When it was a CIA way station for drugs.
"Haiti’s ex-dictator Duvalier may be poised for a comeback" by William Booth | Washington Post, January 22, 2012
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - For a notorious former dictator facing charges of crimes against humanity, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc’’ Duvalier is living a nice life in Haiti after his sudden return from exile a year ago.
Although technically under house arrest, the onetime “president for life’’ dines with his many admirers at the chic bistros of Petionville, where he can be found at Quartier Latin, having his poulet creole. His portrait , a very flattering one, is sold on the streets.
If money can be laundered, so can dictators. Duvalier was the commencement speaker last month at the law school in Gonaives, an appearance that the university’s president called “totally inconceivable.’’
Last week, Duvalier drove himself - with a police escort - to the government’s memorial ceremony to mark the second anniversary of Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquake. The audience - which included President Michel Martelly, his prime minister, and Bill Clinton - rose to greet him.
What more is there to say?
Duvalier is back in Haiti, and it is very possible that he will never be tried for the crimes that his alleged victims and international human rights groups assert he committed: forced disappearances, illegal detentions, intimidation, torture, and executions of journalists, activists, political opponents, and others.
“I cannot believe my eyes,’’ said Boby Duval, who spent nine months in the mid-1970s in Fort Dimanche, one of three prisons known as “the triangle of death’’ during the reign of the Duvalier family - father and son, Papa Doc and Baby Doc - and the Tontons Macoutes, their paramilitary enforcers and secret police.
Duval, a bear of a man who now runs a popular soccer academy for thousands of children from the slums, entered the prison as a robust young athlete.
He emerged weighing 100 pounds. “They didn’t kill you in Fort Dimanche,’’ he said. “They starved you to death. I watched people die of starvation. And you never knew, ‘When am I next?’ ’’
Soon after Duvalier returned to Port-au-Prince in January 2011, after a 25-year exile in France, three cases were filed against him, alleging embezzlement of funds, human rights violations, and crimes against humanity.
See: Noriega is the News
Also see: No One Cares About Noriega Anymore
Although an older generation in Haiti recalls with a shudder the bad things that happened in the Duvalier years, many Haitians are nostalgic for the era, when the country was more prosperous, tourists were not afraid to visit, and it was the world’s leading maker of baseballs.
More than 60 percent of the Haitian population is younger than 25, so they have no memory of Baby Doc’s reign, only stories of better days.
Duvalier was a plump and pampered young man of 19 when he became “president for life’’ in 1971 after the death of his father, the far more ruthless Francois “Papa Doc’’ Duvalier, who once worked as a physician.
The younger Duvalier and his then-wife, Michele Bennett, were famous for their luxurious lifestyle and shopping sprees.
After the couple divorced in 1993, Duvalier endured a more modest exile, without the Ferrari or the mansion, living in a borrowed apartment, saying he was broke.
After months of delay in which three prosecutors came and went, his case is now before Judge Jean Carves, who has promised lawyers that he will soon rule on whether the matter will proceed to trial.
“He will be cleared of all charges. It is almost finished now; the judge is typing up the order to throw it all out,’’ said Duvalier’s attorney, Reynold Georges.
Georges said the crimes alleged - torture, disappearances - have exceeded the statute of limitations.
“Plus, they have no proof of anything,’’ he said in an interview.
Asked whether the rumors are true that Duvalier, now 60, is planning a return to politics, Georges said, “If he decides to run for president, he will be eligible, and if he runs, he will win, and I will support him.’’
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Related: Duvalier Double-Crossed by CIA
He was supposed to be leaving.
And if those were the good old days....
"Two years after Haiti quake, 550,000 still live in camps; Poor strategy, politics hamper reconstruction" by Trenton Daniel | Associated Press, January 08, 2012
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Hundreds of thousands of Haitians' lives have barely improved since those first days of devastation....
It's been two f***ing years!
While UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former President Bill Clinton, and others vowed that the world would help Haiti “build back better,’’ and $2.38 billion has been spent, Haitians have hardly seen any building at all.
Yeah, WHERE DID ALL THAT DAMN MONEY GO, Bill!!!??
At the time, grand ambitions were voiced for a Haiti rebuilt on modern lines. New housing would replace shantytowns and job-generating industry would be spread out to ease the human crush of Port-au-Prince, the sprawling capital with its 3 million people.
But now the government seems to be going back to basics, nurturing small, community-based projects designed to bring the homeless back to their old neighborhoods to build, renovate, and find jobs through friends.
The reasons for the slow progress are many. Beyond being among the world’s poorest nations and a frequent victim of destructive weather, Haiti’s land registry is in chaos - a drag on reconstruction because it is not always clear who owns what land.
Then there is a political standoff that went on for more than a year and still hobbles decision-making. After the quake, a disputed presidential election triggered tire-burning riots that shut down Port-au-Prince for three days. The international airport was forced to close and foreign aid workers had to hunker down in their compounds.
I'm SO SICK of EXCUSES. I can ONLY IMAGINE how the HAITIANS FEEL!!!!!
Related: Haiti's lifeline runway
Yeah, it's been a big success.
Even after the vote was resolved and Michel Martelly was installed as president in May 2011, there were further snags. The former pop star, new to politics, took six months to install a prime minister, whose job is to oversee reconstruction projects. He infuriated opposition politicians because his administration jailed a deputy without following the law and named a prime minister without consulting them first. They retaliated by trying to thwart him at every turn....
Another victim of the impasse was a reconstruction panel co-chaired by Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti. Lawmakers refused to renew its mandate, complaining it contained too few Haitians, though they may have been using it as a pretext to punish Martelly. But it meant that for the next six months there was no agency in place to coordinate home-building.
Meanwhile, government employees could be found napping at their desks while awaiting orders from their supervisors that never came.
The government and international partners say there has been some progress - 600 classrooms for 60,000 children to return to school, almost half of the 10 million cubic yards of rubble cleared, and roads newly paved in the capital and countryside....
The encampments of cardboard, tarps, and bed sheets that went up to cope with 1.5 million homeless people have morphed into shantytowns that increasingly look permanent.
More than 550,000 people are still living in the grim and densely packed camps that are squeezed into the capital’s alleyways and pitched on the side of rural roads. And many of those who left the camps, often being evicted or paid to go, say their new conditions are little better and sometimes much worse.
“I certainly wouldn’t call (reconstruction) a success,’’ said Alex Dupuy, who has written books about Haiti and teaches at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. “Other than putting a government in place . . . I haven’t seen any concrete evidence of recovery underway.’’
:-(
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Of the 10 best-funded projects approved by a reconstruction panel not one focuses exclusively on housing. A US-financed $225 million industrial park includes housing for 5,000 workers. But it’s on the northern coast of Haiti, 150 miles outside the quake zone.
The highest-profile effort to house the displaced came three months after the quake, on the eve of the rainy season. The US military and actor Sean Penn bused 5,000 people from a flood-prone golf course to a cleared field in Corail-Cesselesse, north of Port-au-Prince. It was supposed to be the country’s first planned community, with factories and houses for 300,000 people.
That never happened.
So WHERE DI ALL THAT MERCY MONEY GO?
Today, the people of Corail-Cesselesse are ravaged by floods or bake in the heat in their timber-frame shelters.
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"Haiti earthquake survivor’s death spurs soul-searching; Woman fled quake, only to die alone in Boston" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff, January 14, 2012
The cause of Winnie Henri’s death is unknown, and an autopsy will be conducted, but critics such as Nicole Bahnam, headmaster of Newcomers Academy in Dorchester, where Henri studied after surgery at Children’s Hospital Boston to remove cancerous adrenal glands, are asking how a 20-year-old woman with known medical problems could die on her own while in a Partners in Health, one of Boston’s highest-profile charities, program....
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Also see:
Ornate Back Bay pews are reborn in Haiti
Something stinks.