Haiti’s spiral of misery

The assassination of President Moïse was just the latest calamity to befall Haiti. Why is the country so dysfunctional?

In the 1950s, the U.S. feared that Haiti would turn communist, so Washington supported the ruthless Duvalier regime of dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc.” The Duvaliers looted Haiti of hundreds of millions of dollars and “disappeared” some 30,000 people with death squads trained by the U.S. In 1990, Haiti finally got a democratically elected president, former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but he was deposed in coups in 1991 and 2004, and both times the

U.S. military intervened with U.N. approval. [See box.] The political chaos was compounded by a series of natural disasters.