Right after the earthquake, the US
allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops. The
Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised
for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in some cases even
indirectly, to Haiti. They documented in
January 2010 that thirty three cents of each of these US dollars for Haiti was
actually given directly back to the US to reimburse ourselves for sending in
our military. Forty two cents of each
dollar went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the
Children, the UN World Food Program and the Pan American Health Organization. Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their
government.
The overall $1.6 billion allocated for
relief by the US was spent much the same way according to an August 2010 report
by the US Congressional Research Office:
$655 million was reimbursed to the Department of Defense; $220 million to
Department of Health and Human Services to provide grants to individual US
states to cover services for Haitian evacuees; $350 million to USAID disaster
assistance; $150 million to the US Department of Agriculture for emergency food
assistance; $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration
fees, and so on.
International assistance followed the same
pattern. The UN Special Envoy for Haiti
reported that of the $2.4 billion in humanitarian funding, 34 percent was
provided back to the donor's own civil and military entities for disaster
response, 28 percent was given to UN agencies and non-governmental agencies
(NGOs) for specific UN projects, 26 percent was given to private contractors
and other NGOs, 6 percent was provided as in-kind services to recipients, 5
percent to the international and national Red Cross societies, 1 percent was
provided to the government of Haiti, four tenths of one percent of the funds
went to Haitian NGOs.
Two.
Only 1 percent of the money went to the Haitian government.
Less than a penny of each dollar of
US aid went to the government of Haiti, according to the Associated Press. The same is true with other international
donors. The
Haitian government was completely bypassed in the relief effort by the US and
the international community.
Three. Extremely little went to Haitian companies
or Haitian non-governmental organizations.
The Center for Economic and Policy
Research, the absolute best source for accurate information on this issue,
analyzed all the 1490 contracts awarded by the US government after the January
2010 earthquake until April 2011 and found only 23 contracts went to Haitian
companies. Overall the US had awarded
$194 million to contractors, $4.8 million to the 23 Haitian companies, about
2.5 percent of the total. On the other
hand, contractors from the Washington DC area received $76 million or 39.4
percent of the total. As noted above,
the UN documented that only four tenths of one percent of international aid
went to Haitian NGOs.
In fact Haitians had a hard time even
getting into international aid meetings.
Refugees International reported that
locals were having a hard time even getting access to the international aid
operational meetings inside the UN compound.
"Haitian groups are either unaware of the meetings, do not have proper
photo-ID passes for entry, or do not have the staff capacity to spend long
hours at the compound." Others reported
that most of these international aid coordination meetings were not even being
translated into Creole, the language of the majority of the people of
Haiti!
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