NOTE: go here to read the full testimony.

This testimony details the results of neo-liberal and neo-colonialist policies but does not detail how the policies were developed and enforced. For example, prior to the Clinton years, Haiti was self-sufficient in terms of rice production, after Clinton Haiti was dependent on rice imports from the USA. This was not simply a case of corruption or incompetence. When Aristide came to office as president of Haiti, his policies were opposed by the USA government. Aristide was forced out of office at gunpoint by U.S. Marines—TWICE! On the other hand both Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier were supported by the USA government. Haiti poverty is a direct result of international oppression and exploitation aided by, but not caused by, internal tyrants who were kept in office by international forces, the USA government chief among the forces.

—Kalamu ya Salaam

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Page 1 of 15 

TESTIMONY 

“Reconstructing to Rebalance Haiti after the Earthquake”  

Robert Maguire, Ph.D. 

Trinity Washington University 

And 

The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) 

Testimony presented before the Subcommittee on International Development, 

Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection of 

the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 

February 4, 2010 

Thank you for inviting me to testify today.   

My first visit to Haiti was in 1974.  My first full day in Haiti was the day that Haiti’s 

National Soccer Team scored the incredible goal against Italy in the World Cup.  That 

may not mean much to Americans, but to Haitians it means everything.  I have come to 

take this coincidence as a sign that there was bound to be some kind of unbreakable 

bond between Haiti and me.  And that came to pass. 

My most recent visit ended on January 10, 2010, two days before the earthquake.  In 

between, I have visited Haiti more than 100 times, as a US government official working 

with the Inter-American Foundation and the Department of State; as a scholar and 

researcher, and as a friend of Haiti and its people.  I have traveled throughout that 

beautiful, if benighted, land.  I have met and broken bread with Haitians of all walks of 

life.  I have stayed at the now-destroyed Montana Hotel.  I had dinner there 5 days 

before the quake, chatting with waiters and barmen I had befriended over the years.  I 

speak Creole.  I have lost friends and colleagues in the tragedy.  I am anxious to share 

my views and ideas with you. 

Page 2 of 15 

In the deep darkness of the cloud cast over Haiti by the terrible tragedy of January 12 

there is an opportunity for the country and its people to score another incredible goal, 

not so much by reconstructing or rebuilding, but by restoring a balance to achieve a 

nation with less poverty and inequity, improved social and economic inclusion, greater 

human dignity, a rehabilitated environment, stronger public institutions, and a national 

infrastructure for economic growth and investment.  And, if that goal is to be scored, 

relationships between Haitians and outsiders also will have to be rebalanced toward 

partnership and respect of the value and aspirations of all Haiti’s people.  

A Country Out-of-Balance 

In the five decades that I have traveled to Haiti, I have seen the country become terribly 

out-of-balance.  Much of this revolves around the unnatural growth of Haiti’s cities, 

especially in what Haitians call “the Republic of Port-au-Prince.”  In the late 1970s, 

Haiti’s rural to urban demographic ratio was 80% to 20%.  Today it is 55% to 45%.  The 

earlier ratio reflected what had been chiefly an agrarian society since independence.  

The population of Port-au-Prince in the late 1970’s was a little over 500,000 – already 

too many people to be adequately supported by the city’s physical infrastructure.  By 

then, Haitians from the countryside had already begun trickling into the capital city as a 

result Dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s (1957 – 1972) quest to centralize his grip 

on power.  Under Papa Doc, a ferocious neglect beyond PAP took place, as ports in 

secondary cities languished, asphalted roads disintegrated and, in some cases, were 

actually ripped-up, and swatches of the countryside were systematically deforested 

under the guise of national security or by way of timber extraction monopolies granted 

to Duvalier’s cronies.  Small farmers were ignored as state-supported agronomists 

sought office jobs in the capital. 

The only state institutions present in the countryside were army and paramilitary 

(Tonton Makout) posts and tax offices – which enforced what rural dwellers told me was 

Page 3 of 15 

a ‘squeeze – suck’ (pese -  souse) system of state predation. With wealth, work and what 

passed for an education and health infrastructure increasingly concentrated in Port-au- 

Prince (PAP), it was no wonder that poor rural Haitians had begun to trickle off the land 

into coastal slums with names like “Boston” and “Cite Simon” (named after Papa Doc’s 

wife), and onto unoccupied hillsides and ravines within and surrounding the city. 

The trickle turned into a flood in the early 1980’s when the rapacious regime of Jean- 

Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1972 - 1986) yielded to Haiti’s international ‘partners’ – 

governments, international financial institutions, and private investors – who had set 

their sights on transforming Haiti into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.”  Political stability 

under the dictatorship combined with ample cheap labor and location near the US 

formed a triumvirate that shored up this idea, and the “‘Tawanization” of Haiti 

proceeded, creating by the mid-1980’s somewhere between 60K and 100K jobs in 

assembly factories, all located within PAP.  Fueled by a parallel neglect of Haiti’s rural 

economy and people, the prospect of a job in a factory altered the off-the-land trickle 

into a flood, as desperate families crowded the capital in search of work and the 

amenities – education, especially – that the city offered.   Between 1982 and 2008, Port- 

au-Prince grew from 763,000 to between 2.5 and 3 million, with an estimated 75,000 

newcomers flooding the city each year.1 

As immigrants piled up in slums, on deforested and unstable hillsides, and in urban 

ravines, the opportunity offered by the city became a mirage.  Following the ouster of 

Duvalier in 1986 when, as Haitians say, “the muzzle had fallen” (babouket la tonbe) and 

freedom of speech and assembly returned, factory jobs began to dry up as nervous 

investors sought quieter, more stable locations.  By the 1990’s, only a fraction of those 

jobs remained.  Yet the poor continued to flow into the city. 

1 

 Robert Maguire, Haiti After the Donors’ Conference: A Way Forward, United States Institute of Peace, 

Washington DC, Special Report 232, September 2009.  

Page 4 of 15 

Papa Doc’s centralization, combined, under the rule of Baby Doc, with the urban- 

centric/Taiwanization policies of key donor countries (including the US) and 

international banks had a devastating impact on Haiti.   Enacted by a government and 

business elite who saw these policies as a golden opportunity to make money, the 

internationally-driven Tawanization of Haiti neglected what Francis Fukuyama has 

pointed out as the key to Taiwan’s own success: a necessary investment in universal 

education and agrarian improvement before investing in factories.2  Haiti’s people were 

viewed internationally and by local elites strictly as pliant and ample cheap labor.  

Education might make them ornery.  Avoid it. Why invest in agriculture when cheaper 

food – heavily subsidized imported flour and rice – could feed Haiti’s growing urban 

masses?  In the late 1970’s Haiti did not need to import food.  Today, it imports some 

55% of its foodstuff, including 360,000 metric tons of rice annually from the US.3  

The folly of these policies was seen in early 2008, during the global crisis of rapid and 

uncontrolled commodity price increase, when that rice, still readily available, was no 

longer cheap and the urban poor took to eating mud cookies to survive.  Another spin- 

off of these fallacious policies of the 80’s was political instability.  Poor Haitians took to 

the streets in early 2008 to protest “lavi chè” (the high cost of living), with the result 

being the ouster of the government headed by Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis 

who, coincidentally, had just won praise from the US and the International Financial 

Institutions (IFIs) for the creation of a national poverty reduction and economic growth 

strategy that would serve as a blueprint for developing all of Haiti, and reversing the 

long history of rural neglect. 

Rural neglect combined with migration to cities, moreover, placed considerable 

pressure on those still in the countryside to provide the wood and charcoal the 

burgeoning urban population required.  Here was a recipe for desperately poor people 

2 

 Francis Fukuyama, “Poverty, Inequality and Democracy: The Latin American Experience,” Journal of 

Democracy 19, no. 4 (October 2008). 

3 

 Op.cit, Maguire, “Haiti After the Donor’s Conference” 

Page 5 of 15 

to further ravish the environment.  Today, 25 of Haiti’s 30 watersheds are practically 

devoid of vegetative cover. 

Port-au-Prince, and other cities, particularly Gonaives, had become disasters waiting to 

happen as a result of these developments.  The vast majority of the 200,000 who 

perished on January 12th were poor people crowded on marginal land and into sub- 

standard housing devastated by the quake.  The vast majority of the thousands who 

died in the floods in Gonaives in 2004 and 2008 were poor people crowded on alluvial 

coastal mud flats and in river flood plains.  For Haiti’s poor, their country has become a 

dangerous place and a dead-end.  Is it surprising that Haitians seek any opportunity to 

look for life (chèche lavi) elsewhere?  As one peasant told me in the 1990’s, ‘we have 

only two choices: die slow or die fast. That’s why we take the chance of taking the boats 

(to go to Miami)’ (pwan kantè). 

Haiti had lost its balance in other ways, particularly in social and economic equity, and in 

the ability of the state to care for its citizens.  By 2007, 78 percent of all Haitians – urban 

and rural – survived on $2.00 a day or less, while 68 percent of the total national income 

went to the wealthiest 20 percent of the population.4  During the 29 year Duvalier 

dictatorship, Haitian state institutions virtually collapsed under the weight of bad 

governance.   Following the 1986 ouster of Baby Doc, who, ironically, was lorded with 

foreign funds that went principally to Swiss bank accounts, donors were loathe to work 

with successor governments – including those democratically elected.  Instead, they 

chose to funnel hundreds of millions annually through foreign-based NGOs that enacted 

‘projects’ drawn up in Washington, New York, Ottawa, etc. and that lasted only as long 

as the money did.  Haitians, by the early 1990s, were derisively calling their country a 

“Republic of NGOs” and by 2008, none other than the President of the World Bank, 

4 

 Maureen Taft-Morales, “Haiti: Current Conditions and Congressional Concerns,” Congressional Research 

Service Report for Congress, May 5, 2009. 

Page 6 of 15 

Robert Zoellick, lamented the cacophony of “feel good, flag-draped projects” that had 

proven a vastly inadequate substitute for a coherent national development strategy.5 

Without doubt, Haiti was seriously out-of-balance before the earthquake and Port-au- 

Prince was a disaster waiting to happen.  Many had feared that it would come by way of 

a hurricane; rather the earth shook.  Now, let us see how we might make a positive 

contribution in restoring balance to Haiti so that when, inevitably, the country is struck 

by another natural disaster – be it seismic or meteorological – it is less vulnerable and 

better able to confront and cope with the disaster. 

Rebalancing to ‘Build Back Better’ 

Allow me to stress two points:  we must be fully cognizant of past mistakes, such as 

those outlined above; and the key to ‘building Haiti back better’ is to work toward a 

more balanced nation with less poverty and inequities, less social and economic 

exclusion, greater human dignity, and a commitment of Haitians and non-Haitians 

toward these essential humanistic goals.  With this, Haiti can also achieve and sustain a 

rehabilitated natural environment, stronger public institutions, a national infrastructure 

for growth and investment, and relationships between Haitians and outsiders that are 

based on partnership, mutual respect, and respect of the value and aspirations of all 

Haiti’s people.   

What follows are ideas and recommendations based on not only my experience in Haiti, 

but on endless discussions/conversations with Haitian interlocutors.  In this regard, I 

should add that the principal reason for my visit to Port-au-Prince in early January was 

to deliver an address on prospects for rebalancing Haiti.  That presentation was made to 

an audience of 50 or so Haitian civil servants and policy analysts – some of whom I fear 

are no longer with us - who gathered in Port-au-Prince at a Haitian think tank. My ideas 

were received by them with great and at times animated interest. 

5 

 Robert Zoellick, “Securing Development” (remarks at the United States Institute of Peace conference 

titled Passing the Baton, Washington, DC January 8, 2009.  

Page 7 of 15 

1. Welcoming Dislocated Persons: A de facto Decentralization 

Since the quake, some 250,000 Port-au-Prince residents have fled the city, returning to 

towns and villages from which they had migrated or where they have family.  An 

estimated 55,000 have shown up in Hinche in Haiti’s Central Plateau; the population of 

Petite Riviere de l’Artibonite has swelled from 37,000 to 62,000; St. Marc’s 60,000, has 

swollen to 100,000.6  The flight of Haitians away from a city that now represents death, 

destruction and loss might become a silver lining in today’s very dark cloud.  If that is to 

be the case, however, we – both the government of Haiti and its international partners 

– must catch up with and get ahead of this movement.  Already underdeveloped rural 

infrastructures and the resources of already impoverished rural families are being 

stretched.  The provision of basic services to these displaced populations is an urgent 

priority.  If conditions in the countryside are not improved, the displaced will ultimately 

return to Port-au-Prince, to replicate the dangerous dynamics of earlier decades. 

To catch up and get ahead of this reverse migration, we should support an idea 

proffered by the Government of Haiti in Montreal last week: the reinforcement of 200 

decentralized communities.  As soon as possible, “Welcome Centers” might be stood up 

in towns and villages.  They can be temporary, to be made permanent later.  They can 

serve as decentralized ‘growth poles’ that offer multiple services, including relief in the 

short term, with health and education facilities attached.  Let us not forget that Haiti has 

lost many of its schools and among those fleeing the devastated city are tens of 

thousands of students.  Twenty five percent of Haitian rural districts do not have 

schools.  And schools that exist outside Port-au-Prince are usually seriously deficient.  

The reverse migration we are seeing today offers a golden opportunity to rebalance the 

education and health system of Haiti. 

The centers can coordinate investment and employment opportunities, as well as state 

services including robust agronomic assistance to farmers.  Haiti’s planting season is 

6 

 Trenton Daniel, “Thousands flee capital to start anew,” Miami Herald, January 23, 2010; Mitchell 

Landsberg, “The displaced flow into a small Haitian town,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2010; data from 

MINISTAH headquarters in Hinche.    

Page 8 of 15 

almost here and now more than ever the country needs a bountiful harvest.  Displaced 

people working as paid labor can reinforce Haiti’s farmers.  Infrastructure needs to be 

rebuilt – or built for the first time - including schools, health clinics, community centers, 

roads, bridges and drainage canals.  Hillsides need rehabilitation, particularly with 

vegetative cover and perhaps even stone terraces.  Providing work for not just the 

displaced, but to those they are joining in towns and villages throughout Haiti, will go a 

long way toward rebalancing Haitian economy and society, and toward repairing a social 

fabric ripped to shreds by decades of neglect and subsequent migration.  This is an 

opportunity that must be seized.    

2. Support the Creation of a National Civic Service Corps 

Since 2007, various Haitian government officials and others have been working quietly 

on the prospect of creating a Haitian National Civic Service Corps.  Citizen civic service is 

mandated in Article 52-3 of the Haitian constitution and, even before the quake, the 

idea of a civic service corps to mobilize unemployed and disaffected youth seemed 

attractive.  Now is the time for this idea to take off.  As I have recently written, a 

700,000-strong national civic service corps will rapidly harness untapped labor in both 

rural and urban settings, especially among Haiti’s large youthful population, to rebuild 

Haiti’s public infrastructure required for economic growth and environmental 

rehabilitation and protection; increase productivity, particularly of farm products; 

restore dignity and pride through meaningful work; and give Haitian men and women a 

stake in their country’s future.  It will also form the basis of a natural disaster response 

mechanism.7 

If this all sounds familiar, it should:  the idea of a Haitian National Civic Service Corps 

parallels the same thinking that went into the creation of such New Deal programs as 

the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).  

7 

 Robert Maguire and Robert Muggah, “A New Deal-style corps could rebuild Haiti,” Los Angeles Times, 

January 31, 2010. 

Page 9 of 15 

We have seen what these programs did to help the United States and its people stand 

up during a difficult time.   

In the aftermath of the storms that devastated Haiti in 2008, Haitian President Prèval 

asked not for charity, but for a helping hand to allow Haitians to rebuild their country.  

Today he is making a similar point.  Here is more symmetry between the Haiti and the 

U.S.   As Harry Hopkins, the legendary administrator of the Works Progress 

Administration, pointed out: “most people would rather work than take handouts. A 

paycheck from work didn’t feel like charity, with the shame that it conferred.  It was 

better if the work actually built something.  Then workers could retain their old skills or 

develop new ones, and add improvements to the public infrastructure like roads and 

parks and playgrounds.”8 Let’s help Haiti restore its balance by supporting a national 

civic service corps that can accomplish the same for Haiti and its people as our New Deal 

programs did in the United States decades ago. 

To reiterate, as was the case with our New Deal, Haiti’s civic service corps must be a 

‘cash-for-work’ initiative.  Cash-for-work will inject serious liquidity into the Haitian 

economy and stimulate recovery from the bottom-up.  Already there are various entities 

employing Haitians in a variety of cash-for-work programs.  This Monday, for example, 

the UNDP announced that it has enrolled 32,000 in a cash-for-work rubble removing 

program; a number expected to double by tomorrow.9  Coordination of existing efforts 

within an envisaged national program will be essential to maximizing how Haiti can be 

built back better – by its own people, with everyone wearing the same uniform. 

A special commission, similar to those established by President Prèval in 2007 to engage 

Haitians from diverse sectors to study and make recommendations on key issues 

confronting his government, might be established to oversee this coordination. (Other 

special commissions could be mounted to tackle other topics or needs and as a means 

of expanding the Haitian government’s human resource circle.) Such a commission 

8 

 Nick Taylor, American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, (New York: Bantam Books, 2008), p.99. 

9 

 UNDP, “Fast Fact of the Week,” accessed on February 2, 2010 at undp.washington@undp.org  

Page 10 of 15 

could be enlarged to include representatives of key donors.  A central figure like Harry 

Hopkins will have to lead the endeavor.  Perhaps such a figure could emerge from Haiti’s 

vaunted private sector.  In any case, let’s avoid a repetition of the cacophony of feel 

good, flag-draped projects. 

3. Strengthen Haitian state institutions through accompaniment, cooperation and 

partnership 

At the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Haiti held last week, witnesses 

spoke of the need to rebuild the Haitian state from the bottom up, and of working with 

Haitian officials – not pushing them aside.  I agree with these points whole-heartedly. 

This is not the time to impose governance on Haiti – that is a 19th century idea unfit for 

the 21st century. This is an opportunity to help strengthen Haiti’s public institutions, not 

to replace them. 

As pointed out above, the capacity of the Haitian state, never strong to begin with, has 

deteriorated progressively over the past 50 years.  In recent years that was due in part 

to international policies that circumvented state institutions in favor of private ones – 

both within Haiti and from beyond, and left the resource-strapped government virtually 

absent in the lives of its citizens.  In the aftermath of the quake, we see starkly the 

results of the decimation of the Haiti state.  The already weak state has been further set 

back by the death of civil servants and the loss of state facilities and physical resources.  

In this context, the government of President Rene Prèval and Prime Minister Jean Max 

Bellerive has taken much criticism for its response – or lack thereof – in the past few 

weeks.  

It is easy to kick someone in the teeth when he or she is already on the mat.  Rather 

than swinging our foot, however, we should offer our hand.  This is the time of the 

Haitian government’s greatest need.  Achieving cooperation and partnership, as pointed 

out by Canadian Prime Minister Harper at the recently-held Montreal Conference, is the 

Page 11 of 15 

biggest concern.10  Over the past four years, the Prèval government has won praise 

internationally – and among most in Haiti – over its improved management of the affairs 

of the state.  Political conflict, though still extant, has diminished considerably.  Haiti’s 

terribly polarized society is a little less polarized today.  Moderation and greater 

inclusion – not demagoguery and a winner-takes-all attitude – have worked their way 

into the ethos of the Haitian political culture.  Partnership to strengthen the Haitian 

state was on the horizon following the ‘new paradigm for partnership’ agreed to at the 

April 2009 Donors Conference.11  Let’s stay that course.  Generations of bad governance 

and a zero sum political culture are not turned around overnight. 

Quietly, but steadily in the post-quake period, the Haitian government has been picking 

itself up by its bootstraps beyond the photo-ops and glare of the cameras to 

reassemble, and then to reassert, itself.12  Still, given the magnitude of this catastrophe, 

the government is overmatched.  Any government would be.  This is not the time to cast 

aspersions.  It is the time to work in partnership and to accompany Haitian leaders 

through their time of loss and sorrow, into a more balanced and better future.    

4. Get Money into the Hands of Poor People 

In 1999, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto estimated that there was $5.2 billion in 

‘dead capital’ in Haiti, shared among 82 percent of the population.  Of this sum, $3.2 

billion was located in rural Haiti.  This amount dwarfed by four times the total assets of 

Haiti’s 123 largest formal enterprises. 13  This capital, principally in the hands of poor 

people in the form of property, land, and goods, is considered ‘dead’ because it cannot 

be used to leverage further capital for investment and growth.  To free it up, clear titling 

would be required along with a reduction of red tape and corruption, and a brand new 

10 

 CTV.ca News Staff, “Foreign Ministers vow to be ‘partners’ with Haiti,” accessed on January 30, 2010 at 

www.http://ottawa.ctv.ca/servlet/an/plocal/CTVNews/20100125/Haiti_conference_100125/2010 

11 

 Government of Haiti, “Vers un Nouveau Paradigme de Cooperation,” April 2009 

12 

 Jacqueline Charles, “Haiti President Rene Preval quietly focuses on ‘managing country,” Miami Herald, 

February 2, 2010 

13 

 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of  Capital (New York:Basic Books, 2000). 

Page 12 of 15 

attitude toward Haiti’s most vibrant form of capitalism – its’ informal economy – and 

the poor entrepreneurs who make it work.  Doubtless, you have seen post-quake stories 

of how Haiti’s grassroots entrepreneurs began rebounding within days. 

A key to Haiti’s recovery – and, yes, to its rebalancing – is to get capital into the hands of 

grassroots entrepreneurs – be they still in Port-au-Prince or elsewhere in the country.  

Formalizing dead capital – which will be a long, tedious and conflictive path, but one 

that perhaps can be facilitated now through such steps as the issuance of provisional 

land and property titles that subsequently are fully formalized – is but one way of 

getting liquid assets into poor people’s hands.  Others, more expeditious, include: 

 More small loans (microcredit) to entrepreneurs, particularly those who 

produce something, including farmers.  Farmers with capital will not just 

produce more food, but will increase employment. Government studies 

indicate that a 10% increase in man-hours on farms will create 40,000 new 

jobs.14  One strong candidate to improve microcredit throughout Haiti is an 

organization called FONKOZE.  With more than 33 branches country-wide, it 

serves some 175,000 members, mostly among those who make – or made prior 

to their engagement with microcredit - $2.00 a day or less.  FONKOZE also 

facilitates the efficient and lower cost decentralizing of the flow of funds sent 

to Haiti from family abroad. 

14 

 Government of Haiti, “Rapport d’évaluation des besoins après dèsastre Cyclones Fay, Gustav, Hanna et 

Ike,” November 2008.  

(end of part 1 of 2 — go here for part 2 of 2)

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