NYTimes running articles on France, US role in impoverishing Haiti

Long, exhaustive articles in the NYTimes have published exploring the role that the US and France have played in impoverishing Haiti.

These long pieces are hard to summarize briefly, but it's a refreshing piece of historical context that is often absent when dealing with the present-day situation concerning the impoverished nation frequently plagued by all sorts of social ills.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NYTimes THE RANSOM The Root of Haiti’s Misery:Reparations to Enslavers But for generations after independence, Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I; Germany’s last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the “butcher of the Commune” for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871. The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms. Present’s ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled Haiti’s treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe’s largest financial conglomerates. Haiti’s riches lured Wall Street, too, delivering big margins for the institution that ultimately became Citigroup. It elbowed out the French and helped spur the American invasion of Haiti — one of the longest military occupations in United States history.

It's not particularly well known that Haiti was extorted into paying reparations to France for the grave sin of freeing themselves and their country from French slavery. The piece explores how this wealth was transferred over the years from Haiti to Western banks.

It concludes:

Quote:

Put another way, if Haiti had not been forced to pay its former slave masters, one team of international scholars recently estimated, the country’s per capita income in 2018 could have been almost six times as large — about the same as in its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic. They called the burden imposed on Haiti “perhaps the single most odious sovereign debt in history.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/w...ed-france.html

The Times has published a series of articles about the issue of Haitian poverty, including:

Quote:

Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged.The U.S. Obliged. But decades of diplomatic correspondence, financial reports and archival records reviewed by The New York Times show that, behind the public explanations, another hand was hard at work as well, pushing the United States to step in and seize control of Haiti for the wealth it promised: Wall Street, and especially the bank that later became Citigroup. Under heavy pressure from National City Bank, Citigroup’s predecessor, the Americans elbowed the French aside and became the dominant power in Haiti for decades to come. The United States dissolved Haiti’s parliament at gunpoint, killed thousands of people, controlled its finances for more than 30 years, shipped a big portion of its earnings to bankers in New York and left behind a country so poor that the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived on a diet “close to starvation level,” United Nations officials determined in 1949, soon after the Americans let go of the reins.

US Marines also forcibly dissolved the Haitian government, storming the National Assembly and dispersing officials at gunpoint, when it became clear that a new constitution allowing foreigners to own land in Haiti was not going to pass. Haiti would be under US occupation for 19 years under explicit orders to "protect US financial interests"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...ation_of_Haiti

This is covered in more detail in the excellent book "Gangsters for Capitalism", which covers the history of Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler.

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