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he key decision, however, involved the creation of a mainly foreign body to decide on the allocation of these promised billions, the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). The commission is jointly chaired by Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, and former US President (and former Haiti occupier) Bill Clinton. (Original plans for a 24-member board – 11 Haitians along with 13 foreigners representing international financial institutions and the larger donor nations – had to be revised, in the face of subsequent protests, to allow for numerically equal Haitian/foreign representation). Once plans are approved by this IHRC, another group of foreign technocrats and World Bank officials will then supervise the subsequent spending.[44]

Today, Patrick Elie notes, 'Haiti is the most privatized country in the world. Almost everything that could be privatized here has been, and the only reason prisons have not been privatized is because it is not yet profitable for them to do so.'[49]

With modest job creation and credit facilities in the countryside, with small amounts of money for seeds and fertiliser, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out in late January, 'Haiti's food production could double or triple in the next few years, sustaining the country and building a new rural economy.'[53] But as usual, Haiti's small farmers received little or nothing. Only a paltry US$23 million of the UN's initial request for emergency funds was intended for the agrarian sector, and by the end of February the UN admitted that even this money still hadn't been received. 'In the countryside', Reed Lindsay observed in early March, 'there is no evidence of any humanitarian aid, much less for agriculture.'[54] As a result, confirms Mark Schuller, 'with no jobs, no aid, no prospects of rural development, nothing to keep people in the provinces, the bulk of this reverse migration was undone, and Port-au-Prince is once again a magnet for those seeking jobs.'[55]

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, up in the higher, wealthier and mostly undamaged parts of Pétionville everyone already knew that it's the local residents 'who through their government connections, trading companies and interconnected family businesses' would once again pocket the lion's share of international aid and reconstruction money.[56] At the same time, their counterparts in the US, represented by powerful think tanks and lobbyists like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute or the RAND Corporation, were quick to see that (as RAND's James Dobbins, one of Clinton's former special envoys to Haiti, put it) 'this disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms', including 'breaking up or at least reorganizing the government-controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.'[57]

Foreign investors and foreign NGOs, needless to say, also tend to need foreign protection to guarantee their security. True to form, once the initial wave of foreign troops began to subside, private, neomilitary security companies like Triple Canopy (which took over the Xe/Blackwater security contract in Iraq in 2009 and Overseas Security & Strategic Information began promoting their services.[71] As an Al Jazeera report on a 9-10 March meeting of security companies in Miami explained, firms like GardaWorld, DynCorp and their ilk naturally 'see new disaster areas as emerging markets.'[72]

There are currently around 25,000 garment-sector workers in Haiti, making T-shirts and jeans for labels like Gildan, Hanes, Gap and New Balance. Factory profit margins average about 22 per cent.[74] Canadian garment manufacturer Gildan is one of several companies that expanded production in Haiti after the 2004 coup, reassured by a post-democratic regime that promised a tax holiday and a moratorium on wage increases.

As some investors and their advisors are candid enough to admit, Haiti's most significant 'comparative advantage' remains the stark fact that its people are so poor and so desperate that they are prepared to work for no more than a twentieth of the money they might receive for comparable employment in the US.[78]

Given his commitment to this old agenda, notes Richard Morse, UN envoy Bill Clinton isn't bringing change or hope to Haiti. 'Clinton, along with USAID, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations are bringing more of the same to Haiti: More for the few and less for the many.'[80]

as Schwarz demonstrates in convincing detail in his 2008 book ‘Travesty in Haiti’, food aid has been deployed systematically and deliberately, from the beginning of its intensive use in the 1980s, to 'destroy the Haitian economy of small farmers.'

Today, Isabeau Doucet writes, 'tens of thousands of families are subject to a relentless cycle of exodus, dispersal, and brutality at the hands of the Haitian National police and privately hired armed groups, in violation of Haitian and international law.' In some places, 'rather than clearing rubble from the streets, bulldozers are plowing over the tents of undesired "squatters" only to resettle IDPs expelled from elsewhere.'[95]

As you might expect, there is no such sense of loss among people more directly concerned by the disaster. Perhaps the most striking feature of the whole post-quake period has been the extraordinary hardiness and discipline of the hundreds of thousands people who have lost their relatives, homes and possessions, and who from day one began to organise themselves into new communities.

Grassroots organizations still meet regularly to develop their strategies for political change, as they have throughout history. Across the country on any given day, small groups perch on broken chairs under tarps in refugee camps, huddle amidst rubble in the courtyards of earthquake-destroyed schools, or sweat under thatched-roof gazebos […]. They are developing pressure points for housing rights and protection against rape for those in camps. Some plan information campaigns aimed at sweatshop workers, others programs to politicize youth. The agendas are seemingly endless.’[106]

In the election year of 2010, as in the previous elections of 2000 and 1990, the key political difference remains the division between (a) critics calling merely for a more efficient deployment of reconstruction resources and more 'reasonable' forms of cooperation with the occupying troops and aid workers, and (b) activists working to rekindle popular mobilisation for fundamental political change as the only viable means of regaining national sovereignty and establishing social justice.

Patrick Elie, likewise, stakes everything on a renewal of the popular movement that opened the door to political change in the late 1980s: 'I put all my money on our ability, at the level of the grassroots movement, to remobilise the Haitian people, to make them believe, once more, that they are the key players in politics.'[114]

Unfortunately, the main institutional legacy of the Lavalas mobilisation – Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas (FL) party – is itself both divided and largely excluded from the political process. After its landslide election victory in 2000, opposition politicians anticipated that FL might remain hegemonic for 'sixty years'.[115] The second anti-Lavalas coup and its aftermath have helped level the political playing field.

The FL leadership has made matters worse by indulging in years of sterile post-Aristide in-fighting.

In the election of 2010, as in the last four presidential elections in Haiti, everything will depend on whether this unity and this consciousness are strong enough to prevail over the vast and diverse array of forces drawn up to oppose them. The earthquake has sharpened and accelerated the basic political choice facing Haiti: Either renewal of the popular mobilisation in pursuit of equality and justice, or long-term confirmation of the island's current status as a neocolonial protectorate.