Haiti

• 1. Introduction

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  Haiti is the only country in history established by a slave revolt. On the 1st of January 1804, in the town of Gonaives, the leaders of the Haitian Revolution declared their independence from France. They renamed their land using a word from the Indigenous Taino language, Haiti, meaning land of high mountains. It was the second republic in the Americas and the first country in the Americas to officially abolish slavery. To win it, an estimated 200,000 Haitians died, and more than 50,000 French troops perished trying to retake the colony. How did the richest colonial possession in the French empire become one of the world's least developed countries? How does a nation born of liberation arrive at a moment with no elected officials and gangs controlling most of its capital? The answers run from a 150 million franc ransom to a fault line beneath the streets of Port-au-Prince.

• 2. Land Of High Mountains

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  The Taino name Haiti once belonged to the entire island of Hispaniola. Jean-Jacques Dessalines restored it as the official name of the independent nation, a tribute to the island's Amerindian predecessors. Another theory traces the name to African tradition. In the Fon language, spoken by many bossales, meaning Haitians born in Africa, the phrase Ayiti-Tome means from nowadays this land is our land.

  Haiti occupies the western three-eighths of Hispaniola, the second largest island in the Greater Antilles. It is the most mountainous country in the Caribbean, with plains making up only 22% of its territory. The highest point is Pic la Selle, at 2,680 meters. Because of its rough horseshoe shape, the country has a disproportionately long coastline of 1,771 meters, second in length behind Cuba in the Greater Antilles. It shares a 360 kilometer border with the Dominican Republic to the east.

  In French, Haiti's nickname is La Perle des Antilles, the Pearl of the Antilles, a name earned by its natural beauty and the wealth it once generated for the Kingdom of France. In Haitian Creole the country is spelled Ayiti, with a y and no H. Within the Haitian community it carries other names too: Ayiti-Cheri, meaning Ayiti my darling, and Lakay, meaning home. The island of Tortuga lies off the northern coast, a place that would shelter the first French settlers who reshaped this land.

• 3. The Richest Colony

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  By the 1788 census, Saint-Domingue held nearly 25,000 Europeans, 22,000 free coloreds, and 700,000 Africans in slavery. France had received the western third of Hispaniola under the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, naming it Saint-Domingue. Sugar and coffee plantations, worked by enslaved Africans, turned it into France's richest colonial possession. It generated 40% of France's foreign trade and doubled the wealth produced by all of England's colonies combined.

  The colony has been described as one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies. At the end of the 18th century it supplied two-thirds of Europe's tropical produce, while one-third of newly imported Africans died within a few years. The French enacted the Code Noir, prepared by Jean-Baptiste Colbert and ratified by Louis XIV, which set rules on the treatment of enslaved people. Forests were cleared for plantations and the land was overworked to extract maximum profit. Some enslaved women aborted fetuses rather than give birth to children in bondage.

  In the north, enslaved people kept ties to African cultures, religion, and language, renewed by each new arrival from Africa. Some held to their Vodou beliefs by secretly syncretizing them with Catholicism. Brutality drove many to escape into the mountains, where they built autonomous communities and became known as maroons. One maroon leader, Francois Mackandal, led a rebellion in the 1750s. The French later captured and executed him, but the spirit of revolt had taken root in the hills.

• 4. The Revolt That Won

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  In August 1791, the first slave armies formed in northern Haiti under Toussaint Louverture, inspired by the Vodou houngan, or priest, Boukman. The French Revolution of 1789 and its talk of the rights of man had stirred both settlers and free people of color. Vincent Oge had set up a militia of free-coloreds in 1790, an act that ended in his capture, torture, and execution. Soon a full slave rebellion spread across the entire colony.

  In 1792 the French First Republic sent commissioners to regain control. Two of them, Leger-Felicite Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel, abolished slavery in the colony to build an alliance with the enslaved. The National Convention later endorsed abolition and extended it to all French colonies. The United States wavered. George Washington kept the country neutral, while John Adams provided diplomatic recognition, money, munitions, and warships, including the USS Constitution, beginning in 1798. That support ended in 1801 when Thomas Jefferson took office and recalled the US Navy.

  In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte sent 20,000 soldiers under his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to reassert French control. Within months most of that army had died of yellow fever. The French captured Louverture and shipped him to France, where he died at Fort de Joux in 1803 of exposure and possibly tuberculosis. Generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Petion, and Henry Christophe carried on the fight. On the 18th of November 1803, the rebels decisively defeated the French at the Battle of Vertieres. Across the revolution, an estimated 20,000 French troops died of yellow fever and another 37,000 were killed in action, a toll that exceeded France's combined losses across its 19th-century campaigns in Algeria, Mexico, Indochina, Tunisia, and West Africa.

• 5. Empires And Division

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  Dessalines was proclaimed Emperor for Life as Emperor Jacques the First by his troops. He had at first offered protection to white planters, but once in power he ordered the killing of nearly all remaining whites. Between January and April 1804, between 3,000 and 5,000 whites were killed. Only three groups were spared: Polish soldiers who had deserted the French to fight alongside the rebels, a small group of invited German colonists, and a group of medical doctors and professionals. The new nation began as an empire, and Dessalines was assassinated by rivals on the 17th of October 1806.

  After his death the country split in two. Henri Christophe ruled the north, later declaring himself Henri the First, while Alexandre Petion, an homme de couleur, led a republic in the south centered on Port-au-Prince. Petion's republic was less absolutist, and he carried out land reforms benefiting the peasant class. He also gave military and financial aid to Simon Bolivar, help that proved critical to the liberation of the Viceroyalty of New Granada.

  Beginning in 1821, President Jean-Pierre Boyer reunified the island after Christophe's suicide. When Santo Domingo declared independence from Spain on the 30th of November 1821, Boyer invaded to unite the entire island and end slavery there. He passed the Code Rural, which denied peasant laborers the right to leave the land or start farms of their own, breeding deep resentment. Starting in 1824, more than 6,000 African Americans migrated to Haiti, their passage paid by an American philanthropic group. Many found the conditions too harsh and returned to the United States.

• 6. The Debt To France

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  In July 1825, King Charles the Tenth of France sent a fleet to reconquer Haiti. Under pressure, Boyer agreed to a treaty in which France recognized Haiti's independence in exchange for 150 million francs, an amount put at $560 million in today's dollars. By an order of the 17th of April 1826, the King of France renounced his rights of sovereignty and formally recognized Haiti.

  The payments crippled Haiti's economy for generations. Many Western states still refused recognition. Britain recognized Haitian independence in 1833, and the United States not until 1862. Haiti borrowed heavily from Western banks at extremely high interest rates to repay the debt. The lost economic growth over time has been estimated at between $21 billion and $115 billion, as much as eight times the size of Haiti's economy in 2020.

  The reparations were reduced to $90 million in 1838, but the burden remained. By 1900-80% of Haiti's government spending went to debt repayment, and the country did not finish paying it off until 1947. In 2013, the Haitian government called for European governments to pay reparations for slavery and to establish an official commission to settle past wrongdoings.

• 7. Occupation And Dictatorship

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  In 1915, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam ordered a mass execution of 167 political prisoners. Outrage turned to riots, and a lynch mob captured and killed him. Fearing foreign intervention, President Woodrow Wilson sent US Marines into Haiti in July 1915. Within days they controlled the capital, its banks, and its customs house. They declared martial law and censored the press. A new constitution, written by future US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, allowed foreign ownership of land for the first time.

  The occupation built infrastructure. It made 1,700 kilometers of roads usable, built 189 bridges, and constructed hospitals, schools, and public buildings. Much of this was done through the corvee system, which let the occupying forces take people from their homes and farms at gunpoint to build by force. Armed opposition was led by the Cacos under Charlemagne Peralte, whose capture and execution in 1919 made him a national martyr. During US Senate hearings in 1921, the Marine commandant reported that 2,250 Haitians had been killed in 20 months of unrest, though another report put the toll at 3,250. The occupation ended in 1934.

  In the September 1957 election, Francois Duvalier was elected president. Known as Papa Doc, he created a private militia called the Tontons Macoutes, the Bogeymen, who terrorized the populace and his political opponents. In 1964 he proclaimed himself President for Life and sought a personality cult, identifying himself with Baron Samedi, one of the loa, or spirits, of Haitian Vodou. His anti-Communism earned him American support and aid. When he died in 1971, his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc, took over and ruled until 1986. A visit by Pope John Paul the Second in 1983, who publicly criticized the president, helped embolden the opposition. Roughly 40,000 to 60,000 Haitians are estimated to have been killed during the reign of the Duvaliers.

• 8. Disasters And Collapse

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  On the 12th of January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, the country's most severe in over 200 years. It left between 160,000 and 300,000 people dead and up to 1.6 million homeless. An estimated 80% of schools and more than half of Haiti's hospitals were destroyed or damaged. The quake struck along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, where the Caribbean plate shifts eastward by about 20 millimeters a year against the North American plate. A 2007 hazard study had warned the fault was fully locked and could produce a major earthquake.

  A cholera outbreak followed when infected waste from a United Nations peacekeeping station contaminated the Artibonite, the country's main river. By 2017 roughly 10,000 Haitians had died and nearly a million had fallen ill. The United Nations apologized in 2016 but refused to acknowledge fault, avoiding financial responsibility. On the 7th of July 2021, President Jovenel Moise was assassinated at his private residence, and First Lady Martine Moise was hospitalized in Miami. On the 14th of August that year, another huge earthquake struck.

  Gang violence escalated into a full gang war. By late 2023, gangs and armed groups controlled an estimated 80% of Port-au-Prince. During 2023 gangs killed 4,789 people, kidnapped 2,490 more, and displaced an estimated 362,000. On the 3rd of March 2024, armed gangs stormed the main prison in Port-au-Prince, and about 3,700 inmates escaped. The Transitional Presidential Council took over governance on the 25th of April 2024, but its mandate expired on the 7th of February 2026, leaving acting prime minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime as the sole executive while a planned election was delayed into the second half of 2026.