Remarks by Brian Concannon honoring the life and legacy of Mario Joseph at the 6th Annual Haiti Funders Conference

June 4, 2025

I would like to thank HDI and the Haiti Funder’s Conference for giving me an opportunity to honor my colleague Mario Joseph. Mario led our partner, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, from 1996 until he passed away tragically in a car accident in March. There is much to say about Mario. He was born into an impoverished family in rural Verettes, but through intelligence, hard work and luck became Haiti’s most prominent human rights lawyer, winning international recognition. For 30 years Mario stood up relentlessly and courageously for the rights of Haitians, especially the most marginalized, such as women, and residents of impoverished rural and urban neighborhoods. Mario stood up against dictatorships, death squads, foreign manipulation, police brutality and the advance of today’s armed groups. He defied death threats, car-jackings, bullets striking his office, rocks striking his body, threats of arrest, and declining health from the stress of his work. 

Mario was also relentlessly strategic. My favorite example of this is a speech he gave in Switzerland in 2013 when he was recognized as a finalist for the Martin Ennals Human Rights Award. The huge auditorium was packed with everyone who was anyone in the human rights community around the UN offices in Geneva. Mario graciously thanked the UN human rights system, and human rights organizations for their principled support for his work prosecuting Jean-Claude Duvalier- for clearly established and lethal violations of Haitians’ human rights. When the warm applause subsided, Mario politely asked why the same actors were not providing principled support for his work pursuing the UN for the just as clearly established and even more lethal violations of Haitians’ human rights involved in the UN cholera epidemic. 

Mario did not receive much warm applause for that. But he did inspire the following speaker–UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay–to stop in the middle of her speech, put her prepared remarks down, and tell everyone that Mario was right, that the UN did have an obligation to the cholera victims.

In over 30 years of close collaboration with Mario, I learned that it is often useful to ask “what would Mario do?” when deciding on a course of action. If he had been here with us tonight, Mario would have first of all been full of gratitude to be with so many people who shared his love for the people of Haiti and his commitment to a more stable and prosperous future for them. Mario would have been particularly grateful to the many people here tonight who made his work possible through what our friend Paul Farmer called pragmatic solidarity.

But at the Haiti Funders’ Conference, Mario would have most of all wanted to talk about partnership.

Partnering with Mario for 30 years was an honor, a privilege, and a source of weekly inspiration. But our partnership was also a near continuous pain in the neck. Mario’s laser-focus on helping Haiti’s marginalized—who were often lined up outside his door from morning to evening—left him with little time to send the information I needed for grant reports and audits. Mario was happy to talk about his work and its importance, but at some point the questions I was asking—that kept him from getting back to helping people—sounded like a lack of trust. 

Mario’s critique of power imbalances and privilege was exciting when applied to Haitian elites and interfering foreign governments. But it was less exciting when applied to me. His unwavering insistence on criticizing any person, place or thing that interfered with Haitians’ struggle made it hard to raise money and complicated to navigate relationships.

On the days where I could muster up the self-discipline to do so, I have understood Mario’s critiques as both a valuable gift and a sign of a strong relationship. I like to think of myself as not a complete jerk, and I have, for more than three decades, made sincere efforts to understand both my own privilege and Haitians’ experience of four centuries of racist repression from people with skin like mine. But it would be delusional to think that these efforts somehow removed all trace of the context of white supremacy that I was born into and still live in. So pointing out how my actions might conflict with my espoused principles of equality is, in fact, a great gift and an opportunity for growth.  

Most of us here are partnering with Haitians who were working under difficult conditions even before the horrific violence of the past few years. We are often trying to establish partnerships and working relationships across great divides—divides of distance, which is increasingly uncrossable—but also across divides of language, culture, privilege and highly divergent historical experience. In this context, it is inevitable that our Haitian partners are going to see ways that we are not optimizing our support for their difficult work.  If we are not hearing suggestions of how we might do better, we need to ask ourselves whether it is because we have somehow mastered an endlessly complicated context that is across so many divides from our own or is it because our partners feel they do not have adequate opportunity to provide feedback.

Our requests for documentation— are easily justifiable in our context here in the US, especially when they are required by others upon whom we rely for financial support, seals of approval and 501c3 status. But it is easy to see how Haitians might feel that our requests show a lack of trust. Mario would be the first to insist that it is essential that any money donated to help Haitians is effectively spent for that purpose, in an accountable way. But he would also insist that as we allocate our time and our partners’ time to collecting and processing information, that we measure the accountability value of the information against its opportunity cost, and ask, if we truly trust our partners, is that time well allocated?

Over the past thirty years, Haiti has faced an extraordinary range of challenges, often leaving the path forward in doubt. When I struggled for direction, I could always count on Mario articulating a plausible path towards democracy and stability that we could get behind. But by last fall, when the recommendations of Mario and so many other Haitians had been ignored enough for their democracy and rule of law to be thoroughly dismantled, he ceased to be able to articulate a clear path forward. 

But this lack of clarity did not leave Mario hopeless. When I asked “so what can be done,” he would say “Nap Lite”—we will fight—as if it was silly to ask the question. For Mario, the “we” in Nap lite–those who will fight–included the young idealistic lawyers on his team, who kept walking through dangerous streets to win freedom for arrested activists so they could get back to their families and to their organizing work. Who kept preparing sexual assault cases for when the courts could open again. Who kept speaking out for the rule of law, in the streets and in the media, less to influence their cynical leaders than to reassure their compatriots that democracy and the rule of law were still worth fighting for.

Even more important, Mario’s Nap lite meant all the Haitians who were fighting for a better future. He meant your partners who keep working every day throughout the country, especially on days where the morning commute requires a level of courage that I hope I am never asked to summon. Working to heal the sick. To keep educating the next generation to contribute to a better future. To keep growing the food Haitians need to survive. To create jobs, wealth and build Haiti’s economy. Working to protect Haiti’s environment and to bring Haitians together.

Mario did not know how Haiti would get out of this horrific crisis, but he absolutely trusted that the Haitian people would find the way out. Trust requires evidence or experience, while faith does not. For me, without being able to see the steps ahead, it was easier to see Mario’s confidence as faith than as trust.

But there is evidence to justify trust, centuries of it: from Haitians founding a nation through a revolt of enslaved people in an Atlantic world dominated by slave-owning powers, then continuing to maintain their culture, their language, their religion, their pride, and their willingness to fight through two centuries of repression and interference, in a world that is still dominated by countries that developed their power through enslavement. From some of Mario’s cases that won victories for justice that no one thought was possible, such as the Raboteau massacre and Duvalier prosecutions, and the UN cholera claim. Through the miracles that all of our partners keep doing in Haiti every day.

Our challenge, this week at the Haiti Funder’s Conference, and every day thereafter, is to understand how we can trust Haitians—both our partners and the Haitian people as a whole—and to responsibly convert that trust into pragmatic solidarity that helps them fight for the prosperity and stability they deserve. Nap lite.