Thanks is spelled with anks for your reference.
anks bro. Solid substantive discussion.
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I thought you were here to learn? Maybe you were talking shit and I returned fire? Anywho. You can witty retort and I’ll ignore the last one so that you can say that you got the last word in and showed me who was boss.
I was just asking for any links or things that US likely did it or places to research or something. You think it was probably them. OK. Cool I guess.
So far, I’ve provided Conan talking to Haitians about things and you imagining how things are.
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Not to sweet summer child you but yeah there’s plenty we could do, and nothing we ever will. Law of the fish.
Lots of racism and nonsense ITT. The president that served prior to Moise, who is named Rene Preval, was not a “mass murdering gangster.” Moise was bad (mass murdering gangster is a bit much though) but even his detractors did not want him assassinated.
As an aside, the term mass murdering gangster is clearly racialized and has no place in this discourse, but it’s also useful: it’s a window into how even liberal Americans sneer at and mock the country they ruthlessly extracted wealth from for a century through an outrageous indemnity, then invaded and occupied (and installed a legitimately mass-murdering secret police service), then meddled with and pried open the country for corporate interests. It just feels so natural to call them gangsters, doesn’t it? It’s precisely how we’re trained to think about Haiti, and any group of black people, frankly.
Anyways, a bit of context: it’s difficult to talk about post-2019 Haiti without understanding the energy crisis. Remember how in 2019 Venezuela collapsed? Haiti was collateral damage in that situation, as Venezuela provided oil much cheaper than market rates to Haiti, which was worth several percent of GDP. Almost all of Haiti’s energy is from oil. Since then, the country has basically been ungovernable.
In terms of things actual Haitians are saying about this, it seems to depend on their socioeconomic condition. My wealthier friends think a more empowered version of MINUSTAH is necessary. My middle-class friends are bracing for chaos. My poorer friends want to get the hell out, and are terrified about what happens next (more strikes, food and gas shortages, and violence). Which is basically just a sadder, more desperate version of how these people have felt since I met them.
I always tell foreigners who are interested in learning about Haiti not to focus on the domestic politics so much. That’s a distraction, and feeds into the narratives that a place like Haiti, which is outrageously overpopulated and will never reasonably feed itself, let alone provide adequately for its population in a neoliberal global economy, with 11 million people living on an extremely mountainous patch of land the size of metro Atlanta.
Ask instead why Haiti looks this way in the first place? (Caffeine Needed was basically dead on.) Ask why we make them one of the most immobile, visa-restricted nationalities on earth, when clearly much of the solution is allowing Haitians to emigrate freely to the United States and other countries who have benefited hugely from their misfortunes? Ask why the fuck we insist on making them “compete” in this system of neoliberal capitalism, then scoff when they cannot due to pretty obvious structural reasons?
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Yeah I don’t see the word gangster as racialized at all (in fact as someone with a pretty deep interest in organized crime it usually applies to white people. I have on many many many occasions referred to Trump as a gangster because his dad was a mob associate, he was a mob associate, and anyone who made any money in NYC/NJ real estate development during his time or his fathers time was involved to some degree). It was a commentary on the sad and predictable given the larger context state of domestic politics in Haiti. My general assumption whenever anyone thrives in a certain environment is that they are the kind of person who thrives in that environment. Haitian domestic politics are pretty grimy.
And yes we should let them immigrate here.
let’s say opening up immigration is step 1, which may have the effect of up to one million people moving off the island in say a decade or longer. what is step 2 or 3 or whatever? ceding it to DR? annexing haiti as a territory a la PR?
also metro atlanta is pretty huge. 10,000 sq miles. it’s like taiwan, right? do mountains take up that much land in haiti? i wasn’t aware population density was such a huge problem there.
Still don’t know much, but this looks like a straight up coup that everyone is rolling with to me. The ‘international community’ is behind the guy who had a lucky reprieve from losing the PM job when his replacement’s signing in ceremony was made impossible by the assassination. The mercenaries caught for the crime are linked to someone who seems part of the Haitian elite and who was previously investigated for hiring mercenaries for Moise himself.
But enough of that speculation, I’m mostly here to admire these two paragraphs from the Washington Post’s call for an invasion the other day. Say what you like about liberal interventionists, you just can’t dent their optimism.
There is recent precedent for such a force — the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, whose blue-helmeted troops patrolled Haiti for 13 years before leaving in 2017. That mission, which involved forces from Brazil, Uruguay and other nations, was a far cry from perfect. U.N. troops from Nepal introduced a severe cholera epidemic in Haiti, and others fathered hundreds of babies born to impoverished local women and girls. There were credible allegations of rape and sexual abuse by troops.
The U.N. force did manage, however, to bring a modicum of stability to Haiti following the 2004 uprising that deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At this perilous moment, a modicum of stability would be preferable to most other plausible scenarios.
Cholera and rape are one thing, but a loss of ‘stability’? Not on their watch!
(Note WaPo clearly wants an invasion to protect the dude who it kinda seems like just wacked somebody from the ‘anarchy’ of actual Haitians protesting.)
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1 million people leaving Haiti for the USA, for talking purposes, would represent a gargantuan flow of remittances into the island, and massively better access to educational and financial networks. A gamechanger.
Why is your next step loss of Haitian sovereignty?
Yes, Haiti is roughly the size of Taiwan (and Taiwan = 2x the population). Taiwan has modern farming and a huge fishing industry, and yet it is nowhere near food self-sufficient (on a net basis, about 1/3 of Taiwan’s calories are from the island + fishing). The value of Taiwan’s food imports are roughly equal to Haiti’s entire GDP. Taiwan isn’t a good example for how Haiti ought to be able to be food sufficient.
You can easily google whether Haiti is mountainous (which will reveal that 60% of the country is >20% gradient, which makes it extremely difficult to farm). They still farm them; it’s quite amazing how tiny and rugged the plots people farm are, having been split up over and over throughout the generations. There are also massive environmental problems (erosion) compounding the difficulty of farming the land, all of which leads to Haitians consuming about 50% as many calories as Americans do.
Overpopulation is a big problem in Haiti, and has always been. When the border with the DR wasn’t formalized, Haitians were always encroaching on the frontier to settle and farm it. Eventually the DR perpetrated an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Haitians, in the 1930s. So talk of “ceding Haiti to the DR” is quite cruel and insensitive.
Fun fact: a lot of Haiti’s arable land actually goes towards charcoal production, which accounts for the vast majority of Haiti’s energy and is renewable/essentially carbon neutral/requires no foreign aid. They have special trees you can cut at the base and they regrow from the same roots. But we don’t like to tell positive stories about Haitians and their remarkable ability to survive despite having the worst hand you can possibly be dealt as a country…
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I don’t know nearly enough about Haiti to have an informed opinion, so I appreciate reading takes from people who passionately do.
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thanks for the detailed response. i don’t think these issues are covered well enough, so this is very helpful. the only thing i’ve listened to were podcasts on failure of ngo’s, hillary clinton, and ethnic tensions with DR. but my question isnt about who annexes the territory, but rather what is their political future? do they have parties? do they have nationalists? do they have centrists? are they in danger of intervention?
tbh i don’t know how to think about any of the south or central america countries in terms of their future, especially where US had a hand in seating and propping up a dictator. not that previous or current or future leader will be a dictator, but haiti i imagine are no less susceptible to one than the rest of the world, north america included.
on the other hand, i also disagree with you on the effects of immigration that large. having been through one myself, there are dual ambivalent feelings from and towards the diaspora, and it is a wedge between moderates and extremists. i somewhat read up on the subject (admittedly in another part of the world). those with means and motivation leave and are irreplaceable for that generation, even if they support those back home with money and services. they are lost not just as political leaders or productive local workforce, but even as informed citizens.
however, i do support opening the borders for most immigrants who want to come here with a path to citizenship. this isn’t an argument that we should make them stay there, but rather a greater investment into haiti is clearly necessary, at least as large as the investment into haitians who do migrate.
by the way, there are many trees that regrow from the root after cutting. that’s fairly common in regenerative forests. although charcoal isn’t an efficient renewable at all. there’s a lot more value in sustainable lumber harvesting, and composting the waste.
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Looks like it’s all systems go on operation ‘stabilise’ Haiti.
Also, the excuses are coming in for the US people involved.
According to Haitian officials quoted in the Washington Post, the two Haitian Americans involved, James Solages and Joseph Vincent, were duped into taking part in the assassination. Solages told investigators he had applied on the internet for a job as an interpreter for “foreigners” whose full names, he claimed he did not know.
He said he and Vincent had been told they were executing an order to arrest the president authorized by a judge. It was Solages who called up to the president’s guards during the attack telling them they were from the US Drug Enforcement Agency and ordering them to stand down. Once they discovered the president had been killed they handed themselves in.
It’s always a real pain when that happens. There you are serving a legal warrant after answering an ad in the paper, just casually announcing you’re part of the DEA (presumably for a laugh). Then suddenly, ooops, you’ve shot a President! No choice but to ‘turn yourself in’ a day or so later after your colleagues lose a gun battle.
I’m sure that one of the Americans seems to have been a security guard for a Haitian embassy, and worked for a prominent business man who is often involved in murky political happenings is coincidental.
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Prescient. At one point Wyclef Jean actually did contemplate a run for president of Haiti.
Doubt it, but who knows. My impression is that the US has supported the Haitian Administrations ever since kidnapping and removing Aristide in 2004.
Supposedly the killers were speaking English and Spanish though, which does sound like CIA and Dominicans (which sounds like a possibility if you know anything about the history of the island).
My position is it’s no surprise that local power struggles in Haiti are resolved via networks involving murky organisations that usually link back to US funded ‘democracy’ or military operations. It’s not that this op was CIA, it’s that the region has been inundated with that sort of things for years so the power structures are riddled with it at every turn.
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I’ve linked the CP Grey “Rules for Rulers” a few times. This coup sure looks like the holders of the keys stepping aside and allowing it. I think the new king is the #1 suspect. If he stays in power, let’s see who he rewards.
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People arrested have been former Colombian military and a couple of American “small business owners”.
Is it really so far fetched? There’s a ton of Haitians who have some sort of tie to America or are even citizens.
Again, what are the motivations of the US to be behind the assassination here? I’m willing to listen to what they’d be, but it seems far more likely some jerk-off in Haiti decided they should be in power. That’s far from unprecedented as well.