1978 to 1979 · Haitianspan
A president paid 24,000 dollars a year buys a million dollar yacht
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To keep African swine fever out, the authorities acted on foreign advice and killed every pig along the Dominican border, paying almost nothing for them. Land went the same way. Haiti had no cadastral survey, so Duvalierists took plots that families had worked for generations from people who could not read the paper that proved title, and anyone who objected was beaten and left for the towns. The president told an audience that the country had once exported mahogany and now imported formica. Nineteen thousand hectares near Fort Liberte, once the largest sisal plantation in the world, were handed to Marie-Denise Duvalier for a tourism scheme. Cocoa exports worth three million dollars a year stopped because the monopoly was held jointly by her and the husband she was divorcing. On a salary of 24,000 dollars a year the president bought a yacht costing a million, ranches, and a villa in Monaco worth three million. The World Bank could not account for 45 million dollars of government money in 1975 alone. Foreign officials had begun admitting that they did not know where the money went.
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