nearly a decade ago, his putative mission was to lead raid and rescue operations that would recover a missing American child. But by his own account, he did little work in that direction—and The Daily Beast has discovered he instead fell into the Caribbean state’s thorny politics, and into an unbelievable business deal: control of a paradisiacal island that Port-au-Prince seized from its inhabitants..
But by that time, the contacts Lopez had made through O.U.R. had already secured him power over the island of Ile-à-Vache. He did not respond to repeated outreach from The Daily Beast for this story.The remark referred to Gardy Mardy, a Haitian-American boy from Ballard’s home state of Utah, abducted in Port-au-Prince in late 2009, whose father, like Ballard, is active in the.
Fatton noted that Martelly triangulated between the U.S. and its rivals in the region, most notably Venezuela, which dispensed tens of millions from its PetroCaribe program to subsidize Haiti’s tourism ministry. The development of Ile-à-Vache soon became the Martelly government’s signature initiative. The seed for the new, island-spanning project was to be Abaka Bay, a hotel on Ile-à-Vache’s northwest tier, co-owned by an American citizen and his Haitian in-laws.
Dietrich also shared what he described as counter-offers he sent back to Martelly’s interlocutors as negotiations to build out Abaka Bay continued. In his open letter, and in conversations with The Daily Beast and other, and in the court case lodged in Michigan, he accused his ex in-laws of subsequently pushing him out of the business entirely.
“Ile-à-Vache was very rural, very rustic, very exotic,” he recalled. “People move on this island on foot, use a cow sometimes, but they move from one part to another part by walking.” “There was money, for the first time in Haiti—there was money to do what they wanted,” he lamented. “That’s what bothers me, as a Haitian.”, the 2018 documentary, leaves the impression that donations to O.U.R. would enable additional missions to find Gardy Mardy—and in the process to save other missing children from traffickers.
This is consistent with what The Daily Beast heard from Haitian sources, who believed O.U.R. was mainly an apparatus for milking cash from supporters in the United States.
The arrangement called for completion within 39 months. It also asserted that Watersmark S.A. already possessed $2.5 billion in financing. No one has alleged this deal violated either Haitian or American law, but materials The Daily Beast reviewed raise questions as to why Port-au-Prince decided to work with Lopez and his partners, and about the project’s viability.