Last week a transitional governing council was finally put in place in Haiti. The nine-member body’s mission is to stabilize Haiti — which right now is still all but controlled by violent gangs — and lead the country to desperately needed new elections.
But though it could take two years before all that happens, Haitians like Ralph Edmond aren’t waiting to talk about what their country needs to do next — when the gangs no longer rule.
“We'll have no choice at that point but to say: 'We’re here to do things a different way,'" Edmond told WLRN from Port-au-Prince.
"The key will be social inclusion,” he said. For decades, this has been arguably the most crippling ill in Haiti — which is in fact the most socio-economically unequal country in the western hemisphere, a place where the richest 20% hold two-thirds of the wealth while the poorest 20% hold less than 1% of it.
Edmond is 62 years old and a respected Haitian entrepreneur. Thirty-five years ago he started a pharmaceutical company in Port-au-Prince called Farmatrix. He kept it going after the destruction of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake — and he says he’s determined to reboot it again now after the gangs effectively shut it down in February when they started the bloody, coordinated offensive that currently has the capital and the country in their grip.
“It was very scary," Edmond says of that moment when the gangs virtually closed down the city and its businesses.
"It was very scary because you’re standing in the street with a bunch of young kids carrying machine guns — and then, you have to talk to them to calm them down.”
Fortunately none of Edmond’s 187 employees were killed or hurt. But he feels that while talking to the young, armed criminals terrorizing Haiti is indeed scary, it’s also necessary — especially since a third of Haiti's populationtoday is 14 years old or younger.
Edmond says that lack of social inclusion Haiti is notorious for doesn’t excuse the horror of the gangs, including the more than 1,500 murders the U.N. says they’ve committed already this year. But it does help explain why so many young Haitians have joined their ranks.
“We need in Haiti to address the issues where the gangs come from," Edmond insists.
"I mean, the areas where the gangs come from should be where we have the best schools and create the best opportunities. The best job opportunities and the best sports activity opportunities. I'm a youth karate instructor — I know how important that kind of thing is to kids from poor neighborhoods, and Haitian businesses need to start sponsoring it.”
READ MORE: Is it too late for anything now in Haiti except violent gang government?
Edmond, a University of Miami MBA, says he’s tried to set his own social responsibility example. Haiti, for instance, imports three-fourths of its pharmaceuticals — and the country's foreign aid NGOs buy most if not all the medicines they use there from abroad. So Edmond says he recently invested extra in making a new plant internationally approved so it can sell its products to those organizations, keeping more pharmaceutical revenue and jobs inside Haiti.
When Haiti’s chaos crisis is finally over — what many civic leaders are calling “the day after” — Edmond also plans to start a hand lotion factory in the country’s interior, using local plants like moringa. The goal, he says, is to keep impoverished rural youths from migrating from the countryside, where Haiti's inequality is the most severe, to Port-au-Prince, where they all too often end up joining gangs.
“My belief is the private sector is a powerful medium for Haiti’s improvement in that regard,” he says.
"We'll just have more hell to pay in the next 10 years if we don’t attack the root causes of the gang violence — the structural violence that exists in Haiti."Louis Henry Mars
Many Haitian-American entrepreneurs are thinking along the same lines.
“I want to teach and I want to show these youth that you can make money in agriculture — that you don’t have to move to Port-au-Prince to 'be somebody,'” says Marie Lambert, a Miami business analyst who owns a farm in southeast Haiti.
Before the gang violence crisis erupted, Lambert used the farm to train disadvantaged rural youths in agriculture. When it’s safe to return, she hopes to help them drive an agricultural revival in Haiti — where more than half the food was imported and almost half the population faced malnutrition even before the gangs hijacked the economy.
Street enforcers
But Lambert says more Haitian business elites, who rarely give rural Haiti a thought, will have to get onboard as Edmond plans to in order to make it work.
“If some of these elites actually go out and invest in the countryside and make money doing that," Lambert says, "I think that will change the social inclusion mindset.”
Yet there’s another mindset among much of the Haitian elite that needs to be changed. Many of them have been accused — and in some cases sanctioned by the U.S. and Canada — for actually sponsoring gangs as their security guards or street enforcers, and in many instances overseeing the trafficking of military-style rifles into Haiti for gang arsenals.
“Why use young guys with guns to get to power, to keep power or to bring down people in power?" asks Louis Henry Mars, executive director of the Haitian community development nonprofit Lakou Lapè in Port-au-Prince.
"That dialogue has to happen in this country, with the political class, with the private sector, with the whole of society.”
“We’re just going to have more hell to pay over the next 10 years if we don’t really attack the root causes of the violence — the structural violence that exists in this country, the sucking of the money by a few at the expense of the many," he warns.
Edmond, of the Farmatrix pharmaceutical company in Port-au-Prince, adds: “If we have a private sector that plays by the rules, this country could move forward so fast.
"I always wanted to be part of that.”
The thing is, though, come the day after Haiti’s gang crisis, the country’s private sector will need to create better rules than what it's playing by now — especially when it comes to providing youths with alternatives to gangs.
