by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
On May 22nd, Libya 360, the core international-news site covering imperialism, headlined “Haiti: An Anatomy of Invasion”, and reported:
The US is behind the multinational military invasion and occupation of Haiti. How did we get here?
As all eyes are on the genocide in Gaza, Haiti is undergoing a full scale foreign military invasion. As of May 16th, thirty large transport planes have landed at Toussaint Louverture International Airport, unloading 835 tons of cargo and military equipment and bringing military personnel and contractors. At least one hundred more aircraft, some from the US Air Force, others leased by the US State Department, are expected to arrive in the coming days. Sections of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince are “now the outpost of an international military contingent.” The Pentagon is issuing lucrative contracts to US companies for the provision of materials and services to support the military occupation. The leader of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), in her typical patronizing and racist language, has already announced that its soldiers will take over Haiti’s ports. On twitter, journalist/US state department stenographer Jacqueline Charles posted a video of herself walking freely through the empty Toussaint Louverture airport with a contingent of US military and state department officials. It was as if Haiti was already theirs.
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And perhaps it already is. Poor Haitian people have already begun to suffer the consequences of this new invasion. For example, this build up of US military equipment and foreign personnel in the country —this slow motion foreign invasion — comes alongside the destruction of 350 to 400 homes of some of the most impoverished people in the capital city, Port-au-Prince because they are too close to the airport. Presumably, the US is insisting that destruction of property and further displacement of the Haitian poor is necessary to “secure” the airport. The goal is to destroy 90 more multi-story buildings, displacing more and more poor people.
If the scale of the invasion of Haiti is breathtaking, the sense of the invasion’s inevitability is disappointing. The media, including the aforementioned Jacqueline Charles, present it as a fait accompli, scrubbing from the record the recent history of imperial meddling and crisis that brought Haiti to this point, while conveniently forgetting the manufactured “chaos” and “anarchy” that were used to justify intervention in the first place. Just weeks ago, we should remember, Toussaint Louverture International Airport was reportedly shut down because of “gang violence.” While this “gang violence” narrative is now overshadowed by western celebration of the impending invasion, it did its work in aiding the manufacture of consent around an old, consistent, and racist trope: that Haitian people cannot rule themselves and do not deserve sovereignty. This is, perhaps, the only thing that can explain how the world has so easily accepted the US invasion of Haiti. …
What is behind this is what has always been behind the U.S. regime’s many invasions and military occupations of the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere: U.S. billionaires exploiting this offshore virtually slave labor so as to protect and preserve their profit margins.
On 12 April 2024, Opinion Juris bannered “Unfolding Haiti’s Garment Industry: Decades of Unaccountable Foreign Interference”, and Sarah Wisner reported:
In 2020, a letter written by a group of U.S. congresspeople highlighted the “particularly egregious” failure of 62 U.S. companies importing from Haiti – thanks to U.S. trade agreements – to “comply with health insurance and social security contribution requirements.” The industry also has a history of illegally firing workers who unionize – Palm Apparel S.A., a Haitian apparel manufacturing company that supplies Canadian corporation GILDAN, fired dozens of union members in 2020.
