Why Haiti is Dying & the DR is Booming

Haiti, a country of almost 12 million inhabitants in the Caribbean, is on the verge of total collapse of the State. Around 200 different heavily armed gangs have managed to take control of large swathes of the country's territory and are operating with almost impunity, while some of the more heavily armed gangs that are more similar to paramilitaries have managed to take control of up to 90% of the capital of Hades and the largest city, Port-au-Prince, these gangs have been able to completely dominate what little is left in the country of the former Haitian government, some of the larger and heavily armed Others have even managed to set up barricades and checkpoints between Porta Prince and the country's largest airport and between Porta Prince and the country's main seaports and oil terminals.

In doing so, they have effectively become able to hold the entire country hostage by dominating Hades' access to the outside world and access to imports of crucial supplies and oil, there is barely a Haitian government left in the country from which talk that is actually capable of fighting them because there are not even elected government officials. Remains in the country now the most recently elected president of P Jovenel Moisy was murdered 2 and a half years ago in July 2021 by as yet unidentified gunmen who raided his own private residence; in fact, no elections of any kind have been held. held in Haiti since 2016 almost 8 years ago, as before Moy was assassinated, decided to continually delay the Haitian elections that were supposed to take place in 2019.

His decision to delay those elections coupled with accusations of corruption and a worsening economy in the island nation led to mass protests against him that ultimately culminated in his assassination in July 2021, in deeply suspicious circumstances, the gunmen who murdered him are presumed to remain at large, while Hadi's own government investigation into the matter has been extremely slow, a fact that seems very suspicious considering that just 2 days before Moisy was assassinated, Moisey had nominated a man named Ariel Henry to become the country's next prime minister and then, 2 days later , Moisy was assassinated in his home and Ariel Henry Rose came to power as Hadi's new interim prime minister.

Having never been ratified by the country's Senate after assuming power, Henry has also continually delayed elections in the country for the past two and a half years, meaning that since no new president has ever been elected and all the members in the senate terms have all been allowed to expire henry has been acting as deao leader of hades this entire time without being elected or approved by the senate to do so, there have been multiple accusations since then that henry was directly involved in the plot to assassinate Moisei so he could seize power in the country for himself, including accusations coming from Hadi's chief prosecutor and then, just 2 months after Moy's suspected murder, shook Haiti politically, a devastating earthquake Magnitude 7.2 struck Haiti's Tiberon Peninsula in August 2021, which would shake Haiti even further, to the point where the disaster would kill. about 2,250 people in the country and injure over 12,000 more and would also cause up to $1.7 billion in economic destruction by ha 0, which represents about 8% of all Haitian nominal GDP at the time, so if follows the span of Just For two months during the summer of 2021, Haiti witnessed the assassination of its elected president, following a catastrophic earthquake that caused significant financial and human destruction and, in addition, a new unelected and unratified leader who rose to power under these circumstances and was immediately seen by the majority of Haitians to be completely illegitimate.

It was the perfect opportunity for many of Hades' heavily armed gangs, many of which were made up of former members of the Haian police, to begin taking advantage of the power vacuum and chaos to create their own areas of influence through the Force. Violence of all kinds within Haiti has therefore skyrocketed since 2021, largely as a result of the gang war that has spread through the country's capital, with the United Nations reporting that more than 3,000 people in Haiti have died from gang violence in 2023 alone. a statistic that makes the current conflict in Haiti one of the most violent in the world right now, with a comparable number of deaths from wars in 2023, as happened in Yemen as a result of in July 2023 the Biden Administration in the United States urged all US citizens to immediately leave Haiti and not travel to the country under any circumstances until further notice, as Haiti continues to collapse into increasingly violent lawlessness .

Furthermore, since the current crisis in Haiti exploded in mid-2021, more than 100,000 Hazian Han have fled their country as refugees and risked their lives by traveling to South America and then walking on foot through the notoriously dangerous Daran Gap to the north. to the United States or have embarked for the territory of the United States directly in any improvised boat or water-capable vessel they have been able to obtain, which has recently made Haitians one of the largest nationalities of people encountered by the United States border patrol since then, due to the fact that the various gangs in Haiti currently control approximately 90% of the capital and largest city in the country and the government has completely lost its monopoly on force.

Aeriel Henry's unelected administration has been repeatedly requesting and at times pleading for foreign armed intervention in the country to crush the power of the gangs and restore the power and authority of the government throughout the country, after which Henry promised finally organize the terminally delayed elections in Haiti again on October 2, 2023. Their frequent requests for this foreign intervention were finally granted after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing another armed intervention. intervention in Haiti as the details currently stand as of December 2023, the United States will largely fund the intervention with more than $100 million, while the East African nation of Kenya will take the lead in the intervention with boots in the ground. deploy at least a thousand of their own police and soldiers to Haiti with the aim of destroying gang control over the capital and restoring the authority of the Haitian government and will be assisted by a smaller number of troops deployed from neighboring Caribbean countries. of Jamaica, the Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda, but this latest intervention in Haiti that is taking place right now is only the most recent in a very, very long history of foreign interventions in the country dating back centuries, none of which have managed to establish the conditions to prevent another intervention from being necessary in the future during the last 108 years of history dating back to 1915, Haiti has seen the presence of foreign troops deployed on its soil for 41 of those years or about 38% of the time, including very recently in 1994 and then again between 2004 and 2019 and again in 2023 and probably in 2024 until who knows when, always in the name of ensuring peace in the country and achieving political stability and , however, never achieve it.

However, the crisis occurring in Haiti is possibly the worst in the country's entire modern history, as Haiti is currently on the verge of becoming the only truly failed state in the Western Hemisphere. On par with countries like Sudan or Afghanistan, measured by 2023, it is In addition to the fragile states index and as Haiti sinks further into anarchy and violence, the United Nations intervention led by Kenya and financed by the States United comes to try to restore order in the country again. Hades' only geographical neighbor by land is right next to the Dominican Republic. Republic or Dr. are building a new Great Wall along their entire shared border to separate themselves from the Haitians even further than they already are.

The Dominicans began construction of the wall in February 2023 as the gang war in Haiti intensified and when it is completed. It will be the second longest wall in America, only behind the border wall between the United States and Mexico. It will be 4 m high and will be made of 20 cm thick concrete and covered with metal mesh to prevent people from climbing further. More than 70 watchtowers are planned to be built along the wall, while dozens of gates will be built to allow Dominican soldiers to carry out patrols. The wall will include drones, cameras, radar, motion sensors and fiber optic communications cables, all designed to block anyone out.

The Dominicans do not want the Haitian side to be able to cross the border and once the wall is completed it will effectively transform Haiti and the Dominican Republic into two completely separate islands even though each shares the same geographic island and even though they have shared This same island for centuries the Dominican Republic in Haiti ended up experiencing radically different destinies and even without the wall the two may already be in completely different worlds in nominal terms the economy of the Dominican Republic is 4 and a half times larger than Hades, While in terms of purchasing power parity the economy of the Dominican Republic is seven times larger than Hades even though the two countries have a roughly comparable population, this further means that when it comes to GDP per capita, Dominicans are in average 5 to eight times richer than Haitians.

Next, citizens of the Dominican Republic are more comparable to countries like Serbia or Argentina and citizens of Haiti are more comparable to countries like Rwanda and Uganda in terms of poverty, around 58% of Haitians live on less than $365. per day, making Haiti one of only six countries worldwide outside of sub-Saharan Africa, where the majority of the population continues to live in poverty, by comparison, only 4.3% of the Republic's population Dominican still lives in poverty, while Dominicans also live about a decade longer than Haitians. 98% of the population of the Dominican Republic. The population has access to electricity, while only 47% of Haitians do, once again making Haiti one of only two countries in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of the population still does not have it. no access to electricity.

Haiti is on the brink of the abyss. becoming a failed state with uncontrolled violence and is one of the most impoverished countries in the world, while the Dominican Republic, right next door, is about to become a fully developed, high-income country by the end of the decade In 2030, if Haiti remains more or less in the same state as now, by then there will probably be no other major disparity across the world across borders in levels of development and income, apart from the borders of Saudi Arabia and Oman with Yemen and South Korea's borders with Russia and China. with North Korea, so how did this unique situation on this island develop in the first place?

Why did Haiti and the Dominican Republic, despite existing together on the same island for centuries and having a very comparable current population size, end up so different from each other? and so separated from each other, some of the factors that explain this difference today are historical reasons, but they do not explain the full picture. The island on which they both exist in Hispaniola was initially colonized by the Spanish, but was first legally divided in 1997 by the Treaty of Riswick which previously established a Spanish colony on the eastern 2/3 of the island and a French colony on the western third, although the borders between them were slightly different than they are today from the very beginning of this division of the Although the French and the Spanish treated their separate colonies on each side radically differently, the Spanish ended up following a policy that focused more on settler colonialism on its side with more limited amounts of slavery by Tie standards in the late 18th century, the modern Dominican Republic, still under Spanish colonial rule, only had a population of approximately 104,000 people, of whom only 30,000 were slaves from Africa and, meanwhile, the French on their side of the island treated things extremely differently and followed a policy of historically enormous exploitation such as had never been seen before, as they It is estimated that during the 18th century alone the French forcibly transported approximately 800,000 Africans from their continent to present-day Hadi as slaves, a figure that represents almost double the number of African slaves. brought to the entire North American continentDuring the entire North Atlantic slave trade in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the population of Haiti was estimated to be around 556,000 people, a little more than five times the total population of its Spanish neighbors. colonial Dominican Republic, but only 32,000 of the people living in Haiti at the time were white Europeans, there were an additional 24,000 freed people of color and approximately 500,000 Africans and their descendants bound in the chains of slavery, outnumbering their colonial masters whites by a In a ratio of almost 16 to 1, France used all of these slaves as a source of labor to work on the vast sugar and coffee plantations they established throughout the island, which for a time turned Haiti into the most lucrative and financially valuable colony in the entire world.

The people who really dominated it so ruthlessly in 1789, about half of all the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe came from the slave plantations of Haiti and helped make the French Kingdom the richest in Europe at the time. that Haiti would also become decades of independence before the Dominican Republic and during much more violent circumstances amid the chaos of the French Revolution, Haiti's slaves, vastly outnumbering their colonial masters, rose up in a violent own revolution in 1791. Over the next 13 years, both Haitian slaves and French colonials engaged in brutal genocide. war of annihilation against the other in which it is estimated that 200,000 Haitians would die and practically the entire white colonial population of Haiti would be murdered or expelled from the country never to return.

In 1804, the French had surrendered and withdrawn from their former colony, but they along with the vast majority of the rest of the outside world continued to refuse to recognize Haiti's Independence for decades and although Haiti had paid dearly in blood for its sovereignty between 1791 and 1804, they had not yet finished paying for their sovereignty with treasures and it would not be long in 1825. French warships appeared outside the port of the Haitian capital. A prince gave the Haitians only two options: they could accept a deal in which France would finally recognize Hades' independence in exchange for Haiti's financial acceptance. compensate France for property loss suffered during the Haitian revolution, including France's loss of hundreds of thousands of former slaves, which France claims amounted to 150 million francs.

Haiti could accept this agreement backwards or refuse and take option two war and then the French warship sitting. In the port they would simply blow up everything they could and carry a prince with a gun pointed at his head. Hades selected option one and agreed to pay his former colonial slave masters for his own freedom which they had already paid for in blood, the debt becoming known. as the French Indemnity and although France would technically later reduce the amount owed by the Haitians to 90 million francs, the compensation was financially hindered for more than a century afterwards, as they struggled to repay it with meager resources of their own and a continued lack of recognition international.

Beyond France, which limited their trading opportunities, the Haitians were not in a financial position to pay the compensation that France imposed on them, then resorted to various desperate measures to help pay off the debt, including mass cutting down their own trees to get wood. to sell to the French, which greatly contributed to Haiti's catastrophic modern deforestation problem and then without recognition from the United States or other European powers, Haiti was forced to take several predatory loans from French banks to help pay their original debt of 1825. The indemnity imposed on them by the French government, which transformed their original debt into effectively a double debt: the original indemnity plus all the interest on the loans they were then forced to take to pay the original indemnity.

The coffers of the Hades government remained depleted and empty for decades and decades as they continually attempted to pay this debt and the French continually threatened to bomb their ports if they did not pay. In the 1880s the double Haitian debt was acquired by the modern CIC bank which still Headquartered today in Paris, while payments continued, CIC created the First Central Bank of Haiti in 1880, but it was a bank they owned as a front for their own financial interests in Haiti, the central bank was owned by CIC rather than the Haitian government itself and then the The precursor to today's City Bank, based in New York, acquired a stake in the Central Bank of Haiti in the Haitian double debt in the early 20th century, in the 1920s.

City Bank had bought or outmaneuvered the other European shareholders of the Central Bank of Haiti, so all Hai's double debt payments in the original French Indemnity of 1825 began to flow to Wall Street after the City Bank was able to use its control on the Central Bank of Haiti to impose tens of millions of dollars in additional predatory loans on the country in order to pay off its original debts. 1825 Indemnity: a situation that American communists described at the time as the transformation of Haiti into an American slave colony. It was not until 1935 that the Central Bank of Haiti gained real independence from the City Bank and it was not until 1947 that Haiti finally managed to pay.

To compensate for the double debt originally imposed on them by France 122 years earlier, in total the Haitians ended up paying a total of 112 million francs for their double debt or around $570 million in today's money, thus diverting their scarce resources to the For more than a century, banks in France and the United States prevented Haitians from using that money to invest in themselves, such as better infrastructure, education or health care services. In 2022, the New York Times published a landmark investigation into the lasting legacy of this double debt imposed on Haian society and concluded that if all that money had remained inside Haiti from the beginning and been used for its own development and had worsened over the last two centuries of history since then, it would have been worth a minimum of approximately $21. billion in today's money and potentially up to $115 billion by other estimates, after the Dominican Republic gained its own independence, they would never face this same type of debt problem that was imposed on them by their former colonial overlords and that lasted until the mid-20th century. . and therefore they would have greater opportunities to invest resources in themselves from earlier, but that is only part of the full explanation of how they became so different today in the 21st century.

You see the Dominican Republic achieved its first independence from Spain in 1821 under much better Circumstances than Haiti achieved with France, but immediately afterwards Haiti decided to invade and conquer the Dominican Republic just the following year in 1822, 3 years before France imposed the double debt after the double debt was imposed on them, the Haitians tried to then force the Dominicans they had conquered to help pay it off by imposing very high taxes on them, the Haitians would end up occupying the Dominican Republic for a total of 22 years while they tried to incorporate all the island under the rule of Haiti.

This is remembered today in the Dominican Republic as a particularly brutal and dark period in its history that continues to negatively influence relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti to this day. The Dominican Republic was finally able to fight off its Haitian occupiers in 1844 after 22 years of control, but the Haitians refused to recognize their independence and launched four more military invasions into the Dominican Republic until they were finally defeated definitively in 1856. It would not be Until 1867 that Haiti would finally recognize the independence of the Dominican Republic and abandon its ambition to dominate the entire island from there, the two sides of the same island experienced quite similar stories for a long time, although the Dominican Republic did not have exactly the same type of debt problems that Haiti had, both were impoverished and politically unstable countries. susceptible to violence and authoritarian dictatorships for decades for a time, the United States even invaded and occupied them both for very similar reasons, ensuring that their debts continued to be paid to the Wall Street City Bank, was able to convince the United States to invade and occupy .

Haiti in 1915, while the Dominican Republic was invaded and occupied by American troops the following year, in 1916, for 7 years, the United States occupied the entirety of Hispaniola and intruded further into the border to create the modern border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic that We know today that the United States withdrew from the Dominican Republic in 1924, but continued to occupy Haiti for the next decade until 1934, which represented a 19-year occupation of Haiti by the United States and one of the longest foreign occupations in all of American history. Allis City The World Bank was able to expand its economic control over the country and impose new predatory loans on the Haitian government in the process;

Then, after the United States withdrew from both countries, both the Republic and Haiti experienced long periods of authoritarian dictatorial rule in which little economic progress was seen. done for decades, the Dominican Republic came under the control of a former general named Rapael Truo in 1930, just 6 years after the Americans left the country, while Haiti finally joined under the control of another dictator named Francois Duvalier in 1957 the tru police state in the dominican republic. lasted 31 years until he was assassinated in 1961, leading to another period of chaos in the Dominican Republic culminating in a civil war in the country that broke out in 1965 and then fearing the Cuban communist regime's ability to influence the Civil War and flipped.

Dominican Republic in another Caribbean communist state. The United States intervened directly in the Dominican Civil War and found itself occupying the Dominican Republic again, but after that the United States was able to organize elections in the country in 1966 and withdrew that same year. There has never been another foreign intervention or occupation of the Dominican Republic since then. Meanwhile, the situation in Haiti turned out very different. Haiti was dominated by François Dualer and his own authoritarian police state until his own death in 1971, but unlike Tru's long regime in the Dominican Republic. which collapsed immediately after his death, the dual regime in Haiti survived with a succession of François Duvalier's son, Jean Claude Duvalier, who continued to rule the country as an authoritarian police state for the next 15 years until 1986, when he was finally overthrown by un cou d' During these 29 years that the dualist regime survived in Haiti it was constantly supported and propped up by the United States due to Duvalier's harsh anti-communist policies that Washington considered vital to counter communist Cuba in the Caribbean, just 50 miles from Haiti.

Communist activities within Haiti were punishable by death under the duvalay and up to 60,000 Haitians were murdered by seet police, so ultimately, as the Dominican Republic emerged from its authoritarian dictatorship and period of the War Civil in 1966, Haiti would not end up emerging from its period of dictatorship until 20 years later, in 1986, and have never been able to emerge from its subsequent chaotic period until 1966, when the Dominican Republic held successful elections and the United States withdrew from the country it The Dominican Republic and Haiti were basically two sides of the same coin, both were very impoverished and underdeveloped, with very similar sized economies, very similar incomes, very similar population sizes and both had been isolated from the outside world for decades due to dictatorships. long-standing authoritarian regimes or continued political instability that had long scared away foreign investment, but then things began to change for the Dominican Republic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the country began to successfully reform. , becoming more democratic, more stable and increasingly opening up to trade with the outside world.

It is at this time that If you compare the inflation adjusted GDP per capita graphs between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, you begin to see that the Dominican Republic finally begins to rapidly accelerate away from Haiti and the strange thing about this graph is that the all-time high Hades' absolute GDP per capita to date was actually supported during the repressive period of the Duval dictatorship back in 1980 and since then for over 40 years, Hades' GDP per capita has either continually declined or remained largely unchanged. stagnant measure, while the Dominican Republic has continually exploitedup so clearly. While deep historical factors have played a role in the crippling poverty and Hadesian instability, today the very clear economic divergence between Haiti and the Dominican Republic did not begin to occur until recently, after 1968, and there are probably many reasons. for foreign investors.

It's like investing in countries that are politically stable rather than countries that are not, and Haiti has remained chronically unstable since 1986, after Duvalier's impressive 29-year regime was overthrown that year, the military Haitian established a transitional regime until the first free and open elections in Haiti's history took place in 1990, resulting in the first election of Jean Bertrand, the first democratically elected leader in modern Hades history. However, he was only able to serve as president of the country for 7 months until September 1991, when the military decided to launch another coup d'état and overthrow him, leading the Clinton Administration in the United States to begin an economic blockade of Haiti with new trade restrictions that further impoverished the country and then finally the Clinton Administration authorized a new US military intervention in the country in 1994 to overthrow him.

To remove the army from power and restore Aisti back to the presidency, the United States sent two aircraft carriers to Haiti and more than 20,000 soldiers during the operation to defend democracy in 1994 and then, in the face of this overwhelming firepower, the military's hundred Haian collapsed and puffed up power to avoid a After the war they knew they would lose, Aristy was reinstated as president of the country and would later win re-election again for another term in 2001, but after the United States military intervened to restore him to power and after Ain won his next election again in 2001, he would end up doing something that would really anger both the United States and France.

He did not start committing massive human rights violations. He didn't start any war or start any trade disputes. What he did was much worse. He aimed in 2003 to become the first and so far only leader in the entire history of Haiti to formally demand that reparations be paid to Haiti by France for the indemnity and double debt that had been imposed on them since 1825. Arin demanded that France to pay Haiti no less than $21 billion in reparations, a figure that at the time was more than four times greater than Haiti's entire GDP, within months of making this demand, the farri paramilitary rebels in Haiti They began to launch an extremely successful rebellion in the country and some of these rebels had supposedly received prior training from the US Special Forces.

In February 2004, these rebels had captured the fourth and second largest city in Haiti and were beginning to lay siege to the capital, Porter Prince, when the rebels began to break into and loot the capital in the On February 29, officials from the United States Diplomatic Security Service arrived at the Haian Presidential Palace and what followed between them did not is clear and deeply controversial according to most US government officials who later decided to voluntarily resign as president of Haiti and wanted to escape the country when the rebels stormed the capital, he allegedly agreed to be transferred to the main Hadi airport escorted by personnel from American security, where he then boarded a plane and was flown directly to the Central African Republic to live a new life in exile;

However, there are tons of conflicting accounts about what exactly happened, according to Aristy himself, the American officials who came to him that morning pressured him to resign immediately, saying that if he didn't, the rebels would break into the palace and kill him. They would murder their entire family. he was forced to resign, then kidnapped by American forces, taken at gunpoint to the airport and then taken out by plane without knowing where he was going, where the French managed to convince the Central African Republic to accept him live on the plane just as events were. These accusations by Aristy have also been strongly supported by the actions of the Americans and French surrounding the timeline for his removal from power, particularly the United Nations Security Council. of which France and the United States are permanent members, rejected a call by the Caribbean community on February 26, 2004 that would have sent international peacekeeping forces to Haiti to stop the rebellion before Aristy had resigned and only three days Then, on February 29, just hours after Arista had resigned under these dubious circumstances, the United Nations Security Council suddenly voted unanimously, with both French and American approval, to authorize an armed intervention in Haiti. immediately after Arista's resignation in exile.

The Chief Justice of Haiti, named Bonafos, was succeeded by Alexander as acting acting president and, wouldn't you know it, Alexander also immediately withdrew Hades' demand for the $21 billion worth of reparations from France that Aride had made himself only a few months earlier and no official demands have been made by the Haitian government for reparations since the following year. One day, a thousand American Marines were suddenly sent to Haiti to restore order, while French, Canadian, and Chilean troops arrived the next morning. 18 years later, in 2022, a damning report published by The New York Times includes direct testimony from the former French ambassador who was serving in Haiti.

Back then, in 2004, he concluded that the events of February 2004 in Haiti amounted to nothing less than a cou d'a toss sponsored by France and the United States to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristy in order to crush the Hades demands 21 billion dollars. value of France's reparations then, after Aristy was pushed into exile in Africa, the United States passed the responsibility of keeping peace in Haiti to the French and then to the Brazilians as the United Nations stabilization mission in Haiti, better known by its French acronym. As Mana was led by the Brazilians for almost its entire history, Mana was initially tasked with simply restoring law, order and democracy to Haiti by creating the conditions necessary to host new elections again, but Mana and thousands of foreign troops from around the world would remain. in Haiti until 2019, 15 years after his arrival, since Haiti's stability always seemed eternal.

Mission Out of Reach began to move forward and more and more disasters continued to befall the chronically unfortunate people of Haiti seen throughout the 1990s and 2000s, it was non-stop. Political disasters, coups d'état, rebellions and foreign interventions that continued to hinder Hades' ability to develop events that were almost absent in the Dominican Republic, but in the following decade throughout the 2010s would become unique geographic problems of Hades that would contribute more to the pace of continuous disasters. holding the country back because while thousands of foreign troops in Haiti under the command of Mana could change the political stability of Haiti through Force, they could do nothing to alter the geographical instability of Haiti that is seen despite being located in the same island.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic have some very notable differences. Geographic quirks about them, well some people have speculated in the past that rainfall levels are higher in the Dominican Republic and that contributes to better agricultural potential, which is actually not true. Rainfall levels on both sides of the island are fairly consistent and, if anything, the Haitian side actually receives a little more rain than the Dominican side, with abundant rainfall and warm temperatures year-round. Pretty good soils. Both sides of the island naturally possess a very strong capacity for agriculture; This is why Haiti was the epicenter of the global sugar and coffee industries.

During the colonial era, both sides of the island also experienced a very similar population growth rate from the early 1950s to 1961, at the end of the true Hio dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, the population of Hades was approximately 4 million. , while the Dominican Republic was approximately 3.4 million 40 years later in 2001, the population of the Dominican Republic more than doubled to approximately 8.7 million, while Hades would also roughly double to approximately 8.5 million and both would continue to grow from there at rates similar to their current 2023 populations of approximately 11.8 million. people in Haiti and 11.3 million people in the Dominican Republic, however, even though the two have very similar levels of population growth and very similar total population sizes, Haiti is only about half the geographic size of the Dominican Republic, which means that Haiti has always been significantly more densely populated.

In fact, of all the countries in the world with more than 1 million inhabitants, Haiti is one of the most densely populated in the world, with an average density that is more or less identical to that of the Netherlands, apart from tiny Barbados, Haiti is the most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere today with a density significantly higher than all of its immediate neighbors, but density alone does not imply poverty; In fact, higher population density appears to correlate more with greater wealth generation around the world and no less off the top. The 15 densest countries in the world with more than a million inhabitants, approximately half of them are considered highly developed economies, most of them are in an intermediate position and only three of them are considered less developed countries and only Haiti among those three. is located outside of sub-Saharan Africa within Hai's unique GE graphical environment, however, higher population density works against it in the sense that Haiti is also one of the most vulnerable places in the world to the frequent natural disasters of many different types.

Both sides of Hispanola are very frequently hit by tropical storms and hurricanes, as Hispanola is located in the western Atlantic and Caribbean, which is one of the most hurricane-prone places in the world. Devastating and powerful hurricanes have rocked both Haiti and the Dominican Republic throughout their histories, but Haiti has evolved over time to become more vulnerable to these storms for two very important reasons: First, Hai's population is obviously much more concentrated than within the Dominican Republic, making them more vulnerable to higher levels of damage each time these storms hit the island and, second, Haiti has a serious problem. deforestation problem that the neighboring Dominican Republic simply does not have.

Haiti cut down huge amounts of its forests to sell to the French and Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries to help pay off its double debt, while more recently Hispanola was discovered to have virtually zero coal, oil or natural gas resources and that means that throughout their modern history, both Haiti and the Dominican Republic have had to import practically all of the fossil fuels they have consumed and both continue to depend largely on these Imports Haiti continues to generate 80% of its electricity with these fossil fuels imported, while the Dominican Republic generates 85% of its electricity with them and both continue to rely overwhelmingly on imported gasoline for their transportation sectors, but because the Dominican Republic has been a more politically stable source. of foreign investment since the 1970s, the Dominican Republic has been able to attract greater foreign investment than Haiti and therefore has a significantly more developed electrical grid than Haiti's, while the Dominican Republic's electrical grid is far from be perfect and is still subject to occasional blackouts.

More than 98% of the Dominican population has regular access to electricity as of 2021, only 47% of Haitians have regular access to electricity. Haiti is therefore one of only two countries in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of people still do not have regular access to electricity. access to electricity, the only others are Papua New Guinea and Oceania and because of this, most Haitians continue to rely on burning wood for charcoal as their main source of energy, which obviously also exacerbates the already serious Haiti's deforestation problem starting in 2023. It is currently estimated that due to these factors only about 12% of the land of Hades is still covered by forests, which representsa decrease from the 60% forest cover of just a century ago, back in 1923, but the neighboring Dominican Republic, right next door, still has around 44%. % of their much larger land mass covered by forests, this huge difference between them becomes extremely evident when you look at the border between them today, which even without the wall currently being built between them is one of the most political borders. obvious anywhere in the world. detect from the air or from space because the Haitian side is practically treeless, while the Dominican Republic side is still covered by thick forests, the trees literally begin and end precisely where the Dominican Republic begins and ends.

The deforestation problem of Hades further increases the country's deforestation problem. vulnerability to hurricanes and tropical storms because without all the trees and their deep roots planted in the ground, the soil of Hades is much more vulnerable to erosion and therefore when hurricanes and tropical storms hit the island, the The Haitian side experiences more catastrophic flooding, mudslides, and landslides than the Dominican side does due to its much higher population density and much worse deforestation problem. Haiti is more vulnerable to destruction from hurricanes than the Dominican Republic even though each of them is present on the exact same island, but Haiti also has another extremely serious geographical disadvantage.

That is largely absent in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the existence of very active tectonic faults that run directly through its most densely populated areas. You see, the island of Hispanola exists at the geological intersection of the North American tectonic plate to the north and the Caribbean tectonic plate. plate to the south, two major fault lines cross the island in the south and north and when you overlay a map of the island's population density and political borders over these fault lines you begin to see the main problem: Haiti It has more than twice the population density as the Dominican Republic and the most densely populated part of the country is located precisely along this southern fault line, the Dominican Republic has a more dispersed population and the largest city in the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, is safely located in the southeast of the island, very far away. of both fault lines and throughout recent history, this northern fault line has been the more inactive of the two with very few notable events in recent centuries, this means that the second largest city in the Dominican Republic, Santiago deos cab Aros, has been saved from There have also been very large earthquakes like those that have occurred in the largest city of the Dominican Republic and, on the other hand, Haiti has not been so fortunate.

It appears that the southern fault line that runs through the island goes through alternating periods of intense seismic activity and long periods of inactivity. In the intervening periods it was very active during the French and Spanish colonial periods and caused frequent devastating earthquakes back then, but then remained largely dormant for a very long period of 24 to 40 years until the unfortunate year 2010 came between those times. . People began to worry less about a possible future earthquake that may or may not have occurred during their lifetimes and began to worry more about the frequent hurricanes that hit them almost every year, so they began to build their houses with concrete and blocks of cement.

They were better. to withstand the strong winds of hurricanes compared to houses built with wood that would have withstood hurricane tremors better. An earthquake and then in 2010, after 240 years of inactivity, the southern fault triggered a catastrophic earthquake that shook the nation of Haiti to its foundations. The epicenter of the earthquake hit just 16 miles from the capital of Haes and the largest city, Porto Principe, houses that were poorly built with cemented concrete blocks to withstand hurricanes collapsed and an estimated 250,000 Haitians lost their lives, making the 2010 Haiti earthquake the deadliest natural disaster of the entire 21st century so far and something that the neighboring Dominican Republic was almost completely spared from and killing around a quarter of a million people in Haiti, the 2010 earthquake caused an estimated $8.5 billion in economic damage to the country, as well as a figure that represented almost three4 of the entire Haitian GDP at the time.

The Brazilian Le Mana is still present. Members of the fourth coup rebellion in Haiti were forced to extend their stay in the country to deal with the apocalyptic magnitude of the humanitarian disaster after 2010 and almost immediately after the earthquake that devastated Haiti. Disaster struck the country abroad again. Aid workers from around the world came to Haiti after the earthquake to help with the United Nations response and recovery efforts, but it is believed that just a few months after the earthquake occurred, United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal who came to help Mana in Haiti accidentally introduced chalera into the country a bacterial disease that spreads mainly through unsafe food and water, the introduction of that disease into Haiti caused what also became the deadliest chaler outbreak Throughout the 21st century and over the next 9 years until 2019, almost 820,000 people in Haiti would become infected with CA, while 10,000 of them would die from the disease and then, as the chalera outbreak was raging, the country Still recovering from the 2010 earthquake catastrophe, Hurricane Matthew arrived in October 2016, a Category 4 storm that was the third strongest hurricane in history. that hit Haiti that storm killed another 546 people in Haiti caused another $2.8 billion more in economic damage destroyed more than 200,000 people's homes and further exacerbated the chera epidemic still ongoing in the country Mina would eventually withdraw from Haiti in 2019 after 15 years of continued presence in the country, but the lasting legacies of the 2004 US and French intervention in the country that overthrew the democratically elected president who had demanded reparations from France and then Mina's subsequent introduction of Kalera in Haiti, which killed thousands more, combined to seriously damage Haiti's confidence. in the rest of the outside world, while the failure after failure of the 1994 intervention and the 2004 to 2019 intervention to really establish stability within Haiti left a bad taste in the mouths also of the outside world that did not really want to try to intervene . in Haiti again Haiti's last elected president, Jovenel Moi, was elected in 2016 while Mana continued to remain in the country and that would end up becoming what to date is the final election ever held in the country.

Boyy himself faced repeated accusations of corruption and then began delaying the Hades parliamentary elections that were supposed to be held in 2019 as the USTA withdrew from the country, protests against his administration began to grow and then came his assassination in July 2021 under the aforementioned deeply suspicious circumstances and Ariel Henry, who might have had something. to do with the assassination He came to power instead without any subsequent election and then just 2 months after Mo's assassination and Henry's rise, the southern fault line running through Haiti triggered again and caused another catastrophic earthquake on the Peninsula Tiberonica of Hades that killed more than 2,200 people and caused another 1.7 billion dollars in estimated economic damage and that is what set the conditions for gangs in Haiti to begin to take control of approximately 90% of the capital of the country.

Haiti's current status as a failed state and the United Nations decided that another armed intervention in the country was necessary just a few months ago, this time however, the Biden Administration in Washington decided that the United States would not be the one to lead the intervention on the ground. because of how bad all the previous US interventions were. Washington ultimately turned to Kenya to lead this latest intervention. Kenya has significant experience with previous UN peacekeeping operations and, more importantly, the Biden administration was able to convince them to do so. lead this new intervention in Haiti by providing $100 million in funding to cover it, as well as agreeing to a 5-year defense cooperation agreement with Kenya that offered unspecified US support to Kenya and its own ongoing war with al- shabab in the neighboring country.

Somalia, in exchange for greater US support to fight Al Shabab at home and the knowledge that Kenyan soldiers can earn much higher salaries as part of UN peacekeeping operations than they could earn within the Forces Kenyan Navy, Kenya has agreed to lead the charge into Haiti. and will deploy thousands of its own police and soldiers as part of this new UN intervention, its mission will be to regain control of Porto Prince from the gangs that currently dominate the city and restore Authority to the Haitian government so that elections can be held. continually delayed since 2016 may finally take place again, but doubts abound about how successful this intervention by Kenyon Le in Haiti will actually end up.

There is a very, very long history of corruption in both the Kenyan and Haitian police forces. It is feared that Kenya's intervention could end up simply strengthening the power of a gang in Haiti that happens to have ties to the Haitian government and police and will end up dominating everyone else, while Kenyans backed by US funding could be able to restore the Haitian government. Government Security Sovereignty Two things they will not be able to restore in Haiti alone will be the country's monetary sovereignty and its security from continued natural disasters. In total, natural disasters in Haiti between 2010 and the present have caused about $14 billion in economic damage to the country and have continued to hinder Hades' ability to develop, while the last time a major natural disaster hit the Republic Dominican Republic was Hurricane George in 1998, which caused more than $9.3 billion in damage, but there have been very insignificant natural disasters that have happened to the Dominican Republic since then, ultimately, without the same deforestation problem, without the same high levels of population density and without the same levels of devastating economic opportunities lost during the colonial era that Haiti has endured.

The Dominican Republic has been much more resilient to earthquakes and hurricanes than Haiti and with much less frequent catastrophic natural disasters and greater political stability, the Dominican Republic has been able to accomplish many things recently that Haiti has never been able to do, such as establishing a tourism sector. absolutely

booming

in 2022 more than 82 Million tourists visited the Dominican Republic, making it the most popular tourist destination in the entire Caribbean and even among the five most popular tourist destinations in all of the Americas. Tourism now represents almost 12% of the Dominican Republic's total GDP and has become one of the country's main industries, but Haiti, due to its terrible poverty, frequent disasters and chronic internal instability and violence, has struggled for a long time to attract the same levels of tourism as its neighbor in 2018, although Haiti was still able to successfully attract around 1.3 million tourists to the country. country and made around $620 million in the process, but since the covid-19 pandemic began and this most recent crisis in the country began in 2021, tourism to Haiti has practically come to a standstill that year in 2021, only 148,000 tourists visited Haiti and generated only 80 million in revenue for the country and that compared to the 8.5 million tourists who visited the Dominican Republic in 20122.

Hadi has many of the same geographical, historical and cultural attractions for tourism that the Dominican Republic, but it only has chronic instability. problems of poverty and natural disasters that the Dominican Republic does not have, which is why tourism to the Dominican Republic continues to grow year after year in a kind of positive feedback cycle, while tourism to Haiti continues to collapse year after year in a kind of more negative feedback loop that has been further widening the wealth gap between the Dominican Republic and Haiti and, while neither side has significant fossil fuel resources, much more mineral wealth has been discovered in the Dominican Republic than in Haiti, which includes the location of what is literally the largest and most profitable deposit of gold. mine throughout Latin America and the 13th largest gold mine discovered in the entire world, the Pueblo Vio mine, this huge gold mine currently represents around 2% of the total GDP of theDominican Republic and has become the country's largest corporate taxpayer, having paid more.

Over $2.6 billion in taxes alone between 2013 and 2020, by contrast, Haiti has exactly zero existing mines currently in operation and no discoveries have ever been made in the country that are as significant as Pueblo Vijo in the Dominican Republic. able to use their surplus tax revenues from their

booming

tourism and mining sectors, which are absent in Haiti, to aggressively reinvest in education, healthcare and infrastructure in the country, which has then only further compounded the economic advantages of the Dominican Republic over Haiti and this is all in In a nutshell, why the Dominican Republic has become so much more prosperous than Haiti and with another foreign intervention in Haiti looming, it is unclear what could end up fixing Haiti permanently in the future, it is They have argued that to fix Haiti for good, the country's economic sovereignty should ultimately be restored at the same time as the country's security sovereignty is restored.

The argument is that the French government, which initially extorted Haiti with the compensation in 1825, along with the American government and banks such as cic and City The bank that subsequently benefited from the compensation should finally comply with the demands made by Jean Bertrand Aristy in 2003 establishing a reparations payment to Haiti totaling $21 billion, an amount that is still larger than the entire Haitian GDP without which, they claim, Haiti will continue. They cannot invest in themselves and develop and will remain a politically unstable and violent open wound on the Earth's surface that continues to cause costly problems for all their neighbors in the future, such as the new border wall of the Dominican Republic, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to the United States that Washington will continue to have to deal with if this next intervention in Haiti only restores government sovereignty in a security sense and not in an economic sense with reparations and future costly international interventions at Haiti.

They might continue to become necessary, as they have ultimately proven to be after each of the previous interventions that never attempted to right the historic wrong committed against Haiti in the first place, but the last time a Haitian head of state demanded these reparations in 2003, apparently resulted in a coup sponsored by the United States and France, his own forced exile to another continent, and 15 years of foreign troops on his territory apparently accomplishing so little in all that time that more foreign troops are returning to the country again just 4 years later that left and, as a result, Haiti's future has arguably never been more in doubt than today, while the future of the Dominican Republic is bright enough that it will likely emerge as a fully developed country by the end of the decade with a wall that resembles a fortress. that will be separated from the completely different universe that will exist on the other side of the Island, a border that could eventually become historically different as it is today that separates South Korea from North Korea and just as the Korean Peninsula produced two very different today. so has the island of Hispanola for a very complex variety of reasons, designing a solution to the many complicated problems of Hai is without a doubt one of the most challenging and pressing problems facing the international community today, but our The world is filled with an inconceivable amount of complicated problems that are big like Hades and small like your own individual personal problems and among those smaller personal problems that you could solve right now is with this video sponsor Henson shave Henson makes a razor that exposes the blade less than the thickness of a human hair are offering to sponsor this episode and I asked them to send me a razor to try and decide for myself that was about a month ago and I'm pretty sure I'll never use my old plastic blade again. three leaves. disposable cartridges never again I used to think razors like this were outdated technology, but this Hensen razor looks like it came out of a high-end aerospace manufacturing facility and that's because that's how it was before They made razors.

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