EXPLAINER: Haiti’s Troubled History of Foreign Interventions

Key Points:

• Haiti is in crisis with gangs carrying out coordinated attacks, causing chaos and insecurity.
• The country is facing a humanitarian crisis, with extreme poverty and no effective leadership.
• Foreign interventions, including U.S. and U.N. occupations, have not improved the situation in Haiti.

If you’ve been paying even a little attention to the news, you probably know Haiti is in Crisis.  The world’s first Black Republic is nearly a failed state.  

Over the past month, Haiti’s gangs have carried out a series of coordinated attacks on prisons and police stations, breaking more than 3,800 criminals out of Haiti’s two biggest jails, while also laying siege to the country’s port and airport.

The airports are shut down, making it hard to get out or to get in, for anyone who dared to come. 

Haiti was already facing a humanitarian crisis. It is among the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, with 90% of the population living below the poverty line.

Current president Ariel Henry came to power in 2021 under a deal — not an election —  with the opposition following the assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse. Henry is widely considered illegitimate by the Haitian public and has left the country, leaving no one in charge.  

The country last went to the polls in 2016 and there is no timetable for new elections. Over the past six years, the Haitian parliament has ground to a halt: no major laws have been passed and only one budget was voted on.

History of Foreign Interventions

Since the early 1900s, there have been at least three major foreign military interventions in Haiti led by the United States and the United Nations.

The U.S. first occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Nearly 60 years later, the U.N. launched a peacekeeping mission in 1993, followed by the arrival of U.S. troops in 1994. Another intervention occurred in 2004. The first of those was to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. The second followed a rebellion that removed him again.

What Led to the Interventions?

The interventions came at moments of great political instability.

Seven Haitian presidents were ousted or killed from 1911 to 1915, prompting U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to send U.S marines to Haiti in 1914. The U.S. removed half a million dollars from the Haitian National Bank for alleged safekeeping in New York. A formal U.S. occupation began in July 1915 and lasted until August 1934.

In September 1994, the U.S. sent more than 20,000 troops and two aircraft carriers to Haiti as part of an operation dubbed “Restore Democracy” under President Bill Clinton. The aim was to restore to power Aristide, who had been ousted in a 1991 military coup. Aristide had become Haiti’s first democratically elected president the year before. A smaller contingent of U.S. troops remained in Haiti until early 2000, often under U.N. auspices.

A parallel United Nations peacekeeping effort was launched in September 1993 and ran until 2000.

Aristide was overthrown again in February 2004 in a rebellion originally launched by a street gang. The U.S., which had pushed him to resign, flew Aristide out of the country and sent troops — as did Canada, France and Chile. They were soon replaced by troops of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which stayed until 2017.

What Impact Have Foreign Interventions Had on Haiti?

Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia, said that overall, “The occupations didn’t really improve anything in Haiti.”

He said the 1915-1934 occupation created a unified Haitian military, which was the country’s dominant force until the dictatorial regime of François Duvalier and later his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, from 1957 to 1986, who replaced the military with a private and personal militia called the “Tonton Macoutes”.

The Macoutes consisted of illiterate fanatics-turned-reckless gunmen acting as a paramilitary force. They were not accountable to any state body or court and were fully empowered to dispose of the paranoid president’s enemies.

The group was dismantled in 1986, but gangs have been involved in massacres, attacks on labor strikes or peasant uprisings, and politically motivated assassinations ever since. 

The occupation also established a type of unpaid forced labor known as “corvée” in which U.S. officials used Haitian peasants to build roads, railroads and other infrastructure.

“The occupation was very coercive,” Fatton said. “It was also very centralizing and … very racist.”

He said the second intervention in 1994 was more popular because it helped restore the charismatic Aristide, a former priest who once served poor communities.

The invasion led to the creation of Haiti’s National Police, which effectively replaced the Haitian Army that was disbanded in 1995, though many police officers were former soldiers.

However, there were two failed coup attempts during that occupation and deepening political chaos.

The U.N.’s 2004-2017 peacekeeping mission was marred by allegations of sexual assault by its troops and staffers and the fact that peacekeepers from Nepal were blamed for introducing cholera into Haiti’s largest river in October 2010 by sewage runoff from their base. The U.N. has since acknowledged it played a role in the epidemic and that it had not done enough to help fight it, but it has not specifically acknowledged it introduced the disease.

Fatton said that while the U.N. mission “established a modicum of order,” in Haiti, it was a “very repressive organization.”

“To destroy gangs, they used forceful means. That left a very bad taste with poor Haitians,” he said, noting that they live side-by-side with gangs in slums. “Whether you’re with the gangs or not, you suffered the consequences.”