Last Straw

Can­cel Haiti’s Debt peti­tion — Oxfam International

Alex von Tun­zel­mann, writ­ing for The Times, explains how Haiti became so indebted in the first place:

The appalling state of the coun­try is a dir­ect res­ult of hav­ing offen­ded a quite dif­fer­ent celes­tial author­ity — the French. France gained the west­ern third of the island of His­pa­ni­ola — the ter­rit­ory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and cof­fee, sup­por­ted by an unpre­ced­en­ted increase in the import­a­tion of African slaves. Eco­nom­ic­ally, the res­ult was a suc­cess, but life as a slave was intol­er­able. Liv­ing con­di­tions were squalid, dis­ease was rife, and beat­ings and abuses were uni­ver­sal. The slaves’ life expect­ancy was 21 years. After a dra­matic slave upris­ing that shook the west­ern world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared inde­pend­ence. But France deman­ded repar­a­tions: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not sig­nify the begin­ning of free­dom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged coun­try could afford. Haiti was the only coun­try in which the ex-slaves them­selves were expec­ted to pay a for­eign gov­ern­ment for their liberty. By 1900, it was spend­ing 80% of its national budget on repay­ments. In order to man­age the ori­ginal repar­a­tions, fur­ther loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Ger­many and France. Instead of devel­op­ing its poten­tial, this deformed state pro­duced a parade of nefar­i­ous lead­ers, most of whom gave up the insur­mount­able task of try­ing to fix the coun­try and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the ori­ginal repar­a­tions, plus interest. Doing so left it des­ti­tute, cor­rupt, dis­astrously lack­ing in invest­ment and polit­ic­ally volat­ile. Haiti was trapped in a down­ward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hope­lessly in debt to this day.