Thread: 7 Articles To Read Uncovering Hillary Clinton’s Haiti Record

7 Articles To Read Uncovering Hillary Clinton’s Haiti Record

March 3, 2016 •



Missing from the discussion of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s record has been her work in Haiti, where she blatantly manipulated and threatened Haitian government officials to control electoral outcomes. In that country, too, she and her husband have led the way in promoting a sweatshop-led development model.

Other Worlds has compiled a list of articles that take a closer look into Clinton’s work in Haiti and what her Presidency could portend for other nations. Take a closer look:

Clinton Emails Reveal “Behind the Doors Actions” of Private Sector and US Embassy in Haiti Elections

Recently released e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server reveal new details of how U.S. officials worked closely with the Haitian private sector as they forced Haitian authorities to change the results of the first round presidential elections in late 2010. The e-mails documenting these “behind the doors actions” were made public as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

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What Are We Missing About Haiti in the Hillary Emails?
The Fourth Estate is in foreclosure. The “who, what, where, when, and why” of traditional coverage is missing. A thorough analysis of what is redacted or completely missing in the Clinton emails is not forthcoming, and the real scandal resides in politically motivated reporting. It is time that the press wipe themselves clean of political bias and stop shouting about the paper tiger of wiped servers. To steal a quote from Hillary at the initial Benghazi hearing, “What difference does it make?”
READ MORE

A Look at Hillary (and Bill) Clinton’s Past in Haiti

Hillary Clinton might have some explaining to do before she can claim the top spot in the Democratic primary. Any pro-Hillary voters who prioritize moral plans for American foreign policy should probably look into the candidate’s past in Haiti.
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The King and Queen of Haiti

Sunday, January 30, 2011. Two hundred thousand people occupied Egypt’s Tahrir Square, defying a military curfew to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia’s authoritarian leader had just been overthrown, unleashing a wave of anti-government protests from Yemen to Syria to Morocco. South Sudan’s provisional president announced his people had voted overwhelmingly for independence, clearing the way for the breakup of Africa’s largest country. Yet as Hillary Clinton rushed to Andrews Air Force Base to catch her battered government-issue 727, the secretary of state was not headed to Cairo, Tunis or Juba. She was going to Haiti
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Role of Hillary Clinton’s brother in Haiti gold mine raises eyebrows
Drive down the rutted dirt road a couple of miles to the guardhouse, then hike 15 minutes up to the overgrown hilltop, and there it is: a piece of 3 1/2 -inch-wide PVC pipe sticking out of the ground.

This is what, at least for the time being, a gold mine looks like.

It also has become a potentially problematic issue for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she considers a second presidential run, after it was revealed this month that in 2013, one of her brothers was added to the advisory board of the company that owns the mine.
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Outsourcing Haiti
Across the country from Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, miles of decrepit pot-holed streets give way to a smooth roadway leading up to the gates of the Caracol Industrial Park, but no further. The fishing hamlet of Caracol, from which the park gets its name, lies around the bend down a bumpy dirt road. Four years after the earthquake that destroyed the country on January 12, 2010, the Caracol Industrial Park is the flagship reconstruction project of the international community in Haiti. Signs adorn nearby roads, mostly in English, declaring the region “Open for Business.” In a dusty field, hundreds of empty, brightly colored houses are under construction in neat rows. If all goes as hoped for by the enthusiastic backers of the industrial park, this area could be home to as many as 300,000 additional residents over the next decade.
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WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand.
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Haitian Times


The Haitian Times was founded in 1999 as a weekly English language newspaper based in Brooklyn, NY.The newspaper is widely regarded as the most authoritative voice for Haitian Diaspora.

http://haitiantimes.com/7-articles-t...-record-14284/

Clinton Emails Reveal “Behind the Doors Actions” of Private Sector and US Embassy in Haiti Elections


Written by Jake JohnstonPublished: 08 October 2015

Recently released e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server reveal new details of how U.S. officials worked closely with the Haitian private sector as they forced Haitian authorities to change the results of the first round presidential elections in late 2010. The e-mails documenting these “behind the doors actions” were made public as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

Preliminary results from the deeply flawed 2010 presidential and legislative elections were announced on December 7, 2010, showing René <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval’s hand-picked successor Jude Célestin and university professor Mirlande Manigat advancing to a second-round runoff. The same day, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti released a statement questioning the legitimacy of the announced results.

Behind the scenes, key actors were already pushing for Célestin to withdraw from the race, according to the e-mails. Just a day after preliminary results were announced, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten wrote to Cheryl Mills, Tom Adams and Daniel Restrepo, all key State Department Haiti staff. “Boulos + private sector have told RP [René <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval] that Célestin should withdraw + they would support RP staying til 7 Feb.” “This is big,” the ambassador added.




“Boulos” here refers to Reginald Boulos, one of the largest industrialists in Haiti and a member of the Private Sector Economic Forum. Importantly, Boulos also suggested they would support <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval staying in office through February 7, but with the election delayed due to the earthquake, a new president would not be able to take office by then. Many had advocated for <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval’s early departure, and during a meeting of international officials on election day, <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval was even threatened with being forced out of the country.

The e-mail also shows that Merten was in close contact with Michel Martelly’s campaign. Protests had already broken out across Port-au-Prince and in other cities throughout Haiti, with protesters alleging that their preferred candidate, Michel Martelly, should be in the runoff. Merten writes that he had personally contacted Martelly’s “camp” and told them that he needs to “get on radio telling people to not pillage. Peaceful demo OK: pillage is not.” Documents obtained through a separate FOIA request have shown that a key group behind the protests later received support from USAID and went on to play a role in the formation of Martelly’s political party, Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale.

The following day, as per Merten’s suggestion in the e-mail, the U.S. Embassy released another statement calling for calm and urging political actors to “work through Haiti's electoral contestation process to address any electoral concerns.” As the e-mail reveals, however, efforts were underway to remove Célestin from the race before any contestation process could even begin.

Cheryl Mills’ response to Merten’s email is redacted, as is Merten’s response to that, save for one word: “Understand.”

The Haitian government eventually requested that a mission from the Organization of American States (OAS) come to Haiti to analyze the results. The mission, despite not conducting a recount or any statistical test, recommended replacing Célestin in the runoff with Michel Martelly. Pressure began building on the Haitian government to accept the recommendations. Government officials had their U.S. visas revoked and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice even went so far as to threaten to cut aid, even though the country was still recovering from the devastating earthquake earlier in the year. Mills forwarded to Rice an AFP article on the threat with a comment: “I want to make sure we are synched up over the next several sensitive days on Haiti.”

Eventually, Hillary Clinton traveled to Haiti in late January 2011 to apply further pressure on the government. The day before the trip, there was an ongoing discussion among State Department staff about potential backlash against the international community and the U.S. Mills forwarded Clinton an e-mail from Laura (the last name has been redacted, but it is likely Laura Graham, an official with the Clinton Foundation) with the message: “Let's discuss this on plane.”

“Laura”, in a long, typo-filled note, warns that the international community and U.S. are “taking hits and looking like villan [sic].” “I think you need to consider a message and outreach strategy to ensure that different elements of haitian [sic] society (church leaders, business, etc) buy into the mms [Michel Martelly] solution and are out their [sic] on radio messaging why its [sic] good,” Laura adds. Clinton responds to Mills: “Bill talked to me about this and is quite worried about what I do and say tomorrow.”
“As we all are,” Mills responds, passing along talking points for the following day’s Haiti trip:

We are also here with a simple message with respect to the elections: the voices of the people of Haiti must be heard. The votes of the people of Haiti must be counted fairly. And the outcome of this process must reflect the true will of the Haitian people. That is the only interest of the United States. We will stand in solidarity with all those pursuing these goals, and we will stand against those who seek to undermine them.




Regardless of concerns over a backlash, Clinton was successful in getting Célestin to withdraw from the race. “We tried to resist and did, until the visit of Hillary Clinton. That was when <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval understood he had no way out and accepted” it, the prime minister at the time, Jean-MaxBellerive, told me in an interview earlier this year. After a second-round contest with exceptionally low turnout, Martelly was named the winner over Manigat.

Boulos was quick to follow up after Clinton’s visit. In a long e-mail to Mills one day after the visit, Boulos asked that his thanks be passed on to the then secretary of state.




Boulos cites the private sector’s “behind the doors actions” as having “played a major role” in getting the elections “back on track” by getting <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval to “request the OAS mission, by publicly denouncing the results of the 1st round, and as late as yesterday morning (3 hours meeting with Preval) by convincing him to drop the idea of annulment of the elections.” Boulos boasted: “Everyone in the diplomatic circles and among the Haitian political leaders will confirm the role played by the Private Sector Economic Forum over the past 6 months.”

Boulos also requested that the U.S. continue its support for him and for other Haitian business elites. “We need your support to continue to build a strong and ethical private sector,” he wrote. Boulos’ commitment to building an ethical private sector is questionable, to say the least. During the 1991-1994 coup d’État, Boulos ran a USAID-funded clinic in Cité Soleil which was accused of collaborating with FRAPH, a paramilitary death squad responsible for many killings in the slum. More recently, in January 2006, following the 2004 coup against Haiti’s democratically elected government, Boulos was among a group of Haitian elites who lobbied the U.S. embassy to pressure U.N. troops to conduct assaults on Cité Soleil, and “for more ammunition for the police” to do likewise, which the U.S. charge d’affaires noted would “inevitably cause unintended civilian casualties.” A State Department cable notes: “Boulos began reading off a specific list of needed ammunition …” (The charge, Timothy Carney, green lighted the request, as WikiLeaked cables reveal, and as we discuss in the new book, “The WikiLeaks Files.”)

Fast forward nearly five years and Haiti once again finds itself embroiled in an electoral controversy, with the U.S., Boulos and the Private Sector Economic Forum again playing leading roles. After violence and fraud-marred first-round legislative races were held in August, the electoral council (CEP) and Haitian government have come under increasing scrutiny. Once again, protests have taken place, calling for the resignation of the CEP and in some cases the outright annulment of the elections.

Rather than cast doubt on the results, the U.S. has supported the process. Outgoing U.S. Ambassador Pamela White called the elections, “not perfect, but acceptable.” “It's 2010 all over again, but instead of against Preval, it's for Martelly,” a leader of the Vérite political platform, <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval’s new party, told me in August. On October 6, Secretary of State John Kerry travelled to Haiti to discuss the elections with Martelly. He was joined by the State Department’s new Haiti Special Coordinator, Kenneth Merten, who assumed the post on August 17.

For their part, the Private Sector Economic Forum and Reginald Boulos have also provided support to the process. Boulos was part of a presidential advisory commission in late 2014 that recommended jettisoning Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and forming a consensus government to take Haiti forward to the current elections. As part of the agreement to form a new government, the Private Sector Economic Forum was also made responsible for nominating one of the nine members to the electoral council. Pierre Louis Opont was put forward as its representative. Opont was the director general of the CEP in 2010 and acknowledged in an interview earlier this year that the U.S. State Department and OAS observers manipulated the results of that election. He is the president of the current CEP.

In February, Prime Minister Evans Paul (himself part of the presidential advisory commission)met with the Private Sector Economic Forum in order to establish a public-private partnership to create a “climate conducive to free, fair and democratic elections.”

While trust in the electoral process and the institution responsible for guiding it has eroded since the August 9 vote, Boulos and the Private Sector Economic Forum have come out publicly in support of the CEP. In an interview with Le Nouvelliste, Boulos stated that it was “one of the best CEPs we have had.” “The CEP is not perfect but it is a CEP that has done its best, perhaps, that has made many mistakes and has acknowledged its mistakes,” Boulos told the paper. “I heard the president of the CEP say that the Council will make corrections. We should trust that he will make corrections.” “The process is advancing, the presidential campaign is on the right track,” declared Gregory Brandt, the president of the business grouping, in the same article. Brandt told the paper that he had a meeting with Opont “next week.”
First-round presidential elections as well as the second-round of the legislative elections will be held October 25.

http://cepr.net/blogs/haiti-relief-a...aiti-elections

What Are We Missing About Haiti in the Hillary Emails?
09/14/2015 05:31 pm ET |
Updated Sep 14, 2016
Georgianne Nienaber
Writer and author

The Fourth Estate is in foreclosure. The “who, what, where, when, and why” of traditional coverage is missing. A thorough analysis of what is redacted or completely missing in the Clinton emails is not forthcoming, and the real scandal resides in politically motivated reporting. It is time that the press wipe themselves clean of political bias and stop shouting about the paper tiger of wiped servers. To steal a quote from Hillary at the initial Benghazi hearing, “What difference does it make?”

The truth is that no one will ever be privy to the complete correspondences, but there is more than enough information available to discuss how the United States conducts corrupt foreign policy in Haiti. Even if a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) were submitted to obtain every last email on the official State Department server during Secretary Clinton’s term, most would not see the light of day. Clinton’s staff, under the direction of Cheryl Mills, was known for blocking the release of what they deemed “politically sensitive” documents requested under the FOIA law.

I mention Haiti because, after spending a significant amount of time there post-earthquake, I have come to understand that corruption has been a part of our foreign policy for hundreds of years. I am not a Haiti expert, but I have seen firsthand the malfeasance of USAID, NGOs, the United Nations, foreign church groups, and international banking institutions.

Imagine placing printouts of the available 307 Haiti emails end to end. Give it one twist and tape the ends together. You now have a Mobius Strip with no beginning, no end, and only one surface.

It is our fault and our fault alone if we assume a kind of fake innocence that the truth is unavailable or too confusing to pursue. Orientation and interpretation on this infernal Mobius construct depend upon perspective, but we need more than whining fake innocence to justify jettisoning critical thinking.

There is a timeline available to us. It is documented by the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the Haitian press, by former OAS Ambassador Ricardo Seitenfus, and others. This timeline provides the framework to examine what happened in Haiti in 2010. There is so much more than the “gotcha” moment provided by the Chelsea Clinton email to her parents about policy failures after the January 2010 7.0 earthquake.

In 2010, Haiti faced the triple whammy of an apocalyptic earthquake, a cholera epidemic courtesy of the United Nations, and an election cover-up orchestrated while a good portion of the population was still homeless. Three-hundred-and-seven emails would barely cover it.

According to Ricardo Seitenfus in his book, International Crossroads and Failures in Haiti (L`echec de l`aide internationale a Haiti: Dilemmes et egarements), in April 2009, the State Department, under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, “had decided to completely change the U.S. cooperation strategy with Haiti.” In case you don’t know, Seitenfus was fired from his OAS position in December 2010 for telling the truth to the Swiss newspaper Le Temps about Cholera, NGOs, and a rigged election. His tell-all book lays out a doctrine of intervention.

“Apparently tired with the lack of concrete results, Hillary connected the actions of her government to the smart power doctrine proposed by the Clinton Foundation. From that moment on, the solutions would be based solely on evidence. The idea, according to Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s Chief of Staff, was that if we’re putting in the assistance, we need to know what the outcomes are going to be.” See also “How the World Failed Haiti.”

Now, connect Cheryl Mills’ Haiti Doctrine of orchestrated outcomes with a June 16, 2009 Wiki-Leaks cable, “Deconstructing Preval.” “Managing Preval will remain challenging during the remainder of his term yet doing so is key to our success and that of Haiti.”

The January 2010 earthquake became the “long-awaited opportunity to test this new policy,” Seitenfus says.

Most of the emails discuss the earthquake, and a few mention the emerging cholera epidemic. Two of the “cholera” emails discuss Sarah Palin’s upcoming visit to Haiti, one is an AP report about “Cholera fears sparking an anti-clinic protest in Haiti,” sent via Huma Abedin to Hillary, another is a Reuters report quoting President Rene Preval confirming the outbreak and, one is a press highlight detailing Nepal’s denial that Nepalese soldiers introduced cholera into Haiti by routing raw sewage into the Mirebalais River.

Can it be that only five emails mentioned cholera in the initial stages of an epidemic that would eventually kill 8,972 people and sicken 745,588 since October 2010 (July 2015 numbers).

The lack of emails discussing the November 2010 elections is noteworthy. The search parameter “Martelly” returns one result. An email from Cheryl Mills to Hillary Clinton includes an overnight brief from December 8, 2010.

Announced results conflicted with the EU-backed National Observation Council’s preliminary reports that Michel Martelly led government-backed candidate Jude Celestin in the vote, media report. Embassy Portau-Prince reports civil society representatives took care in announcing early findings, but the information was reported locally as hard fact.

The same email thread has Cheryl Mills providing the unacceptable Haitian CEP results to Hillary. These results would soon change.

This is the statement we released late last night. Election results order Manigault, Celestin, Martielly. May be good to have Tom Adams give you a quick update today.

The original State Department “announced results” were compiled by the CEP, the Haitian Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP). They had Jude Celestin in the runoff and Martelly was out of the next round.

The international observers (CNO) came up with a different outcome. An analysis and timeline can be found here at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) website.

In a heavily redacted email (Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05777664) on Tuesday December 7, 2010, Cheryl Mills instructs a staffer to “print the traffic” on a draft embassy statement that discusses something the “tabulation center” did not show.

The final draft email of the embassy statement (Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05777696), from Cheryl Mills to Hillary, had all the necessary diplomatic ducks in a row to get Martelly into the runoff.

Like others, the Government of the United States is concerned by the Provisional Electoral Council’s announcement of results from the November 28 national elections that are inconsistent with the published results of the National Election Observation Council (CNO)

The “tabulations” of the CEP, tabulations that the State Department announced, were now officially thrown into question.

OAS Ambassador Seitenfus has an explosive charge.



Ballot boxes to bread boxes (Photo: Nienaber Feb. 2011)

The will of the Haitian voter, however, was irrelevant. In this plot, the CNO played a central role in the strategy of electoral sabotage implemented by the international community in the November 2010 elections in Haiti. Choosing the CNO was not because of its expertise, since it had none. In fact, the Council is a union of various purportedly civil society organizations, which in reality form an array of opposition to the government.

In an article published in the Haiti Sentinel, an article that has since been scrubbedfrom the Internet except in cached form, CEP President Pierre Louis Opont says “that as director general he gave the official recount results to the international observers. He says that Cheryl Mills, the Chief of State for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the observers from the Organization of American States then gave results different then what were passed to them.”

The American press has not yet investigated this claim.

The end result was that musician Michel Martelly was declared president-elect after receiving the votes of less than 17 percent of the electorate in the March 2011 second round.

Is it fair to pin all of the blame on Hillary Rodham Clinton when secrecy, duplicity and arrogance have been part of the U.S. policy toward Haiti at least since December 17, 1914 when Citigroup (now Citibank) stole Haiti’s gold reserves?Marines descended upon Haiti to transport a half million dollars in gold to the Wall Street vaults of the National City Bank of New York.

And we’ve hardly seen anything yet. Or maybe, we have seen it all before.

The following quote is taken from Senate hearings that took place from October 4 to November 16, 1921. The Government Printing Office published the official record of the proceedings.

“From 1804 to 1915 Haiti was a sovereign state under a republican form of government. She won her independence from France in 1804. She was deprived of it in 1915 by the United States. Since then we have been in virtual control of her territory, our marines have been in military occupation of the country, and the former republic has been stripped by us of every vestige of her sovereignty.”

There is no beginning and no end to the continuing rape of Haiti by just about everyone.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgi...b_8130026.html

LATIN AMERICA IS A COUNTRY
Hillary (and Bill) Clinton’s Past in Haiti

JULY 3, 2015
by EMILY DALGO

Hillary Clinton might have some explaining to do before she can claim the top spot in the Democratic primary. Any pro-Hillary voters who prioritize moral plans for American foreign policy should probably look into the candidate’s past in Haiti.

The Pulitzer Center hosted journalist Jonathan M. Katz on June 22nd for a discussion about the Clintons’ influence and rather infamous legacy in Haiti and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. It’s surprising how little the failures and destruction of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presence in Haiti have been brought up so far. Hopefully by 2016 this topic will be making headlines.

First, some background on the topic: on January 12, 2010, the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in the hemisphere, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake, devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula and killed 100,000 to 316,000 people.

Former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led the Haitian reconstruction effort and vowed to help the country “build back better,” so that if another disaster struck, Haiti would be able to respond more quickly and with more efficiency. Hillary described their efforts as a “road test” that would reveal “new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.”

The Clinton Foundation alone has directed $36 million to Haiti since 2010. Another $55 million has been spent through the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, and an additional $500 million has been made in commitments through the Clinton Global Initiative’s Haiti Action Network.

But what does Haiti have to show for all of these investments? Not much, according to Katz. “Haiti and its people are not in a better position now from when the earthquake struck,” he said. The hundreds of millions of dollars and the years of reconstruction efforts have yielded negligible results. For a project so expansive, Hillary has kept relatively quiet about Haiti thus far in her campaign. Her spokesman declined to comment on how Haiti has shaped her foreign policy, saying Hillary would address that “when the time comes to do so.”

Hillary’s big plan for how she would “rebuild” Haiti in the wake of desolation was characteristically American: through business. With big corporate plans on the horizon, Bill and Hillary became exceedingly familiar faces in Haiti leading up to the 2011 presidential elections.

It’s not surprising that the candidate who vowed to make Haiti “open for business” was ultimately the victor. Former Haitian pop star Michel Martelly eventually won the race, after Hillary salvaged his candidacy when he was eliminated as the number 3 candidate by convincing the parties to accept him back into the race.

Katz said that this vote was fraudulent. Martelly, a businessman and strong proponent of foreign investment in Haiti, was “attractive” to the U.S. State Department, Katz noted. He very much had a “Clinton view of Haiti and a Clinton view of the world.”

That’s how Caracol Industrial Park, a 600-acre garment factory geared toward making clothes for export to the U.S., was born in 2012. Bill lobbied the U.S. Congress to eliminate tariffs on textiles sewn in Haiti, and the couple pledged that through Caracol Park, Haitian-based producers would have comparative advantages that would balance the country’s low productivity, provide the U.S. with cheap textiles, and put money in Haitians’ pockets.

The State Department promised that the park would create 60,000 jobs within five years of its opening, and Bill declared that 100,000 jobs would be created “in short order.” But Caracol currently employsjust 5,479 people full time. “The entire concept of building the Haitian economy through these low-wage jobs is kind of faulty,” Katz stated on Monday. Furthermore, working conditions in the park are decent, but far from what should be considered acceptable.

Not only did Caracol miss the mark on job creation, but it also took jobs away from indigenous farmers. Caracol was built on fertile farmland, which Haiti doesn’t have much of to begin with. According to Katz, Haitian farmers feel that they have been taken advantage of, their land taken away from them, and that they have not been compensated fairly.

Hundreds of families have been forced off the land to make room for Caracol. The Clintons led the aggressive push to make garment factories to better Haiti’s economy, but what it really created was wealth for foreign companies. This trend was echoed when the Clintons helped launch a Marriott hotel in the capital, which has really only benefited wealthy foreigners and the Haitian elite.
Mark D’Sa, Senior Advisor for Industrial Development in Haiti at the U.S. Department of State, said that many of the Clintons’ promises remain unfulfilled and many more projects are “half-baked.” Haiti remains the most economically depressed country on the continent.

If Hillary wins in 2016, U.S. policy geared toward Haiti will undoubtedly expand, meaning even more money will be funneled to the Caribbean nation to fund the Clintons’ projects, for better or for worse. According to Katz, the truth is that we don’t actually know how much money has been thrown into the Caribbean country to “rebuild” it, and that with economic growth stalling and the country’s politics heading for a shutdown, internal strife seems imminent.

The introduction of accountability for the foreign aid industry is the most important change that can be made, according to Katz. Humanitarian aid does nothing positive or productive if there are not institutions in place, managed by individuals who actually live in these countries, to oversee that aid is serving rather than hurting the people it is supposed to “help.”

Hillary Clinton’s efforts in Haiti have fueled political corruption, destroyed arable farmland, and have forced hundreds of families to leave their homes and their jobs to make room for a factory that has not given even a fraction of the amount to Haiti as it has taken. If the introduction of accountability is the way to go, then we first need to start talking. So Hillary, what do you have to say about Haiti?

This article was originally published on Law Street Media.
http://africasacountry.com/2015/07/hillary-haiti/

The King and Queen of Haiti

There’s no country that more clearly illustrates the confusing nexus of Hillary Clinton’s State Department and Bill Clinton’s foundation than Haiti—America’s poorest neighbor.

nday, January 30, 2011. Two hundred thousand people occupied Egypt’s Tahrir Square, defying a military curfew to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia’s authoritarian leader had just been overthrown, unleashing a wave of anti-government protests from Yemen to Syria to Morocco. South Sudan’s provisional president announced his people had voted overwhelmingly for independence, clearing the way for the breakup of Africa’s largest country. Yet as Hillary Clinton rushed to Andrews Air Force Base to catch her battered government-issue 727, the secretary of state was not headed to Cairo, Tunis or Juba. She was going to Haiti.

Haiti doesn’t seem like a place that would be central to a U.S. presidential candidate’s foreign policy. It’s a small country, whose 10.3 million people inhabit the western third of a Caribbean island the size of South Carolina. They are the poorest people in the hemisphere when you average their country’s meager $8.5 billion GDP among them, and would seem poorer still if you ignored the huge share held by the country’s tiny elite—which controls virtually everything worth controlling, from the banks and ports, to agriculture and, often, politics. It is not a major exporter of anything. Even its location, 500 nautical miles from the Florida Keys, has been of only passing strategic importance to the United States since a brutal 1915-1934 U.S. occupation assured no European power would surpass its influence there.

Yet the world’s most powerful couple have an abiding interest in this out-of-the-way place; the island where Bill Clinton four decades ago recommitted himself to politics after an eye-opening journey and an evening with a Vodou priest. During her tenure at State, Hillary traveled to Haiti four times, as often as she did Japan, Afghanistan or Russia. Bill Clinton continues to visit even as her presidential campaign starts up. He attended the February dedication of Port-au-Prince’s new luxury Marriott hotel, a trip on which he reaffirmed, once again, that his work in Haiti represented “one of the great joys of my life.”

Over the past two decades, the once-and-perhaps-future first couple repeatedly played a key role in Haiti’s politics, helping to pick its national leaders and driving hundreds of millions of dollars in private aid, investment and U.S. taxpayer money toward its development. They’ve brought with them a network of friends and global corporations that never would’ve been here otherwise. Together, this network of power and money has left indelible marks on almost every aspect of the Haitian economy. The island nation, in many ways, represents ground zero for the confusing and often conflict-ridden intersection of her State Department, the Clinton family’s foundation and both of their foreign policies.


At left, workers walk through the $300 million Caracol Industrial Park campus in the north of Haiti last month. The three-year-old park—a key project of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state—was intended to have thousands more jobs by now but is far behind initial projections. At right: Haiti’s first permanent cholera treatment center nears completion last month in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on the campus of GHESKIO, a medical NGO that received funding from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. | Allison Shelley for Politico Magazine

“When it’s happening you don’t realize it, [but] after everything is in place … you see the Clintons at every level,” says former Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who was Clinton’s co-chairman on the commission charged with rebuilding Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. “Even if they are clever enough to make you think sometimes that you are the one having the idea.”

The legacy of the Clintons’ efforts here is decidedly mixed, a murky story filled with big promises and smaller results. Despite the huge amounts of aid and investment, the sweeping visions they’ve offered of transformative prosperity—promises delivered by a broad network of friends they recruited and deals they negotiated—have been tripped up by realities on the ground.

Five years after the hemisphere’s deadliest single natural disaster, when both Clintons assumed leading roles in the rebuilding efforts, little progress has been made on many core problems in Haiti, and the government that Hillary Clinton helped put in power during that January 2011 trip—and that both Clintons have backed strongly since—has proven itself unworthy of that trust. Economic growth is stalling, and the nation’s politics look headed for a showdown in the next year that could once again plunge the country into internal strife.

A World Bank study released in December showed that despite modest declines in extreme poverty—mainly in the capital, Port-au-Prince—Haiti remains the poorest and most economically depressed country on the continent, with the richest 20 percent of households accounting for 64 percent of the country’s total income. (The bottom one-fifth of the population earns less than 1 percent.) The report warned that impending political instability could quickly reverse the few gains made since the earthquake.

Hillary Clinton once hoped that Haiti would be the shining jewel of her foreign policy. But far from transforming this poorest of countries, many of the Clintons’ grandest plans and promises remain little more than small pilot projects—a new set of basketball hoops and a model elementary school here, a functioning factory there—that have done little to alter radically the trajectory of the country. Visiting some of their projects over the course of an April research trip affirmed as much about their tenuousness as about the limited benefits they’ve provided. Many of the most notable investments the Clintons helped launch, such as the new Marriott in the capital, have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and island’s ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with.

Even for those who know how Haiti operates, there are many more questions than answers when one examines the Clintons’ recent work. Did Hillary Clinton keep her promise when she said, soon after taking office at State, that “we will demonstrate to ourselves as well as to the people of Haiti and far beyond that we can, working together, make a significant difference”?
Five years after her husband pledged to Esquire magazine that he was “prepared to spend three years” helping Haitians get “the right things for their country,” what does it mean that the vast majority of Haitians still haven’t gotten much of anywhere?
***
The Clintons like to cast their relationship with Haiti in personal terms—invariably starting with their 1975 visit as newlyweds to Port-au-Prince, where they watched Vodou penitents walk on coals and the country’s then-dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, lay a wreath at the base of a memorial to Haiti’s founding victory over slavery and the French empire. But there is more than sentiment at stake.

Open In New Window

OPTICS: Inside the Clintons' Haiti (Click to view gallery.) | Allison Shelley for Politico Magazine

When Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, America’s poorest neighbor was slated to be one of the first beneficiaries of what she called “the power of proximity.” One of her first directives at State was to review U.S. policy toward Haiti—“an opportunity,” she would write in her memoir Hard Choices, “to road-test new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.” That approach had business at its center: Aid would be replaced by investment, the growth of which would in turn benefit the United States. Underscoring the importance of the policy, she tasked her chief of staff—former Clinton White House deputy counsel Cheryl Mills—to oversee the Haiti review personally.

Clinton had two other tools to make Haiti an even more auspicious “road test.” Shortly after she was confirmed, her husband accepted United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s offer to serve as his special envoy for Haiti. As president, Bill Clinton had intensified a crippling embargo against Haiti’s then-ruling military junta and ordered the 1994 U.S. invasion to restore the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power. Now he was supposed to finish the job, spearheading development after a hunger crisis and a series of damaging hurricanes that had struck in late 2008. Haitians weren’t sure what to think: Clinton was popular with the masses for returning Aristide to power and hated by the elites for the same reason. But few understood his vague new role. Joking that he must be coming back to lead a new colonial regime, the Haitian press dubbed him Le Gouverneur.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...n-haiti-117368
By JONATHAN M. KATZ
May 04, 2015

Role of Hillary Clinton’s brother in Haiti gold mine raises eyebrows

A man walks with a horse close to the guardhouse of VCS Mining, which mines gold in Haiti and has raised controversy by naming Tony Rodham, brother of Hillary Rodham Clinton, to its board. (Andres Martinez Casares/For The Washington Post)

By Kevin Sullivan and Rosalind S. Helderman
March 20, 2015

MORNE BOSSA, Haiti — Drive down the rutted dirt road a couple of miles to the guardhouse, then hike 15 minutes up to the overgrown hilltop, and there it is: a piece of 3 1/2 -inch-wide PVC pipe sticking out of the ground.

This is what, at least for the time being, a gold mine looks like.

It also has become a potentially problematic issue for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she considers a second presidential run, after it was revealed this month that in 2013, one of her brothers was added to the advisory board of the company that owns the mine.

Tony Rodham’s involvement with the mine, which has become a source of controversy in Haiti because of concern about potential environmental damage and the belief that the project will primarily benefit foreign investors, was first revealed in publicity about an upcoming book on the Clintons by author Peter Schweizer.

In interviews with The Washington Post, both Rodham and the chief executive of Delaware-based VCS Mining said they were introduced at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative — an offshoot of the Clinton Foundation that critics have long alleged invites a blurring of its charitable mission with the business interests of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their corporate donors.

VCS Mining has been taking samples via this piece of PVC pipe sticking out of the ground on a hillside in Morne Bossa, Haiti. (Andres Martinez Casares/For The Washington Post)

Asked whether he attends CGI meetings to explore personal business opportunities, Rodham responded, “No, I go to see old friends. But you never know what can happen.”

All sides deny that the Clintons had any role in Rodham’s appointment to the VCS advisory board.

Rodham said he has not been involved in any other deals through connections made at CGI. He said that he has never spoken to his sister or her husband about the Haiti project and that he does not think VCS chief executive and president Angelo Viard, a Democratic donor, approached him because of his family ties. Rodham declined to say who introduced him to Viard; Viard said he could not *remember.

“I’m a very accomplished person in my own right,” Rodham said. He said his work with the company is to try to find investors, which he said has been challenging because of a lack of interest in Haiti.

“I raise money for a lot of people,” he said. “That’s what I basically do.”

Rodham, a former repo man, prison guard and private detective, has long been a source of controversy for the Clintons. Among other things, he and his brother, Hugh, caused consternation in the Clinton White House in 1999 for trying to operate a hazelnut-processing business in the Republic of Georgia with political opponents of the Georgian president, who was a U.S. ally at the time.

[Tony Rodham linked to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe ]
VCS Mining’s collected samples of rocks are bagged on the hillside in Morne Bossa. (Andres Martinez Casares/For The Washington Post)

Viard said that he paid to become a member of CGI so he could attend two of the organization’s meetings, and that he met Rodham at a gathering in 2012. (Foundation officials said Viard paid a $20,000 membership fee in 2013.)

“You try to be a member so you can meet people in the same industry,” Viard said. He said he attended CGI as “a pure marketing operation.”

He said he ultimately stopped attending CGI meetings after realizing that they were largely designed for charities to mingle with possible donors. He said he thinks commitments made at CGI have done a lot of good in the developing world.

Rodham joined the board in October 2013, nine months after Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary of state. Viard said he put Rodham on the board not because of his family connections, but because he worked for a firm, Gulf Coast Funds Management, that had access to *investors.

Viard said that he and Rodham never discussed the Clintons, and that he never talked to the Clintons about Rodham. A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation said that Bill Clinton does not know Viard, and a spokesman for Hillary Clinton said she also does not know him.

In December 2012, VCS won one of the first two gold-mining permits the Haitian government had issued in more than 50 years. The project was immediately slammed by members of the Haitian Senate, who called it a potential environmental disaster and “a waste of resources.” The backlash caused the government to put the permits on hold.

Viard stressed that Rodham was not involved in the effort to win the permit from the Haitian government, which was granted months before Rodham joined the board.

He said Rodham was compensated with stock options that will not vest unless the project is a success. He said Rodham has not landed any investors, adding, “It sounds like people were not interested in Haiti.”

Rodham confirmed that he has received stock options in VCS and that they have not yet vested, saying, “Never seen ’em.”
“I’m just trying to help him out a little bit. If it ever accomplishes anything, great,” Rodham said of Viard, adding that the people of Haiti “got a bad deal” — saddled with poverty and then hit in 2010 by a devastating earthquake — and that he hoped the gold mine could help the country recover.

The Clintons have been longtime advocates for development in Haiti, especially since the earthquake. Bill Clinton, as the United Nations’ special envoy to the nation, and Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, were primary forces in the emergency relief response and later efforts to create long-term development plans for the ravaged country.

But the Clintons’ image in Haiti has slipped in recent months as Haitians increasingly complain that Clinton-backed projects have often helped the country’s elite and international business investors more than they have helped poor Haitians.
Defenders of the Clintons call such criticism untrue and unfair and largely pressed by the Clintons’ political enemies. They argue that Clinton-funded programs have brought millions of dollars in investment to Haiti and have created jobs for thousands of Haitians.

But news that a Clinton family member is helping the mining company attract more foreign investors has deepened *suspicion.

“Rodham is an independent guy, but this is tricky; it’s not a good sign for him to be on the board of a mining company here in Haiti,” said Leslie Voltaire, a former Haitian government official who worked closely with the Clintons after the earthquake. “The Clintons are seen as being in power here. You have to be very cautious that your family does not intervene in business here.”

Jean-Max Bellerive, a former prime minister and a potential presidential candidate in elections expected this year, joined the VCS advisory board at the same time as Rodham.

When the mine permit was suspended in early 2013, Bellerive said, Viard hired him for $8,000 to help him understand Haitian governmental procedures, as well as to introduce him to Haitian senators and advise him on how to persuade them to support the mine project.

Bellerive said that Viard offered compensation when he joined the advisory board a few months later, but that he refused it. He said he had mixed feelings about the project because he was worried about potential environmental damage and unsure whether the Haitian government was equipped to regulate such a complex enterprise.

He said he hoped that by joining the board, he would help ensure that the project was handled “responsibly.” But he said he has had “close to zero” involvement with it.

Bellerive said he was comfortable with his decision to join VCS, but thinks Rodham made a mistake.

“If I was Tony Rodham, I would not have been on the board,” he said. “He knows he did nothing illegal, but it has a high political price for his sister.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...506_story.html

World
Outsourcing Haiti
How disaster relief became a disaster of its own
Jake Johnston
January 16, 2014



Petrocaribe-financed housing development in Morne Cabrit, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Photograph: Jake Johnston
Across the country from Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, miles of decrepit pot-holed streets give way to a smooth roadway leading up to the gates of the Caracol Industrial Park, but no further. The fishing hamlet of Caracol, from which the park gets its name, lies around the bend down a bumpy dirt road. Four years after the earthquake that destroyed the country on January 12, 2010, the Caracol Industrial Park is the flagship reconstruction project of the international community in Haiti. Signs adorn nearby roads, mostly in English, declaring the region “Open for Business.” In a dusty field, hundreds of empty, brightly colored houses are under construction in neat rows. If all goes as hoped for by the enthusiastic backers of the industrial park, this area could be home to as many as 300,000 additional residents over the next decade.

The plan for the Caracol Industrial Park project actually predates the 2010 earthquake. In 2009, Oxford University economist Paul Collier released a U.N.–sponsored report outlining a vision for Haiti’s economic future; it encouraged garment manufacturing as the way forward, noting U.S. legislation that gave Haitian textiles duty-free access to the U.S. market as well as “labour costs that are fully competitive with China . . . [due to] its poverty and relatively unregulated labour market.”

The report, embraced by the U.N. and the U.S., left a mark on many of the post-earthquake planning documents. Among the biggest champions of the plan were the Clintons, who played a crucial role in attracting a global player to Haiti. While on an official trip to South Korea as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton brought company officials from one of the largest South Korean manufacturers to the U.S. embassy to sell them on the idea. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, having just appointed Bill Clinton U.N. special envoy to Haiti, tapped connections in his home country, South Korea.

Then suddenly, the earthquake presented an opportunity for the Clintons and the U.N. to fast track their plans. The U.S. government and its premiere aid agency, USAID, formed an ambitious plan to build thousands of new homes, create new industries, and provide new beginnings for those who lost everything in the earthquake. Originally the plan was to build the industrial park near Port-au-Prince. But land was readily available in the North, and the hundreds of small farmers who had to be moved from the park’s site were far less resistant than the wealthy land-owners in the capital. So the whole project moved to the Northern Department, to Caracol. Under the banner of decentralization and economic growth, the Caracol Industrial Park, with the Korean textile manufacturer Sae-A as its anchor tenant, became the face of Haiti’s reconstruction.

Pledges from international donors rolled in after the earthquake, reaching a total of $10 billion.

Now, only 750 homes have been built near Caracol, and the only major tenant remains Sae-A. New ports and infrastructure have been delayed and plagued by cost overruns. Concerns over labor rights and low wages have muted the celebration of the 2,500 new jobs created. For those who watched pledges from international donors roll in after the earthquake, reaching a total of $10 billion, rebuilding Haiti seemed realistic. But nearly four years later, there is very little to show for all of the aid money that has been spent. Representative Edward Royce (R-CA), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, bluntly commented in October that “while much has been promised, little has been effectively delivered.”

The story of how this came to pass involves more than the problems of reconstruction in a poor country. While bad governance, corruption, incompetent bureaucracy, power struggles, and waste contributed to the ineffective use of aid, what happened in Haiti has more to do with the damage caused by putting political priorities before the needs of those on the ground.

The Housing Crisis and the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission

The earthquake decimated Haiti’s housing stock: 100,000 were destroyed and more were damaged. There were $2.3 billion in damages in the housing sector alone, and 1.5 million people left living in makeshift tent camps. Unplanned and unregulated housing construction made Port-au-Prince, with population at least 3 million, extremely vulnerable to natural disasters. In less than a minute, entire shantytown neighborhoods came crashing down.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission was created by the international community to coordinate post-quake aid and align it with Haitian government priorities. Bill Clinton, as the U.N. special envoy and the head of the Commission, was optimistic. “If we do this housing properly,” he affirmed, “it will lead to whole new industries being started in Haiti, creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and permanent housing.”

Like the Caracol Industrial park, the Commission was presented as a response to the devastation of the earthquake. But its basic tenets—and its slogan, “Build Back Better”—were actually agreed upon by the U.S. and U.N. in the year prior. The commission’s formation was handled not by the Haitian government, but by the staff of the Clintons, mainly Cheryl Mills and Laura Graham, as well as a team of U.S.-based private consultants. The commission’s bylaws were drafted by a team from Hogan Lovells, a global law firm headquartered in Washington, D.C. A team from McKinsey and Company, a New York based consultancy firm, handled the “mission, mandate, structure and operations” of the commission. Eric Braverman, part of the McKinsey team, later went on to become the CEO of the Clinton Foundation.

According to Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a Haitian member of the commission, the body’s “original sin” lay in concentrating the decision-making power in the Executive Committee of the Board, made up of Bill Clinton and then–Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. In October 2010, just six months after its creation, Bourjolly wrote a memorandum to the co-chairs and the rest of the commission’s board. The note cautioned that by “vesting all powers and authority of the Board in the Executive Committee, it is clear that what is expected of us [the rest of the Board] is to act as a rubber-stamping body.” According to Bourjolly, the memorandum was not included in the official minutes of the October meeting at Clinton’s behest, and the document has remained out of the public sphere. But one former commission employee confirmed the commission’s role: he told me that many projects were approved because “they were submitted by USAID and State” and “that as long as USAID is submitting it and USAID is paying for it,” it should be approved.

Bourjolly also contended that the commission was failing to live up to its mission “to conduct strategic planning, establish investment priorities and sequence implementation of plans and projects.” Rather, Bourjolly wrote, “our action has so far been limited to accepting projects that. . . come our way on a first come, first served basis” and that it would result in “a disparate bunch of approved projects. . . that nonetheless do not address as a whole neither the emergency situation nor the recovery, let alone the development, of Haiti.”

The number of displaced persons is down to 200,000 from 1.5 million. But only 25 percent of that decrease is due to official housing programs.

Even the Clintons’ supporters conceded that their staff and the foreign consultants did more harm than good. A Haitian government official, who requested her name be withheld because of the power the Clintons continue to wield in Haiti, commented that “they were lucky to get someone as high-profile and experienced as Clinton” but that the staff “had no idea what Haiti was like and had no sensitivity to the Haitians.” “Out of ignorance, there was much arrogance,” the official said. “And who pays the price? The Haitian people, as always.”

Article 22 of the Haitian constitution enshrines “the right of every citizen to decent housing,” and civil society groups have long advocated for the government to protect this right through large-scale, affordable public housing. But in October 2011, the commission quietly closed its doors. Its eighteen-month mandate was not renewed, and little remained of the grand plans to build thousands of new homes. Instead, those left homeless would be given a small, one-time rental subsidy of about $500. These subsidies, funded by a number of different aid agencies, were meant to give private companies the incentive to invest in building houses. As efforts to rebuild whole neighborhoods faltered, the rental subsidies turned Haitians into consumers, and the housing problem was handed over to the private sector.

The number of displaced persons is down to 200,000 from its 1.5 million peak, according to the U.N. But only 25 percent of that decrease has anything to do with official programs to provide housing. Many were given a paltry subsidy and evicted from their camps. The highest profile and most visible camps were closed down, but those tucked in alleys, out of the view of the convoys of aid workers’ vehicles, remain forgotten. Fifty-five thousand Haitians who moved to areas known as Canaan, Jerusalem, and Onaville were recently removed from the “official” list of Internally Displaced Persons camps. Though those who were pushed out of the camps simply returned to their old homes, the international community claims progress. A USAID–sponsored study from the summer of 2011 estimated that over a million Haitians were occupying damaged homes and that nearly half of them were living in “buildings that might collapse at any moment.” In fact, if another quake happened today, they’d be more likely to die than they were living under tents in clearings.

By September 2013, nearly four years after the earthquake, only 7,500 new homes had been built and 27,000 repaired—an incredibly small achievement when set against the billions of dollars and grand plans put together by the international community in the wake of the catastrophe. “Now, we have a return to the status quo, the same situation that was there before the earthquake, with no coordination and each project done haphazardly,” Gabriel Verret, the former executive director of the commission, said.

USAID’s $33,000 House

While the $500 rental subsidies recommended by the Clinton Commission at the end of its tenure became the preferred form of support by the Haitian government and international community, smaller projects to provide permanent housing that had already been approved by the commission were carried through. In December 2010, the commission’s board had signed off on the U.S. government’s “New Settlements Program,” which called for the construction of 15,000 homes in Port-au-Prince and the North Department, where the new industrial park was to be located.

This June, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report revealing that only 900 of those 15,000 homes had been built. The overall goal has been reduced to 2,600. At the same time, costs increased from $53 million to over $90 million. The GAO found that the program suffered from a fatal flaw: original estimates had drastically low-balled how much the houses would cost. The calculation of 15,000 planned houses was based on an estimate of each costing around $8,000. With the cost of preparing the land, the total cost per house was over $33,000.

USAID assembled a team of shelter experts in August of 2010. The goal, according to Duane Kissick, the head of the shelter planning team, was to put the majority of available resources into the damaged communities. The plan they came back with was simple and meant to be implemented quickly. Jerry Erbach, another member of the Shelter Team, recalled that “there was a good deal of pressure to develop a series of projects very quickly and at low cost in order to meet the needs of those households who became homeless after the earthquake.” The plan was to build homes that were simple, modest and small, but that could expand over time.

The narrative put forth by the Shelter Team experts is confirmed by USAID’s Shelter Sector Activity Approval Document (AAD), which I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The plan called for construction to be completed by December 2012 and specifically noted that “USAID programs will seek wherever possible to work with local partners.” A USAID-funded study by the International Housing Coalition recommended the same thing, noting that “wherever possible, USAID should utilize Haitian construction contractors.” Letting local companies or individuals handle the work means more money for Haiti, its economy, and its people. It’s also cheaper, and has worked in the past.

Food for the Poor, an NGO that has worked in Haiti for decades, utilizes small local construction teams to build 1,000 homes each year at a cost of just $6,400 each. Brad Johnson, the president of Mission of Hope, another NGO working in Haiti, told the New York Times, “We’re not one of the big groups that sit in Washington, D.C., and get the financing. . . But we’re managing to get it done for $6,000 a house. I don’t understand, for all the money that came into Haiti, why there aren’t houses everywhere.”

But the recommendations for using local contractors and the plan to build $8,000 homes were ignored. More international companies were brought in, additional studies were undertaken, and the first contract to actually build a house was not awarded until April of 2012, nearly two and half years after the quake and eight months after the project was approved. The contracts ended up going not to small local companies but to large international ones. Thor Construction, based in Minnesota, received $18 million, and CEMEX, a Mexican company, got over $7 million. Another $35 million went to two Haitian-American firms based in Maryland for environmental assessments, construction management, site preparation, and other associated projects.

Outsourcing the construction drove the price up, since international companies had to fly in, rent hotels and cars, and spend USAID allowances for food and cost-of-living expenses. To incentivize working in Haiti, the U.S. government also gave contractors and employees “danger pay” and “hardship pay,” increasing their salaries by over 50 percent. With all these costs included in contracts, it’s not hard to see how prices ballooned. Bill Vastine, a long-time contractor and member of the Shelter Team, said, “if the American people saw the true cost of this, they’d say ‘you’ve got to be out of your mind.’” The changing priorities undermined any cohesion in the program.

"I don’t understand, for all the money that came into Haiti, why there aren’t houses everywhere.”

With 200,000 still homeless and hundreds of thousands more living in grossly inadequate and often structurally unsound buildings, the 900 homes that USAID has built won’t go very far. No current USAID employees agreed to speak about the project on the record, despite repeated requests for comment. In remarks before Congress, USAID administrator Beth Hogan stated that “we were significantly off in terms of what our original estimates were. . . when we got back bids from offerers who were going to actually build these homes. . . the estimates increased even further.”

The Shelter Team also initially planned to build two-thirds of the homes in the Port-au-Prince area. But this has changed: the current plan is to build 75 percent of the homes in the Northern Department of Haiti, all within 13 miles of the new industrial park. Many USAID staffers on the ground wanted to focus on Port-au-Prince, where the damage was greatest. But the State Department had made a commitment to building houses in the North, in support of the Caracol Industrial Park.

The State Department’s political intervention in the project also delayed the process of getting people into the houses that did manage to get built. According to Erbach, who also worked with an international NGO assisting the Haitian Government in selecting households to benefit from the new housing, pressure from the Department of State led to a “significant amount of time and effort being wasted on identifying and vetting workers from the industrial park who were not IDPs.” The internal shelter AAD warned that “if the process is perceived as inequitable, opaque, or led by the United States, the [government] will appear to be ‘choosing winners,’ resulting in political problems.” As Vastine describes it: “Every agency has its own little fiefdom, their own little budgets to protect and their own cadre of people they protect and they don’t work well together; there is no cohesiveness with our own internal bureaucracy in the United States, much less with everything else that’s here, from all the other countries.”

Speaking before Congress, USAID Administrator Hogan conceded that, “what we realized as we were going into this. . . is that new homes isn't [sic] the solution for Haiti.” USAID is now officially out of the home-building business in Haiti.
As for the 750 houses under construction in Caracol, as the four-year mark comes and goes, the first families are just now starting to move in. Meanwhile, back in Haiti’s capital, at least 200,000 quake victims face another year living under tattered tarps.

Too Big to Fail

Over the last twenty years, the American foreign aid system, much like the military, has become increasingly reliant on private contractors. From 1990 to 2008, USAID experienced a 40 percent decline in staff while funds under their responsibility skyrocketed. A 2008 report from the American Academy of Diplomacy found that “implementation of programs has shifted from Agency employees to contractors and grantees and USAID lacks . . . [the] capacity to provide effective oversight and management.” In her Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said “I think it's fair to say that USAID, our premier aid agency, has been decimated. . . It’s turned into more of a contracting agency than an operational agency with the ability to deliver.” Billions have been shifted to private corporations and NGOs. Many of those who actually implement foreign aid projects are explicitly for-profit companies, but even top employees at some USAID-funded non-profits earn over $300,000 a year.

Before he became head of the recovery commission, Bill Clinton urged those working in Haiti to ask, “Are we helping [the Haitian people] to become more self-sufficient? Are we building infrastructure in local development plans? Are we creating local jobs? Are we paying salaries for teachers, doctors, nurses, police, civil servants? Are we giving money to support government agencies that provide those services?”

The answers to these questions would seem to be mainly in the negative. In Haiti, a report(which I co-authored) at the Center for Economic and Policy Research revealed that less than 1 percent of the more than $1.3 billion in assistance provided by USAID was awarded directly to Haitian companies or organizations. USAID awarded more money to one Washington D.C.-based for-profit contractor, Chemonics, than to the entire Haitian government since the earthquake.

Haiti is not unique; these problems erode U.S. aid across the globe. A revolving door between NGOs, development companies, and the U.S. government has entrenched the system so deeply that any movement for change will be long and difficult.

Fortunately, development agencies are slowly realizing that aid goes much further when more of it stays in the local economy.

For its part, USAID has launched an ambitious reform program called “USAID Forward,” which aims to totally overhaul the procurement system, working directly with local institutions. USAID Administrator Beth Hogan told Congress that in Haiti, the United States is “trying to reach 17 percent of our overall budget to be channeled through local institutions.” But already, for-profit development companies have formed a lobbying group and hired the influential, Democratic party-linked, Podesta Group to get their message out. Their selling point: foreign companies are harder to hold accountable. It’s an argument that rings hollow when you realize that not a single USAID awardee, NGO, or for-profit has been suspended or reprimanded publically for their work in Haiti, despite all the high-profile failures.

The failure of Haiti’s reconstruction is, sadly, another chapter in a long history of poverty perpetuated by outside powers. Bureaucracy, internecine quarrels, moneyed lobbying, waste and inefficiency—these are not monopolies of poor, “developing” countries such as Haiti. They are the problems of the United States and its foreign aid complex.

Read more from Boston Review on Haiti: "Apocalypse" by fiction editor Junot Díaz, "Civilizing Haiti" by Colin Dayan, and Colin Dayan's conversation with Jonathan Katz, "The Secret History of the Haitian Earthquake."

http://bostonreview.net/world/jake-j...ke-aid-caracol

WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day

The US Embassy aided Levi’s, Hanes contractors in their fight against an increase in Haiti’s minimum wage.

By Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives
JUNE 1, 2011

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand.

To resolve the impasse between the factory owners and Parliament, the State Department urged quick intervention by then Haitian President René Preval.

“A more visible and active engagement byPr éval may be critical to resolving the issue of the minimum wage and its protest ‘spin-off’—or risk the political environment spiraling out of control,” argued US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a June 10, 2009, cable back to Washington.

Two months later Preval negotiated a deal with Parliament to create a two-tiered minimum wage increase—one for the textile industry at about $3 per day and one for all other industrial and commercial sectors at about $5 per day.

Still the US Embassy wasn’t pleased. A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

Haitian advocates of the minimum wage argued that it was necessary to keep pace with inflation and alleviate the rising cost of living. As it is, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere and the World Food Program estimates that as many as 3.3 million people in Haiti, a third of the population, are food insecure. In April 2008 Haiti was rocked by the so-called Clorox food riots, named after hunger so painful that it felt like bleach in your stomach.

According to a 2008 Worker Rights Consortium study, a family of one working member and two dependents needed at least 550 Haitian gourdes, or $12.50, per day to meet normal living expenses.
The revelation of US support for low wages in Haiti’s assembly zones was in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by the transparency group WikiLeaks. As part of a collaboration with Haïti Liberté, The Nation is publishing English-language articles based on those cables.

In an emailed statement, the State Department declined to comment on the disclosures in this article,
citing a policy against commenting on documents that purport to contain classified information and stating that it “strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of such information.” However, the State Department spokesperson added in the email: “In Haiti, approximately 80 percent of the population is unemployed and 78 percent earns less than $1 per day”— actually, according to the UN Development Program, 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2, not $1, a day—and “the US government is working with the government of Haiti and international partners to help create jobs, support economic growth, promote foreign direct investment that meets ILO labor standards in the apparel industry and invest in agriculture and beyond.”
For a twenty-month period between early February 2008 and October 2009, US Embassy officials closely monitored and reported on the minimum wage issue. The cables show that the Embassy fully understood the popularity of the measure.

The cables attest that the new wage even had support from a majority of Haitian private sector representatives “based on reports that wages in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (competitors in the garment industry) will increase also.”

Still the proposal engendered fierce opposition from Haiti’s tiny assembly zone elite, which Washington had long been supporting with direct financial aid and free trade deals.

In 2006 the US Congress passed the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) bill, which gave Haitian assembly zone manufacturers preferential trade incentives. Two years later Congress passed an enhanced version of the duty-free trade bill called HOPE II. And USAID Haiti provided technical assistance and training programs to factories to help them expand and take advantage of HOPE II.

US Embassy cables claimed that those efforts were imperiled by parliamentary demands for a wage hike to keep pace with soaring inflation and high food prices. “[Textile] Industry representatives, led by the Association of Haitian Industry (ADIH), objected to the immediate HTG 130 (USD 3.25) per day wage increase in the assembly sector, saying it would devastate the industry and negatively impact the benefits of the Haitian Hemispheric through Opportunity Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II),” said a June 17, 2009, confidential cable from chargé d’affaires Thomas C. Tighe to Washington.

Tighe said that the “ADIH and USAID funded studies on the impact of near tripling of the minimum wage on the textile sector found that an HTG 200 Haitian gourde minimum wage would make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down.”

Bolstered by the USAID study, the factory owners lobbied heavily against the increase, meeting with <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">Pr</acronym></acronym>éval on multiple occasions and with more than forty members of Parliament and political parties, according to the cables.

The Haiti cables also reveal how closely the US Embassy monitored widespread pro–minimum wage demonstrations and openly worried about the political impact of the minimum wage battle. UN troops were called in to quell student protests, sparking further demands from Haitians for the end of the 9,000-strong UN occupation.

As the Haitian Platform for Development Alternatives put it in a press release in June 2009, “Every time the minimum wage has been discussed, ADIH has cried wolf to scare the government against its passage: that raising minimum wage would mean the certain and immediate closure of industry in Haiti and the cause of a sudden loss of jobs. In every case, it was a lie."

Editor’s Note: We first posted this story on June 1, but at the request of Haïti Liberté, our partner in this series, we temporarily removed it until June 8. Some enterprising bloggers noted the “pulled scoop” and, pointing out that you “can’t stuff the news genie back in the bottle,” attempted to summarize it for their readers. Along the way, a few subtleties got lost—like that the factory owners at the center of this sordid story, who moved successfully to block the $5 per day minimum wage passed by the Haitian parliament, were making goods for big-name US retailers like Levi Strauss and Hanes. In keeping with the industry’s usual practice, the brand name US companies kept their own hands clean, letting their contractors do the work of making Haiti safe for the sweatshops from which they derive their profits—with help from US officials. We apologize for the delay in bringing the original article back online.

https://www.thenation.com/article/wi...em-live-3-day/