JD Vance’s Slanders Are Far From the Worst Thing the US Has Done to Haitians

Beyond the failure of its aid program and its political policies, the United States is also reviled for supporting the 13-year UN occupation that only ended in 2017. “The Blinken visit is just a repeat of the traditional American playbook,” says Daniel Foote, former US special envoy to Haiti:

“Three years ago, the Department of State disavowed any desire for another UN peacekeeping mission, apparently acknowledging the fact that Haitians despise UN operations because of past atrocities, massacres, and sexual exploitation of women and children. Plus [the UN force] reintroduced cholera into the country 120 years after it was originally eradicated. Now the US is going for another military intervention [the Kenyan police] that’s not been requested by anyone but the US puppets. The irony: Secretary Blinken does all this while saying the plan is Haitian-led.”

If the US record were not so terrible in Latin America generally, it would be astonishing how backward and destructive the economic and political attitude of the world’s richest, best-armed superpower has been toward this desperate neighbor. After all, throughout its history Haiti has remained reasonably friendly toward the United States: no popular front, no powerful Communist or socialist party, a weak and fractured left, with much of its potential for resistance destroyed at conception by the US Marines’ occupation of the country from 1915 to 1934.

When the murderous Duvalier dynasty fell from power in 1986, Ronald Reagan was in the White house, and Haiti has been one of the prime victims of the US’s long Reagan hangover. His administration hoped that the military-civilian junta they supported after Duvalier’s departure would ensure that Haiti’s multigenerational economic elite and the country’s political class—so welcoming of long-entrenched US business interests and of the American government—would continue to run the country, only now without the obstacles that the corrupt Duvaliers had been putting in their way.

Members of those business-inclined elites—blessed, as Duvalier fell, by Reagan’s foreign policy circles—were repeatedly summoned to negotiating tables by US diplomats in the ensuing years. Until recently they were also still running the country as a balkanized series of corrupt fiefdoms, deploying gang firepower and coercion when necessary. The dead hand of Reaganomics in Haiti also kept the state extremely weak, leaving this same coddled elite and its minions in charge of services that in many other places would have been nationalized: transport, communications, energy, healthcare, water delivery, and education. Even the lottery was in private hands. In economic spaces where profit was not high enough—for example, clinics and schools in the countryside—international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), mostly religious charities, arrived to provide a limited version of service that the Haitian government could not provide, or would not. Haiti is Reagan’s dream made flesh: an economy almost completely run by the private sector, with no regulation.

But now the gangs that this same elite traditionally manipulated for political and business ends have apparently escaped from its control. Equipped with military-style weapons and ammunition brought in clandestinely through Miami’s ports, these groups have morphed into seemingly independent criminal enterprises and drug-trafficking rings that, while still sometimes useful to what Haitians call the county’s “biznis mafya,” can no longer be relied on to obey that mafia’s every command.

These same gangs now run almost all of Port-au-Prince—and are spreading their reigns of terror into the nearby countryside. Already this year, more than 4,000 Haitians have been killed or injured in gang violence. Tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes, all of which are systematically looted, and often burned. Women have been attacked both in gang-run areas, where many have been forced into what amounts to sexual servitude and enforced gang participation, and in neighborhoods under assault, where gang rape is common as a tool of control. Schools have been closed, hospitals attacked, looted, and burned, churches targeted, and barely a police headquarters in the capital or its environs has been left untouched by arson and looting. Several of the country’s largest prisons, redoubts of starvation and criminality themselves, have been destroyed and their populations released into the streets, some to starve further, others to rejoin the gangs.

Only one hospital in all of Port-au-Prince—l’Hôpital Universitaire de la Paix—can be called functional. Medical supplies have been commandeered by the gangs, as has gasoline. Extortionist tolls are exacted from bus drivers and passengers and from individual drivers at important crossroads leading in and out of Port-au-Prince. The highways around the country are places of banditry and death where hardly anyone ventures. The ubiquitous market women who come down from the countryside to sell in the cities’ markets—the picturesque lifeblood of Haitian commerce—are under constant threat of robbery and physical attack. “The gangs,” said Monica Clesca, a Haitian political activist, “are waging a war against the population.”

All of this terror was boiling and churning in recent years, as Washington vacillated and hemmed and hawed and turned away from reasonable Haitian interlocutors, engaging instead with the usual suspects it had always trusted and could never seemingly do without. American and other international negotiators put off new democratic groups, with new ideas about grassroots control of the country and real democratic rule, and rejected their proposals pretty much wholesale, while the old guard plotted and planned.

Whatever else the Haitians and Americans are now each cooking up, the brief passage of Blinken through the Haitian landscape means at least that the US hasn’t turned away from the crisis, even if so far it has been inept at helping to solve it. You may mistrust the motivations behind your friend’s offers of help, but still, you don’t want him to abandon you. From the administration’s point of view, continuing US support of Conille and the Kenyan force may help ensure that the Haitian situation doesn’t deteriorate further, at least in the immediate future, i.e., before the November 5 elections. The last thing the Democratic Party wants to see are boatloads of Haitians arriving on Florida’s shores during the next few months.

Conille is probably the right man for this moment: clear-eyed, familiar with the international complex (he worked for the UN in various capacities from 2001 on, including in Haiti after the earthquake), able to talk as an equal with Blinken, but also connected through family to both the Haitian elite and to the small but still important middle class. Slow to anger and with a reputation for loyalty toward his underlings rather than dramatic firings and hirings, Conille has so far been free from the usual, and often well-founded, accusations of corruption… or drug-trafficking…. or participation in gang massacres…. or looting of government coffers that have been leveled against many of his predecessors.

In the wings, the threat of Trump looms. He’s long put Haiti into his infamous category of “shithole countries,” while just this week his running mate JD Vance accused “illegal Haitian immigrants” of “draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” Vance also accused the Haitians of abducting and eating their neighbors’ household pets. Such talk does not bode well for Haitian immigrants—or for the country’s limping attempts to get out from under the gangs and move toward democratic governance.

When people ask how Haiti can be “like that” when it is so close to the US, the proper response is that it’s “like that” precisely because it is so close to the US.