Haiti 2010 Earthquake

More than a year has passed since Haiti's 2010 earthquake, along with one of the largest international relief efforts in modern history. Yet, for many people in Haiti today, little has changed, and for many others life has become worse. While the uncontrollable forces of nature can be blamed for the death and destruction of the earthquake, the extreme vulnerability of the nation both before and after the disaster was entirely man-made, and a continuation of a lengthy history of self-interested foreign intervention in their country.

No other country in the world has more non-governmental organizations (NGOs) per capita as Haiti. After the January 12 earthquake these NGOs received the bulk of the global relief funds, while the Haitian government, regularly accused of corruption by the U.S. State Department, has remained marginalized in the recovery and rebuilding efforts. This leaves a country where unelected organizations, unaccountable to the Haitian people, are calling the shots and accused of profiting from the poverty they are entrusted to fight.

After January's earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security immediately implemented a mass migration plan to manage any influx of refugees coming from the country. Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Chris O'Neil said that "The goal is to interdict them at sea and repatriate them." O'Neil's declaration reflects the same much-criticized immigration policy that the United States has implemented toward Haiti for dozens of years, a strategy that often corrals the blowback of a long history of U.S. meddling in Haitian internal affairs—both politically and economically. This blowback could be even more explosive now with 1.2 million homeless Haitians living in the squalor of tent cities.

In December 2003, the dedication ceremony of Haiti's first and only public medical school took place in Port-au-Prince. The school's ability to provide free medical education was considered one of the most important achievements of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's administration. A mere one month after it opened, however, the school became one of the many casualties of the military coup that ousted Aristide in 2004. The story of this school is both the story of the Haitian people's iron will for self-determination and betterment, and the country's constant struggle with meddling foreign powers.

"History teaches us not to expect the United States to ride in on a white horse and altruistically save the day for democracy," says the introduction of the NACLA Report's January/February 1994 edition, which examines the question of U.S. interventionism in Haiti. Now that the U.S. military has deployed some 12,000 soldiers to Haiti in the wake of January's devastating earthquake, we republish this article from that edition in the hopes that it can offer a useful historical context for understanding current events.