Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 25 juin 2024

Kenyan police force to leave for UN-backed Haiti mission on Tuesday

23/06/2024 - 18:28

Kenya offered to send about 1,000 police to stabilise Haiti alongside personnel from several other countries, but the deployment has run into legal challenges in the East African nation.

President William Ruto has been an enthusiastic backer of the mission and said this month that the deployment would begin within weeks.

"The departure is this week on Tuesday," an interior ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

"Preparations are set for the team to depart for Haiti on Tuesday. We already have two advance teams that left -- one last week and another one yesterday," a senior police official said.

A UN Security Council resolution in October approved the mission but a Kenyan court in January delayed the deployment.

It said the Kenyan government had no authority to send police officers abroad without a prior agreement.

The government secured that agreement on March 1 but a small opposition party in Kenya has filed a fresh lawsuit to try to block it. 

Aside from Kenya, other countries that have expressed willingness to join the mission include Benin, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados and Chad.

The United States is providing funding and logistical support, but not boots on the ground in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas.

Global monitor Human Rights Watch has raised concerns about the mission and doubts over its funding.

Rights groups have accused Kenyan police of using excessive force and carrying out unlawful killings.

On Friday, a police watchdog said it was investigating allegations that a 29-year-old man was shot by officers in Nairobi after youth-led demonstrations against proposed tax hikes.

Haiti has long been rocked by gang violence but conditions sharply worsened at the end of February when armed groups launched coordinated attacks in the capital Port-au-Prince, saying they wanted to overthrow then prime minister Ariel Henry.

Henry announced in early March that he would step down and hand over executive power to a transitional council, which named Garry Conille as the country's interim prime minister on May 29.

The violence in Port-au-Prince has affected food security and humanitarian aidaccess, with much of the city in the hands of gangs accused of abuses including murder, rape, looting and kidnappings.

(AFP)

National Center of Haitian Apostolate

REFLECTIONS FOR THE TWELFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR B June 23, 2024

Job 38, 1 + 8-11; Psalm 197; 2 Corinthians 5, 14-17; Mark 4, 35-41

This Sunday the Lord invites us to move from fear to confidence. Job implores God in his sufferings. God answers from the heart of the storm (Job 38: 1,8-11) “Look at my power and trust me, even when you do not understand." 

Paul, in turn, reminds the Corinthians that Jesus died for all men while bearing the weight of their evil; we must no longer remain focused on ourselves but on him who died and rose again for us. In the Gospel, the disciples are afraid of dying because of the storm. But Jesus rebukes the threatening wind and commands the stormy sea to quiet down. At once, the wind ceased and calm was restored. 

Like Job or the disciples of Jesus, people of our time feel very insecure, because of so many reasons: like wars, violence, natural disasters, economic and moral crises, etc. More than ever the cry of suffering is relevant: men, women, and children are painfully affected by illness, poverty, and famine. Many live in fear and no longer have the strength to cry out to the Lord. It seems to them, that things and life move too fast. Some even see the Church as sometimes uneasy and fearful. It seems as, if God is too far away; like a God who sleeps, and remains indifferent to our fears and anxieties. 

"Where are you, Lord, when we suffer?" "Why do you sleep, Lord, when your Church suffers?" "Why is there so much evil in the world?" These are often the cries of our human condition when we feel threatened by misfortune, suffering, and evil. 

We are reassured today by Jesus’s reaction and attitude in this Gospel. First, instead of answering the questions of his disciples, he calmed down the tempest with a word of his mouth. Second, he turned the table and started questioning his disciples: "Why are you so afraid?" Where is your faith?" Finally, he reaffirmed his presence in the boat with them. "I am with you. Believe in me, trust me." 

Faith does not eliminate the storm, no matter how strong it is. Faith changes us. Faith allows us to see and to know that Jesus is, not only, with us, but also within us. Moreover, in the middle of the storm, he is our peace. We are not wrong for being afraid. To be afraid is normal, and it is to be expected, but there is a solution. 

The word of God teaches us today that Jesus is in the boat with us. It reminds us at the same time that the real storm, the more threatening storm is always the one that rages within us, in our hearts. The work of Jesus is not only to rescue the sailors of Galilee crossing to the other side of the lake. It is fundamentally to save us, all of us, to save the world. 

The mighty deeds of Christ have been clearly displayed! Jesus is shown as endowed with divine power. The Apostles, witnesses of the event were filled with awe. Are we? Yes, He is Lord! May we live with the full assurance that he is truly the Lord, whose power and mercy are boundless! Let us call on him to calm down the furious winds of terror and violence, of hatred and despair that threaten our very existence. Let us incessantly call on him to calm away our fears and anxieties in the face of the world’s uncertainties and threats. He calls us to repent and become a new creation. Why should we arrogantly stand in defiance of the One whom the winds and the seas obey? 

Let us humbly express our confidence that, with the Lord, we can overcome all trials and all evil.

Undocumented spouses, children of US citizens can stay while applying for permanent residence, Biden announces

BY THE HAITIAN TIMES JUN. 19, 2024

The Haitian Times

President Joe Biden announced Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security will allow certain noncitizen spouses and children to apply for lawful permanent residence without leaving the country. 

The new process aims to ensure U.S. citizens with noncitizen spouses and children can keep their families together while awaiting immigration status adjustments and strengthen the economy, according to the White House.

“President Biden believes that securing the border is essential,” the White House states in a fact sheet. “He also believes in expanding lawful pathways and keeping families together, and that immigrants who have been in the United States for decades, paying taxes and contributing to their communities, are part of the social fabric of our country.”

To be eligible for this opportunity,  an undocumented spouse must have lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years and be legally married to a U.S. citizen as of June 17, 2024. On average, those eligible have lived in the U.S. for 23 years, according to the White House.

Approved applicants will be granted a three-year period to apply for permanent residency, during which they can remain in the U.S. with their families and receive work authorization. It’s estimated this policy will protect around 500,000 spouses of U.S. citizens and approximately 50,000 noncitizen children under 21 whose parents are married to U.S. citizens. 

It’s currently unclear how many Haitians in the U.S. will be affected by this policy.

Biden also announced measures to ease the visa process for U.S. college graduates, including DACA recipients and other Dreamers. This initiative aims to help young people who have earned degrees at accredited U.S. institutions and have received job offers in fields related to their degrees obtain work visas more quickly.

The administration is facilitating the employment visa process for college graduates with high-skilled job offers, including DACA recipients and other Dreamers, allowing them to contribute more effectively to the country’s economy.

“Recognizing that it is in our national interest to ensure that individuals who are educated in the U.S. are able to use their skills and education to benefit our country, the Administration is taking action to facilitate the employment visa process for those who have graduated from college and have a high-skilled job offer, including DACA recipients and other Dreamers,” the White House said.

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 20 avril 2023

 Leaked Pentagon Docs Show Russia's Brutal Wagner Mercenaries Have Ambitions in Haiti

03.08.23

Vice - The leaked Pentagon documents that have become an intelligence nightmare for the U.S. government after circulating in, among other places, a Minecraft forum also shed light on the growing global ambitions of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit working hand in hand with the Kremlin.

Led by an apparently villainous chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin—a catering and business oligarch closely allied to President Vladimir Putin—Wagner has emerged from the war in Ukraine as one of the most talked about features of the Russian offensive for its brutality. Prigozhin’s troops, composed of convicts and other volunteers linked to war crimes, have been key to the siege of Bakhmut—a meat-grinding battle in Donbas between mostly Wagner fighters and Ukrainian forces. Though at least under partial control of the Kremlin, Wagner has acted as a semi-autonomous military force inside Ukraine and around the world, which allows for the export of Putin’s most cynical geopolitical ambitions while giving him the veneer of plausible deniability. 

But the leaked top-secret Department of Defense documents, some potentially tampered with but the veracity of which has led to a DOJ criminal investigation, have provided a portrait of some of Wagner’s global ambitions. Among them a desire to send Russian mercenary troops some 800 miles south of Florida to the embattled country of Haiti, which has faced a litany of security issues since its president was assassinated by Colombian mercenaries in a 2021 coup.

“As of late February, Wagner associates planned to discreetly travel to Haiti to assess the potential for contracts with the Haitian Government to fight against local gangs, according to law enforcement reporting,” reads one of the photographed slides in the cache of documents reviewed by VICE News. 

Russian military and intelligence assets attempting to gain a foothold in the Americas to threaten U.S. regional ambitions is a tale about as old as time. Whether positioning nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 or arming various Communist-backed paramilitaries in Latin America, the Soviet Union often looked to flex its security powers near the American mainland. In recent years, Nicaragua has allowed Russian troops to train in its territory, in what many saw as more of Putin using a Soviet-era provocation to taunt the Biden administration during its struggles in Ukraine.

But if Wagner was even capable of sending mercenaries so close to the U.S. it would represent an escalation of tensions between the Kremlin and Washington, almost certainly necessitating an American reaction if Wagner were actually successful in deploying to Haiti. It’s important to remember that while the Russian mercenary company has gained global name recognition for its efforts in Ukraine and Africa, it isn’t an endlessly financed or manned organization and is facing increased pressures from inside Russia. Prigozhin’s mercenary company has sustained crippling losses and over 30,000 casualties, while fighting Ukrainian forces.

An American intelligence source with knowledge of Russian intelligence capabilities, who wasn’t authorized to speak to the media, told VICE News that in the event Wagner Group were even able to send mercenaries to Haiti it would match up to its other operations, “all over West Africa and Latin America.” 

“They’ll work for anyone and offer dictators coup security,” they said, referring to vulnerable national leaders who might employ the Russian mercenaries as private security details and a loyal military force. 

“They gravitate towards regions of political instability with the stated purpose of providing security. Haiti fits that bill,” they said, adding that Wagner “can be cowboys in Syria” but it would also be a surprising development for the Russian mercenaries to boldly send troops so near the U.S.

The Pentagon has said that it is investigating the leaked documents and acknowledged the damage it has already done. 

“We're not going to get into the validity of the purported documents posted online, but a Pentagon team continues to review and assess the veracity of the photographed documents that are circulating on social media sites and that appear in some cases to contain sensitive and highly-classified material,” said a Pentagon spokesperson in a Monday briefing. “We're still investigating how this happened, as well as the scope of the issue.”

The CIA declined to comment on the leaks to VICE News. In the past, the agency has publicly acknowledged it is covertly attempting to disrupt the Russian mercenary group’s activities in Africa and elsewhere.

The documents, if entirely real, offer several other startling looks inside alleged Wagner schemes. According to one top secret report in the same cache, U.S. intelligence found that Wagner was working with people inside another NATO partner and member state, to secure new weapons.

“Russian private military company Wagner personnel in early February met with Turkish contacts to purchase weapons and equipment from Turkey for Wagner’s efforts in Mali and Ukraine, according to a signals intelligence report,” the alleged leaked intelligence said. “Additionally, Malian Transition President Golta had confirmed that Mali could acquire weapons from Turkey on Wagner’s behalf.” 

The Turkish government did not respond to VICE News regarding the allegation that entities within the country were in contact with Wagner.

The same series of slides also showed how Wagner is willing to utilize its West Africa-based mercenary forces, including what the leaked documents say is 1,645 of their contractors in Mali, to destabilize neighboring Cote d’Ivoire—a country that France is eyeing as a security partner.

Colin Clarke, an analyst on the mercenary group and the director of research at intelligence consultancy firm the Soufan Group, says the leaks, if accurate, show just how determined Wagner is to continue pursuing business around the world even in the midst of what would be considered horrendous PR—and that there are interested buyers.

“The leaked documents shed some interesting light on Wagner and demonstrate that Wagner is even more aspirational than most people were aware of,” Clarke told VICE News. “I don't think Wagner's brand has been damaged in the way I would've guessed a year ago.”

Clarke explained that clearly Wagner is filling a need around the world, for regimes less interested in human rights and more on results. 

“Wagner is willing to do the dirty work and that's something that's still in demand,” he said, “especially in countries where the rule of law is weak and human rights are considered an afterthought, if mentioned at all.”

Russian mercenaries allegedly operating in Haiti “under the nose” of the United States

DOMINICAN TODAY

Recently leaked Pentagon documents have exposed the presence of a Russian mercenary group operating in Haiti, undetected by the United States. This Wagner Group made headlines in 2022 when its members allegedly killed a defector by beating him with a sledgehammer and offered assistance to the Haitian government in tackling violent gangs. According to the Daily Mail, the Wagner Group has already established itself in at least a dozen African countries and has links with Turkey and Syria.

The leaked documents indicate that the original source of the leak is hard to track down as thousands of US government officials have access to the classified material. The founder of the group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is a close associate of Russian President Putin and admitted in September that he founded, led, and funded the group. The leaked documents claim that Prigozhin recruited an army of 22,000 Russian ex-convicts from the Bakhmut area. Prigozhin has a checkered past, with a 12-year prison sentence for robbery and assault charges in 1981. He later gained notoriety for his catering business, winning lucrative Russian government contracts, and earned the nickname “Putin’s chef.”

He expanded into other areas such as media and even a “troll factory,” which led to his indictment in the US for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Wagner Group made its first appearance in eastern Ukraine, supporting a separatist insurgency, followed by Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali. Prigozhin reportedly used these deployments to secure mining contracts for his businesses.

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 4 avril 2023

 Randall Robinson, founder of influential Africa lobby, dies at 81

The founding executive director of TransAfrica was for years the foremost U.S. activist representing Africans and the African diaspora

Emily Langer

Randall Robinson, who as founding executive director of TransAfrica, a high-profile lobbying organization in Washington, helped reshape U.S. foreign policy toward apartheid-era South Africa and once conducted a 27-day hunger strike to bring attention to the suffering of Haitian refugees, died March 24 in St. Kitts, the island in the West Indies. He was 81.

His wife, Hazel Ross-Robinson, said he died in a hospital of aspiration pneumonia.

Mr. Robinson grew up in what he described as the “domestic apartheid system” of the Jim Crow South, recalling that he had not a single White classmate until he was accepted at Harvard Law School.

He participated in the civil rights movement and, in the years that followed, sought to carry on its ideals as perhaps the foremost U.S. activist representing Africans and the African diaspora.

Mr. Robinson led TransAfrica, which also included a scholarly and educational affiliate known as TransAfrica Forum, from its incorporation in 1977 until he stepped down as executive director in 2001. TransAfrica ceased operations in 2014.

A member of Congress, he recalled, once remarked to him that before TransAfrica was founded, “there weren’t more than a few people on the Hill who could name more than three African countries.” Under Mr. Robinson’s leadership, TransAfrica became “black America’s premier foreign-policy think tank,” Washington Post columnist William Raspberry wrote in 1993.

TransAfrica had the backing of Black celebrities including singer Harry Belafonte, tennis player Arthur Ashe, actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, comedians Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory, and boxer Muhammad Ali.

The organization — and Mr. Robinson in particular — was widely credited with forcing the United States to confront the apartheid regime in South Africa and push for the release of South African activists including Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for 27 years under apartheid.

“If I had to identify one person” in the United States “responsible for ending apartheid, it would be Randall,” then-U.S. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) told the Boston Globe.

In November 1984, Mr. Robinson was arrested, along with Del. Walter E. Fauntroy and Mary Frances Berry of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, when they staged a sit-in at the South African Embassy in Washington.

Mr. Robinson went on to lead daily demonstrations outside the embassy that led to thousands of arrests, including those of Ashe, singer Stevie Wonder, feminist leader Gloria Steinem and Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the liberal Republican from Connecticut. Mr. Robinson was detained a total of seven times.

President Ronald Reagan had advocated a conciliatory policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa. But in September 1986, amid growing outrage among Americans over the brutality of apartheid, Congress voted to override Reagan’s veto of legislation that placed economic sanctions on South Africa.

Mandela was released in 1990 and, four years later, was elected South Africa’s first Black president. Mr. Robinson was unable to attend the inauguration, because he had only days earlier ended a nearly month-long hunger strike to draw attention to another plight: that of thousands of refugees fleeing the military junta that had ousted the democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“Lives were at stake,” Mr. Robinson told the Dallas Morning News at the time. “Where life is at stake, one ought to be prepared to do anything to save a life. … If there are not some principles you have that are worth dying for, then your life is not worth living.”

Mr. Robinson took only water and fruit juice during his protest, which attracted national attention. At one point he was hospitalized for severe dehydration. He ended his hunger strike after President Bill Clinton agreed to grant would-be refugees asylum hearings rather than interdicting them at sea and returning them immediately to their violence-wracked country.

Clinton said that his administration had begun reviewing its position on Haitian refugees before Mr. Robinson undertook his protest. But the president had also remarked during the fast that “I understand and respect what he’s doing. … We need to change our policy.”

Randall Maurice Robinson was born in Richmond on July 6, 1941. His father was a high school history teacher and athletic coach, and his mother, a former elementary school teacher, was a homemaker and volunteer.

His earliest memories included the indignities inflicted on people of color because of segregation — the separate drinking fountains and bathrooms, the department store clerk who forced his mother to wear a skullcap before she tried on a hat. He recalled delivering groceries at age 14 to a White family and feeling invisible as they spoke among themselves about intimate details of their life, without any sense of his presence.

“When one gets on a bus and has to sit in the back — even a 2-year-old child understands,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1987. “Life is always a mixed blessing of pain and pleasure, but there was too much pain and no justification.”

Haiti assassination: how much did the US government know about the plot against Moïse?

The alleged involvement of three US government informants in the operation that culminated in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse has raised questions about how much Washington knew about the plan partially hatched in Miami. Does the FBI have a conflict of interest if it is investigating a case involving one of its informants? (Leer en español)

Univision

US Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen speaks during a press conference in Miami on February 14, 2023 to announce the arrest of four suspects and the indictment of 11 people accused of conspiring to assassinate the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moise. Among those named as "planners" were Arcangel Pretel and Antonio Intriago, owners of a security firm, CTU Federal Academy.

In April 2021, the owners of a small South Florida security company met to discuss acquiring weapons and military equipment as part of a plan to remove Haiti’s President, Jovenel Moise.

Over the course of several meetings, the security company claimed to have ties to the FBI and the Justice Department and suggested that the United States government backed its plan to remove Moise.

At least one such meeting was attended by FBI agents who claimed that the security firm "attempted to draw FBI personnel ... into a discussion about regime change in Haiti."

U.S. officials confirmed last month in court documents that the meetings took place, but denied that anyone in the government “sanctioned” the plot to remove Moise, which resulted in his murder three months later.

Left unaddressed, however, were questions about what the FBI agents learned about the plot and whether they tried to stop it, or if they warned anyone in more senior ranks of government, or the U.S. intelligence services.

Miami area security company hired the alleged Colombian assassins

According to court documents, the Colombians were hired by CTU Federal Academy in Miami, the same firm that hosted the meetings with the FBI agents in Doral, Florida a few weeks earlier.

Several of the alleged conspirators, including the owners of CTU Federal Academy, Antonio Intriago and Arcangel Pretel, were arrested last month and accused in federal court with conspiracy to murder Moise. They face life sentences if found guilty.

At the time of the meetings in Doral, Pretel was also an active FBI informant, according to court documents, including an affidavit by one of the FBI agents investigating the plot. Pretel, a Colombian citizen who moved to Miami in 2015, was “deactivated” after the assassination, court documents revealed.

Two other jailed men accused in the plot, a Haitian-American former policemen, Joseph Vincent, and a convicted former drug trafficker, Rodolph Jaar, were also former DEA informants, though they were not active at the time of Moise’s murder, according to court documents.

The Colombians feel duped by CTU

A lawyer for the Colombian soldiers told Univision that the former Colombian soldiers acted under the belief that the plot was sanctioned by the U.S. government and were tricked by CTU.

"They were absolutely convinced that they were working for part of the U.S. government; I don't know if it was the FBI or the CIA or the DEA," said attorney Sondra McCollins, who represents several of the detained men. "They were told that they had to detain a very important person and that the 22 (Colombians) had to accompany them," she added.

The soldiers were recruited in Miami by CTU Federal Academy and flew to Haiti on tickets purchased by the company. Intriago traveled from Miami to meet with them and they received regular briefings by Pretel via Zoom.

The soldiers flew to Haiti on tickets purchased by CTU Federal Academy. Intriago traveled from Miami to meet with them and they received regular briefings by Pretel via Zoom, according to two sources who spoke to Univision.

How the plot evolved into an assassination

CTU's initial plan was to aid regime change, not assassination, according to court documents. But something changed between April and July. The night before the operation, all participants were informed that the mission was to kill the president, according to federal prosecutors in Miami.

On the night of the assassination, one of the men in the convoy that arrived at Moise's residence shouted through a megaphone that it was "a DEA operation," something the U.S. government has strongly denied.

"So they arrive at the house ... and they don't know how to get in ... and one of them leans on the gate and it opens. They don't even have to break anything down," McCollins said.

Three of the assailants found Moise and his wife in their bedroom. Their two children hid the bathroom with the family dog. Moise was shot 12 times and killed instantly; his wife was wounded but survived.

Supposedly, the plan was to install a new government and the Colombians were to be integrated as the new president's security team. But within hours all the Colombians were arrested, and the other conspirators - some Haitian politicians and a Supreme Court magistrate among them - disappeared.

As details of the judicial proceedings in Miami and Haiti emerge, disturbing questions have arisen about the role the U.S. played before, during and after the attack.

McCollins contends that most of the detainees thought that Pretel, who was identified by the prosecution as one of the masterminds of the operation, was an official U.S. government liaison.

"We were convinced that we were doing, that we were supporting legal work for the FBI and the State Department," Juan Carlos Yepes told Univision Noticias in a video sent from prison in Haiti.

In the Zoom meetings, Pretel dressed as a military officer and let people around him believe he was a former colonel in the military. It is unclear whether he ever served in the Colombian military. Univision could not find any record of his service.

According to the Colombian civil registry, the 50-year-old businessman was born in Cali. According to some of the relatives of the Colombian ex-soldiers detained in Haiti, Pretel worked closely with the military in Cali in the 1990s during the hunt for the leaders of the Cali drug cartel.

Pretel circulated photos of him in front of U.S. government offices. Univision obtained one photo of Pretel in front of an official-looking wall with the logos of several branches of the US military, including the Army, the Marine Corps, the US Navy and the Air Force.

It turns out that the wall is located in a public area of Miami International Airport, known as the ‘Wall of Honor’ memorial, listing the names of South Florida military men and women who died serving in the global war on terrorism.

Pretel, in fact, was no stranger to the U.S. government. In the FBI agent's affidavit, Pretel is describes as a "confidential source." But, the FBI alleges, the Colombian leader of the operation "may have tried to use" his prior relationship with the U.S. government to suggest to others that CTU was affiliated with the FBI or the Justice Department.

This was false, according to the government. The agent added that Pretel "did not disclose to the FBI" the plot to assassinate Moise.

What did the FBI know, and when?

But many questions remain.

For more than a year the FBI declined to comment on rumors about Pretel’s relationship with the agency, even after lawyers for CTU issued a press release described the April meetings with agents.

The FBI now admits that agents were present at a meeting in which the alleged conspirators discussed a plan in CTU's office to make political changes in Haiti. According to court documents, the FBI agents know that they should not meddle in the affairs of other countries.

According to court documents, the FBI agents told the security firm that they couldn't help. "An FBI agent told the men, in substance, that the FBI could not help them because Haiti had to solve its own problems," the affidavit stated.

What is not known is how much concern this type of meeting caused the agency. In court documents the FBI now admits that agents were present at a meeting in which the alleged conspirators discussed regime change in Haiti.

The FBI clarified that Pretel had been an informant "on matters unrelated" to Haiti. He is believed to have collaborated as an unidentified informant in a case in Colombia related to weapons destined for the FARC guerrillas, according to Colombian media.

What is not known is how much concern this type of meeting caused the agency.

US law and the 'Duty to Warn'

Under U.S. law, it is a crime to conspire “to kill, kidnap, maim, or injure persons” and damage property in a foreign country. Following numerous futile attempts by the CIA in the 1960s to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, “no person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

U.S. officials also have a ‘Duty to Warn' if they come across information of a plot to kill or otherwise harm a foreign head of state. It is not known in this case if that happened.

The FBI declined to comment on the case. The State Department did not immediately respond to a written request for comment on what it knew about the plot.

The Colombian former soldiers are also left wondering if they might have avoided being led into a trap if the FBI had intervened in time to halt the plot. Three of the Colombians died in the aftermath of the assault.

"Now we learn that FBI agents claim to have been deceived by that American security company. If they were fooled, what makes them think that we weren't fooled," Yepes said in the video sent to Univision.

International arrest warrant against Patrick Noramé

March 28, 2023

An international arrest warrant was issued on Monday against the former DG Office for the Monetization of Development Aid Programs, Patrick Noramé.

He is being prosecuted for corruption, money laundering, financing of terrorism, and embezzlement of public funds.

Twenty other personalities linked to the investigation conducted under the management of Mr. Noramé at the head of the BMPAD are also subject to measures prohibiting departure.

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 24 mars 2023

 
Haiti's sudden turn for the worse puts Trudeau on the spot
Biden's visit is expected to focus heavily on Haiti, where Washington wants Canada to take the lead
CBC News, March 15, 2023

By Evan Dyer

"There's one event that tells it all," Haitian businessman Marco Larosilière told CBC News from his home in Port-au-Prince.

"Last week, the general inspector of the national police was kidnapped with his son in front of his school."

If a high-ranking official of the national police is not safe, said Larosilière, "what about the rest of the population?"

"It's unbearable," he added. "You feel that every day, the situation is getting worse and worse. And you're thinking it can't be worse. And the next day, you find out it's worse."

Larosilière's own neighbourhood has so far been spared, although he can hear the gunfire.

He's essentially trapped in Port-au-Prince, unable to reach his agrifood business in Haiti's south because of the gangs' stranglehold on the capital.

Over the past two weeks, the situation in Port-au-Prince has taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse.

Dr. William Pape of Cornell University is a member of the World Health Organization's scientific committee and one of Haiti's most distinguished medical doctors. He warned last week that the country could be on the road to a Rwanda-scale massacre (albeit without the inter-ethnic element of those events).

And last week, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was forced to close its hospital in Cite Soleil, a place famous for staying open no matter what. "We are living scenes of warfare just meters from the establishment," said MSF medical adviser Vincent Harris in a media statement.

Biden visit raises the pressure

The spiralling chaos comes at a difficult time for the Trudeau government as it prepares to welcome U.S. President Joe Biden to Canada.

Canada has been saddled with the expectation that it will "take the lead" in restoring order to Haiti because the Biden administration pressured it to do so — and because it suggested to other countries that Canada was going to do so.

The last time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Biden shared a bilateral stage was in Mexico City on January 11. "We're all very aware that things could get worse in Haiti," Trudeau said then.

"That's why Canada and various partners, including the United States, are preparing various scenarios if it does start to get worse."

Since then, U.S. pressure on Canada appears only to have increased.

By the time Trudeau headed to the Bahamas in February as a guest of the 15 member states of Caricom, the Caribbean community of nations, the belief that Canada was in charge of fixing Haiti was shared by all.

The other thing everyone agreed on was that, as Haiti's acting prime minister Ariel Henry told Trudeau in Nassau, "the situation is getting worse and worse."

Canada's ambassador in Haiti, Sébastien Carrière, echoed that view in an interview with CBC News. "I think you'd have to be blind to not realize that it's gotten worse," he said.

But that was in February. What has happened so far in March has been even more disturbing.

No more safe zone

When 2023 began, there were still areas of Port-au-Prince that felt like they were beyond the reach of the gangs. "When you start a story for children, you say, 'Once upon a time,'" said Fritz Jean. "This is no longer the case."

Jean, the former governor of the Bank of Haiti and the leading figure of Haiti's political opposition, spoke to CBC News from the formerly safe, middle-class neighbourhood of Petionville.

"Right now, you're in danger in any part of Petionville because gangs can penetrate any time. In the middle of the street, they're kidnapping people, killing people. This is the situation that we live in right now. In fact, they're killing with impunity. They're kidnapping with impunity. The police force cannot handle the situation. They are completely outgunned."

Global Affairs Canada told CBC News that it maintains an evacuation plan for Canadians in Haiti. Asked about the number of Canadian citizens there, GAC's Charlotte MacLeod said "there are presently 2,834 registrants in Haiti. As registration with the service is voluntary, this is not a complete picture of the number."

Last week, Haiti's interior minister told residents of Port-au-Prince to prepare to defend themselves in their own homes. But few Haitians have the means to do so.

"This happened to a friend of mine one week ago," Jean said. "His wife was shot. Even the ambulance could not get up there where he lives. He lives on top of a hill in Kenscoff (south of Petionville). So, we are to do it ourselves."

National Center of Haitian Apostolate

REFLEXIONS ON THE READINGS OF THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 19, 2023)

https://youtu.be/g5-Amz8AjRg

1 Samuel 16, 1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5, 8-14; John 9, 1-41

Easter will come before long. The Church wants Christians to prepare for the celebration of this event. It is the basis of the Christian faith, life, and hope: Jesus who died and rose again. In preparation, the liturgy of the church reminds us today:

JESUS IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.

The first reading asks us to meditate on David's election as king of Israel. Jesse, David's own father, did not even think to present this child to the prophet Samuel as a candidate so that God would choose him to be King. Yet, he was the one God chose from among all his other brothers, despite their beautiful appearance. Because "man looks at the appearance, but God looks at the heart". We too, like God, must learn to overlook outward appearances, to discern inner greatness.

"THE HEALING OF THE MAN WHO WAS BORN BLIND"

The story of the healing of the man born blind in the Gospel of St. John brings a key lesson for us today. To many, this man seemed like a poor wreck. Since he was born he is blind and his job is asking. He represents all of us. We cannot see beyond their appearance. When his eyes were opened, he became a new man. We, too, need new eyes to see what escapes our eyes now. Those who come to Christ with a sincere heart, receive a New vision.

"THE FORMER BLIND MAN BECAME A WITNESS FOR JESUS"

Opposing the blind man are the Pharisees who, pretending to know it all, prove themselves to be the real blind men. They ask him how he recovered his sight "What I know is that I was blind and now I see. Jesus healed me. Therefore, if Jesus heals me, he is a man of God. Do you want to be a follower of Jesus?” Now it is the formerly blind man who is questioning the Jews and the Pharisees. It is surprising that they do not see that Jesus is the light. They themselves are upset. A shame serves anger, they insulted him. Jesus tells the Pharisees that if they refuse to recognize that they are blind, their sins will remain.

“YOU TOO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT JESUS IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD”

Jesus reveals to the blind who He is. Kneeling he worshiped Jesus. As we approach Easter, it is an opportunity to recognize that we are blind to God's grace and mercy. We must confess like the blind man Jesus healed. Being stubborn in the wrong will get you nowhere. A sincere and humble heart can open the door to NEW LIFE! This is what St. Paul said to the Ephesians: "You were once in darkness, but now you are light in Christ." Live like light people. Awake, O sleeper, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light."

Haiti and the failed promise of US aid

Jacob Kushner

When Bill 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 home in Arkansas, but by the time they returned to the US, he had set his mind to running for Arkansas state attorney general, a decision which would put him on the path to the White House. “We have had a deep connection to and with Haiti ever since,” Hillary later said.

Over the next four decades, the Clintons became increasingly involved in Haiti, working to reshape the country in profound ways. As US 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 US invasion that overthrew the junta and restored the country’s democratically elected president to power. Fifteen years later, Bill was appointed United Nations’ special envoy to Haiti, tasked with helping the country to develop its private sector and invigorate its economy. By 2010, the Clintons were two of Haiti’s largest benefactors. Their personal philanthropic fund, The Clinton Foundation, had 34 projects in the country, focused on things such as creating jobs.

Over their many decades of involvement there, the Clintons became two of the leading proponents of a particular approach to improving Haiti’s fortunes, one that relies on making the country an attractive place for multinational companies to do business. They have done this by combining foreign aid 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 called it a “neoliberal” approach to aid.

The most significant test of this approach in Haiti began on 12 January 2010, when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. In a nation of 10 million people, 1.6 million were displaced by the disaster, and as many as 316,000 are estimated to have died. The earthquake also dealt a huge blow to Haiti’s economic development, levelling homes and businesses in the most populous area of the country and destroying crucial infrastructure, including the nation’s biggest port.

Within days of the earthquake, the Clintons stepped up to lead the global response. Bill was selected to co-chair the commission tasked with directing relief spending. As US secretary of state, Hillary helped to oversee $4.4bn that Congress had earmarked for recovery efforts by the US Agency for International Development, or USAid. “At every stage of Haiti’s reconstruction – fundraising, oversight and allocation – a Clinton was now involved,” Jonathan Katz, a journalist who has covered Haiti for more than a decade, wrote in 2015.

There was no greater embodiment of the neoliberal approach to aid in Haiti than the US’s largest post-earthquake project – a $300m, 600-acre industrial park called Caracol, on the country’s northern coast. To make the park more attractive, the US also agreed to finance a power plant, and a new port through which firms operating at Caracol could ship in materials such as cotton, and ship out finished products including T-shirts and jeans.

The Clintons and their allies believed the Caracol project would attract international manufacturers, which they saw as the primary fix to Haiti’s faltering economy. “Haiti has failed, failed and failed again,” wrote the British economist Paul Collier and his colleague Jean-Louis Warnholz, who have both advised the Clintons, in the Financial Times two weeks after the earthquake. By building “critical assets such as ports”, they argued, the US and its allies could help Haiti attract private, foreign investment and create the stable jobs it needed to prosper.

Ten years later, the industrial park is widely considered to have failed to deliver the economic transformation the Clintons promised. But less attention has been paid to the fate of the port. Last year, after sinking tens of millions of dollars into the port project, the US quietly abandoned it. The port is now one of the final failures in an American post-earthquake plan for Haiti that has been characterised by disappointment throughout. It is also the latest in a long line of supposed solutions to Haiti’s woes that have done little – or worse – to serve the country’s interests. “The neoliberal, exploitative economic model currently being imposed” on Haiti “has failed many times before,” Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, has written. The result, he adds, is that many Haitians are living “in a state of despair and daily desperation”.

Haiti makes up the western third of the island of Hispaniola – the other two-thirds are the Dominican Republic – situated between the Atlantic and the Caribbean along several major international shipping lanes. “It’s a strategic location,” says Claude Lamothe, the former director of a small port in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. “All the big boats from the US pass right by here.”

For decades, the vast majority of goods coming to or leaving Haiti travelled through the ageing port at Port-au-Prince in the south. 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). But 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. So 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 collapsed into the sea. “The damage was unbelievable,” said Russell Green, a civil engineer at Virginia Tech University, who arrived to survey the port a few weeks after the disaster.

Just 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 trade would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in a few short years and drive the country’s economy into the future. His plan was a particularly clear expression of the neoliberal prescription for aid: reduce taxes on businesses to attract foreign investment, reduce tariffs to make it cheaper to buy and sell goods and offer loans to finance the infrastructure necessary to accommodate the rest. All this would create jobs, and these new wage-earners would then spend their money on goods from abroad. Everybody, in theory, would win.

Port-au-Prince in Haiti during the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Photograph: Olivier Laban Mattei/AFP/Getty

The new port was a key part of this vision. There were several obvious locations for it in and around the earthquake-devastated capital, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people would have provided a ready workforce. Ultimately, however, USAid decided to build the park and port near Cap-Haïtien, on the country’s northern coast, 650 miles south-east of Miami, Florida.

A 2011 US government 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 as garments, and in certain kinds of high-value agriculture. Companies such as the major Korean textile manufacturer Sae-A, which became one of Caracol’s first tenants, would be able to ship in cotton and ship out apparel. “A port – that was the carrot for these companies,” Jake Johnston, a Haiti expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a liberal thinktank, told me.

But the location was attractive for other reasons, too. “Land was readily available in the north,” and the “hundreds of small farmers who had to be moved” to make way for the park and port “were far less resistant than the wealthy landowners in the capital,” Johnston wrote in 2014. Members of Haiti’s northern elite were also lobbying Bill Clinton to invest in the region, says Leslie Voltaire, who served alongside Bill as Haiti’s special envoy to the UN from 2009 to 2010.

Haitians themselves had remarkably little control over these plans. Between April 2010 and October 2011, decisions about how to rebuild Haiti were made not by Haiti’s parliament, but by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which Bill co-chaired. This was supposed to be 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 board have one role: to endorse the decisions made by the director and executive committee,” which included donors and other Clinton allies.

Haiti’s then-president, a musician-turned politician named Michel Martelly, seemed reluctant to push back against the US’s redevelopment ideas, according to Voltaire. “At that time, Clinton was very close to Martelly,” he told me. “Martelly is an amateur and he respects Clinton’s ideas. They would follow whatever USAid and Clinton would say.” (Martelly did not respond to a request for an interview.)

“You have to put it in context,” Voltaire continued. “Almost all the countries in the world would want someone like Bill Clinton to be a lobbyist for his country.” A former US president with ties to major investors across the globe was expending political capital to help Haiti rebuild. For Haiti, “it was a double asset,” Voltaire went on, “because his wife was secretary 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 ground in 2011, Bill laid the first foundation stone. A year later, at the park’s opening ceremony, Bill looked on as Hillary delivered a speech promising that the park would lead Haiti toward economic independence.

International trade has dictated Haiti’s economy almost since Christopher Columbus landed on Hispaniola by mistake, in 1492. After Spain and later France colonised the island, they imported African slaves to produce one of the most lucrative commodities in history – sugar – and exported it around the globe. By the eve of Haiti’s independence, which Haitians won in 1804, global trade had made the country one of the most profitable pieces of land in the world.

But all this international commerce has rarely benefited the vast majority of Haitians. Little of the wealth generated in the country has ever stayed there. For almost its entire history, Haiti has owed a trade debt to other nations – most notably, a $21bn (in today’s money) burden levied by France after 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 most important of these creditors, indebting Haiti by extending foreign development loans and creating a trade imbalance – an early form of the neoliberal model.

But what worked for the US’s interests worked less well for Haiti. By the 1950s, neither Haiti’s agricultural economy, nor the dollars spent by thousands of American tourists every year, was enough to pay back those debts. By 1961, the US was sending $13m in aid to Haiti – half Haiti’s national budget – in part to help the nation bolster industry. Much of this early US aid to Haiti was looted or wasted by Haiti’s autocratic leaders, especially François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and his son, Jean-Claude, who spent it on personal militias that terrorised Haiti’s citizenry. “Since 1946, the United States has poured about $100m in economic aid … into Haiti without much to show for the money,” the New York Times reported in 1963.

Aid from the US and loans from international financial institutions failed to lift Haiti out of poverty. And yet, American aid kept pouring in. When the Clintons and their allies sought to mould Haiti’s economic future around manufacturing and trade, it was essentially the same neoliberal programme that the US had been pushing for decades.

The most pernicious part of this programme was the agricultural policies that the US imposed on Haiti beginning in the 70s. The US pressured Haiti to reduce its tariffs on imported crops, then shipped surplus American crops into Haiti’s ports under the guise of “food aid”. Haitian farmers could not compete with all the artificially cheap rice and other food crops from abroad, which was part of the point. The strategy was to create another market for American farmers while pushing Haiti’s 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 result was that thousands upon thousands of farmers lost their land, but industrialisation never moved fast enough to replace their livelihoods.

Only years later would Bill 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 can leap directly into the industrial era,” he told Congress in 2010. “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked … I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people.” By the time the earthquake struck, in 2010, a nation that in the 70s grew enough rice to feed itself was now importing 80% of it from abroad.

“Artibonite used to be rich, but now it’s poor,” Denis Jesu-car, a rice farmer in one of Haiti’s most agriculturally rich regions, once explained to me. “We produce rice, but it doesn’t sell.”

Despite his acknowledgement that the US’s prior attempt to liberalise Haiti’s economy had decimated its agricultural sector, in 2010, after the earthquake struck, Bill Clinton and his allies prescribed the same, familiar medicine – this time in the form of construction projects and clothing, instead of rice.

One year 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 part because many were financially or practically infeasible, and in part for lack of land on which to build them. The largest piece of real estate of Haiti’s post-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 power plant and new port that were to come with it. “Each must be completed and remain viable for the others to succeed,” the US Government Accountability Office, Congress’s official financial watchdog, wrote in an audit of the project in 2013. But the audit also 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”.

Former US president Bill Clinton visiting a new power plant in Caracol, Haiti, in 2012. Photograph: Larry Downing/AP

The audit offered a damning account of USAid’s efforts to build the port. Construction was delayed from the start. The time needed to build the port was revised from an initial estimate of two-and-a-half years to 10 years – and then indefinitely. USAid had “no current projection for when construction of the port may begin or how long it will take”. This was “due in part to a lack of USAid expertise in port planning in Haiti”.

To make matters worse, in June 2015, a USAid feasibility study found that “a new port was not viable for a variety of technical, environmental and economic reasons”. What’s more, the US did not have enough money to finish the job: “USAid funding will be insufficient to cover a majority of projected costs,” with an “estimated gap” of $117m to $189m. Not only was the port not viable, it was not even wanted: the private companies USAid had hoped to attract to Haiti’s north “had no interest in supporting the construction of a new port in northern Haiti”, the feasibility study determined.

While the port stalled, the industrial park underdelivered. When Bill and Hillary Clinton flew to northern Haiti to inaugurate the $300m Caracol park in 2012, the overall project had created just 1,500 of the 65,000 jobs that were promised. In fact, many Haitians may have lost their livelihoods because of Caracol: in the end, 366 families were evicted from their land to make way for the project, according to a report by the NGO ActionAid. By June 2017, Caracol still employed only 13,000 people. (In an email, the Clinton Foundation wrote that “The Clinton Foundation did not have a role in building the Caracol Industrial Park and has never invested any funds into the park,” but acknowledged that as part of its wider goal of facilitating investment in Haiti, “the Foundation helped identify potential tenants, including Haitian companies, for the park”.)

As the US’s failure to deliver on its promises for the industrial park made international headlines, the faltering plans for the new port went overlooked. In 2013, USAid reallocated almost all of the $72m that was supposed to be used to build a new port to instead expand and modernise the small, dilapidated port in nearby Cap-Haïtien. US officials knew they were throwing good money after bad: two years prior, a study by the State Department concluded it would be a bad idea to attempt to expand that port because there simply was not enough land on which to do so.

The Cap-Haïtien port “is locked into the city”, Voltaire said. “There is no way you can expand the hangers, the customs, the container areas. There’s not enough space.” But USAid officials went ahead with it anyway. “To scrap it or to stop allocating money is to admit failure,” Johnston, the Haiti researcher said. “And that’s not something that USAid is good at.”

Finally, more than seven years after the port was conceived, USAid confronted reality. In May 2018, almost three years after a new port was originally supposed to be completed, USAid entirely abandoned its plans to build a new port or expand the old one. In August, a spokesperson explained the decision to me: “Based on proposals received and the current marketplace, it appeared that the cost of the project would significantly exceed the business forecast, cost estimate and available funding.” In short, a port was simply not economically viable. Which was precisely the conclusion that US audits and reports had come to dating back to 2011 – reports that USAid had ignored.

After the project was abandoned, US officials did not even bother to tell Haiti the news. When I visited Cap-Haïtien in December, Haitian port authorities were unaware that USAid had scrapped the project. “Last conversation we 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 six months earlier. Gervè leaned back in his chair. “Wow,” he said. “They didn’t tell us that.”

When I asked Gervè what the US’s $70m had achieved, he pointed to two concrete electricity poles, erected as part of a plan to connect the port to the public grid. USAid had paid for the poles, but had not strung the cables needed to electrify them.

By January 2019, nine years after the earthquake, USAid had spent $2.3bn in Haiti. Most of it was given to American companies and hardly any passed through Haitian hands. Less than 3% of that spending went directly to Haitian organisations or firms, according to research by CEPR. In contrast, 55% of the money went to American companies located in and around Washington DC. Most likely, according to the research, the majority of what USAid allegedly spent on Haiti’s recovery ended right back in the US.

It is not clear what happened to the money allocated for a port in Haiti, because USAid would not tell me. In August, it released a factsheet claiming that it still planned to invest in “infrastructure upgrades” at the port, such as “improving the electricity system”. Some of these were things the agency had committed to doing previously, but that had yet to be achieved by the time I visited last December. The factsheet gave no indication of how much money was being directed to these projects, or when they would be completed. In other words, even after abandoning the idea of building a new port in favour of expanding the old one, then abandoning plans to expand the old one, too, USAid is still making new promises, still claiming it will at least do something, despite its failure to make good on earlier promises dating back almost a decade. The only physical improvements the agency claims to have made at the port are “electrical lines, security wall upgrades, a pilot boat and a security card machine”. It 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 past 12 months, I have repeatedly asked USAid spokespeople for a breakdown as to how the $70m allocated to the Cap-Haïtien port was ultimately spent. In July 2018, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to the port expenditures, and last October I resubmitted the request in further detail after discussing it on the phone with a USAid official. The agency acknowledged my request, but has yet to send me a single document in response to it.

“Seventy million dollars? It’s a lot of money” for a project that never materialised, said Voltaire. For that amount, “we could have a nice port in Saint-Marc”, just a few miles north-west of Haiti’s capital. In Canaan, a new city on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that was formed after the earthquake, he added, “they could do 72km of nice road, or 72 primary schools,” with all that money. At the end of last year, Canaan – which is now Haiti’s third-largest city – had fewer than 5km of paved roads and just one public school, for a population of 300,000.

“Here you have an industrial park an eight-hour drive north from where the quake was,” said Johnston, referring to Caracol. “And then you have this city that’s just 8km north, that was created from the earthquake – and it’s gotten nothing.”

In post-earthquake Haiti, there were all manner of things the US 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 as flush toilets, sewers and sewage treatment plants. In a country where 59% of the population lives on less than $2.41 per day, the US could have simply given Haitians the money. Studies have shown that such “unconditional cash transfers” can be a more effective way to increase income and access to education and housing than many types of traditional “project-based” aid. But policies like cash transfers would have undermined the approach to aid in which rich countries simply prescribe “solutions” for poor ones, rather than allowing people to take their futures into their own hands.

Little about the US’s foreign policy toward Haiti has changed since the 2010 earthquake. The US continues to send the country surplus crops through the Food for Peace programme to this day. Hillary Clinton stepped down as US secretary of state in 2013, but her successors have championed the same sort of private-sector-focused development. USAid continues to spend money to boost Haiti’s textile industry, and the US government continues to advertise Haiti as a business opportunity for US investors.

In spite of its failures to ring in a new era of prosperity for Haiti by building an industrial park and a port, the US is undeterred in its belief that industry and manufacturing are the key to Haiti’s future. “Despite the challenges, there are opportunities in the Haitian market for small-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 Haiti.”

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