The Creole Pig: Haiti's Great Loss

The pigs is an incredibly iconic incident of U.S. imperialism in Haiti.

U.S. government coming into Haiti, hunting down, virtually throughout the countryside, the small Haitian black pig, wiping them out.

They slaughtered one of the main sources of income for, in essence, almost everybody in the country.

It's not viewed in isolation.

It's viewed in the context of what has happened in the past 40 years.

It's economic and social, often political issues that enter into what is a pig.

In the story of the Creole pig, Haiti's past, present, and future collide, and its symbolic significance can be traced to the Haitian Revolution.

On August 14, 1791, after almost 300 years of slavery, the Maroon society and many enslaved people, they gathered and had a ceremony.

The purpose of the ceremony was to use it as an open gate to a revolution.

Led by the voodoo priestess named name Ccile Fatiman and Dutty Boukman, this convention of revolutionaries has come to be known as the ceremony of Bois Caiman.

As an artist, I put myself as a witness, as well as a participant.

Whenever, you know, I look at Bois Caiman, I feel that I'm looking at the essence of my own existence, the essence of my own identity.

Before Bois Caiman, we had different traditions.

Either they were traditional of the natives who inhabited the land and the region or they were tradition from the different kingdoms of Africa.

Whether they were tribal traditional, tradition from one village to the next, or tradition from one kingdom or another, all these became one during Bois Caiman and fight slavery and colonialism, and to represent that accord, that contract, that pact among all of us.

We sealed that pact with the blood of a Creole pig.

Our ancestors did that because they were going to fight the army of Napoleon.

They didn't think they were going to survive it, but they had faith in their spirituality that they were capable of doing this fight.

In 1804, this revolution brought an end to the French colony of Saint-Domingue and gave birth to Haiti, the first independent black republic in the world.

Certain scholars who talk about the wealth of Saint-Domingue, one of the richest colonies in the world, produced so much wealth for the French -- what they fail to realize -- that was at the expense of individual enslaved African people.

The enslaved individual actually becomes a factor of production, essentially treated as an input.

There is no individual identity.

There is no family.

There is no sense of community.

The Haitian Revolution was about dismantling that plantation system.

After the Haitian Revolution, you had the dismemberment of plantation holdings.

Many of the formerly enslaved people subdivided these land holdings amongst themselves and created the lakou system.

It's an anti-plantation economic, social, political system, a system that was independent, a system that was self-sufficient, one that did not rely on one kind of economic production, for instance, sugarcane, where you couldn't have large numbers of people being exploited by one owner or one manager or one family.

You didn't have, you know, the owner of the plantation and the overseers and then the slaves.

You had the family.

Lakou Djisou, one of the oldest lakous in Haiti, whose members can trace their lineage back to those who initiated the ceremony at Bois Caiman.

It's tied to family networks.

It's tied to religious observation.

[ Bell ringing ] Connections to particular lwa, particular spirits.

It's not uncommon for family members to be buried on that plot, again for spiritual purposes.

Before the eradication of the Creole pig, 80% of the population lived in rural communities centered around the lakou, and the Creole pig was key to their subsistence farming strategy.

The Creole pig was/is a descendant from the Iberico that became so well known in Spain.

Christopher Columbus brought to the island of Hispaniola in 1494, in his second trip.

The pig played an extremely important role, ecologically speaking, not just in terms of producing meat and so forth, but what it did to the soil.

The pig gets a lot of nutrients from the soil, from basically plowing the soil.

This also helped have more highly producing fields.

Unlike cows and goats, which require grazing fields, this characteristic of pigs allowed Haitian farmers to raise them and simultaneously grow crops.

This would help them develop a symbiotic relationship with what was grown on the land, provided food for their families, and the surplus is fed to the Creole pigs or sold at the market.

When one talks about the Haitian farmer or the Haitian farming system, we're not just talking about men producing food.

We're talking about a whole wide range of activities and we're talking about women and the very, very central and crucial role that they play, especially the link between what happens on the lakou and the marketplace.

Women very often are the ones who bring the food to the market and sell it.

They have what anthropologists call an internal rotating market system, and it's a really beautiful sort of economic phenomenon that occurs in the absence of formal markets and formal control.

Everybody in rural Haiti throughout the entire country has access to two to three markets per week.

Farmers may travel days to reach these markets.

Since crop and produce may not last these long trips, livestock became a preferred item to trade.

This results in these markets developing a section exclusively for trading livestock called palan.

You invested in a pig, you bought a pig, in less than a year, you had a dozen pigs.

That's a huge interest rate.

Where do you know of a bank where you can put a certain amount of money and have 12 times that amount of money within a year.

The pig allowed people who raise kids to send their kids to school.

If there was a big event, such as somebody getting married or a death in the family, the person would sell a pig so that they can get the cash to be able to take care of that event.

The Creole pig was a farmer's primary source of income, accounting for over 40% of it, and more than 90% raised pigs.

This allows roughly $16 million to $20 million to circulate in the rural sector annually, and through a company named HAMPCO.

Haiti would export its meat products through the Caribbean and the United States, ensuring a consistent market for the Creole pigs.

If you came from overseas, you went to the cities, you get around speaking French and so forth.

If you went further than that into the countryside, you wouldn't get around unless you spoke Creole.

And they were moun andeyo.

The term moun andeyo means outsider.

No other term indicates the clear social division of class between rural and urban, the rich and the poor, or the farmer and the bourgeois.

There was a state government, structures, institutions, and there was also a nation, which is these small farmers who are just trying to grow their food and raise their families.

From the very beginning, the Haitian state, as well as the bourgeois, or the merchant class, often viewed the lakou as non-productive.

The lakou doesn't produce food for a global market.

It's not about generating wealth for a class of elites or generating wealth for the state.

Oftentimes, those who controlled the state sought to dismantle the lakou system as an impediment to the re-creation of the plantation economy.

That meant exploiting large numbers of enslaved people or even, post-slavery, exploiting low-wage laborers who had no ownership of land for the generation of profit.

This struggle to re-establish plantations reached its apex in 1915, when the United States invaded and occupied Haiti.

They initially viewed the U.S. occupation as positive.

The U.S. can quell potential peasant rebellion, establish order and stability, and also provide fertile ground for foreign investment.

During the two-decade occupation, the U.S. government facilitated the expansion of companies by providing tax breaks and land concessions to create new plantations.

The American occupation failed at creating plantations in Haiti, so they've escaped this control of the plantations.

100 years later, the U.S. comes along and tries to subdue them and put them to work on plantations.

Wasn't going to happen.

They had the lakou.

To get that plantation land, you had to take it away from somebody.

Haiti has been one big, massive resistance, from the charcoal to the lakou to even the pigs, you know, were part of this subsistence strategy.

They tell a narrative about the Duvalier regime today as if it was one regime.

And it's in the interest of the bourgeois, because it was two regimes.

The era of the two Duvalier regimes began in 1957 with Franois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, followed by his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, and lasted for 29 years, both notorious for their brutality.

However, the contrast between the two can be an allegory for the division between the bourgeois and the peasant farmer, or the state versus the nation.

The Duvalier dictatorship, as it comes to power, attaches itself to these local networks and these rural networks of power.

He extended the influence of the state into the natural roots of the country.

Peasants loved him, and whenever he had a problem, he could call the peasants in.

Who wrote the history books to tell you what an animal he was and how people really hated him?

The bourgeois wrote the history books, and he broke the hand of the bourgeois.

The international community hated him.

He repudiated aid.

People who remember that time remember it fondly, especially the peasants.

While Papa Doc was doing all this, Baby Doc was in school with the bourgeois and he became one of them.

He marries a woman who is seen as emblematic of the Haitian bourgeoisie.

And they thought that Baby Doc would be more malleable, and they were even excited when he married Michle, because they thought, "Well, she will bring some sanity to this and caring for --" Who knows what they were thinking.

But anyway, they had this idea, "We could work with Baby Doc, and he would be a good dictator instead of a bad dictator."

She turned out to be as rapacious as the rest of the people that surrounded Baby Doc.

It was the feast that the bourgeois had been waiting for all the time that Papa Doc was there.

They got back to the table.

They took over.

They shredded the state.

Power of the state was used to extract wealth, and that wealth was being used to spend on luxury goods by a few.

And we knew that because we did have access to people who knew where the actual accounts were and what was going through them.

And that government depended on that corruption.

It wasn't just that a few people were corrupt.

There were many people who were not corrupt, but the whole core of how power was expressed and used depended on that corrupt system, making money and also having access to power.

The earliest reports of ASF were in 1908, 1910, when Europeans, who brought their livestock and their pigs, noticed some of their pigs started exhibiting these symptoms -- fever, listlessness, not wanting to eat, red spots, blotches, paralysis, vomiting, and then death.

No matter what they tried to do, the outcome was always the same.

So they just called it the African swine fever.

The virus poses no danger to humans.

However, it can have a mortality rate of up to 70% in domestic pigs.

Even those recovered or asymptomatic can become carriers.

It's been very difficult so far to develop a vaccine.

The quick and early detection and then immediate response, either by slaughtering those pigs or by making sure that they are quarantined, those are extremely important responses.

The virus showed up in Portugal in 1957.

Then it quickly spread to Europe.

The first reported case of ASF in the Americas was in Cuba in 1971, followed by Brazil in 1978.

Later that same year, it was discovered in the Dominican Republic, likely introduced through Spain or Portugal.

From there, it made its way into Haiti.

The Mexican, American, and Canadian pig farmers were very concerned that the African swine fever would go from the herds on Hispaniola to the Mexican, American, and Canadian herds.

They formed this association, and USDA became the implementer of this.

The USDA decided the best way to protect preventing the entry of African swine fever into the United States was to slaughter the pigs in Haiti.

The slaughter would protect the $15 billion swine industry and related industries in the United States.

Under pressure from the United States and, unbeknownst to the moun andeyo, Jean-Claude Duvalier's administration made the decision to eradicate the Creole pig with about $19 million from the United States, half a million from Mexico, and personnel support from Canada.

They launched the organization PEPPADEP, the acronym for Program to Eradicate African Swine Fever and to Develop Pig Raising.

And so USDA would go in.

They would kill all the pigs.

They would ascertain that the swine fever had been eradicated.

They would put a laboratory in the country so that they could test for African swine fever in the future and avoid a repeat of this.

And then to the country, they would get a lab that was supposed to be a project to rebuild the herds.

So after a few years, everything would be just fine, is what they thought.

I had finished college and wasn't quite sure what I was doing and I got a call from my cousin saying, "Hey, I'm in Haiti, and they're hiring Americans who speak Creole to come and work in this program."

You had to have a foreign passport and an American or a Canadian or a Haitian who had U.S. citizenship.

Went down, spent almost a year working for the program.

We had these little booklets, "Babay ti kochon na jwenn lt" -- "Bye, Bye, little pig, you'll get another one."

I would have a little backpack that might have up to $20,000 in it in cash.

My job was to go out and actually give the money to the people who brought their pigs to be killed.

The promise was, "Here, we're gonna give you this money.

Buy yourself some goats, some chickens so that you can keep your economy going, keep your family fed, and that you'll have money, then, when pigs come back that you'll be able to buy new pigs."

There were these advanced teams that went out to organize in the communities to identify where we'd be on the different days to get the people within the community on board.

By the time I came in, that was all set.

A person would come with their pigs.

They would have a tag put on their ear.

So there was almost always a veterinarian from the USDA.

And then the pig would go to a place where blood would be drawn for testing.

They would have a pit, and they would take the pig and slit the pig's throat and bleed it into the pit and they would cut off the ear.

A farmer would come to my table with however many ears they had, and then I would pay them in cash.

$40 for an adult pig, $20 for a young pig, or $5 for a piglet.

It was a very sensory experience for sure.

All the sights, all the sounds of screaming pigs as they're getting killed, of people protesting, waiting, the movement, the smells, the heat, how gross it was.

These pits that somebody stands in knee-high -- they slit the throats of these pigs and drain all the blood.

From a social point of view, it was quite ineffective.

A lot of the farmers did not really understand why their pigs had to be destroyed.

They used to take their little pig and go to the caves to hide them so, like that they could save their cochon Creole.

It's from generation and generation, the cochon Creole was there.

To the USDA people, they may have even thought they were doing a good thing because they were taking diseased pigs away and now they were going to have herds that would no longer be diseased.

They wouldn't have looked at the other ramifications and they wouldn't have looked at those ramifications because there would have been nobody to tell them to look at that.

That voice didn't have an opportunity to be heard.

I don't know if they really got the full amount of money that they were supposed to get.

It didn't really compensate the farmer for what was being lost in terms of the social benefits, what the pig would yield in the future when it reproduced and had other piglets, and so on.

What harm is being done to that local community, not just on an economic level or a community level, but really even on a personal level?

I don't know what that did to a farmer seeing their pigs be slaughtered by somebody else and knowing that they wouldn't be able to get what they needed from that.

I think I trusted what people were being told -- their pigs would be killed, and then there would be a period of quarantine, pigs would be brought back in, people would be able to buy the pigs back.

I found out later that that was not the case, and maybe it was never intended to be the case.

They ran out of money after the last pig was killed, and in the middle of the night, they left.

They just picked up their stakes and left.

And no follow-on project, no laboratory.

I got called into the Minister of Planning's office.

He was beside himself.

And he said, "Do you know?"

But we found out that they just picked up and left.

The United States government interest at that point was basically done.

And pigs became a very scarce commodity quite quickly.

When I went to travel, I didn't worry about getting food, because everybody made the griot and they fried up the pigs and they made riz djon-djon or they made red rice and -- red beans and rice, one or the other.

So you could always find something to eat.

Kill the pig, all of that changed.

It was hard on people.

Very hard.

The rural sector fell into an economic depression.

The economic depression fueled some very, very major social and political changes.

I was driving from Jean-Rabel, in the north, along the coast to Mle-Saint-Nicholas.

At one point, I saw a group of people.

There were four people.

They looked like two parents and two young people.

And they had, along the side of the road, five big sacks of charcoal.

So I asked them, "Have you made this charcoal?"

And they said, "Yeah, yeah, we made this charcoal.

We made it last week."

And I was looking around.

There are no trees around.

I was wondering, "How do they make charcoal?"

And they pointed to trees.

They looked like very, very old cactus trees.

I asked them, "How long did it take for you to make these five bags of charcoal?"

And they said, "It took us all week."

I asked them, "How much are you going to sell this for?"

And they said, they were going to sell it for five gourds.

That's $1 per sack, at the exchange rate back then.

I don't know how long it was going to take before they actually sold it.

And I asked them, "Is there any way that you can make money from something else?"

And they said, "Pa genyen kochon."

He said, "We don't have any more pigs."

We have to look at this whole issue from the perspective of power.

In the case of the pig, by removing the pigs, they took away the power of so many -- of thousands of families in Haiti.

They took away their financial power.

They took away the social power that came with it.

Lots of kids couldn't go to school because their parents didn't have a pig that they could sell to earn the school fees.

Lots of weddings got postponed.

Lots of social capital didn't get built up.

And that also has a real impact on gender.

The parent who used to send maybe all three, four, five of their kids to school, they're going to choose to send the male child to school.

It further create a larger gap in gender education, and that has direct impact on gender-based violence.

So you see the domino effect that happened with the eradication of the pig that some people don't even think about.

This caused large numbers in the countryside to actually leave the countryside, leave agriculture because they could no longer sustain themselves.

And so what you begin to see is this migration to urban centers, with Port-au-Prince being the primary urban center in Haiti.

Many of them end up concentrated in poor, informal communities.

They became a totally different sort of group, and it grew very, very rapidly, even though they were no longer moun andeyo, they found themselves in the cities, they were still not able to receive the protections of being anndan, you know, of being inside.

Many chose to leave the country not just to escape the economic depression caused by the loss of the Creole pig, but also the persecution of the Duvalier regime.

There is a song going on in Haiti -- "The teeth of the sharks are sweeter than Duvalier."

The song cited by the Reverend Jean-Juste became a tragic reality.

Haitian refugees tragically washed up on the shore of Hillsboro Beach in Florida in 1981.

Our congressman, Fauntroy, was asked to preach the funeral.

He did.

The Congressional Black Caucus are going to continue to oppose, and, ultimately, we're going to be successful in seeing to it that black boat people are not treated any differently than Southeast Asian boat people and, for that matter, a person from elsewhere in the Caribbean, as from Cuba last year.

He was very moved and upset by that experience and came back and talked with Congressman Chisholm and said he did not think that we could remain purely defensive on protecting Haitian refugees, that the problem was in Haiti.

In July of 1982, U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm and Walter Fauntroy decided to make a trip to Haiti.

There were five or six members on the initial delegation.

Congresswoman Chisholm and Walter Fauntroy stayed and went around.

And we got hit with the pig program, and we didn't know that.

We actually saw it in the lives of people.

Congressman Fauntroy, through his investigation, uncovered a $20 million repopulation project with the involvement of the Inter-American Development Bank, a financial institution established to support the economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

They wanted to develop a super kind of plan, very modern, very high tech.

Seeing the exclusion of the Haitian farmers by the Inter-American Development Bank, Congressman Fauntroy would propose an interim program.

He said, "Look, if I can get you some money, would you do a pig-restoration project, but with the poorest people in this country, not with the commercial farmers?"

My boss -- he was the mission director.

I was the deputy.

And he said, "Yes, great.

Fine, we'll do that."

I said to him, "You know, the minute we step into this, everybody's going to say, 'AID did this.'"

He said, "It doesn't matter.

What's more important is we restore the pigs."

What we all thought was going to be a small part of the pig re-establishment.

We were going to just do $3 million, and they were supposed to do $20 million, $25 million.

And the two working together would repopulate the pigs.

I don't know if they ever did that project.

They did not do it while I was there.

The funding actually came through via the Black Caucus on September 30th at 11:59 a.m., one minute before the end of the U.S. government funding cycle.

The purpose of the project -- and this has always been misunderstood -- was to produce and distribute 4,000 pigs.

Designed to grow pigs quickly and produce high litters, the program would consist of breeding pigs in a central location known as the Nucleus Breeding Center.

They would partner with NGOs designated as secondary multiplication centers.

Then the NGOs would create their own repopulation programs.

From their programs, distribute new pigs directly to the farmers.

You know, there were all kinds of arrangements that were required.

They made sure the farmers who were going to be receiving their piglets had a certain amount of training, built appropriate locations for the pigs to be raised, which means that they had to have cement floors.

They couldn't be exposed to a whole lot of sunlight so that you wouldn't have skin issues.

The biggest issue was the feed, because Haitians were used to letting pigs roam to feed, and we did not want that.

We had a requirement that they need to have some money in the bank and show us that they had money in the bank, because at some point, they were going to have to buy feed in order to have enough pigs bred to distribute to their membership.

We developed feed rations based upon feeds in Haiti.

The only feed that we ever imported was vitamin and mineral supplement.

They can eat all kinds of things, but if you want them to produce a lot of meat very quickly, you would rather give the pig a vaccination of iron rather than have them root and get the iron from the soil, because if he roots, he might also get worms, which means that you have to order the iron from overseas.

How many peasants are going to order iron shots from overseas or get them from the pharmacy?

Many Haitian peasants made the claim that these pigs would require better living standards than many members of the Haitian peasantry had themselves, that these were essentially American pigs that required kind of fancy American living.

The Inter-American Development Bank project never materialized, leading farmers to inaccurately view the interim pig program as the new one that was promised to them by PEPPADEP.

Many grow resentment toward the program.

The pigs selected for the program would be imported from Iowa, due to their pale skin.

These pigs would earn the nickname of "Kochon Griml," derived from a Creole term for light-skinned.

When we got the pigs in, we had 500 pigs, and the government wouldn't let us take them off the plane unless they had their share.

They wanted 50 pigs.

If I could negotiate security for 450 pigs and their offspring, then it would be worth giving them the 50 pigs.

HAMPCO, which, by then, had a vacated headquarter, was paid over $1 million to use their facilities as the Nucleus Breeding Center.

HAMPCO didn't even do the minimum to help us.

I went to see this breeding farm.

It was a complete disaster, as our first task was actually to rebuild the cages.

I never had enough money, because -- and I will say it now and I said it before -- once PEPPADEP slaughtered the pigs, the U.S. government did not care about the Haitian farmers.

If it wasn't for the Black Caucus, USAID, and IICA, you wouldn't have had a project.

By the time farmers started receiving piglets from the secondary multiplication centers, the symbiotic relationship farmers had with the pigs and the land had already been fractured.

I came to understand, you know, not only was the pig absolutely central to the economy, but it's also a really important ceremonial sacrificial animal in voodoo.

And I've wondered what voodoo practitioners did.

The pig is a constant part and a very important part of voodoo, because this is the animal that we present as Ezili Dantor.

This woman, this divine, the first black woman recognized in the voodoo spirituality as Ezili Dantor, the food of Ezili is really the black pig.

She is the most veneered spirit and she was evidently present at the ceremony of Bois Caiman and is one of the spirit that allowed us to be who we are.

She's the mother of all of us and she's strong.

She's powerful.

And this is why, in every Haitian woman, you will find Dantor.

At one point, I think that maybe for three years, I could not celebrate Ezili Dantor because of the rarity of the pig, and we would not offer Ezili a pig that is not a Creole pig.

To build a program based purely on the production of meat, I can see the sense of it, if that's what you want to do.

But when it comes to the use of the pig or the importance of the pig as a social asset, the governance aspect of what is a pig takes on a totally different meaning.

There was a lot of tension, there was a lot of pressure, and there was a lot of resentment, and Duvalier was blamed for a lot of this.

People coming from different rural areas, who are now all concentrated in one area, who begin saying, "Hey, you're from this part of Haiti.

I'm from that part of Haiti.

But we face the same kinds of issues, the same kinds of problems.

It was during that time that you had a lot of rural organizations that became extremely important, from a social and political point of view.

You begin to see this link between the peasants in the countryside and the impoverished people in the urban communities.

Both of these groups see the decimation of the Creole pig as a central event in the growing poverty of the countryside and the impoverished conditions in the urban centers.

That link is one that I think is at the core of many of the resistance movements to the Duvalier dictatorship.

Many radio stations, for the first time, started broadcasting primarily in Creole, giving emerging influential activists and leaders a platform to express and amplify their frustration.

Many of them were Catholic priests.

Their ability to connect with the population through the radio and their sermons would merge into a larger movement known as "Ti Legliz," which is Creole for "Little Church."

The Ti Legliz movement was a natural sort of wind in the sails for a lot of the political movement.

Catholic priests who emerged as prominent activists and political figures included Father Grard Jean-Juste, who had to flee the Duvalier regime to Miami, Father Jean-Marie Vincent, who was working with farmers in the town of Jean-Rabel, north of Haiti, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who became a prominent face of the movement.

The Ti Legliz movement was arguably a centerpiece of Haiti's insistence that it manage its own affairs.

With funding from a Catholic humanitarian organization, Caritas, many of these Catholic priests started to develop their own repopulation program, focusing on Haitian farmers.

A dynamic would emerge pitting the kochon griml, which, for many, came to represent colonialism and the corruption associated with the Duvalier regime, against the Creole pig, which symbolized Haiti's hard-fought independence.

These sentiments would translate into protests against the Duvalier regime throughout the country.

Because the Haitian state has always been attached to various segments of the Haitian elite, when the pig depopulation occurred, causing an economic depression in Haiti's countryside, it didn't see that as a fundamental issue that it needed to address.

It didn't see those people as the people that it existed to serve.

You see the disconnect in the kinds of lavish lives that members of the Duvalier regime were living.

For them, the Haitian state was working as it was supposed to, helping them become fantastically wealthy, while the majority of the population, especially in the countryside, were beginning to starve.

I was in Gonaives to talk to potential NGOs to become SMCs.

It was in the daytime.

I remember I was eating lunch at a bus stop, and all of a sudden, people started running around.

Soldiers were shooting, people were dying, and so on.

Well, they cordoned off the town.

I was stuck in that restaurant for, as I recall, three days and two nights.

As we found out, three students were shot by the military, and that started the movement to remove Baby Doc from power.

It's very clear that when a government is seen as corrupt by its people, it loses popular-space legitimacy, and it had lost it.

It was clear to me as day, and that's what I reported.

There was a conversation with one diplomat that I really respected when I came back, and he asked me what I thought, and I said, "I think the regime is crumbling."

And he said, "But that's not our policy."

I said, "With all due respect, it doesn't matter what our policy is.

They've decided."

"They" meaning a broad swath of Haitian society.

U.S.

Ambassador Clay McManaway went in to see Duvalier, and he had a report from the CIA in which he indicated how many deaths would likely happen if the government unleashed enough power to suppress the revolutions going on around the country.

It was an enormous number -- 40,000, 50,000, something like that.

And he asked him, "Do you have the stomach for this?"

Because you're going to have to kill a lot of people to stay here.

We have an alternative to you.

We'll put you on a plane and we'll get you and your family safely out of here and we'll make sure that nobody dies, that there's a transfer of power to a government which does not involve killing people."

And then he had a problem, because he offered the plane, but where was the plane supposed to go?

It couldn't go to the U.S., because, politically, it would be very bad.

So they arranged with the French for Duvalier to go to France, and that's what happened.

And that's how come Haiti did not have a bloodbath before Baby Doc left.

Duvalier's departure left only $500,000 in the Haitian treasury, while over $800 million was embezzled from the Haitian people.

Also, to protect their interests and ensure stability, the United States supervised the handover of governmental authority to the military.

Once the dictatorship ended, these groups actually became much more vocal, challenging policies that were implemented on them.

Large landholders were previously connected to the dictatorship were now facing pressure from smaller peasant farmers, who were stating that, "Hey, your family took our land 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, and we want our land back."

This is where you get tensions that emerge, for example, in the North, in areas like Jean-Rabel.

The massacre in Jean-Rabel was a microcosm of everything happening in Haiti.

It was a struggle for political control, for struggle over the land, for struggle over development funds.

It pitted the traditional elite -- in the case of Jean-Rabel, they were agricultural elite that had inherited this control, in this case, from the American occupation, from the United Fruit Company.

The rural peasants thirsting to access this rich agricultural land.

In the middle of this comes the pigs, where blan comes in, has slaughtered the small black pig to replace it with these white pigs, and now has a pilot project in the middle of it.

The peasants weren't going for it, and they came in and they slaughtered all the pigs.

They cut the pigs' throats.

You know, they represented their adversary with the repression they embodied.

It was a precursor to the slaughter of people.

It was the reaction.

The people who got slaughtered were the Ti Legliz, were the goumen, which was some 157 people were killed.

During the time that Jean-Claude Duvalier is in power, there's pressure by the United States for Haiti to begin changing its economic policies, to make Haiti more open to foreign investment, to make Haiti more open to the importation of foreign goods.

These organizations rejected that model of development.

Oftentimes, what you'd see, these peasant movements would claim that this is part of an American plan.

What the Haitians were calling "the American Plan" refers to the Caribbean Basin Initiative, a 1983 program launched by the Reagan administration aimed at protecting U.S. interests in the Caribbean through economic development, open trade policies, and financial aid to help Haiti focus on its comparative advantage, meaning what they can produce cheaper than their competitors.

Now a nation whose cultural foundation and identity is based around fighting slavery is being told its comparative advantage is cheap labor.

The slaughter of the pigs fit into the American plan.

It was designed to turn Haiti into the Taiwan of the Caribbean, and at the center of that was factories, which was to drive peasants out of the hills and into the cities.

They would be available as labor in the factories, and was agro-industry, which meant big plots of land, mono crop -- coffee, cacao.

Terrorists would be removed.

Other forms of barriers to trade would be removed.

It was the Chicago school of economics -- just open everything up.

Extreme open market.

Everything was coming through, good and bad, unregulated.

Rice in particular, much of this rice coming from the United States.

It's heavily subsidized by the U.S. government.

Not just low-cost rice, but you also had this massive importation of free food that was given to schools, and it's supposed to be eaten by schoolchildren.

And it goes out the other door and into the markets, and the people who are getting it get it for nothing.

And then they sell it for half price.

And that further decapitalized the rural sector.

It became a lot easier to think in terms of importing certain food and selling the food, rather than investing in the rural sector.

Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so, we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era.

It has not worked.

It's maybe been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked.

It was a mistake.

It was a mistake that I was a party to.

I am not pointing the finger at anybody.

I did that.

I have to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people.

In December of 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leading figure from the Ti Legliz movement, became Haiti's first democratically elected president, with over 67% of the vote.

After serving just eight months in office, he was overthrown in a military coup.

They toppled Aristide, and the army took over.

They went after that movement with a vengeance and they destroyed it.

These movements were not communist movements.

By labeling it "communist," can be violently attacked.

Many of these peasant families never recovered.

Many of them never received pigs from this pig-repopulation program.

Those that did and weren't able to take care of the pigs lost the pigs because they died.

The guts of the society was just ripped out.

There is no real economy left.

They destroyed it.

It's dependent on foreign investment, foreign support.

All of us, from me to the Haitian pastor to the NGOs to even the politicians in Haiti, what they're doing is selling access to the population.

What's going on in Haiti today is a continuation of the neglect of the moun andeyo, except the moun andeyo have moved to the urban centers.

Part of that process is also due to the deep politicization of the urban poor.

The gang activity that has occurred in Haiti is a product of that.

These are disenfranchised young people who have been deprived of opportunity and become predatory.

And so now you've got a society of migration.

It's probably the biggest issue we have in Haiti.

Nobody stays where they start.

Everything is pointed towards Port-au-Prince and towards getting out.

I try to imagine what it would look like if you could stand over and look at Haiti and watch the flow of people over the last 50 years, and what you'd see is just people coming out of the dirt in the rural areas, where they're born, flowing into the villages and the towns like water, and then flowing out to the cities and then flowing to Port-au-Prince and then flowing over, spilling out of Haiti, a river headed to the U.S., smaller river going to Canada, and little rivulets going to islands.

You know, another breaches the bank and heads to Chile and Brazil.

The flow is real.

So, a lot of people today outside of the country don't have a land, because they sell their land to go everywhere.

This is why I said to a lot of young people, "Do not sell.

If you had a family land, keep your family land, because there is a value."

So, like, that there is a part of their grandparents that is still connected with them in Haiti, because I believe it is not going to stay like that.

Things has to change only.

When time for the change came, we need to be ready and we cannot be a stranger in our land.

The impacts are still being felt.

The lakous are still here, persisting.

However, the recollection of what happened to the Creole pig continues to cast a long shadow in the Haitian collective memory.

African people who become the Haitians break away from the plantation system.

The Haitian Creole pig, the black pig, becomes a symbol of that freedom outside of the plantation system.

I think, in the Haitian mind, the eradication of the Haitian pig was just step one or step two in a process of trying to transform the Haitian economy, to make it one where Haitians essentially are low-wage laborers on land that they no longer own, producing crops that are essentially not Haitian for export to American, Canadian, and European markets.

For many Haitians, what is the difference between that and slavery and Saint-Domingue?

You can find out more information about this topic at thecreolepig.org.

"The Creole Pig: Haiti's Great Loss" is available on DVD for $25 plus shipping and handling.

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