Hope and horror in Haiti and Mexico, Mark Morford

Hope and horror in Haiti and Mexico
By Mark Morford

It's difficult to tell which story struck me more intensely: the heartbreaking images of devastation in dirt-poor, slum-ravaged Haiti, the result of yet another unstoppable and harrowing act of nature, with tens of thousands presumed dead and billions in damages in an already devastated, environmentally gutted country, or the story of the sharp increase in nauseating ultraviolence in the border towns of Mexico, a country that began the new year with its bloodiest day on record -- 69 murders, many so shockingly gruesome it would make a horror movie director shudder.

How do you parse and turn? Where do you look for relief, for a sliver of understanding? The Haiti drama is so overwhelmingly tragic, so much pain and suffering on such an enormous scale, you can barely get your mind -- much less your heart -- around it.

But it doesn't stop there. If you begin to dig into the Haiti story at all, it only leads you down a cruel rabbit hole of unspeakable desperation and horror, as you read further about the ravaged history of Haiti and its brutalized people, and just how destitute and violent, doomed and impossible the overall situation is in the western hemisphere's only third world country.

Here's a fascinating, albeit hugely depressing, Times story from back in May, to give an overview of what current Haiti earthquake relief efforts are up against. While the U.S., China, Venezuela and many others are already sending millions of dollars in food and relief, you read a story like this, in a country with 80 percent unemployment, where U.N. and relief workers have frequently been directly involved in drug deals and gang wars, where the children eat mud, and rape is common, you can only ask: what does the international aid actually mean? How does it serve anything? Wasn't the situation already so awful, so destitute and fraught, it's as though Haiti has been in a state of perpetual emergency for more than 50 years? ...

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A cause that could be readily changed in a single afternoon with but a few signatures.

The drug war.

The violence in Mexico wouldn't end immediately but it would ramp sharply downward and continue to drop with a cessation of the drug war.

The Purgatorial level of horror that is Haiti is a far more complex problem and not amenable to simple or simplistic remedies.

on their debt mostly to the french. If that is anywhere close there is where we need to focus our energy in changing. We americans are going to find ourselves in the same boat in the future if we don't quit spending money like drunk sailors.

by spending. That was naked raw imperialism.

We've got the same thing going on here in the us right now. We're bigger so it takes longer but the powers to be want us to be but serfs, all of us that aren't one of them. South American countries is the same thing. american imperialism is doing a number on a lot of people and it sucks. Its all because of the few who can't seem to get enough self worth that causes the problem. I'd say less than one percent of the people in the world are making life a lot harder than it should be for the other 99 percent of us. We need to cut the head off that snake actually :hi: methinks anyway