what happened to the clinton foundation money for haiti
W hen Pecker and Hillary Clinton travelled to the Caribbean nation of Haiti as newlyweds in 1975, they were enchanted. Bill had recently lost a race for Congress back abode in Arkansas, only by the time they returned to the The states, he had set his listen to running for Arkansas state attorney full general, a decision which would put him on the path to the White Firm. "We take had a deep connectedness to and with Republic of haiti ever since," Hillary later said.
Over the next 4 decades, the Clintons became increasingly involved in Haiti, working to reshape the country in profound means. As U.s. president in the 1990s, Bill lobbied for sweeping changes to Haiti's agricultural sector that significantly increased the country's dependence on American food crops. In 1994, three years after a military coup in Haiti, Bill ordered a United states invasion that overthrew the junta and restored the country'due south democratically elected president to ability. Fifteen years afterwards, Bill was appointed United Nations' special envoy to Haiti, tasked with helping the country to develop its private sector and invigorate its economy. Past 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 equally creating jobs.
Over their many decades of involvement there, the Clintons became two of the leading proponents of a detail approach to improving Republic of haiti's fortunes, one that relies on making the country an attractive place for multinational companies to do business organisation. They accept washed this past combining foreign assistance with diplomacy, 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 chosen it a "neoliberal" arroyo to assistance.
The virtually significant test of this arroyo in Haiti began on 12 January 2010, when a magnitude vii.0 earthquake struck just due west of the upper-case letter, Port-au-Prince. In a nation of 10 million people, one.6 1000000 were displaced by the disaster, and as many as 316,000 are estimated to have died. The earthquake besides dealt a huge blow to Haiti'south economical development, levelling homes and businesses in the most populous expanse of the country and destroying crucial infrastructure, including the nation'due south biggest port.
Within days of the earthquake, the Clintons stepped upwardly to lead the global response. Neb was selected to co-chair the commission tasked with directing relief spending. Every bit US secretary of country, 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 phase of Republic of haiti's reconstruction – fundraising, oversight and allotment – a Clinton was at present involved," Jonathan Katz, a announcer who has covered Haiti for more than a decade, wrote in 2015.
There was no greater embodiment of the neoliberal arroyo to assistance in Haiti than the US'southward largest post-earthquake project – a $300m, 600-acre industrial park chosen Caracol, on the state'southward northern declension. To make the park more attractive, the U.s. also agreed to finance a power establish, and a new port through which firms operating at Caracol could transport in materials such as cotton, and ship out finished products including T-shirts and jeans.
The Clintons and their allies believed the Caracol projection would attract international manufacturers, which they saw as the primary fix to Haiti'southward faltering economy. "Haiti has failed, failed and failed once 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 later on the earthquake. By building "critical assets such as ports", they argued, the US and its allies could aid Haiti attract individual, foreign investment and create the stable jobs it needed to prosper.
10 years later on, the industrial park is widely considered to have failed to deliver the economical transformation the Clintons promised. But less attention has been paid to the fate of the port. Terminal twelvemonth, later sinking tens of millions of dollars into the port project, the Usa quietly abandoned it. The port is now one of the concluding failures in an American post-earthquake plan for Haiti that has been characterised past disappointment throughout. It is also the latest in a long line of supposed solutions to Republic of haiti's woes that have done piffling – or worse – to serve the country's interests. "The neoliberal, exploitative economic model currently beingness imposed" on Haiti "has failed many times earlier," Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Commercialism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, has written. The consequence, he adds, is that many Haitians are living "in a state of despair and daily desperation".
H aiti makes up the western tertiary of the island of Hispaniola – the other ii-thirds are the Dominican Republic – situated between the Atlantic and the Caribbean forth several major international shipping lanes. "It's a strategic location," says Claude Lamothe, the former director of a modest port in the northern metropolis of Cap-Haïtien. "All the big boats from the Us pass right past here."
For decades, the vast bulk of goods coming to or leaving Haiti travelled through the ageing port at Port-au-Prince in the southward. In the 70s, that port handled 90% of Haiti's imports and 60% of its exports (including thousands of baseballs destined for the US, some for the Major League). Only by the late 2000s, the fees it charged companies to dock, load and offload their goods were higher than any other port in the region. Then companies turned to ports in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Bahamas or Trinidad and Tobago instead. When the earthquake hit, a large section of the port at Port-au-Prince complanate into the sea. "The damage was unbelievable," said Russell Dark-green, a civil engineer at Virginia Tech University, who arrived to survey the port a few weeks after the disaster.
Simply before the earthquake hit, Paul Collier had published a report for the UN 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 program was a particularly clear expression of the neoliberal prescription for aid: reduce taxes on businesses to attract foreign investment, reduce tariffs to make information technology cheaper to buy and sell goods and offer loans to finance the infrastructure necessary to accommodate the remainder. All this would create jobs, and these new wage-earners would then spend their coin on goods from away. Everybody, in theory, would win.
The new port was a cardinal part of this vision. There were several obvious locations for it in and around the earthquake-devastated uppercase, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people would have provided a gear up workforce. Ultimately, however, USAid decided to build the park and port near Cap-Haïtien, on the country's northern declension, 650 miles south-east of Miami, Florida.
A 2011 US government written report declared: "With its proximity to Miami, a new container port in this region could become a hub for the north," which had "untapped potential" in light manufacturing, such every bit garments, and in sure kinds of high-value agronomics. 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 wool and ship out clothes. "A port – that was the carrot for these companies," Jake Johnston, a Haiti expert at the Heart for Economic and Policy Enquiry (CEPR), a liberal thinktank, told me.
But the location was attractive for other reasons, also. "Land was readily available in the due north," and the "hundreds of small farmers who had to exist moved" to make way for the park and port "were far less resistant than the wealthy landowners in the majuscule," Johnston wrote in 2014. Members of Republic of haiti's northern elite were also lobbying Nib Clinton to invest in the region, says Leslie Voltaire, who served alongside Bill as Republic of haiti's special envoy to the UN from 2009 to 2010.
Haitians themselves had remarkably little command over these plans. Between Apr 2010 and October 2011, decisions about how to rebuild Haiti were made not by Haiti's parliament, but past the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which Bill co-chaired. This was supposed to exist a Haitian-led body, but in December 2010, the 12 Haitian members of the committee wrote a letter declaring: "In reality, Haitian members of the lath have one function: to endorse the decisions made past the manager and executive committee," which included donors and other Clinton allies.
Haiti'due south then-president, a musician-turned political leader named Michel Martelly, seemed reluctant to push back confronting the US's redevelopment ideas, according to Voltaire. "At that time, Clinton was very close to Martelly," he told me. "Martelly is an amateur and he respects Clinton's ideas. They would follow any USAid and Clinton would say." (Martelly did not respond to a request for an interview.)
"Yous take to put it in context," Voltaire continued. "Almost all the countries in the world would want someone like Pecker Clinton to be a lobbyist for his country." A quondam US president with ties to major investors beyond the globe was expending political capital to assistance Haiti rebuild. For Haiti, "it was a double nugget," Voltaire went on, "considering his wife was secretarial assistant of state," and had influence over USAid, which controlled most of the Us's post-earthquake spending.
In the months after the earthquake, Bill worked tirelessly to attract manufacturing companies to the Caracol industrial park. When construction on the park broke basis in 2011, Beak laid the first foundation rock. A year later, at the park's opening anniversary, Bill looked on every bit Hillary delivered a speech promising that the park would lead Republic of haiti toward economic independence.
I nternational trade has dictated Republic of haiti'due south economic system almost since Christopher Columbus landed on Hispaniola by error, in 1492. Subsequently Spain and later French republic colonised the isle, they imported African slaves to produce one of the nigh lucrative commodities in history – sugar – and exported it effectually the world. Past the eve of Haiti's independence, which Haitians won in 1804, global merchandise had made the country 1 of the most profitable pieces of state in the world.
But all this international commerce has rarely benefited the vast majority of Haitians. Petty of the wealth generated in the country has ever stayed in that location. For near its unabridged history, Republic of haiti has owed a merchandise debt to other nations – near notably, a $21bn (in today'southward coin) burden levied by France subsequently independence. During the two centuries that followed, the effect of these debts has been to severely impoverish the country, and to make it beholden to the rich nations who have acted as its creditors. In the past 100 years, the US and the international financial institutions it partners with have been the virtually important of these creditors, indebting Haiti by extending strange development loans and creating a trade imbalance – an early grade of the neoliberal model.
But what worked for the U.s.a.'s interests worked less well for Republic of haiti. By the 1950s, neither Haiti's agronomical economic system, nor the dollars spent by thousands of American tourists every year, was enough to pay back those debts. By 1961, the Usa was sending $13m in aid to Republic of haiti – half Haiti's national budget – in role to help the nation bolster industry. Much of this early US aid to Republic of haiti was looted or wasted by Haiti'south autocratic leaders, especially François "Papa Doctor" Duvalier, and his son, Jean-Claude, who spent information technology on personal militias that terrorised Republic of haiti's citizenry. "Since 1946, the U.s.a. has poured almost $100m in economic assist … into Haiti without much to show for the money," the New York Times reported in 1963.
Aid from the Us and loans from international financial institutions failed to lift Haiti out of poverty. And even so, American assistance kept pouring in. When the Clintons and their allies sought to mould Haiti'southward economic future effectually manufacturing and trade, it was substantially the same neoliberal programme that the The states had been pushing for decades.
The most pernicious part of this program was the agronomical policies that the U.s. imposed on Haiti commencement in the 70s. The U.s. pressured Haiti to reduce its tariffs on imported crops, then shipped surplus American crops into Republic of haiti'south ports under the guise of "nutrient assist". Haitian farmers could non 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 Republic of haiti'southward labour force away from the fields and into factories. As president, Bill Clinton furthered this programme, creating massive surpluses of crops such as rice by extending hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to US farmers. In Haiti, the effect was that thousands upon thousands of farmers lost their country, but industrialisation never moved fast enough to replace their livelihoods.
Only years later would Beak Clinton acknowledge how this policy had failed Haitians."The United States has followed a policy … that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they tin leap straight 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 accept to alive every mean solar day with the consequences of the lost chapters to produce a rice ingather in Haiti to feed those people." By the time the earthquake struck, in 2010, a nation that in the 70s grew plenty rice to feed itself was at present importing 80% of it from abroad.
"Artibonite used to exist rich, only now it'due south poor," Denis Jesu-car, a rice farmer in one of Republic of haiti'south most agriculturally rich regions, in one case explained to me. "We produce rice, merely it doesn't sell."
D espite his acknowledgement that the The states'due south prior attempt to liberalise Haiti'due south economy had decimated its agronomical sector, in 2010, after the convulsion struck, Neb Clinton and his allies prescribed the same, familiar medicine – this time in the course of structure projects and clothing, instead of rice.
I twelvemonth later, Bill presided over a conference at which building firms from across the globe presented their designs for permanent housing for the displaced, most of which never came to fruition, in role because many were financially or practically infeasible, and in function for lack of state on which to build them. The largest piece of real estate of Haiti's mail-earthquake reconstruction was not built for poor Haitians at all, but 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 found and new port that were to come with it. "Each must exist completed and remain viable for the others to succeed," the US Government Accountability Office, Congress'due south official financial watchdog, wrote in an audit of the projection in 2013. But the inspect likewise found that USAid, which was leading the port project, lacked "staff with technical expertise in planning, construction, and oversight of a port." USAid, the audit pointed out, "has not constructed a port anywhere in the world since the 70s".
The audit offered a damning business relationship of USAid's efforts to build the port. Construction was delayed from the outset. The time needed to build the port was revised from an initial guess of two-and-a-half years to 10 years – and and so indefinitely. USAid had "no current projection for when construction of the port may begin or how long information technology will take". This was "due in part to a lack of USAid expertise in port planning in Republic of haiti".
To brand matters worse, in June 2015, a USAid feasibility study found that "a new port was not viable for a variety of technical, ecology and economic reasons". What'southward more, the US did not have enough money to finish the task: "USAid funding will exist insufficient to cover a majority of projected costs," with an "estimated gap" of $117m to $189m. Not just was the port not feasible, information technology was not even wanted: the private companies USAid had hoped to attract to Haiti'south north "had no interest in supporting the construction of a new port in northern Republic of haiti", the feasibility report adamant.
While the port stalled, the industrial park underdelivered. When Bill and Hillary Clinton flew to northern Republic of haiti to inaugurate the $300m Caracol park in 2012, the overall project had created but i,500 of the 65,000 jobs that were promised. In fact, many Haitians may have lost their livelihoods considering of Caracol: in the end, 366 families were evicted from their country to make manner for the projection, according to a report past the NGO ActionAid. Past June 2017, Caracol however employed only 13,000 people. (In an e-mail, the Clinton Foundation wrote that "The Clinton Foundation did not accept a role in building the Caracol Industrial Park and has never invested whatsoever funds into the park," but best-selling that as part of its wider goal of facilitating investment in Republic of haiti, "the Foundation helped identify potential tenants, including Haitian companies, for the park".)
As the The states's failure to deliver on its promises for the industrial park made international headlines, the faltering plans for the new port went disregarded. In 2013, USAid reallocated almost all of the $72m that was supposed to be used to build a new port to instead aggrandize and modernise the pocket-sized, dilapidated port in nearby Cap-Haïtien. Usa officials knew they were throwing good money afterwards bad: 2 years prior, a study past the State Department ended it would be a bad thought to endeavour to expand that port considering there simply was not enough land on which to do and then.
The Cap-Haïtien port "is locked into the city", Voltaire said. "There is no way you can aggrandize the hangers, the customs, the container areas. There's not enough infinite." But USAid officials went ahead with it anyway. "To scrap it or to stop allocating money is to acknowledge failure," Johnston, the Haiti researcher said. "And that's not something that USAid is practiced at."
Finally, more than than seven years after the port was conceived, USAid confronted reality. In May 2018, nearly 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 old ane. In August, a spokesperson explained the determination to me: "Based on proposals received and the electric current marketplace, it appeared that the cost of the project would significantly exceed the business organization forecast, cost estimate and bachelor funding." In short, a port was merely non economically viable. Which was precisely the determination that US audits and reports had come to dating back to 2011 – reports that USAid had ignored.
Later the project was abased, United states of america officials did non even carp to tell Haiti the news. When I visited Cap-Haïtien in December, Haitian port authorities were unaware that USAid had scrapped the project. "Final conversation nosotros had, they told us 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 cancel the port project half dozen months earlier. Gervè leaned back in his chair. "Wow," he said. "They didn't tell us that."
When I asked Gervè what the US'south $70m had achieved, he pointed to two physical electricity poles, erected as part of a program to connect the port to the public grid. USAid had paid for the poles, just had not strung the cables needed to electrify them.
B y January 2019, 9 years after the convulsion, USAid had spent $2.3bn in Haiti. Most of it was given to American companies and hardly any passed through Haitian hands. Less than iii% of that spending went directly to Haitian organisations or firms, according to research by CEPR. In contrast, 55% of the coin went to American companies located in and around Washington DC. Nearly likely, according to the inquiry, the bulk of what USAid allegedly spent on Haiti's recovery ended correct back in the US.
It is non articulate what happened to the money allocated for a port in Haiti, because USAid would not tell me. In Baronial, it released a factsheet challenge that it still planned to invest in "infrastructure upgrades" at the port, such every bit "improving the electricity system". Some of these were things the agency had committed to doing previously, only that had yet to be achieved past the time I visited final Dec. The factsheet gave no indication of how much coin was being directed to these projects, or when they would be completed. In other words, fifty-fifty afterwards abandoning the idea of building a new port in favour of expanding the former one, and then abandoning plans to aggrandize the old one, too, USAid is however making new promises, still challenge it will at to the lowest degree do something, despite its failure to make practiced on earlier promises dating dorsum almost a decade. The but physical improvements the agency claims to have made at the port are "electrical lines, security wall upgrades, a pilot boat and a security menu machine". Information technology also claims to have trained 575 Haitian customs officers, but did not say how many of them are employed at the Cap-Haïtien port.
Over the by 12 months, I accept repeatedly asked USAid spokespeople for a breakup as to how the $70m allocated to the Cap-Haïtien port was ultimately spent. In July 2018, I submitted a Freedom of Data Deed asking for documents relating to the port expenditures, and final Oct I resubmitted the request in farther particular after discussing information technology on the telephone with a USAid official. The agency acknowledged my request, but has yet to send me a unmarried document in response to it.
"Seventy 1000000 dollars? It's a lot of coin" for a projection that never materialised, said Voltaire. For that corporeality, "nosotros could have a prissy port in Saint-Marc", simply a few miles northward-west of Haiti'southward capital. In Canaan, a new city on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that was formed afterwards the convulsion, he added, "they could exercise 72km of nice road, or 72 primary schools," with all that money. At the terminate of final yr, Canaan – which is at present Haiti's third-largest city – had fewer than 5km of paved roads and merely i public school, for a population of 300,000.
"Here you lot take an industrial park an eight-hr bulldoze due north from where the quake was," said Johnston, referring to Caracol. "And then you have this city that'southward just 8km north, that was created from the earthquake – and information technology'due south gotten nothing."
In postal service-convulsion Republic of haiti, in that location were all fashion of things the The states could have spent its money on. It could have spent that money to revitalise Haiti's agricultural sector. In a country where only one in four people have access to basic sanitation facilities, the US could have invested in building things such every bit flush toilets, sewers and sewage handling plants. In a land where 59% of the population lives on less than $2.41 per day, the U.s. could have simply given Haitians the money. Studies accept shown that such "unconditional cash transfers" can be a more effective way to increment income and access to didactics and housing than many types of traditional "project-based" aid. Just policies similar greenbacks transfers would have undermined the approach to assist in which rich countries simply prescribe "solutions" for poor ones, rather than allowing people to take their futures into their own hands.
Niggling near the The states's foreign policy toward Haiti has changed since the 2010 earthquake. The US continues to transport the country surplus crops through the Food for Peace programme to this day. Hillary Clinton stepped down as US secretary of state in 2013, only her successors have championed the same sort of private-sector-focused development. USAid continues to spend money to boost Republic of haiti's textile industry, and the U.s.a. authorities continues to advertise Haiti as a business opportunity for Usa 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 United states is undeterred in its belief that industry and manufacturing are the primal to Haiti'southward future. "Despite the challenges, in that location are opportunities in the Haitian market place for pocket-size-to-medium-sized US businesses," wrote the US Department of Commerce in August. "The apparel sector is the most promising opportunity in the manufacturing sector in Republic of haiti."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/11/haiti-and-the-failed-promise-of-us-aid
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