青瓜视频

0:07 聽聽聽聽聽Madi Minges: From the School of International Service at American 青瓜视频 in Washington, this is Big World, where we talk about something in the world that truly matters.

0:15 聽聽聽聽聽Scott Freeman: When you look back at what occurred, right, the injustice first was the displacement, but after the agreement, that was 2017. People still have not received, we have this chart of when people received land, the delays continued five, six years after. And I think those delays are this second injustice.

0:40 聽聽聽聽聽MM: That was Professor Scott Freeman. He joins us today to tell us about the David versus Goliath story of more than 400 Haitian families who were displaced by a development project, and what lessons on international development can be learned from their story.

0:56 聽聽聽聽聽MM: According to its website, the Inter-American Development Bank is the primary source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean. Since its creation in 1959, the IDB's mission is to, "Improve the quality of life for millions of people in 26 borrowing member countries across Latin America and the Caribbean."

1:16 聽聽聽聽聽MM: It's certainly a noble mission, but what happens when projects financed by the IDB designed to improve quality of life for folks en up being called into question by the same people it's designed to help? I'm Madi Minges and I'm joined by Professor Scott Freeman. Scott is a professor here at the School of International Service in the Department of Environment, Development, and Health. He's an anthropologist whose work exists at the intersection of anthropology of the environment, critical development studies, and the anthropology of labor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In 2024, Scott published an article with the Accountability Research Center at SIS focused on the 2011 displacement of farmers in Northern Haiti, which is the topic of today's episode. Scott, thank you for joining Big World.

2:00 聽聽聽聽聽SF: Thanks for having me.

2:01 聽聽聽聽聽MM: Scott, so I mentioned you published an article alongside a few co-authors entitled After the Agreement: Implementing Remedy for Displacement in Northern Haiti. Can you start our conversation by giving us some background on your research and on the 2011 Caracol industrial park displacement situation in Haiti?

2:20 聽聽聽聽聽SF: Yeah, I've been working in Haiti since about 2011, and most of my work had been in the south, in the southern peninsula. And it's always been at the intersection, sort of looking at how aid projects affect farmers on the ground and how farmers understand those aid projects. In I think about 2017, I, through the Accountability Research Center here at SIS, I was introduced to Milostene Castin, who is an organizer who had been working to organize these 400 families who had been displaced. I'd heard of his work, it was well-publicized sort of in the circles of Haitian academics and people concerned about human rights. Because after the earthquake that happened in 2010, there was this huge investment, and the investment didn't happen where you would have expected. The earthquake happened in Port-au-Prince, in Leogane, and in both of those places, there's still lots of rubble, still issues with homelessness, finding places for people to live.

3:38 聽聽聽聽聽SF: But there's this big investment in the north of Haiti. And the idea was that by building a factory, a textile factory, there would be an incredible amount of jobs provided to Haitians in the country. And there's varying logics for that. The idea of the manufacturing park was not new. It fit in line with what economists said should happen in Haiti's rebuilding. The spot where they wanted to build was occupied by 400 families' farms. This is where their agricultural land was. But it appeared through the documents that were produced that no one really lived there, and this was sort of vacant land.

4:34 聽聽聽聽聽SF: Through a process by which IDB and the Haitian ... So this was a project that was lent to the Haitian state, but it wasn't just the IDB, it was USAID and the State Department. So there was multiple actors that were really pushing for this project. And farmers were presented with information, asked to sign documents in French that they couldn't read or understand, and all of a sudden they were landless. The story of the displacement is actually a story of this idea of a manufacturing plant that would satisfy sort of very particular economic visions of what Haiti should be doing. And the result of that was a very real prioritization of industrialization over agricultural livelihoods. It wasn't just that this was a priority on paper. Farms were bulldozed in order to build an industrial park.

5:47 聽聽聽聽聽MM: So their land was essentially destroyed. Not only were they displaced, but their land was destroyed to make way for this industrial park. What did the families do? How did they react to this situation?

6:02 聽聽聽聽聽SF: So at first they were promised some compensation, but it became clear that this was really paltry and didn't at all compensate them for what they lost. And they had a couple of avenues. One was a legal avenue, but a legal avenue in Haiti was not a guaranteed win by any stretch of the imagination. The presidential administration at the time was hollowing out the judiciary, and ensuring that it was favorable to the party in power, which since that point has been the PHDK.

6:45 聽聽聽聽聽SF: The decision was made, well, the legal judiciary route would not lead to anything, right? There's no sort of independent judiciary that they felt would listen to their claims. So then they thought about what the other two major actors were, and one of them was USAID. But USAID does not have a mechanism for people affected by development projects to complain about what happened; the IDB does.

7:15 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And so this was, I'm sort of stating these facts like they are readily apparent. They're not. It took Castin and these 400 families a long time to decide how they would pursue this fighting back. And the whole thing was consensus-based. So it was getting 400 families together, talking about how they should organize themselves, getting a sort of a leadership group together that represented those families, voting them in, deciding what their attack would be, bringing that back to the larger group and getting approval. One of Castin's major goals was that at any given moment there was consensus, and if there wasn't, they'd go back and revise. And they got sort of plugged in with ActionAid, who helped them navigate the first part of realizing what institutions were at play, who they could appeal to, and ultimately, Accountability Council.

8:22 聽聽聽聽聽MM: I know from reading your research that these displaced families, and as you were talking about, they really joined together to create a collective, and almost eight years after their land was taken, they did get to an agreement with the IDB through this process that you were talking about. I'm curious if you can walk us through how did they get to this agreement and what did it contain?

8:47 聽聽聽聽聽SF: As I said, the legal avenues through the Haitian state were decided against, and the larger group decided to engage in dialogue. They wanted to meet with the IDB and essentially tell them what had happened. And that was a very explicit choice of theirs. That was the avenue that they thought would be most effective.

9:15 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And so, this took years. So the displacement happened in 2011. We got the, or the collectif and Accountability Council got the agreement in 2017. So it took six years of negotiations and going back and forth. It was this iterative process of trying out proposals, and revising, and meeting, and monitoring, and documentation of what they had lost, right? Because the first piece was to really demonstrate that these 400 families did live there, and had these livelihoods, and that this land was valuable, and that it wasn't vacant. And as that process went through the IDB, I think that it was very apparent that there had been a huge series of mistakes.

10:09 聽聽聽聽聽MM: And when they reached that agreement, what did they end up getting? What were the options put on the table for them?

10:15 聽聽聽聽聽SF: So the options presented to the families, and there were limited quantities of each of these, but it was receiving agricultural equipment, which was a water pump and irrigation materials. It was a small business program, and it was land. And so those were the sort of options in addition to getting training to work at the Caracol Park, that was a part of the compensation.

10:50 聽聽聽聽聽SF: There were other aspects, like receiving backpacks and school materials. But the principal one, clearly, is land. And land has been always the goal for any of these claims, because it's replacing what you've lost. So land is clearly the most important piece of this compensation. Only a limited number of families were going to receive land, but it was pretty huge. It hadn't been done before. Only in one other case was it even on the table, globally.

11:28 聽聽聽聽聽SF: So in many ways, this is groundbreaking, not just in Haiti, but globally. It's 400 agricultural families, who have limited literacy, in a language that is quite marginalized. Documentation of the agreement before Milostene Castin was involved, before they got involved, all the documents were in French. And so people had limited knowledge, limited access to the information, and they managed to organize and take on a huge international financial institution and get that institution to agree some land back. And so in part, this is a pretty incredible David and Goliath type of story.

12:17 聽聽聽聽聽MM: Now, I know that your report indicates that reaching this massive agreement was one thing, implementation was another. So I'd like to actually read a section from the report here. It says, "Implementation of the agreement has not been straightforward and has been marked by significant delays. Bureaucratic barriers such as the complex process of facilitating land transfers have slowed implementation substantially, causing additional hardship to already displaced families." And then the research goes on to say that the COVID-19 pandemic even brought further delays. So Scott, I know you've mentioned the Accountability Council. I know that you actually, the report states that you worked with them, says that you conducted interviews with more than two dozen of the families impacted by the land loss in 2011. I'm curious if you can share, through those conversations, what did you find out about how the delayed implementation of this agreement has harmed families?

13:20 聽聽聽聽聽SF: Yeah, working with the Accountability Council has been really tremendous. They've been really brilliant about all of this. They started, as soon as they started working, doing interviews with a subset, a sample of the families who were getting compensation. And so they started those interviews before we started working together. And then I hopped on the team, originally with plans to go down there and do essentially a separate study that went beyond the survey interviews.

13:58 聽聽聽聽聽SF: What we did is a series of phone interviews that tracked the experiences of the individuals receiving compensation. And so we asked them about what their jobs were, how many people depended upon them for food, how many times they ate, what they were eating. And these were all self-reported, right? So these aren't perfect figures in terms of income and whatnot, but it gave us a really good idea of, writ large, how people were talking about food, education, who was living with them, and their economic dependents. So our surveys really wanted to get at, well, what's going on in the lives of these families as they receive compensation?

14:51 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And when we started, we met in 2017 and immediately started talking about how we should write something about the success of this agreement. But as the years went on, we realized that this paper was not going to be a paper about success. This was going to be a paper about challenges. I mean, I think that's what you don't necessarily see reading the report, is how long this has just been going on.

15:18 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And the reason was, anytime we sat down to write, we realized this is not the end of the story. This was we would be writing in the middle of the book. We wouldn't have the end. And so we wanted to get to a point where we could say what had happened. And the longer that we waited, the worse things got. As we interviewed people, we realized that there was some maybe modest statement of improvement for some, but by and large people really suffered, because this implementation was so delayed and it was delayed in part because of COVID and an increasingly dire political situation.

16:08 聽聽聽聽聽SF: But really, this was slowed up by the bureaucracy of aid, the way that IFIs work with states. It was pushed along by some really important individuals in each institution, and I think that's worth noting, that this happened because there were people in each spot that said, "Yeah, this is the right thing to be doing."

16:38 聽聽聽聽聽SF: But there were a lot of hurdles. All of the families prior to 2011 had land to depend on. And land, in Haiti, is people's capital. It's the way that they produce their income. They can always depend on the land. They could rent it out to someone if they didn't want to farm it themselves, they could farm it themselves and sell the crops. It was the way that you could pay bills, generate income, the whole ... In many ways, these plots of land are like savings accounts. And to have lost that meant that when things got really dire in Haiti, there was just no way to produce food and income.

17:22 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And not only is it capital, but it's your ability to produce food. So you can sell some beans, but you also would always have beans for your own consumption. One of the women we talked to had was in the small business program, and so got a small grant to start a small business. She wanted to sell different types of soaps, shampoos, pretty standard small business in the countryside. And she got that money and in fact, couldn't use it for the shampoo and soap, because she couldn't pay for food and she couldn't pay for school. So that money didn't go to the small business. It went to just paying bills. And so those types of situations became more and more apparent in the surveys, in the interviews, and really gave us this overall picture of people whose situation was getting worse and worse after the agreement.

18:24 聽聽聽聽聽MM: I think, Scott, something that comes to mind for me, just kind of hearing you talk about the harms that this delayed implementation has caused is just the injustice of it all. And I'm curious, did you find that to this day, there are still folks waiting for a remedy?

18:51 聽聽聽聽聽SF: Yeah, people are still waiting for remedy, and some people have so lost hope in getting remedy for land that they just said, "Well, whatever. Give me the agricultural equipment option." The hope, for many people, has been lost. Now, there's still some folks who have received land. November of 2023, another family received land. So there's still a chance that other folks will get land. But I think if people are just saying, "Forget it, I'm going to change my option away from land because this is just taking too long and I just want something," I think that's a huge indictment of the process. I think it is injust. I think when you look back at what occurred, the injustice first was the displacement, but after the agreement, that was 2017, people still have not received ... We have this chart of when people received land. The delays continued five, six years after.

20:05 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And I think those delays are this second injustice. There's that Martin Luther King quote, that, "Justice delayed is justice denied." And I think that's what happened here. There were delays that occurred because of the way that compensation was structured, and because of the rules of the development bank, and because of the political and security situation in Haiti. And because of all of those things, people didn't get what they should have. And so I think justice was denied. This was a very, very, very imperfect process. This was a process actually allowed not the resolution of injustice, but the festering of injustice as the years wound on, and people who had lost land found themselves in worse and worse conditions because they didn't have something to depend on. The slow violence of this all is really notable, right? We're in 2025 now, and there's still people waiting for something that was agreed to in 2017.

21:17 聽聽聽聽聽MM: Scott, I'd like to round out our discussion by zooming out from this situation, and I want to ask you, what does this situation tell us about the international development system, and what lessons can be learned from this story so that situations like this can be less likely to occur in the future?

21:43 聽聽聽聽聽SF: One of the lessons is that this was really hard, and it shouldn't be really hard. It was really hard for 400 families to get together to figure out how to appeal to the IDB. They couldn't appeal to USAID, Haiti, which is the client of IDB, they couldn't really appeal to the judiciary system there. And they needed an organization like the Accountability Council, and that shouldn't be the case, right? It should be the case that the process is so simple and straightforward that anyone can take it on. Any group of people can say, "We've been wronged by this," and there's accordingly an independent evaluation of their claims. This is a world of bureaucracy and paperwork, and that world is not particularly friendly to small groups who do not have the skills and knowledge and literacies that are necessary to navigate that world in order to make claims that they've been wronged.

22:47 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And I think out of that comes a set of lessons for other accountability groups and civil society actors, which is, well, that's what we should aspire to. That's the sort of advocacy that we need to have. But right now, what we need to know is that if you do bring a claim to an independent evaluation or accountability mechanism of an IFI, getting the agreement is not the end of the line. It's kind of the beginning of a different type of fight, which is ensuring at every step of the way that it's being implemented and that it's being implemented in a fairly quick way. I think that the success of organizing, the success of getting the agreement was not entirely overshadowed, but a big part of it was overshadowed by the delays, the fight that everyone had to put up to just get those agreements implemented. But in the end, I think what's really clear is that an irrigation pump, and even a plot of new land will never replace the land that people lost when they were kicked off of their land.

24:08 聽聽聽聽聽SF: And I think that needs to be so clear in people's minds, and so clear in the minds of folks designing projects. I do want to say, Castin and I continue to work together on now preventative measures, like how can we prevent and how can we ensure that there are participatory land, cadastres or land registries in the area so that this doesn't happen again? And I think Castin is really sort of a continual optimist of, we did make inroads, right? This was an unlikely group of individuals who took on a huge institution and got something in return. And so that possibility is there, right? Other groups can do this, and there's precedent, and that's important, and the dial gets moved just sort of slightly. And this is a longer fight than just about this land and this factory. This is setting up things for the future so that this doesn't happen again, and setting up a set of maybe preventative measures so that this sort of displacement and opening up to multiple types of injustice doesn't occur.

25:20 聽聽聽聽聽MM: Scott, thank you so much for joining Big World to tell us this story. We really appreciate it.

25:26 聽聽聽聽聽SF: Thanks so much for having me.

25:28 聽聽聽聽聽MM: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American 青瓜视频. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen. If you like what you heard, please leave us a rating or review. Our theme music is, It Was Just Cold by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.