The following is a longer-than-typical article diving into Haiti’s present and past. It includes a conversation with Brian Concannon, a human rights lawyer and founder of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. TLR is very grateful for his time. You can read more about his expertise, experience, and his organization here.
The beat is undeniably catchy - a synthetic club mix overlaid to an auto-tuned Donald Trump singing, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”.
These specific Tiktoks – satirizing the former President’s outlandish debate claims about the culinary proclivities of Haitian refugees – are light-hearted and quite funny. The social media trend is among the more harmless which have arisen in recent days. Others, on the other hand, are deeply dehumanizing and hateful.
Go for a scroll on X and you’ll quickly encounter racist AI depictions of black Haitians chasing pets, videos mocking desperate Haitians for eating mud cakes, and others, with alarming amounts of likes, claiming the ‘sub-human IQ of its people’ has doomed Haiti to failure.
Brian Concannon, a human rights lawyer who has devoted his career to fighting for justice for the Haitian people, is alarmed at the rapid pace in which the hate campaign is spreading in the States.
“It's the basic playbook that they used in Rwanda and in Germany, except you know, it took years there. It's terrifying what Trump was able to do. It's not particularly new. Haitians have been demonized with false accusations since before there was a Haiti”
Concannon tells The Lookout Report that many are now acting upon the debunked pet-eating narrative, firing off death threats to Haitian friends of his and their defenders.
“They're having to go into hiding and there's, real world, very rapid consequences that were unleashed”.
It wasn’t long before Concannon’s anecdotes were substantiated by mainstream outlets, who are reporting the closure of Springfield schools due to bomb threats, vandalism of Haitian-American property, and an overwhelming increase in hate speech against members of the small, displaced community in Ohio.
A Look Back
Ignorance towards Haiti is par for the course. A vast majority of Americans, even those with a penchant for history, are completely unaware of the devastating US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934.
Justified as a ‘stabilization mission’ after a series of Haitian coups, the brutal occupation stripped the world’s first free black Republic of all its finances and its key constitutional tenet banning foreign land ownership. Big business quickly consolidated the nation’s fertile lands and, with help from the occupiers, thousands of rural Haitians were forced into servitude on the sugar and pineapple plantations. Collaborating elites in Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, were compensated handsomely.
The occupation left deep fissures in Haitian society, worsening divides between the urban and rural, the elites and the masses. While Haiti was nominally free of armed American occupation afterwards, foreign interests continued to cast a dark shadow on the nation’s political and economic life. The NAACP’s The Crisis magazine in 1935 reads, “The marines are gone, but the American Financial Adviser is still there, collecting for American creditors”. And they weren’t the only creditors funneling Haitian wealth out, as it wasn’t until 1947 that Haiti repaid a colossal debt owed to France for ‘appropriating property’ in 1804. The property, of course, being the enslaved people of Haiti liberated in the revolt.
In 1957, a black nationalist rose to power in Haiti by the name of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. American fears were quickly alleviated, however, as Duvalier announced his austere opposition to Castro and everything communist. Historians assert that this anti-communist positioning was far from genuine, rather “a ploy to secure more U.S. supports which it used to exert control over domestic politics and, especially, to eliminate political opponents and repress organized labor”
The US had a mixed relationship over the next few decades with the regimes of Duvalier and his son ‘Baby Doc’. Kennedy’s Administration was skeptical of supporting a ruler renowned for human rights abuses. His successors were less hesitant, cooperating on numerous matters in the name of opposing Communism. By the 1980s, Haiti was unraveling, years of despotism and looting by the regime had pushed the nation to its breaking point, driving tens of thousands to attempt escapes to the US. Reagan, not unlike the current top Republican, was eager to prevent the arrival of Haitians. Thus, a ‘deal with the devil’ was formed: funding for the repressive Duvalier regime in exchange for a domestic crackdown on fleeing refugees.
While Reagan coordinated with Duvalier on migration, American development agencies experimented in innovative poverty-reducing programs, infamously concocting the American pig replacement program.
For hundreds of years, Haiti’s creole pigs were crucial elements of the rural economy. The pig was a key resource of the household, providing food if needed but also serving as an asset which could be traded for supplies, clothing, or education. In the early 1980s, a swine flu on the island worried America’s farm lobby. If the disease crossed over the sea, millions in profits could be lost in a pig pandemic.

So the US worked with the Duvalier regime to slaughter millions of the essential creole pigs. USAID substituted the lost hogs with American ones as compensation, but these were unfit for the climate, required expensive feed, and were accustomed to Iowa’s clean water. They quickly died off en masse. The program was a calamity, eliminating one of the last items of value from Haiti’s rural poor.
In his book, Eyes of the Heart, former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide calls the doomed project, “Haitians’ first experience with Globalization”. A bit of background: Aristide was a Salesian Catholic Priest and liberation theologian at the forefront of the social movement against the Duvalier regime. After surviving numerous attempts against his life, weathering massacres of his supporters, and being excommunicated from his beloved Order for ‘inspiring revolution’, Aristide rose to the Presidency of Haiti in 1990 in the first legitimate election of its kind.
However, 8 months later, he was overthrown by Haiti’s notorious, CIA-linked military. The ensuing chaos and migrant crisis warranted Clinton’s Operation Uphold Democracy, a US military mission to reinstate Aristide. During his time in office, there were significant improvements in literacy rates, wages, democratic participation, and access to healthcare.
Serving as a human rights investigator and then as a public interest lawyer in 1990s Haiti, Concannon says he sensed a real “willingness by the international community to let Haiti choose its own leaders”. This fueled domestic hopes, and things, while still difficult, were looking up for the traumatized nation.
Concannon says that in the early 2000s the international consensus favoring Aristide and his associates had changed: “The powerful countries did not like who Haitian voters chose to lead the country or the policies that those people were elected to implement. And ever since then, they withdrew their support for democracy”.
In a 2006 interview, Aristide elaborated on the details of this pivot, explaining that his opposition to neoliberal advice, mainly privatizing state assets, drove a wedge between him and the American leadership.
“I refused simply to sell them (state assets) off, unconditionally, to private investors. I said no to untrammeled privatization… They started to insist, and again I said no. They went back on our agreement, and then relied on a disinformation campaign to make it look like it was me who had broken my word. It’s not true”
During the Bush era, pressure against Aristide increased externally and internally. In 2002, a major prison break released hundreds of anti-Aristide militants in the city of Gonaïves, which instigated a wider rebellion joined by gangs, former military men, and spiteful oligarchs. Leaked US Embassy cables place a CIA Officer in the vicinity of the prison break the night before, fueling speculation of the intel agency’s involvement. Among those freed were terrorists responsible for the Raboteau Massacre of Aristide supporters in 1994; Concannon himself spent years seeking justice for the victims of this horrific crime.
By early 2004, the armed insurrection had pushed to the edge of Port-au-Prince, and on leap day of that year, Aristide found himself surrounded by American marines on a flight bound for the Central African Republic, never to return to the Haitian Presidency. The Bush Administration alleged this was done for his protection, Aristide called it “kidnapping”.
Within the high-ranks of the US government there was dissension on the coup. Representative Maxine Waters accused Bush of creating the conditions for the overthrow and for “holding Aristide against his will”. Her protests did little against the current, and a US-UN peace-keeping mission was quickly drawn up to back the new interim President. Thousands of foreign soldiers were deployed to Haiti once again. A year later in 2005, all convictions in the Raboteau massacre case were overturned by the new government.
Concannon says “Haiti's democracy has never functioned as well since 2004”.
“Haiti's government has been established over 200 years to be a kleptocracy. I mean, that has been one of the main purposes of Haitian government is to is to divert state and collective resources to individuals hands”
I asked Concannon whether this policy reversal was carried out solely to defend neoliberalism and American corporate interests. He responded, “if you look under Aristide, he certainly critiqued the international economic order and specifically the role of multinational corporations. But he also, in many ways, made the country business friendly by doing things like promoting the rule of law and having regular elections. Despite being portrayed as anti-business, he was doing alot to establish the baselines for healthy business, the foundations”.
In years since, the business environment has crumbled, Concannon explains. The predominant Haitian Tet Kale Party (PHTK) Party have made it a nightmare for international investors in the last decade, blatantly rigging the courts in their favor, seizing assets arbitrarily, and backing criminal gangs who rob and threaten foreign multinationals.
I inquired, were similar claims of corruption and malfeasance leveled against Aristide’s Lavalas Party during the height of its success in the early 2000s also true? Candidly, Concannon explained that the past democratic leadership was also impacted by deep-rooted kleptocracy, a difficult structure to eliminate simply with the “wave of a magic wand”. However, Concannon attests that as far as corruption goes, “things were getting better”.
“If you look at the level of corruption now, it's just absolutely on a different scale”.
Blinken’s 2024 Vision for Haiti
The top brass of this corrupt and crumbling system had an unusual visitor earlier this month, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. After his plane landed at Port-au-Prince’s largely defunct airport, Blinken was whisked away by an armored motorcade to the fortified US Embassy complex. From there, he had a brief photoshoot alongside Haiti’s interim Prime Minister, Gary Conille, before heading to the podium for an unprecedented address at the scene of the action.
The Haiti that Blinken descended into is in a grim state. The Government’s autonomy over the nation has largely disintegrated in the last three years after the assassination of PHTK President Jovenel Moïse. Things really took a turn for the worse in March of 2024 however, after the unelected and despised Prime Minister Ariel Henry was chased out of the country.
Since then, roughly 80% of the capital has fallen under the control of street gangs. The price of rice, the national staple, is up 56% on the year and, over the weekend, 15 were killed in an explosion after desperate crowds surrounded a downed gasoline truck. Amidst the chaos, are 400 US-backed Kenyan police ‘peace-keepers’ who’ve made little to no progress in reestablishing security in the crumbling state.
The country’s dire situation can be solved, Blinken announced, by more, more, more. $45 million more in humanitarian aid, more armored vehicles, more personnel for an upgraded, formal UN peacekeeping mission, more anti-gang expertise, more involvement from international organizations. If all goes according to plan, the innovative effort will hoist the imperiled Haiti from the brink, setting it on course for free and fair democratic elections within a year.
Concannon doesn’t share Anthony’s optimism, saying the proposals were akin to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Enola Gay”.
Clarifying his apocalyptic analogy, Concannon said, “it’s a mission that is proposed as promoting democracy, but is designed to prop up the undemocratic elements in Haitian society. I mean, it's going to actually have its intended result, not its articulated result. The intended result is to keep democracy in Haiti down. The articulated result is promoting democracy. But you know, you can't do both”.
Chief among the ‘undemocratic elements’ aligned with the US’s proposals is the PHTK party. Often associated with the nation’s elite upper class, the PHTK has been “increasing economic stress, increasing inequality, decreasing government services, and has subsequently dismantled accountability”, according to Concannon.
Despite their terrible track record, the unpopular party has been propped up by the United States over the last few years as the nation has descended into disarray. In 2021, a roadmap to Democracy supported by 650 civil society actors known as the Montana Accords was vetoed by the Biden Administration. Its transitional council, consisting of broad representation of Haiti’s democratic actors, was replaced by the US vision which bolsters PHTK rule and provides a near majority of seats in the crucial body to the corrupted party.
The Administration's 2021 decision to this effect, and to support Ariel Henry, was so objectionable that it triggered the dramatic resignation of the US State Department’s own special envoy to Haiti who decried the “hubris” of his higher-ups. The US finally dropped support for the disgraced Prime Minister Ariel Henry after his March 2024 ousting, yet, support still remains for the PHTK-favoring council.
Concannon ties the modern PHTK’s corruption to the nation’s kleptocratic past. In the 1980s there was outrage when Michèle Duvalier, the wife of dictator ‘Baby Doc’, spent $25,000 on a weekend shopping spree in New York. Michel Martelly, the PHTK’s President who ruled Haiti from 2011-2016 after its devastating earthquake, officially allocated $25,000 per day, and more for his entourage, each time he traveled. Well known in Haiti as a ‘bandi légal’ or legal bandit, Martelly has no shame.
Martelly only rose to the Presidency in the first place due to haranguing and pressure from Hillary Clinton. The election was widely panned as fraudulent, but once it was settled, the Clintons were free to pump millions into Haitian development projects through their foundation. One such endeavor – a $300 million industrial park and port designed to attract big business to the faltering nation – ended in complete failure. Locals were cleared off their land, the wages were terrible, and no long-term wealth was ultimately generated for the Haitian people.
Beyond stunted neoliberal projects, the main legacy of the Clinton State Department is that of Michel Martelly. Since his Presidency he has been a very busy man. Last month, Martelly was officially sanctioned by the United States for running large amounts of cocaine into the United States, laundering drug proceeds, and sponsoring violent criminal organizations. In post-Clinton Haiti, the political leaders are not only permissive of gangs, they run them.
Despite the damning evidence and US / Canadian recognition of it, Concannon tells me that “Martelly has been getting pretty persistent international support”, and that the actual sanctions are designed to do little to “prevent him from doing the things that he's accused of doing.”
I wanted to direct the conversation towards potential solutions, so I posed Concannon with the hypothetical of an Aristide return. Could the once-beloved President come back in some Messianic fashion to save Haiti’s democracy? Concannon doesn’t see it as very likely, due to term limit constraints Aristide would be violating, a lack of motivation on his part, and, importantly, likely American opposition to such a move.
Within Haiti, Concannon doesn’t see a major unifying movement arising at the present, but said, “I think it's possible if the international community allows it, that there be some way of coming together around basic themes like pro democracy, fighting corruption and violence”.
For that to happen, the US foreign policy machine would have to get out of the way, drop its fruitless support for the corrupt Haitian elite, and allow authentic Haitian-led democratic movements for change. While this seems very unlikely under a potential Harris Presidency, it is unfathomable under Trump, who has called the country a shithole, spread false and dehumanizing rumors about its asylum-granted refugees, and threatened to mass deport the legally recognized residents back to their imperiled Haiti.
Even after being couped twice and seeing his many achievements fall by the wayside, Jean-Bertrand Aristide clings to a hope that things can change for Haiti. He has described this as having faith in “the collective consciousness of the Haitian people, their mobilization for democracy. These things may not have been fully actualized but they exist, they are real. This is what sustains me… The power is real and it is what animates the way forward.”