The Clintons Didn’t Screw Up Haiti Alone. You Helped.
By Jonathan M. Katz
Trump has turned
Haiti into the new symbol of Bill and Hillary’s crookedness. If only things
were that simple.
Last week, during
a swing through Miami, Donald Trump stopped by a community center in Little
Haiti. Trump has never held much interest in Haiti or Haitian Americans, and it
showed. Instead of the usual bluster, the reality TV star tentatively read some
vague, prepared remarks off a sheet of paper, then sat back on a stool “to
listen and to learn” for a few minutes from the small crowd of mostly
middle-aged, upper- and middle-class Haitian Americans in dark suits and print
dresses, scattered among a few rows of folding chairs.
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| POOL/Getty Images |
Not long ago,
Trump’s team glommed onto the possibility that Haitian Americans—generally
black, generally Democratic-leaning voters who make up roughly 2 percent of the
population of Florida, where Trump and Hillary Clinton are separated by less
than a point—might be persuaded to vote against the former secretary of state.
The irony of a nativist pandering to thousands of immigrants and refugees
aside, there was a logic to this. Many people rightly identify Clinton with
failures of humanitarianism and development in Haiti. The Trump team has folded
that perception into a half-true narrative in which Haiti—like Whitewater and
Benghazi before it—becomes a synecdoche for all the ills, real and imagined, of
the Clintons themselves.
There are good
reasons the world’s first black republic has been an island-sized headache for
Clinton as she seeks the presidency. Haiti is a place where some of the darkest
suppositions that lurk on the left and right about her and her husband take
form. Here is an island country of 10 million people where America’s ultimate
power couple invested considerable time and reputation. Here is a fragile state
where each took turns implementing destructive policies whose highlights include
overthrowing a presidential election. Bill Clinton in particular mixed personal
relationships, business, and unaccountable power in ways that, if never exactly
criminal, arouse the kind of suspicion that erodes public trust. No two
individuals, including Haiti’s own leaders, enjoyed more power and influence
than the Clintons in the morass of the failed reconstruction following the
deadly Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, when a troubled country managed to go from
catastrophe to worse.
The Clintons
compounded the resulting political problem the way they usually do, by saying
as little as possible while letting their enemies fill in the blanks. A year
before he became Trump’s campaign “CEO,” Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon
began pushing facile theories of corruption and malfeasance in the book Clinton
Cash, written by Peter Schweizer under the aegis of Bannon’s Orwellianly named
Government Accountability Institute. It was later turned into a film. Both
versions of Clinton Cash tell a kaleidoscopic version of Haiti’s post-quake
story, remixed and more than occasionally fudged to push the Clintons into the
center. Those flawed but relatively measured accounts in turn inspired
whack-job theories that have become articles of faith in the anti-Clinton fever
swamps, such as the fantasy that Hillary and Bill just straight up stole
billions of dollars in post-quake relief money—an impossible claim so unmoored
from reality that even Peter Schweitzer didn’t bother making it.
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| Donald Trump (à gauche) en conversation avec un participant à la rencontre du candidat à Miami le 16 septembre 2016 |
The reality is a
lot more complicated (and interesting) than that. The United States and Haiti
were the first two independent republics in the Americas, and our often
blood-soaked relationship goes back a lot further than the meeting of a silky
Arkansan and an ambitious Illinoisan at Yale Law School.
Trump, probably
unwittingly, submerged himself in some relatively recent chapters of that
history at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. His host was Georges Saati, a
wealthy Lebanese-Haitian industrialist whose family backed the brutal
20th-century dictatorships of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier and whose far-right
faction helped foment the violent overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
in 2004.
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| George Sami Saati (FB Photo) |
Trump was also
treated to a speech by Bernard Sansaricq, a radical right-wing ex-Haitian
legislator whom the Los Angeles Times once called the “self-proclaimed president
of Haiti’s Senate” and who collaborated with the military junta that ruled
during Aristide’s first exile in the 1990s, following a coup carried out during
the George H.W. Bush administration by former Duvalierists on the CIA payroll.
Trump was so moved that this week, his staff published another statement by
Sansaricq on its website.
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| Bernard Sansaricq (FB photo) |
Both wealthy
Haitians openly loathe Bill Clinton, who ordered the U.S. invasion that put
down the junta and restored Aristide to power, for a time. Sansaricq, who long
ago left Haiti and ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress as a Republican in 2010
and 2012, repeated nonsensical, Breitbart-esque claims about “the whole world”
having given “billions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation for the Haitians”
(false: The Clinton Foundation has raised about $30 million in connection with
Haiti and was at no point a general clearinghouse for post-quake relief money)
and promising Trump the Haitian American community’s support if he will “ask
Hillary Clinton to disclose the audit of all the money they have stolen from
Haiti.”
Trump nodded
thoughtfully. “I didn’t understand,” he said, “now I understand it.”
He didn’t. I know,
because I’ve spent years looking into what’s really gone on in Haiti. I was the
Associated Press correspondent in Port-au-Prince from 2007 to 2011 and survived
the earthquake in 2010. I’ve spent years digging into the details of the
response and recovery, much of which I put in a book. I’ve also done extensive,
critical reporting on the Clintons’ roles in particular, which is why my name
appears halfway through the Clinton Cash documentary, misleadingly implying
that I was some sort of corroborating source.
In all that time,
neither I nor anyone else has found the coveted evidence of either Clinton
making off with vast sums of money from Haiti or the relief effort. And while
America’s foremost power couple may be as culpable as anyone for the disastrous
results of the earthquake response, it is fundamentally misleading to say that
they are singularly responsible for it, much less for America’s long and
abusive history with its oldest and poorest neighbor. I wish things were that
simple.
There’s a real
case to be made against Hillary Clinton in Haiti. From her first days as
secretary of state, Clinton saw the island republic as a place to “road-test” a
central piece of her foreign policy vision of “elevating development alongside
diplomacy and defense as core pillars of American power.” Haiti would be a
major example of “economic statecraft,” as she called it, where business and
government partner to address natural disasters, poverty, and disease,
neutralizing threats while generating money and power for the United
States—what her husband would call a “win-win-win.”
Clinton has gotten
grief in this election for that kind of thinking, exemplified elsewhere by a
2011 speech in which she pitched reconstruction in Iraq, eight years after the
U.S. invasion, as a “business opportunity.” In reality, what she is pushing has
been standard U.S. foreign policy for more than a century. (In Iraq, she was
very late to the party.) It’s no less true when it comes to “humanitarianism.”
The U.S. government devotes less than 1 percent of its budget to “foreign aid,”
most of which goes to vendors based in the United States. For instance, nearly
half a billion dollars of U.S. government relief aid “for Haiti” following the
2010 earthquake went to the Defense Department. The vast majority of U.S.
government contracts went to American firms; almost no cash ever went, or was
intended to go, to Haitians or the Haitian government. The same is true for
nearly all nongovernmental organizations and charities, including the American
Red Cross.
Despite promises
to change this way of doing aid, both Clintons rode herd on business as
usual—Hillary as head of the State Department (which includes the U.S. Agency
for International Development, or USAID), and Bill in his panoply of roles,
including co-chairing the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), a nominally
Haitian government agency charged with overseeing the allocation of
reconstruction money donated by foreign governments to a World Bank–managed
fund for 18 months after the earthquake. USAID, ignoring recommendations to
hire Haitian contractors, brought in several U.S. firms (and one Mexican firm)
to build a housing development. The added cost of flights, hotels, cars, food
allowances, living expenses, and “danger pay” ballooned the cost per house from
$8,000 to $33,000, investigative reporter Jake Johnston found. Ultimately two
of the American contractors weresuspended from receiving future government
contracts. “Out of ignorance, there was much arrogance,” a Haitian official
told Johnston.
But when the right
isn’t beating the Clintons over the head about it, this pattern—keeping the
money close to home—is how most conservatives, and a lot of other Americans,
want foreign aid to work. Clinton’s insistence that relief and development
efforts yield benefits for American businesses and consumers is aimed mostly at
critics who don’t understand that this is how U.S. aid and intervention always
operate. (That includes Trump himself, who told a Fox News town hall in April:
“We have many, many countries that we give a lot of money to, and we get
absolutely nothing in return, and that’s going to stop fast.”)
Before and after
the earthquake, the State Department openly and enthusiastically pushed a
vision of prosperity for Haiti through foreign investment in tourism,
construction, and low-wage garment factories. In its view, this would save
Haitians from poverty and prevent future refugee crises while making money for
American and multinational corporations. That idea is badly flawed—among other
things, the low wages and sweeping tax exemptions investors demand mean little
money flows into the local economy—but it’s the program every single U.S.
presidential administration has backed in Haiti since at least the 1960s. In
the 1970s and early 1980s, Haiti produced huge quantities of cheap clothes,
toys—and at one point all the baseballs used in the U.S. major leagues—earning
it the nickname the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” It’s a bipartisan effort:
Clinton’s vision of “economic statecraft” isn’t all that different from the
policies Ronald Reagan was pushing when his administration created the
Caribbean Basin Initiative.
But efforts to
resurrect the assembly sector, which collapsed in the turmoil following the
fall of the Duvalier dictatorship 1986, got ugly. A few months before the
quake, U.S. embassy officials pressured the then-Haitian president, René
Préval, to nix a legislative proposal to raise the minimum wage for garment
factory workers from roughly 22 cents an hour to 62 cents an hour, arguing that
higher wages would discourage investment. Préval and legislators compromised at
38 cents an hour. (It has since gone up.) Bill used his newly minted position
as U.N. special envoy to promote the economic agenda. “In the end all of our
efforts will have to be judged by how many jobs we create, how much we swell
the middle class, and whether we perform for the investors and make them a
profit for doing the right thing,” he said at the time.
Once the disaster
struck, the U.S. government focused its reconstruction efforts on pushing this
vision. That resulted in the construction of Caracol Industrial Park, a $300
million, 600-acre industrial development built to house garment factories in
northern Haiti. The project was financed through U.S. tax money via USAID, as
well as the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank. The Clinton
Foundation helped promote the project to investors. Bill and George W. Bush
teamed up to lobby Congress together to expand trade preferences for Haiti-sewn
apparel. Bill also used his position with the IHRC to direct further funds to
the project. With the help of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a former
South Korean trade minister, the organizers recruited Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., a
South Korea–based global garment giant that supplies many of the clothes you
buy at Target, Walmart, Gap, Old Navy, and other stores, to be the anchor
tenant.
All that was at
stake when, 11 months after the earthquake, Haiti held a presidential election.
Millions were still displaced and polling places in rubble, but the United
States and its allies were paying for the election and insisted it go on. The
process fell into chaos in the first round, with riots in the streets and candidates
accusing each other of manipulation and fraud.
The electoral mess
increased the Americans’ frustrations with Préval; they blamed his
recalcitrance and skepticism about foreign intervention for the slow pace of
reconstruction. The U.S. embassy openly fanned the flames by saying the
official electoral results conflicted with a European Union–sponsored poll.
U.S. officials then pushed Préval to throw his party’s candidate out of the
second-round runoff and replace him with Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, a
raunchy pop singer who enthusiastically backed foreign investment projects
including Caracol. (Martelly had also proved receptive to guidance from foreign
political hands.)
Clinton’s State
Department played hardball behind the scenes, revoking the visas of Préval’s
inner circle and banding with France, Brazil, Canada, and the United Nations
leadership to pressure the president into stepping down.
Then, on Jan. 30,
2011, the secretary personally flew to Port-au-Prince. The night before, she
had traded emails with her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, as well as the Clinton
Foundation’s chief operating officer, Laura Graham, who also served as Bill’s
chief of staff on the IHRC. In one email, Graham said resistance was building
against the U.S. plan and that the secretary had been “specifically criticized
today for imposing this solution.” Mills suggested that Clinton emphasize a
message in response: “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.”
Hillary delivered
that message almost word for word to the Haitian and foreign press the next
day. Behind closed doors, she sweet-talked Préval, convincing him that
accepting the U.S.-backed candidate would secure his legacy.
Martelly became
president in May. In his inaugural speech he declared, in English: “This is a
new Haiti open for business, now!” Bill was in the audience.
Initially,
Martelly accepted Garry Conille—Bill Clinton's chief of staff at the U.N.
Office of the Special Envoy—as his first prime minister. But sensing a
babysitter, Martelly quickly booted him out and replaced him with his own
business partner. “The situation cannot afford Washington to sit on sidelines.
They elected him and they need [sic] pressure him,” Graham grumbled to Mills in
an unusually candid email.
The earthquake
recovery foundered, inflation spiraled, and violence spiked. Martelly left office
earlier this year amid an unfinished, fraud-wracked election; for a week, the
country had no president. Haiti is now struggling with a weak, transitional
government. Demonstrations loom, as do strikes and threats of takeover by armed
militants.
Caracol opened in
2012 with both Clintons joining Martelly (and an acquiescent Préval) at the
opening ceremony. The project has been a disappointment by any measure. Sae-A
brought in a fraction of the jobs it promised. Its employees grumble about the
long hours, tough conditions, and low pay. The project has had little positive
impact on Haiti’s economy so far.
Trump has
criticized Caracol on the stump, referring in a recent speech to the time that
“Hillary Clinton set aside environmental and labor rules to help a South Korean
company with a record of violating workers’ rights set up what amounts to a
sweatshop in Haiti.” It’s a hypocritical complaint for a mogul who employs his
own sweatshop labor in China and Central America. Small wonder that he dropped
that line of criticism at the Little Haiti event, where his hosts were wealthy
industrialists whose opposition to Aristide (and Bill Clinton) was rooted in
large part in the former Haitian leader’s resistance to garment-factory owners
and foreign investment schemes. Still, it’s only a bit overstated—while Hillary
built nothing alone, her State Department pushed hard to get the park up
quickly, over theobjections of other administration departments.
But what the
shallower critics of the Clintons miss is whom this fundamentally unjust system
is designed to benefit. Despite cherry-picked, half-understood stories about
permits for nonexistent gold mines and isolated instances of naked (and duly
punished) fraud that account for rounding errors in the actual billions raised
and spent after the earthquake, there is simply no evidence that the intent was
to line the Clintons’ pockets.
The system isn’t
designed for them; it’s for us. The low wages that the U.S. embassy helped
suppress are the reason we can enjoy a steady stream of $9 Mossimo camisoles
and $12.99 six-packs of Hanes T-shirts. Even U.S. military uniform parts get
made in Haitian sweatshops. As America moves further away from its producer
past and deeper into its consumer present, we will want cheaper and cheaper
smartphones and cheaper and cheaper clothes that we can afford on our stagnant
service wages, and we will demand our leaders find us alternatives to sourcing
from rivals like China. Places like Caracol are the result. Some Americans say
they want production jobs to come back home, but few are ready to pay twice as
much for their clothes or $100 extra for their iPhones, most of which would
still have to be sourced from overseas.
To get the things
we want, the United States has been in the business of overturning elections
and toppling governments for more than a century. Clinton’s trip to Haiti in
2011 represents the softer end of a long tradition of U.S. invasions, coups,
and usurpations: Panama in 1903 to Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954, to Congo, 1961;
Vietnam, 1963, to Chile, 1973, to Iraq 2003, and on and on.
The U.S. Marines
occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, helping foster the overcentralization—whereby
American-run businesses and breaks on custom duties were concentrated in the
capital—that made the 2010 earthquake so deadly. And we have been meddling ever since—ferrying
leaders out and in and out again.
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| Marines américains en patrouille durant l'occupation d'Haiti en 1915 |
As Trump was
reminded in Little Haiti, Bill Clinton ordered the 1994 U.S. invasion. George
W. Bush ordered his in 2004. The U.N. peacekeeping mission that dumped cholera
into Haiti’s waterways a few months after the quake had nothing to do with
Clinton’s U.N. Office of the Special Envoy; it was created years earlier,
during the Bush administration, to take over from his U.S.-led force and has
been kept there and aggressively defended by administrations through Barack
Obama’s in large part because it is cheaper than sending U.S. troops back
again.
That military
might is used, explicitly, to keep things from deteriorating to the point that
thousands of Haitians flee toward Florida, as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.
Why? Because as it turns out, a lot of Americans aren’t fond of refugees.
None of this gets
the Clintons off the hook for the actions they are personally responsible for
in Haiti. I’ve asked Hillary’s spokesman many times to comment on how things
have turned out there and what if anything she would do differently as president.
He said once that she’d comment “when the time comes to do so.” That was back
in April 2015. I’m still waiting.
Bill continues to
mix his post-presidential fame and Haiti business matchmaking in ways that set
off alarm bells—often in conjunction with his trademark quarter-million-dollar
speaking fees. In the reconstruction effort, he often partnered with Irish cell
phone company Digicel and its head, Denis O’Brien. The company helped arrange
at least one lucrative speaking engagement for the former president, while the
Clinton Foundation “facilitated introductions” to help O’Brien build a
luxurious new Marriott hotel next to Digicel’s Port-au-Prince headquarters.
USAID has directed about $1.3 million to Digicel since 2008, along with private
grant money. Digicel has donated tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton
Foundation. It’s hard to say how, or even if, any of those parts fit together:
Digicel was dominating Haiti’s cell phone market and doing development work
there long before the Clintons re-engaged with the country in 2009. USAID money
started going to Digicel while George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice were running
U.S. foreign policy, and most has been paid out since Clinton left the State
Department. An indirect speaking fee is hardly proof of a kickback scheme.
Still, the relationship is clearly an example of the many ways money and
celebrity combine and strengthen each other at the highest levels of power.
But it ignores all
history and logic to pin the whole sordid tale of Haiti’s relief and
reconstruction disasters on one couple, no matter how powerful they have been.
Turning legitimate criticisms about U.S. intervention into a question about one
candidate’s personality is a way of avoiding harder questions. The Clintons
didn’t create the world we live in; they just know how to navigate it better
than most of us do. If we want it to change, we have to change it. And it seems clear that electing a strongman
leader who turns to putschists for advice on the developing world and who has
never shied away from making money by working with corrupt regimes isn’t the
answer. Changing a system that operates with millions of people and trillions
of dollars will take more than shunting all the evils of empire onto one or two
personalities—not when we benefit from them so eagerly and almost never change
ourselves when it counts. Pretending otherwise is just a way to let ourselves
off the hook, too.
Source: Slate
La mise en caractères gras de certaines phrases
du texte sont de l'auteur. Illustrations de HCN à l'exception de la toute
première photo qui acconpagne l'article dans les colonnes de Slate
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