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.
That would be much more compelling, except for the fact that Haiti was poor and unstable even before France imposed the debt, and that subsequent regimes, including US-friendly and US-hostile, did nothing to improve the situation. Haiti’s issues are far more fundamental than “The US reduced and redirected investment in the Haitian economy while extracting debts owed to US investors back in the 1910s-1940s”.
Obviously, this is ignoring the moral issue of the occupation of Haiti (which is, of course, an atrocity), as the discussion is currently centered around responsibility for modern Haitian poverty and instability.
The debt was imposed some 30 years after the Haitian Revolution, if memory serves. Taking on the (punitive and ridiculous) debt was the condition for France recognizing Haiti’s independence, though it had been de facto independent for a generation.
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.
That would be much more compelling, except for the fact that Haiti was poor and unstable even before France imposed the debt, and that subsequent regimes, including US-friendly and US-hostile, did nothing to improve the situation. Haiti’s issues are far more fundamental than “The US reduced and redirected investment in the Haitian economy while extracting debts owed to US investors back in the 1910s-1940s”.
Obviously, this is ignoring the moral issue of the occupation of Haiti (which is, of course, an atrocity), as the discussion is currently centered around responsibility for modern Haitian poverty and instability.
Haiti didn’t exist before France’s debt AFAIK.
The debt was imposed some 30 years after the Haitian Revolution, if memory serves. Taking on the (punitive and ridiculous) debt was the condition for France recognizing Haiti’s independence, though it had been de facto independent for a generation.