Dragooning the Destitute

      Paul Farmer's "Suffering and Structural Violence" highlights the disparities between suffering populations around the world.  He points to the dominant and deadly force of capital in divvying out sufferings; "...the world's poor are the chief victims of structural violence..." (Farmer, 383).  The world's poor are merely invisible pawns to the majoritarian, hegemonies of global capitalism and neoliberal sociopolitical economics.  "Developed" nations that maintain and dominate "global" economies control nation-states and peoples of the global South through economic and political coercion via capital-rich NGOs.  The people of Haiti recognize their illusory agency over their status economically, politically, and socially within Mark Schuller's Killing With Kindness; "'We have elections.  And we pep la, what do we get?  How have our lives changed'" (Schuller, location 114 of 3646)?  The neoliberal aims and NGO-operated notions of "exporting democracy"are merely cover stories for neocolonial and imperialist regimes' own power (capital) building.  The real, influential power lies in the hands of those who fund NGOs, thus their interests are generally self-promotional economic advantages rather than the health and agency of "Other" humans.  Schuller writes, "...Haiti is sliced up and given to NGOs, ceding near-sovereign control to these NGO 'fiefdoms'" (Schuller, loc. 162/3646). 
     The United States employed its military might and economic prowess to open up markets and capital opportunities within Haiti during the Aristide controversies, exposing the country to neoliberal "Reaganomics;" "...Aristide signed the Governor's Island Accord...ceding control to international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Band, and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) through privatization and structural adjustment" (Schuller, loc. 404/3646).  Intersectionality is key in understanding the varied ways in which Haiti has been constructed as a, "...resource-starved, foreign-occupied, deliberately underdeveloped, class-divided, male-dominated society...," for all of these sufferings are related and built upon one another (Schuller, loc. 587/3646).  Haiti and other nation-states of the global South are treated as lab rats and capital mines for socioeconomic and political neoliberalisms.  Schuller states, "...policies such as privatization and state devolution are field-tested first in foreign development settings..." (Schuller, loc.2392 of 3646).  Because governmental agencies and big businesses would stir the global media and the moral compasses of many peoples, NGOs function as neoliberal, imperialist Trojan horses, coercing and dragooning impoverished states and peoples in ways that benefit their own capital building.  NGOs operate between the walls of poverty and affluence; "...NGOs are structures that flue together local communities from across the globe: they are intermediaries" (Schuller, loc.2828/3646).  "Suffering and Structural Violence" notes the quickly-growing divisions between the capital-starved and capital-obsessed; Farmer, quoting Pablo Richard's points on the (meta)physical constructions of walls, "'A wall between the rich and poor is being built, so that poverty does not annoy the powerful...'" (Farmer, 383).