Haiti
Country Overview
Haiti is the only country in the world that was founded by a slave revolt. Ever since, it has been a target of US military and political intervention. In 1918, US Marines invaded Haiti, massacring hundreds, dismantling the constitutional system, enforcing massive land take-overs by US corporations, and installing the brutal National Guard, which terrorized the country for decades. The US also trained and protected the long-standing Duvalier dictatorship and provided military support for a series of other short-lived dictators and military juntas over the years.
80 percent of Haitians live in extreme poverty, and more than half suffer from malnutrition. Unemployment is a staggering 70 percent, and tens of thousands of people die each year from diseases related to a lack of clean water. Meanwhile, the richest one percent of the population controls nearly half of the country's wealth.
Natural Disasters
In 2008, Haiti was hit by four back-to-back hurricanes, and the already impoverished population was devastated by the impact. Read about MADRE’s emergency response.
In January 12, 2010, Haiti was struck by an earthquake of 7.0-magnitude, the epicenter located just outside of the capital Port-au-Prince. The death toll was estimated as high as 200,000. Read about MADRE's emergency response.
Haitian Politics and US Intervention
Today, US intervention in Haitian affairs appears to be driven by a concern that if Haiti—the hemisphere's poorest country—can determine its own course, other countries may also claim the right to formulate their own policies without interference from Washington.
In 1991 and again in 2004, the US helped to overthrow Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had resisted Washington's prescriptions for Haiti's economy by insisting on social spending for the poor.
Since 1990, every internationally validated election in Haiti has produced a landslide victory for Aristide's Lavalas Party. Once the standard-bearer of Haiti's pro-democracy movement, the party has now splintered into factions, including some unaccountable and violent groups. Despite its flawed human rights record, Lavalas would no doubt win another election if its candidates were allowed to run; for Lavalas is the party of the poor and 80 percent of Haitians are poor.
After the 2004 coup, violence raged between the interim government's forces and supporters of the pro-Aristide Lavalas Party. A study published in the British medical journal The Lancet found that 8,000 murders and 35,000 sexual assaults occurred in and around the capitol of Port-au-Prince during the period of the interim regime. Most of the violence was directed at people in the poorest neighborhoods, who form the base of Lavalas' support.
Food Security
Before Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were imposed on Haiti in the 1980s, 70 percent of Haitians were peasant farmers. Most of the country's food came from small family plots. In order to qualify for IMF loans in the 1980s, however, Haiti was forced to comply with the usual prescription of SAPs, including slashing tariffs on US-grown rice from 30 percent to just three percent (the lowest tariff in the hemisphere). US agribusinesses soon flooded Haiti with cheap US rice; by the mid-1990s imports of US rice had increased 27-fold, bankrupting peasant farmers throughout the countryside. Malnutrition rates skyrocketed, causing an alarming rise in preventable deaths among children.
Today, Haiti is forced to import half of all its food—the highest percentage in the hemisphere. Haitian women report price increases upwards of 100 percent on the imported food they are forced to buy.
Haiti's 'food dependency,' also the hemisphere's worst, holds the government captive to further IMF demands, like the 1990s injunction against raising the minimum wage. A key ingredient of the neo-liberal recipe, 'wage repression' was a disaster for Haitians and a boon to the many US-based assembly plants that set up shop in Port-au-Prince. Disney, Nike, and other corporations continue to take advantage of a huge reserve of workers, including the tens of thousands of women who were driven off their land by US agribusiness and left with little choice but to accept jobs with US companies for rock-bottom wages under miserable conditions. Many women have been pushed into even less desirable, sometimes dangerous jobs in the informal sector (the part of the economy not counted in government statistics), such as working as maids or prostitutes.
Healthcare
Haiti's health indicators reflect the high levels of inequality and political insecurity exacerbated by US-imposed policies. The full role of the US in fomenting and sustaining Haiti's 1991-1994 coup d'etat is still being revealed. This period of violence and unrest degraded the health of an already vulnerable population through assaults, disease, trauma and a systematic campaign of rape and sexual torture, targeting supporters of Aristide's pro-democracy movement. The coup also brought shortages of food and medicine and the suspension of most water protection, vaccination, and health outreach programs. These conditions led to a rise in measles, tuberculosis, typhoid and complications from HIV infections that continue to plague Haiti. The spread of AIDS in Haiti, as in other poor countries, is directly related to migration and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). After Aristide was reinstated as president in 1994, SAPs mandated severe restrictions on government spending, effectively nullifying many of his proposed reforms to the health sector.
Today, there is one physician for every 4,000 people in Haiti. Average life expectancy at birth is only 50 years, and one in 16 women face a lifetime chance of dying during childbirth, compared to one in 10,000 in the US. Malnutrition threatens half the population, and almost five percent of Haitians are HIV-positive—the highest rate in the western hemisphere.
