The Uses of Paul Farmer: Against Progressive Imperialism in Haiti
Clash! recently called attention to the linkage between Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party, its loyal representatives that shout ‘US Out of Haiti,’ and their longstanding ties with US imperialism. One major kernel of evidence for this linkage is Lavalas and Aristide’s enduring relationship with Paul Farmer’s NGO, Partners in Health. Despite campaigns of distraction and misinformation that suggest Haitian solidarity activists with sympathies toward Lavalas despise Bill and Hilary Clinton, the late Harvard professor Farmer remained a close associate of the Clintons for over twenty years. From this, we can conclude that Farmer and the Clintons were close associates prior to the second coup against Aristide in 2004. Could Farmer be a friend of the Clintons and a friend of Aristide? How should we make sense of this mutual comradeship between Farmer, Aristide, and the Clintons?
Farmer passed away in Rwanda after receiving an award for service from President Paul Kagame, the notorious frontline agent of US empire and its military wing, AFRICOM. After Farmer died in 2022, Madame Mildred Trouillot-Aristide, wife of Jean-Bertrand, saluted Farmer at an activist forum in Oakland in late 2023. She did not acknowledge the popular mobilization against the proposed US/UN policing action in Haiti with ground support from CARICOM and Kenya.
Until the night before Madame Aristide’s address, Lavalas loyalists assured allies that the party did not support the US/UN policing action. Lavalas representatives insisted they would not participate in the summit with CARICOM and “international partners” at a hotel in New Kingston, Jamaica, to appoint a Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) for Haiti. Within days, Lavalas had changed course and signed on to the TPC accord that mandated support for the US/UN policing action. We rehearse this not merely to expose hypocrisy among the ranks of Lavalas supporters. Rather, recent history reveals the absence of any popular democratic content or transparency among Lavalas and its activist cheerleaders. How could its fervent supporters believe Lavalas would never support the US/UN policing action until it did? This reveals, instead, their willful ignorance of popular democratic forces in Haiti and their affinities with Washington-based lobbyists and ruling elites in peripheral states of the Caribbean and beyond.
Lavalas supporters in North America often champion the maintenance of the University of the Aristide Foundation (UniFA) and a hospital in Port au Prince amidst what they describe as ‘unimaginable chaos.’ In the face of much heralded destabilization by US-backed forces, how have the signature institutions of the Aristide Foundation survived? If Washington has supplied street gangs with high powered weapons, why have they not fundamentally menaced the UniFA campus? Why have they not experienced the brunt of this violence and ensekirite? There is much to be learned from following the money that underwrites the Aristide Foundation. Its affiliation with Farmer and Harvard University, alongside other imperialist mainstays of the military industrial complex, reveal the open secret of its collaborations with Washington.
We do not wish to see everyday people menaced or coerced by anyone. On the contrary, too much disinformation is spread in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’ while providing cover for US empire and its silent partners in Haiti. In this spirit, we must revisit what Paul Farmer represented. The capitalist hordes at Forbes, the Council on Foreign Relations, TIME, and Capitol Hill showered accolades on his life and work, even calling it ‘the audacity of accompaniment.’ But why, then, do The Nation, NPR, and Democracy Now also see Farmer as a ‘friend’ who claimed to oppose the oppressive order that surrounded the sick and poor beyond the clinical treatment of maladies and diseases?
On Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti
Farmer, the former head of Harvard’s School for Public Health, was offered the head of USAID by President Barack Obama. Farmer declined. But what qualified him for the position in the eyes of the Obama administration is clear. The CIA-backed USAID is an arm of US empire that operates under the guise of ‘food security,’ ‘public health,’ ‘saving children’, and ‘opposing violence against women.’ With this mandate, it maintains its imperial tentacles and surveillance over a large swath of the world’s nations. USAID is a source of the seemingly benevolent charitable images that veil US intervention in Haiti. But this pattern recurs across the Global South.
The Haitian elite in waiting and CARICOM governments are openly funded by USAID and the European Community. Compacts forged in the name of Caribbean unity and regional purpose are openly sponsored by the empire itself. CARICOM and the newly appointed TPC in Haiti now struggle to maintain the intellectuals and propagandists that endorse this pathetic masquerade.
It is fashionable for activists and militants who oppose US empire to condemn white supremacy. Many like to suggest that empire is exclusively a Euroamerican project, perhaps with the reluctant addition of Japan. Empire certainly reproduces fundamental racist dynamics. But the empire of capital is built on exploitation of labor. And many junior partners have been invited to join the empire of capital after the age of formal decolonization. No matter the schemes devised by other blocs of capital (i.e. Russia, China, Venezuela, and whoever wishes to join the BRICS from Saudi Arabia to the UAE), the projection of clashing nationalisms obscures their unspoken alliance in Haiti.
As members of the UN Security Council, Russia and China abstained from the vote on the US/UN policing action in Haiti. Whether this action is fronted by Kenya, Benin, Rwanda, we know the Caribbean Regional Security Service remains at the forefront as a regional military force funded and trained by the US. Today, the RSS can be mystified from above as a defender of Pan Africanism and Pan Caribbeanism in the Americas. This is why Clash! has called for the renewal of a Caribbean federation from below conceived in the 1970s by advocates of direct democracy and workers’ self-management in the region.
When critics of empire condemn white supremacy alone, they offer tacit cover for the ruling classes of the Caribbean who cast themselves as victims of global white supremacy while commanding ethnically plural police states that maim and kill the people of Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the entire region with impunity.
Paul Farmer’s Uses of Haiti emerges out of this tradition. It demonstrates how empire conquers again under the benevolent guide of opposing racism and advancing social democracy. Many anthropologists and public health officials have aspired to serve as experts in peripheral areas and indigenous languages, often lending their skills to the Human Terrain System, covert and military intelligence. This thrived under the pretense of cultural relativism and the imperatives of development and progress for the world’s poor and destitute.
If we revisit Paul Farmer’s Uses of Haiti, we see how diabolical the US imperial cultural apparatus can be. Here is a summary of its major points:
[1] Farmer shows that it is possible for functionaries of US empire to look back on the history of Haiti — the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the subsequent financial subordination by France, successive US occupations, invasions, and coups in Haiti — and conclude these have been the ‘wrong policies.’
[2] Farmer shows that ordinary Haitians had no idea what they represented to the US. The popular imagination slotted Haitians into racial stereotypes marked by inferiority and the personification of evil. Even those Haitians who were enamored with the US could not help but conclude that Washington considered Haitians to be innately inferior — ‘they use us as they see fit.’ Farmer summarized this aspect of the Haitian popular will, and, alongside the Clinton, Obama, and Biden factions of the Democratic Party, continued to pursue this approach. Haitians and peripheral conquered toilers can be ‘used’ even as the empire insists they are tired of this sordid legacy of racist stereotypes. The imperialists who come to conquer in the name of anti-racism make a big show of rejecting their white privilege while aligning with local elites to suppress the popular will of the Haitian people.
[3] It is possible for functionaries of US empire like Farmer — and even its partnered Caribbean ruling elites — to make a big show of solidarity while rejecting Haitians en masse who desire to flee from tyranny and migrate to their territories. They tolerate only a subordinate Haitian sentiment that seeks permission from its perennial overlords with the mantra, ‘Let us.’ Let us vote for who we want. Let us trade. Let us build up our infrastructure instead of constantly seeing it torn down. ‘Let us’ is the aspect of the Haitian popular will, that the progressive imperialists have attached themselves. To be clear, whatever the character of the various Haitian militias bereft of a popular democratic vision, none of them have made the projection, ‘Let us.’
[4] Farmer’s Uses of Haiti suggests there is only so much support one can bring from the outside to the poor and powerless. Note it well, the aspiring rulers they propose to collaborate with in Haiti and the Caribbean, have decided their name, image, and likeness is ‘the poor and the powerless’ while they scheme to exploit and suppress the poor and powerless themselves.
[5] Paul Farmer’s Uses of Haiti, while affirming a Haitian tradition of resistance, presents Haiti nevertheless as an imbroglio of shadowy death squads, of armed gangs who do not respect the rule of law, as embodied by an aspiring national bourgeoisie or Black political class that collaborates with empire, that has been discredited by the grassroots time and again.
If one looks at declassified documents from Haiti and the Caribbean, there is sometimes a better analysis of the conflicting tendencies at the grassroots than many supposed activists and intellectuals produce. The latter often refuse to concede that any conflicting tendencies exist among popular democratic forces in Haiti and limit themselves instead to lobbying and petitioning US lawmakers. However, in their efforts to contain and repress at the level of the grassroots, the USAID/CIA deftly partners with aspiring rulers who will preach justice, reparations, and social democracy to quell the insurgent social motion of the Haitian people themselves.
[6] Paul Farmer’s Uses of Haiti attached itself partially to a practice of liberation theology, from Jean Bertrand Aristide to Gustavo Gutierrez. Farmer expresses admiration for this tradition as a lifelong Catholic. As US Evangelical Christianity and the religious right make inroads in the Caribbean, it is easy to sympathize with social democratic voices among religious leaders and clergy. But the actual relationship of liberation theology to the empire of capital and elite representative government has yet to be disclosed.
Liberation theology does not know if it wants to bring the Church into social revolution or cast its hierarchies out. It cannot clarify the actual role of the priestly classes mediating the popular will with God’s will, in contrast to the search for revelation by ordinary people themselves. It continues to maintain a pursuit of personal salvation side by side with social salvation — a saving of the existing imperial system.
The fact is Liberation theology seeks genuine protest about the poverty of our times by appealing to who? What authorities does it wish to reform and save their souls too? Despite the Catholic Church and imperialists in the past warning against the ‘Marxist’ influences of liberation theology, they have found a base in the imperial cultural apparatus for a reason. Their concern about ‘spiritual poverty,’ given the critique of their own privilege in the face of the poor peasants, is an appeal to save the soul of the empire itself. So we should be clear, the Imperialist functionaries also have a soul and can know salvation, after they kill, conquer, with some apologetics, and propose to be partners in health.
In his celebration of liberation theology, Farmer suggests that the mechanisms by which Haitian and Caribbean labor have been exploited have never been properly studied. Yet to send someone like Farmer out to explain why the popular masses suffer is a false opening. How are functionaries of the empire of capital going to discover the problem of a hierarchy of property relations, the profit motive, and the search to accumulate wealth as a problem for toilers who produce and distribute everything?
Farmer’s progressive imperialism can never discover that; the truth is Aristide and Gutierrez have no idea of it. They have discovered the vodou and indigeneity of the masses but have had no revelation that toilers produce and distribute everything. They have run afoul of Church authority for far less than that.
The intersection of progressives and imperialism share a welfare state of mind mentality, whether they pursue consistently its implementation or not. Farmer could embrace the idea that the hand of the dominator rejects any protest by the oppressed exactly because a major veil of American empire is that it respects protest and dissent.
[7] Now Paul Farmer can say he objected to CIA-backed subversion not simply in Haiti, but in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Peru. But those who claim to be radical but impose thought crimes on themselves cannot see that debates within the US foreign policy establishment about past approaches to conquering are fully within the realm of the imperial cultural apparatus itself. This is how the university falsifies and disorients anti-imperialist activism to begin with. This is how many anti-imperialists, who speak of ‘the tragedy of the American empire,’ are actual functionaries of, and collaborators with, it.
[8] The strategy of Paul Farmer’s Uses of Haiti was to exhibit a worldview that could be the basis of a faction of US empire that understands itself to be peaceful and benevolent. This is what qualified Farmer to serve as director of USAID under Obama, the charismatic deceiver-in-chief who carried out imperialism while claiming cultural affinity with a section of the Haitian ruling class. Farmer entered under the banner of condemning his own privilege. Farmer positioned himself as the imperialist against white privilege. Now the empire of capital presents itself as condemning racism with its Afro and Indo-Caribbean partners by its side in New Kingston.
[9] Most ‘progressive’ activists, when sincere, fail to follow through and logically identify the patterns of empire in order to oppose it. First, one must reject capitalism and the state. Yet critics of neoliberalism wish to partner not with toilers, but industry and banks to revive capitalist production and social democracy. A close reading of critiques of their policies reveal this. Liberals and progressives (who are also the identity of most State Department and CIA officials and the cultural and economic apparatus in which they participate) think about global poverty only in terms of their own ‘national security.’ Haitian and Caribbean aspiring rulers have exposed themselves as agreeing to a shared vision of ‘national security’ with the US empire. The empire’s security is also these rulers’ security — this can only come together if those who conquer and exploit at home and abroad can function on an ‘anti-racist’ consensus. Respect among the imperial rulers and the peripheral bourgeois, for them this is opposition to racism.
[10] Farmer introduced himself to his public as someone engaged in public health work in rural Haiti, particularly concerned with ‘tuberculosis’ and ‘AIDS.’ He emphasized that he worked with ‘a score of villagers.’ But Farmer says one does not have to be a physician to be incensed by crimes committed with utter impunity against the sick and the poor. Why did Farmer never insist that professionals like him should be abolished as the embodiment of culture and government such that the power of the poor to govern themselves may be unleashed? Instead he placed a kind face on the monstrous visage of US empire.
Today, empire conquers in the name of social democracy — the left bloc of capital. Is social democracy opposed to hierarchies of property and capitalist ownership? Of course not! Social democrats believe there are good and bad banks, good and bad monopoly trusts, good and bad spies, good and bad capitalists, and good and bad agents of empire.
[11] Farmer’s Uses of Haiti suggests awareness of abuses of US and UN military intervention in 1993–1995, and USAID approaches to Haiti in the 1970s, what the US House Foreign Affairs Committee has approved, and what former US Defense Secretaries had said, what the Council on Hemispheric Affairs thought. There is talk of human rights investigators, World Bank and International Development Bank officials, and the prospects of free and fair elections. There is no talk of ordinary Haitians directly governing themselves.
In no way does Farmer attempt a history or perspective from below. In no way does he identify with the outcasts who think and act by and for themselves. He identifies with rice bowl Christians who bend their political views to those missionaries, secular or faith-based, who will feed them. But the truth is far worse.
Farmer’s form of empire proposes to find a national bourgeoisie who will play ‘activist’ games by preaching reparations and justice while the US empire finances and trains its military, funds the construction of roads, hospitals, and schools.
Now Farmer’s Uses of Haiti maintains a vague awareness that Haiti’s employers used these imperial and local military forces to repress Haitian toilers who dared to organize themselves. Why did he not become a revolutionary in the United States given its own long history of police brutality against those fighting racism, and labor exploitation at home?
Farmer’s Uses of Haiti, a justification for the renewal of American empire in Haiti, nonetheless warns of false humanitarian interventions. Those, like the Aristides, who allied with Farmer have the ability to oppose the current UN/US policing action proposed for Haiti. Why have they not condemned it and the collaboration of Fanmi Lavalas?
The US empire can invent false flag activist-intellectuals at any time from the imperial cultural apparatus to oppose its policies. Just as Palestine solidarity is infiltrated by liberal Zionists that oppose the policies of Israel as a means of preserving that nation-state project’s legitimacy, where Paul Farmer in the early 1990s suggested President Clinton’s policy toward Haitian refugees at Guantanamo ‘would not be his most popular one,’ he was paving the way for the imperial restoration of Aristide as a US-backed ruler above Haitian society. Many communists for capitalism and USAID-funded activists rallied the masses of Haitians in support in NYC and Miami.
The overthrow of Aristide, the restoration of Aristide, the overthrow again of Aristide, the present day funding of Aristide by US empire reveals that there are conflicting tendencies within its policy makers. Some are racist. Some stridently oppose racism and white privilege as they understand it. But the latter continue to work for USAID and the US State Department as ‘partners in health’ for the next imperialist approved government in Haiti.
The future of anti-imperialism that must fight an affirmative action empire and an ethnically plural police state comprised of an university-trained overseer class of functionaries and bureaucrats who conquer in the name of public health, food security, opposing violence against women, and saving the children, must take seriously self-emancipation and the search for genuine autonomy.
Independence is not a social identity certain people inherit as a result of historical oppression that can be sold for professional development and social capital. The best instinct found in the Haitian popular will is not ‘Let us.’ For this, whether we know it or not, seeks imperial sponsorship and compromised peripheral partners.
It is a social motion that will build popular assemblies to link up with the popular militias that will discard all those who previously were police (or wish to be so tomorrow) or previously took part in electoral politics. It will no longer welcome US and UN-sponsored persons groups to consult, but will gather with those who toil and are unemployed in the barrack yards, dungles, and katye across the region.
Farmer’s outlook is just one indication of how activists for the government co-opt the rhetoric of autonomy and the popular will. The type of social criticism we offer has its limits. But it suggests a turning point between the old world and the new. The old world of the failure to face the realities of a post-civil rights, post-colonial empire. Renewal can only mean defeating an empire that arrives wearing the masks of anti-racism and social democracy. Whether those who wield these masks are sincere in pursuit of these principles does not concern us. This is who we must fight today to ensure that Haiti and the Caribbean do not know permanent subordination and degradation.
