Even before the earthquake, Haiti was effectively a trusteeship run by the UN (which is to say, the U.S. with a little help from the other “Friends of Haiti”, Canada and France) and that trusteeship has only intensified since Jan. 2010. They are the ones that make the decisions, decide what gets funded, and what form recontruction will take. The big powers hastily drew up the PDNA which then became the reconstruction plan in the weeks (!) after the quake with only the barest of Haitian input. It was a reiteration of the “sweatshop model of development” which has been tried on Haiti since the late 1970s, and ignored the need for social housing completely. Indeed, the only provision for public housing in the plan was designated for the police force.

What is more, a few month after the quake, the Preval government estimated that the cost of acquiring land to relocate survivors was around $250 million. The government, completely broke, of course asked for funding from the IntCom. The response from UN spokespeople shortly before the UN reconstruction conference was to scoff that the government was wasting its time. Housing for poor people is not part of their plan.

The land question is not a question of lack of government capacity or attention to the matter, but a question of power. The government has the legal authority to begin settling the land question. As the ActionAid report notes, the government expropriated 450 hectares of land near the waterfront in PauP for redevelopment. The land was mostly neighborhooods like Bel Air and La Saline, slum areas that will be replaced by government office towers and businesses. Since it is poor people being expropriated, there is no problem.

However, when the government was considering expropriating large landowners so that survivors could be relocated, the response from the economic elites was swift and aggressive. The head of the Chamber of Commerce told the government that there may be a coup d’État if it went ahead with expropriations. After intense discussions and repeated threats from the landowners, the government finally shelved its relocations plans.

The land question will not be resolved in the interests of poor people until there is a democratically elected government with the power to act in their interests. The IntCom and the elite have done everything they can to stifle democracy and disenfranchise the people of Haiti, from the 2004 coup d’État to the Reconstruction commission to the recent exclusionary and fraudulent elections.