There are countless reasons to keep the Clintons out of the White House in 2017. Many of them are obvious including sex scandals, Benghazi, Travelgate and Hillary’s most recent declaration that we must come to understand the reasons that militant Islamists have for killing, in short be sensitive to their condition. Yeah sure. But let’s take a look at a matter ignored for many years and that is Haiti.
Hillary’s Half-Baked Haiti Project
Caracol Industrial Park is failing to deliver on the promises made to foreign investors and Haitians.
On the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti remains a poster child for waste, fraud and corruption in the handling of aid. Nowhere is the bureaucratic ineptitude and greed harder to accept than at the 607-acre Caracol Industrial Park, a project launched by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with U.S. taxpayer money, under the supervision of her husband Bill and his Clinton Foundation.
Between the State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which hands out grants to very poor countries thanks to U.S. generosity, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this park in an attempt to attract apparel manufacturers. But the park is falling far short of the promises made to provide investors with necessary infrastructure. If things continue this way, frustrated investors will look for greener pastures.
Successful industrial parks are built by people who know the business and who demand accountability. This park was put in the hands of State, the IDB and Bill Clinton. The results have been predictable.
I had been warned about Caracol going to the dogs by sources on the ground in Haiti. So last month I traveled east by truck from Cap Haitien, across the poor rural north of the country to see if the alarm was justified. I found a project in trouble. It can be saved, but only if it is handed over to professionals with skin in the game.
On paper Caracol makes sense. Thanks to special trade legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in Dec. 2006, Haitian-sewn apparel enters the U.S. duty free and the manufacturers can use fabric purchased from anywhere in the world. This gives Haiti a big advantage over apparel exporters to the U.S. who have to source the fabric in the U.S. even if they sew overseas. With lower wages than in many Asian markets and proximity to North America, Haitian-based producers have comparative advantages that might offset the country’s low productivity.
The State Department initially promised that the park would be able to support 65,000 direct jobs by 2020. The Clinton Foundation has made similar statements. That means constructing 40 10,000 square-meter buildings for garment assembly. It won’t happen at the current pace.
The total job-creating capacity since the foundation stone was laid in November 2011 is three assembly buildings and a 10-megawatt power plant. A fourth workshop is under construction but is unlikely to be completed before late spring.
This must be tough to take for the anchor tenant, the Korean manufacturer Sae-A Trading Ltd. It has committed to a $78 million investment at Caracol and currently employs some 4,500 Haitians. It says it wants to hire 20,000. To do so it needs another dozen buildings.
A Dec. 12 IDB press release says the Haitian government is approved for a new $70 million grant to construct, among other things, three new production buildings by 2018 with a goal of providing space for 6,800 workers. Bank officials have to know that putting Haitian government officials in charge of such a project is likely to doom it. But let’s suppose I’m wrong and the buildings go up. The Caracol workforce will then be 11,300—a far cry from the State Department’s estimate of 65,000 direct jobs or even the IBD’s forecast of 40,000.
It’s understandable for the IDB to want to lower expectations. But the target should be higher and it shouldn’t take three years to boost capacity. Craig Miller, president of the Boston-based Waterfield Design Group and a consultant for the Haitian apparel sector, told me that “once the materials are on site, a 10,000 square-meter production workshop can be built in six to eight months.”
Apparel manufacturers in Haiti are hungry for production space but my sources say investors were not given an option to build their own workshops in Caracol. The Clinton planners—Hillary at State and Bill at the Clinton Foundation—wanted to retain that responsibility for reasons that can only be guessed. So now the producers have to wait.
This is tragic for the thousands of Haitians eager to get the sewing jobs. Factory workers earn three times the average income in Haiti’s north. Sae-A produces for a wide number of American labels, such as Target and Wal-Mart, WMT +0.48% Wal-Mart Stores Inc. U.S.: NYSE $89.78 +0.43+0.48% Jan 12, 2015 11:44 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.72M P/E Ratio 18.32 Market Cap $287.99 Billion Dividend Yield 2.14% Rev. per Employee $219,905 01/09/15 Toys “R” Us Holiday Period Sam… 01/08/15 Tesco to Cut Prices, Close Unp… 01/08/15 Stocks to Watch: Family Dollar… More quote details and news » WMT in Your Value Your Change Short position and the American companies regularly dispatch auditors to inspect work conditions. Even without the U.S. Labor Department breathing down its back, Sae-A has incentives to care for workers to retain them and boost productivity. Getting a spot on the assembly line opens the door to economic mobility, and that’s unusual in Haiti.
Haiti has a rare opportunity. Investors want to invest, workers want to work, and consumers want to buy. This seems like a good time for government to get out of the way.
But how did all this begin?
Bill Clinton’s Shameful Haiti Legacy
I had heard the Haitians saying of the U.S. after the American troops went home: “Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.”
It’s the proper time, of course, to ask what is the legacy of American foreign policy in Haiti, a beleaguered neighbor that we have invaded and occupied twice in the 20th century, the first time to preempt German influence there during and after World War I, the second time during the early years of the Clinton administration, an 18-month long intervention which I reported on for Harper’s magazine.
Looking at the images pouring out of Haiti these days, what comes immediately into focus is the near-sighted, irrational nature of what is out of focus in American foreign policy since the Marshall Plan worked its miracles on a shattered planet. I think that we can all agree that Haiti has finally found its bottom, but the descent, lubricated by man-made folly, was not inevitable.
To be sure, Haiti brings out the cynic in me. Perhaps I should express that sentiment with more precision: The United States’ two-faced relationship with Haiti stirs a cynicism within me that I’d rather not claim.
The U.S. Army came ashore in September 1994 locked and loaded to do battle with a military dictatorship composed of a tiny dysfunctional army and roving bands of FRAPH’s homicidal thugs, who threatened to send America’s sons and daughters back home in coffins. Essentially an absurd boast but from a genuine enemy. Colin Powell’s brinkmanship defused the potential for bloodshed on the eve of the invasion, yet the fact remained—our soldiers would be liberating villages, towns, and cities controlled by a terrorist organization that had brutalized the population.
Early on, there were shootouts between U.S. soldiers and FRAPH. Special Forces hunted down FRAPH leadership in the countryside, captured them and shipped the detainees to headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where, to general dismay, they were invariably released. One night, hunkered down with a detachment of Green Berets in the mountains south of Cap Haitien, I listened in alarm to a radio transmission from Col. Mark Boyatt, the overall commander of Special Forces in Haiti, telling his commandos to begin regarding FRAPH as Haiti’s “loyal opposition,” as if the terrorists, overnight, had become Haiti’s equivalent to the Republican Party, rehabilitated patriots eager to remake Haiti into a modern democratic nation.
Months later, when I challenged Colonel Boyatt on this highly counterproductive order to his troops, he clammed up on me. For the next two years, I tried to track down who in the chain of command had told Boyatt to whitewash the terrorist organization FRAPH. The trail finally led to the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, and then it jumped to the mainland, Sandy Berger, and the White House.
Legacy No. 1: We left the poison in the system. The result: A Haiti rendered ungovernable by our heedless self-interest. The only Devil in Haiti is to be found in the deals we cut with the worst elements in that society. Sound familiar?
On March 31, 1996, the United States handed over Operation Restore Democracy to the United Nations and a peacekeeping force that has been there ever since. Early in the Clinton administration’s intervention in Haiti, the word came down to the boots on the ground from the White House: You have not been deployed to conduct nation-building. The mission turned out to be foolishly attenuated: Restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, to the National Palace. Hold elections that will remove the troublesome Aristide from the National Palace. Go home.
Ultimately, the mission ended up profoundly disillusioning not only the Haitians but the American troops as well. Back at Fort Bragg, I asked a Special Forces Master Sergeant if he was glad he went to Haiti. “Tough question,” he said. “No carpenter likes to build a house and see it crooked and leaning and ready to fall down the day he leaves. But if he builds a nice house, he’s happy about it, it’s something he’ll be proud of the rest of his life.”
“You don’t think you have anything to be proud of?” I asked.
“No.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“It is,” said the Master Sergeant. “It is.”
I told him what I had heard the Haitians saying about the United States after the American troops went home. Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.
Legacy No. 2: In Haiti, America wasted a perfectly good occupation. Call our post-earthquake presence there anything you want, but let’s hope it works out better this time around. Good luck, Bill. And remember, merry are the builders.
Bob Shacochis, a professor at Florida State University, is the author of The Immaculate Invasion, a chronicle of the 1994 U.S. intervention in Haiti.
