You know it's sad I never went to Haiti. My parents always say the crime is out of control. My pops last went to Haiti in 99 and mom's went to Haiti in 2009. I will go once my money is straight. Also remember all the crimes are in Port Aug Prince. But outside PAP isn't bad. Like where my father is from Aug Caves is safe. I want to go during kanaval fete champagne. It's fukked up many of the Diaspora have been in Montreal, Bosoton, Miami and NYC longer they been in Haiti.
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.
Preliminary results from the deeply flawed 2010 presidential and legislative elections were announced on December 7, 2010, showing René Préval’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 Préval] 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 Préval 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 Préval’s early departure, and during a meeting of international officials on election day, Préval 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 separateFOIA 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 Préval 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 Préval 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, Préval’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.
WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day
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?”
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.
The same email thread has Cheryl Mills providing the unacceptable Haitian CEP results to Hillary. These results would soon change.
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.
The “tabulations” of the CEP, tabulations that the State Department announced, were now officially thrown into question.
OAS Ambassador Seitenfus has an explosive charge.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
“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.
"Joking that he must be coming back to lead a new colonial regime, the Haitian press dubbed Clinton Le Gouverneur."
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.
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.
The other tool was the Clinton Foundation, which was simultaneously embarking on its own program to boost Haiti’s economy, securing commitments worth more than $130 million from foreign leaders, corporate executives and philanthropists to help Haiti “build back better,” as Clinton put it, from the 2008 storms.
Everything seemed to be falling into place when, on January 12, 2010, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake ripped through the mountains of Haiti’s southern peninsula, leveling much of the capital and killing 100,000 to 316,000 people—the deadliest single natural disaster ever recorded in the hemisphere. The earthquake destroyed the presidential palace, government ministries, schools, offices and countless homes.
It also threatened to upend the Clinton State Department’s nascent Haiti policy. Mills’ team had completed its review just a few hours before the ground shook, concluding in a draft report that Haiti was poised for an economic renaissance, citing indicators such as marginal declines in child mortality and upticks in employment in the country’s garment-assembly industry. Undeterred, in the final, 89-page post-quake version of the report, the State Department team would call the response to the disaster “a moment for U.S. partnership, leadership and strategic investment.”
I was the Associated Press correspondent in Haiti at the time. I had been posted in Port-au-Prince for 2 ½ years when the earthquake shattered the walls of my house with me inside. That night, suddenly homeless like millions of others, I moved through the devastated city with my Haitian friend and colleague, Evens Sanon, taking stock of the devastation and watching Haitians rescue and comfort one another as best they could. The living sang prayers of salvation. Everyone was waiting to see what kind of help would come. I remained in Haiti for another year to report on the response, watching up close the central role Hillary and Bill Clinton came to play in the attempt to rebuild.
Four days after the quake, Hillary Clinton was at Port-au-Prince’s damaged airport, holding meetings with then-Haitian President René Préval. That same day, Bill Clinton was in the White House Rose Garden with President Barack Obama, agreeing to lead fundraising efforts on behalf of the beleaguered country along with former President George W. Bush. Two days later, on January 18, Bill arrived in the quake zone with daughter Chelsea and her fiancé, Marc Mezvinsky. In short order, the Clintons became the most important figures in the response. They co-moderated a U.N. donors conference at which 150 nations and organizations pledged $9 billion for Haiti’s recovery. Bill was tapped at the same meeting to co-chair the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, a nominally Haitian entity that was supposed to direct the spending. At every stage of Haiti’s reconstruction—fundraising, oversight and allocation—a Clinton was now involved.
“I believe, before this earthquake, Haiti had the best chance in my lifetime to escape its history, a history that Hillary and I have shared a tiny part of. I still believe that,” Bill Clinton had said in the Rose Garden, alongside Obama and Bush. “It is still one of the most remarkable, unique places I have ever been, and they can escape their history and build a better future if we do our part.”
***
Hillary Clinton never took her eye off Haiti as secretary of state, even as so many geopolitical hotspots competed for attention. The island represented a key piece of what Clinton called “economic statecraft”—her theory that U.S. foreign policy should not simply respond to security threats but should actively bolster both America’s economy and global influence through diplomacy, trade and economic development abroad.
Former President Bill Clinton has recruited a number of friends to the island’s cause, including Digicel CEO Denis O’Brien, shown right, who attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Iron Market in January 2011 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. | Allison Shelley for Politico Magazine
Two months later, Martelly was elected president. Fewer than one in five adult Haitians voted. At his inauguration, Martelly pledged his country would at last be “open for business.”
Bill Clinton applauded from a few feet away.
Many in Haiti thought the Clintons’ influence had reached its peak when, shortly after Martelly took office, he selected one of Bill Clinton’s top aides, Garry Conille, to be his prime minister. Conille had been Bill Clinton’s chief of staff at the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy, and many in the Haitian political elite assumed that the Clintons had imposed him to keep an eye on the unpredictable new president.
If that was the idea, it failed. Conille lasted just four months. He was replaced by Laurent Lamothe, Martelly’s longtime business partner, whom the former pop star had once referred to, lovingly, as a “true bandit” in a song.
Things have only gotten more discordant since. Haiti has not held a single election, at any level, in Martelly’s four years in office. Parliament disbanded late last year when the terms of its members expired, leaving Martelly to rule by decree. Both the Clintons and the State Department tried to remain enthusiastic about the Martelly-Lamothe administration. But when opposition protests broke out last year, even Bill’s last-ditch endorsement of the prime minister in a Miami Herald interview could not save him from being forced to resign.
Shortly thereafter, a New York Times article by reporter Frances Robles spotlighted criminality surrounding the Martelly administration, including its protection of members of an alleged kidnapping and drug smuggling ring. A day after the article’s publication, one of the most prominent allies of the president, Woodley Ethéart, was indicted on charges of kidnapping and murder—only to be freed within weeks.
I asked Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, Nick Merrill, whether Martelly’s track record had changed her opinion about the leader she helped put in power. “She supports democratic elections, just like she did as secretary,” Merrill said. He declined further comment.
***
The hardest thing about evaluating the Clintons’ work in Haiti is that there is so much of it. There’s the Clinton Foundation, which has directed $36 million to Haiti since 2010, but also the $55 million spent through the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, and the $500 million in commitments made through the Clinton Global Initiative’s Haiti Action Network. On Hillary’s side, there’s her own diplomacy, the State Department’s Office of the Haiti Special Coordinator, and the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose administrator reported to her.
The amounts of money over which the Clintons and their foundation had direct control paled beside the $16.3 billion that donors pledged in all. Even Bill’s U.N. Office of the Special Envoy couldn’t track where all of that went—and the truth is that still today no one really knows how much money was spent “rebuilding” Haiti. Many initial pledges never materialized. A whopping $465 million of the relief money went through the Pentagon, which spent it on deployment of U.S. troops—20,000 at the high water mark, many of whom never set foot on Haitian soil. That money included fuel for ships and planes, helicopter repairs and inscrutable such as an $18,000 contract for a jungle gym that I found buried in the U.S. Navy’s Haiti bills. Huge contracts were doled out to the usual array of major contractors, including a $16.7 million logistics contract whose partners included Agility Public Warehousing KSC, a Kuwaiti firm that was supposed to have been blacklisted from doing business with Washington after a 2009 indictment alleging a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government during the Iraq War. (That case is still pending in U.S. federal court.)
"When it’s happening you don’t realize it, [but] after everything is in place … you see the Clintons at every level.”
But even looking at money and institutional heft alone barely captures the reach and influence of the Clintons’ network in Haiti: a vast, diffuse web of power in all its 21st-century permutations. Take the story of actor Sean Penn and his unlikely transformation into a Haiti power player. Penn used his celebrity to establish the aid group J/P HRO in the weeks after the earthquake, then to forge a friendship with Bill Clinton—who in turn used his foundation and his own celebrity to help turn J/P HRO into one of the most powerful NGOs in Haiti. That led to deeper ties to the newly elected government of Martelly, which named Penn an ambassador.
When I returned to Haiti in April for nine days, the Clinton Foundation put me in touch with about a dozen projects it is still running there. Many surely do excellent work, such as the Haitian medical group GHESKIO, one of the world’s oldest AIDS clinics, which is now engaged in a host of medical issues including battling the pernicious cholera epidemic imported into Haiti by United Nations peacekeepers in 2010. The Clinton Global Initiative supports coffee growers and peanut farmers, and has helped the Swiss fragrance supplier Firmenich expand its access to Haitian limes and vetiver, a key oil in perfumes.
The money given directly by Clinton entities, often a few hundred thousand dollars, is small change compared to the billions floating around the humanitarian industry and the corporate world. But the combination of carefully targeted money and connections is invaluable, says GHESKIO’s founder, Dr. Jean William Pape: “He’s a catalyst. He doesn’t give you funds to throw away. He gives you funds to get you started.”
The Clintons have also had a hand in nearly all the new luxury hotel projects that have sprung up around the Haitian capital. Denis O’Brien, the billionaire owner of the major cellphone provider Digicel and principal investor in the swank $45 million Marriott that just opened in Port-au-Prince, said Bill Clinton conceived the project. “He said to the two of us [O’Brien and Marriott CEO Arne Sorensen], ‘Why don’t you build a hotel?’ And after a bit of a conversation, about half an hour, we said, ‘We’ll put up the money.’”
One of the Clinton Foundation’s favorite lines is: “Everywhere we go, we’re trying to work ourselves out of a job.” But at least in the case of Haiti, it’s hard to see how that would happen. The Clintons themselves are the only thing linking all of these projects and initiatives.
More than money, in other words, what the Clintons really provide is access. That dynamic both leaves them open to criticism and makes people loath to criticize for fear of being left on the outside. “I don’t want to use names, but I have seen bad businessmen around Mr. Clinton badmouthing the good businessmen and then the good businessmen, seeing that, come into the Clinton Foundation. It’s life, it’s like that,” says Leslie Voltaire, a longtime Haitian politician and government minister who served as the Préval government’s liaison to Clinton at the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti. “Every businessman looks to see if they can be next to power.”
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The Clintons are hardly the first foreigners to try to remake this island. The ancestors of today’s Haitians were survivors of one of the most brutal periods of slavery, torture and exploitation the world has ever known. More than 910,000 kidnapped Africans were taken to what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue between 1679 and 1797, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at Emory University. Their labor on sugar and coffee plantations turned the colony into France’s most valuable engine of economic growth. That period ended with the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in modern history, which created the second-oldest republic in the Western Hemisphere, behind the United States—and the first in which all people were free. Haiti’s former French masters, though, exacted a crippling indemnity in compensation for what they deemed the lost value of land and bodies.
For the past century, it’s been the Americans, not the French, who repeatedly reshaped the political landscape here. On July 1, 1915, the U.S.S. Washington arrived on the north coast of Haiti, nominally in response to political turmoil on the island. Within weeks, U.S. Marines had taken the capital, placing the United States in control of Haiti’s government and finances. Five U.S. presidents oversaw the occupation of Haiti, waging war against Haitian insurgents, rewriting laws and ensuring, as Duke University historian Laurent Dubois has written, a “Haitian government [that] was compatible with American economic interests and friendly to foreign investments.”
The Marines’ departure in 1934 did not end U.S. involvement in Haiti. Exactly sixty years later, President Clinton ordered a new American invasion—Operation Uphold Democracy—to restore exiled President Aristide, who had been deposed in a 1991 coup. The story of the Clintons and the first black republic had already been underway for a long time. Their December 1975 trip as newlyweds is often described by the Clintons as a seminal journey. It was paid for by a friend, Edwin David Edwards, a junior executive at Citibank who had just set off a firestorm by accusing his bank of improper currency transactions in the Caribbean.
The newly married couple were at a critical juncture in their political lives. Bill had just lost a congressional race in Arkansas and was giving up on national politics. It was in Haiti that he decided instead to embark on a run for Arkansas attorney general—the race that turned out to be the start of his journey to the White House and, arguably, the beginning of Hillary’s public life as well. We may never know what moved him. But an important moment came outside the capital, at the Vodou temple of Max Beauvoir, a Sorbonne- and City College of New York-educated houngan, or priest. After a ceremony honoring Ogou—the god of iron, war and politics—the Clintons and Beauvoir sat all night by the coral-stone peristyle talking about faith and the future, the houngan told me. “We reached the conclusion that the pursuit of God is the pursuit of excellence,” he recalls.
When Clinton ran for president in 1992, he blasted the George H.W. Bush administration for rounding up boats of Haitians fleeing the military junta that ousted Aristide and for taking too light a hand countering the junta itself, many of whose leaders had received U.S. training or money. Ultimately, Clinton’s intervention returned Aristide to power. But Aristide did not live up to White House expectations. In the years ahead, U.S. relations worsened, and in 2004 the George W. Bush administration provided a plane to fly him into exile, touching off years of instability and lost growth, all capped by the 2010 earthquake. That last disaster presented another chance for the U.S. to get involved and another chance for redemption.
Today, driving east from the city of Cap-Haïtien—where the U.S.S Washington first arrived 100 years ago this summer—out along Haiti’s north coast, past the banana-tree farms at the foothills of the Massif du Nord, you enter the hotbed of U.S. post-quake reconstruction. The agricultural region, a bumpy six-hour drive from Port-au-Prince, was partly chosen to encourage people to disperse from places devastated by the 2010 disaster. Development plans for the corridor include expanded tourist facilities (visitors are expected to flock to the Citadelle Laferrière, a monumental 19th-century Haitian fortress and UNESCO World Heritage Site; Royal Caribbean’s lone pier in the country is also nearby), ports, schools, roads and electrification. American Airlines recently began flights to Cap-Haïtien.
The linchpin is the $300 million, 600-acre Caracol Industrial Park, financed by U.S. taxpayer money and Inter-American Development Bank and geared toward making clothes for export to the United States. The Clintons were instrumental at nearly every step in its creation. The development program Bill came to sell as U.N special envoy, written by Oxford University economist Paul Collier, had garment exports at its center.
As only he can, Bill Clinton managed to tout the idea as an exciting departure from Haiti’s past. He successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress to eliminate tariffs on textiles sewn in Haiti. (The powerful Association des Industries d’Haiti lobbied, too, paying at least $550,000 to a D.C. lobbying firm led by Andrew Samet, a former Clinton Labor Department official, and Ronald Sorini, who was the chief U.S. Trade Representative negotiator on textiles during the North American Free Trade Agreement talks.)
Clinton won headlines by apologizing for having maintained as president the import-substitution policies that destroyed Haiti’s food sector—policies built on the dangerously misguided theory that factory jobs obviated the need to produce rice and other food locally. He made a special point to note that the policy had benefited farmers in his home state of Arkansas. The message was clear: This time would be different. And he had grand plans for what the industry could become. Clinton predicted that with the right support to the garment sector, 100,000 jobs would be created “in short order.”
Secretary Clinton joined in too: She hired Collier’s research partner in Haiti, Soros Economic Development Fund consultant Jean-Louis Warnhoz, as a senior adviser. She and her key aide Cheryl Mills negotiated an agreement between the Haitian and U.S. governments, multilateral financiers and the South Korean textile giant Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., which makes clothes for Old Navy, Walmart, Kohl’s, Target and other retailers. The Haitian government provided the land. To create a “plug and play” environment in a country lacking nearly all basic services, IADB and USAID invested millions in roads, water systems, a power plant, executive dormitories and the warehouse-like “shells” that would house the factories. The Clinton Foundation “helped to promote Caracol as an investment destination and worked … to attract new tenants and investments to the park,” says Greg Milne, the foundation’s director of Haiti programs.
In October 2012, Hillary and Bill Clinton flew down to join President Martelly at the ribbon-cutting, where she pledged, “Our partnership, I promise you, will extend far beyond my time as secretary of state. And so, too, will the personal commitment that my husband and I have to Haiti.”
If things went as planned, Caracol would be a triumph of the Clintons’ core model: the “public/private partnership”—U.S. taxpayer dollars, Haitian land and private corporations working together to put cheap clothes on American shelves and wages in Haitian pockets.
Today’s reality, though, falls far short of the 2012 dream—despite an incredible financial investment. Far from 100,000 jobs—or even the 60,000 promised within five years of the park’s opening—Caracol currently employs just 5,479 people full time. That comes out to roughly $55,000 in investment per job created so far; or, to put it another way, about 30 times more per job than the average Sae-A worker makes per year. The park, built on the site of a former U.S. Marine-run slave labor camp during the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation, has the best-paved roads and manicured sidewalks in the country, but most of the land remains vacant.
The park’s boosters respond that the number of employees has doubled in the past year. One of Haiti’s richest men, Richard Coles, is opening a new factory to produce for Hanesbrands there. The park’s 10-megawatt plant is providing electricity to more than 8,000 people in the surrounding area under a pilot project run by a Beltway-based energy cooperative, bypassing the weak national electric utility. Mark D’Sa, a former Gap Inc. sourcing director who now works for the State Department, laughed at the idea that anyone could evaluate Caracol’s success or failure after only 2 ½ years. “It’s a half-baked idea that’s still in the oven,” he says, approvingly.
But the workers have their own complaints, starting with pay. Aselyne Jean-Gilles, 35, makes the minimum 225 gourdes a day, or about $4.75. She says she spends $3.19 on food, plus 45 cents each way for a group taxi that takes her from her home in Cap-Haïtien to a town where she can catch a free shuttle to work. She does not have children yet. “If you do, you can’t afford to do anything,” she says.
Inside, Sae-A’s three warehouses are kept reasonably comfortable by giant fans. A disc jockey plays Haitian kompa music to keep workers energized. Enormous U.S., Haitian and South Korean flags hang overhead. Seamstresses sit in forward-facing rows, stitching and passing forward Mossimo and Old Navy tops under the glow of red signs that keep track of the daily “meta,” or quota (the signs were imported, along with middle managers, from older Sae-A factories in Central America, at least one of which closed as the Haiti project was opening). Quality checkers stand all day at the end of the row, discarding clothes unfit for export. “From 7 a.m. until 5 p.m., I stand and stand. I can’t sit down,” says Tamara Pierre, a 22-year-old quality checker, rubbing her visibly swollen ankles as she waits for a bus home.
Outside the park’s walls some 336 families say they were forced off the land to make way for Caracol and were not compensated enough to make up for the loss of livelihoods. It was good, productive farmland in a deforested, hungry country—chosen by the park’s planners precisely because of its access to a good water supply. The farmers’ claims are hard to prove, in large part because Haitian land law is a mess. Five years after it became clear that disputes over land tenure were halting reconstruction after the quake, Haiti still lacks a functioning land registry.
Park officials say the proper channels were followed and compensation was more generous than it had to be. But the peasant farmers believe that once again they were taken advantage of by unaccountable, distant powers. “Mr. and Mrs. Clinton,” specifies Milostene Castin, an area farmer and organizer with the community group Je Nan Je, or “Eye to Eye,” “they have been there since the cornerstone was laid. I think they have monetary interests and political interests in the park.”
When I mentioned that President Clinton had apologized for harming Haitian farmers in the past, Castin was unimpressed. “We call on them to invest in the people, respect human rights and the law,” he says.
To many close observers of Haiti, the Clintons made the same mistake that has been made for generations. Though striking a populist pose, in practice they were attracted to power in Haiti, which meant making alliances and friendships within the Haitian elite. “The strong push toward Caracol is evidence of this,” says Robert Maguire, an expert on development in Haiti and the director of The George Washington University’s Latin American and Hemispheric Studies Program. Their project responded not as much to the “more inclusive development priorities pushed for by most Haitians and their government … but rather to those supported by Haiti’s economic elites, who stood to benefit the most from them.”
That does not mean that the Haitian elite are all fans of the Clintons. Far from it. Many still smart over Bill’s decision to reinstate the overthrown Aristide. Others are resentful of the power and money the Clintons bring with them in their entourage, including billionaires like O’Brien (who in turn have no love for the oligarchical power of the Haitian import-export cartels). But infighting, the maneuvering of power and political brinkmanship have long been tactics of the Haitian elite.
In a way, some whisper in Port-au-Prince, it’s as if the Clintons have joined their ranks.
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'I’ve heard people say Bill Clinton was trying to buy the Citadelle!”
The Washington Post recently wrote that “the Clintons’ long influence in Haiti is hard to overstate.” It’s indeed hard—but not impossible. While the Clintons and their allies sometimes seem to be omnipresent, they are not omnipotent. In part, that’s because, as a rule, things in Haiti do not go as planned.
The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission closed shop in 2011, derided for ineffectiveness and decisions “not necessarily aligned with Haitian priorities,” according to theGovernment Accountability Office. In December 2010, the IHRC’s Haitian members protested in a letter that they were being sidelined by Clinton, Bellerive and major donors on the board, including the U.S. representative to thecommission, Mills. “In reality, Haitian members of the board have one role: to endorse the decisions made by the Director and Executive Committee,” they wrote.
Washington was a bigger obstacle. Congress capped the U.S. money it let the IHRC control at a comparatively tiny $120 million, and the Obama administration then issued instructions on how the money had to be spent. “That was the end of the trust fund as it was intended,” a former senior Haitian commission official told me. (In a recent interview, Bill Clinton told Town & Country that the IHRC was “incredibly cumbersome.”)
Other allegations of double-dealing and pocket-lining have been based on the dubious idea that the Clintons can do as they please in Haiti. Conservative author Peter Schweizer recently set off a media storm when he reported that a small mining company with rights to dig in northern Haiti had Tony Rodham, Hillary’s brother, on its board. On a sunbaked April morning, I hiked up a narrow path on Morne Bossa, the mountain 160 miles north of Port-au-Prince where that mine is supposed to end up. Spectacular countryside surrounded us. In the distance, across a wide green valley, the Citadelle Laferrière soared atop a 3,000-foot peak. Our destination inspired less awe: a sawed-off PVC pipe in a concrete base the size of a shoebox, from which the company—Victory, Championship, Strategic Mining—occasionally takes samples.
Schweizer’s report triggered a lot of speculation, inside Haiti and out, that the Clinton network was enriching itself in Haiti, and that lonely pipe on a remote hill became an object of fascination for the political press. But the site looked more like another example of overblown promises than a master scheme. There was no mining equipment nearby, and judging by the complete lack of activity at VCS Mining’s nearby office, little sign any would come soon.
VCS CEO Angelo Viard told me Rodham was a financial adviser, not a member of the board as had been reported, and that he had met him—through the Clinton Global Initiative—after the Haitian government had already granted him the right to explore for gold and copper. “Mr. Rodham … said very clearly, Haiti has been hurt by so many disasters, if there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know. And we said, ‘Hey, you might be able to help us with the capital,’ and he was very happy to do so,” Viard told me. He estimates he needs $60 million to begin digging, whenever the government might allow it again.
All mining programs in Haiti are on hold while the country’s mining law is reviewed. VCS’s office, full of dusty bags and wooden boxes of rocks, have no active staff beside the caretaker, Williamcite Noel, whose main qualifications seem to be speaking a bit of English and living near the site.
Many observers I spoke to think Viard is more likely to try and flip the company than to ever actually start blasting the ground. What role Tony Rodham might play in the company’s future, or what money he might make off a future deal, is just as unclear as the mine’s future. Its potential may never amount to anything, which some argue might actually be the better outcome for Haiti. An open-pit mine on the site could create environmental havoc while destroying the gorgeous view from the Citadelle, harming tourism potential in the years ahead.
Others have questioned a $500,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation made by the Algerian government after the 2010 earthquake, and a $900,000 donation by Boeing to support Haitian schools at the same time Secretary Clinton was lobbying the Russian government to buy that company’s planes. The foundation has acknowledged it violated an ethics agreement with the Obama White House by taking the Algerian donation. Boeing indeed won a major contract, according to the Washington Post.
But, though tracing the money in Haiti is difficult, there are no solid indications that the donations went anywhere other than where they were supposed to go. A Clinton Foundation spokesman says the Algerian money went into a $16.4 million direct aid fund, which in turn provided money to groups including Partners in Health, the operating fund of the IHRC, and Sean Penn’s J/P HRO.
Boeing’s money went to a now-defunct NGO named Architecture for Humanity, which rebuilt a quake-damaged school in the impoverished Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Bel-Air. I visited on a recent school day. While the new building does not scream luxury—there is no library or computer lab, barely any furniture, and the school building does not get electricity—it does seem to be a well-put-together piece of construction, certainly by Haitian standards, where schools collapsed from shoddy building materials even before the earthquake. The former lead for the project, Kate Evarts, told me that while she no longer has immediate access to the books, she thinks that $900,000 sounds about right as a price tag when considering fees, licenses and the cost of subcontractors. The foundation says some money also went to teacher training.
Following the money in Clinton Foundation projects is often a challenge. In recent weeks, under media pressure, the foundation has admitted that its bookkeeping and transparency have been lacking attimes. Last week, after days of questions and press reports about the Clinton Foundation’s work in various countries, acting CEO Maura Pally posted a statement explaining the foundation was committed to transparency: “Yes, we made mistakes, as many organizations of our size do, but we are acting quickly to remedy them, and have taken steps to ensure they don’t happen in the future.”
Even poring over documents doesn’t tell you much: In 2013, the most recent tax year for which disclosures are available, the foundation raised $295 million overall and spent $223 million—of which it says $197 million, or 88 percent, went to “program services.” That intentionally vague term, used universally by NGOs across the aid world, includes anything that can be justifiably linked to specific projects including travel, office expenses and salaries.
Clinton Foundation officials told me that, “unlike most organizations operating in Haiti, the Clinton Foundation and its Haiti program do not charge overhead expenses or collect an administrative fee for our work.”