Aid State
Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Haiti’s state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moise and not a single elected leader holds office, refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America, and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters, both man-made and natural, that destroyed much of Haiti’s infrastructure and institutions. How did a nation founded on liberation—a people that successfully revolted against their colonizers and enslavers—come to such a precipice?
In Aid State, Jake Johnston, a researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, reveals how long-standing US and European capitalist goals ensnared and re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it. To the global West, Haiti has always been a place where labor is cheap, politicians are compliant, and profits are to be made. Over the course of nearly 100 years, the US has sought to control Haiti and its people with occupying police, military, and euphemistically-called peacekeeping forces, as well as hand-picked leaders meant to quell uprisings and protect corporate interests. Earthquakes and hurricanes only further devastated a state already decimated by the aid industrial complex.
Based on years of on-the-ground reporting in Haiti and interviews with politicians in the US and Haiti, independent aid contractors, UN officials, and Haitians who struggle for their lives, homes, and families, Aid State is a conscience-searing book of witness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnston, a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, debuts with a powerful and disturbing examination of decades of chaos in Haiti caused by outside forces, including the U.S., the United Nations, and what he evocatively terms the "aid-industrial complex." Johnston's focus is primarily on the period between 2010 and 2021, an era bookended by two devastating earthquakes, when the country's supposed reconstruction with the help of billions of dollars in aid was sidetracked by greed and corruption. For example, after the 2010 quake, agribusiness firm Monsanto donated more than 100 tons of hybrid or genetically modified seeds, which by design supplanted crops that naturally produced seeds, thus creating a new, for-profit market for the company. Johnston lends immediacy to his account through stories of individual dispossession, such as that of the residents of Caracol, who were displaced by construction of an industrial park and never compensated or adequately rehoused. Bill Clinton, named a United Nations special envoy to the country in 2009, and his wife, Hillary, who oversaw America's Haiti policy as secretary of state, come off poorly as patronizing would-be saviors, but they have plenty of company. This cri de coeur from an expert with firsthand knowledge of what ails Haiti is a must-read.
