--:-- Halima Shah: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
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--:-- Sean Ramos: You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.
--:-- Halima Shah: Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
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--:-- Halima Shah: It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah filling in for Sean Ramos. 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.
--:-- [Phone call in the background]
--:-- Halima Shah: 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 as 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: Hi, Halima. I'm Jacqueline Charles, the Miami Herald's Caribbean correspondent.
--:-- Halima Shah: We reached you 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.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: The coastal town of Lekai was one of the hardest hit, and its hospital is at capacity.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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 Lakai, the biggest town in this region.
--:-- Halima Shah: And as you can see behind me, this is what's left of a massive five-story hotel.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: You know, this is just a scene of utter devastation. They're still doing an assessment of the damage.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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 know, you saw houses completely collapsed.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: We had more than 300,000 people who died in that spike, according to the Haitian government figures. Here we're talking roughly about 1,300 people will be the latest figure, but that number is expected to rise.
--:-- Halima Shah: A magnitude 7.2 earthquake displaced thousands and left more than 1,900 dead and more than 6,000 injured.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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 area where you don't have a lot of people, but the houses also are not on top of each other.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: I mean, how is that loss of leadership affecting this crisis?
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: Well, you know, it is taking place right after the assassination of a president. There is a prime minister in charge in the way that Haiti's government structure is that the prime minister is in charge of the day-to-day governance.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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 a court among the various political factions in order to move this country forward with that.
--:-- Halima Shah: We call upon people to show solidarity with each other. Let's avoid panic in the face of this earthquake.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: And how are Haitians grappling with all of this? What are they saying to you?
--:-- Halima Shah: The idea of an earthquake, it's like here we go again. For people who are from the south, this is their 2010.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: And they are people who are still dealing with Hurricane Matthew. That is their reference point.
--:-- Halima Shah: Initial reports were of flooding and destruction brown torrents of water that had washed homes and villages from the landscape
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: But only now three days after Matthew are we getting a clear picture of what the aid agencies are facing
--:-- Halima Shah: Hurricane Matthew was just five years ago. I spoke to a lady today. Her house was barely rebuilt.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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 out.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: Two psychologically people are afraid they don't want to go underneath the building at this point in time. And so she's 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: She said to me only god can peace with me you know at this point.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: And the only thing that she wanted from the government was for them to basically help remove the debris from her collapsed home.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: And it was an acknowledgement that the government didn't have any money and she wasn't expecting anything more.
--:-- Halima Shah: I mean, he talked about in terms of Haitian resilience and sort of encouragement.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: And, you know, I'm not a fan of that word, resilient.
--:-- Halima Shah: But what you find here in Haiti is that, you know, every disaster is not new. It's like, here we go again.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: But Haitians find a way to rebuild. They find a way to get up. They find a way to move on.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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 through the best that they can.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: The death toll from the quake is now over 1,900. Authorities are still trying to assess the damage from the storm.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
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--:-- Halima Shah: We'll see you next time.
--:-- Halima Shah: The earthquake in south and western Haiti brings back memories of the 2010 quake that devastated Port-au-Prince.
--:-- Halima Shah: And it's not just memories of the natural disaster itself. It's memories of how the international community responded.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: Jake Johnston works at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
--:-- Halima Shah: He started tracking humanitarian aid to Haiti just after the 2010 earthquake.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And he says it's had some pretty negative impacts.
--:-- Halima Shah: So if you look at Haiti, in the last 10, 20 years, we've seen steadily declining participation rates in Haitian elections.
--:-- Jake Johnston: One reason why this is, 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: So it's almost like in Haiti, when a natural disaster occurs, there's this kind of influx of foreign aid.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And that shapes the country's politics.
--:-- Halima Shah: Yeah that right
--:-- Jake Johnston: And I think it's so easy to look at Haiti and say oh you know was just assassinated another disaster
--:-- Halima Shah: It easy to throw one hands up and declare Haiti a failed state
--:-- Jake Johnston: And I think this misses the mark on a number of things here.
--:-- Halima Shah: And I think I'm using a different term, that of an aid state.
--:-- Jake Johnston: A state whose institutions, whose political reality has been shaped as much by foreign interference and intervention as the Haitian people themselves.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: Where does aid go wrong, and how do we have to do it differently this time?
--:-- Jake Johnston: You know, I think maybe we can just sort of start with the 2010 earthquake.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jake Johnston: A week where people had to fend for themselves, desperate for food and water, tending to their own injuries, burying their own dead.
--:-- Halima Shah: This was a massive earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010.
--:-- Jake Johnston: It caused untold damages, collapsed almost every single government ministry, displaced over a million people.
--:-- Halima Shah: And a few months after that, there was a donor conference.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And so what happened to that money? Where did it go?
--:-- Halima Shah: And this has been a question that sort of plagued the relief efforts and reconstruction efforts for the following decade.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And, you know, the answers are actually shockingly simple.
--:-- Halima Shah: Most of the money that we allocate to foreign assistance is going to companies that are located in the United States of America.
--:-- Jake Johnston: So after the Haitian earthquake in 2010, in the years after, USAID spent hundreds of millions of dollars.
--:-- Halima Shah: Less than 5% of that funding went to local businesses, organizations, or the Haitian government.
--:-- Jake Johnston: Where was the other 95% going?
--:-- Halima Shah: The other 95% goes to largely U.S.-based NGOs and for-profit development companies.
--:-- Jake Johnston: A majority of it actually went to just a handful of for-profit companies, all located inside the Beltway, Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.
--:-- Halima Shah: And this is no accident, right?
--:-- Jake Johnston: This is the foreign aid system we have designed.
--:-- Halima Shah: And so when we talk about the lack of results, the lack of efficiency in foreign aid, this isn't about other countries.
--:-- Jake Johnston: This isn't about where these programs are taking place. It's about the system that we've put in place.
--:-- Halima Shah: So aid organizations basically start to create this system where they take on the work of a government.
--:-- Jake Johnston: But do they also have direct influence on the political or electoral process?
--:-- Halima Shah: Yeah, of course.
--:-- Jake Johnston: So after the 2010 earthquake, you know, following this donor conference, they created this thing called the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission.
--:-- Halima Shah: This is a sort of supranational body bringing together all of the largest donors to Haiti, the U.S., the U.N., the World Bank, the EU, et cetera, et cetera.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And it was chaired by Bill Clinton.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jake Johnston: But what the commission ended up doing was undermining the Haitian government.
--:-- Halima Shah: It becomes very important to donors who that Haitian government is and who is in it.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And so this manifested itself pretty quickly after the earthquake.
--:-- Halima Shah: There were elections that needed to be held.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And in the fall of 2010, 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: We need a legitimate government that has, you know, the population's support to build back better, right?
--:-- Jake Johnston: If you put water into a bucket with holes, nothing will be in it.
--:-- Halima Shah: And those holes are the instability.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: That election was held with more than a million people still deplaced by the earthquake.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: And that was exactly what happened.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jake Johnston: Instead, within hours of the polls opening, a serious challenge to the credibility of this entire democratic process.
--:-- Halima Shah: The election was a total mess. Over 10% of the votes never even made it to the Capitol to be counted.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And what's really important is what happened after.
--:-- Halima Shah: So rather than looking at that situation and saying, OK, we need to take a pause, step back, hold new elections once we can actually prepare for them and ensure broad participation.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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
--:-- Halima Shah: Now what they did after coming in they didn do a full recount
--:-- Jake Johnston: They didn't project where the missing votes came from or anything, but they recommended overturning the results of that election.
--:-- Jake Johnston: What resulted was a government that came to office that had probably even less legitimacy than the one that it was replacing.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jake Johnston: So you can see how aid also becomes a bargaining chip and a means of influence, right, for these big donors.
--:-- Halima Shah: 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.
--:-- Jake Johnston: There was Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
--:-- Halima Shah: Did that also have these kinds of impacts?
--:-- Jake Johnston: So that 2016 hurricane, you know, related very much to another electoral process similar to 2010, right?
--:-- Halima Shah: And so there were elections held actually in the fall of 2015 to elect a new legislature and a new president.
--:-- Jake Johnston: Now, they were contested, and they ended up getting canceled.
--:-- Halima Shah: The results were thrown out. And the transitional government took office to oversee, you know, sort of an audit of the electoral process and the reholding of a vote.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And all of this leads up to this rerun election in 2016.
--:-- Halima Shah: And on the eve of that vote, you have Hurricane Matthew just absolutely devastate the southern portion of Haiti.
--:-- Jake Johnston: Now, again, instead of pushing things out further, instead of taking that step back, the election was only delayed a few weeks.
--:-- Halima Shah: The result was you had an election with less than 20% participation.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And so finally, after this election, Haiti did have a new elected government.
--:-- Halima Shah: The recently assassinated Jovenel Moïse had taken office.
--:-- Jake Johnston: He was known as Banana Man.
--:-- Halima Shah: Now Jovenel Moïse, a banana exporter without any experience in public office, was sworn in as Haiti's 58th president.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And so people look at Haiti and say, oh, why was the government so unstable, right?
--:-- Halima Shah: Why did Jovenel Moïse have all of these problems with governance, all of this instability?
--:-- Jake Johnston: Well, you have to look at that election itself that brought him to power, right?
--:-- Halima Shah: I mean, with that low of a turnout, with that few votes, nobody was surprised that his rule was almost immediately contested
--:-- Jake Johnston: And that he never could consolidate that sort of legitimacy because that process was never going to deliver it.
--:-- Halima Shah: And so, again, you can't de-link these long-term political developments from the role that natural disasters play.
--:-- Jake Johnston: And this latest earthquake doesn't have the same death toll as the 2010 earthquake we talked about.
--:-- Halima Shah: But could it still influence the politics of the country moving forward?
--:-- Jake Johnston: I think there's no doubt, right?
--:-- Halima Shah: But of course, there's a significant political crisis happening right now, right?
--:-- Jake Johnston: In the aftermath of the assassination of Moïse, and really for the last number of years, there have been 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?
--:-- Halima Shah: Now, obviously, the earthquake has disrupted that.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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?
--:-- Halima Shah: Will that actually gain strength because of this sort of perceived need to have an institution, a government institution to partner with for donors, et cetera, right?
--:-- Jake Johnston: Or will this event catalyze the opposition and 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?
--:-- Halima Shah: It seems like the moral of the story here is that there is nothing altruistic about foreign aid.
--:-- Jake Johnston: Well, you know, I think that's right in so many ways, right?
--:-- Halima Shah: 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?
--:-- Jake Johnston: And I think that's really important.
--:-- Halima Shah: It's not condemning so many of these individuals who are trying to do the right thing.
--:-- Jake Johnston: But it's taking a step back and looking at the system in which they're operating, right?
--:-- Halima Shah: And how challenging that is to change that system or to use that system to create something more sustainable.
--:-- Jake Johnston: 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.
--:-- Halima Shah: It's the interest of donor communities.
--:-- Jake Johnston: It's the interest of, you know, boardrooms in foreign capitals as opposed to the Haitian communities that are actually affected.
--:-- Halima Shah: Jake Johnston is a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
--:-- Halima Shah: He's the lead author of the blog Haiti, Relief and Reconstruction Watch.
--:-- Halima Shah: I'm Halima Shah. It's Today Explained. Thanks for listening.
