What will happen to the people of Haiti after the earthquake? What private interests or U.S. interests will seek to control the direction of Haiti? Will interests seek to capitalize off the crisis? In this article, why the people of Haiti are impoverished, the history of U.S. intervention, the kidnapping of Aristide by the US, economic shock therapy in the aftermath of disasters, and more are explored.

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Flickr photo byUnited Nations

I owe this post to Naomi Klein who explored the way that private or corporate interests "use a public's disorientation following massive collective shocks to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy" in her book "The Shock Doctrine." All should visit her website, NaomiKlein.org, and follow her updates on the aftermath in Haiti.

As I watch the images of devastation, I cannot simply consider how much damage has occurred to Haiti. I cannot cast off concerns about the plight of the Haitians and let worries about U.S. citizens visiting Haiti surpass what has happened to the Haitians with this massive earthquake either.

I cannot simply search for the best relief organization to donate to or cheer at the fact that politicians may practice bipartisanship and agree that Haiti needs this nation to help its people pull through. I must put it all together.

I must connect the poverty in Haiti to the history of the country --- how it has been subjected to colonization, exploitation, and foreign countries whose military and private interests have sought to control the country and violate the nation's right to self-determination.

In particular, I must put the focus on the U.S. and, specifically, USAID, because at the moment USAID is in the country conducting disaster relief. What does USAID hope will happen in the aftermath? What does USAID hope to gain? That's not an unreasonable question because, as you will see in my article, USAID has pursued ventures in Haiti before this earthquake.

The World Bank has agreed to give $100 million in "emergency grant funding to support recovery reconstruction in the Caribbean nation." What stipulations are attached to that? Will the World Bank only allow private interests or public-private partnerships to rebuild? Will it dole out the money to specific interests? Will they use the money as a way of oppressing the people and controlling the political or economic direction of the country? Again, you will see in my comprehensive article that the World Bank has pursued interests in Haiti before this earthquake much like USAID.

What do organizations like the Heritage Foundation, which have already signaled a readiness to take advantage of the crisis, plan to do? What will the American Enterprise Institute and other pro-private enterprise think tanks be suggesting America do in Haiti?

Americans should be concerned for Haiti but also be concerned about who and what organizations will be helping the country in the aftermath.

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE POVERTY RESPONSIBLE FOR SO MUCH DEVASTATION

Haiti is a country internationally known to be one of the poorest (if not the poorest) country in the world. Why is the damage in Haiti so catastrophic?

According to the CIA World Factbook, the GDP is 9.2 billion. The real annual income per capita is $250. The population below the poverty line is 80%. Unemployment is 70%. And, it has an external debt of $1 billion that European countries and the U.S. have used to suppress and oppress social movements in the country.

U.S. engineers suggest "lax building standards" played a role in the devastation. Buildings lacked quality control and were not built with good engineering knowledge. In many cases, nonductile concrete was used to build the building creating a "great seismic life safety hazard" because of the "collapse potential" of nonductile concrete.

High population density along with the fact that, according to the New York Times, many poor residents live in tin-roof shacks, which sit on steep ravines, also intensified the damage.

Lack of disaster preparedness also was a factor. If people were more aware of the risk, the mortality in and after an earthquake would significantly drop as it has in poor countries like Bangladesh.

News reports also connected the high damage to deforestation in Haiti. But, this wasn't the fault of the people of Haiti.

Ezili Dant????, award winning playwright, performance poet, author, human rights attorney, and political and social commentator from Haiti described how a century of theft and exploitation including deforestation has made Haiti so impoverished:

"Haiti's deforestation is due as much to the use of wood for charcoal as the soil erosion occurring right now in Haiti (because of the current destruction of Haiti's mountains) is due to digging up for cement, marble, granite, aggregate, gold and copper by the Haitians peasant for constructing their houses! Haiti's peasants could be using charcoal and raw mountain materials for construction to meet their sustainable daily needs for centuries and would not have denuded the mountains or dug them up to the extent visible today, leaving Haiti with the soil erosion it is currently experiencing and the craters that will be left when Haiti's remaining mountain ranges and natural protection have been more thoroughly exploited and mined by the transnational corporations now in Haiti. Mining Haiti's mountains for extraction of raw materials for the foreign construction industry has been steadily going on for decades in Haiti and since before the 1980s. The digging up of Haiti, for the construction industry and, to a smaller scale at present, for its mineral wealth (gold, copper...), post-Bush Regime Change/2004 coup d'etat, has intensified.

The Euro/US companies carting off Haiti's natural resources, by digging its mountains right now, and before that, by razing whole Haitian forests to the ground for lumber to meet Western profit needs, along with the destruction of Haiti's peasant economy (elimination of Haiti's indigenous black pigs and dumping of US rice that destroyed domestic agriculture) so that the peasant could not afford other fuel, are the primary reasons for the environmental degradation in Haiti."

News media in the U.S. mentioned "unstable governments" as a factor behind the significant damage. While true, the Haitian people are not responsible for this as they have been controlled and exploited by foreign countries and private interests for centuries.

A HISTORY OF U.S. INTERVENTION IN HAITI

Ever since General Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti's independence in 1804 after defeating a French Army sent by Napoleon to re-enslave those who had led the world's first successful slave revolt, the U.S. has taken actions that show suspicion and antagonism toward Haiti.

In 1806, the U.S. Congress banned trade with Haiti joining French and Spanish boycotts because of fear that the revolution in Haiti that led to the country's independence might "inspire enslaved Africans in other parts of the world to rebel."

It wasn't until nearly sixty years after the slave revolution in Haiti that the U.S. recognized Haiti's independence.

In 1915, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sent forces to Haiti to prevent Germany or France from taking control of the nation. The U.S. pressured Haiti into signing a Disadvantageous Treaty, which legitimized a U.S. occupation that lasted until 1934 and placed Haitian finances and government under U.S. control for twenty years.

According to Greg Guma, what happened in 1915 "led to the destruction of Haiti's democratic potential, the creation of a repressive police apparatus, and a climat e of exploitation, repression, and racism that set the stage for much of what followed."

Guma's explanation of what happened features Marine hero Smedley Butler. It's possible that Haiti was one instance where Butler learned firsthand that war was a racket:

"Haiti's constitution was later revised to remove a prohibition against land ownership by foreigners. US investors would henceforth be able to purchase fertile areas and go into business with plantations producing sugar cane, cacao, banana, cotton, tobacco, and sisal. This legal reform made possible the full consolidation of the Haitian oligarchy during the succeeding decades, and set the stage for a Black nationalist revolt, manipulated by the devious and brutal doctor-turned president-for-life, Francois Duvalier."

Forty thousand Haitians rebelled against a U.S.-instigated law requiring forced labor. The rebellion took over much of the northern mountainous region of Haiti. U.S. forces repressed the rebellion in March of 1919 and, for the first time ever, airplanes were used to provide support for U.S. ground forces.

Thirteen U.S. soldiers died and over 3,000 Haitians were killed.

The U.S. appointed a new U.S. representative, Louis Borno, who admired Mussolini, to be the new president and replace Sudre Dartiguenave, who would not sign an agreement to repay debts to the U.S.-owned National City Bank (Citibank), which controlled Haiti's national bank and its railroad system.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to withdraw troops in 1933. And, in 1956, Francois Duvalier won Haiti's presidential election, created a totalitarian dictatorship, declared himself president-for-life in 1964, and ruled until 1971 when he died.

Francois' heir, Jean-Claude Duvalier, ruled Haiti until 1986, when a popular uprising led him to flee the country for France. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a reformist priest, won the presidential election in Haiti with a two-thirds majority. Election turnout was high and the election was widely perceived as one of the most honest elections in Haiti's history.

But, the CIA and the U.S. would not allow Aristide to govern with popular support. They had to interfere in Aristide's plans to work to eradicate poverty.

ARISTIDE MEETS THOSE SEEKING TO CREATE A CAPITAL-FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT IN HAITI

Contrary to the story delivered by the corporate media in America, Aristide did not rig the elections in 2000. Nor did he unleash violent militias on political opponents. And, he did not bring the Haitian economy to a "point of collapse" and his people to "the brink of humanitarian catastrophe" either.

All the problems with Aristide occurred because the U.S. and free market interests refused to let Aristide prevent the "indiscriminate privatization of state resources" and stick "to his guns over wages, education and health" even though he accepted "a series of severe IMF structural adjustment plans."

On October 31, 1991, the Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People (FRAPH) overthrew the Haitian government while Aristide was on a UN visit in New York. A repressive regime ruled and massacred hundreds if not thousands of dissidents until 1994 when the U.S. led a UN intervention to put Aristide back in power. (The leader of FRAPH later admitted to being supported by the CIA.)

William Blum, author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions wrote, "the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend-because of all their rhetoric about "democracy"-that they supported Aristide's return to power in Haiti."

Blum added, "After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that he would not help the poor at the expense of the rich, and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving literally starvation wages."

The World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Organization of American States (OAS) put together a package of neoliberal reforms and managed to get Haiti to agree to it. The reforms called for the suppression of wages, reduction of tariffs, and the selling off of state-owned enterprises. The reforms were meant to "create a capital friendly macroeconomic environment for the export-manufacturing sector" and they did little for the country's rural population, which represented the activities of 65 percent of the Haitian population.

As a member of the Marin Interfaith Task Force on Central America, George Friemoth described in a Spring newsletter how the U.S. blocked a $146 million loan from the IDB:

"The loan had been approved by the IDB, signed by the Haitian government and intended for critically needed health care (AIDS), education (basic literacy) and public works (potable water and impassable roads). Last year, in order to avoid losing the contracted loan, Haiti paid $10 million on the loan it didn't receive.

The IDB loan is part of a blocked total aid package of $500 million earmarked for Haiti by international financial institutions. This is the same $500 million that the international community determined to be necessary for Haiti in 1994 when democratic rule was restored with President Aristide's return from exile. For the last eight years, the US has managed to effectively block funds to the Haitian government while permitting $70 million to flow to the Convergence and, through USAID, to NGOs that support the Convergence."

The [Democratic] Convergence, a coalition made up of roughly 200 groups, led by a former Aristide supporter and a product of a USAID program, formed. Its purpose was to "fund those sectors of the Haitian political spectrum where opposition to the Aristide government could be encouraged."

The International Republican Institute (IRI), associated with the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, provided financial support to the Convergence.

In 2000, it was reported that this organization composed of "current or former Republican Party officials, Republican officeholders, or members of Republican administrations" received about $3 million annually from Congress (and millions more from private interests in the U.S. and Haiti).

In May of 2000, the Lavalas party of President Aristide swept the parliamentary elections winning over 80 percent of all the seats. The U.S. cut off funding for presidential elections hoping to force postponement of the constitutionally mandated election. When postponement did not happen, the U.S. encouraged opposition candidates to boycott the election.

Facing mounting opposition from forces seeking to foment a coup, Aristide forced seven of the eight Haitian senators to resign and told the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) new elections would be held within six months.

In November 2000, Aristide ran unopposed in Haiti's presidential elections and won 91.5 percent of the vote. The U.S.-supported Democratic Convergence Party opted to boycott the election and claimed it was rigged instead of participating in the election. USAID commissions polls taken before and after the election indicated that many of the figures were accurate but these polls were suppressed by the U.S.

Having failed to wholly discredit Aristide and his party, from 2001 to 2004 the U.S. trained an anti-Aristide army in the Dominician Republic. The U.S. government funded and trained a paramilitary army of 600 anti-Aristide Haitians with the support of the Dominican Republic's president, Hipolito Mehia.

More than a million dollars in funds were directed to the IRI with the understanding that the funds would be used for "encouraging democracy in Haiti." The U.S. also shipped 20,000 M-16s for "the Jade Project" in 2002--a project where Dominican army people were secretly trained to fight in Haiti.

The Organization of American States (OAS), an organization that claimed it was "mediating" between the Convergence and Aristide, called for the removal of Aristide in 2003. And, a month later, five Haitian coup plotters were arrested indicating that Contra-like rebels were present (In addition to the arrest of plotters, it is found that the U.S. has stationed 900 U.S. soldiers to patrol with the Dominican army.)

By now, the U.S. had successfully convinced several European countries to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars in credit and aide and the IMF, World Bank, and the European Union had been instructed in some way or another to deny lines of credit to Haiti until Aristide reaches an agreement with the Convergence.

In February 2004, rebels take over cities in north Haiti and move toward the capital, Port-au-Prince. Led by a former death squad leader, the rebels close in and Aristide is flown out of the country or kidnapped by the U.S. at the end of February in 2004. (The U.S. immediately sends forces in to secure and stabilize the country.)

Jean Bertrand-Aristide, now exiled, maintained he was kidnapped. On March 1, 2004, Congresswoman Maxine Waters said on Democracy Now! :

"He said that he was kidnapped; he said that he was forced to leave Haiti. He said that the American embassy sent the diplomats; he referred to them as, to his home where they was lead by Mr. Moreno. And I believe that Mr. Moreno is a deputy chief of staff at the embassy in Haiti and other diplomats, and they ordered him to leave. They said you must go NOW. He said that they said that Guy Phillipe and U.S. Marines were coming to Port Au Prince; he will be killed, many Haitians will be killed, that they would not stop until they did what they wanted to do. He was there with his wife Mildred and his brother-in-law and two of his security people, and somebody from the Steel Foundation, and they're all, there's five of them that are there. They took them where-- they did stop in Antigua then they stopped at a military base, then they were in the air for hours and then they arrived at this place and they were met by five ministers of government. It's a Francophone country, they speak French. And they were then taken to this place called the Palace of the Renaissance where they are being held and they are surrounded by military people. They are not free to do whatever they want to do. Then the phone clicked off after we had talked for about five--we talked maybe fifteen minutes and then the phone clicked off. But he, some of it was muffled in the beginning, at times it was clear. But one thing that was very clear and he said it over and over again, that he was kidnapped, that the coup was completed by the Americans that they forced him out."

Guma wrote of the private interests that drove Aristide to be kidnapped:

"It was far easier to identify the economic interests at stake in 1915. In a globalized economy, those who pull Haiti's strings are more numerous, and all but invisible. By the late-90s, over 60 US corporations were doing business in Haiti, many of them well-known in the apparel and sportswear trade. The names included Wilson and Star Sportswear baseballs and softballs, Universal Manufacturing, and H.H. Cutler Co., producing goods for Disney's Babies, Fisher-Price, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League. The leading retail outlets for goods made in Haiti before and during the 1990s coup were Sears, J.C. Penney, and WalMart.

At the time, Haitian labor leaders maintained that Aristide's intention to raise the minimum wage to 50 cents an hour, up from a scandalous 14 cents, was a crucial reason for his overthrow. Even if they were wrong, the wage situation, a byproduct of the World Bank's structural adjustment program for the country, said much about the true intentions behind US intervention. As in 1915, Haiti was essentially considered an endangered investment, and so US troops were deployed again to pacify the population."

Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (and since 2004 the author of "The End of Poverty") wrote of the U.S.-backed coup:

"Aristide was enormously popular in early 2001. Hopes were high that he would deliver progress against the extraordinary poverty. Together with Dr. Paul Farmer, the legendary AIDS doctor in Haiti, I visited villages in Haiti's Central Plateau, asking people about their views of politics and Aristide.? Everybody referred to the president affectionately as "Titid." Here, clearly, was an elected leader with the backing of Haiti's poor, who constituted the bulk of the population.

When I returned to Washington, I spoke to senior officials in the IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Organization of American States. I expected to hear that these international organizations would be rushing to help Haiti.

Instead, I was shocked to learn that they would all be suspending aid, under vague "instructions" from the US. Washington, it seemed, was unwilling to release aid to Haiti because of irregularities in the 2000 legislative elections, and was insisting that Aristide make peace with the political opposition before releasing any aid.

The US position was a travesty. Aristide had been elected president in an indisputable landslide. He was, without doubt, the popularly elected leader of the country -- a claim that President George W. Bush cannot make about himself.

Nor were the results of the legislative elections in 2000 in doubt: Aristide's party had also won in a landslide.? It was claimed that Aristide's party had stolen a few seats. If true -- and the allegation remains unproved -- it would be nothing different from what has occurred in dozens of countries around the world receiving support from the IMF, World Bank, and the US itself. By any standard, Haiti's elections had marked a step forward in democracy, compared to the decades of military dictatorships that America had backed, not to mention long periods of direct US military occupation.

The more one sniffed around Washington the less America's position made sense. People in positions of responsibility in international agencies simply shrugged and mumbled that they couldn't do more to help Haiti in view of the Bush veto on aid. Moreover, by saying that aid would be frozen until Aristide and the political opposition reached an agreement, the Bush administration provided Haiti's un-elected opposition with an open-ended veto. Aristide's foes merely had to refuse to bargain in order to plunge Haiti into chaos."

Since the coup in 2004, human rights abuses have become rampant. Thomas Griffin with the Center for the Study of Human Rights of Miami University's Law School published a report documenting a "truly sickening security breakdown in Port-au-Prince with the police dominated by former Haitian army soldiers and gang warfare fomented by sinister US-supported figures like coup-instigator Andy Apaid.

If one is familiar with the contents of the report, it's not hard to understand why the Legal Director Center for Constitutional Rights, Bill Quigley, a man who has been actively pushing for human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, would like to keep their guns from being pointed at Haitians who are not the enemy.

Guns being pointed at victims has happened all too often.

PRIVATIZE OR FACE DIVINE PUNISHMENT (IS THIS WHAT PAT ROBERTSON WAS THINKING ABOUT WHEN HE DEVELOPED HIS CRAZY THEORY ON HAITI MAKING A PACT WITH THE DEVIL?)

While Haiti was hit with four tropical storms or hurricanes in 2008, killer storms in 2005 and 2004, and floods in 2007, 2006, 2003 (twice), and 2002 and while the earthquake is the fifteenth disaster that has led USAID to send money and help to Haiti, history shows how major catastrophes have been exploited by corporate or private interests.

Naomi Klein wrote about the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which had a magnitude of 9.0 at one point and produced a series of lethal tsunamis in December killing hundreds of thousands of people. The tsunamis killed people and produced significant damage in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and even had an impact in Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania.

Klein wrote a chapter on how the crisis created by the tsunami created opportunity for private interests in Sri Lanka:

"[the] significance of the event was understood immediately. The newly elected government would need billions from foreign creditors to reconstruct the homes, roads, schools, and railways destroyed in the storm--and those creditors knew well that when faced with a devastating crisis even the most committed economic nationalists suddenly become flexible."

President Chandrika Kumaratunga, according to Klein, had a kind of "religious epiphany" and believed the tsunami to possibly be "divine punishment for failing to sell off Sri Lanka's beaches and forests." She bowed to pressure from Washington lenders and created a group "made up of Sri Lanka's most powerful business executives from banking and industry" called the Task Force to Rebuild the Nation.

Instead of allowing elected leaders in government to handle reconstruction, she gave private interests a gateway they had been hoping for before the tsunami ---an opportunity to drop barriers to private land ownership, institute more "flexible" labor laws, modernize the national infrastructure, etc.

To those who remembered how the Sri Lankan people had opposed such reforms which favored private interests and engaged in militant strikes, street protests, and voted against the set of reforms favoring private interests at the polls, it may have seemed strange that there was now no real force of people standing up to the onslaught of privatization entering the country.

According to Klein, the U.S. government was very excited about the potential for high-end tourism and all the possibilities for resort chains and tour operators in Sri Lanka. USAID even launched a program "to organize the Sri Lankan tourism industry into a powerful Washington-style group."

But, most importantly, plans to let private interests take over the country existed before the tsunami. The U.S. used the crisis to let interests that had been kept out into the country:

"The grand plan to remake Sri Lanka predated the tsunami by two years. It began when the civil war ended and the usual players descended on the country to plot Sri Lanka's entry into the world economy--most prominently USAID, World Bank, and its offshoot the Asian Development Bank. A consensus emerged that Sri Lanka's most significant advantage lay in the fact that it was one of the last places left uncolonized by go-go globalization, a by-product of its long war."

Tourism Concern, a UK-based NGO, released a report detailing how private interests were keeping the people from returning to their homes:

"A record amount of promised donations and aid was raised to help the victims of 400 million in the UK. Yet, ten months after the disaster, thousands of survivors are still trying to survive in temporary camps.

Many of them are being refused permission to return home. Governments and big businesses have plans for the beaches and the plans don't include the people who used to live and work there."

Later in the report, Tourism Concern said of Thailand:

"post-tsunami reconstruction in Thailand appears on the surface to have been conducted overall in a speedy and efficient, if at times over zealous and authoritarian, manner. The government did produce Master Plans for the rebuilding of various beach resorts. However, the private sector, criticizing the government for inaction, has started to rebuild tourism amenities. Much of the rebuilding (for example on Ko Phi Phi) is theoretically illegal because laws on buffer zones and building regulations have been ignored, just as they were before the tsunami."

For more on the aftermath, read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Or, check out this page with sources on the economic shock therapy countries faced in the aftermath: Chapter 19 Blanking the Beach

"AN OPPORTUNITY TO RESHAPE HAITI'S LONG-DYSFUNCTIONAL GOVERNMENT AND ECONOMY"

While speaking to an audience in New York Wednesday night, Naomi Klein addressed the crisis in Haiti:

"We have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy--which is part natural, part unnatural--must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interest of our corporations. This is not conspiracy theory. They have done it again and again."

Postings by the Heritage Foundation indicate that those looking to further privatize Haiti and further violate the public sector in Haiti (which is already severely damaged) are lurking in the shadows and ready to find a way to sneak certain policy changes in possibly as an attachment to any disaster relief legislation Congress passes in response to the earthquake.

Klein told an audience that the Heritage Foundation published the following less than 24 hours after the earthquake:

"In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti's long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

But, it removed this revealing statement from its blog posting on what the U.S. response should be. Still, the conservative policy think tank's blog postingsuggests that:

""the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue. Congress should immediately begin work on a package of assistance, trade, and reconstruction efforts needed to put Haiti on its feet and open the way for deep and lasting democratic reforms." [emphasis added]

James M. Roberts, Research Fellow for Economic Freedom and Growth in the Center for International Trade and Economics, and Ray Walser, Ph.D., Senior Policy Analyst for Latin America in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation, wrote this in "American Leadership Necessary to Assist Haiti After Devastating Earthquake":

"Congress should immediately expand U.S. trade preferences for Haiti. The 2006 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, and an extension approved in 2008, helped to create jobs and boost apparel exports and investment by providing tariff-free access to the U.S. market. The apparel sector represents about two-thirds of Haitian exports and nearly one-tenth of Haiti's GDP.

The U.S. should also establish trade preferences for other manufactures and agriculture commodity exports from Haiti to the U.S. Benefits for both Haitian and American importers and exporters are available under the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act--which provides for duty-free export of many Haitian products assembled from U.S. components or materials--the successor program to the Caribbean Basin Initiative."

If you read this Internationalist story from on Haitians battling over starvation wages and neocolonial occupation, you might wonder what trade preferences the Heritage Foundation hopes to see expanded.

Roger F. Noriega published a response to the disaster in Haiti on the American Enterprise Institute website:

"...Before the hurricanes, flooding, mudslides, and earthquakes that have befallen Haiti in the last decade came the man-made disaster. Ineffective political institutions, a predatory state, corrupt and venal politicians, and a weak civil society have conspired to wreck Haiti's western third of the island of Hispaniola. You can literally see dysfunction from space: satellite photos of the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic show the denuded hillsides on the Haitian side of the border.¹ Muddy hills routinely swallow up Haitian hamlets because the state does not have the wherewithal or the interest to keep villagers from stripping the hillside of trees that can be burned to warm a hovel or heat an evening meal..."

Noriega's contempt for the state government in Haiti and his convenient ignorance of the reasons why political institutions may be ineffective, why the state may be predatory, why politicians may be corrupt, and why civil society may be weak should not go unchallenged. Noriega was once the U.S. permanent representative to the Organization of the American States, an organization that pushed for the removal of Aristide.

As permanent representative, he was connected to the International Republican Institute, played a role in plans in 2004 that involved the take over of cities in Haiti by rebels, had deep connections to the coup that involved Aristide being kidnapped by the U.S., and contended in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute that under Aristide the people of Haiti had "lost their democracy."

In the same speech, Noriega outlined neoliberal reforms he hoped Haiti would some day adopt:

"We will provide technical and legal aid to update Haiti's Commercial Code, which dates from the 19th century, in order to help create the right environment for growth and wealth creation. We will also encourage the Government of Haiti to move forward, at the appropriate time, with restructuring and privatization of some public sector enterprises through a transparent process."

The world can take a cue from Noriega and other outspoken individuals from think tanks and "pro-democracy" projects in America (like the Haiti Democracy project which Roger F. Noriega is connected to). The shock therapy of Haiti will most likely occur as a result of imposed political solutions and systematic discrediting and smearing of the Haitian state.

Through discrediting, smearing, and the spread of disinformation and misinformation through media, entities friendly to private interests like USAID and the World Bank will hone in on the ways Cuba and Venezuela are seeking to help Haiti in the aftermath.

U.S. interests may seek to influence the outcome of the next election in Haiti by electing more leaders who are unsympathetic toward Chavez in Venezuela or the government in Cuba.

If the U.S. succeeds in getting a better political foothold in the nation of Haiti, it could not only influence the political direction of the country, but it could also remove enterprises from state-ownership and further privatize the country.

Haiti could be a U.S. proxy that is not only a means for challenging Hugo Chavez but also an example of the kind of democracy ruled by private enterprise that U.S. interests would like to see in Venezuela, Bolivia, and other Latin American or Central American countries.

For Haitians who have suffered greatly under colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism throughout the last few centuries, one hopes that private interests do not succeed in undoing more of the public sector and influencing the Haitian government for their gain.

But, leaders in place now have been fighting off the wolves for two decades. With the recent earthquake, there is reason to fear things will get way worse before they get better unless outside relief organizations take a stand for human rights in Haiti and use that stand to keep out the corporatist vultures circling the fresh carcasses in Haiti.

Authors Bio:
Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof Press. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure." He was an editor for OpEdNews.com