The Uses of Haiti

Paul Farmer's most politically direct book, arguing that Haiti's suffering is not a product of culture or geography but of deliberate, consistent US policy spanning more than a century — from the 1915 occupation and Duvalier-era complicity to the 1991 coup, the Guantánamo HIV detention scandal, and the structural adjustment imposed as the price of Aristide's return. Written in 1993 at the height of the post-coup crisis, it introduces structural violence as the framework for understanding how poverty concentrates risk and removes options, tracing how AIDS, political violence, and refugee crisis all follow paths carved by Haiti's position in the US-dominated Atlantic system.