Is the US responsible for Haiti now too?
In the sense of this particular period of instability being the intentional design of the US, not as far as I’m aware. In the sense of the historical context behind why Haiti has basically always been extremely poor even compared to it’s neighbors being largely though not entirely a result of the actions of the US, the history is rather horrifying.
America is somehow powerful enough to control all nations on the globe at the same time.
Incredible.
Control? No
Influence? Certainly, basically any major power has the capacity to do that to some extent and the US has been a great power for over a century at this point. It doesn’t even need to be “the globe” in this case anyway though, Haiti isn’t all that far away relatively speaking, and the US has a history of meddling with smaller countries in Central America and the Caribbean going back to not too long after the founding of the country.
And as we all know, nobody else on the planet is influencing anything ever. It’s all a result of American influence.
Nazi Germany only happened because America didn’t conquer Germany in the 1890’s.
Russia invading Ukraine? Also, America. Gang violence in Haiti? America.
Tianamen Square? Believe it or not. America.
I never said nobody else was, just that Haiti in particular has a history that has seen the US act to hinder it’s development on a number of occasions. The same for that matter can be said of France in this case. My point was not that Haiti’s situation is the exclusive fault of the United States, but rather that the US does at least have some responsibility for how it has turned out.
My point was not that Haiti’s situation is the exclusive fault of the United States, but rather that the US does at least have some responsibility for how it has turned out.
Some responsibility is undeniable, but I think saying Haiti’s poverty is ‘largely though not entirely a result of the actions of the US’ is vastly overstating the role of the US in this particular scenario. I don’t think “The US refuses to intervene to buoy the junk debts acquired by US banks in the 1910s-40s” fundamentally changes the trajectory of Haiti’s history.
The US literally took over the country’s central bank, occupied the country for a period of over a decade, and forced it to pay a huge percentage of it’s national income for that period to US banks to repay a debt that it never fairly acquired in the first place (admittedly, one that the US had basically taken over from France, which had forced it on Haiti in the first place, which is one of the reasons I also named France as a contributor in one of these replies). The country was prevented from using this revenue to invest in itself for a significant chunk of time, and that kind of investment has compounding effects that would have made the country at least somewhat better off had it not been basically robbed of it’s income at gunpoint. As things like organized crime thrive under an environment of poverty and desperation, it isn’t that unreasonable to think that the gangs would be less severe a problem had this development been allowed to occur.
We generally regard increasing chaos on the international scene as undesirable in a post-Cold War world.
