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The Biden administration is considering the role that the U.S. military should play in Haiti after an alleged team of mercenaries armed raided the President of Hait’s Port-au-Prince home earlier this month and killed him.
The New York Times laid out the history of the U.S.’s relationship with the island nation and how, in the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy considered ousting François Duvalier, the despotic ruler. Kennedy decided to leave him in place and the paper pointed out that the decision led to 23 “disastrous years” in the country.
The paper then pointed out that President Bill Clinton, in an apparent effort to avoid a similar fate of Kennedy’s, intervened in the country after seeking UN approval. In 1994, he ordered the overthrow of the junta and restored democracy on the island. The troops in “Operation Uphold Democracy” were welcomed by a cheering crowd. Clinton referred to the coup as a reign of terror.
“The intervention in Haiti was a short-lived success,” James Dobbins, who then was U.S. special envoy, told the Times. “It achieved all of its objectives with no casualties within a very short timeframe. But it didn’t take hold. Haiti illustrated that these things take a long time—they don’t transform a society overnight.”
The Times pointed out that instead of having a positive role in Haitian society, the Clinton intervention probably hurt the county. The paper said, “American-pushed economic reforms flooded the country with imported food and other goods that drowned out Haitian businesses.”
There was another coup in 2004 by UN peacekeepers, but the island was hit with a devastating earthquake a few years later. Robert Fatton, a Haitian-born political scientist at the University of Virginia, told the paper that “the forces that Haitians had once greeted as saviors” became a “resented a foreign occupation, really hated.”
The paper reported that the UN peacekeepers took over law enforcement in the country, but that led to its own problems. Police officers in the country—who were essentially out of a job—turned to crime and when the peacekeepers were reassigned, there became a vacuum.
“Once they exited, it got very messy again and the gangs are even more powerful than they were,” Fatton said.
The paper pointed out that the UN force exited in 2017 and were shrouded in scandal.
President Joe Biden said Thursday that the U.S. planned to bolster its security at its embassy in the country following the unrest. The Biden administration has said it does not plan to send troops into the country.
“We’re only sending American Marines to our embassy,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “The idea of sending American forces to Haiti is not on the agenda.”
Mathias Pierre, the country’s economic minister, told the AP that Biden’s comment shows that there is a chance that the U.S. could intervene.
“This is not a closed door. The evolution of the situation will determine the outcome. In the meantime, the government is doing everything we can to stabilize the country, return to a normal environment and organize elections while trying to come through a political agreement with most political parties.”
Président Jovenel Moïse, 53, a former banana exporter who has been ruling by decree and considered illegitimate by some, was assassinated, allegedly, by a team of 28 mercenaries while inside his home in the capital city. His wife was also injured in the raid.
The media says a squad was made up of foreign mercenaries, including two American citizens and retired Colombian soldiers.
The U.S. threw its support behind the de facto prime minister Claude Joseph. He has claimed to be in charge while Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon appointed as new prime minister just days before the killing, has also claimed the role. A former cultural minister told The New York Times that it seems that nobody knows for sure who is in charge and the country’s 11 million are in a “wait-and-see and powerless position.”
The Times pointed out that even as Moïse’s popularity within the county began to diminish, the U.S. continued to show almost unconditional support—even as protests demanded his resignation in 2019. The paper pointed out that former President Trump at the time posed “cheerfully with him” in Mar-a-Lago. The paper said even the Biden administration was warned about allegations of Moïse’s “anti-democratic abuses,” but still supported his claim to power.
Current and former Washington officials told the paper that supporting Moïse was viewed by the U.S. as “the easiest way of maintaining stability in a troubled country that barely figured into the priorities of successive administrations.”
TRENDPOST: We reported in a 2019 article “HAITI: NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE” that thousands took to the streets while inflation hit 22.6 percent, and fuel shortages and prices of basic goods continued to rise as the currency was devalued.
It should also be noted that Woodrow “War Monger” Wilson, of the Harvard, Princeton, Yale – Bullets, Bombs and Banks Gang, sent U.S. Troops to invade Haiti in 1915… two years after he turned America’s monetary system over the Federal Reserve private Banksters, and two years before he dragged the U.S. into World War I.
The U.S. occupied Haiti for nearly 20 years and killed over 15,000 of its people who resisted the occupation.