Battered after the debacle and withdrawal from Afghanistan, the US imperialist tentacles are rising again and this time the target is - Haiti. Haiti, a small Caribbean nation near the US, had been at the forefront of facing the brutal brunt of the Monroe Doctrine, which considers countries in Latin America and the Caribbean as a playground for US imperialism. The US intervention in Haiti that started in 1905 with the military occupation of the country continue even today through various overt and covert means.
Currently, Haitian capital and many areas are in the grip of gang-related violence. The violence in Haiti is on the rise since the assassination of the US-backed President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, with his interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry becoming the interim President. The violence, which the CORE Group (composed of the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General, the Ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union, the USA, and the Special Representative of the OAS) would like to project as lack of democratic understanding in the country, is in fact the product of years of throttling democratic aspirations of the people by the criminal-oligarchy nexus backed by the Core Group itself.
The US-Core Group now wants to ‘send democracy’ in Haiti through funding, electoral meddling and rehashing the horrors of military intervention in the country. In fact, today the Caribbean nation is the largest subject to foreign actors’ constant self-insertion into internal matters. It was the same US-Core Group that helped in ousting democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the 2004 coup by right-wing ex-army paramilitary units, which invaded the country from across the Dominican border.
Anti-IMF and anti-austerity protests have been taking shape of popular uprising in Haiti since 2019 as international institutions like IMF, World Bank and USAID accelerated attempts to restructure and realign the country's economic system in favour of the US economic agenda in the region. When Moïse government implemented IMF demanded fuel price hike with a 38 per cent increase in 2019, massive protests forced him to revoke the move.
Any US-Core group backed intervention in Haiti will further deteriorate the political situation in the country. The political crisis in Haiti is the product of consistent foreign interference that has kept the country mired in poverty. As nation that broke shackles of slavery and French colonialism around the period US became independent, the people of Haiti can chart their own future.
