A childhood friend of the president collects USAID money without bidding

Harold Charles ran a construction company called CEEPCO from Maryland and had been a childhood friend of Michel Martelly. His first contract from the American aid agency arrived in April 2011, two weeks before he flew to Washington with Martelly to meet the heads of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the American secretary of state. In June, two months after the inauguration, CEEPCO received 475,000 dollars to prepare a shelter site in the far north of Haiti. In September Charles told an audience at the State Department that nineteen years inside the federal government had taught him the acronyms and the language, that he sat as one of six government members on the reconstruction commission, and that there was no conflict of interest. Shortly afterwards the agency gave his firm nine million dollars with no bidding process. The engineer responsible justified the absence of competition by the housing emergency in a capital 150 miles away.

An analysis published in 2011 tested samples taken from masonry blocks in Port-au-Prince buildings of various ages that had been damaged in the earthquake. The concrete measured between 545 and 1,135 pounds per square inch. The minimum acceptable standard set by the American Concrete Institute is 2,500 pounds per square inch, so the weakest samples came in at about a fifth of what the material was supposed to deliver and the strongest at under half. The assessment also worked out the remedy. Raising the proportion of cement in a block from one part in thirty to one part in six, and using better aggregate, doubled the compressive strength. The ratio was known and the ingredients existed. What was missing was money to buy cement at the price Haitians were charged for it, and any institution able to insist that they did.

Two months after the ruling, in November 2013, President Danilo Medina announced by decree that a regularisation plan would be created, and the plan itself was established in December. In 2014 the Dominican Republic passed Naturalisation Law 169-14. It divided people into two groups. The first was the roughly fifty five thousand people born in the country whose citizenship had been annulled; the law restored their nationality, and five years later about half of them had actually recovered their documents. The second was people born in the country whose births had never been registered, because they were born outside a hospital or left one without papers. To become citizens they had first to declare themselves Haitian nationals, enter the register for foreigners and wait two years for a naturalisation procedure nobody had defined. Enrolment took repeated journeys and money for transport. Before the deadline, 8,755 applications were filed.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.