Sunday, May 11 marked the grim two-year anniversary of a tragic incident that CEPR has investigated and frequently blogged about: the DEA-related killing of four indigenous villagers in the northeastern Moskitia region of Honduras.  The victims – two wome

Last month Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald reported that the U.S. government had changed its plan for the development of a new port in support of the Caracol industrial park in Haiti’s north. The Herald report began:

After months of unsuccessfully trying to get private investors to cough up millions of dollars for the construction of a new, multimillion dollar port in northeastern Haiti, the U.S. government is scratching its plans and will instead revamp the existing port in the city of Cap-Haitien.

“The private sector was markedly unenthusiastic about investing in a new port,” said a U.S. government official familiar with the decision, but not authorized to speak publicly.

The new Fort Liberté port would have cost between $185 million and $257 million, and the U.S. government had committed to investing $70 million. A new port was viewed as being critical to the success of the nearby $300 million Caracol Industrial Park because the park’s five companies mostly ship out of ports in the neighboring Dominican Republic, a loss of valuable dollars to the Haitian treasury.

But while the Herald report points to a lack of private sector enthusiasm for the project as a key reason for its failure, an analysis of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports and contractor documents reveals that this project has been plagued by a lack of in-house expertise and planning from the beginning.

It began in September 2011 when USAID awarded a contract to MWH Americas to conduct a feasibility study for port infrastructure in northern Haiti. MWH had previously been found by the New Orleans inspector general to have overcharged the city on reconstruction contracts related to hurricane Katrina. As HRRW reported in February 2013, “Within two weeks of receiving the $2.8 million contract, MWH Americas turned around and gave out $1.45 million in subcontracts to four different firms, all headquartered in Washington DC or Virginia.” The contract was extended multiple times, with the overall cost increasing to over $4.25 million. Still, the GAO later found that further studies “still need to be performed,” because the USAID “did not require the contractor to obtain all the information necessary to help select a port site,” according to the GAO.

As we’ve described before, there is much controversy surrounding the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation’s investment in palm oil production in the Bajo Aguan, Honduras. Wealthy landowners have been engaged in a violent conflict with campesinos, resulting in the deaths and forced evictions of many campesinos at the hands of security forces both governmental and private. The company at the heart of the investigations and recent media scrutiny is Dinant, owned by the man many consider to be Honduras’ wealthiest and most powerful, Miguel Facussé.

As we have previously noted, Facussé has admitted the killings of some campesinos by his security forces. A 2011 human rights report from the Food First Information and Action Network, the International Federation for Human Rights and other groups details a number of killings, kidnappings, torture, forced evictions, assaults, death threats and other human rights violations that victims, witnesses and others attribute to Facussé’s guards.

Facussé has attempted to clean up his public image before, such as a notable December 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Times in which he made the case that just because he keeps a gun on his desk, and just because he “keeps files of photos of the various Honduran activists who are most vocal against him,” and just because one of his private planes was used to fly the foreign minister out of the country (against her will) during the 2009 coup, and just because he was aware of the coup plans before the coup, he’s really not a “bad guy.” And sure, he admitted he “probably had reasons to kill" attorney Antonio Trejo Cabrera, who worked on behalf of campesino groups in the Aguan, but Facussé said, "I'm not a killer."

Now Dinant has demonstrated a similar PR savviness. Writing in the Guardian after a series of articles examining the IFC/Dinant controversy, Dinant corporate relations director Roger Pineda Pinel noted among other things that “We have never engaged in forced evictions of farmers from our land; such evictions are undertaken exclusively by government security forces acting within the law and under instruction from the courts.”

Nicole WooThe Hill, May 8, 2014

Mark WeisbrotAl Jazeera America, May 7, 2014

Two weeks after the Associated Press reported that the “old political party founded under the Duvalier dictatorship says it plans to enter candidates in Haitian elections,” President Martelly issued an executive decree naming one of Duvalier’s lawyers, Frizto Canton, as a member on the body overseeing said elections.

The holding of local and legislative elections, now more than two years overdue, continues to cause controversy and political gridlock in Haiti and consternation for the international community.

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and head of MINUSTAH, Sandra Honore recently warned in a press release, co-signed by the so-called “Friends of Haiti” group of countries, “that certain important decisions to advance toward the holding of the elections have yet to be made” and that the “inability to hold elections in 2014 could lead to the dissolution of Parliament in January 2015 which would engender yet another political crisis, with unpredictable consequences for the future of Haitian democracy.” This followed visits by members of the U.S. Congress, U.S. State Department representatives and the Club de Madrid, ostensibly to push elections forward.

The gridlock between the senate and the president stems from the composition of Haiti’s electoral body, tasked with organizing and overseeing the electoral process. The international community and President Martelly have continually referred to the “El Rancho Accord,” which was the result of negotiations brokered by the Catholic Church, as outlining the composition of the electoral council. However, the president of the Senate, Simon Dieuseul Desras recently stated, as reported by Haiti Liberté, that, “the El Rancho Accord has no binding force and cannot override either the Constitution or the Electoral Law.” Desras added that a “trusted electoral council of consensus would not take one week to set up.”

Martelly, apparently frustrated by the Senate’s position, decided to move unilaterally today. The AP reports:

Haitian President Michel Martelly announced Tuesday he has appointed a new council to oversee legislative and local elections that are two years overdue, an important step to organizing a vote whose tardiness has frustrated many.

In a posting on his Facebook page and in a separate email, the leader said that the newest member of the council is Frizto Canton, a high-profile attorney who is defending former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier against human rights abuse and embezzlement charges.

Four years ago today, the Dow Jones dropped almost 1000 points in minutes. This frightening episode, now known as the Flash Crash, demonstrated how computerized high-frequency trading (HFT) could exacerbate swings in financial markets to dangerous magnitudes.

On this anniversary, coincidentally, several European nations announced that they have agreed move ahead with a multi-national financial transaction tax (FTT) by the start of 2016 at the latest. While originally proposed in response to the 2008-09 world financial crisis, the EU FTT has received renewed attention as an instrument to help slow down overheated trading as well.

Nate Singham
Truthout, May 5, 2014