US Marines in Haiti: Back to colonialism

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US Marines in Haiti: Back to colonialism
27 January 2010

The US media’s coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti has increasingly
included articles and broadcast reports extolling the supposed
humanitarian role of US soldiers and Marines in the Caribbean country.
They generally describe how “combat-hardened” veterans of Iraq and
Afghanistan are lending a helping hand to the survivors of the earthquake.

Some of this reporting seems aimed at countering growing international
criticism of the US militarization of the response to the Haitian
disaster, which has given priority to rushing in combat-equipped
troops over the provision of medical supplies, food and water
desperately needed to save lives.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, for instance, voiced concern
over “the extreme confusion of distributing food with a gun.” The
organization formally protested the repeated diversion of planes
bringing it medical supplies after the US military seized control of
the Port-au-Prince airport, saying that many of its patients have died
as a result.

With hundreds of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands more
injured, there is undoubtedly shock among the troops in Haiti at the
scale of the devastation and sympathy for the suffering of the Haitian
people.

Those in Washington who sent them there and the senior officers who
command them, however, are operating on the basis of very different
motives, as one recent press report on their mission makes clear.

USA Today published an article Monday headlined “Marines Studied Their
Own History in Haiti,” describing the country as “a major part of
Marine Corps lore.”

The Marines, the article states, “governed Haiti from 1915 to 1934
after an invasion force was sent to prevent an anti-American dictator
from assuming power. Young, non-commissioned officers governed Haiti
with little supervision.”

USA Today goes on to quote Lt. Col. Gary Keim, the commander of a
Marine logistics battalion, who said he and other officers had studied
the history of the occupation before deploying to Haiti. “We were
required to reread it,” he said. “We’ve been here before. We’ve been
successful before.”

The Marines, the article continues, “viewed those years as a model for
nation building and counterinsurgency strategy.”

That the US Marines sent to Haiti by the Obama administration are
consciously modeling their mission on the “success” of the 20-year
occupation that ended in 1934 has unmistakable political significance.

When the Marines first invaded Haiti 95 years ago it was also
presented as a rescue mission, aimed at protecting American lives and
saving Haitians from German domination. Declaring martial law, the
invasion force seized control of Haiti’s treasury and customs houses,
while armed Marines were sent into the country’s parliament to ensure
that it installed Washington’s choice for president.

Over the next two decades, some 3,000 Haitians were killed by the
occupiers, while the Marines themselves suffered just 16 fatalities.

The initial years of the occupation saw a campaign to suppress
opposition from the so-called cacos, a peasant-based rebel movement
led by a former Haitian army officer, Charlemagne Peralte. The
movement gained broad support from Haiti’s most oppressed layers, in
large measure because of the brutal methods of the American occupiers,
who seized peasants off their land and pressed them into chain
gang-style labor.

As the USA Today article suggests, the Marines introduced innovative
“counterinsurgency” tactics that would be repeated from Vietnam to
Afghanistan, including the US military’s first use of aerial
bombardments to support ground assaults on the cacos and the peasant
population that supported them. As in the current US wars, prisoners
were beaten and tortured to extract information and, in many cases,
subjected to summary execution.

Peralte himself was captured and murdered by the Marines in 1919. His
corpse, nailed crucifix-style to a door, was placed on public display
in an attempt to intimidate the population.

Washington pushed through changes in the Haitian constitution giving
foreigners the right to own land for the first time since a slave
revolt secured the country’s independence from France in 1804.

The US set about building up a Haitian repressive force, commanded by
Marine officers, known as the Garde d’Haiti. The creation of this
force was part of what the press referred to at the time as the
“Haitianization” of US colonial domination of the country.

It was growing popular resistance that forced the US military out of
Haiti. The decision to withdraw was hastened by mass unrest sparked by
the economic crisis that gripped the country in 1929, with the
collapse of coffee prices. A student strike was joined by workers, and
peasants staged risings in a number of areas.

In Cayes, in the southwest, thousands of peasants carrying stones,
clubs and machetes confronted Marines armed with automatic weapons on
December 6, 1929. The Marines opened fire, killing 24 and wounding 51
Haitians. One Marine was reported injured. The unit’s commander was
subsequently awarded the Navy Cross for directing the massacre.

In 1931, Smedley Butler, the Marine officer who led the initial
intervention and headed the Haitian security forces for two years,
provided a candid assessment of his mission: “I was a racketeer for
capitalism,” he declared. “I helped make Haiti…a decent place for the
National City boys to collect revenue in.” National City, the
precursor of Citibank, controlled Haiti’s railroads and largest bank.
After the US invasion, it took over the Haitian treasury.

The Marine occupation left behind a powerful US-dominated military
which effectively controlled the country’s political life for decades,
and in 1957 brought to power the Duvalier dictatorship, which would
rule Haiti through savage repression for 30 years.

This deadly legacy played a decisive role in subjecting the Haitian
people to poverty and oppression and creating the social and economic
conditions that allowed the January 12 earthquake to claim such a
staggering toll in human life.

That today’s Marine commanders invoke the occupation of the early 20th
Century as a precedent for their current mission constitutes a
warning. Behind the humanitarian mask, Washington’s intervention in
Haiti is part of an attempt to assert US imperialist interests in the
Americas and across the globe by use of military force.

In Haiti, the US military has been deployed to assert Washington’s
hegemony over the lands to its south, where American imperialism got
its start and where it now faces ever greater challenges from powerful
economic rivals in Europe and China.

As in the intervention that ended in 1934, US guns will inevitably be
used against the resistance of Haitian workers and oppressed to
poverty, starvation wages and extreme social inequality.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j27.shtml

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