Sunday, January 30, 2011. Two hundred thousand people occupied Egypt’s Tahrir Square, defying a military curfew to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia’s authoritarian leader had just been overthrown, unleashing a wave of anti-government protests from Yemen to Syria to Morocco. South Sudan’s provisional president announced his people had voted overwhelmingly for independence, clearing the way for the breakup of Africa’s largest country. Yet as Hillary Clinton rushed to Andrews Air Force Base to catch her battered government-issue 727, the secretary of state was not headed to Cairo, Tunis or Juba. She was going to Haiti.

Haiti doesn’t seem like a place that would be central to a U.S. presidential candidate’s foreign policy. It’s a small country, whose 10.3 million people inhabit the western third of a Caribbean island the size of South Carolina. They are the poorest people in the hemisphere when you average their country’s meager $8.5 billion GDP among them, and would seem poorer still if you ignored the huge share held by the country’s tiny elite—which controls virtually everything worth controlling, from the banks and ports, to agriculture and, often, politics. It is not a major exporter of anything. Even its location, 500 nautical miles from the Florida Keys, has been of only passing strategic importance to the United States since a brutal 1915-1934 U.S. occupation assured no European power would surpass its influence there.

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Yet the world’s most powerful couple have an abiding interest in this out-of-the-way place; the island where Bill Clinton four decades ago recommitted himself to politics after an eye-opening journey and an evening with a Vodou priest. During her tenure at State, Hillary traveled to Haiti four times, as often as she did Japan, Afghanistan or Russia. Bill Clinton continues to visit even as her presidential campaign starts up. He attended the February dedication of Port-au-Prince’s new luxury Marriott hotel, a trip on which he reaffirmed, once again, that his work in Haiti represented “one of the great joys of my life.”

Over the past two decades, the once-and-perhaps-future first couple repeatedly played a key role in Haiti’s politics, helping to pick its national leaders and driving hundreds of millions of dollars in private aid, investment and U.S. taxpayer money toward its development. They’ve brought with them a network of friends and global corporations that never would’ve been here otherwise. Together, this network of power and money has left indelible marks on almost every aspect of the Haitian economy. The island nation, in many ways, represents ground zero for the confusing and often conflict-ridden intersection of her State Department, the Clinton family’s foundation and both of their foreign policies.

“When it’s happening you don’t realize it, [but] after everything is in place … you see the Clintons at every level,” says former Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who was Clinton’s co-chairman on the commission charged with rebuilding Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. “Even if they are clever enough to make you think sometimes that you are the one having the idea.”

The legacy of the Clintons’ efforts here is decidedly mixed, a murky story filled with big promises and smaller results. Despite the huge amounts of aid and investment, the sweeping visions they’ve offered of transformative prosperity—promises delivered by a broad network of friends they recruited and deals they negotiated—have been tripped up by realities on the ground.

Joking that he must be coming back to lead a new colonial regime, the Haitian press dubbed Clinton  Le Gouverneur.

Five years after the hemisphere’s deadliest single natural disaster, when both Clintons assumed leading roles in the rebuilding efforts, little progress has been made on many core problems in Haiti, and the government that Hillary Clinton helped put in power during that January 2011 trip—and that both Clintons have backed strongly since—has proven itself unworthy of that trust. Economic growth is stalling, and the nation’s politics look headed for a showdown in the next year that could once again plunge the country into internal strife.

A World Bank study released in December showed that despite modest declines in extreme poverty—mainly in the capital, Port-au-Prince—Haiti remains the poorest and most economically depressed country on the continent, with the richest 20 percent of households accounting for 64 percent of the country’s total income. (The bottom one-fifth of the population earns less than 1 percent.) The report warned that impending political instability could quickly reverse the few gains made since the earthquake.

Hillary Clinton once hoped that Haiti would be the shining jewel of her foreign policy. But far from transforming this poorest of countries, many of the Clintons’ grandest plans and promises remain little more than small pilot projects—a new set of basketball hoops and a model elementary school here, a functioning factory there—that have done little to alter radically the trajectory of the country. Visiting some of their projects over the course of an April research trip affirmed as much about their tenuousness as about the limited benefits they’ve provided. Many of the most notable investments the Clintons helped launch, such as the new Marriott in the capital, have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and island’s ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with.

Even for those who know how Haiti operates, there are many more questions than answers when one examines the Clintons’ recent work. Did Hillary Clinton keep her promise when she said, soon after taking office at State, that “we will demonstrate to ourselves as well as to the people of Haiti and far beyond that we can, working together, make a significant difference”?

Five years after her husband pledged to Esquire magazine that he was “prepared to spend three years” helping Haitians get “the right things for their country,” what does it mean that the vast majority of Haitians still haven’t gotten much of anywhere?

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The Clintons like to cast their relationship with Haiti in personal terms—invariably starting with their 1975 visit as newlyweds to Port-au-Prince, where they watched Vodou penitents walk on coals and the country’s then-dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, lay a wreath at the base of a memorial to Haiti’s founding victory over slavery and the French empire. But there is more than sentiment at stake.

When Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, America’s poorest neighbor was slated to be one of the first beneficiaries of what she called “the power of proximity.” One of her first directives at State was to review U.S. policy toward Haiti—“an opportunity,” she would write in her memoir Hard Choices, “to road-test new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.” That approach had business at its center: Aid would be replaced by investment, the growth of which would in turn benefit the United States. Underscoring the importance of the policy, she tasked her chief of staff—former Clinton White House deputy counsel Cheryl Mills—to oversee the Haiti review personally.

Clinton had two other tools to make Haiti an even more auspicious “road test.” Shortly after she was confirmed, her husband accepted United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s offer to serve as his special envoy for Haiti. As president, Bill Clinton had intensified a crippling embargo against Haiti’s then-ruling military junta and ordered the 1994 U.S. invasion to restore the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power. Now he was supposed to finish the job, spearheading development after a hunger crisis and a series of damaging hurricanes that had struck in late 2008. Haitians weren’t sure what to think: Clinton was popular with the masses for returning Aristide to power and hated by the elites for the same reason. But few understood his vague new role. Joking that he must be coming back to lead a new colonial regime, the Haitian press dubbed him Le Gouverneur.