To the State and Government of France
To French Organizations and Society in General
April 17, 2025, marks 200 years since France ordered Haiti to pay an indemnity of 150 million gold francs in exchange for recognition of its independence, after 21 years of blockades and embargoes. Thus, Haiti was forced to pay its colonists and slave owners for daring to become, in 1804, the first free Black nation in the modern world and the first free nation in the Western Hemisphere.
This “ransom” consumed most of Haiti’s fiscal and commercial resources, forcing it to go into debt with French, American, and German banks in order to comply with such an unjust agreement. For more than a century, Haiti had to focus its entire economy on paying this double “Independence Debt”. The country and its people were impoverished, unleashing a cycle of extraction, debt, and dependency that left them vulnerable to elite domination and foreign interference.
The current crisis in Haiti, a true silent genocide, is one result of this ransom. Among the main causes of gangsterism in Haiti are chronic poverty and the social inequalities accumulated and reproduced over two centuries of neocolonial suffocation.
Instead of investing in infrastructure, public services, and industrial development, the wealth of the Haitian people was used to benefit France, helping to make it one of the largest economies in the world.
Haiti’s reparation demands are therefore situated within this brutal history of slavery and racism, postcolonial extortion, and neocolonial domination by former slave owners and their European and US allies. They are an integral part of the Haitian people’s persistent struggle for justice and self-determination.
It is time for France to recognize, restore, and make reparations for this debt owed to the people of Haiti.
From Latin America and the Caribbean, we recognize in our own histories similar relationships of exploitation, indebtedness, and extortion. We also recognize the historic struggle of the Haitian people and the vital solidarity they provided to our peoples’ independence struggles.
We therefore embrace as our own, their cry for “Recognition, Restitution, and Reparation of the Independence Debt Now!” Together with the Haitian people, we expect concrete, material, and urgent actions from France that will begin to repair the damage done and lay new foundations for relationships based on true liberty, equality, and fraternity. We will continue to stand with them until their just demands are met.
– Latin America and the Caribbean, April 17, 2025