Law Commons^™

A Centrist Solution To Central American Violence And Inequality, Devin Joshi

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The northern triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) has experienced horrific violence, poverty, and a vicious cycle of human rights violations for decades. Repeated natural disasters and the re-routing of the drug trade through Central America are not helping the situation. On the other hand, nearby Costa Rica has achieved a much higher standard of human rights, public safety, and political stability. Why? Costa Rica has put in place four pillars of development and stability lacking in most other countries in the region: a stronger state, an educated population, inter-racial cooperation, and a more inclusive democracy. For …

January Roundtable: The Haiti Earthquake, One Year Later, Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“Haiti's Blame Game” by Poooja Bhatia. Foreign Policy. November 23 2010.

The Perils Of Walking Fast And Walking Far, Walter Lotze

Human Rights & Human Welfare

When Haitian President René Préval early in January 2011 lambasted the international community for riding roughshod over his country’s sovereignty and his government, and called for greater Haitian ownership over the aid and recovery effort in his country, he highlighted a frustration which has been noted by so many other nations before: while international aid efforts are welcome and usually do provide critical relief to the targeted populations in the short term, they generally tend to undermine governments (and the faith of the people in their government) over the long term.

Bring Back Aristide, Louis Edgar Esparza

Human Rights & Human Welfare

My friend Annie recently had her trip to Haiti postponed because of the political instability surrounding the November elections. Annie totes modest sums of cash, medicine, and clothing collected from sympathetic friends and has a resolute willingness to help. Together with the partner organizations she is working with, she is hiring Haitians to build an orphanage. Another colleague of mine, Tonya, traveled to the country very soon after the earthquake. She described her experience in The Nation, lamenting that the major US airlines, which had agreed to waive baggage fees for relief aid to Haiti, did not do so for …

Earthquakes And Expectations In Haiti And Chile, Robert Funk

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Although 2010 was a bicentenary year for many countries in Latin America, that the year was a memorable one for Chileans is due less to celebrations of independence than to two disasters— one natural and one man-made—and to the country’s response to them. The usual year-end retrospectives tended to emphasize the February 27 earthquake and the accident and rescue at the San José mine much more than the light shows and other forgettable pyrotechnics of the bicentenary. But as with the bicentenary, both the earthquake and the San José disaster enabled the authorities and the average Chilean to indulge in …