Haiti After the Quake: Where the Relief Money Did and Did Not Go

by BILL QUIGLEY and AMBER RAMANAUSKAS

  Counterpunch

An occupying UN tank  standing in front of the  broken president office
five moths after a 7.0 earthquake devastated the capital.Photo by Wadner  Pierre

Haiti, a close neighbor of the US with over nine million people, was devastated by earthquake on January 12, 2010.  Hundreds of thousands were killed and many more wounded.

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.
Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.