The assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse on Wednesday was the first slaying of a Haitian leader in more than a century. But the scripts that dominate interpretations of Haitian politics, with its cycles of political upheaval abetted by foreign actors, can seem relatively unchanged over time.
Often lost in this narrative are the root causes of the alienation of the Haitian people from their government. Over and over, the Haitian state and its manipulators have failed to support the democratic aspirations of its people, who have faced mutating but ever-present obstacles in their efforts to create a life based on principles of freedom, dignity and true sovereignty.
The convergence of forces that have shaped Haiti’s history came together in July 1915, when Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed in Port-au-Prince by a crowd infuriated by the executions of political prisoners. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson immediately ordered the deployment of the Marine Corps under the guise of reestablishing order. In reality, a U.S. occupation had been in the works for some time, and what was supposed to be a short-term mission lasted 19 years.
Then came the reign of François Duvalier in 1957; trained in U.S. schools, he constructed a powerful and brutal dictatorship. He received U.S. support for much of his tenure, as did his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier. President Bill Clinton ordered troops into Haiti in 1994 to restore deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and in 2006, a United Nations military force arrived and stayed for 15 years.
In the 1970s, a group of Haitian novelists living and writing under the Duvalier regime coined the term “spiralism” to describe how they thought it necessary to tell their country’s story. A spiral is a repetition with a difference, and it captures how the cycles of Haitian political history can sometimes feel.
In Haiti, the state has always seemed fundamentally at odds with the people. Having carried out a successful anti-slavery revolution in the 1790s and winning independence from France in 1804, the Haitian population created a set of egalitarian and community-oriented social and cultural forms in the countryside. Sociologist Jean Casimir calls this a “counter-plantation system” — the antithesis of mass-production plantations that exploit workers and grow crops for export. The local system is built around family and community ownership and cultivation of plots of land to produce food for local consumption and national and international markets. The system was driven by a sense that Haiti’s freedom was precarious and had to be defended continually against foreign and national elite interests. Urban areas, which saw an influx of residents over the course of the 20th century, also formed populist organizations that have repeatedly challenged the political and business elite to address their basic needs, including jobs, better housing and educational opportunities.