Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti

Jake Johnston

Jan 2024 · Sold by St. Martin's Press

About this ebook

Haiti’s state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moise and not a single elected leader holds office, refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America, and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters, both man-made and natural, that destroyed much of Haiti’s infrastructure and institutions. How did a nation founded on liberation—a people that successfully revolted against their colonizers and enslavers—come to such a precipice?

In Aid State, Jake Johnston, a researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, reveals how long-standing US and European capitalist goals ensnared and re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it. To the global West, Haiti has always been a place where labor is cheap, politicians are compliant, and profits are to be made. Over the course of nearly 100 years, the US has sought to control Haiti and its people with occupying police, military, and euphemistically-called peacekeeping forces, as well as hand-picked leaders meant to quell uprisings and protect corporate interests. Earthquakes and hurricanes only further devastated a state already decimated by the aid industrial complex.

Based on years of on-the-ground reporting in Haiti and interviews with politicians in the US and Haiti, independent aid contractors, UN officials, and Haitians who struggle for their lives, homes, and families, Aid State is a conscience-searing book of witness.

Ratings and reviews

This enlightening book exposes the historical entanglement of Haitian interests with US and European capitalist powers. It reveals a pattern of exploitation dressed as aid, compounded by natural disasters. The book is fascinating and easy to read, but also heart-wrenching. It demonstrates the need to work at a grass-roots level to give the people of Haiti control over their own destiny. Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

About the author

JAKE JOHNSTON is Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. and has been the leading writer for the center’s Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch website since February 2010, just weeks after a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, ABC News, Boston Review, Truthout, and The Intercept, and elsewhere. He grew up in Portland, Maine and lives in Washington, D.C.