déchets. stigmatisations, commerces, politiques ... - Viva Rio en Haiti

ternational debates on poverty, inequality and development
(forming part of the UN’s Millennium
Development Goals 33 ), coinciding with topics such
as sanitation, health and the environment.
However garbage is also intimately related to
politically highly sensitive issues. Outside agents
commonly identify the poor populations living in
the most degraded areas of the city with an intense
form of politicization linked to periods of violence
in the 1990s and the fi rst half of the 2000s. Thereafter
poverty has been associated with désordre
(disorder). The latter is also an ambiguous term,
implying the idea of messiness linked to the lack
of infrastructure and the overwhelming presence
of garbage, but also – and above all – the idea of
violence. In the semantic fi eld of violence in Haiti,
this word may be used simultaneously as a diagnosis
of a disordered situation and as a threat of
producing disorder. Highly stigmatized zones like
those covered by the present research are considered
places of désordre by outsiders, the natural
habitat of chimères. 34
The relation between garbage and politics is
also connected to the living conditions and selfesteem
of the population living on (or near to) the
garbage. For this reason forms of dealing with the
problem are sometimes seen to include possibilities
for job creation for an unqualifi ed and stigmatized
workforce living in the regions taken to be
problematic and prone to becoming involved in violent
acts. Hence the generation of jobs in cleaning
and waste management sometimes seems to be associated
with the “politics of stabilization”.
Finally, but no less importantly, garbage and
dirt are easily converted into political arguments
capable of mobilizing the middle classes and opinion
makers, threatening the continued survival of
municipal and even national governments. 35
The history of garbage managment in Haiti
and in the city of Port-au-Prince and the history
32 The company directors explain that they do not buy
glass as the resale prices are too low.
33 Included in the seventh goal relating to preservation
of the environment.
34 Chimère is a key word in contemporary Haitian politics,
also forming part of the semantic fi eld of violence
in the country. It seldom appears as a category of selfidentifi
cation: it is more commonly a category of accusation
levelled at people who are “violent for no rea-
of public sanitation and cleaning policies are certainly
lengthy and heavily intertwined. However
the end of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986 seems
to have paved the way for a new phase that continues
to this day. This is not simply a question of the
idea found in various testimonies that the city was
cleaner ‘before,’ or that the government (national
or municipal) managed waste in a more appropriate
way. In constructing the contemporary problem
of garbage we need to analyze concretely the
convergence of three elements discussed below. It
should be emphasized that their order is neither
hierarchical or causal.
The fi rst element is the withdrawal of the
state from providing a basic public infrastructure
(and not just in relation to waste) in areas of
the city in which until then it had been relatively
present (the same can be noted in relation to
the provision of water and electricity). The second
element are the increasing fl ows of international
cooperation in money, the formulation of problems
and projects, the elaboration and implementation
of public policies and the presence of new
actors and forms of knowledge (photo 44). The fi -
nal element is the public visibility from 1986 inwards
and principally following the fi rst Jean-
Bertrand Aristide government of the population
from extremely poor districts, such as those covered
in the research (Bel Air and Cité Soleil), located
in the lower areas of the city, fl ooded with garbage,
many of them full-blown waste dumps. The
transformation of these populations into political
actors and claimants of rights made the ‘garbage
problem’ something different. It gave visibility to
those who had none, reinforcing the associations
between garbage, poverty and violence, placing
the dynamic of the stigmatization experienced by
these populations on the agenda of national politics
and the policies of international cooperation
agencies, NGOs and also the state – although, par-
son,” and was also widely used to refer to the party
militias of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. In both
cases (employed to describe either a person or a group)
the term chimère echoes two meanings attached to the
term in French: a nightmarish monster and a sterile
dream or empty utopia.
35 In the fi eld we encountered, for example, accounts referring
to the disorder associated with garbage under
the Gérard Latortue government in 2004.
GARBAGE | 53