Respuesta a la pregunta de investigación y objetivos

While powerful economic ties to France persisted into the 20th century, reflected in both

export patterns and debt payments, Haiti became increasingly indebted to US financial institutions. The transition from French to US dependency was capped by the US marine invasion of Haiti shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, which was followed by a two-decade occupation between 1915 and 1934. The US occupation involved the rewriting of Haiti’s constitution to facilitate debt service and increase foreign investment, most notably by taking control of the banking system and legally enabling foreign interests to own land, which had been outlawed since the Revolution (Hallward 2010; Heinl and Heinl 1996; Trouillot 1990; Nicholls 1986; Schmidt 1971). Worse still, the US

13 _{The primary exception being Maroon communities of escaped slaves. Although}

Hispaniola was relatively densely populated at the time of Columbus, Tainos settlements were mostly on coastal planes and the island was almost entirely forested.

occupation was paid for in part by borrowing from US banks and, much as had occurred

with the 19th century debt to France, the burden was again largely transferred to the

peasantry and collected through the customs houses (Lundahl 1982).

Considerable dispossession followed the legalization of foreign land ownership. As many as 50,000 peasants with insecure tenure lost their land in the north alone and plantation agriculture was re-established on over 250,000 acres of land, as constitutional changes made it possible for companies like Standard Fruit to procure land and establish large banana estates in the 1930s (Mintz 1974). Dispossession continued in the 1940s through a collaborative project between the American and Haitian governments, the Société Haitienne-Américaine Pour le Dévelopment Agricole (SHADA), which forcibly evicted roughly 40,000 peasants, destroyed many homes, felled a million fruit trees, and converted more than 47,000 acres of peasant land to large-scale production of sisal and rubber for export (Smith 2009).

Another very important aspect of the US occupation was the increasing centralization of power in the Haitian military. This stemmed from a desire to pacify

oppositional peasant groups known as cacos, which had been manipulated by political

rivals to help overthrow ruling governments and were consequently blamed for the political instability preceding the US occupation. To do this, US marines used force at first but over time transferred the job of internal repression to the Haitian military. Once tasked with defending Haiti’s independence against recolonization, the National Guard was strengthened and reorganized to discipline dissent in Haiti. By the time the US marines departed in 1934, the National Guard was a source of not only military but political power, capable of determining the rise and fall of Presidents. The rising

authoritarianism that ensued was concentrated overwhelmingly in Port-au-Prince, and it also transformed the nature of peasant exploitation. Before 1915, surpluses were primarily extracted from peasants through the petty traders who preyed on the isolation and knowledge imbalances, and through distant customs houses, but the rise of the Garde made physical coercion and the threat of force a new feature disabling the ability of peasants to seek better terms or to organize collectively (Farmer 2003; Heinl and Heinl 1996; Trouillot 1990; 1994; Nicholls 1986; Mintz 1974; Schmidt 1971).

Although one can easily see a direct line connecting the US occupation to the increasing power of the Haitian Garde to Papa Doc’s rise to power in 1957, it is also important to recognize that there were significant mass mobilizations during this period which might have led towards a different course, as Smith (2009) emphasizes. In the 1930s, progressive social movements began taking on a more radical character from the populist nationalism of the occupation period, led partly by the growth of organized labour. Marxism came to inform ideas about class and inequality alongside a racialized noiriste discourse, though the latter had a strong anti-liberal component.

After the Second World War, the Mouvement Ouvrier Paysan (MOP) (Peasant Worker Movement) emerged at the forefront of Haiti’s racially charged class politics, which had been enflamed by the establishment of large-scale plantations and destruction of peasant holdings across large areas of Haiti’s best land in the 1930s and 1940s. The MOP sought to represent the black working class and peasant farmers and to challenge the prevailing economic and cultural power of the mulatto elite, and it quickly transformed from a mass organization into a political party. Unfortunately, it was here that Papa Doc Duvalier found his initial political foothold as general secretary, and he

came to appropriate and manipulate the racialized noiriste discourse in the service of his totalitarian government (Smith 2009).

The expansion of plantation agriculture and the SHADA project were flashpoints in the 1946 overthrow of Élie Lescot, who was sympathetic to US interests and strongly supported SHADA. The coup, led by a coalition of Marxist, noiriste, and populist groups, gave rise to Haiti’s first black President, Dumarsais Estimé, whose government nationalized the banana industry in 1947. This nationalization quickly proved unsuccessful and lands were reconverted into peasant smallholdings with one great drawback: the productive fruit trees that previously occupied the land were mostly gone (Smith 2009). Estimé struggled to balance the coalition between more moderate factions allied to mulatto interests, and more radical ones, especially organized labour, which had brought him to power, and eventually he lost the support of both and was pushed out of power in 1950. The next President, Paul Magloire, subsequently sought to ally Haiti strongly with the US, create a favourable climate for foreign investment, and to pursue export-led growth. For agriculture, this involved a renewed expansion of coffee production, even in the face of low international prices, and the vulnerability laden in this narrow export dependence was seen clearly in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel destroyed nearly half of the total coffee crop (Dupuy 1989). Around this time, rural-to-urban migration began quickening, and by the mid-1950s roughly half of the population of Port- au-Prince had been born in the countryside, with roughly three-fifths of the housing stock

contained in growing bidonvilles, or shanty-towns (Smith 2009; Lundahl 1979). Amidst

deteriorating social and economic conditions, Magloire transferred power to Papa Doc Duvalier in 1957.

2.4 The Duvalier Dictatorships: Intensifying the predatory state (1957-1986)