Haiti and the Evangelist Shock Doctrine.

Naomi Klein's 2007 book, "The Shock Doctrine" explored the American doctrine of economic opportunism. Klein's book detailed with precision how war, coups, and natural disasters are exploited by the American proponents of Milton Friedman economic school to get a foothold in "shocked" regions and implement neo-liberal economic policies.

Friedman economics added energy to the academic and economic arm of the military coup that pushed out Chile's left-leaning democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1972. Friedman himself commented on the coup and the resulting panic and destabilization that would provide the "shock treatment" that would "facilitate the adjustment" to the economic policies he hoped to see implemented worldwide. He would not be disappointed. Chile quickly implemented Friedman's policies. The shock of militarization of Chile's streets, the threat of torture, and mass disappearances of dissidents facilitated the collective psychological "shock" necessary for economic takeover on a massive scale.

One needn't consider shock exploitation on purely a macro level. There are also micro examples. Klein documented the way developers swept into Sri Lanka in the wake of the Tsunami to grab land from fishermen and build huge tourist hotels. But I also remember the terrible story of a SriLankan woman who was raped by a man "offering help" literally the minute the wave of water that carried them both dropped them to the ground.

All of these examples came to mind when I read about a recent case in Haiti in which a group of evangelical missionaries were stopped from transporting Haitian "orphans" over the border to their mission in the Dominican Republic ostensably for food and shelter but, most certainly also for the purpose of being "saved" by Jesus.

From chattahbox.com:

"Kidnappers for Jesus? A group of Evangelical church folk from Idaho, led by personal shopper Laura Silsby, Executive Director and founder of New Life Children Refuge, descended upon the earthquake ravaged country of Haiti last week, to snatch and grab 100 orphans off of the streets and from orphanages. The Baptist group’s mission statement was to “share God’s love with these precious children, helping them heal and find new life in Christ.” However, they were only able to “gather” up 33, some of whom weren’t even orphans. The evangelical do-gooders became alleged kidnappers and child traffickers when they loaded the Haitian “orphans” on a bus and attempted to take them across the border to the Dominican Republic to the New Life Refuge orphanage, with no documents from the Haitian government. Well, the so-called orphanage turns out to be a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic that the group was renting. The group of ten Americans from two Baptist churches based in Idaho were arrested at the border and are now in custody in Port-au-Prince Haiti, charged with child trafficking. And the group of child-snatching evangelizing Americans have set off an international firestorm in Haiti, with officials already fearful of child trafficking in the wake of the chaos in the devastated country."

The blog blackspin.com reported today:

"The twists continue in the story of 10 American Baptist missionaries charged with child trafficking in Haiti. Now the Associated Press is reporting that many of the children who had been taken were turned over to the Americans by their own desperate parents, and are not orphans at all.

From where I sit, this is an even more alarming development, because it means that the missionaries lied about the children they were taking. And if you know anything about child trafficking around the world, you know that it is very common for parents to be coerced in to giving away their children with some amorphous promise that the children will be whisked away to a better life.That's exactly what appears to have been promised in this case:

Parents in this quake-wracked Haitian village unable to feed or clothe their children handed the youngsters over to a group of American missionaries who promised to give them a better life.

In a testament to the misery of a nation that was the Western hemisphere's poorest even before a Jan. 12 earthquake, many Callebas parents say they wouldn't know what to do if they had to take the children back.

"I am living in a tent with a friend," said Laurentius Lelly, a 27-year-old computer technician who gave up his two children, ages 4 and 6. "My main concern is that if the kids come back, I'm not going to be able to feed them." Source: US Baptists to appear before Haitian prosecutor, Associated Press"

Do you see the shock doctrine at work here? A group of missionaries who fly into Haiti to "help" convince parents that the only way their children will find shelter, food, and education is to hand their future over entirely to evangelists. Were they well intentioned people? Probably. So were the Milton Friedman economists who were eager to "fix" the economy of post war Iraq and Chile. The problem is that both groups are so blindly convinced of the ability of their ideological brand to fix misery that they end up contributing to the misery themselves. Both exploited disaster to meet their own ends.

I would love for Klein to focus on this particular brand of shock doctrine in the future. How many times have the "true believers" swept in after a tragedy with promises and a "plan" to fix it all? I already have the title for the book. "The Flock Doctrine- The Rise of Disaster Evangelism"

More on this case as it unfolds.