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A partial transcript from the Documentary
"Haiti: Killing the Dream."
“Haiti is located on the Western part of the Island, Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. The French turned it into their most profitable slave colony, but in 1791 the slaves revolted. By 1804 the slave armies defeated Napoleon’s legions, making Haiti the first independent Black Republic in the world.
Fearing the example would spread the United States refused to recognize Haiti, beginning an uneasy relationship between a country founded by slaves and one founded by slave owners. At the turn of the century, America’s view of Haiti was summed up by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryant who said “Dear me, think of it, Niggers speaking French.”
Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General:
More than two years before we entered WWI, we decided we had to control Haiti.
The US government wanted to control the strategic windward passage between Haiti and Cuba; the major shipping route to the Panama Canal and the Pacific, so they created a pretext to justify a military intervention. ‘In 1915 US Marines land in Haiti to battle Haitian bandits threatening destruction of American properties, and native bandits quickly head for the hills. This puts an immediate end to troubles in populated areas, but marines prepare to drive into interior and route the insurgents out.
RC: The arrogance with which we went about it, when you think of a young Franklin Delanore Roosevelt, as a Assistant Secretary of the Navy, bragging, as he’s writing the constitution for ‘the free people of Haiti. ‘There can’t be a more imperialist mentality than that; these people were too dumb to write their own constitution, I have to do it
for them.’
NOAM
CHOMSKY: ‘It was a murderous bloody intervention which destroyed the constitutional systems which reinstated slavery. The Marines stayed there for twenty years. What they left behind them was a military force, a national guard, which actually took over and has run it under one or another dictatorship since.’
In 1957 the United States propped up the regime of Haiti’s most feared president, Francoise Duvalier. Known as Poppa Doc, he was a country doctor who became a despot. To insure that he would not be overthrown by the army like his predecessors Papa Doc built up his own vigilante militia; the infamous Ton-Ton Macoutes. Volunteers for the Macoutes were paid by having free license to steal and extort from the people who they tortured raped and murdered.
Toward the end of his life, Duvalier cemented his ties to Washington and arranged for his son Jean Claude to succeed him. After Poppa Doc’s death in 1971, nineteen year old Baby Doc took over as president for life. Baby Doc plundered the national treasury and with army support turned Haiti into a major drug transshipment stop. In 1986 a popular uprising ended the three decades of Duvalier dictatorship. Baby Doc was flown into exile aboard a US government jet, taking a vast fortune and leaving behind a devastated but relieved country. After years of living in fear the Haitian people exploded taking revenge on the most abusive Macoutes ~ uprooting the Duvalier oppression. Some Macoutes who committed capital crimes suffered a popular justice ~ ‘necklacing’ ~ a tire filled with gasoline was placed around their bodies and burned.
In the traditional government that was named after the provisional government fell was an army led government, the CNG. And the army has shown little interest in staying out of political affairs since then. There’ve been seven or eight coups since 1986 and the army has been involved in every one of them.
‘They sing (in the streets), “Things are still the same, the soldiers have become Macoutes and are breaking heads.” Despite signs of deepening army entrenchment the country tried to hold elections in 1987. They were destroyed by the military and the Macoutes who slaughtered voters as they tried to cast their first ballot. At the same time a young Catholic priest, Jean Breton Aristed began drawing attention for his outspoken criticism of the government and foreign domination of the country. Inspired by the Latin American Church’s liberation theology Aristed was dedicated to helping the poor. He worked for years with orphans in a vast shanty-town. (*)
 In today’s ‘world’ the global community has once more left Haiti to the criminally-colonial power of the United States which has yet to provide that quake-torn country with food, shelter, medicine or water in the month that has elapsed since the attack upon that tiny poverty-stricken country. We have again taken over that country, and we now control the distribution of aid and virtually everything else, through the 20,000 US troops now stationed there. But there is another lesson clearly visible here. If we do not begin to resist the police-state inside this country all that we shall have to look forward to is the same kind of slavery extortion and murder which Haiti has been suffering from since before WWI.
Many might think that this is simply a bridge too far – a stretch that cannot be justified. However a simple look back at what the occupants of the US Offices of the Attorney’s General have been so busy doing since 2002 will give us a much clearer picture of what our real future might very well look like: Given how much of the US Constitution we have already consciously allowed to be destroyed.
 In today’s ‘world’ the global community has once more left Haiti to the criminally-colonial power of the United States which has yet to provide that quake-torn country with food, shelter, medicine or water in the month that has elapsed since the attack upon that tiny poverty-stricken country. We have again taken over that country, and we now control the distribution of aid and virtually everything else, through the 20,000 US troops now stationed there. But there is another lesson clearly visible here. If we do not begin to resist the police-state inside this country all that we shall have to look forward to is the same kind of slavery extortion and murder which Haiti has been suffering from since before WWI.
And after this obscenity we allowed Bush to appoint Gonzales and a whole new crew to the same offices to write the criminally far-reaching torture laws for illegally detained “combatants” in an illegally created set of wars that had no basis under International Law; and we’re still expanding our illegally-constructed adventures under Obamanation’s increasingly belligerent administration that continues to seek more wars in evermore places to justify the unjustifiable, everywhere!
Every action that is taken in the world requires an equal and opposite reaction, that’s a law of nature. It might take awhile, but this law cannot be violated, by any nation forever. The fact that the American public chooses to remain so silent about the malevolent crime of failing to assist hundreds of thousands of starving and dying people, in Haiti, is already a crime against human-nature and the community of nations that claims to care about the welfare of even the poorest of nations in this hemisphere. Yet nothing has been done, and apparently nothing is even remotely planned except to revert to the same corrupt contractors that were used after Katrina; Contractor’s that have yet to even make a dent in what that ‘catastrophe’ did to the people of New Orleans. But since we did not pay attention to that bit of history, it is now repeating itself, only in far greater losses of both life and hope to a people that we obviously don’t give a damn about when it comes right down to it!
Jim
Kirwan
NOTES:
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