On the 12th of January 2010, Haiti was devastated by an earthquake which struck some 10 miles Southwest of the capital Port-au-Prince. Recording 7.0 on the Richter scale, it left 220,000 people dead, over 300,000 more injured. Haiti’s already inadequate  infrastructure was also severely affected as the earthquake damaged or destroyed as many as 250,000 [...]

Book Review: Damming the Flood - Haiti and the Politics of Containment, Peter Hallward (Verso, 2nd Edition, Jan 2011).
Haiti is a country largely ignored by the world’s media and public opinion. It needs a catastrophe, whether a hurricane, cholera outbreak or an earthquake, to bring it to the world’s attention. Thus, an image has been [...]

On January 10th this year Near FM’s Under the Sun program broadcast an interview with Peter Hallward, the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment to coincide with the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake which is estimated to have affected three million people, killing 316,000 and leaving 300,000 injured [...]

It’s an old cliche that the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity. In Haiti however, business and political leaders are not concerned with originality. The catastrophic earthquake was quick to be seen as an opportunity to rebuild the Western hemisphere’s poorest country, with the US thinktank the Heritage Foundation famously writing that [...]

In the aftermath of an earthquake that devastated the slum-cities of Haiti, there has been a strong influx of foreign money and troops, apparently to help rebuild the poverty-stricken country. However, we should note that many of the countries that have been to the fore in expressing their altruistic intentions are those which are most [...]

Earthquakes Leave Us All in a Difficult Position
Like everyone else in the world, I have been watching the earthquake coverage on the television from Haiti and making prayers morning noon and night that God will stop now. I am as lacking in compassion as the next man, so long as the next man is me, [...]

Today Haiti is most commonly known for being the poorest country in the ‘western’ hemisphere and a land wracked by destitution and despair. This picture has only been reinforced by the horrific consequences of the January 13th earthquake, 15 kms south-west of Port-au-Prince. While the media networks are falling over themselves to relay stories of [...]