Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

  Instability in both parts was ended, in the Dominican Republic long before Haiti, by the two most evil dictators in Latin America’s long history of evil dictators. Rafael Trujillo was the Dominican chief of the national police and then the head of the army that the U.S. military government established and trained. After he took advantage of that position to get himself elected as president in 1930 and to become dictator, he proceeded to remain in power as a result of being very hardworking, a superior administrator, a shrewd judge of people, a clever politician, and absolutely ruthless—and of appearing to act in the broad interests of much of Dominican society. He tortured or killed his possible opponents and imposed an all-intrusive police state.

  At the same time, in an effort to modernize the Dominican Republic, Trujillo developed the economy, infrastructure, and industries, mostly running the country as his own private business. He and his family eventually came to own or control most of the country’s economy. In particular, either directly or through relatives or allies as front men, Trujillo held national monopolies of beef export, cement, chocolate, cigarettes, coffee, insurance, milk, rice, salt, slaughterhouses, tobacco, and wood. He owned or controlled most forestry operations and sugar production, and owned airlines, banks, hotels, much land, and shipping lines. He took for himself a portion of prostitution earnings and 10% of all public employee salaries. He promoted himself ubiquitously: the capital city was renamed from Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City), the country’s highest mountain was renamed from Pico Duarte to Pico Trujillo, the country’s educational system inculcated giving thanks to Trujillo, and signs of thanks posted on every public water faucet proclaimed “Trujillo gives water.” To reduce the possibility of a successful rebellion or invasion, the Trujillo government spent half of its budget on a huge army, navy, and air force, the largest in the Caribbean area, larger even than those of Mexico.

  In the 1950s, however, several developments conspired to cause Trujillo to begin to lose the former support that he had maintained through his combination of terror methods, economic growth, and distributing land to peasants. The economy deteriorated through a combination of government overspending on a festival to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Trujillo regime, overspending to buy up privately owned sugar mills and electricity plants, a decline in world prices for coffee and other Dominican exports, and a decision to make a major investment in state sugar production that proved economically unsuccessful. The government responded to an unsuccessful Cuban-backed invasion by Dominican exiles in 1959, and to Cuban radio broadcasts encouraging revolt, by increasing arrests, assassinations, and torture. On May 30, 1961, while traveling in a chauffeur-driven unaccompanied car late at night to visit his mistress, Trujillo was ambushed and assassinated in a dramatic car chase and gun battle by Dominicans, apparently with CIA support.

  Throughout most of the Trujillo era in the Dominican Republic, Haiti continued to have an unstable succession of presidents until it too in 1957 passed under the control of its own evil dictator, François “Papa Doc”

  Duvalier. While a physician and better educated than Trujillo, he proved to be an equally clever and ruthless politician, equally successful in terrorizing his country by secret police, and ended up killing far more of his country-men than did Trujillo. Papa Doc Duvalier differed from Trujillo in his lack of interest in modernizing his country or in developing an industrial economy for his country or for himself. He died a natural death in 1971, to be succeeded by his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who ruled until forced into exile in 1986.

  Since the end of the Duvalier dictatorships, Haiti has resumed its former political instability, and its already weak economy has continued to shrink. It still exports coffee, but the amount exported has remained constant while the population has continued to grow. Its human development index, an index based on a combination of human lifespan and education and standard of living, is the lowest in the world outside Africa. After Trujillo’s assassination, the Dominican Republic also remained politically unstable until 1966, including a civil war in 1965 that triggered the arrival again of U.S. marines and the beginning of large-scale Dominican emigration to the U.S. That period of instability ended with the election of Joaquín Balaguer, former president under Trujillo, to the presidency in 1966, helped by ex-Trujillo army officers who carried out a terrorist campaign against the opposing party. Balaguer, a distinctive person whom we shall consider at more length below, continued to dominate Dominican politics for the next 34 years, ruling as president from 1966 to 1978 and again from 1986 until 1996, and exercising much influence even while out of office from 1978 to 1986. His last decisive intervention into Dominican politics, his rescue of the country’s natural reserve system, came in the year 2000 at the age of 94, when he was blind, sick, and two years short of his death.

  During those post-Trujillo years from 1961 to the present, the Dominican Republic continued to industrialize and modernize. For a time its export economy depended heavily on sugar, which then yielded in importance to mining, free trade zone industrial exports, and non-sugar agricultural exports, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. Also important to the economies of both the Dominican Republic and Haiti has been the export of people. More than a million Haitians and a million Dominicans now living overseas, especially in the United States, send home earnings that account for a significant fraction of the economies of both countries. The Dominican Republic still rates as a poor country (per-capita income only $2,200 per year), but it exhibits many hallmarks of a growing economy that were obvious during my visit, including a massive construction boom and urban traffic jams.

  With that historical background, let’s now return to one of those surprising differences with which this chapter began: why did the political, economic, and ecological histories of these two countries sharing the same island unfold so differently?

  Part of the answer involves environmental differences. Hispaniola’s rains come mainly from the east. Hence the Dominican (eastern) part of the island receives more rain and thus supports higher rates of plant growth. Hispaniola’s highest mountains (over 10,000 feet high) are on the Dominican side, and the rivers from those high mountains mainly flow eastwards into the Dominican side. The Dominican side has broad valleys, plains, and plateaus, and much thicker soils; in particular, the Cibao Valley in the north is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. In contrast, the Haitian side is drier because of that barrier of high mountains blocking rains from the east. Compared to the Dominican Republic, a higher percentage of Haiti’s area is mountainous, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture is much smaller, there is more limestone terrain, and the soils are thinner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery. Note the paradox: the Haitian side of the island was less well endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. The explanation of this paradox is that Haiti’s burst of agricultural wealth came at the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils. This lesson—in effect, that an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cash flow—is a theme to which we shall return in the last chapter.

  While those environmental differences did contribute to the different economic trajectories of the two countries, a larger part of the explanation involved social and political differences, of which there were many that eventually penalized the Haitian economy relative to the Dominican economy. In that sense, the differing developments of the two countries were overdetermined: numerous separate factors coincided in tipping the result in the same direction.

  One of those social and political differences involved the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in France’s overseas empire, while the Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was in economic and political decline itself. Hence France could and chose to invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish coul
d not or chose not to develop in their side of the island. France imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain. As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbor during colonial times, and it still has a somewhat larger population today, about 10,000,000 versus 8,800,000. But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic, so that Haiti with a larger population and smaller area has double the Republic’s population density. The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side. In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid-mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.

  A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic, with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry, was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contributed to the country’s development. The people of the Dominican Republic even chose to resume their status as a Spanish colony from 1812 to 1821, and its president chose to make his country a protectorate of Spain from 1861 to 1865.

  Still another social difference contributing to the different economies is that, as a legacy of their country’s slave history and slave revolt, most Haitians owned their own land, used it to feed themselves, and received no help from their government in developing cash crops for trade with overseas European countries, while the Dominican Republic eventually did develop an export economy and overseas trade. Haiti’s elite identified strongly with France rather than with their own landscape, did not acquire land or develop commercial agriculture, and sought mainly to extract wealth from the peasants.

  A recent cause of divergence lies in the differing aspirations of the two dictators: Trujillo sought to develop an industrial economy and modern state (for his own benefit), but Duvalier did not. This might perhaps be viewed just as an idiosyncratic personal difference between the two dictators, but it may also mirror their different societies.

  Finally, Haiti’s problems of deforestation and poverty compared to those of the Dominican Republic have become compounded within the last 40 years. Because the Dominican Republic retained much forest cover and began to industrialize, the Trujillo regime initially planned, and the regimes of Balaguer and subsequent presidents constructed, dams to generate hydroelectric power. Balaguer launched a crash program to spare forest use for fuel by instead importing propane and liquefied natural gas. But Haiti’s poverty forced its people to remain dependent on forest-derived charcoal from fuel, thereby accelerating the destruction of its last remaining forests.

  Thus, there were many reasons why deforestation and other environmental problems began earlier, developed over a longer time, and proceeded further in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic. The reasons involved four of the factors in this book’s five-factor framework: differences in human environmental impacts, in variously friendly policies or unfriendly policies of other countries, and in responses by the societies and their leaders. Of the case studies described in this book, the contrast between Haiti and the Dominican Republic discussed in this chapter, and the contrast between the fates of the Norse and the Inuit in Greenland discussed in Chapter 8, provide the clearest illustrations that a society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.

  What about the Dominican Republic’s own environmental problems, and what about the countermeasures that it adopted? To use the terminology that I introduced in Chapter 9, Dominican measures to protect the environment began from the bottom up, shifted to top-down control after 1930, and are now a mixture of both. Exploitation of valuable trees in the Republic increased in the 1860s and 1870s, resulting already then in some local depletion or extinction of valuable tree species. Rates of deforestation increased in the late 19th century due to forest clearance for sugar plantations and other cash crops, then continued to increase in the early 20th century as the demand for wood for railroad ties and for incipient urbanization rose. Soon after 1900 we encounter the first mentions of damage to forest in low-rainfall areas from harvesting wood for fuel, and of contamination of streams by agricultural activities along their banks. The first municipal regulation prohibiting logging and the contamination of streams was passed in 1901.

  Bottom-up environmental protection was launched in a serious way between 1919 and 1930 in the area around Santiago, the Republic’s second largest city and the center of its richest and most heavily exploited agricultural area. The lawyer Juan Bautista Pérez Rancier and the physician and surveyor Miguel Canela y Lázaro, struck by the sequence of logging and its associated road network leading to agricultural settlement and watershed damage, lobbied the Santiago Chamber of Commerce to buy land as a forest reserve, and they also sought to raise the necessary funds by public subscription. Success was achieved in 1927, when the Republic’s secretary of agriculture contributed additional government funds to make possible the purchase of the first natural reserve, the Vedado del Yaque. The Yaque River is the country’s largest river, and a vedado is an area of land to which entry is controlled or forbidden.

  After 1930, the dictator Trujillo shifted the impetus for environmental management to a top-down approach. His regime expanded the area of the Vedado del Yaque, created other vedados, established in 1934 the first national park, set up a corps of forest guards to enforce protection of forests, suppressed the wasteful use of fire to burn forest in order to clear land for agriculture, and banned the cutting of pine trees without his permission in the area around Constanza in the Central Cordillera. Trujillo undertook these measures in the name of environmental protection, but he was probably motivated more strongly by economic considerations, including his own personal economic advantage. In 1937 his regime commissioned a famous Puerto Rican environmental scientist, Dr. Carlos Chardón, to survey the Dominican Republic’s natural resources (its agricultural, mineral, and forestry potential). In particular, Chardón calculated the commercial logging potential of the Republic’s pine forest, by far the most extensive pine forest in the Caribbean, to be around $40,000,000, a large sum in those days. On the basis of that report, Trujillo himself became involved in logging of pines, and came to own large areas of pine forest and to be the joint owner of the country’s main sawmills. In their logging operations, Trujillo’s foresters adopted the environmentally sound measure of leaving some mature trees standing as sources of seed for natural reforestation, and those big old trees can still be recognized today in the regenerated forest. Environmental measures under Trujillo in the 1950s included commissioning a Swedish study of the Republic’s potential for building dams for hydroelectric power, the planning of such dams, the convening of the country’s first environmental congress in 1958, and the establishment of more national parks, at least partly to protect watersheds that would be important for hydroelectric power generation.

  Under his dictatorship, Trujillo (as usual, often acting with family members and allies as front men) carried out extensive logging himself, but his dictatorial government prevented others from logging and establishing unauthorized settlements. After Trujillo’s death in 1961, that wall against widespread pillaging of the Dominican environment fell. Squatters occupied land and used forest fires to clear woodlands for agriculture; a disorganized large-scale immigration from the countryside into urban barrios sprung up; and four wealthy families of the Santiago area began logging at a rate faster than the rate under Trujillo. Two years after Trujillo’s death, the democratically elected President Juan Bosch attempted to persuade loggers to spar
e the pine forests so that they could remain as watersheds for the planned Yaque and Nizao dams, but the loggers instead joined with other interests to overthrow Bosch. Rates of logging accelerated until the election of Joaquín Balaguer as president in 1966.

  Balaguer recognized the country’s urgent need for maintaining forested watersheds in order to meet the Republic’s energy requirements through hydroelectric power, and to ensure a supply of water sufficient for industrial and domestic needs. Soon after becoming president, he took drastic action by banning all commercial logging in the country, and by closing all of the country’s sawmills. That action provoked strong resistance by rich powerful families, who responded by pulling back their logging operations out of public view into more remote areas of forests, and by operating their sawmills at night. Balaguer reacted with the even more drastic step of taking responsibility for enforcing forest protection away from the Department of Agriculture, turning it over to the armed forces, and declaring illegal logging to be a crime against state security. To stop logging, the armed forces initiated a program of survey flights and military operations, which climaxed in 1967 in one of the landmark events of Dominican environmental history, a night raid by the military on a clandestine large logging camp. In the ensuing gunfight a dozen loggers were killed. That strong signal served as a shock to the loggers. While some illegal logging continued, it was met with further raids and shootings of loggers, and it decreased greatly during Balaguer’s first period as president (1966 to 1978, comprising three consecutive terms in office).