Cabal Goggles Off: Sound of Freedom/OUR, Part 4

Haiti, illicit adoption, and reconsidering evidence of trafficking without our cultural assumptions

Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash

In the last section, I argued that Ballard’s ability to interpret information in front of him seems to be blinkered by what he thinks trafficking is. Namely, Ballard is looking for people who self-awarely and consciously warehouse children, frequently for international distribution, so that the children will be sexually exploited. Because of this, I suggested that when Ballard looks at information in front of him, he’s wearing “cabal goggles” – a tendency to interpret all data through the imagining of what he believes trafficking to be.

In this next section, I want to try re-evaluating Ballard’s data on Yvrose, but this time while not wearing “cabal goggles.” Instead, I want to look for evidence of orphanage abuses that are reported in Lumos’s data – primarily, illicit adoptions and profiting from the orphanage industry. In the final section, I want to do a wrap-up about why this matters for American audiences and how we think about trafficking.

Materials from OUR that tell the story of Gardy include the blog series, selections from the documentary movies Operation Toussaint and The Abolitionists, and a reality TV series also called The Abolitionists. The blog has been in part removed from OUR’s website. Both movies are available for free online. The TV show is not available for sale but the distributors will let you watch it if you call and ask very nicely. There is, of course, also the movie Sound of Freedom that loosely adapts Gardy’s story for film, but I’m not going to use that as a source. Instead, I’m going to walk through all available footage that OUR has on the search for Gardy, focusing in particular on the sting on Yvrose’s orphanage.

Background: Who took Gardy, and Why is Yvrose Involved?

There are multiple stories in the footage but according to Ballard, the “most common” is this: Two men, one of whom was Carlos, put Gardy on a motorbike and drove away with him from the family’s church. They handed off Gardy at Carlos’s brother-in-law’s house. The location of this house is not clear but from the graphic it looks like it is south of Port-au-Prince. From there, they say, Gardy was handed off to others. 

At one point in a video Ballard says the last time someone saw Gardy was in Les Cayes, where Carlos was eventually incarcerated (it’s not clear for what and I can’t find external documentation). In Les Cayes, Ballard learns Yvrose was Carlos’s contact at the jail. She is his godmother, and, Ballard says, Carlos thought “She’d make a good lawyer,” even though she isn’t one. 

Ballard thinks Carlos is lying about this because Yvrose isn’t a lawyer. I think an underrated explanation for Carlos’s odd statement may just be the irregularities of the Haitian legal system. My interviews with people in Port-au-Prince suggests that Yvrose was well respected and connected in the city.

Next, at Guesno’s church, Ballard interviews people who have information about Gardy. One person named Jean-Louis sits down and says that he has heard (apparently from Carlos) that in his interrogation, Carlos was ready to just give Gardy back. However, the child was with his wife and brother-in-law. The brother in law took Gardy out into the woods when Gardy was taken by a different group of bandits. After some time, they became scared, killed Gardy, and threw him into a latrine. 

For some reason Jean-Louis’s testimony is shown in full in both the documentary The Abolitionists and the TV show, but no one in the interview says why Ballard et. al. clearly don’t believe it. I’m personally skeptical of it on the grounds that it is pretty convenient for Carlos’s family to have had a whole different group of bandits take the child from them. A later video from 2018 shows that Ballard in cooperation with Haitian police has arrested Carlos’s brother as “the guy who trafficked Gardy.” It’s possible OUR think Carlos’s brother took Gardy secondarily but they never say one way or another. 

Attention eventually fixates on Yvrose’s orphanage and the theory that Gardy ended up here. The evidence at this point that Yvrose was involved in kidnapping Gardy, much less ever had custody of him, is incredibly circumstantial. It seems that Yvrose’s willingness to sell kids is eventually taken as rock-solid evidence that she would have collaborated in a kidnapping. 

Yvrose and Refuge des Orphelins 

Ballard and his translator Andre arrive at Refuge des Orphelins. Neighbors know where the orphanage is and point the travelers to it. For the most part, the kids retreat into the classroom and office when they see the guests coming. One of them goes to get Yvrose, whose office is open to the courtyard. The kids seem to be allowed into the office whenever Yvrose is in there. One kid actually just stands in the doorway during Yvrose’s meeting with the Americans. Yvrose welcomes the guests in and brings them into her office. 

There’s a later clip of Ballard saying that Yvrose’s office was beautiful and well-maintained while the rest of the orphanage was filthy and run down. To me, the office and the classroom looked as though they’d received about the same level of care. The dorms for older kids are extremely crowded (multiple beds pushed up alongside each other), but it’s not clear if this is unusual among orphanages in Haiti (Editor’s note: after several interviews with Haitians and expats who worked in orphanages, it seems it is not). In a later clip, Ballard says that after Yvrose’s arrest the orphanage was dirty and the children weren’t changed from their clothes or eating, though it had been clean before. It’s not clear what effect Yvrose’s arrest had on the state of the orphanage. At least one night passes between her later arrest and the children’s removal from the orphanage. 

Most of the audio from Ballard’s first meeting with Yvrose is not available. Yvrose has them both sit down and speaks with them. It’s not clear for how long they talk. The voiceover says that Yvrose doesn’t ask their intentions and immediately offers to sell them kids. I find this hard to believe given that this is a serious offense in Haiti and Yvrose is aware of it – I don’t think she would be the first to offer the men a child, especially given how often she received American volunteers who did not want to take children. I think Ballard and Andre probably told her or hinted they wanted kids, given how risky it would be for Yvrose herself to bring it up. When we hear Yvrose in her own words, she says that she is able to assist in getting kids out of the country by creating false documents for them using her last name. She then travels with the children to where they are going as though they are her kids.

Yvrose then encourages the visitors to go around and interact with the children. Ballard is affable and playful with them. He asks kids to give him a tour of the place. The kids enjoy his presence and warm up to him quickly. Yvrose follows at a distance and prompts shy kids to talk to the guests. She also takes some photos. Ballard asks a few kids how long they have been there and gets varying answers. Most say a few years. 

Ballard primarily interacts with a boy and girl who are biological siblings, Colin and Coline. Ballard tells Yvrose he definitely wants the little boy but also thinks he wants his sister. In actual fact, Ballard does want to adopt these kids and means to do so from the first interaction he has with them – he tells the team when he gets in the van to leave that he will take those two kids after all. Ballard eventually did adopt the children in a process that took about four years – although, as he notes, they had no documentation. 

For the next two weeks Andre, who is posing as Ballard’s… lawyer? assistant? agent?, calls Yvrose every day to finalize the deal. At some point, Yvrose says that she has spoken with other orphanage directors and the cost for her services (the children, plus the fake documents, plus her travel) is now $15k per child. Meanwhile, Ballard organizes the sting with the Haitian police. Once Yvrose has accepted cash for the children, the police will arrest her. 

It seems that both Ballard and Andre think that Yvrose is self-consciously engaging in selling children as slaves. Ballard says that a family that wanted to raise a chid as their own would never simply give money to an orphanage director for an undocumented child. Of course, as we argued in Part 2, Americans absolutely have engaged in this practice for a long time. Andre seems to imply in a conversation that because Yvrose has asked which child Ballard is “interested in” and which one he wants to “take” (this is all in Haitian Creole and French, of course) that Yvrose thinks of this as sexually exploitative trafficking. 

The Sting 

On the day of the sting Ballard arrives with a woman in green, who appears to be Ballard’s wife. If she isn’t actually, Yvrose’s later testimony makes it clear she thinks they’re married. Ballard again interacts with the kids, and the couple cuddles and plays with siblings Colin and Coline. At one point Ballard asks Yvrose if Coline would be sad if he only took her brother. Yvrose seems to not know what to say, and finally says, “It’s up to you” while smiling. 

In the office, Ballard asks how long it would take to do a legal adoption instead. Yvrose says it would take at least two years, and a lot more money. Ballard et. al. then agree to do the exchange off-the-books. They tell her they have hired a nanny and will take Yvrose to their penthouse hotel room to receive the kids and give Yvrose the first half of the money. The second part of the money will be handed over once Yvrose completes the false documents and brings the kids to the US. 

For this part of the operation, Yvrose is accompanied by another woman, who I’m certain I’ve identified but I’m not going to name here because she doesn’t show up in any publicly available texts. The second woman asks Ballard and his group if they understand what they are doing is illegal and how discreet they need to be. The group – Ballard, his wife, his translator, Yvrose, Yvrose’s associate, and the two children – then travel to the hotel. Yvrose carries one of the kids. 

In the hotel room Yvrose settles onto the couch with the rest of the family. She also meets the Haitian woman who is pretending to be the children’s nanny. Yvrose suggests that the Ballards teach their new kids call the Black nanny “Mom” instead of the adoptive mom so onlookers will not find the family suspicious.

When the time comes to take out money, Yvrose tells the parents that the kids should not be present for this. Ballard’s wife takes the kids outside on the balcony to play. Ballard counts out the cash for Yvrose on the table. Yvrose places the cash in her purse. Her associate is completely overcome and seems to be crying with joy at the exchange. 

Outside the hotel, Yvrose is arrested with her associated. Under interrogation Yvrose’s cover story is that Ballard and his wife were establishing a new location of the orphanage and wanted to take the children to see it. The cash was a donation for the new orphanage. Yvrose is eventually pinned down that she did offer children for cash. She denies knowing anything about Gardy. 

After the Sting and a Later Operation

A later episode of the TV show recounts the continued search for Gardy at what Ballard describes as a “child labor camp.” This is a village near the border that has a large number of what Ballard describes as restaveks, or children who are given by their parents to wealthier families to serve as domestic help in return for education and food. The operation depends on a group of people going to this town to serve as medical missionaries, who attempt to gain intel on where children are being kept during their medical work. Guesno is there serving as a pastoral counselor for people who have received treatment. He is told after at least one full day in the field that he is there because the team think Gardy is nearby. How exactly Guesno could have been collecting intel while not knowing they are looking for Gardy is not clear. 

The mission comes to an end when the group tries to move over a certain hill past a militia group. Members of the militia warn the group on their first attempt not to go that way, because they do not have control over that area. The team tries to go again earlier in the morning, where they are intercepted by locals who are angry at their presence. A translator clarifies that the villagers think that the camera crew is there to scout for natural resources, and they want the group to leave. There’s a standoff and finally some of the local elders come and ask the group firmly and politely to leave. They then drive ahead of the group to make sure that the group actually does completely leave the area. It seems that Ballard thinks this is confirmation that there is a group of child slaves in the area that they are restricting access to. 

This operation seems to be the same one recounted in this Vice article, in which two members of the search team confirmed that the tip-off that Gardy and a larger group of child slaves was in the area was a psychic named Janet from Utah, which would later go on to work as a director of OUR’s adoption wing, Children Need Families (CNF).

My Interpretation of this Footage 

If you watch this material while not assuming Yvrose is performing the quotidian and still-very-unethical behaviors that are commonly documented in Haitian orphanages, the narrative that seems to emerge is pretty different from the one Ballard tells the camera even during the course of the investigation. Here’s what I’m noticing.

Observation #1: Yvrose doesn’t sell a lot of kids.

The fact that two of the child witnesses had been there for four years complicates Ballard’s assertion that Yvrose’s orphanage is primarily a way-station where kids are sold quickly out the back door. Numbers in Yvrose’s file suggest that usually the orphanage contained between 10-20 children. Comparing photos of the orphanage from different years, it looks like at least some kids who were in the orphanage in 2010 were still there in 2012. It’s hard to find solid evidence that Yvrose was selling kids as fast as she could get them. Likewise, as we’ve discussed, in order to make an income, Yvrose didn’t need to sell kids quickly – children in the orphanage were still profitable. 

Yvrose’s plan to get the kids out of Haiti is also difficult to pull off at scale. Yvrose travels with children, posing as her children, out of the country, and then leaves them there. This does not seem the sort of thing you can do at the same airport several times a month without attracting attention.  

Yvrose’s associate’s reaction to the money also suggests that she, at least, does not regularly sell kids. She is emotional and overwhelmed at the sight of the payout for the children in the sting operation. This does not look like something she does regularly. I suppose it is possible this is one of the first times she has been at a meeting in which money has changed hands, but seeing $10k in cash on a table is clearly not an experience she has regularly.

Observation #2: Yvrose sees herself as arranging back-alley adoptions without the red tape where the fees go to her instead of IBESR. 

Yvrose does not see herself as selling child sex slaves. Of course, her system of adoption is incredibly vulnerable to abuses, it is morally wrong, and it should be, and is, illegal. But Yvrose herself does not seem to think of herself as an international trafficking supplier.

Yvrose juxtaposes her system of adoption with the legal method of adoption, which implies she sees the two as closely related alternatives instead of utterly unrelated events. Furthermore, her associate’s warning to Ballard, “you know this is illegal, right?” is asinine if she believes that she and Ballard both see themselves as international traffickers dealing with enslavers and pimps. If Ballard was planning to use these children as enforced sex workers, he would obviously know what he was doing is illegal. If he was an overeager American dad who wanted to raise some orphans as his own with as little red tape as possible, he might need someone to spell this out for him. 

Nothing about Yvrose’s experience with Ballard would suggest that he was taking large numbers of children for the purposes of exploiting them. He plays with them and brings his wife. Of course, this is how actual sexual abuse works (abusers gain children’s trust), but there are a lot of reasons to think that Yvrose would read his behavior (even if she did it naively) as paternal and harmless.

Finally, I’m not a forensic expert and reading body languages and expressions is a complex, maybe impossible task. Nonetheless, the reactions of Yvrose and her associate to the deal are hard to square with the idea that they understand themselves to have just consigned two kids to a fate worse than death. There’s no reserve or coldness you’d expect from two people who are used to the idea that, when these children leave, they’re going to suffer horribly so the women can live comfortably. There’s no jocularity or dark humor about violence you see in footage of other traffickers from OUR who are open about their willingness to sell children for rape. They look, for lack of better words, grateful and joyful. This could be consistent with two women who really hope that the kids are going to America for a better life but don’t really think about it too much because they’ve just made a life-changing amount of money. This could also be consistent with two women who are inured to the reality of poverty and sexual abuse and at least think that, whatever happens to these kids in the US, these kids will have running water (and of course, they’ve also just made a life changing amount of money). But it doesn’t look like the reaction of two women who regularly and consciously sell children into slavery and have accepted that this sadistic business is how they make their money. 

Yvrose and her associate

Observation #3 (Tentative): Yvrose doesn’t seem to have enough money to be selling kids on a large scale.

We’ve already noted that Yvrose’s associate is overwhelmed by the amount of money in the deal. Yvrose isn’t exactly cool as a cucumber, either. 

In later footage, Ballard describes Yvrose’s office as “really nice, or nice for Haiti.” As we’ve noted, Yvrose’s facility looks fairly consistent in its upkeep from room to room. Yvrose wears clean, well-maintained clothes, as do the children in pre-sting footage. The facility looks crowded, but not in terrible shape. There is no running water, and Yvrose makes reference to another facility and a new building in her police interrogation – possibly moving to a better-supplied area? At any rate, nothing about Yvrose suggests that she is living in comparative luxury. As we noted, her office is open to the children. It doesn’t seem to be locked away from them or hiding her comparative wealth.

The gross national income per capita in Haiti in 2013 (earliest year I could find) was $1410, so even one back-alley adoption a year resulting in a payout of $10-15k would have made Yvrose the Haitian equivalent of an American woman who makes half a million dollars a year. However, Yvrose just doesn’t seem to be rich. We never see her car or if she even has one. There may be more evidence that the police later found that she was, but signs of suspicious wealth are not available in the footage. If Yvrose and her associate were regularly making more than ten times the annual salary of Haiti in cash, where was their money going? How much money do they actually have? How many ways was the money divided? (One report from IBESR says Refuge des Orphelins had 3 employees on the books). Is there evidence that Yvrose had a ton of money? If so, it’s not in the footage.

Observation #4: The evidence that Gardy is part of a cohort of children being kept as slaves en masse is minimal. 

The move to hunting for Gardy in Port-au-Prince to looking for him at the border at the “labor camp” seems to be based in part on the assumption that wherever Gardy is, he must have been sold to someone who is holding a lot of children. 

There is certainly evidence that Haitian children are held for the purposes of bonded labor to work on sugar cane plantations in the DR. (However, the search for Gardy in the later footage on the border of the DR was not taken at a sugar cane plantation. It’s also described as a jungle mission in some OUR reports though the area looks quite arid. The search seems to have been done at a villages that were seen as suspicious hot spots for child trafficking due to their high concentrations of children living as domestic workers, a phenomenon we’ll discuss later). 

If Yvrose ever had Gardy (and it’s a big if), the odds that she sold Gardy to a group of people who wanted to use him to harvest sugar cane or to serve as a domestic laborer through her particular brand of passport foraging is slim. Given the rate at which Haitian children are forced into labor, it’s not clear why agricultural laborers would pay $10k for a toddler when hungry, desperate adults and older children are free. It’s plausible that Yvrose sent older children away to serve as domestic or agricultural laborers, or that she simply sent Gardy out the door at the first possible opportunity to cover her tracks, but this is speculation. There’s no evidence Yvrose was involved in a scheme to supply families with domestic workers or supply plantations with child workers. 

If Yvrose had Gardy, as a child under 5, Gardy would have been far more valuable as an orphan adoptee. Between the ages of 2-6, Gardy’s labor probably wasn’t worth $10k, but he clearly was worth that much as an international adoptee. 

Observation #5: Ballard keeps looking for Gardy in places where large number of kids are, in contexts where he imagines they are being held against their will, used as large-scale chattel slaves.

Ballard’s background is in law enforcement and he has a cop’s solution to problems. He also has a sharply defined narrative in his head of what trafficking is. Let’s call this capital-T Trafficking. Capital-T Trafficking occurs when children are kidnapped (or perhaps sold) across borders for the purposes of either mass warehousing and renting for the purposes of exploitation (usually sexual) or personal ownership following a sale. It’s basically American chattel slavery but modern, particularly associated with children, and explicitly for the purposes of sexual exploitation (of course, sexual exploitation has always been a key component of chattel slavery). The motifs surrounding Trafficking are all from the world of international commerce and merchandising – ie, the idea that ports of entry and shipping hubs are primarily associated with trafficking because that’s how children are shipped, or that a padlock would be left as evidence that a child was trafficked because the padlock was used to seal the shipping container he was held in.

Ballard sees this kind of Trafficking everywhere, even in cases where this is manifestly not what happened. It’s also just generally difficult to find documented cases where this is what happened – and as Polaris has noted in their Myths and Facts section, it’s just not a very common form of trafficking. 

But this Trafficking seems to be driving the narrative of what happened to Gardy, despite the fact that evidence for it is so poor. For instance, the evidence that the town that blocked Ballard’s team from entering did so because they were keeping a large number of slaves seems to come primarily from Utah psychic and adoption director Janet Runsson. OUR doesn’t dispute the psychic’s involvement in this operation. However, the footage, and other eyewitness testimony, makes it clear that there is plenty of evidence that the locals had a lot of reasons to not want OUR around – suspicion of their large camera crew, fear that they were looking for a diseased person in the town (probably associated with the medical clinic), and anxiety that the Americans were there to scout out and take natural resources. While it does seem that the region had a large number of restaveks – which is a form of child labor and often vulnerable to extreme abuse – there isn’t anything that a jump team could have done to end this.

It also seems to be driving the idea that Yvrose was closely involved with Gardy’s kidnapped and even Trafficked her himself – even though the idea that Yvrose was a Trafficker is slim.

So what do we make of all this?

Conclusion: What Should We Think About All This?

My primary conclusion here is a small one, and is specifically related to the search for Gardy. Namely, I’m not convinced Yvrose ever had him.

It looks to me that the idea that the idea that Yvrose had Gardy and sold him (which seems to be a dominant theory in OUR’s investigation) depends on the idea that Yvrose was a seasoned trafficker who was involved in the kidnapping from the outset and could have sold him to anyone. I think the presumption of the existence and prevalence of large-scale operations that sell children at scale for sexual exploitation (and to some extent labor, as the second operation involved) is driving the way this evidence has been framed, not the other way around. 

If the evidence in OUR’s footage is the best evidence they have, then it doesn’t seem like there is clear evidence Yvrose ever had Gardy. I wish she did, because then the next step in the chain would be a fairly clear-cut one – Yvrose probably adopted him out. 

However, little data actually ties Yvrose to the kidnapping or large-scale capital-T Trafficking as Ballard understands it, and a lot of information points against Gardy having ended up in her orphanage. Based on publicly available information, connections between Yvrose and the kidnapping are all circumstantial. The fact that Yvrose was willing to sell children seems to function for Ballard as very strong circumstantial evidence – if a major child trafficker was attached to this case at all, she must have trafficked Gardy. But this is overreading the data. Yvrose engaged in back-alley adoptions, which are widely attested among orphanage culture in Haiti. 

The putative involvement of Carlos’s family in the attempted kidnapping and ransom makes it even less likely that Yvrose ever had Gardy herself. If this is what happened Carlos didn’t need a place to drop Gardy once he took him – he already had relatives who were willing to hold him. 

So what actually happened to Gardy? If Yvrose didn’t have him, who did?

We don’t know, and it’s not clear that anything short of immediate and active police involvement could have saved Gardy. After Carlos left Gardy with his family,¹ almost anything could have happened. Gardy could have been left at any number of locations, or with any number of people. He absolutely could have been dumped at an orphanage, but would Carlos’s family have taken Gardy all the way back to Port-au-Prince, only a mile from Guesno’s church, where the Mardys were exhaustively looking for him? If they did choose to abandon Gardy at an orphanage, the wiser choice would have been to pick one closer to Carlos’s brother-in-law’s house on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, in the rural areas where Carlos’s wife took Gardy to evade the police, or towards Les Cayes, where Carlos seems to have family and connections. 

He might have been, as in Jean-Louis’s testimony, handed off to a different group of kidnappers. 

What is particularly horrible to consider is if Gardy is even alive, or if the case could ever be decisively closed. Whether Gardy survived his first forty-eight hours of captivity seems like an open question, unless there is eyewitness testimony that suggests he actually lived longer. (Who saw Gardy in Les Cayes, and how good of a lead is that?) Whether he survived the earthquake, mudslides, floods, and epidemics in the wake of the earthquake is even a harder question. 

The people who would be able to answer this question are Carlos’s family. I’m a little concerned that attention shifted to Yvrose as quickly as it did because of the appeal and capacity of doing a sting operation, when publicly available information actually points away from Yvrose. Of course, for all I know, Carlos’s family didn’t survive the Port-au-Prince earthquake, and this trail is unrecoverable. 

This is not the search that appears in OUR material. The search that appears in OUR material is for Trafficked children. But is there actually evidence that Gardy was Trafficked besides the assumption of the prevalence of Trafficking? And if not, how should we think about this organization, and the way Americans get involved in ending child trafficking?

This brings me to my second conclusion: Americans in general, and OUR in particular, seem very primed to look for Trafficking to the exclusion of other forms of exploitation. This is clear in this case of Gardy.

It seems that from the beginning the search for Gardy has hung on the assumption that Gardy would be found with a large group of similarly enslaved children, or children for sale. However, this conclusion does not seem to be based on information that is specific to Gardy’s case. It instead seems based on the assumption that this is the most likely thing to happen to kidnapped children, and that organized networks of child snatchers, enslavers, warehousers, and dealers must be involved in the case of a missing and exploited child. Indeed, Ballard seems to see this even in cases when this is very clearly not what happened, as we discussed in the Earl Buchanan case.

As I have argued extensively in this, I don’t think child trafficking is a rare phenomenon in Haiti. It is alive and well in the business of orphanage tourism, poorly-sourced or illicit adoptions, child labor, and the restavek system. Much of this exploitation emerges from poverty and parents who are desperate enough to give their children over to possible harm, or who will give one away to support the other three. 

But restaveks can’t be rescued en masse using OUR’s particular plan of attack, which is designed to respond to Trafficking, not trafficking. The OUR model of intervention depends on arresting people who are caught in the act of exchanging money for children, or children’s services, freeing the children, and returning them home or to a facility or an adoptive family. But this doesn’t make sense as an intervention against incredibly prevalent forms of exploitation in Haiti. In the restavek system, parents generally know where their kids are. Even if OUR had taken every single restavek and brought them back to their homes, the probable outcome is that their parents would simply send them away again, or put them in orphanages, and the exploitation cycle begins again.

Likewise, orphanage tourism and illicit adoptions emerge from poverty, not kidnapping. Parents surrender their children to orphanages because they want them to be fed and have an education. Illicit adoption occurs when parents do not understand that they have signed away rights to their children and do not understand they have given up their children permanently. It also occurs when documentation of a child is so poor that there is no way to determine whether a child has living parents. This is covered in the first chapter of Kathryn Joyce’s 2014 book The Child Takers, which covers adoption out of Haiti and particularly the flood of poorly-sourced adoptions in the wake of the earthquake. Again, we can’t stop these forms of exploitation with jump teams. About half the children taken from Yvrose’s orphanage were returned to their parents. But what happened to them then?

The problem is, I don’t think Ballard thinks of these things as trafficking. I think he either rounds up these cases to Trafficking, even when they aren’t, or he thinks of them as unrelated phenomena. (It’s worth noting here that Guesno Mardy also runs an orphanage – his facility seems to be supplied by the Mormon Church and may be less dependent on private support. Likewise, OUR also has an international adoption wing called Children Need Families that is run by Ballard’s wife, and Ballard is the adoptive father of two children from Yvrose’s orphanage. I don’t say this to accuse any of them of engaging in illegal or immoral activities pertaining to adoption, but just to note that there’s a lot of reasons why Ballard might think of adoption and trafficking as utterly unrelated phenomena).

Without this tendency to think of Gardy’s kidnapping through the lens of Trafficking, could the search for him have been more successful? I have no idea. I don’t know if an early canvas of orphanages in Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes would have turned up more leads, or if Yvrose could have been offered a generous plea deal in exchange for any information she may have gotten from Carlos or his family. I also don’t know if a canvas of aid organizations that worked with Yvrose could have confirmed or denied if Gardy actually did make it to the orphanage. I hope someone asked. 

I don’t really feel qualified to say how the search for Gardy should have proceeded – only that I can see how some leads would be left uncovered if the goal was always to find Traffickers, which seems to be Ballard’s primary MO. However, it’s not really for me to say what Ballard could have or should have done differently, or whether the outcome would have been different.

What I do think I can say is why this matters for the rest of us. “Cabal goggles” are not a Ballard-exclusive phenomenon. It’s a predominant way of thinking about human trafficking in the US, and our most popular media about trafficking (Taken, Sound of Freedom) does nothing to remove these goggles. In the tentative final section of this, Part 5, I want to wrap up with a conclusion about why this matters. Why does it matter what we think trafficking is, or if we focus on Trafficking to the exclusion of trafficking? What is trafficking, actually? What can we actually do about it? And are our narratives about it actually useful?

1. Editors’s Note - I should note here that this is assuming the story in The Abolitionists - that Carlos took Gardy at all - is true, but I cannot independently verify it. As I discuss in my article “It’s Time to Ask Some Hard Questions,” there are a lot of irregularities in the footage of Carlos’s interrogation, which raises questions of what happened to Carlos. I should also note that this is not even the only story about what happened to Gardy told in the footage of The Abolitionists itself. Carlos’s involvement is insisted upon in the footage, but I have no other reason to think this is what happened. May 30, 2024