Nearly five years after a 7.0 magnitude quake killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, Haiti’s recovery efforts remain muddled and confused, with the whereabouts of the billions of dollars pledged by the international community an apparent mystery to the country’s leaders.
“We don’t know where the money has gone,” Raymond Joseph, former ambassador of Haiti to the U.S., said Friday in an interview on Bloomberg’s “Market Makers.”
In 2010, Haiti was rocked by a deadly earthquake that claimed the lives of between 200,000 and 300,000 people. In response to the tragedy, the international community pledged an estimated nine billion dollars in foreign aid to help Haiti’s recovery efforts.
However, according to Joseph, much of the pledged cash never made it to Haiti. And the money that did make it to Haiti has mysteriously disappeared.
“So you say, ambassador, you don’t know where the money has gone,” Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker said. “No new buildings have been inaugurated. It is five years since the earthquake. We’ve talked about the billions of dollars that have flown in or that have entered the country. Where should Haiti be right now?”
“I think Haiti, myself, should have been on developing the way it should be developed,” Joseph said.
“Which is?” Erik Schatzker pressed.
Joseph then recalled an event in 2012 when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, the U.S. envoy to Haiti, personally attended the launch of an industrial park that promised to create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Haitians desperate for work. That industrial park today has created only a fraction of the jobs promised.
“For example: the former Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, went down to Haiti in October 2012. Her husband was there and he was the U.S. Envoy to Haiti. The president of Haiti was there, all of the dignitaries were there and they inaugurated the Caracol industrial park,” Joseph said.
“That Caracol industrial park was supposed to bring in 20,000 jobs in five years and 65,000 eventually. Well, Caracol only has one big company there. It’s a Korean textile manufacturer and only 4,000 jobs. So, you know, I take Caracol as the real example of how bad things are,” he added.
In her prepared remarks at the site of the industrial park, then-Secretary of State Clinton said: “In addition to effective government,” she said, “Haiti needs a strong justice sector, free and fair elections, housing, energy, schools, [and] health care.”
Elsewhere, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, titled “Five Years Later: Where Did All the Haiti Aid Go,” Joseph lamented the confused state of Haiti’s recovery, calling on the international community to assist Haiti in establishing democratic institutions.
