American Red Cross squandered aid after Haiti earthquake, report alleges

Despite raising nearly half a billion dollars and allocating $170m to ‘shelter relief’, the aid organization built only six permanent homes, an investigation has found

The Guardian, Alan Yuhus, 4 June 2015

An undated American Red Cross handout photo of the aftermath of the earthquake
shows the devastation to homes in Haiti. Photograph: Matt Marek/American
Red Cross/PA

Despite collecting nearly half a billion dollars for Haiti earthquake relief, the American Red Cross has built only six permanent homes and seemingly squandered millions in the country, according to a new report.

A joint investigation by ProPublica and NPR uncovered rampant mismanagement, high overhead costs and deeply rooted acrimony from Haitians toward the aid organization. Among the investigation’s findings was that although the Red Cross apportioned about $170m to the category of “shelter” relief, and although it at first planned to build some 700 houses, it only constructed six permanent homes.

The report charges the Red Cross with consistent misrepresentation of its projects, especially in housing. The authors cite promotional materials that say the Red Cross provided more than 130,000 people with homes, and then note that that total includes people in “transitional shelters”, recipients of short-term rent assistance, and people who had been “trained in proper construction techniques”.

The Red Cross disputes the report and asserts it has “helped build and operate eight hospitals and clinics” and “move more than 100,000 people out of make-shift tents into safe and improved housing”. In a statement, the organization said it is “disappointed” by the “lack of balance, context and accuracy” on the part of ProPublica and NPR.

A major problem for the organization was leadership and staffing, according to the report. Integral positions, including experts for health and shelter, were left vacant for months and sometimes years. The positions that were staffed were predominantly held by expats or by people flown in from the United States, many of whom could not speak French or Creole.

In one 2011 document, Red Cross official Judith St Ford notes that there are “serious program delays caused by internal issues that go unaddressed”, including for cholera relief.

“There is a clear lack of foresight and planning,” she wrote, and “the lack of leadership ability has contributed to poor morale in the field.”

She also urged her superiors to hire more Haitians: “the implication that talented, smart, competent Haitians cannot be found in Haiti has to be dispelled.”

In its statement the Red Cross says 90% of its current staff are Haitians; the organization did not break down the hierarchy or positions of its staff.

“If they were an organization that had a real history in Haiti I think this would’ve gone a lot better,” said Justin Elliott, one of the journalists who co-wrote the report. “The entire Haiti reconstruction effort has been really problematic, but the outside groups that have done better have roots there, have Haitian people working at high levels, have people who speak the language.”

In one 2013 email published by ProPublica, CEO Gail McGovern admitted a project had failed and that she did not know what to do with a $20m remainder. “Now that the Northern project is going bust and we are still holding $20 million of contingency, any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?” she asked, before mentioning a mysterious “wonderful helicopter idea”.

Without Haitians in leadership positions, the Red Cross was particularly ill-prepared to deal with Haiti’s land tenure rules, a system so tangled and unforgiving that it has intimidated USAid and Vatican relief efforts.

Residents of the Jean-Marie Vincent camp for people displaced by the 2010
earthquake, wait for customers outside their tent where they have set up a
stand to sell rice, oil and canned goods in Port-au-Prince on 9 January 2013.
Photograph: Dieu Nalio Chery/AP

“Land tenure is probably the biggest stumbling block,” said Jonathan M Katz, a freelance journalist and author of a book about the earthquake, The Big Truck That Went By. The system has stymied aid organizations for years, and Katz said that for years aid organizations have “thrown up their collective hands and said ‘we don’t really want to deal with this.’”

The Red Cross entangled itself in a web of other organizations, often paying them to do relief work, themselves struggling in Haiti. This outsourcing is commonplace in the international aid industry, Katz said, and leads to inevitable but not necessarily unreasonable overhead costs. But eager to better solicit donations, organizations often try to downplay these costs.

The report notes that overhead charges by the Red Cross and its contractors undermine McGovern’s claim that “minus the nine cents overhead, 91 cents on the dollar will be going to Haiti.”

In one case, Elliott and his co-author, NPR’S Laura Sullivan, found that the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) exacted $1.56m in overhead from the American Red Cross’s payment of $6m, all to help give Haitians rental subsidies so they could leave tent camps. The IFRC said the costs were related to “administration, finance, human resources”.

In another case, the Red Cross commissioned Swiss and Spanish Red Cross societies to upgrade shelters, but still took 24% of the money for the project in additional overhead costs, according to the report.

Where exactly the $488m of the American Red Cross’s Haiti budget has gone is unclear, Elliott said, since “the whole international aid sector is pretty opaque in general. And the spending of the American Red Cross is incredible opaque. You can tell hardly anything from their disclosures.”

He said that the issue of money was particularly sensitive to Haitians who had coordinated with the Red Cross.

“They were furious basically over broken promises,” Elliott said. “About three years ago, the Red Cross told people they were going to build hundreds of new homes in this very hard-hit area, and this thing was just stalled. Over the next two years they had meetings with the community, handed out juice boxes and so on, and nothing happened for a long time.”

The Red Cross is now helping build a road and install solar lights in the area.

Katz said that the problems of the American Red Cross are “typical of the aid industry in general. The Red Cross is sort of the biggest kid on the block. Because they make way more money than anybody else, what they do is magnified.”

The interconnected NGOs and aid organizations of the world, ranging from the many satellites of the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders to the Clinton Foundation, Katz said, should deserve more skepticism from the public. Reports have traced the 2011 cholera epidemic to United Nations relief efforts, he noted, adding that many organizations operate more like businesses than anything else.

“Even when an aid group is pulling off a project well,” he said, “if it isn’t going to be there forever, if it isn’t going to be accountable for successes and failures, if it isn’t leaving something behind that’s permanent, then it’s still capable of doing damage.”

Last year the Red Cross similarly took issue with another ProPublica report that said the organization had disastrously mismanaged aid relief after hurricane Sandy.

Colombia Farc rebels free 10 soldiers and police

Guerrilla group claims the hostages represent its last police and military captives but president tempers peace hopes

guardian.co.uk, Associated Press in Villavicencio, Tuesday 3 April 2012

A Brazilian air force helicopter emblazoned with the Red Cross logo
 takes off to pick up the captive soldiers and police. Photograph:
Fernando Vergara/AP

Colombia's main rebel group has freed what it says were its last 10 military and police captives, returning the men to their families after at least 12 years spent in jungle prisons.

The release of the six police and four soldiers highlighted efforts to seek peace talks by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's oldest and most potent guerrilla band, which has been weakened by Colombia's US–backed military.

Flown from a jungle rendezvous aboard a loaned Brazilian air force helicopter painted with the Red Cross logo, the freed captives waved jubilantly.

They were escorted by nurses to awaiting relatives for reunions behind closed doors. Some jumped for joy on the tarmac.

Pets accompanied some of the men: a peccary, a monkey, two small birds. A few wore the Colombian flag over their shoulders. All looked newly shaven.

Their loved ones were overjoyed.

"I shouted! I jumped up and down!" said Olivia Solarte when she got first word her 41-year-old son, police officer Trujillo, had been freed. He had been held since July 1999.

The group was flown to Bogota where other relatives were waiting and medical checks in hospital were scheduled.

The rebel group, known as the Farc, had announced Monday's liberation on 26 February in tandem with a halt in ransom kidnappings.

President Juan Manuel Santos called the release "a step in the right direction, a very important step" but cautioned against "pure speculation" of imminent peace talks.

He said he wanted proof the Farc, which took up arms in 1964, is truly abandoning ransom kidnapping. "When the government considers that sufficient conditions and guarantees exist to begin a process that brings an end to the conflict the country will know," he said.

It is not known how many ransom kidnap victims the Farc holds.

The head of Colombia's anti-kidnapping police puts the number at least six, including four Chinese oil workers seized last June. Other officials put the number closer to two dozen.

The citizens' watchdog group Fundacion Pais Libre maintains a list of at least 400 people the Farc kidnapped or has otherwise held against their will since 1996 who were never freed. It does not expunge a name from its records until the person is released or a body is found.

Two serious goverment-Farc peace negotiations have failed over the past three decades and recent weeks have seen increased violence in the conflict.

The Farc killed at least 11 soldiers in a mid-March attack in Arauca near the Venezuelan border and the military responded with two precision bombings on rebel camps that killed more than 60 insurgents.

The rebels have in recent years suffered their worst battlefield setbacks ever, beginning when Santos was defence minister from 2006 to 2009 and thanks to billions in US military assistance and training.

Their main source of funding is the cocaine trade and military pressure has made holding kidnap victims increasingly difficult for the Farc.

Monday's mission was brokered by leftist former senator Piedad Cordoba, a friend of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez

Cordoba has served as a go-between in the release of 20 Farc hostages since January 2008 and said her work would be done with this week's releases as she had no desire to become involved in cases in which money rather than politics was involved.

She said, however, that the activist group she leads, Colombians for Peace, planned to send letters to the Farc asking it exactly how many civilians it holds.

The Farc has only publicly acknowledged holding captives it considered "exchangeable": police, soldiers or politicians it held hoping to swap them for imprisoned rebels.

It held scores of such prisoners in the late 1990s when it controlled about half the countryside but gradually released them all, never obtaining the hoped-for exchange.

Some captives were rescued. The Franco-Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors rescued in 2008 by Colombian soldiers posing as members of a phony international humanitarian group. At least 25 others have died in captivity, many killed by Farc insurgents to prevent their rescue or escape.

Among those in attendance for Monday's release was Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan rights activist who won the 1992 Nobel peace prize.

She said it was time for Colombia's government to respond to the Farc's gesture with its own display of political willingness to attain peace.

But analysts caution that peace talks, even back-channel negotiations, could be a long time coming.

Many do not believe they could happen before the 2014 presidential elections.

Related Article:

Colombia's Farc rebels release hostages

Colombian rebels release police officer

Rescue bid for two other Farc hostages by International Red Cross fails

guardian.co.uk, Associated Press, Monday 14 February 2011

Carlos Ocampo (second from right), who was kidnapped by Farc
in December, after his rescue. Photograph: Mauricio Due As/EPA

Colombian rebels have released a fourth captive but a planned handover of two others did not occur. The government said the men were not at the location designated for the helicopter retrieval by the International Red Cross.

Former senator and peace activist Piedad Córdoba, who has been the go-between in all 18 releases by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) since early 2008, said via Twitter that she was "certain we will soon see them freed", but did not offer any further details of Sunday's failed rescue.

She wrote from Ibague, central Colombia, the area where the rescue missions were set to take place. The Red Cross also did not give any further explanation.

Government spokesman, Eduardo Pizarro, told reporters that after picking up police officer Carlos Ocampo, 30, who had been held since December, the loaned Brazilian military helicopter emblazoned with Red Cross logos went to a different jungle location whose co-ordinates had been given to Cordoba by the Farc.

Pizarro said "the Farc has committed a scandalous act".

He said the government would evaluate the situation with the Red Cross and other involved parties. He said it "is committed to the liberation" of police major Guillermo Solórzano, 35, captured in June 2007, and of army corporal Salín Antonio San Miguel Valderrana, 27, held captive since May 2008.

The Farc now holds fewer than 20 police and soldiers, with whose freedom they wish to bargain in exchange for jailed rebels.

Badly battered by government air raids and record desertions during President Juan Manuel Santos' 2006-2009 tenure as defence minister, the Farc is also seeking a dialogue that might open a path to peace talks.

Santos has criticised what he termed the "media show" surrounding the rebels' recent piecemeal liberations.

The first in nearly a year, they began last week with the release of a town councillor and continued when the guerrillas freed another councillor and a young soldier.