This might sound a strange thing to say but let’s not delude ourselves, the disaster in Haiti is largely a man-made one. And it’s down to the usual suspects:
Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums.
As one commenter notes:
Now is exactly the time to inject some realism into the discourse. I’ve been reading/listening to reports from the Western media, and they are full of revisions and distortions concerning our historical role there. ‘Haiti is a failed state,’ ‘Aristide ‘fled,’ was ‘forced out by a rebellion,’ etc., ignoring the deliberate campaign of destabilisation and coup d’etat against the democratically elected government in 2004.
Religion-free ways to donate to the relief effort:
To donate to the relief effort in a religion-free way and help counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans you can donate at SHARE or Non-Believers Giving Aid.