How Washington’s Plot Against Haiti Worsened The Earthquake Disaster

The American mainstream media is covering the Haitian earthquake as it always covers natural disasters: by showing graphic footage of wreckage and issuing plaintive calls for donations to aid agencies without any scintilla of political analysis. There is no other phrase for this style of coverage but disaster porn.

Those who have taken even a cursory interest in Haiti know there has been a longstanding campaign by Washington going back to the US Marine occupation that began in 1915 to control the country’s government and maintain it as an outpost for American corporate interests. Of course, the earthquake can’t be blamed on the so-called Washington consensus. However, the Haitian government’s inability to mount even a band-aid relief effort, combined with the fact that the decimated rural economy has overwhelmed Port-au-Prince with new residents, placing enormous stress on its already inadequate infrastructure and leading to the mass casualties we are witnessing, are factors directly linked to American meddling.

In 2004, when the national press corps failed to report the American hand in the coup that overthrew Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, I embarked on a long and exhaustive investigative report on role of right-wing operatives in Washington and Haiti in toppling the government. My report, which I just discussed on the Thom Hartmann Show, is also the story of how lawmakers in Washington — including President Bill Clinton, who forced Aristide to sign free trade agreements that would destroy the rural economy as the condition for returning him to power — undermined Haiti’s capacity to support a viable governing structure. Not surprisingly, we are seeing the corporate sweatshop owners that Clinton and others had posited as the future stewards of Haiti’s economy fire their employees en masse and flee the country for safer environs instead of helping out.

Below the fold I have reprinted my piece for Salon.com, “The Other Regime Change” (which the NY Times’ Walt Bogdanovich basically plagiarized), in full. A transcript of my Democracy Now discussion of the right-wing plot against Haiti is here.

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