Haiti: From Neo-Colonialism to Neoliberal Brutality
The French acquisition of the western portion of Hispaniola was formalized by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, transforming the territory into the colony of Saint-Domingue. By the eve of the French Revolution, the colony had become one of the most profitable possessions in the Atlantic world. Its plantations generated enormous quantities of sugar and coffee, while enslaved Africans supplied the labour on which this prosperity depended. The wealth extracted from Saint-Domingue flowed into French commercial centers and helped sustain the fortunes of merchants, plantation owners, and financiers. These contradictions between spectacular colonial wealth and extreme exploitation created the conditions for the revolutionary upheaval that began among the enslaved population in August 1791. The revolt would eventually develop into a prolonged war that defeated successive attempts by European powers to restore colonial slavery and culminated in Haitian independence in 1804.
The revolutionary conflict in Saint-Domingue gradually became an international war as Britain, Spain, and France attempted to contain the destruction of the colonial order. The struggle continued for roughly thirteen years and ultimately exposed the limits of European military power in the Caribbean. British and French expeditions suffered enormous losses in their attempts to defeat the revolutionary forces and restore plantation slavery. Napoleon’s expedition of 1802 to reassert French authority ended in defeat in 1803, clearing the way for the creation of an independent Haitian state the following year.
On January 1, 1804, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti an independent country:
“Citizens, it is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die.”
Revolution and External Pressures
Dessalines had entered the revolutionary struggle as an enslaved person and eventually became one of the principal military figures of the Haitian Revolution. Following Toussaint Louverture’s deportation by the French, he assumed a leading position in the final struggle against French attempts to reimpose colonial domination. The Declaration of Independence presented this struggle as a definitive break with the political order that had produced slavery. Its language connected national independence to the permanent exclusion of renewed French rule and the restoration of the plantation system. Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, who served as one of Dessalines’s secretaries, is traditionally credited with drafting the document. His famous remark about writing the declaration with the skin, skull, and blood of a white man captures the revolutionary violence with which Haitian independence was conceived.
Haiti’s independence was not a smooth process. Imperialist countries intervened incessantly to block any path for the continued advancement of national liberation. After the French position in the region weakened, Jean-Louis Ferrand established a French-backed regime in Santo Domingo. His government represented a direct threat to the emancipatory gains achieved by the Haitian Revolution. Ferrand sought to restore slavery in the territory under his control and authorized military operations that extended into Haitian territory. These operations included the seizure of people who had gained their freedom during the revolutionary period. The episode demonstrated that Haitian independence existed within a wider Caribbean struggle over whether the abolition of slavery would become permanent. Foreign powers continued to view the destruction of the plantation order as a threat to their own political and economic interests.
The harms inflicted by military raids were amplified by the repercussions of a total embargo. In 1825, Charles X offered formal French recognition of Haitian sovereignty while demanding compensation for property lost by former plantation owners during the revolution. The category of property covered by the indemnity included the people whom the plantation system had previously treated as enslaved property. French naval forces accompanied the ordinance, giving the demand the character of coercion rather than a negotiated settlement between sovereign states. Haiti consequently assumed a massive financial burden in exchange for recognition of an independence it had already won militarily. Servicing this obligation continued until 1947, diverting resources from a country whose economy had already been devastated by decades of colonial extraction and revolutionary warfare.
Internal Divisions
After Dessalines was assassinated in October 1806, there were two strong contenders for power in Haiti: Henri Christophe and Alexandre Petion. The mulatto elites – people of mixed white and black ancestry – created a constituent assembly to form a government. They selected Christophe, a black general, to be president and Petion to head the legislature. The selection of Christophe was an attempt to rule through titular black leaders – a framework known as politique de doublure (policy of lining). However, Christophe had no intention of being a puppet president. He raised an army and marched to Port-au-Prince but could not take the city, which was commanded by Petion, who had powerful artillery.
Christophe went north and captured Cap Haitien. He brought in warriors from Dahoumey in central Africa to serve as his elite guard. In the south, Petion was made president-for-life of the Republic of Haiti with the capital at Port-au-Prince. Haiti remained separated until Christophe’s death in 1820.
The political division changed substantially after Jean-Pierre Boyer consolidated power in Haiti. In 1822, Haitian forces entered the eastern part of the island, where political actors seeking autonomy from Spanish rule had begun organizing around independence. Boyer incorporated the territory into the Haitian Republic, presenting the union of the island as a means of defending it against renewed foreign intervention. The arrangement gradually generated opposition among sections of the Dominican population. Boyer’s overthrow in 1843 created an opportunity for Dominican separatists to challenge Haitian authority directly. When Charles Rivière-Hérard attempted to preserve the union, political instability within Haiti limited his ability to suppress the movement. On February 27, 1844, Dominican forces proclaimed independence and removed the remaining Haitian troops from Santo Domingo.
American Occupation, Resistance Movements, and Coups
The United States subsequently established a direct form of political control over Haiti. During the occupation, Washington reorganized the country’s political and security institutions in ways that facilitated foreign economic penetration. The 1917 constitutional changes opened Haitian landholding to foreign ownership, reversing an earlier restriction. The occupation authorities relied upon the Haitian Gendarmerie and the National Guard to suppress opposition, while US Marines remained central to the coercive apparatus supporting the new political order. Resistance persisted through rural rebellion and organized labor action, demonstrating that military occupation could impose institutional changes without eliminating popular opposition. The American withdrawal in 1934 therefore ended the formal occupation without resolving the deeper structures of dependency that it had helped establish.
The Lescot government subsequently became involved in an ambitious agricultural scheme backed by the United States. Established in 1941 with financing from the US Export-Import Bank, the Haitian-American Agricultural Development Company sought to cultivate roughly 100,000 hectares for wartime rubber production. The project failed to generate the promised economic transformation. Its collapse left little lasting productive infrastructure, while the expansion of the scheme had displaced Haitian peasants from land on which they depended. Economic restructuring was accompanied by tighter regulation of organized labor, including a requirement that police officers attend meetings of workers’ associations.
The political crisis of 1946 culminated in the removal of President Élie Lescot. A movement involving students and workers had generated growing opposition to his government, while young Marxists played an important role in the mobilization in Port-au-Prince. Lescot responded by seeking military assistance to suppress the demonstrations. Colonel Eugène Lavaud, however, refused to employ the National Guard against the protesters and was subsequently detained. Colonel Antoine Levelt then became involved in discussions concerning the political transition, including consultations with Lavaud and the American ambassador, Orme Wilson. Military leaders subsequently established an executive council that pressured Lescot to resign. His cabinet soon followed, and Lescot left Haiti with his family, departing from Bowen Field for Miami. The episode demonstrated the extent to which the Haitian political order remained vulnerable to intervention by the military establishment and its external allies.
Imperialist Strangulation
Beginning in 1950, Washington supported the regimes of François Duvalier and, subsequently, his son Jean-Claude. The Duvalier governments consolidated a political economy in which Haiti occupied a highly dependent position within global capitalism. Economic deprivation provided fertile ground for popular unrest, while the dictatorship responded through extensive political repression. The Tonton Macoutes, the regime’s paramilitary force, became one of the principal instruments of this repression and received assistance from the US military mission. Rural and urban opposition eventually converged in the uprising that brought down Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, forcing him to leave Haiti for France.
Haiti’s citizenry reentered the international stage with an economic landscape devastated by the Duvaliers. The IMF solution for Haiti’s wretched poverty involved further reductions in wages – which had reached starvation levels – privatization of the state sector, reorientation of domestic production in favour of cash crops popular in North American supermarkets, and the elimination of import tariffs. There was no forgiveness for the large debts accumulated by a dictatorship characterized by a lack of accountability. Attempts to fight these injustices through a sustained movement – known as the flood (lavalas), led by the former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide – were undermined through external interventions.
The September 1991 coup inaugurated a period of systematic repression against the Lavalas movement. The military government headed by Raoul Cédras sought to dismantle the political networks that had developed among Haiti’s poorer communities, particularly in the urban neighborhoods that had provided strong support for Aristide. Security forces and allied paramilitary groups targeted activists, community leaders, churches, and organizations associated with Lavalas. Thousands of people were killed during the period of military rule. The repression reached a particularly brutal expression in the Raboteau massacre of April 1994, when forces associated with the military regime attacked residents in Gonaïves. The violence eventually generated a political crisis for Washington as repression contributed to a growing flow of Haitian refugees and made continued military rule increasingly difficult to sustain.
Cédras agreed to leave on October 15, 1994. Aristide had to make a number of compromises for this agreement. He forwent the right to prosecute many human rights violations; he signed away three years of his presidential term, agreeing that his term would end in February 1995, counting the coup years as if he had been president; and he dropped his preference for Prime Minister, leftist Claudette Werleigh, in favour of neoliberal Smarck Michel. These decisions were forced upon Haiti by an international conjuncture containing little room for maneuver. In November 2000, Aristide again won the presidential election with 92% of the votes cast, on a turnout estimated at around 50%.
He tried his best to utilize Haiti’s drastically limited resources for the betterment of the people. The Lavalas administration increased investment in schooling and literacy initiatives, including the distribution of educational materials and the establishment of literacy centers. These programs reached hundreds of thousands of Haitians and coincided with a substantial decline in the country’s illiteracy rate during the 1990s and early 2000s. Cooperation with Cuba also expanded medical education, including the establishment of training facilities intended to serve students from poorer communities who would subsequently work in underserved parts of Haiti. Public-health campaigns addressed HIV/AIDS and sought to improve maternal and infant health. The government also attempted to increase the fiscal contribution of wealthier sectors and raised the minimum wage in 2003.
Aristide’s social agenda confronted resistance from Haiti’s economic elite as well as from foreign governments concerned about the direction of Lavalas. In 2004, following Aristide’s removal, the United Nations deployed MINUSTAH with the stated purpose of stabilizing the country and assisting political reconstruction. Its presence soon generated intense controversy. Investigations subsequently documented allegations involving sexual violence, torture, and the introduction of cholera, while many Haitians came to regard the mission as an instrument of external political control. The contrast between the resources devoted to the international operation and Haiti’s own unmet social needs further intensified popular resentment toward the mission.
The earthquake of January 2010 produced a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands of Haitians losing their lives. International financial intervention followed alongside the emergency response. The IMF provided Haiti with a $114-million loan, adding another financial obligation to a state already burdened by external debt. Reconstruction subsequently attracted roughly $9-billion in international assistance, yet the distribution of those resources heavily favored international organizations and contractors. Only a small fraction reached the Haitian state directly. The reconstruction process consequently reproduced a pattern in which decisions concerning Haiti’s recovery remained concentrated outside Haitian institutions.
Neo-Colonialism
The post-earthquake political order brought Michael Martelly to the presidency in 2011 following a contested electoral process in which the Organization of American States played an influential role. His administration promoted an investment strategy centered on opening Haiti more aggressively to foreign capital. The Caracol industrial park became a prominent example of this approach. Constructed in northeastern Haiti, the project occupied agricultural land and displaced local farmers while receiving extensive concessions intended to attract foreign manufacturing. The development was promoted as a source of employment, yet the benefits granted to the foreign corporation included tax advantages and access to inexpensive Haitian labor. The episode illustrated the tension between export-oriented development and the material interests of Haiti’s rural population.
Martelly stepped down in February 2016, handing power to a provisional president in the aftermath of the 2015 elections, which were marred by fraud. The final round of elections was held weeks after Hurricane Matthew wrecked large parts of the country. Jovenel Moïse, a businessman who was Martelly’s chosen successor, became president in February 2017. Only 20% of Haiti’s voters showed up on the day of election.
In other words, less than 10% of registered voters – only about 600,000 votes – supported Moïse. He started confronting mass opposition in the streets from 2018, when his government raised fuel prices by 38% (gasoline) and 51% (diesel and kerosene) as part of an IMF “readjustment” program. Grassroots resistance intensified as it emerged that some $4-billion in oil import subsidies supplied by Venezuela under its Petrocaribe program, meant for developmental purposes, had been pocketed by Moïse and his cronies. In the bargain, the corrupt Haitian government received Washington’s support in exchange for abetting its regime-change operation against the socialist government of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.
As neoliberal brutality led the Haitian masses to take to the streets, Moïse’s rule became authoritarian. Beginning from October 2019, he ruled by decree after dissolving Parliament when elections could not be organized. Haiti’s armed forces were reinstated after having been disbanded in 1995, the powers of the police were bolstered, and a National Intelligence Agency – accountable only to the president – was established. Moïse also proposed a referendum to establish a new constitution, which would have increased the dominance of the president. Proposed changes included abolishing the post of prime minister accountable to the legislature; replacing the bicameral parliament with a unicameral one; and eliminating the prohibition in Haiti’s Constitution on a president serving two consecutive terms. This last measure was introduced as a democratic buffer following the downfall of the Duvalier dictatorship.
Moïse’s presidential term ended on February 7, 2021. Despite repeated calls to step down and mass protests demanding his resignation, he refused to leave office. His administration became an open dictatorship, relying on the deployment of pure force to sustain itself. At 1 a.m. in the morning of July 7, 2021, armed gunmen – two Haitian-Americans and 26 Colombians – stormed Moïse’s private residence in Pétionville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince, and assassinated him. This killing was the result of Moïse’s aggressive pursuit of personal ambitions and endless efforts to cling to power. His mode of governance ultimately alienated and antagonized many actors in Haiti. •
