1826-00-00: (Boyer Contracts Foreign Loans From French Banks to Begin Indemnity Payments, Initiating a Cycle of Debt Servicing That Would Consume Over Half o…

1826-00-00: (Boyer Contracts Foreign Loans From French Banks to Begin Indemnity Payments, Initiating a Cycle of Debt Servicing That Would Consume Over Half of All Government Revenue for the Next Six Decades): In 1826, Boyer contracted a loan of 24 million francs from private French banks to begin annual indemnity payments to France. The loan terms were usurious, the interest rates punishing, and the repayment schedule designed to extract maximum wealth from the hemisphere’s poorest republic for the benefit of the bankers who had financed the slaveholders’ compensation. Servicing the foreign debt and making the indemnity payments consumed over half of all Haitian government revenues for the next sixty years, starving the nation of the capital it needed for schools, roads, hospitals, and every other instrument of development that the European powers took for granted. The indemnity payments were made according to schedule and finally completed in 1883. The bank loans, however, were not fully repaid until 1947, meaning that Haiti spent 122 years paying for the privilege of having freed itself from slavery. No other nation in the history of the world has been required to finance its own liberation at compound interest.