Fernando Anibal Capellán, 66, is the Dominican founder, CEO, and president of the Grupo M textile firm as well as the five-acre CODEVI industrial park and free trade zone established in the impoverished northeast Haitian town of Ouanaminthe, across the Massacre River (which forms Haiti’s eastern border) from the Dominican town of Dajabón. Among CODEVI’s investors have been the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund and Citibank Group.
The CODEVI sweatshops produce many of the famous brand-name clothes sold in stores across the U.S. and Canada: Old Navy, Fruit of the Loom, Levi’s, GAP, Dockers, Liz Claiborne, Polo, Hanes, Calvin Klein, Columbia Sportswear, Nordstrom, Dillard’s, etc. In 2021, the zone employed 14,000 workers, two-thirds of them Haitian. It is one of Haiti’s largest employers.
You may have never heard of Fernando Capellán, but to understand his power, one must first understand the matrix in which he thrives.
Haiti is not an economy in crisis — Haiti is an economy of crisis. A model where poverty, violence, and dependence are not system failures but the very conditions of its operation. In this economy, chaos becomes a resource. It secures the margins of importers, justifies humanitarian aid, and fuels the cheap labor force essential to textile competitiveness.
Fernando Capellán operates in this space as a clever manager of disorder. Where Haitian elites profit from import trade and port rents, he transforms misery into labor. Where the state fails, he builds a private, quasi-sovereign zone — with its own rules, security, housing, infrastructure, and moral order.
The “industrial godfather” is merely the visible face of an invisible system. He did not invent dependence; he perfected its model. Where the U.S. empire controls maritime routes, aid programs, and trade regimes, Capellán manages the border, the factory, and the workforce. He embodies the missing link between imperial power and organized poverty.
And therein lies the irony: those who believe they are “offering jobs” are, unknowingly, part of a global apparatus where work is no longer dignity, but servitude. The workers of CODEVI do not produce clothes; they produce the stability of a system that needs their misery to survive.
The economy of submission is a subtle art: it transforms precarity into policy, resignation into peace, and poverty into a tool of governance. Every dollar of aid, every textile contract, every foreign mission becomes a strand in the web that has entangled Haiti for more than a century.
The truth is, the Empire no longer needs to invade. It merely needs to invest. Humanitarian aid has become the new colonialism, textiles its obedient workforce, and chaos its moral cover.
The Haitian people believe they are fighting for survival — yet they are kept in survival precisely so they will never fight.
That is why peace never comes: because it would cost too much to those who profit from silent war.
The Capellán System: A Symbiosis of Disorder
The mistake would be to think Capellán acts alone.
His empire could not exist without the U.S. legislative umbrella: HOPE, HELP, CBI * — trade regimes designed in Washington that created the conditions for a Dominican capitalist to control Haiti’s industrial destiny.
These laws were not gifts; they were instruments of control. They guaranteed U.S. companies access to cheap Haitian labor without the social or political constraints of a strong internal market. Through Capellán, the United States outsourced the management of Haitian disorder: chaos remains local, profits flow globally.
This model is perfect in its cruelty:
1. The United States gains migratory stability and a stream of low-cost exports.
2. The Dominican Republic reaps logistical, fiscal, and port revenues.
3. The Haitian elite receives its symbolic share — contracts, political loyalty, and illusions of prestige.
4. And the Haitian people, for their part, work merely to survive on the border of a country they no longer control.
Beneath the varnish of “industrial development,” Capellán understood that the true lever of power is not the factory — it is dependence. Every job becomes an instrument of economic discipline. Every factory, a space of political normalization: obey to keep your job, stay silent to keep your meager wage.
CODEVI is therefore not merely a production zone — it is a social laboratory testing the new form of Haitian governance: power without sovereignty, stability without a state, prosperity without people.
Such is the perverse genius of the Capellán model: turning misery into a production factor and the border into a tool of control.
After HOPE/HELP: The Battle for Control of Haiti’s Industrial Future
The HOPE and HELP Acts expired, through the Trump administration’s pointed inaction, on Sep. 30, 2025. The non-renewal of HOPE/HELP is not just a commercial decision — it is a political earthquake. It reveals the system’s true face: without American trade preferences, the entire industrial edifice collapses.
Economist Kesner Pharel rightly observed: for half a century, Haiti has locked itself into low-end subcontracting, a model without innovation, without national strategy, without autonomy. A model where multinationals thrive, but the state remains poor.
Capellán, aware of this fragility, pleads urgently with Washington to save the preferential regime. But within that gesture lies a deeper truth: Haiti’s economy no longer determines its own destiny. Its survival depends on the will of a foreign Congress, the interests of a textile lobby, and the calculations of a Dominican businessman.
Power in Haiti no longer lies in the palaces but in the “free trade” zones. It is no longer won through elections but through contracts. It is no longer defended by ideals but by currencies.
The “industrial godfather” is not the symptom of betrayal but of mutation: the mutation of a country whose sovereignty has dissolved into aid flows, subcontracting, and resignation.
As long as this model endures, peace will remain dangerous, dignity a luxury, and dependence the norm.
In conclusion, what is now called “development” in Haiti is no longer a project of emancipation — it is an architecture of dependence. Beneath the flags of free zones, NGOs, donors, and investors lies a sophisticated mechanism: submission through survival.
Haiti is no longer ruled by bayonets, but by budgets. No longer through occupation, but through contracts. No longer by fear, but by hunger.
The new colonization needs no flags — it has logos. It does not speak Kreyòl or French — it speaks in numbers, projects, and “public-private partnerships.” It does not kill people — it employs them. Unless they revolt. Then it kills them.
Haiti will not be liberated by weapons or NGOs, but by lucidity. The day Haitians understand that chaos is not a fate but a business, that misery is not a curse but a strategy, and then they rise up and organize — the economy of submission will collapse on its own.
We may have seen the first flickers of this consciousness when hundreds of Haitian workers staged a peaceful protest last week in the CODEVI industrial park to protest the de facto Haitian government withholding taxes from their puny wages. Ironically, the industrial park was formed to be a “free trade” i.e. tax-free zone… for capitalist investors.
Of course, the Empire will try to salvage their wage slave-labor colony, as it is desperately trying to do today with its multiple multinational proxy mercenary forces. But the Empire may very well fail.
And this is when Haiti’s true independence can begin.
Because the most fragile form of power is the one that rests on the ignorance of the dominated.
And on that day when Haitians understand “the system,” Capellán, the donors, the multinational corporations, the NGOs, the embassies, the bribed, cheerleading media — all the so-called “development partners” — will have to answer one question:
Who truly benefitted from Haiti’s disorder?
* This refers to three U.S. Congressional programs: the 2006 Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, the 2010 Help Haitian Adoptees Immediately to Integrate (HELP) Act, and the 1983 Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). All three were designed to lubricate the flow of capital from the U.S. to Haiti to take advantage of its dirt-cheap labor for primarily assembly manufacturing.