Haiti's collapse appears to be by design

Many nations are hit by a periodic crises that tests the strength of their institutions.
Haiti is being struck by THREE crisis at once, at the same time that virtually all of their institutions have failed.

Officials have warned of “new levels of desperation” in Haiti as multiple crises have been compounded by recent protests, the looting of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid and an ongoing “siege” of a key fuel terminal.

Speaking to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on Monday, Haiti’s envoy, Helen La Lime warned that “an economic crisis, a gang crisis and a political crisis have converged into a humanitarian catastrophe”.
...
Lime said the Varreux fuel terminal in Port au Prince has been in a “state of siege” for more than a week, blocked off by criminal gangs who have dug trenches and obstructed roads with fuel containers around the site.

While the Haitian elites hold much of the blame, all three of those crisis (economic crisis, a gang crisis, political crisis) can be traced back to either the United States, or the international community.
Let's start with the political crises.
Roughly 14 months ago, Haitian President Jovenel Moise was assassinated. Because he had conspired to stay in the office long after his term had expired, and because he had denied a scheduled election from happening, very little of an elected government existed already.
That was when things got dramatically worse.

The man in charge of organizing the assassination squad, according to Haitian authorities, was a former Haitian anti-corruption official named Joseph Felix Badio, who was on the run.

But on that early September night, those undercover officers thought they knew exactly where Badio would be: at a meeting with Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, inside his official residence in the capital.
A confidential informant had told the officers that Henry would meet with Badio that night. Since the assassination, the pair had already met twice in-person, according to investigators.

PM Henry had only been appointed by Moise days before and hadn't even had a chance to take office yet before he had Moise killed.
But this was all caused by Haitians, right?
If that was the case then why did the U.S. government claim national security for blocking the investigation?

The undercover work of former U.S. government informants suspected of plotting to kill Haiti’s president has compelled Miami federal prosecutors to seal off evidence about their past activities in the interest of U.S. national security, saying the information is classified and cannot be turned over to the defense in the widening investigation, the Miami Herald reported.

We already knew that the assassination was organized in Florida, what we don't know is how much the U.S. government was involved. More than 100 organization have called on Biden to drop his support for Haiti's Prime Minister/assassin.

Most of the blame for the surge in gang violence can be placed on Haiti's ruling elites.

Powerful business families in Haiti have been paying gangs to sustain the security of their trade for them...Haitian politicians have increasingly resorted to gangs as a more reliable and obedient source of power to suppress rebellions.

But once again the U.S. is at least partially responsible. Haiti is still subject to a 1990s arms embargo, but that hasn't stopped a spike in illegal high-caliber weapon shipments coming from America. The gangs are now better armed than the police.

There, the gang members have been destroying slum homes with bulldozers to expand their territory, as well as raping women and girls, and killing ordinary citizens at random.

Back in June, a gang known as “5 Seconds” took control of Port-Au-Prince’s Palace of Justice for over a week.
Haiti has reconstituted a small army, which has engaged in pitched battles with the gangs in the streets, but all is not what it seems.

What appears to be state resistance is often a show intended to mask that many of the gangs are collaborating with the government.
“Any skirmishes are symbolic. The reason the gangs are being allowed to proliferate is because elections are coming up,” she said.

Well, surely the riots of the past week can't be blamed on anyone but the Haitians, right?
Once again, the answer is different than what you might expect.

Over the last decade, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations’ International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank have all urged poor nations to stop subsidizing fossil fuels. “End fossil fuel subsidies and reset the economy for a better world,” read the headline of a June 2020 WEF article about the launch of its “Great Reset” initiative.
Last week, the government of the small Caribbean island of Haiti took the advice of the IMF, WEF, and World Bank and announced the end of fuel subsidies. The result has been riots, looting, and chaos. A powerful gang leader used public outrage at the announcement to block a port and organize the overthrow of the government. Looters stormed warehouses, making off with food aid. Rioters burned down beach houses and businesses. And several European embassies shut down to protect their staff.

The price of gasoline went up by 128%. Diesel went up by 189.80% overnight. Even before the spike in fuel prices inflation was a problem.
Inflation in Haiti was over 30%. The price of food has increased by 52%, with the cost of rice more then quadrupling. Obviously the billionaires at the World Economic Forum didn't bother to consider the consequences of their policies for the impoverished and starving Haitians.
About 60% of Haitians live in poverty, with nearly half the population in immediate need of food assistance and 1.2 million suffering from extreme hunger.

The fact that Haiti can't feed itself must be the blame of the Haitians, right? Wrong.
As recently as 1985, Haiti was self-sufficient for food. But then USAID and the IMF imposed sweeping economic reforms, such as lowering of tariffs on agricultural products and the elimination of import quotas that undercut domestic food production. The result was that thousands upon thousands of farmers lost their land. Haiti went from importing less than 5 percent of the rice it consumed – 7,337 tons – from the United States in 1985, to more than 35 times that amount in 2005. Haiti which once grew enough rice to feed itself was now importing 80% of it from abroad.
And then things got much worse when the Clinton's got involved after the 2010 earthquake. USAid, which hadn't constructed a port anywhere in the world since the 1970's, decided to build the park and port near Cap-Haïtien.

“Land was readily available in the north,” and the “hundreds of small farmers who had to be moved” to make way for the park and port “were far less resistant than the wealthy landowners in the capital,” Johnston wrote in 2014.

366 families were evicted from their land to make this port, which was never completed.
About six weeks ago the U.S.-led Organization of America States (OAS) finally admitted it's culpability in destroying Haiti.

“The institutional crisis that Haiti is experiencing right now is a direct result of the actions taken by the country’s endogenous forces and by the international community,” reads the first paragraph of the statement from the organization’s General Secretariat. Then, dropping the idea of those “endogenous forces” entirely, here’s the second paragraph: “The last 20 years of the international community’s presence in Haiti has amounted to one of the worst and clearest failures implemented and executed within the framework of any international cooperation.”

While corruption by Haiti's elites is a leading cause of this misery, and incompetence in the international community is certainly part of the equation. You can't help but wonder if so many things going wrong in the same way wasn't just part of a plan.

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Cassiodorus's picture

... so that people (read Homo Economicus) will voluntarily choose to buy alternative energy instead. Marginal propensity to consume, y'know.

The result has been riots, looting, and chaos. A powerful gang leader used public outrage at the announcement to block a port and organize the overthrow of the government. Looters stormed warehouses, making off with food aid. Rioters burned down beach houses and businesses. And several European embassies shut down to protect their staff.

Oh, right.

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay

in the same paragraph, you tend to see vultures on the wings.

Vulture.jpg

Throw in OAS, USAID and the Clinton Foundation, and the aid evaporates ...

By January 2019, nine years after the earthquake, USAid had spent $2.3bn in Haiti. Most of it was given to American companies and hardly any passed through Haitian hands. Less than 3% of that spending went directly to Haitian organisations or firms, according to research by CEPR. In contrast, 55% of the money went to American companies located in and around Washington DC. Most likely, according to the research, the majority of what USAid allegedly spent on Haiti’s recovery ended right back in the US.

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when the Clintons got involved..."

Boy, where have we heard that before.

I'm starting to think some of this destruction is engineered - WEF elite types probably have prime areas pegged for idyllic (and well-secured) enclaves. Once they clear out the bulk of the scruffy natives (need to keep some around for domestics and local color, though). After all, Hispaniola was pretty paradisiacal when Columbus showed up.

Maybe something similar planned for Puerto Rico? That would explain a lot...

Good deepish dive from Dinesh D'Souza circa 2016 about the Clinton Global Initiative and Haiti.

Just the usual - big $$ for the CGI, fat quid pro quo contracts for big donors, shafted locals, land grabs, unbuilt schools, unbuilt (and/or unlivable) housing, telecom scams, dead investigators...

https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/how-clinton-foundation-got-rich-p...

(excerpted from D’Souza’s book, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)

https://caucus99percent.com/content/reporter-investigating-sex-trafficki...
(Shout out to Bondibox)

Despite the demands of making the world safe for industrial scale grifting, the Clintons manage to take time out to bail out human traffickers.

https://thewashingtonstandard.com/the-clintons-laura-silsby-haiti-amber-...

Now is that inspirational or what?

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