Haiti’s 1804 slave revolt freed it from French Imperial
domination, so we forced them to pay reparations to French slave
traffickers for most of the 19th century. President Thomas
Jefferson refused to recognize Haiti as an independent nation,
and this continued until the signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation in 1864. In the early 20th century, America invaded
Haiti and occupied it until 1934, making it a safe haven for
U.S. corporate powers to exploit the population and siphon its
wealth into their bank accounts. After troops withdrew, a series
of brutal U.S. sponsored dictatorships oppressed the people, the
most notable being the Duvalier father-and-son regime, and its
murderous and ruthless Tonton Macoutes. The only freely elected
leader of Haiti was the former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
elected in 1990 and removed in a U.S.-created coup in 1991, and
reinstalled in 1994 by Clinton—serving two years but burdened
with International Monetary Fund “structural agreements,”
designed to destroy the public s