/edu/ - Education

Nobody ever talks about this, but the United States was in Haiti for longer than it was in Vietnam. July 28, 1915 – August 1, 1934 (19 years and 4 days). During the US occupation of Haiti, two major rebellions against the occupation occurred, resulting in several thousand Haitians killed, and numerous human rights violations – including torture and summary executions – by Marines and the Gendarmerie of Haiti. A corvée system of forced labor was used by the United States for infrastructure projects, that resulted in hundreds to thousands of deaths. Under the occupation, most Haitians continued to live in poverty, while American personnel were well-compensated. Death estimates have a high range, and I think the uncertainty of the statistics betrays how little Haitian lives were valued by the (mostly white) US marines, who frequently wrote letters home describing the Haitians as subhuman.

>3,250–15,000 Haitian deaths
>Hundreds to 5,500 forced labor deaths
>National bank of Haiti and its gold seized by US authorities

<"Military camps have been built throughout the island. The property of natives has been taken for military use. Haitians carrying a gun were for a time shot on sight. Machine guns have been turned on crowds of unarmed natives, and United States Marines have, by accounts which several of them gave me in casual conversation, not troubled to investigate how many were killed or wounded."
<NAACP executive secretary Herbert J. Seligman wrote in the July 10, 1920, The Nation

The United States introduced Jim Crow laws to Haiti with racist attitudes towards the Haitian people by the American occupation forces that were blatant and widespread. Many of the Marines chosen to occupy Haiti were from the Southern United States, specifically Alabama and Louisiana, often the grandchildren of confederate veterans, resulting in increased racial tensions. Racism has been recognized as a factor leading to increased violence by American troops against Haitians. One general described Haitians as "n***ers who pretend to speak French".

The torture of Haitian rebels or those suspected of rebelling against the United States was common among occupying Marines. Some methods of torture included forcing prisoners to drink large quantities of water in a short period of time, leading to gastric distension, water intoxication, and possibly death, hanging prisoners by their genitals, and "ceps," which involved pushing both sides of the tibia with the butts of two guns.

The Americans used the now-familiar "counter-insurgency" "tactics" of treating everyone in the country as guilty by association with armed rebels, failing to treat the inhabitants of the country as human beings, killing and burning down towns and villages indiscriminately, deforesting and destroying agriculture, poisoning water.

When Charglemagne Peralte, the rebel leader was killed, the marines stripped his body naked, desecrated it, took photos of it, and dropped printed photos from their airplanes all over Haiti to discourage further insurgency. However, it had the opposite effect, with the image's resemblance to a crucifixion making it an icon of the resistance and establishing Péralte as a martyr.

Woodrow Wilson forced the re-writing of the Haitian constitution so that foreigners were allowed to own private property. This opened the floodgates for the American capitalist plunder of Haiti.

Comprador leader Louis Borno took out more loans from the US to cover Haiti's debt, which was already equal to many years of government budget, debt which Haiti was already in for over a century by that point because France forced indemnity on them through gunboat diplomacy for the crime of… slave rebellion and declaring independence…

The US-backed Borno regime oversaw the use of forced labor to expand the economy and to complete infrastructure projects, which were used to reintroduce large sugar plantations to the island, for the purposes of turning Haiti into a cheap export economy for US consumers.

Many Haitians fled Haiti for the Dominican republic and Cuba only to find US marines were also occupying those places at the time. They had no way to escape.

In 1929 the US marines massacred Haitian protesters during a general strike.


>burger general
please, no, this is about burger imperialism in Haiti.