MINUSTAH’s Occupation of Haiti – A Structure of Global Complicity | Global Research
Haiti under Aristide was no longer content to be the world’s
sweatshop, providing cheap labour to whomever would bring it capital.
Haitians wanted to chart a course away from the neoliberal capitalist
economic and social policy framework that would have generated mass
suffering. Aristide was responsive to the needs of Fanmi Lavalas and the
people because they put him in power, and he was acquainted with their
condition from his pastoral work as a priest.
One aim of the Aristide
government, which Sanderson’s cable refers to by innuendo, was to seek
repayment of the 90 million gold francs (now worth over $22 billion)
paid out to France between 1825 and 1947, as compensation for the
slaveholders’ loss of property in enslaved Afrikans and land resulting
from the Haitian Revolution. Aristide’s claim for compensation
infuriated France. His demand that France repay the extracted
independence ransom is widely seen as a factor that country’s role in
engineering the 2004 coup.
