Slavery in Haiti

Haiti has the second-highest incidence of slavery in the world, behind only Mauritania and the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons has placed the country in the "Tier 2 Watchlist" since 2017.

[7] In response to the brutality, some the natives fought back and escaped into remote parts of the island's mountains and formed communities in hiding as "maroons".

[10] In the late 1490s they planned to send 4,000 slaves back to Spain each year, but this expectation failed to take into account the rapid decline the native population would soon suffer and was never achieved.

[11] It is not known how many Taino people were on the island prior to Columbus's arrival – estimates range from several thousand to eight million – but overwork slavery and in particular diseases, inadvertently introduced by the Europeans to which the natives had no resistance, quickly killed a large part of the population.

[16] In 1519, Africans and Native Americans joined forces to start a slave rebellion that turned into a years-long uprising, which was eventually crushed by the Spanish in the 1530s.

[18] The Spanish ceded control of the western part of the island of Hispaniola to the French in the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697; France named its new colonial possession Saint-Domingue.

The gens de couleur libres class was made up of affranchis (ex-slaves), free blacks, and mixed-race people, and they controlled much wealth and land in the same way as petits blancs; they held full citizenship and civil equality with other French subjects.

Some slaves became skilled workmen, and they received privileges such as better food, the ability to go into town, and liberté des savanes (savannah liberty), a sort of freedom with certain rules.

There are extreme cases recorded where slaves were whipped, burned, buried alive, restrained and allowed to be bitten by swarms of insects, mutilated, raped, and had limbs amputated.

[30] In 1791, St. Dominican Creoles began the French Revolution in Saint-Domingue; Republican revolutionaries incited a slave rebellion aimed at overthrowing the Bourbon Regime.

[59] Christophe and other leaders enacted policies allowing state land to be broken up and sold to citizens, and the plantation system largely gave way to one in which Haitians owned and farmed smaller lots.

[67] Under pressure to produce money to pay the debt, in 1826 Boyer enacted a new set of laws called the Code Rural that restricted agricultural workers' autonomy, required them to work, and prohibited their travel without permission.

The U.S. embargo of Haiti lasted 60 years, but Lincoln declared it unnecessary to deny the country's independence once the institution in the United States began to be ended.

[76] As had occurred under the regimes of Dessalines and Christophe, unfree labor was again employed in a public works program, this time ordered by the U.S. Admiral William Banks Caperton.

[77] Since the Haitian resistance fighters, or Cacos, hid out in remote, mountainous areas and waged guerrilla-style warfare against the Marines, the military needed roads built to find and fight them.

[81] Reports of the abuses led the commander of the Marines to order an end to the practice in 1918; however, it continued illegally in the north until it was discovered — no one faced punishment for the infraction.

[91] While trafficking often implies moving, particularly smuggling people across borders, it only requires "the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit a person for profit," and it is understood to be a form of slavery.

[97] Restaveks work long hours (commonly 10 to 14 a day) under harsh conditions, are frequently denied schooling, and are at severe risk of malnutrition and verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

[106] While women migrants were vulnerable during this time, the situation of children was underscored because of the phenomenon of irregular adoptions (one facet of human trafficking) of supposed "orphans" through the Dominican Republic.

[91] Sheldon Zhang defines sex trafficking as "migrants [who] are transported with the intent to perform sexual services...and in which the smuggling process is enabled through the use of force, fraud, or coercion.

[88] Suspicion was raised in 2007 that UN peacekeeping forces (deployed in 2004 to quell political instability) were creating an increased demand for sex trafficking after 114 UN soldiers were expelled from Haiti for using prostitutes.

One group at high risk for sexual enslavement and other types of forced labor is internally displaced persons, particularly women and children living in refugee camps,[113] which offer little security.

[98] For decades Haitians have been crossing the Haitian-Dominican border for various reasons, including voluntary and involuntary migration, long- and short-term residence in the Dominican Republic, legal and illegal entry, smuggling, and human trafficking.

[117] Given this threat of violence, women turn to alternative, unofficial routes and dependence upon hired buscones (informal scouts), cousins and other distant family to accompany them across the border.

Hired buscones also sell women and children into the sex slave trade within the Dominican Republic (brothels and other venues) or into sexual slavery as an export.

[122] In accordance with these international conventions, Haitian law prohibits abuse, violence, exploitation and servitude of children of any kind that is likely to harm their safety, health, or morals.

[103][incomplete short citation] The government took steps to legally address the issue of trafficking of women and children by submitting a bill to Parliament, in response to its ratification of the Palermo Protocol which required it.

[117] Since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, international aid and domestic effort has been focused on relief and recovery, and as a result few resources have been set aside for combating modern day slavery.

[128] Due to the sheer size of the sum asked from the nation, Haiti was forced to borrow heavily from Western banks at extremely high interest rates to repay the debt.

[132][133][134] In 2004, the Haitian government demanded that France repay Haiti for the millions of dollars (tens of billions in today's money) paid between 1825 and 1947 as compensation for the property loss of French slaveholders and landowners as a result of the slaves' freedom.