The International Monetary Fund announced on Thursday that it will give Haiti a loan of $100 million. As is its normal practice the loan comes with a   whole tangle of neo-liberal strings attached. These will include increased prices for electricity and pay freezes for public employees. Given that the Haitian state is largely outsourced to NGOs, charities and the Brazilian army the opportunities for trimming the public sector are fairly minimal. This IMF loan stands in a long tradition of imperialism squeezing money out of the island. In 1824 France offered the recently liberated slave colony the option of a European embargo or paying 150 million francs in gold as reparations to the former slave owners. This began a cycle of debt which saw the island paying 80% of its income in debt repayments in 1900 and what do you do when you are really deep in debt? They borrowed more from the United States and Britain. The new state was economically strangled at birth.

The Obama administration is using the devastation caused by last week’s earthquake to annex the island. It operations there are being run  by the Pentagon and the decisions are made by US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). That might, among other things, explain why a French flight with a mobile hospital was not allowed to land because priority was being given to the removal of US citizens at the airport. That’s the least of it. The ten thousand troops that the Americans will send include two thousand marines and it is absolutely certain that a significant American military presence will remain on the island for years to come under the pretexts of peace keeping and reconstruction. as their press release says the marines “are trained in a wide variety of missions including security and riot-control in addition to humanitarian tasks.”   They like to think of themselves as “compassionate warriors, reaching out with a helping hand for those who need it.” Sic.

SOUTHCOM  is the spearpoint of US imperialism in Latin America. Don’t take my word for it. Its own mission statement says its purpose is  “to conduct military operations and promote security cooperation to achieve U.S. strategic objectives.” (Our Mission – U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM). One of its specialities is counterinsurgency” in Latin America and the Caribbean

Beefing up the troops on the ground the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and its support flotilla are already off the Haitian coast. these include two vessels which are indispensable when you have to feed and provide medical aid to millions of people the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy and guided-missile frigate USS Underwood.

Haiti has effectively been under foreign military occupation since the coup in 2004. Obama, who persuaded millions of people to vote for him because they believed he would put an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is using the the tragedy in Haiti to take control of the state. It is a straightforwardly and explicitly imperialist intervention. An indication that he might have taken a different tack to his predecessor would have been to give the Haitian government the cost of a couple of frigates and an aircraft carrier to help reconstruct the country. With every day that passes the continuities with the Bush administration’s foreign policy become more glaring. In a few weeks Halliburton and Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) and parasites like them will be getting in on the action. It will take a couple of years but a local resistance to this return of empire is bound to emerge.

If you want to donate here are a couple of suggestions. Partners In Health is a NGO which is substituting for a state health system but it’s evident that food and medicines are the immediate priorities. The Haiti Emergency Relief Fund is a radical network which supports grassroots activity.