Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
jobs, accused the airport authority director of incompetence
and demanded his resignation. Most of the street demonstrations
that followed, which involved setting fire to tire barricades—and
cost millions of dollars in lost business and customs
duties—were led by supporters of former President Aristide,
who reportedly remains opposed to the government's privatization
program.
Despite these protests, Prime Minister Jacques Edouard
Alexis decided in mid-1999 to resume the privatization process
after a two-year hiatus. He transferred majority ownership of
the Cimenterie d'Haiti to private hands for US$15 million. The
cement company was the second enterprise to be privatized.
The first was La Minoterie flour mill, which was turned over to
private ownership in September 1997. It had been closed, and
hundreds of its workers, who were not hired back when it
reopened, blocked the entrance to the mill with flaming tires
and demanded compensation for their toil and lost income.
Lack of progress on the privatization front was only one of
the many concerns of the international community trying to
help Haiti. The international community, including the United
States, repeatedly voiced impatience with the slow pace of both
economic and political reforms. United States displeasure at
Haiti's sluggish pace of reform was bluntly expressed by then-
Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers at the annual
meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in March
1998. Former chairman of the United States National Security
Council, Anthony Lake, also visited the island nation several
times in 1998, trying to energize Haitian reform efforts. On the
congressional side, many Republican members showed no
enthusiasm for approving administration requests for more
assistance to Haiti. On the contrary, most members strongly
criticized the lack of progress on judicial reform, the continuing
corruption of the police force, and the increasing amounts
of drugs entering the United States through Haiti.
Fiscal Policy
The banks mentioned on the privatization list did not
include the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (Banque de la
Republique d'Haiti—BRH), which was founded in 1880 as a
public-sector institution and which started functioning as a
central bank in 1934, when it became known as the National
Republic Bank of Haiti (hereafter Central Bank). The other
two state-owned commercial banks are the National Credit
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