Americas Quarterly

hen Haiti’s President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier fled to France in 1986, he left a nation plagued by poverty and dependent on aid. Like many dictators, Duvalier had illicitly amassed vast personal wealth—conservatively estimated at $300 million—during his time in power. 1 Amid reports that suitcases of gold and currency traveled with him on the C-171 cargo plane taking him into exile, Haiti’s treasury was revealed to be virtually empty. 2 For his cash-strapped successors in the Haitian government, recovering the assets that the President-for-Life had squirreled away in various foreign nations became a matter of necessity.

In Europe and the Americas, pri-
vate investigators and lawyers were
hired to chase promising leads on Du-
valier’s assets. But despite some ini-
tial success in recovering assets held
in New York, these efforts came to a
grinding halt when Haitian politics
shifted and Duvalier allies returned
to power. A letter from Haiti’s outside
counsel to then-Haitian Prime Min-
ister Prosper Avril in 1989 bluntly de-
scribed the change:
‘’The behavior of your ministers
leaves us no alternative except to con-
clude that [they] apparently want our
efforts on behalf of Haiti to fail, are
not concerned that Haiti will lose the
substantial investment it has made
in pursuing the Duvaliers, and want
the Duvaliers to keep the money
they stole.” 3

For almost two decades, Haiti’s recovery efforts against Duvalier were at an impasse, until President René Préval took a unique step forward in 2007. To complete the recovery of $5.4 million of Duvalier assets still frozen in Switzerland, Haiti formed a link with the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR)—launched in September of that year by the World Bank Group and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 4

With a mandate to facilitate cooperation on recovering corruptly acquired assets, a StAR team traveled to Haiti to provide technical assistance to Haitian authorities. At the same time, World Bank officials worked with Swiss officials and lawyers to further efforts to bring the Duvalier case to conclusion. Using the