These are points of concern to academics, journalists, and human rights activists who, noting heavy North American involvement in the planning and construction of the dam, believe that neoliberal influences may be at play.

The Péligre Dam was proposed as a means to rehabilitate the agricultural lands of the Central Plateau through control of floods as well as to generate hydroelectricity to fuel the industrial expansion of Haiti.

Also, it was believed that the generation of a reliable supply of electricity from the dam would drive economic growth and reduce social disparity.

[1] The dam was completed in 1956 by the US Army Corps of Engineers and Brown & Root, creating Lake Péligre (essentially a large reservoir) in the process.

Lumas Kendrick, of the Inter-American Development Bank states that, of the energy that is generated by the dam, over half is lost due to poor power lines, defective transformers, and billing issues.

[2] The problems of heavy deforestation and soil erosion in rainy seasons have caused a large amount of sediment to become trapped in the dam, reducing its functionality.

This project is intended by the Inter-American Development Bank to increase the lifespan of the dam and power station by another twenty years.

These families, all of which were poor, rural peasant farmers, were forced to move to either seek employment in the city or to retreat into the less-fertile highlands above Lac Péligre.

[8] According to personal testimonies collected by Dr. Paul Farmer working in Haiti, these displaced farming families never were subject to a properly enforced resettlement plan, instead being forced to migrate at a moment's notice when the water began to rise.

[8] In addition to the usual environmental impact of reservoirs, the flooding caused by the dam has prompted the relocation of farming families, and there have been extremely high levels of deforestation and erosion on the hillsides where these farmers now reside.

Furthermore, because the primary interest of Electricité d'Haiti is generation of electricity, little consideration in water management decisions is given to flood mitigation in the watershed below the dam.

These floods cause agricultural and infrastructural losses in the irrigated district, as well as impacting the local ecosystems and tributary flow regimes.

In another study, it is suggested that the impacts of the dam on changes in water regimes in the Meye Tributary System of the Artibonite River may also be linked to the 2010 Cholera outbreak in Haiti.

The primary sources of income for 150,000 rural families in the Artibonite watershed, upstream of the dam, are livestock farming, charcoal production, and agriculture.

Farmer considers poverty in Haiti to be a human rights abuse that is the result of structural violence driven by the economic interests of the wealthy elites.

[14] Scholars believe that in Haiti, neoliberalism is marked by the structural violence of American institutions, the interests of the economic elites and the dispossession of the poor.

To add insult to injury, the majority of these people do not have access to electricity, as was promised them before the dam's building by the Duvalier regime .

It was during this regime that money was borrowed from banks in the U.S. to fund projects like the factories and agribusinesses, which were powered by the hydroelectricity from the Péligre Dam.

This regime set a precedent in which the economic interests of the elite are considered to be more important than the livelihoods of the poor, increasing the disparity and animosity between the two groups.

The influence of neoliberalism continues to shape Haitian life, due to transnational economic interdependencies such as those that led to the building of the Péligre Dam.