US Marines patrol the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 2004 [Photo: DoD]
January 12, 2025 marked the 15th anniversary of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake [7.0 on the Richter Scale] that together with 52 aftershocks 12 days later [magnitude 4.5 and greater] shook Haiti and killed more than 200,000 people, injured more than 300,000 and left 1.3 million homeless. Lacking even minimal assistance, many survivors had to dig themselves out of the rubble. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are still grappling with the effects of one of the biggest natural disasters ever in the Americas.
This natural disaster came on top of an ongoing social disaster produced by US imperialism, which had imposed a dictatorship and transformed this Caribbean nation into a 27,750 km2 (10,710 sq. mi) concentration camp.
A key event driving this social disaster had taken place six years earlier, when the elected government of President Jean Aristide was overthrown by the CIA. Together with his family Aristide was arrested and secretly flown to Africa as a pro-imperialist regime was installed and US Marines occupied the island.
Today, Haiti is run by the Core Group, an unelected alliance of the US, Canada, the UK, Caricom, and the Organization of American States. For all effective purposes, the Core Group is dominated and financed by the US government and by global financial interests.
The current narrative, that Haitian society is dominated by so-called gangs that with unprecedented brutality control the urban neighborhoods of Port-Au-Prince and other cities and towns, leaves out the role of US imperialism in arming these groups, and that more than gangs, these are paramilitary “death squads” entrusted with terrorizing the urban and rural working class, allied with corrupt elites and multinational corporations.
The use of death squads to pursue the aims of US imperialism is not unique to Haiti. They have been utilized to terrorize the working class across Central America, in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. These “gangs” also functioned in Colombia and the Southern Cone of South America to murder and disappear workers and youth.
In Haiti the “gangs” are split-offs of the infamous “Tonton Macoutes” paramilitary organization created by the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship in 1959 and renamed Volunteers for National Security [Milice de Voluntaires de la Sécurité Nationale —MVSN] in 1971.
As of January 2024, about 200 such “gangs,” derived from the Tonton Macoutes, operated in Haiti with nearly half based in Port-au-Prince, where they controlled the city’s impoverished working class neighborhoods. They grouped themselves into two coalitions, the G9 and G-Pep.
In the words of a 2010 study by the Council of Hemispheric Affairs (two months after the earthquake), the Haitian death squads, are truly “The Central Nervous System of Haiti’s Reign of Terror.”
Most recently, troops from Kenya and other nations have been sent into Haiti to perform policing operations, alongside the death squads. All of these forces are financed by the United States.
Despite this continuing reign of terror against the Haitian workers, prior to, and following the 2010 earthquake, the Haitian masses have repeatedly mobilized in revolutionary struggle and fought against the successive dictatorial regimes, including in a massive wave of popular protest in 2018.
A second earthquake (magnitude 7.2) shook Haiti’s southern peninsula in 2021, resulting in 2,000 deaths; an estimated 500,000 people required emergency humanitarian aid.
The effects of the 2010 and 2021earthquakes are still being felt, an estimated 5.4 million people, nearly half of Haiti’s population, is malnourished living on one meal a day or less; over 1 million are still homeless; and currently six thousand Haitians are starving.
Haiti has the lowest per capita Gross Domestic Product (US$2700) and life expectancy (63 years) in the Americas.
Haiti shares a 400-kilometer border with the Dominican Republic. In 2023, Luis Abinader, the Dominican Republic’s wealthiest man and current president, mandated that a wall be built along the border, falsely claiming that Haiti was illegally appropriating water from the Dajabon River, on the northern part of the border. He also argued that a wall was needed to ensure the safety of the Dominican Republic from the Haitian gangs and drug trafficking.
Last October Abinader’s government announced its intention to deport 10,000 Haitian immigrants a week, including sugar cane and other workers who had resided in the country for decades, with an ultimate goal of deporting 1.5 million Haitian immigrants.
On February 4, the first flight of Haitian deportees from the US landed at the Cap-Haïtien airport in northern Haiti. The next day Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in the Dominican Republic to rubber stamp Abindar’s deportation program.
Last week, 500 Haitian immigrants were deported from the Dominican Republic through a narrow opening in the border wall, in a scene reminiscent of the deportation of Jews into Nazi concentration camps. Some were interviewed by NBC and AP News: “They were the first deportees of the day, some still clad in work clothes and other barefoot as they lined up for food in the Haitian border city of Belladère before mulling their next move… ‘They broke down my door at 4 in the morning’ said Odelyn St. Fleur, who had worked as a mason in the Dominican Republic for two decades. He had been sleeping next to his wife and a 7-year-old son.”
Among the deportees at the border have been pregnant women, Dominican-born children of Haitian immigrants, retirees and chronically ill people.
The AP article also reported on the reaction by Dominican workers in defense of their Haitian class brothers:
“Last year, a group of Dominican men, outraged at what they said was the treatment and arrest of their Haitian neighbors, threw rocks, bottles and other objects at authorities. One man tried to disarm an immigration official before shots were fired and everyone scattered.”
Sealing the perimeter to the Haitian concentration camp are the naval patrols by the Navy of the Bahamas, British warships, the Cuban border patrol and the US Coast Guard as part of a blockade operation to prevent Haitian refugees from leaving their country. The UK warships are intended to prevent Haitians from seeking refuge in the Turks and Caicos British colony. Also participating in the blockade is the State of Florida, which has increased marine and aviation patrols.
While the blockade is designed to prevent the movement of people; the same cannot be said for the entry of weapons from the US and other nations to arm, and provide ammunition for, the terror squads (80 percent originate in the US).
According to a CNN study published last May, despite the naval blockade: “guns and drugs keep pouring in, crossing international waters and airspace to reach the embattled country —most of the firepower originating from the US.” Much of that weaponry originates in Florida, one of the participants in the blockade that surrounds Haiti, and is the source of enormous profits for weapons merchants.
Haiti is an agricultural and clothing exporter, a source of profit for transnational firms and the wealthy elites that live in privileged areas near Port-Au-Prince, surrounded by shanty-towns and protected by the death squads. These elites benefit from the hunger wages and terrible working conditions that are enforced through terror. Haiti also has significant oil reserves as well as important mineral reserves, ripe for exploitation by US and European corporations.
One of the biggest sources of dollars entering Haiti is the remittances from the Haitian diaspora in the US, Canada, the Dominican Republic and other countries. These will surely diminish with the mass deportation of Haitian workers from the US, now accelerating under the fascist policies of Donald Trump.
Fifteen years after the Haitian earthquake and in the context of the disaster unleashed by profit-seeking capitalism and imperialist war preparations, Haiti has been transformed into one of the world’s largest concentration camps. Its people confront a slow genocide from starvation, disease and terror squads, armed by US imperialism and in the service of the native elites and transnational corporations, all of which have stood in the way of reconstruction since the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes.
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Publish date : 2025-02-14 11:18:00
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