"Antes que recibir la compasión nos gustaría ser oídos"

"Haití no es América Latina"

Expertos haitianos piden en Madrid que la ONU cambie su estrategia en el país

ANNA-MARIA HOLLAIN - Madrid - 11/10/2010

Antes que recibir la compasión nos gustaría ser oídos". Con esta reivindicación tan fundamental como desoída por la comunidad internacional comienza el manifiesto Haití, año cero, firmado, entre otros, por el antropólogo Daniel Supplice (Puerto Príncipe, 1951), la socióloga Michèle Oriol (Puerto Príncipe, 1956), y el politólogo Erick Balthazar (Puerto Príncipe, 1968), todos curtidos en política y organismos supranacionales, invitados a Madrid por el festival VivAmérica. "Desde hace 15 años, desde que hay una misión de paz en Haití ?aunque no ha habido guerra?, el peso de Naciones Unidas ha ido aplastando las instituciones haitianas donde, ahora mismo, no hay gente capaz de tomar las decisiones correspondientes a la magnitud del problema", afirman en una entrevista con EL PAÍS el viernes.

Diez meses después del terremoto que se cobró 220.000 vidas y dos meses antes de las elecciones presidenciales, la falta de cooperación entre Gobierno, ONU y ONG deja patente el vacío político en que han quedado atrapados los más de 2,3 millones de desplazados. "Hay que clarificar esta situación: ¿se encuentra Haití bajo tutela o es un país independiente?", subraya Michèle Oriol, y Daniel Supplice recuerda la situación de Somalia, "que jamás se ha recuperado de la intervención internacional". La vía de salida propuesta en el manifiesto es un Estado Mayor liderado por EE UU o Francia como nexo entre las comunidades haitiana e internacional encargado de coordinar las labores de reconstrucción y garantizar que las donaciones no se esfumen en el agujero negro de la corrupción, que se ha tragado ya miles de millones de dólares. Un solo interlocutor en lugar de 20, "porque eso es lo que hace Naciones Unidas y ya hemos visto que eso no funciona", explica Oriol. En el manifiesto califican el papel de las potencias regionales en el país durante los últimos años de "superfluo". "Haití es un país caribeño, no es América Latina. Nuestras culturas son muy diferentes, lo que hace muy difícil el diálogo, y con EE UU y Francia, por lo menos, tenemos una historia común, aunque conflictiva", remata Erick Balthazar.

No ponen sus esperanzas en las elecciones de diciembre. De los 19 candidatos, solo dos se presentan para partidos que existen desde hace dos décadas, los otros 17 pertenecen a estructuras sin nombre. "No existe financiación pública de los partidos y no hay una institución electoral organizada y fiable. Solo un candidato tiene dinero suficiente para organizar una campaña electoral. ¿Cómo se pueden alcanzar mayorías, impulsar propuestas, cuando no hay partidos?, se pregunta Oriol. "Cuando no hay equipos, tampoco hay visiones para el país. Sin confrontación no hay debates", precisa Balthazar. "Para poder implementar nuestras ideas, haría falta gente a todos los niveles del poder [Haití tiene una sistema presidencial y parlamentario], senadores, diputados en el Congreso etcétera. Y estos candidatos no forman parte de la estructura política existente", destaca Supplice.

Las fuerzas de seguridad internacionales dicen que el aumento de las violaciones de mujeres en Puerto Príncipe no es su responsabilidad. La Policía Nacional haitiana no tiene los medios para parar a los que se sienten seguros ante la falta de persecución legal. Las ONG ignoran que su atención gratuita ha provocado el cierre de muchos hospitales y que su permanencia masiva en el país dispara los alquileres. Y el Gobierno haitiano se queda inerte ante el crecimiento masivo de la población en la capital cuando habría que descentralizar, porque la falla sigue allí. Ante la presión de esos problemas, ellos piensan ya en las elecciones de 2015: "Para que Haití deje de ser un país asistido y se convierta en un país responsable hace falta concienciar a los ciudadanos a una participación política. Ya no estamos a tiempo para estas elecciones, pero sí para las de 2015", coinciden.

Infantes salvos en "la botella"

Weighing the Lives of Babies in HaitiBy

DENNIS ROSEN, M.D.

It was the first week of May, almost four months after the earthquake, and the situation remained dire. Rubble was everywhere, many buildings were unusable, and all of the pediatric care was being given in tents. Supplies were sparse and unreliable.

The obstetricians at the General were on strike, and women in labor were being told to go elsewhere. But word had gotten out that there were American doctors at the hospital, and many patients simply refused to leave.

So it was on that rainy Sunday evening that there were six women in active labor in the emergency room. And soon one of them, in her late teens, gave birth to a tiny boy, just 2 pounds 3 ounces. A neonatologist on our team estimated that he was two months premature. (The mother claimed she hadn’t even known she was pregnant.)

Premature babies can get into a lot of trouble, and the smaller they are, the higher their risk of complications. They usually have difficulty maintaining a normal body temperature, losing heat to their surroundings faster than they can generate it. This is why they are kept in incubators until they are able to stay warm on their own. They are at high risk for infections, along with feeding and breathing problems.

Once the baby was born, we dried and swaddled him and started looking for a place where he could be cared for until he was stable enough to be sent home. There were no working incubators at the hospital, nor any free beds in the pediatric tents, and we had no luck finding incubators at other hospitals.

Then an American physician at another medical camp told us that he had faced a similar situation some days before, and had built his own incubator — “MacGyver” style, as he put it. He suggested we do the same.

So that’s what we did. We took a cardboard box from the medical supply room, padded it with some surgical drapes and a blanket and found a desk lamp with a working bulb to serve as a source of heat. Voilà! Our youngest patient now had an incubator.

The next morning we tried to persuade the attending Haitian pediatrician to accept the baby to the pediatric tents. “Don’t be absurd!” she scoffed, as I recall. “A baby that small will not make it. He has no chance of survival, and we have no spare beds to waste.”

None of us felt comfortable arguing with her. Still, we knew that to send the baby to his mother’s tent city while he was still so vulnerable would be a death sentence. So we decided to keep him and his mother in the emergency room until a proper place could be found — understanding that we needed to find a solution before returning to Boston, as the group that would follow us did not include pediatricians qualified to treat complications of prematurity.

A baby bottle was found, along with clothes and diapers. The nurses taught his mother how to express milk into the bottle and to feed him. We’d been calling him “baby in the box”; now he became Jack, as in Jack in the box. He did very well, and his mother, after overcoming her surprise at his unexpected appearance, bonded with and cared for him devotedly.

Each day we pressed his case to the Haitian medical team, and each day we were turned down. “There is no room for him,” we were told, though there seemed to be beds for other children in the pediatric tents.

Finally, on Friday, we found an incubator for him at another hospital. We transferred him and his mother there, satisfied that we had gotten him through those first few days, but soberly aware of the odds he faced going forward. The next day we left for Boston.

Six weeks after our return, at an informal reunion, the neonatologist told us he had learned that Jack had been discharged home with his mother in good health, weighing five and a half pounds.

We were thrilled. Our stubbornness had paid off.

But our euphoria was tempered by a somber reality. Looking at the big picture, we had to concede that the Haitian doctors were probably right.

We were in Port-au-Prince, after all, not Boston. Surely the Haitians, acutely aware of what they could and could not do with the resources they had, would know better than a group of well-intentioned foreigners accustomed to the best equipment money can buy. Didn’t it make more sense to invest time, effort and scarce resources in a baby with a better chance of surviving?

Yet ultimately this was not an abstract discussion about the proper allocation of medical resources in an impoverished country, but a decision about the fate of a baby who was very much alive. He was our patient, and we were determined to give him the best possible care.

In the little-picture view, a life had been saved.

 

Dr. Dennis Rosen is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

Haití: un nombre, una nación y un destino a cambiar (Guy Pierce)

En este polémico ensayo, el historiador de la Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México y ex diplomático haitiano Guy Pierre nos habla del drama de su país y de las necesidades acuciantes de un pacto político popular para construir un futuro diferente y soberano. El terremoto de enero de 2010 ha despertado el interés en esta nación isleña que lucha por recuperarse. Desde el siglo XVI, Haití ha sido cruce de culturas, primero entre españoles y pueblos indígenas, y luego como colonia francesa con una de las poblaciones de origen africana más importantes de América. Haití fue la primera nación latinoamericana en alcanzar su independencia en 1804, merced a la lucha de los antiguos esclavos que bautizaron su nación con un nombre prehispánico.

To lo artículo en: 

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Haiti/nombre/nacion/destino/cambiar/elpepuintlat/20100813elpepuint_2/Tes

En su artículo, Pierce propone un  "pacto programático"basado en 7 puntos:

1. 
   
   -Reconfigurar el aparato de Estado para fortalecerlo, reformando así el sistema judicial y estableciendo nuevas normas por el funcionamiento de la administración pública; y las ONG, las cuales deben ser reducidas a un cierto número determinado y colocadas bajo el control estricto del poder central
2. 
   
   Reformular el discurso político general, educando así al pueblo para que apoye el nuevo proceso de acción, pero sin llevarle por medio de prácticas populistas a ilusionarse sobre el futuro inmediato del país.
3. 
   
   -Definir con las Naciones Unidas un calendario para el retiro de la Misión de Estabilización de las Naciones Unidas en Haití (MINUSTAH) en un plazo de dos años
4. 
   
   -Reformular el discurso político general, apoyándose así en el pueblo y educándole sin llevarle por medio de la retórica populista a crearse ilusiones
5. 
   
   Fortalecer la Policía Nacional, tomando medidas eficaces para dotarla de recursos financieros suficientes y de medios modernos por el incremento de su eficacia; aumentar el número de agentes en consonancia con el incremento de la demanda de los ciudadanos y ciudadanas en materia de seguridad y de servicios; y elevar el nivel de formación de los agentes y su capacidad de comunicación y de dialogo con los ciudadanos y las ciudadanas
6. 
   
   -Asentar las bases para implementar de manera progresiva un plan de acción de largo plazo tendente a apoyar de manera sostenida la educación y a reactivar en general la economía en un marco distinto del modelo que las organizaciones financieras internacionales lo vienen imponiendo desde los años ochenta.
7. 
   
   Reconsiderar con las Naciones Unidas y las potencias tradicionales las condiciones de la ayuda que se ofrece al país a raíz de los graves daños sufridos el 12 de enero pasado. Es decir proponer y llevar a las Naciones Unidas y a las potencias aludidas anteriormente a aceptar a transformar la CIRH, con un número muy reducido de miembros y en coordinación con el Senado, en un comité de auditoría encargado de verificar los gastos realizados para la reconstrucción con fondos procedentes del extranjero. Todo ello con el entendido de que el comité podrá pedir a las Naciones Unidas suspender el desembolso de los fondos en el caso que se revele que ha habido malversación de algunas partidas ya desembolsadas

Cómo las IMF ayudaron a través de internet

( de Sitio de BID)

Los medios sociales, desde Facebook a Twitter, los SMS y el uso de celebridades son herramientas útiles para que las microfinancieras ayuden en una crisis humanitaria. El caso de FINCA lo muestra en detalle

Sólo bastaban dos clics o un send para ser solidario. Apenas un día después del terremoto de 7.3 grados en la escala Richter que pulverizó Port-au-Prince y otras ciudades de Haití, los usuarios de YouTube alrededor del globo eran invitados a hacer una donación a la Cruz Roja de Estados Unidos y los clientes de telefonía celular norteamericanos a transferir US$10 enviando el mensaje de texto HAITI al #90999.

La respuesta fue abrumadora. En 48 horas, la Cruz Roja estadounidense recibió donaciones por US$ 35 millones, más de la cuarta parte a través de mensajes de texto y de usuarios de medios sociales. La organización humanitaria informó luego a la prensa que la recaudación sobrepasó la suma de las donaciones recibidas por el Huracán Katrina y el tsunami que arrasó las costas de Tailandia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka e India.

Facebook, Twitter, blogs y hasta mensajes telefónicos proveyeron otra vez su velocidad y ubicuidad para viabilizar, por vía rápida, la respuesta espontánea a las crisis humanitarias. Esas características, que no pasaron de largo para la Cruz Roja y otras organizaciones humanitarias, tampoco fueron ajenas para las instituciones microfinancieras. Organizaciones como ACCION International, BRAC, Incofin, Freedom From Hunger, la Fundación Grameen y WOCCU lanzaron campañas inmediatas para reunir fondos que ayudaran a corto plazo a las familias haitianas y, a mediano y largo, a poner otra vez a rodar la industria microfinanciera de la isla.

¿Cómo fueron esos procesos? Uno de los ejemplos que permite explicar el compromiso inmediato de la industria microfinanciera con la crisis fue la campaña de FINCA Internacional, una organización con larga experiencia en la recolección de donativos por internet para su programa de financiamiento para microemprendedoras Village Banking, instrumentado en 21 países del mundo.

FINCA lanzó la campaña FINCA Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund con el objeto de poder financiar préstamos para que sus más de 12.000 clientes en el país puedan reiniciar sus negocios y comenzar su reconstrucción. FINCA trabaja en Haití desde mediados de los años ’80, donde provee microcréditos mayoritariamente a mujeres que viven con menos de US$ 3 por día.

Una actriz en escena

La campaña del FINCA Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund siguió la estructura básica de las campañas de recaudación online, con difusión casi geométrica a través de redes sociales, el uso de una marca conocida entre los participantes y la implementación de una plataforma simple, ágil y segura para enviar dinero por internet. Inicialmente, FINCA abrió una “ventanilla” de donación en el sitio de Village Banking con sistemas de seguridad provistos por Visa. Los donantes pueden realizar aportes de monto fijo, de US$ 5 a US$ 5.000, o proponer su propia cantidad.

A horas del lanzamiento del FINCA Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, la organización publicó enlaces simultáneos con el mensaje de su presidente y director ejecutivo, Rupert Scofield, en la web de Village Banking y para sus 1.100 seguidores en Twitter. Poco tiempo después, abrió los mensajes a una multiplicación incesante cuando la actriz Natalie Portman escribió una convocatoria en el sitio de Village Banking.

Portman, que como Embajadora de la Esperanza de FINCA desde 2004 ha visitado Guatemala y Ecuador, remarcó las posibilidades que abren los microcréditos para los más necesitados y pidió la más inmediata y generosa donación para Haití. El mismo mensaje se reprodujo en el sitio oficial de la actriz en Facebook, donde cuenta con 121.000 seguidores, y en Twitter.

FINCA también utilizó su página grupal en Facebook para mantener informados a sus 1.100 fans sobre la evolución de la crisis y su compromiso con Haití. La organización abrió una causa —una aplicación de la red social para realizar convocatorias públicas— y facilitó a las personas la posibilidad de donar desde allí.

Más que dinero

Los resultados económicos de las campañas aun están en proceso. En MySpace, donde el programa Village Banking utiliza profusamente la imagen de Portman para promocionar las actividades de FINCA, las donaciones vía el sistema de pagos PayPal sumaban US$ 1.165 a quince días del terremoto. FINCA todavía no ha informado resultados de las recaudaciones del FINCA Haiti Earthquake Relief Found y el volumen de las recaudaciones de la página The Village Banking Campaign’s Impact son bajos.

Pero el dinero no lo es todo en las redes sociales, que inicialmente son más útiles para difundir e instalar discusiones y proyectos. De hecho, en la semana posterior al terremoto, la recaudación acumulada en la aplicación Causas por todos los usuarios de Facebook sumaba sólo US$ 100.000 pero su impacto informativo se contaba por millones de personas. Sin ir muy lejos, durante esa semana y cada 60 segundos, 1.500 personas cambiaron sus estados —la frase que figura junto a la foto y nombre del usuario para ser vista por terceros— y en un santiamén se formaron más de 500 grupos por la causa haitiana, cada uno de ellos con miles de inscriptos.

En el caso de FINCA, las palabras de Portman, quien ya ha hecho campaña para la organización en programas de alta audiencia de la TV estadounidense, como “The View”, se convirtieron velozmente en mensajes virales distribuidos por Twitter, redes, blogs y sitios de medios tradicionales, incluidos los del corazón y la farándula. El breve pedido de donaciones para FINCA publicado en su página de Facebook tuvo la adhesión inmediata de más de 250 personas.

Marca y prestigio, en alza

Durante la campaña en Facebook, FINCA amplió la repercusión positiva sobre su marca, asunto nada menor a la hora de atraer recursos para atender crisis humanitarias como la de Haití o la actividad corriente de los emprendedores financiados por microcréditos. (Al 29 de enero, fecha de cierre de este artículo, Village Banking, la página de FINCA en Facebook, contaba con 1.100 seguidores, tres y hasta cuatro veces más que las de otras organizaciones microfinancieras.)

Como lo demuestra el apoyo de Natalie Portman, FINCA sabe lo que pesan los nombres y el prestigio. En Haití, la organización ha trabajado muy cerca de la William J. Clinton Foundation, dirigida por el ex presidente de Estados Unidos. Además, tiene el reconocimiento de Charity Navigator, una organización que audita la calidad institucional de organizaciones sin fines de lucro y que en 2009 le asignó su máxima calificación —cuatro estrellas— por séptimo año consecutivo.

Ese voto de calidad abona el terreno para quien busque sembrar más alcance. Charity Navigator y otras organizaciones que utilizan estrictos criterios de calificación, como Givewell.net y el Philantropy Institute, están siendo asiduamente citadas por las campañas de donativos con el fin de ayudar a encauzar la generosidad, especialmente desde que se detectaron algunos intentos de fraude con donaciones por internet para supuestos grupos de ayuda a Haití.

Ayuda al Desarrollo en Haití: por Jeffrey Sachs

Seven questions for Jeffrey Sachs



Jan 25th 2010, 19:34 by R.M.
NEW YORK


JEFFREY SACHS is considered one of the world's foremost development economists. He is also one of the most productive. Mr Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, an itinerant adviser to poor-country governments, and special adviser to Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general. Mr Sachs has authored numerous articles, reports and books, including "The End of Poverty" and "Common Wealth". Most recently he has put forth a strategy for rebuilding Haiti. On Friday I spoke to Mr Sachs over the phone and asked him some questions about the rebuilding effort and America's role in helping Haiti recover. Here's an edited transcript:


DIA: You've written that American relief and development institutions do not function properly. What's wrong with them?
Mr Sachs: For roughly 25 years US development assistance has been scaled back when measured against need and against the scale of the US economy (and hence the “ability to aid” and fair international “burden sharing”). Over the course of many years we have stripped USAID of a strategic role and it became a kind-of contracting agency, heavily focused on war zones as an adjunct to US military and foreign policy, rather than operating as a world-leading development institution. I am hoping that this might change, finally, under new management.
The American people, in general, are also not particularly supportive of development assistance. Many people, in fact, think we spend far more money in development than we actually do. They're only vaguely aware of development assistance, and how it can work. It is deemed by Congress and the White House to be poor politics, although I think that is a mistaken view by the politicians. And as a result we just haven't carried out a significant international development effort in this county for quite a long time, and the institutions have atrophied as a result.


DIA: Focusing on Haiti, you've called for America to appropriate at least $1 billion this year and next for the country. Based on what you just said, how can I be confident that the money is going to get to where it needs to go?
Mr Sachs: I want the money to come from the US, but not to go through the US government. What I'd like is for US and other donor money to be put into a multi-donor trust fund (MDTF). My specific recommendation is that the MDTF should be located at the Inter-American Development bank. There are a lot of reasons for that. In essence the IADB is a development-finance institution that works well, has a long-term commitment to Haiti, has a lot of expertise, and is competent in handling money and organising projects with the proper monitoring, auditing and evaluation. And so I think that when you scan the institutional environment, the IADB seems the best place to do this. I think that relatively little of the aid should go through the bilateral development agencies of any of the major donor countries.

DIA: Have you been happy with Barack Obama's response to the disaster?
Mr Sachs: Yes, in the sense that he's paying significant attention to it. He's organised a massive effort by US agencies, including the military. So yes, I am happy with it.
I do feel, however, based on a lot of experience, that this attention will wane rather quickly, and so we want to institutionalise the response and not have it depend on the day-to-day interest of the president of the United States.


DIA: In the long term, if you were in charge of developing American policy towards Haiti, what would you do?
Mr Sachs: Like any long-term development problem, Haiti has suffered from both a lack of infrastructure—roads, power systems, water and sanitation systems, rural and agricultural development—and a failure of internal institutions. And the US has unfortunately had a hand in both of these shortcomings, though there are massive internal sources of failure as well. So it's a complicated situation.
In order to have a successful long-term response to this crisis we have to view it from a long-term development perspective, meaning that beyond the emergency relief and stabilisation efforts, the thinking has to be oriented to helping the country escape from what has been two centuries of poverty and, more recently, two decades of downward spiral. To do this we must address both physical and organisational shortcomings . We need a strategy that is consistent with Haiti's geography, its resources, its endowments and its potential development path. Haiti needs a strategy that is both rural and urban, focusing on agriculture, light manufacturing and services, and at the same time one that builds, nearly from scratch, an internal institutional capacity to manage in the future. In the field of development there are lots of examples of how these things can get done. I believe that this is how we should be oriented and I believe that Haiti can be successful.
It's a remarkable thing, but in the past we never actually supported the basics in Haiti. For decades after Haiti’s independence, the US did not even recognise the country. In the 20th century, the US occupied the country militarily, and left behind little except further decades of military rule. Haiti was also a pawn in the cold war. More recently there have been decades of trauma, from the political upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s until the earthquake. In the early 1990s, the US imposed a trade embargo to restore President Aristide to power, and then a few years later under George W. Bush squeezed Haiti’s economy to chase Aristide from power! Even after devastating hurricanes hit the country in 2008, the US and other countries offered little practical help to Haiti despite lots of good speeches and pledges and positive signs from outside. The world, including the US government, just couldn't get organised to do anything practical, up until the earthquake.
So it has been a very, very long time—literally decades, though one could argue two full centuries—where the international politics and the domestic politics and the strategy have been out of alignment. Finally, now, there seems to be the right combination of factors, where we have a supportive international community, a potentially productive partner inside the country, and a realistic development strategy in my view. But alas, the earthquake, one of the deadliest in human history, has now brought the society back to mass death and destitution.


DIA: How do you respond to critics who say that the Haitian government does not have the capacity to absorb so much aid, that aid efforts in the past have fostered a culture of dependence, and that much of this money only seems to benefit the powerful or crowd out local enterprise?
Mr Sachs: Haiti needs to build from a state of physical and institutional collapse, so all of those worries are real and need to be considered. The thing that is absolutely unworkable is simply to transfer cash to the Haitian government. But I don't think that is what anyone in Haiti has in mind.
What is needed are a set of specific investment programmes, targeted at key sectors, including peasant farmers, labour-intensive reconstruction of the capital city, power plants, roads, water systems and so forth. Some of these efforts will be rather complex, involving a large amount of engineering and logistics. So this is not aid in the sense of people writing checks to a foreign government. It is aid to finance and help design and manage targeted investment projects, each with their own professional component, and with Haitians playing a growing role over time. It's a series of discrete challenges that add up to a recovery and development strategy.


DIA: Based on what you're saying—the need for massive support from foreign donors and aid workers—how do we make sure that this effort doesn't foster a culture of dependence?
Mr Sachs: To my mind a lot of the basic infrastructure issues are not about dependency per se, but about making the basic functions of life operational again. And so I would like to proceed pretty quickly on those fronts. Haiti needs power plants and roads. Getting those in place as soon as possible will reduce rather than increase “dependency”.
I think that what is more important over time is that this effort is not about putting people in IDP camps, or handing out food. The way to beat dependency is to see the building of a viable Haitian economy as a core part of this process. In my view there are several different components to that. One is that, for the first time ever really, there needs to be a rural agricultural strategy so that peasants who are impoverished right now can start earning a living by producing food for the rest of their countrymen. And that is an empowering kind of assistance which builds from within. If you get bags of fertilizer to peasant farmers, who then turn out crops at yields three times of what they had done before—I've watched that happen in many places—that empowers rather than dis-empowers the farmers. That breaks dependency. It creates a commercial agricultural sector that right now doesn't exist and really hasn't existed in Haiti in a large part of the rural areas. Similarly, Haiti used to have hundreds of thousands of people working in assembly operations before political instability and trade embargoes killed the sector. That sector needs to be re-energised. It's not going to happen in the first year, but it can happen over a period of five years. Haiti also has had a vibrant tourist industry in the past, which has utterly disappeared. Tourism on the other side of Hispaniola has been a very big driver of the Dominican Republic's growth. Haiti can do the same thing in the coming years.
The key, in short, to avoiding dependency, is to focus not on handouts but on building a viable economy in which Haitians will earn incomes, gain skills, form businesses, and become the masters of their own destiny. Development assistance is not the same as humanitarian aid (important as that is in the immediate aftermath of a disaster).


DIA: You've touched on it in your previous answers, but how responsible do you think the US is for Haiti's pre-earthquake struggles?
Mr Sachs: Well, I don't think the US has ever had the combination of political will and substantive understanding to be a sustained helpful partner for Haiti. Clearly if Haiti had stronger internal leadership over the decades, it could have done vastly better despite America's combination of neglect, misunderstanding and often poor policy. But Haiti didn't have that internally, and the US has done a lot of things ranging from simple neglect to advertently or inadvertently destabilising the country. Whether it’s training generals who ended up making coups, supporting Papa Doc during certain periods of the cold war, enacting trade embargoes or chasing Aristide out of the country—those are all events that I would not put in the pro-development column. And I don't think the US has ever had a sustained political and conceptual approach to Haiti that came close to what we could and should have been doing to support Haiti’s long-term development. Now is the time to set a new course, based on sustained support, through a multilateral effort, and with Haiti’s sustained escape from poverty as the central objective.

Violencia afuera/Adentro de la Comunidad: Caso de Haiti

La violencia del Estado refleje en la violencia adentro de la comunidad. Trabajar la construción de paz en noiveles politicos requiere acciones al nivel de la comunidad.

Esto es lo que concluye articulo en Development Outreach acerca de la experiencia de Haiti

Beyond basic security, the root causes of violence and fragility, that is,the social and economic marginalization residents face, must be addressed.Promising approaches include World Bank Community Driven Development processes, which can serve as a forum for community reconciliation and consensus building on local development. Also, support for basic service provision in violence hot spots can be a means to bring the state presence back into under-governed areas, helping to rebuild state legitimacy in violence-affected communities. By linking violence prevention and institutional strengthening, development institutions can go a long way toward arresting the cycle of violence and poverty that holds vulnerable communities back from sustainable development.

http://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/devoutreach/article/191/bottom-state-building-preventing-violence-community-level