1
THE “COMPASSIONATE INVASION”
On January 12, 2010, Haitian president René Préval left his office in the white-domed National Palace, in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, a little earlier than usual. He and his wife, Elisabeth, wanted to stop home before attending a gala that Tuesday evening hosted by the US ambassador. The president pulled into the driveway of their private compound, got out of the car, and noticed his eight-month-old granddaughter Alessa in the courtyard with her nanny. He picked her up and pulled her close. It was 4:53 P.M.1
Eight miles underground, two tectonic plates shifted. The friction produced an explosion equivalent to some 475,000 pounds of dynamite.2 A deep rumble rose from the earth. The land beneath the Prévals’ feet began to shake. He fell to his knees; his wife was knocked back onto the ground. Their house swayed, and then they watched it collapse, unsure if their two daughters had been trapped inside. Within thirty seconds, the sky was dark—the low evening sun obscured by hazy clouds of dust and debris. Elisabeth turned to her husband.
“Let’s get out of here before the ground opens up,” she said, frightened.
But they stayed instead, and soon opened the gates of their compound and invited those in the street, confused, injured, in shock, to join them. Nobody could fully grasp what had happened, what was still happening. The earth shook again. The phone lines were down. The power was out. The president was unable to reach his aides or ministers.
Soon, the minister of the interior arrived on the lawn, covered in dust. The prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, arrived a short time later on a motorcycle. His car had been crushed. The chief of police, the justice minister, and a number of top advisors followed. The National Palace had collapsed, Préval learned. So had the Parliament, the police headquarters, the justice ministry. When the dust-clouded sun fell beneath the horizon line at 5:30 P.M., Port-au-Prince was darker than anybody remembered seeing it before.
Unable to communicate with anyone not already in his front yard, the president hired a handful of motorcycle taxis, motos as they’re known in Haiti. He sent an emissary on one to the US ambassador’s residence. The president got on the back of another and set off to tour the city, the magnitude of the death and destruction becoming more apparent with each turn. He passed the palace, seeing for himself the sunken white dome, the broken symmetry of the French renaissance–style façade. Throngs of people crowded outside the country’s largest public hospital, part of which lay in ruins. He continued to the Parliament, where nearby residents were scrambling to pull bodies, including the head of the Senate, from the rubble.3
Préval stayed on the streets until the sun rose the following morning. Since the initial fissure, the earth had barely stood still. By the time the president returned home after his all-night tour of the crumbled Haitian capital, there had been more than thirty aftershocks. All but one of the government’s twenty-nine ministry buildings had collapsed.4 Many of those who hadn’t left work early remained trapped in the rubble, buried under tons of mangled iron rebar and substandard concrete. “I went to a poor neighborhood called Bel Air, and everywhere there, there were dead,” Préval later remembered. “This is when I discovered the horror of the catastrophe.”5
For twenty years, Préval had stood at the forefront of Haiti’s democratic trajectory. Since the fall of the dictatorship in 1986, Haiti had seen more than ten heads of state6; only Préval had managed to get elected, serve a complete term, and then hand power over to another elected leader. He was scheduled to do so again in 2010. He had served as prime minister under Haiti’s first freely elected president, the liberation theologian priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and as president himself twice. Préval was Haiti’s “indispensable man” and “likely the only politician capable of imposing his will on Haiti—if so inclined,” the US ambassador had written to Washington the year before the quake.7 Despite their nearly two decades of familiarity, the US was still wary of Préval and his left-leaning background.
In contrast to his political stature, his friends called him Ti-René or Little René. With a neatly cropped salt-and-pepper beard framing his mostly bald head, Préval was always more comfortable behind the scenes. He once told a journalist that, when he retired, he just wanted to run a cigarette stall in a local street market.8 He preferred Marlboros. His lack of formality extended to how he dressed—most commonly in a white button-down shirt, slacks, and sandals, regardless of the circumstance. That’s what the president was wearing as he sat in his yard the morning after the quake, contemplating what he had just seen and what he would do next.9
The country and the government, which Préval had tried for two decades to build up, was now in pieces, parts of it scattered in his front yard. The images from his firsthand look at the devastation were planted deep in his psyche. In a matter of seconds, the country had changed, and so had he. He was criticized for not making any public statement that first night. The reality was that he had no idea what he could say to families who had just lost everything, who were still frantically trying to pull loved ones from the rubble. “As a person, I was paralyzed,” he remembered months later. “I couldn’t find the words.”10
But he had asked for help, starting with the US ambassador. He may not have had the words, but after his all-night tour of the city, one thing was clear. “The catastrophe was beyond the means of Haiti to respond,” he said.
* * *
ON A MAP, Haiti looks like a crab’s claw, open and reaching west into the Caribbean Sea from the Dominican Republic, the country with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola. Port-au-Prince, the capital and the center of the country’s economic and political life, is the claw’s hinge and sits just thirty miles from the border. Deeply impoverished communities occupying the land nearest to the bay surround the palace and most government buildings. Unlike most of its Caribbean neighbors, the capital’s shoreline is devoid of hotel chains or beach resorts. Instead, the land has long been used for industrial manufacturing and squatter camps for workers. The real estate is coveted by developers, producing an inherent tension over Port-au-Prince’s land use. Préval’s presidential compound, a white, boxlike, two-story home with a smaller guest house where his aides work, sits on a curving hillside to the southeast, higher up into the mountain range that protects the city and the country’s elite. The US ambassador’s residence stands about halfway between the top of the mountains and the bay.
On the afternoon of that same tragic Tuesday, US Ambassador Kenneth Merten had hosted Lieutenant General P. K. “Ken” Keen, the second-in-command of US Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, the Pentagon wing that oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. A former Army Ranger and Special Forces commander, he was on a routine visit from his Florida headquarters. After a long day, the two sat on the veranda of the ambassador’s residence, enjoying the setting sun and drinking a couple of Diet Cokes.11 Upstairs, Merten’s wife, Susan, and their two daughters were reviewing the guest list for a reception to be held in Keen’s honor, the reception that President Préval had left the office early to attend.12
At 4:53 PM, as the ground began to shake, Mrs. Merten noticed the palatial staircase inside the front entrance rippling “like waves in the ocean” while actual waves spilled over the edges of the pool outside.13 But the residence, constructed in 1938, stood. From the hillside perch, the city below appeared gone, hidden by a rapidly expanding cloud of dust. They could hear screams coming from the city’s densely packed neighborhoods in the distance and the collapsed Hotel Montana nearby, where the team accompanying Keen had been staying. On a typical day, one could see the historic hotel from the front of the home. The ambassador rushed around the corners of his property. There was nothing but a dark fog of debris in the foreground. The hotel was nowhere to be seen.14
Merten, at forty-eight, was a career foreign service officer and a portrait of US diplomacy—white, balding, slightly overweight, and friendly with everyone he was supposed to be friendly with. He had joined the State Department in 1987 and only a year later was sent to Port-au-Prince during the chaotic years following the end of the dictatorship and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s exile to France. After another two-year posting in the late 1990s, President Barack Obama nominated him for the ambassadorial position in June 2009. Twenty years after his first posting, Merten spoke fluent Kreyòl and had developed close personal relationships among Haiti’s political and economic elite.
Earlier in the day, he and General Keen had been discussing disaster preparedness for the upcoming hurricane season. Nothing, however, could have prepared him for what was happening now. In a panic, Merten attempted to reach the State Department in Washington, DC. There was no cell phone service. They were two miles from the US Embassy compound, but eventually, with a spotty landline, a two-way radio, and the general’s BlackBerry, they set in motion what would end up being the most expensive response to a natural disaster the world had ever seen.15
Fifty-nine minutes after the magnitude 7 quake, President Obama was briefed on the situation in Haiti, while an aftershock, the fourth in less than an hour, rattled Port-au-Prince once more.16 As the shockwaves continued to reverberate from the quake’s epicenter just sixteen miles southwest from the capital, reports of widespread ruin echoed throughout the mostly empty early-evening concrete halls of the federal government buildings in DC. At six o’clock, before Préval had even been able to speak with most of his ministers, a joint planning group met in Washington, bringing the US Agency for International Development (USAID) together with officials from the State Department and the Department of Defense.17
At nine o’clock, before Préval had even gotten on the back of a moto to survey the crisis, SOUTHCOM held an emergency meeting with the State Department. They still had no hard information about the situation on the ground but feared general lawlessness and widespread violence could take hold. According to a directive from the US Embassy, the immediate priority was the evacuation of American citizens. There were nearly fifty thousand of them in Haiti. By the time Préval’s aide had arrived at Merten’s residence, the US response was already in motion.18
Planning meetings continued throughout the evening. Just after one in the morning, SOUTHCOM reported to the State Department that two Coast Guard cutters were en route to Haiti.19 An hour later, the military Joint Chiefs convened via video conference. US troops had been sent to Haiti twice in the preceding fifteen years, once to help restore the ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency and then again to help stabilize the government after Aristide was overthrown a second time. The Pentagon continued to keep a close eye on the country, with confidential intelligence briefs prepared by SOUTHCOM in the months before the quake, providing leadership with regular updates on the number of Haitians attempting to migrate to America and any possible risks to stability.20 The earthquake, they determined, was a threat to US national security. The Joint Chiefs’ most immediate fear was that if the situation was not quickly stabilized, there would be a “mass exodus toward Cuba and the US,” according to an after-action report prepared by the US military.21
Unlike the palace and the president’s residence, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince, one of the largest structures in American diplomacy, remained standing. But the day after the earthquake, most of its employees were told to pack their belongings and leave. By daybreak on the following morning, as Préval was finally returning home from his tour, the first US ships had arrived off the coast, and a helicopter began evacuations of three or four people at a time, starting with a few injured embassy employees. Later, a steady stream of black SUVs ferried staff, their families, and their pets in heavily guarded convoys to the airport.22 With the control tower damaged, however, most planes could not take off or land.
* * *
MONA AUGUSTIN, HEAVYSET with thick dreadlocks wrapped up and over his head, had spent the early part of January 12 at his modest home in Delmas 30, a middle-class neighborhood between the seaside shantytowns of downtown and the relatively wealthy suburbs that filled out the hills above.23 Delmas is the main road between the two areas, and traveling up the hill is like climbing Haiti’s socioeconomic ladder. The street numbers increase as you go, and the higher the number, the wealthier the neighborhood.
Most days, in the afternoon, Augustin walked to St. Vincent’s School for Handicapped Children, where he volunteered teaching music. He played guitar and was the lead singer in a Haitian folk band. On January 12, however, Mona was ill. He’d tossed and turned in bed most of the day, fighting violent stomach pains and an aching fever. He never went to St. Vincent’s, where the school collapsed, killing almost all the children and teachers. When the earth shook, Augustin, too, had been buried in the debris of his home.
It was impossibly dark when Augustin initially came to. He was trapped, but it was as if the earthquake had shaken the illness from him. He was alive. And his wasn’t the only house on the block to collapse. He could hear neighbors calling to him, pulling up shards of concrete, zinc metal roofing, and splintered wood to release him. He listened to the screams of other neighbors just a few feet away. Somehow, he did not suffer any major injuries. A few blocks away, the Delimart, one of the biggest supermarkets in the capital, had folded into itself, trapping dozens of shoppers and employees inside. Other screams of pain and cries for help sounded far away and seemed to echo forever. After the first devastating blow, the fear and panic had not subsided as the ground had continued to convulse for hours. No structure in the neighborhood seemed safe. Augustin and about two hundred others sought some sort of refuge in a drainage canal. He blindly probed the fetid knee-deep swirl of dark water and debris, searching for a pair of sandals or something he could use to cover his feet, still bare since he had emerged from the rubble.
He’d lost a sense of time, he’d later say, but it was, at least, a few hours before the fear of a tsunami convinced Augustin and most of the others in the canal that it was time to look for safer ground. He started walking. Eventually, amid the wreckage, he arrived at a familiar empty lot. He wasn’t even sure how he got there, but he knew the space well. Neighborhood vendors set up their food stalls here, and neighborhood kids played soccer on the vacant and often trash-clogged field set back off the street.
Many others kept walking in search of higher ground, but Augustin stayed. By the next morning he knew this field was where he had to be and where his old neighbors needed to come. Through his band, Augustin had international connections and friends with places for him to sleep. Still, something greater seemed to be pulling him toward this nondescript, grassy lot. “People were injured,” Mona later remembered. “One person was missing a leg, but there was nothing for them. I said, ‘Wow, I need to do something. I need to help.’”
Copyright © 2024 by Jake Johnston
