Farmer, Paul — The Uses of Haiti (1994; 3rd ed. 2006) Source Information
Author: Paul Farmer
Full Title: The Uses of Haiti
Publisher: Common Courage Press
Year: 1994 (third edition with new epilogue, 2006)
Type: Secondary Source — political economy, public health, US-Haiti relations, structural violence
Foreword: Noam Chomsky
Location in Vault: research/secondary-sources/
Source PDF: ~/dev/rasin/data/sources/secondary_sources/annas_archive_new/farmer-uses-of-haiti.pdf Status
Text extracted: PDF in Rasin archive
Review pass: Audited and integrated (2026-03-31) — full read, all chapters and epilogue
Chapter notes: farmer uses of haiti ch notes
Graph review in this pass: Strengthened francois duvalier, jean bertrand aristide, 1991 coup haiti, structural adjustment haiti, us occupation haiti, corvee forced labor, charlemagne peralte, structural violence, haitian diaspora, us non recognition haiti Overview The Uses of Haiti is Paul Farmer's most politically direct book — an extended argument that Haiti's suffering is not a product of Haitian culture, geography, or bad luck, but of deliberate, consistent US policy spanning more than a century. Written in 1993 at the height of the post-coup crisis following the September 1991 overthrow of Aristide, it synthesizes colonial history, occupation legacy, Duvalier-era complicity, the 1991 coup, the Guantánamo HIV detention scandal, the blood-plasma trade, structural adjustment, and the mythology of international journalism into a single account of what Farmer calls "the political economy of brutality." The book's central move is to make Haiti's suffering legible through structure rather than culture.