The
New York Times
sought to place the proper spin on the February 4 decision to advance the anti-Aristide scenario and benefit US businesses. Under the headline “U.S. Plans to Sharpen Focus of Its Sanctions Against Haiti,” Barbara Crossette reported from Washington that “The Bush Administration said today that it would modify its embargo against Haiti's military Government to punish anti-democratic forces and ease the plight of workers who lost jobs because of the ban on trade.” The State Department would be “fine tuning” its economic sanctions, the “latest move” in Administration efforts to find “more effective ways to hasten the collapse of what the Administration calls an illegal Government in Haiti.” The naive may find the logic a bit obscure: how the move punishes the anti-democratic forces who applauded it, while easing the plight of workers who strenuously opposed it, is left a mystery. Until we translate from PC to English, that is. Then all is clear.
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A more straightforward account appeared a few days later in a report from Port-au-Prince under the heading: “Democracy Push in Haiti Blunted: Leaders of Coup Gleeful After U.S. Loosens Its Embargo and Returns Refugees.” Howard French writes that “the mood in army and political circles began to turn from anxiety to confidence that the United States,
feeling no particular domestic pressure now from Haiti's problems
, would leave them in peace.” The same day, the anniversary of Aristide's inauguration, New York traffic was tied up by a large protest march against the US actions, as in Miami. That is not what is meant by “domestic pressure,” however; mostly black, the protestors merited little noticeâthough the actions were reported in the Alaska press, where one could also read the statement by Haiti's consul general in New York, who said “There is a tacit collaboration between the Haitian military and the State Department. The Americans will have the last word. And the Americans don't want Aristide's return.”
Time
quoted a “disillusioned Republican congressional staffer” who said, “The White House is banking on the fact that people won't care. Politics, not principle, is the overriding consideration.”
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That much seems beyond dispute. For those who choose to hear, the italicized words tell the story that is solidly based on two centuries of history. Without popular support here, Toussaint's tree of liberty will remain deeply buried, at best a dreamânot in Haiti alone.
Chapter 9
The Burden of Responsibility
1. Irrational Disdain
As the US proceeded to “assume, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system” after World War II, it also extended the “experiments in pragmatism” that it had been conducting in its narrower domains to “accelerate the process of national growth and save much waste” (Gerald Haines, Ulysses Weatherby). One striking feature of the “scientific methods of development” designed for our wards is what Hans Schmidt calls the “irrational disdain for the agricultural experience of local peasants.” This was the source of “a series of disastrous failures” as US experts attempted to apply “the latest developments in scientific agriculture” to their Haitian testing areaâas always, sincerely believing that they were doing good while (by the sheerest accident) benefiting US corporations. A 1929 study found that “Haitian peasants were growing cotton more successfully than American plantations which employed the latest scientific methods,” Schmidt observes. The chief US agricultural expert reported to the State Department that US ventures “had failed because promoters had been unwilling to study the techniques employed by local people who had, through generations of practical experience, developed locally viable methods,” which enabled the natives to raise cotton more successfully than the plantations that were “scientifically cultivated.”
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The story continued after the government was handed over to Haitian overseers. In 1941, the Haitian-American Company for Agricultural Development (SHADA) was set up as an aid project under the guidance of US agronomists, who dismissed the advice and protests of Haitian experts with the usual contempt. With millions of dollars of US government credits, SHADA undertook to raise sisal and rubber, needed at the time for war purposes. The project acquired 5 percent of Haiti's finest agricultural lands, expelling 40,000 peasant families, who, if lucky, might be rehired as day laborers. After four years of production, the project harvested a laughable five tons of rubber. It was then abandoned, in part because the market was gone. Some peasants returned to their former lands, but were unable to resume cultivation because the land had been ruined by the SHADA project. Many could not even find their own fields after trees, hills and bushes had been bulldozed away.
“Haitian objections to U.S. aid projects sound paranoid,” Amy Wilentz remarks after reviewing this not untypical instance.
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Sometimes, however, there really is a man with an ax chasing the fellow with the irksome complaint.
In 1978, US experts became concerned that swine fever in the Dominican Republic might threaten the US pig industry. The US initiated a $23 million extermination and restocking program aimed at replacing all of the 1.3 million pigs in Haiti, which were among the peasants' most important possessions, even considered a “bank account” in case of need. Though some Haitian pigs had been found to be infected, few had died, possibly because of their remarkable disease-resistance, some veterinary experts felt. Peasants were skeptical, speculating that the affair had been staged so that “Americans could make money selling their pigs.” The program was initiated in 1982, well after traces of disease had disappeared. Two years later, there were no pigs in Haiti.
Peasants regarded this as “the very last thing left in the possible punishments that have afflicted us.” A Haitian economist described the enterprise as “the worst calamity to ever befall the peasant,” even apart from the $600 million value of the destroyed livestock: “The real loss to the peasant is incalculable... [The peasant economy] is reeling from the impact of being without pigs. A whole way of life has been destroyed in this survival economy.” School registration dropped 40-50 percent and sales of merchandise plummeted, as the marginal economy collapsed. A USAID-OAS program then sent pigs from Iowaâfor many peasants, confirming their suspicions. These were, however, to be made available only to peasants who could show that they had the capital necessary to feed the new arrivals and to house them according to specifications. Unlike the native Haitian pigs, the Iowa replacements often succumbed to disease, and could survive only on expensive feed, at a cost that ran up to $250 a year, a huge sum for impoverished peasants. One predictable result was new fortunes for the Duvalier clique and their successors who gained control of the feed market. A Church-based Haitian development program that had sought to deal with the problems abandoned the effort as “a waste of time.” “These pigs will never become acclimated to Haiti...Next they'll ask us to install a generator and air conditioning.”
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Other experiments have often turned out the same way. In his study of another long-time “testing area,” Liberia, anthropologist Gordon Thomasson found the same “irrational disdain” for native intellectual achievement, and the same severe costsâfor the locals. Over the centuries, the Kpelle had developed hundreds of varieties of rice that were matched precisely to microenvironments in particular ecosystems; dozens of different seeds might be planted in a small field, with very high yields. US agronomists advised capital-intensive “green revolution” techniques using petrochemical inputs which, apart from being far too costly for a poor country, bring lower yields and loss of the traditional knowledge and the wide variety of seeds that have been bred, selected, diversified, and maintained over centuries. Thomasson estimates that agricultural productivity will be cut by as much as 50 percent if the rich genetic pool of rice varieties, “the product of centuries of self-conscious breeding and selection,” is lost and replaced by foreign inputs: “many areas of rural Liberia will for all intents and purposes cease to exist, and so will many of Liberia's indigenous cultures.”
The disdain of the experts was heightened by the fact that this is “women's knowledge,” transmitted by older women to young girls who spent much time acquiring the skills and lore. The same attitudes extend more broadly. Max Allen, curator of one of the world's leading textile museums, observes that “In most Northern-hemisphere traditional societies, the most impressive man-made artifacts are not made by men at all, but by women,” namely textile products, which “are certainly
artistic
,” though not regarded as “art” by Western tradition. They are assigned to the category of crafts, not art. The fact that the artistic traditions extending over thousands of years are “women's work,” may contribute to these dubious interpretations, Allen suggests.
4
The “suspicious” will not fail to observe that, however ruinous to Liberia, the “scientific methods of development” offer many benefits to the western corporate sector, perhaps well beyond the usual beneficiaries, agribusiness and petrochemicals. As the variety of crops is reduced, and disease and blight become an increasing threat, genetic engineering may have to come to the rescue with artificially designed crops, offering the rising biotech industries alluring prospects for growth and profit
Following standard doctrine, US experts advised Liberia to convert farmland to plantation cash crops (which, incidentally, also happens to benefit US corporations). The resulting shortfalls led USAID to push the development of paddy rice in swamps, ignoring a World Health Organization effort to keep people out of these regions because of extreme health hazards.
The Kpelle had also developed sophisticated metallurgical technology, enabling them to produce highly efficient tools. In this case, Thomasson writes, their achievements were “killed by colonialism and monopoly capitalism, not because the product it produced was in any way inferior or overpriced in the marketplace,” but by means of subsidies to coastal merchants and other market distortions designed by the economic experts and imposed by the US-controlled govemments, “eventually destroying the economy, currency, and indigenous industry.” Again, there were beneficiaries: multinational mining concessions, foreign producers who supplied the importers, and banks outside Liberia to which they ship their profits.
5
Chalk up another victory for “free market” values.
Some might consider it unfair to take Liberia and Haiti as illustrations. As Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing explained:
The experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course, there are many exceptions to this racial weakness, but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the negro problem practically unsolvable.
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Perhaps it is this racial weakness that accounts for the results of the experiments in Liberia and Haitiâwhich are duplicated throughout the subject domains.
These regular features of the 500-year conquest will have growing significance in the years ahead as the ecological consequences of unsustainable capital-intensive agriculture reach a scale that cannot be neglected even by the rich. At that point, they will enter the agenda, like the ozone layer, which became “important” when it seemed likely to endanger rich white folk. Meanwhile, the experiments will continue in the testing areas.
2. Laboratory Animals
The concept “testing area” merits particular notice. Similarly, “American strategists have described the civil war in El Salvador as the âideal testing ground' for implementing low-intensity conflict doctrine” (a.k.a. international terrorism), a DOD-sponsored RAND Corporation report on the experiment concludes. In earlier days, Vietnam was described as “a going laboratory where we see subversive insurgency...being applied in all its forms” (Maxwell Taylor), providing opportunities for “experiments with population and resource control methods” and “nation building.” The Marine occupation of Haiti was described in similar terms, as we have seen. The technical posturing appears to sustain the self-image, at least.
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One finds no intimation that the experimental subjects might have the right to sign consent forms, or even to know what is happening to them. On the contrary, they scarcely have the rights of laboratory animals.
We
will determine what is best for them, as we always have; another hallmark of the 500 years.
The wise among us just
know
, for example, that maximizing consumption is a core human value: “If we weren't influencing the world” in this direction, “it would be someone else because what we are seeing everywhere is an expression of the basic human desire to consume,” Boston University professor of management Lawrence Wortzel explains. US entrepreneurs are fortunate indeed to be so in tune with human nature. True, slow learners sometimes have to be helped to understand their true nature. The advertising industry devotes billions of dollars to stimulating this self-awareness, and in the early days of the industrial revolution, it was no small problem to bring independent farmers to realize that they wished to be tools of production so as to be able to gratify their “basic human desire to consume.” The very “visible hand” of government has also helped. As radio was becoming a major medium, the Federal Radio Commission “equated capitalist broadcasting with âgeneral public service' broadcasting” since it would provide whatever “the market desired,” Robert McChesney writes, while attempts by labor, other popular sectors, or educational programming were deemed “propaganda.” It was therefore necessary “to favor the capitalist broadcasters” with access to channels and other assistance.
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