RepulsiveNumberOPMOD無•

This is an article about the coup in Haiti — the coup of Aristide in 2004. This is "old news," but the article is worth reading still. Some "money quotes":

Extension of this destitution to the country as a whole was guaranteed by the isolation of its ruined economy in the decades following independence. Restoration France only re-established the trade and diplomatic relations essential to the new country’s survival after Haiti agreed, in 1825, to pay its old colonial master a ‘compensation’ of some 150 million francs for the loss of its slaves—an amount roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, or around ten years’ worth of total revenue in Haiti—and to grant punishing commercial discounts. With its economy still shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could only begin paying this debt by borrowing, at extortionate rates of interest, 24 million francs from private French banks. Though the French demand was eventually cut from 150 to 90 million francs, by the end of the nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France consumed around 80 per cent of the national budget; France received the last instalment in 1947. Haitians have thus had to pay their original oppressors three times over—through the slaves’ initial labour, through compensation for the French loss of this labour, and then in interest on the payment of this compensation. No other single factor played so important a role in establishing Haiti as a systematically indebted country, the condition which in turn ‘justified’ a long and debilitating series of appropriations-by-gunboat.

Naturally, the IMF plays an important role in this story, and it's about what you'd expect:

Predictably, the IMF cure for Haiti’s desperate poverty involved further reductions in wages that had already sunk to starvation levels, privatization of the state sector, reorientation of domestic production in favour of cash crops popular in North American supermarkets and the elimination of import tariffs. It was the last of these, easiest to implement, that had the most immediate impact. With the tariff on rice cut from 50 per cent to the imf-decreed 3 per cent, Haiti—previously self-sufficient in the crop—was flooded with subsidized American grain, and rice imports rose from just 7,000 tonnes in 1985 to 220,000 tonnes in 2002. Domestic rice production has all but disappeared. A similar sequence eliminated Haiti’s poultry sector, at the cost of around 10,000 jobs. Haitian farmers tend to associate these developments with the most bitterly resented of all the international community’s many aggressive interventions in their domestic economy—the 1982 extermination, to allay the fears of American importers concerned by an outbreak of swine fever, of Haiti’s entire native pig population, and their subsequent replacement with animals from Iowa that required living conditions rather better than those enjoyed by most of the island’s human population.

Similarly:

Lavalas had good reason to drag its feet. When the state-run sugar mill was privatized in 1987, for example, it was bought by a single family who promptly closed it, laid off its staff and began importing cheaper sugar from the us so as to sell it on at prices that undercut the domestic market. Once the world’s most profitable sugar exporter, by 1995 Haiti was importing 25,000 tons of American sugar and most peasants could no longer afford to buy it. By contrast, in September 1995 Aristide dismissed his prime minister for preparing to sell the state-owned flour and cement mills without insisting on any of the progressive terms the imf had promised to honour—opening the sale to middle-class and diaspora participation, and ensuring that some of the money it earned was to go towards literacy, education and compensation for victims of the 1991 coup. Aristide could only delay the process for two years, however. In 1997 the flour mill was duly sold for just $9 million, at a time when its yearly profits were estimated at around $25 million per year.

In relation to Aristide's victory in 2000:

The OAS had itself been closely involved in the development of this form of calculation, and there is no good reason to believe that the balance of power in the Senate would have been any different whatever method was used. The results are consistent both with the undisputed returns registered in the Chamber of Deputies ballot held at the same time and with a US-commissioned Gallup poll taken in October 2000. In November 2000, Aristide went on to win the presidential election with 92 per cent of the votes cast, on a turnout estimated, by those few international observers left in the country, at around 50 per cent (although much lower by the opposition).

The immediate response from the Clinton Administration was to seize upon the OAS objection to the calculations for the senatorial seats in order to justify a crippling embargo on foreign aid—democratic scruples hard to square with Washington’s support for the Duvalier dictatorships and the juntas that succeeded them. In April 2001, after cutting off its own aid to Haiti’s government, the US blocked the release of $145 million in previously agreed loans from the Inter-American Development Bank, and of another $470 million scheduled for the following years. In 1995 the Haitian government had received close to $600 million in aid. By 2003 the total government budget had been reduced to just $300 million—under $40 a head per year for each of its 8 million citizens—minus the annual $60 million payment on the national debt (45 per cent of which was incurred by the Duvalier dictatorships). The response of the IMF and other international lenders was to force Haiti to make still deeper cuts in its budget and pay yet higher sums in arrears.

Few governments could survive such sustained financial assault. The combined effect of these measures was to overwhelm an already shattered economy. Haitian GDP fell from $4 billion in 1999 to $2.9 billion in 2003. While American exports to Haiti have risen substantially in recent years, a majority of Haitians now live on the edge of starvation, without access to water or medicine; average incomes amount to little more than a dollar a day and unemployment hovers around 70 per cent. In 2001, a bankrupt Aristide agreed to virtually all of the concessions demanded by his opponents: he obliged the winners of the disputed Senate seats to resign, accepted the participation of several ex-Duvalier supporters in his new government, agreed to convene a new and more opposition-friendly CEP and to hold another round of legislative elections several years ahead of schedule. But the US still refused to lift its aid embargo.

Lastly, this. It isn't from the article, but from Wikipedia, in relation to the 2015 elections that the recently assassinated Moïse "won":

Amid declarations of fraud and numerous delays of an elected government, the Provisional President Jocelerme Privet created a verification commission in May 2016 to audit the results of the August 2015 legislative elections and first round of the presidential elections.[20] On 30 May 2016 the commission, headed by Pierre François Benoît, issued a report recommending the election be redone citing findings of significant fraud.

While Haiti-based organizations found innumerable counts of fraud and proof of unfair elections on October 25, international observers endorsed the results before the interim government's report had been released.[21] According to the U.S. Deputy Spokesman, for example, "The United States regrets the decision by the Provisional Electoral Council to restart the presidential elections from the first round. This will increase time and resources needed to complete the 2015 electoral process and further delay installation of a constitutionally elected president.... The United States regrets that the electoral process has extended yet again, with the president-elect unlikely to be installed before February 7th, 2017."[22] The National Human Rights Defense Network published one of several reports criticizing the happenings on election day, using Haitian observations to bolster claims apparently unseen by many international players.[23][24]

1