Book Talk: “Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti”
Date and Time
Mar 19, 2024 6:00 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Mar 19, 2024 6:00 pm
450K
Haiti’s state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moïse and not a single elected leader holds office; refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America; and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters, both man-made and natural, that destroyed much of Haiti’s infrastructure and institutions. How did a nation founded on liberation—a people that successfully revolted against their colonizers and enslavers—come to such a precipice?
In Aid State (2024, St. Martin’s Press), Jake Johnston, a researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, reveals how long-standing US and European capitalist goals ensnared and re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it. Based on years of on-the-ground reporting in Haiti and interviews with politicians in the US and Haiti, independent aid contractors, UN officials, and Haitians who struggle for their lives, homes, and families, Aid State is a conscience-searing book of witness.
