Even after the dam, most peasants still had their black, low-slung Creole pigs, which they kept like bank accounts, to pay for things such as school tuition. But in the early 1980s, they lost those as well. Alarmed about an outbreak of African swine fever in the Dominican Republic, afraid that it might threaten the American pork industry, the United States led an effort to destroy all the Creole pigs in Haiti. The plan was to replace them with pigs purchased from Iowa farmers. But these were much more delicate, much more expensive to house and feed, and they didn’t thrive. Many peasants ended
...more
