L'Échec de l'aide internationale à Haïti: Dilemmes et

égarements by Ricardo Seitenfus (review)

Pierre Minn

Journal of Haitian Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp.

173-175 (Review)

Published by University of California, Santa Barbara

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhs.2018.0012

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707409

[200.239.65.25] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 16:37 GMT)

 Book Reviews 173

L’Échec de l’aide internationale à Haïti: Dilemmes et égarements.

By Ricardo Seitenfus. Translated from the Portuguese by Pascal
Reuillard. Montreal and Port-au-Prince: CIDIHCA and Les Éditions de
l’Université d’État d’Haïti, 2015. ISBN 978-2-89454-3306. 421 pp. $40.00
CAD.

Review by Pierre Minn

On one level, critiques of international aid and interventions must fight

an uphill battle. They work against dominant narratives and widespread
assumptions that international charitable organizations do good, that the
relief and development programs of wealthy governments straightforwardly
improve living conditions in poorer countries, and that global political
and financial systems favor progress, success, and eventual equality for
all. Yet on another level, persistent poverty and growing inequalities
have fueled suspicions that none of these assumptions are correct and
that international aid and development are dysfunctional or exploitative,
fueling the interests and greed of rich nations. Haiti is often the exemplar
of aid gone wrong: a country that, despite (or because of) its saturation
by international projects and programs, persists as a site of widespread
deprivation, absent or crumbling infrastructure, ineffective governance,
and ongoing precarity in nearly all spheres of daily life.
Exposé critiques of aid in Haiti abound, but they have been produced
primarily by journalists and scholars. What makes Ricardo Seitenfus’s
volume such a unique contribution is the author’s role in the systems that
he critiques. Seitenfus (now a professor in the Faculty of Law at the Federal
University of Santa Maria, Brazil) was the Special Envoy of the Brazilian
government in Haiti from 2004 to 2008 and the Special Representative
of the secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS) to
[200.239.65.25] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 16:37 GMT)

Haiti from 2009 to 2011. This means, of course, that he was holding this
crucial position during the devastating earthquake of January 2010. His
book, first published in Portuguese, was translated into French shortly
afterward. Seitenfus’s work thus became much more accessible to a Haitian
scholarly audience than most texts about the country, which are published
primarily in English. (A group of Haitian students, led by sociologist Hérold
Toussaint, recently published a critical response to Seitenfus’s account.1
L’Échec de l’aide internationale is divided into three sections. In the first,
Seitenfus traces Haiti’s history from colonial times to the contemporary
period, with chapters devoted to the colonization of Saint-Domingue and
the postrevolutionary era, Haiti’s place in international relations, and the
rise and fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Two especially insightful
174 Book Reviews

and informative chapters detail the roles played by Latin American

nations in Haiti’s politics, with particular attention to the place of Brazil
in MINUSTAH. They are particularly welcome given that most analyses
of international relations in Haiti focus heavily on US–Haiti dynamics.
The second section describes the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake: it
criticizes the inefficacy of the immediate response to the disaster and
details the shortcomings of the International Commission for Haiti Relief
(ICHR) established after the quake. Seitenfus names specific individuals
he blames for irresponsible or unethical behaviors, including prominent
leaders of MINUSTAH and the OAS, who he claims jockeyed for power
and put their own countries’ interests before those of the Haitian people.
In particular, he criticizes the UN’s handling of the cholera epidemic
that was introduced by MINUSTAH soldiers. A chapter is devoted to a
critical appraisal of international NGOs for their exclusion of the majority
of Haitians in decision-making processes, and another to his perspectives
on President René Préval. Seitenfus offers both a critical assessment and
a respectful appraisal of Préval’s strengths and weaknesses in what was
certainly one of Haiti’s most challenging presidential mandates.
The third and most compelling section of the book details the
involvement of MINUSTAH leaders and other powerful international
actors in the 2011 election, which led to the choice of Michel Martelly as
Haiti’s president. Seitenfus claims that Haiti’s provisional electoral council
was pressured by MINUSTAH and the US government to alter the results
in order to ensure that the Unité candidate ( Jude Célestin) would not
advance to a runoff election. He writes, “The Recounting Mission [the
Joint OAS-CARICOM Electoral Observation Mission] pursued two
objectives: to keep Jude Célestin out of the second round and to impose
this decision as though it were legal according to the Constitution and
Haitian electoral law” (373).
Overall, L’Échec de l’aide internationale is extremely ambitious, aiming to
be an analysis of Haitian politics, an aid exposé, and a memoir. Its greatest
impact is perhaps in the latter respect, as an account from someone who had
access to the highest reaches of power in Haiti’s international governance.
Certain sections of the text are repetitive and disjointed. Seitenfus does
not seriously engage with the analyses of social or political scientists. He
often disappears from his own narrative, moving from a firsthand account
to more generalized claims that are not always supported by empirical
evidence. As Raoul Peck remarks in his otherwise positive introduction,
Seitenfus is at times guilty of the essentialization he condemns in others:
this manifests in his claims that the international community wishes to
“normalize an abnormal country” (60) or that “Haiti must be felt before
it is thought” (23).
Book Reviews 175

It is clear that one of the reasons for the book’s appeal in the Haitian
media was that the critique of powerful systems came from within: readers
critical of the “friends of Haiti” or the narrative of disinterested aid will
find validation in Seitenfus’s findings. The prevailing narrative is that the
author took risks in composing this account. (In fact, he was asked by the
OAS to leave Haiti the same day his criticisms were published in a Swiss
newspaper.) However, the critiques that appear in the book are widespread,
and Seitenfus is one of many who have pointed out that aid is ineffective,
that international relations as designed by powerful nations work in the
interests of those same nations, and that the majority of Haitians are
excluded from the processes that determine the future of their country.
Still, his account provides an important insider perspective on the inner
workings of powerful actors and institutions. It will be remembered less for
its analysis of power and institutions in Haiti than for the unique vantage
point from which it was written.

Note
1
See Stéphanie Balmir, Jefferson Bélizaire, Méleck Jean-Baptiste, Myriamme J.
Jean-Baptiste, Wisline Louissaint, and Patrick Saint-Pré, under the direction
of Hérold Toussaint, La Guerre des diplomates en Haïti: Quand Ricardo Seitenfus veut
sauver son Brésil (Port-au-Prince: Collectif des Universitaires Citoyens, 2016).

Visualizing Haiti in U.S. Culture, 1910–1950. By Lindsay J. Twa.

Ashgate: London, 2014. ISBN 0-978-1-4094-467299. 322 pp. $49.10
paperback; $73.77 hardcover.

Review by Jerry Philogene

Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) famously analyzes African

traditions and popular beliefs in Haiti, detailing their impact on Haitian
subjectivity. Such a revalorization of African folklore and folk culture in the
development of a society that Price-Mars so artfully detailed in his prose
was an equal quest for the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Perhaps, then, it makes sense that for many African American activist-
intellectuals, dancers, writers, and visual artists during this growing pan-
Africanist movement, Haiti became their aesthetic nirvana, however
misconstrued. An analysis of this flawed utopic “visualization” of Haiti
by US white and African American artists and intellectuals is at the core
of art historian Lindsay Twa’s generative book Visualizing Haiti in U.S.
Culture, 1910–1950.