The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer (11 page)

Generally, poor nations have much less access to disaster-related information, and even if they have access, the information itself or its dissemination is compromised in some way.
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The result? In poorer countries, an elite few with higher education and an ability to be part of a global community of scientists, or educated enough to know how to understand scientific information, know the risks they and others face. They also know how to protect themselves and have the means to do so. They know when a warning to evacuate makes sense and probably make their own decisions anyway. They can build strong houses on strong ground. They would never allow their houses to be built below standard.

Members of that elite may be part of the government or they may not be, but either way they control wealth and political power. The massive inequality in wealth across the globe and within countries—which, as discussed in chapter 1, determines the highly variable outcomes of disasters—is matched and exceeded by the massive inequality in the natural science–based knowledge of the dangers people face in risk-prone places. And just as the chasm between the natural and social sciences discussed earlier creates a void that can be
filled and exploited by scienciness, those who have knowledge can exploit knowledge inequalities for their own profit. Poor people in poor countries generally know the least and thus are most at risk both during and after disaster events. Which brings us to Haiti, the focus of the next chapter.

Chapter 3

Carnage in the Caribbean, Chaos in Concepción

In Haiti, profiteering is part of everyday life. It takes many forms, depending on where the profiteer fits within the society's structure. In 2010, there were two very different ways of life in Haiti. And those two ways life changed (or ended) when an earthquake shook the capital, Port-au-Prince, senseless on the twelfth day of that year.

In his book
The Big Truck That Went By,
1
Jonathan Katz devotes a chapter to describing the two classes in Haiti—
blan
and
neg.
Blan
derives from “white,” but it is used to mean “foreigner” regardless of skin color;
neg,
though derived from “Negro” or “black person,” is less related to skin color than to class. The neg are the lowermost class. It's a them-and-us distinction that Katz describes as the “cardinal division of Haitian society.” You are part of one or the other, and there is no movement between the two and no mixing.

The blan is made up of a very small group of wealthy people who run most of the businesses in Haiti. At the time of the quake, if you were part of that elite, you lived extremely well by any global
standard. If you were in this group, you were probably not Haitian by birth and you may not have had Haitian nationality; more likely you were French, Lebanese, Syrian, or German.

As one of the elite, you probably lived in the lush enclave of Pétionville, in a large mansion behind a strong high gate and protected by high walls topped with razor wire, broken glass, or steel spikes. You also had high levels of personal security—armed guards. The razor wire or broken glass on those high walls would be the main clue that, although you lived very well yourself, you lived well in a very poor country where the great majority did not live well at all. Those were the people the walls were meant to keep out.

Gated communities with high protective walls as barricades are hardly unique to Haiti; they are common in almost all major cities in Africa and Latin America and in many other places, the United States being no exception. You can sometimes mistake them for prison walls meant to keep people in, but they are meant to keep people out.

If you were living behind the wall in Haiti, you were certainly connected to the government in some way, even if quite indirectly. Many of the top government officials were your neighbors. The business you had, legal or illegal, relied on an almost complete lack of regulation and government oversight. You may have paid taxes in Haiti but probably not, and if you did it was a trivial amount. You didn't comply with labor laws, and you didn't provide your workers with decent wages or benefits. You may have been a government crony. And whether you were or not, you saw the government as a sort of theater of the absurd because it was so completely nonfunctional. The outcome of elections mattered little because the government didn't really govern. You had no interest in seeing effective government. A functioning government would charge taxes on business profits and impose regulations that governed how workers were paid and
should be treated. That wasn't in
your
interest. The government led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, champion of democracy and the poor, was threatening to you because it might have imposed such regulations. For that reason, it was never allowed to function.

So you profited from the fact that nothing functions well in Haiti, especially the government.

In 1994, while Jean-Bertrand Aristide was still in exile after one of the coups that ousted him, the US ambassador to Haiti called your group the “morally repugnant elite.”
2
You thought that was funny and joked about it with others in the elite, using the acronym MRE to refer to yourselves.

The other class in Haitian society in the first days of 2010 was comprised of the people in the overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly numerous lower group—the 99-plus percent who lived down the hill from the elite. If you lived that life, you lived in the slums of Port-au-Prince or in the destitute farming communities of the interior of the country, where poverty is at its worst. Your home was not much like the places where the rich lived, and there were no high walls protecting you. Your home typically was a rough cinder-block structure or reinforced concrete building. But many dwellings in Cité Soleil and other slums were nothing more than corrugated iron sheets put together as a sort of container for people, with a crude opening as an entry but probably with no actual door. No electric power, no running water, no toilet, no cooling, no real place to cook—just walls and a roof, not much more. And in the same way the homes of the rich in Pétionville looked much like the homes of the rich anywhere, your home in Port-au-Prince looked like the slum dwellings of the poor practically anywhere in Latin America or Africa.
3

Cité Soleil is home to maybe 400,000 (no census is available
4
) of the very poorest people in Haiti, some of the poorest people anywhere
in the world. Eighty percent of Haitians are thought to live below the poverty line, and 54 percent live in abject poverty.
5

The unemployment rate in Haiti is around 40 percent, as best as can be estimated,
6
but two-thirds of those in Haiti who do “work” have informal jobs, meaning they don't receive regular wages or benefits from an employer. They try to sell things—anything—in tiny stalls or on foot by the side of the road. It's hard work but it just doesn't get counted as employment when figures are tallied. And gross domestic product (GDP) doesn't include the productivity of people who work in this way.

Katz makes an important point about this sort of labor. In Haiti and in most poor countries, almost everybody actually
does
work. They are working hard to survive, often harder than many people whose work
is
tallied. The product of this work, however, never finds its way into GDP.

Living in Cité Soleil, the chances that you had a high school education were practically nonexistent. You probably couldn't read: Haiti's literacy rate is only 53 percent. That means that the chances that you had any sort of real job were virtually zero. You probably suffered malnutrition as a child. One in ten children dies before the age of five in Haiti, and malnutrition is the leading cause of death. Of those who survive, one-third show signs of severe growth retardation, and 40 percent of five-year-olds are stunted and have reduced brain development resulting from inadequate nutrition.

You were probably born in a rural area and migrated to the city for a chance at getting out of poverty, a chance that didn't materialize. Still, you were better off than if you had stayed on the farm. You didn't have a car. You might have had a bicycle or even a motorcycle, but chances are you mostly walked to get from place to place or took a “tap tap,” a converted pickup truck that carries passengers in a brightly painted enclosure over its bed.

Cité Soleil was established as a workers' community close to the former Haitian American Sugar Company factory; it was intended to give workers easy access to their place of work. Later it housed laborers for the export-processing zone established by the dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. But all that has collapsed, in no small part due to policies imposed by the United States. Now the walk to work is long, arduous, and dangerous.

Cité Soleil is also one of the most violent places on Earth.
7
Gangs run the slums, and their foot soldiers are known as the
chimeres
(ghosts). Chimere is a highly derogatory term and is applied as an invective to slander people of a different political persuasion or class. It is used widely to describe the poorest people in Haiti and to associate them with criminal behavior.
8
The gang structure is, in fact, very complex. People's motivations for joining gangs vary considerably and may include genuine political reasons.
9
But all gangs profit from the absence of effective law enforcement, and their members rob, extort, and rape with impunity.

One of the chief activities in Haiti is the random work of the countless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The word
countless
is not accidentally chosen—no one knows for sure how many there are. Working for one of these NGOs is one of the few ways a neg can make a reasonable salary and be treated reasonably well. UN peacekeepers make up a massively omnipresent force in Haiti. They are the troops of MINUSTAH—the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. As of January 31, 2015, there were 6,892 uniformed personnel comprising 4,658 troops and 2,234 police.
10
They come from an astonishing array of countries. The cholera outbreak in northern Haiti that began ten months after the earthquake (and had nothing at all to do with the quake itself, though it may have advanced more aggressively because the state was weakened by the quake) was brought by MINUSTAH troops from Nepal.
11
The
UN pays countries to provide troops for MINUSTAH, which is why troops so often come from poor countries like Bangladesh.

Haiti is the most unequal of all countries in Latin America, which is one of the most unequal regions in the world.
12
Even Chile, the least unequal of the Latin American countries, is still well down the list on global standards. Pétionville is a tiny oasis of wealth and Cité Soleil a broad desert of poverty in Haiti. There are many ways to express social inequality, but one way to get a sense of its magnitude is this fact: The 85 wealthiest people in the world today have a combined wealth equal to that of the bottom half of the world's entire population.
13
That comparison might be even more stark in Haiti, where the poor are so very poor and so numerous, and the elite so wealthy and so few by comparison. Individuals in the Haitian elite may have wealth equal to the sum of the income of as many as 2 million of the poorest Haitians. The World Bank has estimated that the richest 20 percent holds more than 65 percent of the country's total income, while the poorest 20 percent holds barely 1 percent.
14

The earthquake started blanket bombing the city of Port-au-Prince at 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010. The most intense barrage was short, shaking the ground for only 10 or 11 seconds. The onslaught came from the west, from a region near the town of Léogâne, which was flattened on the way. Destruction was indiscriminate; the homes of the rich and the homes of the poor were all targets. Even the presidential palace scored a direct hit.

The first shock was followed by more than 60 aftershocks in the next days and weeks. The capital city had no defenses. These aftershocks knocked down just about anything still standing, much of which was weakened by the first attack. When the aftershocks ceased, more than 200,000 homes had been destroyed or severely damaged;
most of them belonged to the poor.
15
Damage maps and photos of the Port-au-Prince area taken from high altitude look like damage maps from the firebombings of German cities toward the end of World War II. Vast tracts of buildings were brought to rubble heaps in both places. The damage seems almost capricious—some buildings stand essentially undamaged among the ruins of others. Some areas look to be 100 percent flattened; others appear unscathed.

Just how deadly the sacking of Port-au-Prince was will never be known. In massive events such as the Haitian quake, most morgues fail to function. In New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina struck, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency established a DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team) facility, a temporary morgue with volunteer morticians, in the town of St. Gabriel, a considerable distance from New Orleans, to compensate for the submerged and mostly inoperative morgues in the city itself. Nothing of that sort happened in Haiti. Bodies, mostly unidentified, were brought to vast open burial sites by the truckload.

In the early aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, the Red Cross
16
estimated that around 50,000 people had died, in accord with the initial estimate from the Haitian government (which may have merely been a repetition of the Red Cross figure). Several revisions followed, until the official death toll was put at 220,570—though figures as high as 300,000 had been mentioned.
17
If the official toll is correct, it equals or exceeds the death toll from the 2004 Great Sumatran earthquake and tsunami, which affected a vast area around the Indian Ocean. Such a high mortality figure is not entirely unreasonable. Port-au-Prince was a densely crowded city. Almost no buildings were constructed to be earthquake resistant.

The Haitian government eventually raised its total count to 300,000. Most major relief agencies—Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, Doctors Without Borders, and others—adopted a figure closer
to an earlier government estimate of 230,000 or else finessed the issue by stating that “several hundred thousand” had died. On the first anniversary of the quake, the government put the death toll at 316,000. A very high death toll was inevitable, but that number is probably an overstatement.

Two sources of information have suggested that the Haitian death toll may be exaggerated. Netherlands Radio Worldwide claimed that “only” 52,000 people had been buried at official burial sites, the only places where any attempt was made to keep a count of the dead.
18
The article also asserted that the government reported 20,000 to 30,000 deaths in the coastal town of Léogâne, close to the quake epicenter, whereas Léogâne authorities themselves said they had buried 3,364. The article further reported that the government claimed 4,000 dead in the town of Jacmel, whereas a French aid group whose workers were involved in burying the Jacmel dead reported only 145 bodies. Jacmel authorities, the report went on to say, settled on a death toll of between 300 and 400.