A week after international donors promised some $5 billion in aid to Haiti over the next 18 months (and $10 billion over the next half decade), the plan to reconstruct Haiti is being met with significant skepticism and indifference by many Haitians. That’s what a report by Jesscia Desvarieux argues in Time this weekend. Desvarieux writes that “Haitians are concerned that aid money will not trickle down to the people but instead [will] be used by the government to take care of its own… The government has yet to earn the trust of the people. It cannot simply be placed at the helm, expecting citizens to believe in it.”
But it’s through the Haitian state where both international donors and Haitian government officials see the most hope for reconstruction and recovery. In an interview with FP’s Elizabeth Dickinson, Haitian ambassador to the US, Raymond Joseph says the idea of Haiti as a “republic of NGOs” must come to an end. Here’s Joseph:
“What has not worked well is that about $2 billion have been collected for Haiti, but the Haitian government has only seen about $10 million. The money has been pledged and collected by NGOs. That's one thing we have to change in the future. Governments [of donor countries] have to work with the government of Haiti. I can understand in the past where they worked with NGOs [because at that time] the Haitian government was not responsible or transparent. However, Haiti has met quite a few benchmarks on corruption and [good governance] such that the international community forgave $1.2 billion of Haiti's debt last June. The remaining $800 million is being forgiven right now. We've shown we're on the way, so now donors should have more trust in the government to carry out the projects. The money should not be sent to NGOs because NGOs cannot develop the country: NGOs cannot take care of the infrastructure, they cannot build the roads, and they cannot have electric plants.”
Joseph also calls on countries, including the US, to extend tariff-free imports on textiles and other goods coming from Haiti. And, says the ambassador, he would like to see a new emphasis placed on reviving Haitian agriculture. “The fact that a lot of people left Port-au-Prince after the earthquake -- I think it was a very good thing. I'm suggesting that whatever aid is being given now be distributed, for the most part, to the countryside of Haiti.”
In other news:
· A series of drug war related stories from Mexico, as a 7.2 magnitude earthquake centered around Mexicali shook Northern Mexico and parts of Western United States yesterday. From the LA Times, a report on a clandestine interview given by notorious Mexican drug boss Ismael “el Mayo” Zambada in Mexico’s Proceso. Zambada tells the weekly that he lives in fear of being arrested but that his arrest would have little impact on the drug trade. The details of the secret interview with one of the Sinaloa cartel’s top capos by journalist Julio Scherer Garcia are quite extraordinary:
“Scherer says he was summoned to the interview through an anonymous note that set a time and place where he would be picked up to be taken to the drug boss' hide-out. He describes a series of long drives with switching-off chase cars and hours of waiting in a safe house. He finally ends up in a remote, mountainous location where Zambada appears, flanked by well-armed bodyguards. The author and narco then sit down to a lunch of meat and beans.”
· The LAT also has a piece on Eduardo Ravelo, called the “face of terror” in Ciudad Juarez by some, and now believed to be connected to the murder of three individuals linked to the US consulate in that city some three weeks ago. Ravelo is a leader of the Barrio Azteca prison gang suspected of carrying out the March assassinations. The paper writes of the gang operating in an organized manner on both sides of the border: “Today, authorities say there are 2,000 or more hard-core Barrio Aztecas roaming El Paso, a city of 600,000 beset by drug trafficking and illegal immigrant smuggling. In Ciudad Juarez, Ravelo's gang is known simply as the Aztecas. Its numbers are difficult to count but are probably three times those in El Paso. Maybe more.” The AP reports that 13 inmates were freed from a prison in Reynosa after armed men stormed the jail over the weekend. Thirty one prison guards have been detained for questioning. The mass jail break in the state of Tamaulipas was the second in two weeks, and it comes after a shootout between drug gangs and Mexican troops killed five in a residential area of Reynosa Friday. According to the AP, the violence stems from attempts by the Gulf cartel and their hitmen, the Zetas, to gain control of northeastern Mexico. Finally, the New York Times reports on violence spilling over into the US. In particular, the paper’s Randal Archibold focuses on fears among Arizona ranchers after a ranching “scion” was murdered last week in an incident police suspect may be linked to drug or smuggling rings operating in the area.
· The Wall Street Journal says Colombia’s cocaine industry has fallen on hard economic times since its peak days of the late 1980s. Cocaine once accounted for nearly 7% of the country’s GDP, but, the paper says, Colombian cartels have lost control of major smuggling routes north while legal industries like oil and mining have boomed. Today the cocaine trade is estimated to be just 1% of Colombian GDP. [For some comparison, Mexican cartels generate as much as 2.5% of that country’s GDP today.] According to the WSJ:
“Cocaine production peaked at some 650 tons in 2000, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, up from around 19 tons in 1985. Since then, output has slipped, with Colombia producing 430 tons of cocaine in 2008—around 51% of the world's total—from 81,000 hectares planted with coca, the raw material used to make cocaine. However, the money made from growing coca bushes and processing the leaves into cocaine is paltry compared with the vast profits made from smuggling.”
· The Wall Street Journal also has a very interesting weekend interview with pop star Shakira. The main topic of discussion: her efforts to build schools and community centers in some of the poorest neighborhoods in her native Colombia while bringing early childhood education to the forefront of Latin America’s political debate.” Because of this work, the paper writes, she’s gotten a meeting with President Obama on childhood education for Latinos in the US and had numerous international speaking gigs to talk about the work of her foundation, the Barefoot Foundation. Next November she’ll be taking her message to the Ibero-American Summit in Argentina where President Cristina Kirchner has apparently given her an “extraordinary commitment” to make early childhood development a central topic of discussion.
· From Venezuela, a report from the New York Times on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Venezuela last week where oil, arms, and agriculture were the main topics under discussion. Simon Romero also begins a report on Venezuela with information on the arrest of Judge María Lourdes Afiuni after an anti-Chavez ruling last December. The paper writes: “Since Judge Afiuni’s imprisonment, a dizzying sequence of other high-profile arrests has taken place, pointing to Mr. Chávez’s recent use of his security and intelligence apparatus to quash challenges to his grip on the country’s political institutions.” According to one legal scholar interviewed in the piece, there are about 20 or 30 Venezuelans who are currently imprisoned on politically-related charges.
· In Bolivia, Evo Morales and the MAS scored a “modest” election victory Sunday as pro-government candidates held leads in 5 of 9 state governor races as of this morning. In mayoral elections, the AP says, pro-government candidates won three major cities but, interestingly, lost in La Paz, the seat of the Morales administration.
· At Global Post, an interesting piece on blogging and social networking in Cuba. The focus of the story is blogger, Yoani Sanchez (who Global Post says remains “largely unknown on the island” because her blog is blocked there). But Sanchez does continue to run a “Blogging Academy” out of her Havana apartment with some 30 students regularly attending.
· Finally, four opinions. An editorial in the New York Times on Haiti says last week’s donor’s conference was hopeful because donor’s promised to focus efforts on putting money into the Haitian state in an organized way. Andres Oppenheimer attacks the aid pledge of the Chinese to Haiti which he calls “pitiful” at just $1.5 million (not billion dollars). Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal begins with a discussion of the number of Brazilians on Forbes recent “richest individuals in the world list” and argues Lula’s predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, deserves most of the credit for the country’s economic success. And in the Guardian, Vaclav Havel attacks restrictions on free speech in Venezuela. His focus is the arrest of Oswaldo Alvarez Paz. The article (co-signed Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister of Russia; Francisco Bermudez, a former minister of national defence, Guatemala; Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion and current opposition political activist in Russia; Javier Loaiza, a consultant and political analyst in Colombia and Don McKinnon, a former secretary general of the Commonwealth) maintains that:
“Under Chávez's rule, a radical form of state-sanctioned lawlessness has taken hold in the country. You could say that Venezuela now exists as a ‘lawless legality,’ a political system within which officials deny that in making or interpreting laws they are bound in any way by the spirit of justice that underpins those laws.”
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