Cholera returns to Haiti as nation lurches from one crisis to the next.
At the time of this writing, the country is in the grips of a massive cholera outbreak that has killed more than 1,400 people and sickened more than 12,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many of those infected were young children, and many more have become infected at a young age and are showing signs of illness.
As we look at the epidemic, we may be seeing the effects of years of neglect and displacement at the hands of both the U.S. government and its private contractor. The U.S. military has been carrying out military training exercises in Haiti since 2000. As the country’s political instability grew, the U.S. government began to use U.S. military officials to run the schools. This has caused the displacement of thousands of families, while the government has remained largely in the hands of those who supported the U.S. invasion. The U.S. government and its contractors have also caused years of conflict across the country through their military training exercises and by the practice of arming local militia groups.
As they carried out their training exercises, the U.S. military officers were providing military training to groups of fighters who were trying to retake land from the government. Since most of these fighters were armed and financed by the U.S. government, which continues to provide weapons to Haitian fighters even after the U.S. has abandoned the country, the crisis in Haiti is not the result of a single, random event.
But rather, it’s an interconnected system in which poverty, violence, and the U.S. military have been the catalysts for massive displacement, and the effects of the instability are reverberating in many different ways. The United States has an enormous economic and military presence in Haiti, and it has continued this presence during the course of the crisis. Despite this