'The Greatest Heist In History': How Haiti Was Forced To Pay Reparations For Freedom

[marble falls]

'The Greatest Heist In History': How Haiti Was Forced To Pay Reparations For Freedom

Planet Money

October 5, 202110:25 AM ET

Greg Rosalsky

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/05/1042518732/-the-greatest-heist-in-history-how-haiti-was-forced-to-pay-reparations-for-freed?utm_source=pocket-newtab


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Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world, and rich countries have their fingerprints all over the nation's stunted development. The United States worked to isolate a newly independent Haiti during the early 19th century and violently occupied the island nation for 19 years in the early 20th century. While the U.S. officially left Haiti in 1934, it continued to control Haiti's public finances until 1947, siphoning away around 40% of Haiti's national income to service debt repayments to the U.S. and France.

Much of this debt to France was the legacy of what the University of Virginia scholar Marlene Daut calls "the greatest heist in history": surrounded by French gunboats, a newly independent Haiti was forced to pay its slaveholders reparations. You read that correctly. It was the former slaves of Haiti, not the French slaveholders, who were forced to pay reparations. Haitians compensated their oppressors and their oppressors' descendants for the privilege of being free. It took Haiti more than a century to pay the reparation debts off.

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During Haiti's critical period of development, France intervened even more directly than the U.S. to thwart its success. In July 1825, the French King, Charles X, sent an armed flotilla of warships to Haiti with the message that the young nation would have to pay France 150 million francs to secure its independence, or suffer the consequences. That sum was 10 times the amount the United States had paid France in the Louisiana Purchase, which had doubled the size of the U.S.

Almost literally at gunpoint, Haiti caved to France's demands in order to secure its independence. The amount was too much for the young nation to pay outright, and so it had to take out loans with hefty interest rates from a French bank. Over the next century, Haiti paid French slaveholders and their descendants the equivalent of between $20 and $30 billion in today's dollars. It took Haiti 122 years to pay it off. Professor Marlene Daut writes it "severely damaged the newly independent country's ability to prosper."

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Haitian expatriates sent $3 billion back home to Haiti in 2018, near one-third of the nation's GDP.

[marybourg]

1. I think of that every time I hear Haiti called

“the poorest country in the hemisphere “. I always wish a few words would be appended noting why it is so.

[hunter]

2. The criminal gangs in Haiti have a symbiotic relationship with the Evangelical Christians.

I only mention this should anybody here have any ideas about breaking that stalemate.

Both institutions, the criminal gangs and the Evangelicals, require secure sources of human misery.

They'll manufacture it themselves if they must.

[tulipsandroses]

3. The legacy of slavery will forever live on. UK finished paying off their debt in 2015

Until 2015, black folks were paying off their ancestors’ freedom since this debt was paid for by tax payers. It’s a sickening thing. So much wrong was done in Haiti. The US supported Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the murderous father and son dictators.