How Much Money Did The Clintons Steal Fron Haitian Relief Fund
W hen Bill and Hillary Clinton travelled to the Caribbean nation of Haiti as newlyweds in 1975, they were enchanted. Pecker had recently lost a race for Congress dorsum abode in Arkansas, but by the time they returned to the U.s.a., he had set his listen to running for Arkansas country attorney full general, a decision which would put him on the path to the White House. "Nosotros take had a deep connection to and with Haiti always since," Hillary later said.
Over the next four decades, the Clintons became increasingly involved in Haiti, working to reshape the country in profound ways. As Usa president in the 1990s, Bill lobbied for sweeping changes to Haiti's agronomical sector that significantly increased the state'due south dependence on American food crops. In 1994, iii years subsequently a armed services coup in Republic of haiti, Nib ordered a US invasion that overthrew the junta and restored the country's democratically elected president to ability. Fifteen years later on, Nib was appointed Un' special envoy to Haiti, tasked with helping the country to develop its private sector and invigorate its economy. By 2010, the Clintons were two of Haiti's largest benefactors. Their personal philanthropic fund, The Clinton Foundation, had 34 projects in the country, focused on things such as creating jobs.
Over their many decades of involvement there, the Clintons became two of the leading proponents of a item approach to improving Haiti's fortunes, ane that relies on making the country an attractive place for multinational companies to practice concern. They have washed this by combining foreign aid with affairs, attracting foreign financing to build factories, roads and other infrastructure that, in many cases, Haitian taxpayers must repay. Hillary has called this "economic statecraft"; others have called it a "neoliberal" arroyo to aid.
The most significant test of this approach in Haiti began on 12 January 2010, when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck merely west of the capital letter, Port-au-Prince. In a nation of 10 million people, one.6 1000000 were displaced past the disaster, and as many as 316,000 are estimated to have died. The convulsion also dealt a huge accident to Haiti's economic development, levelling homes and businesses in the most populous surface area of the country and destroying crucial infrastructure, including the nation's biggest port.
Within days of the earthquake, the Clintons stepped up to atomic number 82 the global response. Bill was selected to co-chair the commission tasked with directing relief spending. As United states of america secretary of state, Hillary helped to oversee $iv.4bn that Congress had earmarked for recovery efforts by the United states of america Agency for International Evolution, or USAid. "At every stage of Republic of haiti's reconstruction – fundraising, oversight and allocation – a Clinton was now involved," Jonathan Katz, a journalist who has covered Haiti for more than a decade, wrote in 2015.
At that place was no greater embodiment of the neoliberal arroyo to aid in Haiti than the US'due south largest mail-convulsion project – a $300m, 600-acre industrial park called Caracol, on the country'south northern coast. To make the park more attractive, the United states also agreed to finance a power plant, and a new port through which firms operating at Caracol could ship in materials such equally cotton, and ship out finished products including T-shirts and jeans.
The Clintons and their allies believed the Caracol project would concenter international manufacturers, which they saw as the primary fix to Republic of haiti's faltering economic system. "Haiti has failed, failed and failed again," wrote the British economist Paul Collier and his colleague Jean-Louis Warnholz, who have both brash the Clintons, in the Financial Times two weeks after the earthquake. Past edifice "critical assets such as ports", they argued, the United states and its allies could assistance Haiti attract private, foreign investment and create the stable jobs it needed to prosper.
10 years subsequently, the industrial park is widely considered to have failed to deliver the economic transformation the Clintons promised. But less attention has been paid to the fate of the port. Last twelvemonth, after sinking tens of millions of dollars into the port project, the US quietly abandoned it. The port is at present ane of the final failures in an American post-earthquake plan for Haiti that has been characterised by disappointment throughout. It is also the latest in a long line of supposed solutions to Haiti'south woes that have done little – or worse – to serve the country's interests. "The neoliberal, exploitative economical model currently being imposed" on Republic of haiti "has failed many times before," Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, has written. The result, he adds, is that many Haitians are living "in a state of despair and daily desperation".
H aiti makes upwardly the western third of the isle of Hispaniola – the other 2-thirds are the Dominican Republic – situated betwixt the Atlantic and the Caribbean along several major international aircraft lanes. "It'southward a strategic location," says Claude Lamothe, the former director of a modest port in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. "All the big boats from the U.s.a. pass correct by here."
For decades, the vast bulk of goods coming to or leaving Republic of haiti travelled through the ageing port at Port-au-Prince in the due south. In the 70s, that port handled 90% of Republic of haiti's imports and threescore% of its exports (including thousands of baseballs destined for the United states of america, some for the Major League). Merely by the tardily 2000s, the fees it charged companies to dock, load and offload their appurtenances were higher than any other port in the region. So companies turned to ports in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Bahamas or Trinidad and Tobago instead. When the earthquake hit, a big section of the port at Port-au-Prince collapsed into the bounding main. "The harm was unbelievable," said Russell Green, a civil engineer at Virginia Tech University, who arrived to survey the port a few weeks afterwards the disaster.
Simply earlier the earthquake striking, Paul Collier had published a report for the United nations that laid out a vision for Haiti in which international manufacturing and merchandise would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in a few short years and bulldoze the land's economy into the future. His plan was a particularly clear expression of the neoliberal prescription for aid: reduce taxes on businesses to attract foreign investment, reduce tariffs to brand information technology cheaper to purchase and sell appurtenances and offering loans to finance the infrastructure necessary to accommodate the rest. All this would create jobs, and these new wage-earners would then spend their money on goods from abroad. Everybody, in theory, would win.
The new port was a primal role of this vision. There were several obvious locations for information technology in and around the earthquake-devastated capital, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people would have provided a set workforce. Ultimately, nevertheless, USAid decided to build the park and port near Cap-Haïtien, on the land'due south northern coast, 650 miles south-east of Miami, Florida.
A 2011 US government study declared: "With its proximity to Miami, a new container port in this region could get a hub for the due north," which had "untapped potential" in light manufacturing, such as garments, and in certain kinds of high-value agriculture. Companies such every bit the major Korean cloth manufacturer Sae-A, which became one of Caracol's first tenants, would be able to ship in cotton and ship out apparel. "A port – that was the carrot for these companies," Jake Johnston, a Haiti expert at the Heart for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a liberal thinktank, told me.
But the location was bonny for other reasons, too. "Land was readily available in the north," and the "hundreds of pocket-size farmers who had to exist moved" to make way for the park and port "were far less resistant than the wealthy landowners in the capital," Johnston wrote in 2014. Members of Haiti'due south northern elite were also lobbying Beak Clinton to invest in the region, says Leslie Voltaire, who served alongside Bill every bit Republic of haiti's special envoy to the UN from 2009 to 2010.
Haitians themselves had remarkably little control over these plans. Betwixt April 2010 and Oct 2011, decisions about how to rebuild Haiti were made non past Haiti's parliament, merely past the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which Neb co-chaired. This was supposed to be a Haitian-led body, but in December 2010, the 12 Haitian members of the commission wrote a letter declaring: "In reality, Haitian members of the board have one function: to endorse the decisions made by the director and executive committee," which included donors and other Clinton allies.
Haiti's then-president, a musician-turned politician named Michel Martelly, seemed reluctant to push back against the US's redevelopment ideas, according to Voltaire. "At that fourth dimension, Clinton was very close to Martelly," he told me. "Martelly is an amateur and he respects Clinton'due south ideas. They would follow whatever USAid and Clinton would say." (Martelly did not respond to a request for an interview.)
"You have to put information technology in context," Voltaire continued. "Nearly all the countries in the world would want someone similar Bill Clinton to be a lobbyist for his country." A former U.s.a. president with ties to major investors beyond the world was expending political capital letter to assist Republic of haiti rebuild. For Haiti, "information technology was a double asset," Voltaire went on, "because his married woman was secretary of state," and had influence over USAid, which controlled almost of the Usa's mail-earthquake spending.
In the months after the earthquake, Bill worked tirelessly to concenter manufacturing companies to the Caracol industrial park. When construction on the park broke ground in 2011, Bill laid the start foundation stone. A year later, at the park'south opening ceremony, Pecker looked on equally Hillary delivered a voice communication promising that the park would atomic number 82 Haiti toward economic independence.
I nternational trade has dictated Republic of haiti's economy near since Christopher Columbus landed on Hispaniola by mistake, in 1492. Later on Spain and later France colonised the isle, they imported African slaves to produce one of the about lucrative commodities in history – sugar – and exported it effectually the earth. By the eve of Haiti's independence, which Haitians won in 1804, global trade had made the land i of the nigh profitable pieces of land in the world.
But all this international commerce has rarely benefited the vast majority of Haitians. Footling of the wealth generated in the country has ever stayed at that place. For nearly its entire history, Republic of haiti has owed a trade debt to other nations – about notably, a $21bn (in today'due south money) burden levied by French republic after independence. During the ii centuries that followed, the result of these debts has been to severely impoverish the country, and to make it appreciative to the rich nations who have acted as its creditors. In the past 100 years, the U.s.a. and the international financial institutions it partners with have been the virtually important of these creditors, indebting Haiti by extending foreign development loans and creating a merchandise imbalance – an early grade of the neoliberal model.
But what worked for the United states'due south interests worked less well for Haiti. Past the 1950s, neither Republic of haiti's agricultural economy, nor the dollars spent by thousands of American tourists every year, was enough to pay back those debts. By 1961, the United states of america was sending $13m in aid to Republic of haiti – half Republic of haiti's national budget – in part to help the nation bolster industry. Much of this early US aid to Republic of haiti was looted or wasted past Haiti's autocratic leaders, particularly François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and his son, Jean-Claude, who spent information technology on personal militias that terrorised Haiti'south citizenry. "Since 1946, the United States has poured about $100m in economic aid … into Haiti without much to show for the money," the New York Times reported in 1963.
Aid from the Usa and loans from international fiscal institutions failed to lift Haiti out of poverty. And notwithstanding, American aid kept pouring in. When the Clintons and their allies sought to mould Haiti's economic time to come effectually manufacturing and trade, it was essentially the same neoliberal programme that the US had been pushing for decades.
The near pernicious role of this programme was the agronomical policies that the U.s. imposed on Haiti get-go in the 70s. The US pressured Republic of haiti to reduce its tariffs on imported crops, then shipped surplus American crops into Haiti'due south ports under the guise of "food aid". Haitian farmers could not compete with all the artificially cheap rice and other food crops from abroad, which was part of the point. The strategy was to create another market for American farmers while pushing Haiti'south labour force away from the fields and into factories. Equally president, Pecker Clinton furthered this plan, creating massive surpluses of crops such equally rice by extending hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to Us farmers. In Haiti, the result was that thousands upon thousands of farmers lost their state, but industrialisation never moved fast enough to supplant their livelihoods.
Only years later would Bill Clinton acknowledge how this policy had failed Haitians."The United States has followed a policy … that nosotros rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and salvage them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can spring directly into the industrial era," he told Congress in 2010. "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked … I have to live every 24-hour interval with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people." By the time the earthquake struck, in 2010, a nation that in the 70s grew enough rice to feed itself was now importing 80% of it from abroad.
"Artibonite used to be rich, but at present it'due south poor," Denis Jesu-car, a rice farmer in i of Haiti'southward most agriculturally rich regions, once explained to me. "We produce rice, but information technology doesn't sell."
D espite his acknowledgement that the Us'south prior attempt to liberalise Haiti's economy had decimated its agronomical sector, in 2010, subsequently the convulsion struck, Bill Clinton and his allies prescribed the aforementioned, familiar medicine – this time in the form of construction projects and clothing, instead of rice.
One yr later, Bill presided over a conference at which building firms from across the world presented their designs for permanent housing for the displaced, most of which never came to fruition, in part because many were financially or practically infeasible, and in part for lack of country on which to build them. The largest piece of real estate of Haiti's mail-convulsion reconstruction was not built for poor Haitians at all, just for wealthy ones and foreigners: a new Marriott hotel in Port-au-Prince, financed by a multinational telecoms corporation whose chairman was a friend of Clinton's. The Clinton Foundation brokered the deal, and Bill inaugurated the hotel in 2015.
The flagship projects of Haiti's reconstruction were the Caracol industrial park and a ability plant and new port that were to come with it. "Each must be completed and remain viable for the others to succeed," the US Government Accountability Office, Congress's official financial watchdog, wrote in an audit of the projection in 2013. But the audit as well found that USAid, which was leading the port projection, lacked "staff with technical expertise in planning, structure, and oversight of a port." USAid, the audit pointed out, "has not constructed a port anywhere in the earth since the 70s".
The inspect offered a damning account of USAid'south efforts to build the port. Construction was delayed from the start. The time needed to build the port was revised from an initial estimate of 2-and-a-half years to ten years – and so indefinitely. USAid had "no electric current projection for when construction of the port may brainstorm or how long it volition accept". This was "due in part to a lack of USAid expertise in port planning in Haiti".
To make matters worse, in June 2015, a USAid feasibility written report found that "a new port was not viable for a multifariousness of technical, ecology and economical reasons". What's more, the United states of america did not have enough money to finish the job: "USAid funding will be insufficient to cover a majority of projected costs," with an "estimated gap" of $117m to $189m. Non only was the port not viable, it was not even wanted: the private companies USAid had hoped to attract to Republic of haiti's north "had no interest in supporting the construction of a new port in northern Republic of haiti", the feasibility study adamant.
While the port stalled, the industrial park underdelivered. When Neb and Hillary Clinton flew to northern Haiti to inaugurate the $300m Caracol park in 2012, the overall project had created just one,500 of the 65,000 jobs that were promised. In fact, many Haitians may have lost their livelihoods because of Caracol: in the finish, 366 families were evicted from their land to make mode for the project, according to a study by the NGO ActionAid. By June 2017, Caracol yet employed only thirteen,000 people. (In an email, the Clinton Foundation wrote that "The Clinton Foundation did non have a role in edifice the Caracol Industrial Park and has never invested whatever funds into the park," merely best-selling that as role of its wider goal of facilitating investment in Haiti, "the Foundation helped place potential tenants, including Haitian companies, for the park".)
As the United states of america'south failure to evangelize on its promises for the industrial park made international headlines, the faltering plans for the new port went overlooked. In 2013, USAid reallocated almost all of the $72m that was supposed to exist used to build a new port to instead expand and modernise the minor, dilapidated port in nearby Cap-Haïtien. United states officials knew they were throwing good money later on bad: 2 years prior, a study by the State Department ended it would exist a bad thought to attempt to expand that port considering there simply was non enough state on which to do and so.
The Cap-Haïtien port "is locked into the city", Voltaire said. "There is no way you can expand the hangers, the community, the container areas. There'southward non enough infinite." Just USAid officials went ahead with information technology anyhow. "To scrap information technology or to finish allocating money is to acknowledge failure," Johnston, the Republic of haiti researcher said. "And that'southward not something that USAid is good at."
Finally, more seven years afterward the port was conceived, USAid confronted reality. In May 2018, almost three years after a new port was originally supposed to exist completed, USAid entirely abandoned its plans to build a new port or expand the sometime 1. In August, a spokesperson explained the conclusion to me: "Based on proposals received and the current marketplace, it appeared that the toll of the project would significantly exceed the business forecast, price guess and available funding." In brusque, a port was simply not economically viable. Which was precisely the conclusion that US audits and reports had come up to dating back to 2011 – reports that USAid had ignored.
After the project was abandoned, U.s. officials did not even bother to tell Haiti the news. When I visited Cap-Haïtien in December, Haitian port authorities were unaware that USAid had scrapped the project. "Concluding conversation we had, they told united states of america the money is there," Anaclé Gervè, the director of the Cap-Haïtien port, said. I told him what a USAid official told me: it had decided to abolish the port projection six months earlier. Gervè leaned back in his chair. "Wow," he said. "They didn't tell usa that."
When I asked Gervè what the US's $70m had achieved, he pointed to ii physical electricity poles, erected as part of a plan to connect the port to the public grid. USAid had paid for the poles, but had not strung the cables needed to electrify them.
B y January 2019, nine years subsequently the earthquake, USAid had spent $2.3bn in Haiti. Almost of information technology was given to American companies and inappreciably any passed through Haitian hands. Less than 3% of that spending went direct to Haitian organisations or firms, according to research by CEPR. In contrast, 55% of the money went to American companies located in and around Washington DC. About likely, co-ordinate to the research, the majority of what USAid allegedly spent on Haiti's recovery ended right back in the Usa.
It is not clear what happened to the money allocated for a port in Haiti, because USAid would not tell me. In August, it released a factsheet claiming that it still planned to invest in "infrastructure upgrades" at the port, such every bit "improving the electricity organisation". Some of these were things the bureau had committed to doing previously, merely that had yet to be achieved past the time I visited last Dec. The factsheet gave no indication of how much coin was beingness directed to these projects, or when they would be completed. In other words, even after abandoning the idea of edifice a new port in favour of expanding the quondam one, then abandoning plans to expand the old i, too, USAid is still making new promises, withal claiming it will at least exercise something, despite its failure to make good on earlier promises dating back most a decade. The only physical improvements the agency claims to have made at the port are "electrical lines, security wall upgrades, a airplane pilot boat and a security card machine". Information technology as well claims to accept trained 575 Haitian customs officers, but did not say how many of them are employed at the Cap-Haïtien port.
Over the past 12 months, I accept repeatedly asked USAid spokespeople for a breakdown as to how the $70m allocated to the Cap-Haïtien port was ultimately spent. In July 2018, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to the port expenditures, and terminal October I resubmitted the request in further item afterward discussing it on the phone with a USAid official. The agency acknowledged my request, but has all the same to send me a single document in response to it.
"Seventy million dollars? Information technology's a lot of money" for a project that never materialised, said Voltaire. For that amount, "we could have a nice port in Saint-Marc", just a few miles north-west of Republic of haiti'south capital letter. In Canaan, a new city on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that was formed afterward the earthquake, he added, "they could practise 72km of nice road, or 72 main schools," with all that coin. At the terminate of terminal year, Canaan – which is now Haiti's tertiary-largest metropolis – had fewer than 5km of paved roads and just one public school, for a population of 300,000.
"Here you have an industrial park an eight-hour bulldoze north from where the convulse was," said Johnston, referring to Caracol. "And and then yous have this metropolis that's just 8km north, that was created from the earthquake – and it's gotten nothing."
In post-convulsion Haiti, at that place were all mode of things the US could take spent its money on. It could have spent that coin to revitalise Haiti's agronomical sector. In a country where only one in iv people accept access to basic sanitation facilities, the Us could have invested in building things such as flush toilets, sewers and sewage handling plants. In a land where 59% of the population lives on less than $2.41 per day, the Us could have simply given Haitians the money. Studies take shown that such "unconditional greenbacks transfers" can be a more effective way to increase income and access to teaching and housing than many types of traditional "projection-based" help. But policies similar cash transfers would have undermined the arroyo to assist in which rich countries only prescribe "solutions" for poor ones, rather than assuasive people to take their futures into their own hands.
Little well-nigh the US's foreign policy toward Republic of haiti has changed since the 2010 earthquake. The U.s.a. continues to transport the state surplus crops through the Food for Peace programme to this twenty-four hour period. Hillary Clinton stepped downwards every bit US secretary of state in 2013, but her successors take championed the aforementioned sort of private-sector-focused development. USAid continues to spend money to boost Haiti'southward fabric manufacture, and the U.s. government continues to advertise Republic of haiti every bit a business opportunity for The states investors.
In spite of its failures to ring in a new era of prosperity for Haiti by building an industrial park and a port, the US is undeterred in its belief that industry and manufacturing are the fundamental to Republic of haiti's hereafter. "Despite the challenges, there are opportunities in the Haitian market for minor-to-medium-sized United states businesses," wrote the Us Department of Commerce in August. "The apparel sector is the most promising opportunity in the manufacturing sector in Haiti."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/11/haiti-and-the-failed-promise-of-us-aid
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