Today, Explained - Back-to-back crises in Haiti

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

An assassination followed by an earthquake followed by a tropical storm strike a country where aid organizations often have more influence than Haitians. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support��Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah filling in for Sean Ramos-Ferrum. And it seems like Haiti cannot catch a break.

Just last month, the country's president was assassinated. And just last weekend, a part of the country that people thought was relatively safe was struck by an earthquake. We're talking about southern and western Haiti, which is basically an agricultural rural area. People often refer to it as the greenest part of Haiti. It's one of the last places where you still have a lot of trees. You don't see the deforestation as deep there as you see in the rest of the country. Jacqueline Charles is in Haiti for the Miami Herald. We reached her by phone just before the arrival of Tropical Storm Grace,

which came just two days after the earthquake. While this is a country that has fault lines running throughout it, this is an area that was sort of on the low risk in terms of the next big one. Everyone thought, the experts thought, that the next big one would have been in northern Haiti. On Saturday, what happened was there was a quake, and it was a major quake. The epicenter of the 7.2 magnitude quake is about 80 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The coastal town of Lecai was one of the hardest hit, and its hospital is at capacity.

We've seen it at around 7.2. This would put it higher than the 2010 earthquake that basically destroyed most of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. This is Lekai, the biggest town in this region. And as you can see behind me, this is what's left of a massive five-story hotel. This is just a scene of utter devastation. They're still doing an assessment of the damage.

I mean, one of the things that is happening here, if you were just looking at it from a perspective of what you saw in 2010, you saw houses completely collapsed. We had more than 300,000 people who died in that place, according to the Haitian government figures. Here, we're talking roughly about 1,300 people would be the latest figure, but that number is expected to rise. A magnitude 7.2 earthquake displaced thousands and

left more than 1,900 dead and more than 6,000 injured. But not to get to 300,000 which you saw in 2010. And one of the reasons for that is that we're talking about agricultural area. It's not teeming, it's not overcrowded. So you're talking about an area where you don't have a lot of people, but the houses also are not on top of each other. But there has clearly been destruction. A lot of losses, material losses here.

People have died. People are still underneath the rubble. So there's a huge impact. A huge impact. And while it's not as bad as that catastrophic earthquake we saw in 2010, this is taking place right after the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. I mean, how is that loss of leadership affecting this crisis? Well, you know, it is taking place. Right after the assassination of a president, there is a prime minister in charge, and the way that Haiti's government is structured is that the

prime minister is in charge of the day-to-day governance. Prior to his death, President Jovenel Moïse was one of 11 elected officials in a country of 11.5 million people. Haiti was delayed in holding legislative elections. Parliament is non-functional. There's only 10 elected senators out of 30. So, you know, you're talking about a country that is, quote unquote, a democracy, but at the same time, today, there are only 10 elected leaders in this entire country. So there's been a lot of pressure for Haiti to hold elections, to hold them quickly, but there are a lot of logistical and a lot of issues that have to go in that. And the current prime minister, who hasn't really been in a job barely a month, still needs to try to get some sort of a political agreement or accord

among the various political factions in order to move this country forward with that. We call upon people to show solidarity with each other. Let's avoid panic in the face of this earthquake. And how are Haitians grappling with all of this? What are they saying to you? The idea of an earthquake, it's like, here we go again. For people who are from the south, this is their 2010. And they are people who are still dealing with Hurricane Matthew. That is their reference point. Initial reports were of flooding and destruction,

brown torrents of water that had washed homes and villages from the landscape. But only now, three days after Matthew, are we getting a clear picture of what the aid agencies are facing. Hurricane Matthew was just five years ago. I spoke to a lady today. Her house was barely rebuilt. She is a person who lives off the land like most of the people in this area. She was hit by Hurricane Matthew, which really wiped up. And so what happened was when the quake happened, it collapsed on her.

Her leg is broken. She's in the yard of a hospital. They can't take people inside the hospital, one, because the hospital itself has been damaged. Two, psychologically, people are afraid. They don't want to go underneath the building at this point in time. And so she can't even imagine what rebuilding looks like. She has to. She knows that she's going to do it. But right now, she's basically, you know, in her bed, cannot get up. She said to me, only God can save me, you know, at this point.

You know, the prime minister said that, you know, when he was visiting this region, his second visit in two days, you know, he met a woman who, again, had lost her home and collapsed. And the only thing that she wanted from the government was for them to basically help remove the debris from her collapsed home. And it was an acknowledgement that the government didn't have any money and she wasn't expecting anything more. I mean, he talked about in terms of Haitian resilience and sort of encouragement. You know, I'm not a fan of that word, resilient, but what you find here in Haiti is that, you know, every disaster is not new. It's like, here we go again. But Haitians find a way to rebuild.

They find a way to get up. They find a way to move on. Poverty, political turmoil does not mean that life stops. It does not mean that you don't get to live. And they live, and they live their lives to the best that they can. Jacqueline Charles is the Miami Herald's Caribbean correspondent. We spoke to her on Monday afternoon, and that night, tropical storm Grace brought 5 to 10 inches of rain to the very part of Haiti that was hit by Saturday's earthquake. The death toll from the quake is now over 1,900.

Authorities are still trying to assess the damage from the storm. Coming up, Haiti needs aid to recover from this week's events. But not the kind of aid that it got after the 2010 earthquake. That's in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter.

Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame.

And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. The earthquake in South and Western Haiti brings back memories of the 2010 quake that devastated Port-au-Prince. And it's not just memories of the natural disaster itself. It's memories of how the international community responded.

This is something we've seen in Haiti for so, so long, where the response to disasters, the response to these events, ends up undermining the government, undermining local institutions, and making the response to the next one even more difficult than the one before it. Jake Johnston works at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He started tracking humanitarian aid to Haiti just after the 2010 earthquake. And he says it's had some pretty negative impacts. So if you look at Haiti in the last 10, 20 years, we've seen steadily declining participation rates in Haitian elections. One reason why this is pretty clear is that the government is less and less actually in charge of the country as things have become more and more outsourced to foreign actors who are continually responding to these disasters.

So it's almost like in Haiti, when a natural disaster occurs, there's this kind of influx of foreign aid and that shapes the country's politics. Yeah, that's right. And I think it's so easy to look at Haiti and say, oh, you know, the president was just assassinated, another disaster, right? It's like easy to throw one's hands up and declare Haiti a failed state. And I think this misses the mark on a number of things here. And I think, you know, I'm using a different term, that of an aid state, right? A state whose institutions, whose political reality has been shaped as much by foreign interference and intervention as the Haitian people themselves. There has been a real sort

of erosion of sovereignty over a long period of time, where the state itself and public services have largely been outsourced to foreign NGOs, to development agencies, to church groups, to private companies. And so again, when we're talking about development in Haiti, we need to understand that this is a much broader picture than just the Haitian government itself. You know, I think after seeing such a devastating earthquake of this nature, the first place people's minds go is aid, because that's probably all you can do as a person who's watching all of this happen.

Where does aid go wrong and how do we have to do it differently this time? You know, I think maybe we can just sort of start with the 2010 earthquake. It has been a horrifying week here in Port-au-Prince, a week where the dead, the injured and the homeless are sharing a city largely reduced to rubble. A week where people had to fend for themselves, desperate for food and water, tending to their own injuries, burying their own dead. This was a massive earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. It caused untold damages, collapsed almost every single government ministry, displaced over a million people. And a few months after that, there was a donor conference.

The member states of the United Nations and international partners have pledged 5.3 billion U.S. dollars for the next two years and 9.9 billion dollars in total for the next three years and beyond. And at the donor conference, countries from all over the world pledged $10 billion to, in the words of Bill Clinton, build back better, which is a phrase we've heard more recently with President Biden. And so what happened to that money, right? Where did it go? And this has been a question that sort of plagued the relief efforts and reconstruction efforts for the following decade. And, you know, the answers are actually shockingly simple. Most of the money that we allocate to foreign assistance is going to companies that are located in the United States of America. So after the Haitian earthquake in 2010,

in the years after, USAID spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Less than 5% of that funding went to local businesses, organizations, or the Haitian government. Where was the other 95% going? The other 95% goes to largely U.S.-based NGOs and for-profit development companies. A majority of it actually went to just a handful of for-profit companies all located inside the Beltway, Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. And this is no accident, right? This is the foreign aid system we have designed, right? And so when we talk about the lack of results, the lack of efficiency in foreign aid, this isn't about other countries. This isn't about where these programs are taking place. It's about the system

that we've put in place. So aid organizations basically start to create this system where they take on the work of a government. But do they also have direct influence on the political or electoral process? Yeah, of course. So after the 2010 earthquake, following this donor conference, they created this thing called the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission. This is a sort of supranational body bringing together all of the largest donors to Haiti, the US, the UN, the World Bank, the EU, etc, etc. And it was chaired by Bill Clinton. And this entity, you know, was ostensibly there to coordinate, to make sure that donors were working together and had one cohesive plan that was in support of the Haitian government.

But what the commission ended up doing was undermining the Haitian government. It becomes very important to donors who that Haitian government is and who is in it. And so this manifested itself pretty quickly after the earthquake. There were elections that needed to be held. And in the fall of 2010, so about nine months after the earthquake, there was an electoral process backed very strongly by donors who said, oh, we need a new government that we can work with. We need a legitimate government that has, you know, the population's support to build back better, right?

If you put water into a bucket with holes, nothing will be in it, and those holes are the instability. You can put as much money as you want into Haiti, but if Haiti doesn't have the ability to efficiently manage that money, then it will get lost. That election was held with more than a million people still displaced by the earthquake. Without proper preparation for the election, many warned before that election was held that it was sure to be a total mess and to actually further instability. And that was exactly what happened. Haitians were supposed to be going to the polls today

to elect a new president as well as lawmakers to both houses of the Haitian parliament. Instead, within hours of the polls opening, a serious challenge to the credibility of this entire democratic process. The election was a total mess. Over 10% of the votes never even made it to the Capitol to be counted. And what's really important is what happened after. So rather than looking at that

situation and saying, okay, we need to take a pause, step back, hold new elections once we can actually prepare for them and ensure broad participation, international community pressured the Haitian government to accept a delegation from the Organization of American States, a hemispheric body, to come in and analyze the vote. Now, what they did after coming in, they didn't do a full recount. They didn't project where the missing votes came from or anything, but they recommended overturning the results of that election. Wow. What resulted was a government that came to office that had probably even less legitimacy than the one that it was replacing. And it went so far as

that the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time actually threatened to withhold post-earthquake aid if the Haitian government did not accept the OAS recommendation of overturning the election results. So you can see how aid also becomes a bargaining chip and a means of influence, right, for these big donors. You know, we've talked a lot about the 2010 earthquake, but that was not the only disaster in recent history to hit Haiti and kind of create this flood of aid into the country. There was Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Did that also have these kinds of impacts? So that 2016 hurricane, you know, related very much to another electoral process similar to 2010, right? And so there were elections held actually in the fall of 2015 to elect a new legislature and a new president. Now, they were contested, and they ended up getting canceled. The results were thrown out. And a transitional government took office to oversee an audit of the election in 2016 and on the eve of that vote you have hurricane matthew just absolutely devastate the southern southern portion of haiti now again

instead of pushing things out further instead of taking that step back the election was only delayed a few weeks right the result was you had an election with less than 20% participation. And so finally, after this election, Haiti did have a new elected government. The recently assassinated Jovenel Moïse had taken office. He was known as Banana Man. Now Jovenel Moïse, a banana exporter without any experience in public office, was sworn in as Haiti's 58th president. And so people look at Haiti and say, oh, why was the government so unstable, right? Why did Jovenel Moïse have all of these problems with governance, all of this instability? Well, you have to look at that election itself that brought him to power, right? I mean,

with that low of turnout, with that few votes, nobody was surprised that his rule was almost immediately contested, and that he never could consolidate that sort of legitimacy because that process was never going to deliver it. And so, again, you can't de-link these long-term political developments from the role that natural disasters play. And this latest earthquake doesn't have the same death toll as the 2010 earthquake we talked about. But could it still influence the politics of the country moving forward? I think there's no doubt, right? But of course, there's a significant political crisis happening right now, right? In the aftermath of the assassination of Moïse, and really for the last number of years, there have been, you know, tremendous organizing among

civil society organizations to push for something that can address these bigger structural issues that have seemed to continually impede the Haitian state's ability to oversee long-term sustainable development, right? Now, obviously, the earthquake has disrupted that. Will this government that everyone was sort of saying, okay, it's just there for a little bit, it's not elected, it's not constitutional, it's just there because of the assassination. Will that become consolidated now? Will that actually gain strength because of this sort of perceived need to have an institution, a government institution, to partner with for donors, etc.? Or will this event catalyze the opposition in the civil society organizations who've been doing this tremendous organizing and really push them to, you know, show really clearly why something different is needed for the future of the country.

It seems like the moral of the story here is that there is nothing altruistic about foreign aid. Well, you know, I think that's right in so many ways, right? And it's not to say that there aren't many people who are trying to do good, who want to do good, who have great intentions, right? And I think that's really important. It's not condemning so many of these individuals who are trying to do the right thing, but it's taking a step back and looking at the system in which they're operating, right? And how challenging that is to change that system or to use that system to create something more sustainable. And the end result is that it's not the interest of the Haitian people or the affected community that is really motivating foreign assistance or long-term development. It's the interest of donor communities.

It's the interest of boardrooms in foreign capitals as opposed to the Haitian communities that are actually affected. Jake Johnston is a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He's the lead author of the blog Haiti, Relief and Reconstruction Watch. I'm Halima Shah. It's Today Explained. Thanks for listening. you