With 200,000 feared dead and 1.5 million left without homes, the recent earthquake to strike Haiti has once again revealed the vulnerability of the underdeveloped world to natural disasters. And, yet, while the media praises the United States’ and other developed countries’ humanitarian response to the catastrophe, absent is a deeper, critical investigation into Haiti’s perpetual underdevelopment and the developed world’s relationship to it. Superficial and often racist explanations of Haiti’s impoverishment, leading many to the conclusion that the country “just needs to get it together,” obscures the reality that Haiti’s destitution is the product of a long-term historical trend of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment, most recently through failed neoliberal experimentation and political repression imposed by the United States.

Haiti in crisisEver since it invaded and occupied Haiti in 1915, the U.S. has played a direct role in shaping the country’s history. From 1957 to 1971, Haitians lived under François Duvalier, a brutal dictator backed by the U.S. for being a steadfast anti-Communist. After his death, his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, inherited the presidency and ruled Haiti until finally overthrown in 1986. During his reign throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Haitian elites, the U.S. government, and international capital subjected the country to neoliberal restructuring. Promising modernization and economic development, this small, poor country was ordered to abandon its traditional, agricultural past in a frenzy of liberalizing reforms.

According to the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Haiti was an ideal candidate for this neoliberal experiment. The entrenched poverty of the Haitian people could be used to coerce them into low-paying manufacturing jobs to grow Haitian cities into major exporting bases. The countryside, it was thought, could also be reshaped to be export-oriented. To this end, USAID, along with the landed elite and urban industrialists, worked to create agro-processing facilities, while at the same time hypocritically increasing their practice of dumping heavily-subsidized surplus crops from the U.S. onto Haitian markets.

These structural changes led by the U.S. predictably forced Haitian peasants who could no longer survive in agriculture into major cities, especially Port-au-Prince, where new manufacturing jobs were promised. However, immigrants new to these urban centers soon found a shortage of work in the manufacturing sector. The city became increasingly overpopulated and slum areas grew exponentially. To accommodate the growing number of displaced peasants, cheap and poorly-constructed housing was erected, leaving the city overcrowded, without enough jobs, and with desperately inadequate infrastructure.

In time, American planners and Haitian elites acknowledged the failure of their restructuring and abandoned their neoliberal project. Yet, although American planners and international capital were able to escape Haiti, millions were left toiling in the legacy of decades of failed economic adjustment. In part because of this recent history, Haitians found themselves living in absolute desolation, entirely unprepared for any kind of natural disaster to strike. As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, recognizes: “Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses.”

Moreover, while decades of neoliberal “reform” devastated the Haitian economy and helped retard lasting development, the United States has also forcibly prevented any candidate critical of neoliberalism from taking office. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, elected by an astounding 75% of the electorate in what was one of the greatest demonstrations of grassroots democracy in recent history, was the latest victim of such interference. For criticizing globalization and advocating a state-led path for Haitian development, his presidency was labeled a threat and was overthrown by an internationally-sponsored coup in 2004, killing several thousand people and stirring anti-American sentiment among the population. The UN subsequently has maintained a large and terribly expensive military presence in the country.

Since the 2004 coup, the United States and other developed countries have been effectively ruling Haiti. While the developed world scrambles to send emergency aid to Haiti now, during the last five years, the same countries have blocked any extension of the UN mission’s mandate beyond its original military purpose. Proposals to use some military spending toward poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, continuing the predominantly military character of international “aid” extended to the underdeveloped world.

While the media continues to champion the “noble” response of developed countries coming to aid of Haiti in this time of crisis, it is important to recognize the larger political and economic context under which Haiti finds itself unable to escape underdevelopment and makes it particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. Exploitative economic policies, coupled with neoimperial intervention, have robbed Haiti of any significant agency to take control, invest in its people, regulate its economy, and rise from the horror of perpetual poverty.

To help alleviate Haitian suffering, concerned Americans can do more than make donations out of pity. Along with sending emergency relief, we must work to empower the people of Haiti and defend the integrity of their public institutions. True aid means the right of self-determination for Haiti’s government, the right to pursue an alternative to neoliberalism, and an end to the exploitative perversion of its economy. Americans must transgress trite and superficial explanations of global poverty. We must confront our own country’s role in creating the conditions in Port-au-Prince that magnified the earthquake’s impact and recognize America’s role in blocking Haiti from achieving meaningful development.