http://www.corporations-suck.com/CKs/Niman/ToHaitietc.shtml------
The current situation in Haiti is heart-wrenching. Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere. This is not an accident. Haiti won its freedom in an African slave revolt, sending a chilling warning throughout the hemisphere which ultimately led to the eradication of slavery. A newly independent Haiti, stripped of its resources by over 250 years of colonial plundering, was immediately greeted by a devastating economic boycott. Haiti's former colonial ruler, France, then extracted, by military and economic force, over a century of "reparation" payments - in essence making the Haitian's "buy" their country from France for an inflated price much higher than that of the Louisiana purchase. This arrangement thrust Haiti into a cycle of debt that it is still mired in today. The French then established trade ties only with the light skinned Haitians, effectively crating a race-based caste system that also is still in place today.
Jean Bertrand Aristide, the Haitian president, is the first dark skinned man to lead Haiti, elected by a landslide in the early 1990s after Haitians suffered for 40 years under the brutal US backed Duvalier family dictatorship. Aristide, a former Catholic priest and liberation theologist, however, was quickly deposed during the Bush Senior administration in a 1991 military coup which lead to the murder of 3,000 backers of the democratic government. Aristide was restored to power during the Clinton administration in 1994 by a multinational invasion force, but at a cost - Aristide agreed to abandon land reform efforts and support structural readjustment programs dictated by the World Bank, diverting funds from domestic programs to service Haiti's perpetual foreign debt (a debt it has had since imposed by France).
After a second term, Aristide stepped down from the presidency in 1996, only to be elected again by a landslide in 2000. Aristide's concessions to the World Bank, however, caused unrest and cost him some of his political backing. Recently, he started backing away from these polices - calling for raising the minimum wage from $1.35 per day (bad news for sweatshops manufacturing Disney branded clothing) and going as far as to levy a multi-billion dollar reparations lawsuit against France. This is his real crime. If Haiti is successful in suing its former colonial oppressor in World Court, the precedent both for colonized nations and formally enslaved peoples could be earthshaking. Hence, it is no surprise that France has called for the democratically elected Aristide to step down from power.
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