It's now been six months since the Haitian earthquake, in which more than 300,000 people died, but Haiti has virtually disappeared from public view, returning to the invisible status it has almost always had in America, except for when it periodically appears as an object of menace. One of the few national news programs to offer detailed coverage of Haiti on more than a crisis basis has been Democracy Now!, and so it's no surprise that Democracy Now! did a whole hour of programming on Haiti today, including an interview with Patrick Elie, a longtime Haitian democracy activist and Haiti's former Secretary of State for Public Security. This interview provides a good overview of the state of Haiti today, and how it fits into Haiti's history.
My own big-picture take is that South America has begun to free itself from the control of American imperialism (with the obvious exception of Colombia, of course), while Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean remain torn in a state of struggle that has certainly changed over the past few decades, but which remains largely in a state of limbo... except of course, for when it more closely resembles hell:
AMY GOODMAN: .... Six months ago was just days after the earthquake, January 12, 2010. One of the worst natural disasters in history. Over 300,000 people have died. Yet, since we saw him after the earthquake in Creole, known as Terre Tremble, the earth trembled, not much has changed. Thousands of people remain under the rubble. The rubble has hardly been moved. 1.7 million people are homeless. There are more than 1300 official refugee camps. Hundreds more dotting the country. People under tarps, under tents, outside their homes on baking plateaus, waiting, waiting for something to change here in Haiti. Today we will be speaking with a human rights attorney. We will go to one of those camps. But first, we are going to speak with the former Secretary of State for Public Affairs, a longtime pro-democracy activist. We are standing in the ruins of the Montana Hotel. Just behind me, one part of that hotel that was the site of international press for many years. 111 guests died, more than 200 people were killed in the earthquake, people who worked at the hotel. Today it continues to lie in ruins. Our guest is Patrick Elie We welcome you to Democracy Now!
PATRICK ELIE: Thank you for the invitation.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you first talk about your country?
PATRICK ELIE: Yes. As you know, maybe a lot of the American public don't know, Haiti has had a very difficult history, having emerged from slavery and colonialism through a war against the most powerful countries at the time. And since then, for a lot of its history, Haiti has been almost blockaded, or at least isolated and faced the hostility of the powerful countries of the time. On top of that, Haitian revolution after independence did not actually bring what the people of Haiti expected from it. What happened is that a minority seized most of the riches and as a consequence, the development of the country has been a very unequal.
I believe Haiti is now one of the countries where you have the most social divide, is the widest, and probably as a consequence of that, the Haitian state is very weak, has always been after independence and has mostly, for the majority of Haitians, the power of [inaduible]. Haitians have never had a chance to collaborate with their state. And even though dictatorship after dictatorship took power in Haiti, what they brought was not order, but chaos. It seems like a paradox, but the Haitian system had only one objective, was for the strong man at the time and the classes that were his allies, to hold power. They didn't care what happened on the periphery of power. And we are actually in the reconstruction, and even before that, you could say that the horrible toll of the earthquake, even though its magnitude was serious, but that toll is the result of the behavior of the Haitian state, often allied with foreign power, to disenfranchise the majority of the Haitian people and, if you want, impoverish the peasants who had no choice but to either migrate toward the DR and the Cuban cane fields when these belonged to U.S. interests, or to migrate to Port-au-Prince. And there, there was no plan to accommodate them, and the result is what you have seen, shantytown upon shantytown, no standards for building, very high population density, and that's why when the earthquake struck we had so much damage and more than the damage, so much loss of life.
AMY GOODMAN: It wasn't long after the Haitian earthquake there was an earthquake in Chile. It was hundreds of times stronger than the Haitian earthquake and yet hundreds of times fewer people died, less than 300 people died. In Haiti it was close to 300,000. Now I want to ask you about the aid. There has been close to $11 billion promised. Haiti hasn't seen even 10% of that. Why is that?
PATRICK ELIE: Well, you might point to the bureaucracy of, you know, the international donors; but also I think that the weakness of the Haitian state also explains that. You see, it is a vicious circle. The powers that be-and I mean by that, the U.S., France, and Canada-but mostly the U.S., have worked over decades to weaken the Haitian state. And then now they are using this weakness as a pretense, not to free the aid or have it go through Haitian authorities. So, that 10% of aid that has been released actually, most of it did not go through the Haitian state. And I can say, even though I am not a specialist, that a lot of it went into things that were not indispensable for reconstruction. As you know, in the beginning we have 82nd Airborne being deployed around Haiti and in Haiti. These cost a lot of money and all this money, if you want to count it, is money that went to help Haiti. So, it gives you a false sense that, you know, already a lot had been done and we are not seeing the result on the ground.
So, this is what the neoliberal project looks like: If Haiti cannot be made more like the US once was, now both will become more alike in the nature and extent of the gap between rhetoric and reality.
