TEASER: Haiti. Life in Empire's Shadow

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Recorded 4/4/24

The U.S. State Department has been working hard to get Americans out of Haiti. The island nation’s government is in shambles and gangs run much of the urban center of Port-au-Prince. Haitians have struggled for hundreds of years at the hands of gangs, brutal authoritarian dictators, and colonial rule. One of its biggest problems has always been its nearest Imperial neighbor: America.

On this episode of Angry Planet, we get America’s side of the story. Keith Mines is the Vice President for Latin America at U.S. Institute of Peace. If you’ve never heard of the USIP, you aren’t alone. As Mines says in the show, it is bad at branding. Part of a Congressional initiative from 1984, the USIP was founded to pursue peaceful resolutions to worldwide conflict.

Mines has a storied career of government service. He’s worked for the State Department and been all across the world. His unique point of view gives listeners a window into the mind of a member of the U.S. political establishment. Mines has a deep knowledge of Haiti and a deeper understanding of how badly America has screwed up its efforts to help.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature
0:05.1	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Yeah, it's pretty miserable and it is, well, just one frame of reference.
0:22.8	I mean, I just turned 65.
0:24.3	I got a friend in Haiti.
0:25.6	We work together really closely.
0:28.0	He's, if not my age, a little younger, but not much.
0:30.7	So he goes all the way back to Duvalier and I just asked him I said you know how do you
0:36.7	measure the last whatever six decades of history he said this right now is the worst
0:40.9	it's ever been so So frame of reference is pretty bad and that's going
0:45.5	through an awful lot that's going through an earthquake and you know all these
0:48.9	different periods of ups and downs but he said it's it's just a daily struggle now because of the gangs and the way they kind of locked down everything.
0:56.8	So that's you know the short-term frame of reference. The rest of it all it's a little bit like and you don't want to just blame the international community for everything and I think that's actually not a good move for Haitians because whatever's happened has happened.
1:12.8	A lot of times you talk to Haitians
1:14.1	and you get a history lesson and I say,
1:16.1	I got the history, we got to move on.
1:17.6	Let's see where we go from here.
1:19.8	But it was a society that's, they're actually very skilled in a lot of ways.
1:27.0	They used to have a corner on the market of the baseball industry back in the 60s and
1:31.1	70s and we had all the worlds baseballs. Incredibly talented artisans and that sounds, you know, quaint, but there's actually a lot of that that has been that they had, you know, great factories for textiles, kind of a easy place to do textiles when things are stable.
1:49.3	Again, a very hardworking, talented population, they flourish everywhere they go so there's you
1:54.6	know it's not the natural it's not the people it's the system and it is a system that
1:59.6	internal to Haiti not just because of us, has been very predatory.
	...

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