Latin America

Haiti:

 A natural and human-made catastrophe combine

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on January 12. But it's no accident that so much of Haitian capital Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone.

Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly human-made outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment.

Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic post-colonial oppression. The noble “international community” currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and its allies.