Haiti Is Not Luxembourg: Southern Peacekeepers and the Global Racial Order

In 2004, the UN Security Council established the United Nations Stabilizing Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), following the forced flight of the elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide. MINUSTAH is considered the first Southern-led UN mission and was marked by violence against civilians. This paper considers the role of Southern nations in maintaining a white-supremacist racial order through a decolonial feminist analysis of a Chilean UN peacekeeper’s memoir. I show how the 2010 memoir of Deputy Force Commander Eduardo Aldunate Herman (titled Backpacks Full of Hope: The UN Mission in Haiti) draws on global racial narratives about who is considered civilized and who is not. I argue that Aldunate’s memoir provides valuable insights for thinking how South American nations are implicated in, and seek to redraw, the global racial capitalist order. This order has its roots in the conquest of Indigenous land and enslavement of Black people, and supports a racial capitalist project that concentrates wealth in the Global North through the exploitation of the Global South. I examine Aldunate’s memoir, alongside other public and official declarations of the Chilean state, military, and media on MINUSTAH. I focus on how the stories they tell frame the encounter with Haitians. Distancing Chile from Haiti’s blackness provides access to the respectability and “maturity” that is required of the civilized. Distance from Haiti provides access to whiteness. This study shows that, in addition to economic remuneration, Southern nations are interpellated into imperialist interventionist projects through the possibility of ascending the global racial hierarchy.