Haiti is one of the few countries John Kiriakou has studied as an economy rather than as an intelligence target, and the finding he reports is about ownership.
The seven families
“When I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff I did a study on the Haitian economy, and one of the things that I was surprised to learn was that the seven largest merchant families — the merchant families that run the entire Haitian economy — are white. I was fascinated by that.”[1]
Poverty as policy
Kiriakou refuses the accidental reading. “It’s like we never learn our lessons, especially in our own hemisphere. There are so many ways we could have helped the Haitian people, and instead we decided to take advantage of them. It’s not an accident that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere — and it’s no wonder that so many Haitians are trying to get out of their country to try to save themselves.”[2]
The silence around it
Introducing the subject in March 2021, he framed the coverage problem before the substance: “Haiti is in the throes of what may be a revolution right now, and it’s getting almost zero coverage in the American press.”[3]
He returned to the point that July, when protests in Cuba dominated American television: Haitians “have been having protests for years,” and the contrast in coverage is what he calls a double standard.[4]
The Clintons and the case against deportation
Kiriakou’s judgement on responsibility is direct: it is “well documented that the Clintons, Bill Clinton as president, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State under Barack Obama wrecked Haiti. They wrecked it.”[5] Combined with a catastrophic earthquake and with armed roving gangs now in control of the country, that history is what makes return unsurvivable for the Haitians living in the United States on temporary protected status.[5][6]
The community he uses as the example is the roughly 12,000 Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, where people whose status has expired have been summoned to an immigration facility and offered a choice between detention on the spot and an ankle monitor pending a court appearance.[7][8] Kiriakou’s general principle is that the countries people cannot be returned to are often American work: “often times the US is largely to blame for that country being a hell hole.”[9]