PORT-AU- PRINCE, Haiti — Election workers scurry across the airy courtyard of their lavish new headquarters, a three-story building that hardly suffered a crack in Haiti’s earthquake.
With its stately iron gates, the building looks like a government office. But until recently, it was an upscale shopping center, the $1.8 million property of a major cocaine trafficker.
New cooperation between Haitian authorities and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration before the Jan. 12 earthquake brought an unexpected yield to a country whose infrastructure is in ruins: confiscated properties that are spacious, opulent — and free. While the quake destroyed all the government ministries’ headquarters, only four of the 30 seized buildings suffered quake damage.
