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Residents who once lived there were forced out. Politicians conspired with developers to assure they didn't come back.
History not only rhymes, as Mark Twain once said, a lot of times it repeats. Haitians now suffer like Sri Lankans, other East Asian tsunami victims, and Katrina displaced New Orleans residents.
Haitians are no strangers to adversity and anguish. For over 500 years, they suffered severe oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, unrepayable debt, and natural calamities.
They included destructive hurricanes and numerous magnitude 7.0 or greater regional earthquakes.
The last major one came in 1946. A magnitude 8.1 quake struck adjacent Dominican Republic. Haiti was also affected. Earlier catastrophic ones were in 1751 and 1770. Both devastated Port-au-Prince. In 1842 Cap-Haitien was destroyed.
In 2004, Washington militarized Haiti after ousting Jean-Bertrand Aristide. After January 2010, in came the marines.
After its worst catastrophe in nearly 170 years, Haitians need food, housing, medical care, clean water, and other vital services, not military forces confronting them repressively. They still do.
US marines are gone. MINUSTAH shock troops remain. For years, they've committed murders, kidnappings, extrajudicial detentions, rapes, non-sexual assaults, physical threats, and other type abuses. They're enforcers for political and corporate crime bosses.
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