[News] Plan Lanmó – the Death Plan: The Clintons, foreign aid and NGOs in Haiti

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://sfbayview.com/2015/08/plan-lanmo-the-death-plan-the-clintons-foreign-aid-and-ngos-in-haiti/* 



  Plan Lanmó – the Death Plan: The Clintons, foreign aid and NGOs in Haiti

*/by Charlie Hinton /*
August 26, 2015

When Bill and Hillary Clinton married in 1975, a friend gave them a trip 
to Haiti for their honeymoon. The Washington Post reported 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011503820.html>_:_ 
“Since that honeymoon vacation, the Caribbean island nation has held a 
life-long allure for the couple, a place they found at once desperate 
and enchanting, pulling at their emotions throughout his presidency and 
in her maiden year as secretary of state.” Haiti’s president at the time 
was Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, and Hillary and Bill fell in love 
with a country living under a dictator and his tonton macoute death squad.

Bill Clinton helped found the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, 
formed as a conservative counter to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition 
campaign of 1984, which more pro-business Democrats saw as a threat. 
Running as a “New Democrat,” Clinton became president in 1992 after 12 
years of “Reaganomics,” philosophically part of the global economic 
movement called “neo-liberalism,” a policy of privatization and free 
trade that was transforming the global economy.

Instead of trying to brake or reverse Reaganomics, Clinton vigorously 
pursued Reagan-Bush policies, aligning with Republicans to push U.S. 
participation in both NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO) 
through a resistant Democrat-controlled Congress. He also signed the 
Republican-sponsored bill to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, 
which had separated commercial banking from investment banking. The 
destruction of that firewall fueled the Wall Street gambling-created 
economic bubble that burst in the housing mortgage crisis of 2008-2009.

Clinton finally had to confront some of the consequences of his actions. 
“We made a devil’s bargain,” Clinton apologized 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/1/clinton_rice> at a hearing before 
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2010. He apologized for 
forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported U.S. rice, subsidized by our 
government, during his time in office. Neo-liberal policy prevented 
Haiti’s government from subsidizing its own rice farmers, and they could 
not compete, wiping out Haitian rice farming and seriously damaging 
Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient.

Clinton testified: “Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, 
until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, 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.

“It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in 
Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake … I have to live every 
day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in 
Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.”

What he did not explain is that after Haitians stop producing rice to 
feed themselves, under neo-liberal gospel, they’re supposed to instead 
produce mangos and other tropical foods to export to Northern countries. 
Thus they become dependent on cutthroat global markets to earn the hard 
currency foreign exchange necessary to buy imported food, which can now 
be sold at monopoly prices because there is no domestic competition.

By the time Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to office in 1994 after the 
first coup against him in 1990, “Miami rice” had already flooded Haiti’s 
markets. However, the Aristide government resisted enormous pressure to 
privatize other Haitian government-owned businesses, and Clinton made 
sure Aristide would not serve the full five-year term to which he was 
elected, despite demands from the majority of Haitians who wanted 
Aristide to complete five full years in office, making up for the almost 
four years spent in exile after the coup.

As a result of the destruction of the rice crop, Haitian farmers and 
their families who could no longer afford to farm flooded into 
Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, to look for work. Many of them were 
among the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured in the catastrophic 
earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010.

Eight days after the quake, Bill Clinton told the Washington Post 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011503820.html>, 
“This is a personal thing for us.” Hillary and I have “always felt a 
special responsibility” for Haiti and its 9 million people. “She has the 
same memories I do. She has the same concerns I do. We love the place.” 
The earthquake destruction “personally emotionally affected” him. His 
wife, he said, became “physically sick.”

The global community responded with incredible generosity 
<https://philanthropy.com/article/Haiti-Earthquake-Relief-How/159217> 
after the quake, donating or pledging almost $10 billion 
<http://newint.org/features/2012/01/01/haiti-money-ngo-un/>. The Red 
Cross 
<http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m42240166_Haiti_Five-Year_Update_FINAL.pdf> 
raised $488 million, World Vision 
<http://www.worldvision.org/sites/default/files/Haiti-5-Years-On_Report_0.pdf> 
$265.3 million (by 2015), Catholic Relief 
<https://philanthropy.com/article/Haiti-Earthquake-Relief-How/159217> 
$159 million, Partners in Health 
<http://www.givewell.org/international/disaster-relief/Partners-in-Health#Howmuchdidtheorganizationraiseandhowmuchdiditspend> 
more than $81 million, the Clinton Bush fund 
<https://philanthropy.com/article/Haiti-Earthquake-Relief-How/159217> 
$52.6 million, the Clinton Foundation $36 million, and on and on. One 
hundred eighty charities raised money in the name of Haiti earthquake 
relief, yet Haiti remains as poor as ever, with the poverty rate in 2012 
<http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/publication/beyond-poverty-haiti> 
at 58.5 percent and in rural areas at 74.9 percent.


      As a result of the destruction of the rice crop, Haitian farmers
      and their families who could no longer afford to farm flooded into
      Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, to look for work. Many of them
      were among the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured in the
      catastrophic earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010.

In “Haiti: Seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go 
<http://sfbayview.com/2012/01/haiti-seven-places-where-the-earthquake-money-did-and-did-not-go/>,” 
Bill Quigley and Amber Ramanauskas note: “The largest single recipient 
of U.S. earthquake money was the U.S. government. The same holds true 
for donations by other countries.

“Right after the earthquake, the U.S. allocated $379 million in aid and 
sent in 5,000 troops. The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 
million in initial U.S. money promised for Haiti, most was not really 
money going directly, or in some cases even indirectly, to Haiti. They 
documented in January 2010 that 33 cents of each of these U.S. dollars 
for Haiti was actually given directly back to the U.S. to reimburse 
ourselves for sending in our military. Forty-two cents of each dollar 
went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the 
Children, the U.N. World Food Program and the Pan American Health 
Organization. Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their government.

“The overall $1.6 billion allocated for relief by the U.S. was spent 
much the same way, according to an August 2010 report by the U.S. 
Congressional Research Office” – reimbursed to the Department of 
Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, to USAID disaster 
assistance, to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of 
Homeland Security and so on.

International assistance followed the same pattern. After the 
earthquake, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti wrote an email 
<http://www.thenation.com/article/wikileaks-haiti-post-quake-gold-rush-reconstruction-contracts/> 
saying, “The gold rush is on,” and indeed it was. For everyone but Haitians.

Instead of building infrastructure and providing aid to those most in 
need, Haiti’s international rulers continue their same old neo-liberal 
formula of promoting tourism, sweatshops 
<http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-04-29/haiti-hotel/54629220/1>, 
natural resource extraction, and cash crop exports. As secretary of 
state, Hillary Clinton promoted this very policy, demonstrated 
particularly in the imposition of Michel Martelly as president.

In January, 2011, at the height of the Egyptian Arab Spring revolution, 
Clinton flew to Port-au-Prince 
<http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/15/usaid-funded-group-supporting-haitian-president.html> 
to demand that Martelly be named one of the two runoff candidates, 
although he was not announced originally by the Electoral Council as one 
of the two top vote getters.


      After the earthquake, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti wrote an email
      <http://www.thenation.com/article/wikileaks-haiti-post-quake-gold-rush-reconstruction-contracts/>
      saying, “The gold rush is on,” and indeed it was. For everyone but
      Haitians.

Despite a voter boycott, with fewer than 20 percent of the electorate 
voting, Martelly was announced the winner of the “runoff,” and the 
results were accepted by the international community. The results have 
been catastrophic for the Haitian majority, as Martelly appointed 
Duvalierists throughout his administration and has sanctioned 
privatization, repression, death squads, corruption, illegally appointed 
judges and illegal changes to the Constitution, while bringing a 
particularly greedy and arrogant entourage into his government.

His administration has granted mineral concessions with no 
accountability and cut down the only forest on the island of Ile a 
Vache, displacing hundreds of peasant families, to build a tourist resort.

“At least seven hotels are under construction or are in the planning 
stage in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas, raising hopes that 
thousands of investors will soon fill their air-conditioned rooms 
looking to build factories and tourist infrastructure that will help 
Haiti bounce back from a 2010 earthquake,” according to USA Today 
<http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-04-29/haiti-hotel/54629220/1>. 
The Clinton Bush fund invested $2 million of earthquake money in the new 
luxury Royal Oasis Hotel.

The Clinton Foundation invested earthquake money in the Caracol Northern 
Industrial Park 
<https://www.clintonfoundation.org/our-work/clinton-foundation-haiti/programs/caracol-industrial-park>, 
with Korean apparel manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., known for its 
sweatshops, as the anchor tenant. Sae-A makes clothes for Walmart, Gap 
and other retailers.

The earthquake did not touch this part of Haiti. Projected to provide 
65,000 jobs, as of September 2014, only 4,156 people worked there 
<http://cepr.net/blogs/haiti-relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haiti-by-the-numbers-five-years-later?highlight=WyJoYWl0aSIsImhhaXRpJ3MiLCInaGFpdGkiLCJlYXJ0aHF1YWtlIiwiZWFydGhxdWFrZSdzIiwicmVsaWVmIiwiaGFpdGkgZWFydGhxdWFrZSIsImhhaXRpIGVhcnRocXVha2UgcmVsaWVmIiwiZWFydGhxdWFrZSByZWxpZWYiXQ==>. 
At the opening ceremony, Secretary of State Clinton said 
<http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2012/10/199451.htm>, 
“I want to begin by thanking President Martelly for his leadership and 
his vision and his passion about the people of his country and for your 
administration’s commitment to show the world Haiti is open for business.”

In June, 2015 Pro Publica and NPR published an analysis of the Red Cross 
<https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes> 
called “How the Red Cross raised half a billion dollars for Haiti and 
built 6 homes.” “The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 
130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has 
built in all of Haiti: six. …

“After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious 
plans to ‘develop brand-new 
<http://www.press.org/news-multimedia/news/red-cross-chief-executive-outlines-haiti-relief> 
communities.’ None has ever been built.” The donations, however, “helped 
the group erase its more than $100 million deficit.”


      *NGOs*

Haitians call neo-liberalism Plan Lanmó, the “Death Plan,” because of 
the social and economic devastation caused by neo-liberal policies – the 
forced opening of markets to U.S. goods, sweatshop wages, the plundering 
of natural resources, austerity budget programs and the privatization of 
state owned enterprises.

This pattern is not new so much as a continuation of the same policies 
used to rule over Haiti since the people’s successful 1804 revolution to 
overthrow slavery and drive out the French. The former slave owning 
countries, in particular France and the United States, have operated 
ever since to prevent any true democratic form of government that would 
benefit the majority of Haitians and limit in any way U.S. and French 
business interests.

The most recent development is rule through non-governmental 
organizations, or NGOs. In “Is Haiti Doomed to Be the Republic of NGOs? 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vijaya-ramachandran/haiti-relief-ngos_b_1194923.html>” 
Vijaya Ramachandran <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vijaya-ramachandran/> 
writes, “One study 
<http://www.mendeley.com/research/cacophonies-aid-failed-state-building-ngos-haiti-setting-stage-disaster-envisioning-future/> 
found that even before the January 2010 earthquake, NGOs provided 70 
percent of health care, and private schools (mostly NGO-run) accounted 
for 85 percent of national education.”

“Humanitarian agencies, NGOs, private contractors and other non-state 
service providers have received 99 percent of [earthquake] relief aid 
<http://www.haitispecialenvoy.org/download/Report_Center/has_aid_changed_en.pdf> 
– /less than 1 percent of aid in the immediate aftermath of the quake 
went to public institutions or to the government/,” the article reports, 
with emphasis.


      Haitians call neo-liberalism Plan Lanmó, the “Death Plan,” because
      of the social and economic devastation caused by neo-liberal
      policies – the forced opening of markets to U.S. goods, sweatshop
      wages, the plundering of natural resources, austerity budget
      programs and the privatization of state owned enterprises.

NGOs first entered Haiti shortly after World War II but became a flood 
in the 1980s, propelled by global neo-liberal economic ideology, changes 
in tax laws that allowed the mushrooming of foundations as tax dodge 
havens, and the desire to avert aid money away from the famously 
kleptocratic regime of Baby Doc Duvalier.

One goal of neo-liberalism is to starve governments of the money 
necessary to provide social services, so those services, like education, 
healthcare, water and even prisons, become privatized. Public assets, 
theoretically available to all who need them, get sold to corporations, 
and then only those with money get served. Once governments can no 
longer fund services, NGOs leap in to try to do the job, but with a hitch.

A democratically elected government will work to serve the needs of the 
people that elected it, whereas NGOs fulfill the agendas of those who 
fund them and are not necessarily accountable to the people they serve. 
While NGOs may seem benign, they actually help to destabilize social 
services, undermine governments and ultimately increase poverty.


      One goal of neo-liberalism is to starve governments of the money
      necessary to provide social services, so those services, like
      education, healthcare, water and even prisons, become privatized.

Since foundations and governments in the Global North are primary 
funders of the NGOs that operate in the Global South, the goals of NGOs 
may not be the same as the goals of governments – particularly in Haiti, 
where 67 percent of Haitian voters elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide 
president in 1990 with a mandate to develop institutions to support the 
majority of Haitians, instead of international investors.

Big NGOs operate as big businesses, with the same goals, methods and 
views, but their “profits” come from the “alleviation” of people’s 
suffering. In other words, NGOs exist as a result of suffering and they 
need that suffering to thrive and persist.

Each NGO has its own staff, its own office, own agenda, and own Haitian 
“partners.” They raise money in the name of Haiti, but they control that 
money, and they decide how to spend it, not Haitians. After the 
earthquake, not only did little money go to the Haitian government or 
institutions, many meetings about aid distribution excluded Haitians or 
were conducted in languages other than Haitian kreyol.

According to an internal Red Cross budgeting document 
<https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes> 
for a housing project, “the project manager – a position reserved for an 
expatriate – was entitled to allowances for housing, food and other 
expenses, home leave trips, R&R four times a year, and relocation 
expenses. In all, it added up to $140,000. Compensation for a senior 
Haitian engineer — the top local position — was less than one-third of 
that, $42,000 a year.”


      *Plan Lanmó and cholera*

The cholera epidemic provides possibly the most explicit example of how 
Plan Lanmó is the “death plan.” Cholera was introduced 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_cholera_outbreak> into Haiti by the 
waste dumped into the Artibonite River by Nepalese soldiers serving in 
the U.N. MINUSTAH army, which has occupied Haiti since the U.S., Canada, 
and French-sponsored coup against democratically elected President 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29, 2004.

Conservative estimates show that as of Aug. 30, 2014 
<http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/12/world/haiti-earthquake-fast-facts/>, 
8,592 people had died from the disease and 706,089, 6 percent of the 
population, had been made sick because of water contaminated by sewage. 
At first the U.N. denied its role in introducing cholera; then, when a 
French scientist proved it, the U.N. refused to spend the necessary 
money to create or coordinate the creation of a sanitation system that 
would eliminate it.

The Pro Publica report says, “When a cholera epidemic raged through 
Haiti nine months after the quake, the biggest part of the Red Cross’ 
response — a plan 
<http://newsroom.redcross.org/2011/02/01/press-release-american-red-cross-announces-7-4-million-for-cholera-programs-in-haiti/> 
to distribute soap and oral rehydration salts — was crippled by 
“internal issues that go unaddressed 
<https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/2081560-red-cross-haiti-program-director-judith-st-fort.html>,” 
wrote the director of the Haiti program in her May 2011 memorandum.

“Throughout that year, cholera was a steady killer. By September 2011, 
when the death toll had surpassed 6,000, the project was still listed as 
‘very behind schedule’ according to another internal document.”

The Guardian reported 
<http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/feb/28/haiti-plan-cholera-un-funds> 
on a 10-year plan to eradicate cholera, “According to Nigel Fisher, head 
of the U.N. mission in Haiti, funding is tight – the U.N. has committed 
only $23.5 million on top of money it has already spent on cholera. This 
compares with the $650 million the U.N. spends annually on the troops 
that brought the epidemic to Haiti.”

It took four years after the introduction of cholera for the 
international community to hold a donor conference to raise funds for 
the cholera response. Of the $2.2 billion needed 
<http://tinyurl.com/p27cqst> for an eradication program, only $50 
million has been pledged.

So there you have it. When Haiti needs coordinated planning to create a 
massive infrastructure project, there is no entity capable of leading 
it. A competent government is the most obvious answer, but the Haitian 
government has been so neo-liberalized, privatized, defunded, imposed 
and corrupted that it has neither the will nor the capacity to carry out 
such a task.

The U.N. occupation army created the catastrophe, but a U.S. judge has 
ruled that the U.N. has legal immunity from any lawsuits by Haitians. 
There’s been no hearing of the case in Haitian courts.

The Red Cross distributes soap. Many governments, NGOs and church 
organizations initiate programs, most well intentioned and staffed by 
well-intentioned people, but their efforts are not coordinated, and none 
of them yet get to the root need – a modern sanitation system.

Almost all aid decisions are made – and the aid administered – by 
non-Haitians. When Haitians twice elected a government that actually 
worked to benefit the majority of its people, the U.S. government and 
Haitian elites twice orchestrated coups to overthrow it, and the U.S. is 
the primary funder of a U.N. occupation army which suppresses those 
calling for its restoration.

This system of outside control of Haiti – replacing government with 
foreign aid, NGOs and consultants – has totally failed most Haitians. 
Finally, Martelly and the Electoral Council called a parliamentary 
election for Aug. 9 and a presidential election for Oct. 25.

Former President Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas, will be running 
candidates for the first time since 2000. Repression and exclusion 
chicanery by forces allied with Martelly have already begun.

The Aug. 9 parliamentary elections have been widely denounced. Election 
day was marred by acts of voter suppression by Martelly’s PHTK party and 
two others affiliated with the Martelly-Paul government. Live radio 
interviews from many areas of Haiti reported violent acts by heavily 
armed individuals identified with PHTK against poll watchers and voters. 
These included the takeover and closure of polling stations, ballot 
stuffing and destruction of ballots already cast.

There were widespread reports of authorized poll watchers and voters 
denied access to polling stations while poll watchers from PHTK and 
allied parties were given free access. These are but the most recent of 
the repressive actions of the continuing 2004 coup d’état and occupation.

It’s time for Haitians to be able to choose their own government and for 
the international community to respect and support their choice.

/Charlie Hinton is a member of the Haiti Action Committee, 
//www.haitisolidarity.net/ <http://www.haitisolidarity.net/>/. He may be 
reached at //lifewish at lmi.net/ <mailto:lifewish at lmi.net>/. /

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