Americas Quarterly

It has, for instance, helped to transform the Haitian National Police into an institution that has won respect from the population at large. Around the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, police are ubiquitous, and there is a feeling that people are safer than they have been in a long time. People stay out later, and a semblance of nightlife is returning to the bars and restaurants of Petion Ville—the middle class suburb perched on the hilltops overlooking Port-au-Prince. Kidnappings and other forms of violent crime are down throughout the country.

For his part, Clinton has narrowed
his mission to a few basic but deeply
important elements: disaster mitiga-
tion and prevention; ensuring that
donors disburse pledges; support-
ing recovery programs; and getting
more private international investors
to Haiti. All of these signal a plan to
shake loose more money from do-
nors and investors to shore up Haiti’s
crippled economy and devastated in-
frastructure. In effect, he’ll be spend-
ing more time outside Haiti than
inside, where Haiti’s dysfunctional
political system has been as much,
if not more, a cause of the country’s
economic woes than donor or inves-
tor recalcitrance.

“I’m going to go around the world to hector every last dime from everybody who promised to give money,” Clinton said during a gathering of Haitian-Americans in Miami in August. “I’ve been deluged with emails

BAD GOVERNMENT Haiti’sproblems—runawaypopu- lation growth, acute shortages of food and basic necessities, environmental degradation—seem insurmountable when coupled with a weak and dysfunctional government.

During the Miami gathering of the Haitian diaspora, one common complaint was the lack of transparency in Haiti’s bureaucracy, making it difficult and risky to open businesses there. The lack of a strong judiciary and the rule of law make these potential investors, whom Clinton is particularly counting on for help in his mission, leery of plunking down their hard-earned wealth in a place where it can vanish in a heartbeat. Most remember the case of Franck Cine, a highly successful telecommunication executive with MCI who went on to found the telecommunication company Haitel in 1999. Three years ago, Cine was snared by a mismanagement scandal of Socabank, where he was a major shareholder and board member.

The government arrested Cine and he spent almost three years under arrest before he was recently released without any explanation. He was never officially charged with a crime. “If it can happen to Franck, it can happen to anyone of us,” said a Haitian-American, New York physician who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Just because we’re Haitians doesn’t mean we have to make unwise investments there. We should have some basic guarantees.”