CARACOL, Haiti (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton encouraged foreigners to invest in Haiti as she and her husband Bill led a star-studded delegation gathered Monday to inaugurate a new industrial park at the center of U.S. efforts to help the country rebuild after the 2010 earthquake.
Actors Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, fashion designer Donna Karan and British business magnate Richard Branson were among the luminaries at the opening of the new Caracol Industrial Park, which is projected to create thousands of jobs more than 100 miles from the quake-ravaged capital of Port-au-Prince.
Hillary Rodham Clinton told a roomful of investors gathered for a luncheon that she had made Haiti a priority when she became secretary of state.
“We had learned that supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti meant more than providing aid,” she said. “It required investments in infrastructure and the economy that would help the Haitian people achieve their own dreams.
“So we shifted our assistance to investments to address some of the biggest challenges facing this country: creating jobs and sustainable economic growth,” she added.
Earlier Monday, thousands of Haitians lined the roadway to wave at her motorcade as it wound its way from the newly renovated airport in the seaside city of Cap-Haitien. Clinton and other U.S. officials, including Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, toured a housing development for industrial park workers supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The secretary of state noted there were three presidents gathered in one room to celebrate the opening: her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, current Haitian President Michel Martelly and his predecessor, Rene Preval.
Bill Clinton, now a U.N. special envoy for Haiti, arrived in Caracol separately from his wife.
The Clintons and their allies hope that the $300 million industrial facility will transform the northern part of this impoverished country by providing thousands of desperately needed jobs.
But some Haitians say the industrial park does little more than replicate failed efforts from the past and will benefit outsiders more than Haitians. They also worry it will harm some of the few pieces of undamaged environment that still exist in Haiti.
“It’s really all-in on this project, and there’s a high bar to deliver,” said Laurent Dubois, a historian who teaches at Duke University and is author of “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.” ‘’It really needs to deliver in a big way so that people will think, yeah, this was the right thing to do.”
The stakes are high in large part because the Clintons have been so heavily involved.
The Caracol project was in the works before the earthquake but it became a top priority for the Obama administration soon after the disaster under Preval. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, has made almost monthly visits to the site on Haiti’s northern coast.
In a nod to President Barack Obama who was preparing for the final, foreign policy-focused debate later Monday, the secretary of state said the Obama presidency had made Haiti a central focus of its international development efforts.
The $124 million put in by the U.S. makes the park Washington’s biggest single investment in the aftermath of the quake and it is certain to shape the legacy here of the Clintons, who last visited Haiti together in 1975 on a wedding gift following their honeymoon in Mexico.
“We’ve had a deep connection with Haiti ever since,” Hillary Rodham Clinton said.
Monday’s trip is her third to Haiti since the earthquake, and there have been more than a dozen visits by her husband, who was co-chairman of an earthquake recovery panel before its mandate ended a year ago.
