Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 43
JB: It's like a particular kind of sort of Victorian schooling that the international community is
intent on pretend-providing for Haiti. It's it struck me for a long time now that it actually is the
very apparatus of aid which encourages which almost necessitates looking at Haitians as
sort of subhuman, or less than human, which then propagates the systems which allow the
abuse to take place, because actually those the peacekeepers and the aid workers actually
end up existing in a parallel context to Haitians.
MA: Absolutely. I mean you can see right after the earthquake in 2010 that essentially
created a middle class that was made-up of expats and NGO workers here in Haiti. You had
the Haitian government and the bourgeoisie class and then you had the pepla which is the
predominant population of Haiti and then somewhere in the middle you had this weird
formation of
expats and NGO workers that were riding around in their air conditioned cars
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that are feeding into the local economy but not necessarily at a local level. They're the ones
that are going to restaurants and they're the ones that are using the hotels and they're the
ones that are paying to go swim or pay to be at the beach and in some ways that's excellent
because it helps generate the economy but the problem is they're perpetuating a cycle
where many graffiti artists have depicted Haitians looking into the mirror and in the mirror is
a dog.
Haiti is a country full of minerals: gold; uranium; coal you name it they have it here. and that
was initially what started the occupation in 1915 by the US banks that are now known as
Citibank. This global bank originating in the US actually went to the US government and said
