He runs Agacorp, an apparel manufacturer that employs 4,200 people. Not sure if 4,200 is the grand total because it seems he owns multiple factories. Still digging.
===
ANDY APAID, 52, factory owner
Port-au-Prince -- Part of Haiti's tiny elite, Andy Apaid's family runs several textile mills that employ more than 4,000 people, making them one of Haiti's largest employers.
"We pay our workers 2 1/2 times the minimum wage," he said, an amount that equals about $4.50 per day. "It's small but it's an opportunity. Haiti is in dire need of jobs."
In recent months, Apaid has organized a campaign to change Haiti's history of woeful political failure by demanding that politicians of all stripes agree to basic principles: honest, efficient government; respect for political adversaries; transparency in all public enterprises. ((oh cough, cough))
But Apaid has since abandoned his nonpartisan stance, leading marches demanding that President Aristide resign.
"He's treating people with the same repressive ways, making the same mistakes of the past," Apaid said.
Other portraits also:
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/atlanta_world/1203/31haiti.html===
It looks like U.S. imperialism is up to its old dirty tricks once again -- this time in Haiti. In April 2002, the Bush regime and the CIA tried to overthrow the popularly elected government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. They failed abysmally. The working people of Venezuela poured out into the streets in their hundreds of thousands to defend their hero and their populist government, and the right-wing, upper class coup that had been scripted in Foggy Bottom, Langley Va., and Miami was rolled back. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines of the news stories in the U.S. media to see that the scenario in Haiti is pretty much the same: The Haitian “opposition” has declared a “strike” (really a business lock-out) against the government and is aided and abetted by a propaganda onslaught launched by the privately-owned, right-wing media, the same strategy used against Chavez in Venezuela. The privileged class basis of much of the opposition is equally clear. Two of the opposition’s leaders, Andre Apaid, Jr. and Charles Henri Baker, are sweatshop owners, for Christ’s sake. Should we trust sweatshop owners to do the right thing? In the opposition coalition’s “Group of 184" are many more business owners and members of the Haitian professional elite. Their rhetoric may be about democracy and human rights.
Apaid who was once a supporter of the bloody Duvalier dictatorships now claims with a straight face to be a Gandhian advocate of non-violence. But what many are really upset about are the efforts of the Aristide government to raise the minimum wage for the workers and to make the rich pay up on their tax obligations.<snip>
The United States has also played its own despicable role in keeping Haiti impoverished. The slaveowners and their political allies who dominated the U.S. before the Civil War were scared shitless that the example of an independent country of self-emancipated Africans, if allowed to be successful, would inspire slave rebellions here. Trade with Haiti was restricted at the insistence of that eloquent friend of liberty and equality (for whites only), slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, when he was President, so that Haitian ships could not come to U.S. ports bringing with them the possible contagion of liberty for blacks. The U.S. refused to recognize Haiti until Abe Lincoln finally did so in 1862. In 1915, the U.S. invaded Haiti and occupied it until 1934. It took over the Haitian customs offices and funneled receipts to U.S. banks. It rewrote the Haitian constitution so that Haitian land could be sold off to foreigners. Later, in the years of the repressive “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier regimes from 1957 to 1986, the U.S. largely turned a blind eye to the enormous number of human rights violations there as those regimes opened the doors of Haiti to U.S. investors. They appreciated a dirt-cheap workforce kept intimidated by the regimes’ vicious terrorist organization, the Tonton Macoutes. In the 1980s, Haiti was a victim of one of those U.S.-supported IMF and World Bank “Structural Adjustment Programs” that lowered wages and government spending on education and social programs in the holy name of "comparative advantages" and "free trade". As elsewhere, this has only served to bring greater riches for a handful of foreigners and Haitian compradors and greater suffering to the masses of the people.
<snip>
http://www.neravt.com/left/contributors/moore25.htm==
Some opposition leaders made no secret of their desire to see Washington play a more active role in hastening the 50-year-old Aristide's exit.
" We have asked him to leave because too much is too much," said Andy Apaid, a U.S.-born businessman who heads a collection of anti-Aristide organizations and community leaders known as the Group of 184. " nothing gets done without Washington."Apaid and other leaders of the government's so-called democratic opposition have been accused of having links to the motley crew of gang members and ex-soldiers who now control many of the principal towns and cities north of Port-au-Prince. At least 70 people have been killed—including an estimated 40 policemen—in fighting since the rebellion erupted in the seaport of Gonaives on Feb. 5.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4374487/==
Congresswoman Maxine Waters: I believe that the opposition in Haiti is trying to foment a coup d'etat. They claim that they are staging peaceful protests, but that is not what they are actually doing. It is my impression that the opposition, led by Andy Apaid, is simply involved in a power grab. They want to place a council of their choosing in charge of the government and the country, instead of accepting the will of the people and respecting Haiti's democratically elected president. And they want to make sure that the governing council represents only their interests as members of Haiti's bourgeoisie. They want their group, “the elite”, to totally control Haiti. The opposition’s protests are becoming increasingly violent and the United States Government, my government, is not providing the required leadership. It is not meeting its responsibility to help de-escalate the crisis in Haiti. The situation there is serious.” The Congresswoman wants the US to” get tough”, with the Haitian Opposition.
In all the negotiations over the years the Opposition has simply refused to have any dealings with the country’s lawfully elected President Aristide – who has a much better title to his office than President George Bush.
The leader of this Opposition, André Apaid, is a millionaire businessman of Middle Eastern extraction whose family has been in Haiti for decades. He is the leader of the elites, the unreconstructed class of light-skinned and white Haitians who have never forgiven the blacks for defeating France, Spain and Britain on their way to independence. They were extreme racists 200 years ago, and some of them still are today, although one imagines that like the elites in Jamaica, many would have accommodated themselves to reality.
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/mw2_7_4.htmlDemocracy Now: "The leader of the 'opposition' is an American citizen named Andy Apaid. He was born in New York. Haitian law does not allow dual-nationality and he has not renounced his US citizenship. In a recent statement,
Congressmember Maxine Waters blasted Apaid and his opposition front, saying she believes 'Apaid is attempting to instigate a bloodbath in Haiti and then blame the government for the resulting disaster in the belief that the United States will aid the so-called protestors against President Aristide and his government'."http://radio.weblogs.com/0116902/2004/02/26.html#a2133===
According to some businessmen, cheap labour is Haiti’s only resource.
Opposition leader
Apaid owns several factories of the free-zone kind – maquiladoiras in which Haitians work for low wages. In 1997 the American anti-sweatshop NGO – the National Labour Committee – described his operation:
“ Alpha Sewing produces industrial gloves for Ansell Edmont of Coshocton, Ohio, which is owned by Ansell International of Lilburn, Georgia, which in turn is owned by Pacific Dunlop Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia. Ansell Edmont boasts in its promotional literature that it is the world's largest manufacturer of safety gloves and protective clothing, but the workers at Alpha Sewing do not have even the most basic safety protection. They produce Ansell Edmont's "Vinyl-Impregnated Super-Flexible STD" gloves with bare hands; Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), the chemical that toughens the glove, also takes off layers of skin. And the dust from the production of the "Vinyl-Coated Super Comfort Seams-Rite" gloves gives many workers respiratory problems. Hours at the plant are from 6 am to 5:30 pm, Monday through Saturday, and often from 6 am to 3:30 pm on Sunday as well--a 78-hour work week. Approximately 75% of the workers make less than the minimum wage. In April, 1995, a worker who refused to work on Sunday so that he could go to church was fired. When he returned to pick up his severance pay, the manager called the UN police and reported a burglar on the premises. The UN police arrived and promptly handcuffed the worker. After protests from the other employees, the UN police finally let the worker go. The next day, management began firing, three at a time, four at a time, all those workers who had protested the arrest."
According to the National Labour Committee " …Apaid is a notorious Duvalierist. When asked at a business conference in Miami soon after the coup in 1991 what he would do if President Aristide returned to Haiti, Apaid replied vehemently, 'I'd strangle him!' At the time, Apaid was heading up USAID's PROMINEX business promotion project, a $12.7 million program to encourage US. and Canadian firms to move their businesses to Haiti.”
http://www.nathanielturner.com/cannibalarmy.htm
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Opposition leader Andy Apaid Jr., citizen of both the U.S. and Haiti, cannot be president without a consitutional amendment. 
