Haiti by Elizabeth Abbott

Author:Elizabeth Abbott [ABBOTT, ELIZABETH]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: HIS041000
ISBN: 9781468301601
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2011-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Duvaliers treated Haiti as if it was their private property. Their dictatorship did not permit them to make a distinction between the goods of the State and those of the Duvalier family. They behaved as if Haiti was their feudal kingdom and the coffers and revenues of their State their private property. The distinction between the Public Treasury and their private goods scarcely existed. The distinction was ignored to the point that the Duvaliers had blank check books for drawing on funds.

The system was breathtakingly simple. On the blank checks the Duvaliers would simply write the account number of a government department, the name of the beneficiary—often “Cash”—and endorse and cash the check. This economic despotism extended to all government departments, and the Duvaliers routinely raided all these agencies: (1) the Finance Ministry; (2) Tobacco Authority, which controlled the price stability of essential goods by buying and selling them; (3) the Flour Mill; (4) the State Lottery; (5) the State Gambling Commission; (6) State Automobile Insurance; (7) Teleco, the phone company; (8) Electricity of Haiti; (9) Cement of Haiti; (10) National Bank of Credit; (11) Tax Department. Simply, the Duvaliers had at their disposal the entire resources of the nation.

Another aspect of the Haiti/Duvalier finances was a system of establishing “extra-budgetary” accounts controlled by trusted Duvalier cronies. Frantz Merceron, the Finance Minister, alone oversaw extra-budgetary accounts worth $70.7 million. These moneys were siphoned from regular government revenue, and Duvalier drew on them by writing checks to himself, his family, and friends. Checks as large as $6.8 million were written.

Another form the embezzlement took involved forcing government agencies to write checks to three dummy agencies bearing the charitable-sounding name “Social Works,” one for Jean-Claude, one for Michèle, and one for the newly rehabilitated Simone. Though “Social Works” had no bank account, the Central Bank honored checks with any one of these three signatures.

Michèle also had her real foundation, and government organizations regularly issued checks to it. Michèle endorsed them and usually withdrew them in cash or deposited them directly into her personal account. Not that the Duvaliers were needy even on paper. Despite Jean-Claude’s small salary, the national budget provided for an average annual sum of $1.5 million for the expenses of his presidency, and Michèle had a monthly salary of $100,000.

But Michèle sometimes overspent. In 1983, when she had a bank overdraft of $284,617.25, her friend Merceron had an identical amount credited to her account. It was not that she was broke, but she preferred to keep her money outside Haiti. Soon after her marriage, for instance, she deposited $14.3 million in her personal account at New York City’s Irving Trust.

Gourde-rich, the Duvaliers still had the problem of converting their money to greenbacks, negotiable anywhere. Central Bank Governor Jean-Claude Sanon aided them, cashing their gourde checks in dollars drawn from the Central Bank, repository of Haiti’s hard currency reserves. The Duvaliers then entrusted them to “mules” such as Victor Nevers Constant, murdered by Haitians in Paris before he could stash the cash into the Duvaliers’ bank accounts.

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