving ground for her vision of American power.” Despite his premier role in exacerbating Haiti’s underdevelopment, Bill Clinton was put in a leading role for this project. And he’d clearly learned nothing from his first go at trying to govern Haiti. Once again, as Politico would later report, the Clintons’ plan “had business at its center: Aid would be replaced by investment, the growth of which would in turn benefit the United States.” At the behest of Haitian elites and American garment companies like Levi Strauss, the Clinton State Department, in one of its first acts, pressured President René Préval to "aggressively" block a meager increase to the minimum wage to 62 cents an hour from 24 cents an hour. 

In January 2010, Haiti was hit with a catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake, which killed an estimated 220,000 people upon impact and left 300,000 more with injuries. One and a half million people—nearly a sixth of Haiti’s entire population—were suddenly left homeless. From there, the Clintons’ role expanded further, as Bill would be put in charge of the U.S.’ Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which would oversee the nation’s reconstruction. 

In a 2016 article, “What the Clintons did to Haiti,” this time in Current Affairs, Robinson goes into detail about why “the Clinton-led recovery was a disaster.” Much of the money that was raised was never dispersed. And when it was, it went towards what the Wall Street Journal called “a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.” Politico wrote that its projects, which “primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and the island’s ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with,” included a luxury hotel that barely got any business on an island where the population was desperately poor. 

When the money did go to things that the people of Haiti actually needed, like storm shelters, the results were “shoddy” and “dangerous”—overheated and overcrowded and full of mold and carcinogenic chemicals that caused lung illnesses. Rather than spend money trying to address Haitians’ immediate needs, the project coordinators focused on the ill-defined goals of “fostering economic development” through projects like the Caracol industrial park, which was designed to lure a South Korean clothing company to set up shop. The Clintons promised 65,000 jobs within its first five years, but after four years of operation, Caracol had just under 5,500 full-time employees. Even Chelsea Clinton wrote in an internal memo that “the incompetence” of her parents’ organization was “mind-numbing.” On the political level, the Clintons were instrumental in helping Michel Martelly, a business-friendly pop singer with close ties to both Duvalier and people who worked on John McCain’s presidential campaign, into office. Hillary Clinton described Martelly as Haiti’s “chief dreamer and believer,” someone who declared Haiti “open for business.” Martelly’s government would be accused of embezzling $2 billion in foreign aid that was meant to go towards infrastructure and economic development and helping to facilitate drug trafficking and supporting several of the gangs that ravaged Haiti in subsequent years.

Haiti’s economy had already been looted for two centuries, and the earthquake and the hapless response to it left the nation in tatters. In large part, American policy sought to ensure that Haiti remained a subservient client for Western financial interests, as it had been for centuries. This arrangement is fundamentally backward relative to what is sensible and humane. The U.S. is the richest country in the hemisphere (and the world), while Haiti is the poorest, with the average person living on less than $2,000 per year. Given that the U.S.’ wealth was built in part on Haitian toil and blood, the country and its allies owe a debt to the Haitian people, not the other way around.

The U.S. is still fueling violence and chaos in Haiti to this day. Haiti’s current instability, nominally caused by a society-wide gang war, is being fueled in large part by American arms dealers operating out of states with lax firearm laws. Haiti’s latest round of political instability began with the assassination of Prime Minister Jovenel Moïse (a U.S.-backed successor to Martelly), an event which was carried out by a gang of assailants with deep ties to U.S. law enforcement agencies. And according to the Miami Herald, the embattled prime minister that took his place, Ariel Henry, resigned earlier this year not long after receiving a message from the State Department while on board a flight home from a diplomatic mission. 

While many countries in the Global South have come under the boot of Western imperialism in some form or another, it’s hard to think of another whose fate is more dependent on the whims of powerful nations. When considering all this history, the Right’s characterization of Haiti’s poverty and instability as the result of some congenital or cultural defect becomes impossible to countenance. 

And indeed, when right-wingers are forced to confront the history of Haiti, they are often left flummoxed. One of the most telling examples came when Matt Walsh appeared on the Breaking Points podcast to defend Republican attacks on Haitians. The exchange occurred between Walsh and co-hosts Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky.  When asked if he believed any Republicans had engaged in racism towards Haitians, Walsh said no. He further elaborated, essentially saying the following: that Haitians, being the “third world” (aka deficient) people that they are, are threatening to white American culture and would make the country “more like Haiti” (presumably, he means fucked up). When Grim pointed out that Haiti is “basically a colony that the West [has spent] 200 years punishing after the Haitian Revolution,” Walsh had to recede his position. 

 He began with the viewpoint that Haiti’s problems were entirely due to the deficiencies of its people (a position echoed from earlier in the conversation, when he argued that negative stereotypes about racial groups are usually at least somewhat accurate). But by the end, he had essentially backed off his entire premise to the point of arguing that the United States is not “entirely” responsible for the situation in Haiti, which seems to concede that it largely is. You can tell that Walsh did not come prepared to discuss the history of Haiti, since he didn’t bring up any counter-examples in which Haitians were responsible for their own country’s conditions. (This would not have been hard, as there certainly have been many corrupt Haitian leaders who have enriched themselves at the expense of their people.) He deflected from answering the question by claiming to be a “non-interventionist.”⁵ (This, by the way, is a bald-faced lie. Walsh has said he is generally fine with invading other countries and often praises imperialism and colonialism specifically because it brought “civilization” to peoples he believed lacked any. It seems like the only countries or people he sees as deserving of being left alone would be white Europeans.) But the fact that he was so flummoxed by the introduction of history into the conversation should give you a sense of the terrain upon which this discussion of Haitians is taking place. The people seeking to exclude Haitians based on the state of their country have never stopped to think about how those conditions arose because doing so might require them to confront the simplistic narrative that these people are simply less civilized.

It should come as no surprise that people like Walsh are so adamant about squashing any discussion of the history of race and colonialism in this country, and, especially, the idea of reparations for any injustice. If Americans were to learn about how their country has used and abused Haiti—or other poor nations in the global South—it would be much more difficult to subscribe to their belief that their problems are the result of cultural or biological deficiencies. Worse yet, it might get people thinking about the idea that these people are actually owed something in return for what has been stolen from them. 

As the world’s wealthiest country and one that seeks to have an outsized influence on the world stage, we should also accept the responsibility of providing outsized help to those most in need—no matter where they come from. But in the case of Haiti, the responsibility is uniquely great. As Americans, we live in the richest nation in the world, and that wealth has, in part, been amassed through the toil and bloodshed of Haiti’s people—from the slaves of St. Domingue to the garment workers of Port-au-Prince. Haiti must be allowed to determine its future on its own terms. In order for this to happen, the U.S., France, and other nations that have had a hand in Haiti’s subjugation should pay the country financial compensation. In the meantime, as Haitians have been left to deal with the wreckage that has been gifted to them, we owe it to them to accept them when they come to us for help rather than seeking to punish them further. And it goes without saying that anti-Haitian racism and xenophobia, like all forms of bigotry, should be completely rejected, and we should register our discontent with our fellow Americans and leaders when they engage in such hatred. 

notes

1. 

There’s a history of racist association between Haitians and HIV/AIDS because of stigmatization in the 1980s. As Li Zhou wrote in Vox in September:

The stigmatization of Haitian immigrants continued, too, in subsequent decades, including efforts to associate Haitians with illnesses, such as HIV. In the early 1980s, when no scientific name had been given to HIV/AIDS, the press and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deemed it the 4H disease—which stood for ‘Haitians, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, and Heroin users,’ in part because some of the early cases of the illness included Haitian people.

2.

Paul Cheney. Cul De Sac : Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

3. 

Whitney, Kathleen Marie (1996). "Sin, Fraph, and the CIA: U.S. Covert Action in Haiti." Southwestern Journal of Law and Trade in the Americas. 3 (2): 303-332.

4.

 In a darkly prescient column for the Guardian in 2012, Mark Weisbrot wrote about the absurdity of America’s veto power over Haiti’s ability to elect its own leaders: “In Haiti, these attempts to deny people democratic rights tend to lead to instability. Imagine trying to tell Brazilians that former president Lula da Silva could not participate in politics in Brazil, and threatening to prosecute him in US courts. Or doing the same to Evo Morales in Bolivia, or Rafael Correa in Ecuador. It would never be tolerated.” The irony is that, in the coming years, Lula would be forced out of politics by a U.S.-backed lawfare campaign that led to his imprisonment and Morales would be forced to flee after the U.S. propped up nonsense election fraud claims and gave cover to a right-wing military takeover.

5.

Walsh is such a non-interventionist that he also says he “would support a full-scale military invasion of Mexico.”