US corporations, private mercenaries, Washington and the International Monetary Fund are using the crisis in Haiti to make a profit, promote unpopular neoliberal policies, and extend military and economic control over the Haitian people.

As Noami Klein thoroughly proved in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, throughout history, “while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times.”

This push to apply unpopular neoliberal policies began almost immediately after the earthquake in Haiti.

With the Haitian catastrophe now in its 10th day, it is becoming increasingly clear that the response of the Obama administration and the Pentagon, which have made military occupation of the Caribbean nation its first objective, has deepened the immense suffering of millions of injured, homeless and hungry people.

The Pentagon has announced that it is sending 4,000 more troops to Haiti, which will boost the US military occupation force to 16,000. For the first time, a unit that had been slated for deployment by the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being diverted to the Caribbean nation.

Meanwhile, a naval encirclement of Haiti’s coastline is growing. The Miami Herald reported Thursday that the U.S. military has also prepared a detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay Navy Base in Cuba – site of the infamous prison where detainees were tortured – to hold up to 1,000 Haitians should they manage to elude the U.S. warships.

By using Guantánamo as a holding pen for refugees fleeing the horrific conditions of Haiti, the US government will insist that they have no legal rights and cannot appeal their deportation back to their homeland. This same procedure was used in 1991, when thousands of Haitians fled the country following a violent military coup.

The claim that this military “surge” into Haiti is an indispensable prerequisite for delivering aid to the Haitian people is a lie. Relief agencies operating in the country insist that they have not been threatened by the Haitian people, but rather hindered by the attempt to impose war zone-style security over their efforts.

The worldwide media (particularly in the U.S.) never so much as hints that there could be anything but the sincerest humanitarian motives behind Washington’s assertion of control over Haiti. It makes no reference to the country’s history, which includes a two-decade US occupation at the beginning of the twentieth century, the deployment of U.S. troops twice in the last 20 years, and Washington’s orchestration of a 2004 coup that ousted and exiled Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

In publications reflecting the views of the military-intelligence apparatus, however, there are franker assessments of Washington’s objectives and the real mission. The American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Defence Studies issued a “crisis update” on Haiti, warning: “Conducting a ‘humanitarian relief’ mission in a poor country stricken by a natural disaster can quickly embroil the United States in local politics. And desperate people can easily become violent people.”

The statement continued by affirming, “Beyond delivering relief, US soldiers and Marines will inevitably find themselves securing the peace.” Part of this mission, it added, would be “to ensure that Haiti’s gangs – particularly those loyal to ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide – are suppressed.”

Let’s be clear, Washington is exploiting the tragedy that has been inflicted upon the people of Haiti to assert colonial-style control over the country. Its aim is to reaffirm U.S. imperialist hegemony in the broader region and to suppress any social revolt by the Haitian masses.

It is only a matter of time before the horrendous death toll caused by the January 12 earthquake will be augmented by victims shot to death by U.S. occupation forces.

In the wake of this huge tragedy in Haiti, the U.S. continues to press forward its plans to further dominate and exploit the Haitian people. Obama put George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in charge of U.S. aid to Haiti. Bush’s resume for this job is that he is the one who presided over the crimes against the people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Bill Clinton’s credentials are that he is the point man for a much-praised plan for Haiti that involves setting up tourist areas and sweatshops where Haitians will be paid 38 cents an hour.

If you really want to talk about looting – and on a grand scale – this is what Bill Clinton had to say after the earthquake: “Once we deal with the immediate crisis, the development plans the world was already pursuing have to be implemented more quickly and on a broader scale. I’m interested in just pressing ahead with it. Haiti isn’t doomed. Let’s not forget, the damage from the earthquake is largely concentrated in the Port-au-Prince area. That has meant a tragic loss of life, but it also means there are opportunities to rebuild in other parts of the island. So all the development projects, the agriculture, the reforestation, the tourism, the airport that needs to be built in the northern part of Haiti- everything else should stay on schedule. Then we should simply redouble our efforts once the emergency passes to do the right sort of construction in Port-au-Prince and use it to continue to build back better.”

In other words, Clinton now sees the massive destruction in Haiti as an opportunity to press forward with his plans for setting up profitable sweatshops and tourist areas. Clinton has already enlisted Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing US$55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050. According to the Miami Herald:

The US$40 million plan involves transforming various small towns into tourist villages, eco-tourism, archaeological exploration and visits to Vodou rituals. Clinton’s plan also includes a major expansion of the sweatshop industry in Haiti and the U.S. has already put in place provisions for duty-free treatment of Haitian apparel exports.

The U.S. government and the mainstream media continue to paint the U.S. as the most generous and caring country that will “not forget the Haitian people.” In his speech pledging aid to the Haitian people Obama said, “Our nation has a unique capacity to reach out quickly and broadly and to deliver assistance that can save lives.”

But everything the U.S. has been doing is aimed NOT at rescue and relief, is NOT helping the Haitian people – but has in fact meant many more deaths and more suffering.

The immense death and suffering inflicted upon the people of Haiti by the recent earthquake has laid bare a massive international crime by US imperialism, which prepared this catastrophe with a century of oppression and is now attempting to exploit the disaster for its own ends.

The estimated 200,000 who have died, the quarter million or more injured and the three million whose homes have been destroyed are victims not merely of a natural catastrophe. The lack of infrastructure, the poor quality of construction in Port-au-Prince and the impotence of the Haitian government to organize any response are determining factors in this tragedy.

These social conditions are the product of a protracted relationship between Haiti and the United States, which, ever since US Marines occupied the island nation for nearly 20 years beginning in 1915, has treated the country as a de-facto colonial protectorate.

It subsequently backed the three-decade-long dictatorship of the Duvalier’s, extending a series of loans that went into the family bank accounts, with the impoverished Haitian people left to foot the bill.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Washington promoted free market policies based on eliminating any safeguards for Haitian agriculture and the privatization of government enterprises and services. The results have been mass poverty, the increasing migration of destitute peasants to the shantytowns of Port-au-Prince, and the hollowing out of the country’s government and infrastructure – all conditions that have compounded the social and human costs of the earthquake.

Now, for an entire week, with the whole world watching, millions of Haitians have been left abandoned without medical care, food, water or shelter, as US military cargo planes have ferried in thousands of soldiers and Marines, and US Naval and Coast Guard vessels have mounted patrols off Haiti’s shores to prevent anyone from trying to escape.

The absence of any concerted rescue effort is not an accident, nor is the agonizingly slow arrival of food, water and medicine in far from adequate quantities merely a matter of logistics. The claim that the US military, which was able to pour a quarter of a million troops into Iraq and conquer Baghdad within barely two weeks, could not rush water, food and supplies to traumatized earthquake survivors 700 miles from the US mainland is a contemptible lie.

What is involved is a deliberate and sinister policy characterized by a gross indifference to human life that borders on the genocidal.

Within the Obama administration and the American ruling elite, definite calculations were made. What was the use of saving injured members of an impoverished and chronically unemployed population that US capitalism has long treated as surplus labour? Why dig people out of the rubble only to have to provide them with medical care when Washington is attempting to ration health care within the US itself?

Even as people were still being pulled out alive from demolished buildings, US and UN officials insisted that further rescue operations were hopeless.

At the very least, saving lives has not been the priority of the US intervention in Haiti. Wherever rescue and relief have come into conflict with the primary focus of Washington’s efforts – the military occupation of the country – they have taken a back seat.

The cargo planes that are bringing in US military personnel and supplies, it should be noted, fly back empty. There is no desire to bring injured Haitians, who will die without medical care or face the amputation of their limbs for lack of medical supplies, back to the US where they could be healed and their lives saved.

So blatant has the US military operation been that its ostensible allies in Haiti like Brazil, which heads up the United Nations peacekeeping force there, and France have registered protests with Washington. French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet went so far as to call for the UN to clarify Washington’s role, saying that the mission was “helping Haiti, not occupying Haiti.”

Groups involved in rescue and relief operations have also publicly condemned the US military response.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) protested Tuesday that its cargo plane carrying 12 tons of desperately needed medical equipment had been turned away three times from the US-controlled Port-au-Prince airport since Sunday night, despite being assured that it would be allowed to land. Since January 14, five of the organization’s planes have been diverted to the Dominican Republic. The result, the group said, is the deaths of hundreds of its patients, and hundreds more injured Haitians are dying daily.

“We don’t have any more morphine to manage pain for our patients,” said Rosa Crestani, MSF medical coordinator for Choscal Hospital. “We cannot accept that planes carrying lifesaving medical supplies and equipment continue to be turned away while our patients die. Priority must be given to medical supplies entering the country.”

Similarly, a Spanish aid group active in Port-au-Prince called a press conference at the Madrid airport Tuesday to denounce the US militarization of the response to the Haitian earthquake and to warn that the “obsession with security” was disrupting efforts to save lives. The group – Intervención, Ayuda y Emergencia – said that it had never encountered anything like it in responding to disasters from Sri Lanka to Turkey.

The real character of the US “aid” effort is expressed in President Barack Obama’s choice of his predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to lead it. Both have Haitian blood on their hands. The Bush administration orchestrated the 2004 coup that ended with the kidnapping and expulsion of elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, together with the killing of thousands by CIA-trained death squads. Clinton sent troops into Haiti in 1994.

It is the Democrat, Clinton, who in some ways has expressed most nakedly the attitude of the US ruling elite, which is characterized by class hatred for Haiti’s oppressed and barely concealed racism.

In media interviews, Clinton has praised the government of President Réne Préval for its subservience to Washington’s demands. He has spoken of Haiti coming out of the earthquake better than before, treating the mass carnage and social disaster as little more than a speed-bump on the road to progress, which is to be measured in increased US investment.

This is Washington’s real and malignant purpose. It aims to exploit the country’s tragedy in order to impose more direct colonial control and create conditions for US firms to make massive profits by exploiting virtual slave labour working for starvation wages.

At the same time, it is reasserting its domination in an area that it long regarded as its “own backyard,” the birthplace of Yankee imperialism. Facing growing challenges from its economic rivals in Europe and China for trade and investment in the Western Hemisphere, as well as a deterioration of its influence over the states of the region, Washington is utilizing military force to pursue its interests.

The corporate-controlled US media has played a particularly odious role in supporting this process. It has glorified the role of the US military, while deliberately concealing the obstructions that the US occupation forces have placed in the way of rescue and aid work.

At the same time, it has sensationalized stories about “looters” – for the most part, hungry people searching through the rubble for some means of sustenance – in order to provide a pretext for the massive military response. The real criminals under these conditions are not the so-called looters, but the hoarders – those who defend private, profit-making control of vitally needed supplies and those who withhold them from the hungry and homeless people.

The crimes being carried out against the Haitian people are inseparable from the assault on the conditions of the working class and the oppressed masses all over the world, which is driven by the economic crisis of capitalism. The rescue of Haiti’s workers and oppressed from the conditions created by over a century of oppression can be achieved only by uniting their struggle with that of workers across the globe to put an end to an unethical profit system.