<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5">
<div style="display: block;" id="reader-header" class="header"> <b><small><small><small><a
href="http://sfbayview.com/2015/08/plan-lanmo-the-death-plan-the-clintons-foreign-aid-and-ngos-in-haiti/"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sfbayview.com/2015/08/plan-lanmo-the-death-plan-the-clintons-foreign-aid-and-ngos-in-haiti/">http://sfbayview.com/2015/08/plan-lanmo-the-death-plan-the-clintons-foreign-aid-and-ngos-in-haiti/</a></a></small></small></small></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">Plan Lanmó – the Death Plan: The Clintons,
foreign aid and NGOs in Haiti</h1>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div style="display: block;" id="moz-reader-content">
<div
xml:base="http://sfbayview.com/2015/08/plan-lanmo-the-death-plan-the-clintons-foreign-aid-and-ngos-in-haiti/"
id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div class="entry">
<p><strong><em>by Charlie Hinton </em></strong><br>
August 26, 2015</p>
<p>When Bill and Hillary Clinton married in 1975, a friend
gave them a trip to Haiti for their honeymoon. The <a
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011503820.html">Washington
Post reported</a><u>:</u> “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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Clinton finally had to confront some of the
consequences of his actions. “We made a devil’s
bargain,” Clinton <a
href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/1/clinton_rice">apologized</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Eight days after the quake, Bill Clinton told the <a
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011503820.html">Washington
Post</a>, “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.”</p>
<p>The global community responded with incredible <a
href="https://philanthropy.com/article/Haiti-Earthquake-Relief-How/159217">generosity</a>
after the quake, <a
href="http://newint.org/features/2012/01/01/haiti-money-ngo-un/">donating
or pledging almost $10 billion</a>. The <a
href="http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m42240166_Haiti_Five-Year_Update_FINAL.pdf">Red
Cross</a> raised $488 million, <a
href="http://www.worldvision.org/sites/default/files/Haiti-5-Years-On_Report_0.pdf">World
Vision</a> $265.3 million (by 2015), <a
href="https://philanthropy.com/article/Haiti-Earthquake-Relief-How/159217">Catholic
Relief</a> $159 million, <a
href="http://www.givewell.org/international/disaster-relief/Partners-in-Health#Howmuchdidtheorganizationraiseandhowmuchdiditspend">Partners
in Health</a> more than $81 million, the <a
href="https://philanthropy.com/article/Haiti-Earthquake-Relief-How/159217">Clinton
Bush fund</a> $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 <a
href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/publication/beyond-poverty-haiti">poverty
rate in 2012</a> at 58.5 percent and in rural areas at
74.9 percent.</p>
<h3><span>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.</span></h3>
<p>In “<a
href="http://sfbayview.com/2012/01/haiti-seven-places-where-the-earthquake-money-did-and-did-not-go/">Haiti:
Seven places where the earthquake money did and did
not go</a>,” 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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>International assistance followed the same pattern.
After the earthquake, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti
wrote an <a
href="http://www.thenation.com/article/wikileaks-haiti-post-quake-gold-rush-reconstruction-contracts/">email</a>
saying, “The gold rush is on,” and indeed it was. For
everyone but Haitians.</p>
<p>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
<a
href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-04-29/haiti-hotel/54629220/1">tourism,
sweatshops</a>, 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.</p>
<p>In January, 2011, at the height of the Egyptian Arab
Spring revolution, <a
href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/15/usaid-funded-group-supporting-haitian-president.html">Clinton
flew to Port-au-Prince</a> 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.</p>
<h3><span>After the earthquake, the U.S. ambassador to
Haiti wrote an <a
href="http://www.thenation.com/article/wikileaks-haiti-post-quake-gold-rush-reconstruction-contracts/">email</a>
saying, “The gold rush is on,” and indeed it was. For
everyone but Haitians.</span></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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
<a
href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-04-29/haiti-hotel/54629220/1">USA
Today</a>. The Clinton Bush fund invested $2 million
of earthquake money in the new luxury Royal Oasis Hotel.</p>
<p>The Clinton Foundation invested earthquake money in the
<a
href="https://www.clintonfoundation.org/our-work/clinton-foundation-haiti/programs/caracol-industrial-park">Caracol
Northern Industrial Park</a>, 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.</p>
<p>The earthquake did not touch this part of Haiti.
Projected to provide 65,000 jobs, as of September 2014,
only <a
href="http://cepr.net/blogs/haiti-relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haiti-by-the-numbers-five-years-later?highlight=WyJoYWl0aSIsImhhaXRpJ3MiLCInaGFpdGkiLCJlYXJ0aHF1YWtlIiwiZWFydGhxdWFrZSdzIiwicmVsaWVmIiwiaGFpdGkgZWFydGhxdWFrZSIsImhhaXRpIGVhcnRocXVha2UgcmVsaWVmIiwiZWFydGhxdWFrZSByZWxpZWYiXQ==">4,156
people worked there</a>. At the opening ceremony, <a
href="http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2012/10/199451.htm">Secretary
of State Clinton said</a>, “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.”</p>
<p>In June, 2015 Pro Publica and NPR published an <a
href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes">analysis
of the Red Cross</a> 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. …</p>
<p>“After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern
unveiled ambitious plans to ‘<a
href="http://www.press.org/news-multimedia/news/red-cross-chief-executive-outlines-haiti-relief">develop
brand-new</a> communities.’ None has ever been built.”
The donations, however, “helped the group erase its more
than $100 million deficit.”</p>
<h3><strong>NGOs</strong></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The most recent development is rule through
non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. In “<a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vijaya-ramachandran/haiti-relief-ngos_b_1194923.html">Is
Haiti Doomed to Be the Republic of NGOs?</a>” <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vijaya-ramachandran/">Vijaya
Ramachandran</a> writes, “<a
href="http://www.mendeley.com/research/cacophonies-aid-failed-state-building-ngos-haiti-setting-stage-disaster-envisioning-future/">One
study</a> 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.”</p>
<p>“Humanitarian agencies, NGOs, private contractors and
other non-state service providers have <a
href="http://www.haitispecialenvoy.org/download/Report_Center/has_aid_changed_en.pdf">received
99 percent of [earthquake] relief aid</a> – <em>less
than 1 percent of aid in the immediate aftermath of
the quake went to public institutions or to the
government</em>,” the article reports, with emphasis.</p>
<h3><span>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.</span></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3><span>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.</span></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>According to an <a
href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes">internal
Red Cross budgeting document</a> 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.”</p>
<h3><strong>Plan Lanmó and cholera</strong></h3>
<p>The cholera epidemic provides possibly the most
explicit example of how Plan Lanmó is the “death plan.”
Cholera was <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_cholera_outbreak">introduced</a>
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.</p>
<p>Conservative estimates show that <a
href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/12/world/haiti-earthquake-fast-facts/">as
of Aug. 30, 2014</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://newsroom.redcross.org/2011/02/01/press-release-american-red-cross-announces-7-4-million-for-cholera-programs-in-haiti/">plan</a>
to distribute soap and oral rehydration salts — was
crippled by “<a
href="https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/2081560-red-cross-haiti-program-director-judith-st-fort.html">internal
issues that go unaddressed</a>,” wrote the director of
the Haiti program in her May 2011 memorandum.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>The <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/feb/28/haiti-plan-cholera-un-funds">Guardian
reported</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://tinyurl.com/p27cqst">$2.2 billion
needed</a> for an eradication program, only $50
million has been pledged.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It’s time for Haitians to be able to choose their own
government and for the international community to
respect and support their choice.</p>
<p><em>Charlie Hinton is a member of the Haiti Action
Committee, </em><a
href="http://www.haitisolidarity.net/"><em><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.haitisolidarity.net">www.haitisolidarity.net</a></em></a><em>.
He may be reached at </em><a
href="mailto:lifewish@lmi.net"><em><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:lifewish@lmi.net">lifewish@lmi.net</a></em></a><em>.
</em></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>