Haiti- Is intervention a good thing?

By Dom Dellamano

Haiti is (and has been) one of the poorest countries in the world. According to research, Haiti is actually the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (Shah 1). After the Haiti Crisis back in 2010, there have been large amounts of humanitarian efforts to help the people in Haiti. After the earthquake, the government was in shambles. Everything from the buildings to the roads to the government as a whole crumbled as a result of the Earthquake.

But, why did so many countries flood into Haiti? Why did they make this a issue of global security? Looking at the history, Haiti has been plagued by civil strife and poverty. When countries flooded in, they went in for their own interests. As President Obama said in his speech in response to the Haiti crisis in 2010, he wanted to go into save Americans. While I do nto deny his intentions were also to help the Haitians, their main goal was to save American citizens. They placed priority on them over Haitians, and I feel that is wrong. Going into Haiti to save Americans should not be the biggest priority. While it was a smart political move, people should not have wanted to come help just to save Americans. Therefore, it took away greatly from the humanitarian aspect of it all.

This in turn affected how effective our intervention was. We are able to see how Haiti did not necessarily benefit from all this intervention. In essence, they left an even bigger disaster than the one that crippled the country. We came in and tried to help, but poor media coverage plagued the response. People were thinking they were doing well, but in essence they were not. Haiti still remained poor, and little to no actual reconstruction was done by the U.S. Political instability remained after our intervention, and we did not help them establish a legitimate government. We tried, yes, but in essence it was a failure. We aimed to promote democracy, but in turn we helped create a ineffective governmental infrastructure that could not effectively invest in its resources or its people.

There is also the problem of the real endgame of U.S. aid to Haiti. While we did provide aid to Haiti, it was most often on U.S. terms rather than having it governed by Haitian institutions. This basically made U.S. aid conditional. This ties back into Obama’s speech, because he did not mention this other side of the bargain. It also demonstrates how our intervention was based mainly on our own interests. I feel like this makes our aid seem so superficial, as well as the media’s coverage of the whole situation. It looked like we were providing real assistance, but it was only short term repression. In the long term, it did not do anything real. It only made things worse, having Haiti be governed by U.S. and foreign interests. With these powers at play, it is virtually impossible for Haiti to develop its own independence or autonomy.