Brazil for Haiti: "Right now, government and opposition are together." Agência Senado (Brazilian Senate)

PSDB called for greater military presence in Haiti, says Azeredo. Senator Eduardo Azeredo (PSDB-MG) said on Monday (25) that his party supports the increase in the Brazilian military in Haiti. He said that to prevent a conflagration and to ensure the stability of the country - hit by an earthquake 12 days ago - it is necessary to expand the presence of United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH), which is headed by Brazil.

Chairman of the Foreign Relations and National Defense (CRE) of the Senate, Azeredo reminded that he was in this country in August. He said that even before the earthquake, Haiti has "lived a tragedy without precedent, a situation that does not exist either in the Brazilian slums'. According to the senator, only 10% of the Haitian population has access to electricity, water supply benefits less than 20% of the population, the unemployment rate is 70% and infant mortality is 69 per thousand newborns . He also stressed that "the country's production system is destroyed, mainly in the field '. - Components are perfect for social conflagration. It is for this reason that the presence of MINUSTAH is needed - he argued, adding that, "In addition, we will need to rebuild the country. " The senator also noted that "in Brazil there are good engineering battalions that can help in the reconstruction of Haiti, as is the case of Araguari Battalion." Azeredo also noted that the leader of the PSDB in the Senate, Arthur Virgilio (PSDB-AM), reiterated the support the Executive call to the increase of the Brazilian contingent. - In this case, government and opposition are together - Azeredo said.

 
Ricardo Koiti Koshimizu / Agência Senado
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The world’s best foreign minister

Why Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is having a great term | David Rothkopf
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This may have been the best month for Brazil since about June 1494. That's when the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed granting Portugal everything in the new world east of an imaginary line that was declared to exist 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. This ensured that what was to become Brazil would be Portuguese and thus develop a culture and identity very different from the rest of Spanish Latin America. This guaranteed the world would have samba, churrasco, "The Girl from Ipanema," and through some incredibly fortuitous if twisted chain of events, Gisele Bundchen.

While it took Brazil sometime to live up to the backhanded maxim that it was "the country of tomorrow and always would be," there is little doubt that tomorrow has arrived for the country even if much work remains to be done to overcome its serious social challenges and tap its extraordinary economic potential.

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H. E. Mr. President Lula da Silva sends to Parliament US$ 200M bill on aid to Haiti.

Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 18:29
Memorial to the Brazilian military dead in Haiti

The Bill sent to Congress on Thursday (Jan, 21st) provides financial assistance in more than R$ 350 million (approx. US$ 200M) for Haiti, according to the minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha.

The Bill adds for the R$ 15 million already announced by President Lula in the days following the disaster last week, more R$ 205 million from the Ministry of Defense for use in humanitarian aid and R$ 135 million from the Ministry of Health that aims to build and equip 10 Emergency Care Units (UPA) on Haitian soil.

Padilha also said that President Lula has recommended to the Health Minister that he immediately begin the process of construction of the UPAs, as the people of Haiti have urgent demand for primary health care. 

The government also wants to increase military peace forces in Haiti in more than 1.3 thousand military and another message will be sent to Congress. 

By now the Caribbean country will receive more than 900 men of the Brazilian Armed Forces to join the more than 1,200 yet there.

World Bank: We Are in Haiti for the Long Haul

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Yvonne Tsikata 

World Bank Haiti Country Director

Posted: January 21, 2010 06:11 PM

Today's announcement that we're waiving all payments from Haiti for the next 5 years while we continue to work to forgive its debt of US $38 million -- less than 4% of the country's external debt -- is only a small sliver of our much larger commitment to Haiti.

Since 2005, we have provided US $363 million in grants that have been used to further the country's reform agenda and improve its overall economic prospects.

Additionally, in June of 2009 Haiti received US $1.2 billion in debt relief after reaching the completion point under the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), which allows creditors, including multilateral institutions, to provide debt relief to the world's poorest and most heavily indebted countries.

Haiti was already showing encouraging signs of improvement when the earthquake struck.

It had posted three successive years of economic growth since 2004 -- when the economy contracted by 3.5% -- and the government was making headway in improving governance and transparency, especially in the area of public financial management systems.

In spite of the global financial crisis and the fall of remittances, Haiti's economy grew more than 2% last year.

The earthquake has put the brakes on all that, but at the Bank we look to redouble our support to Haiti and its people by building back better and putting the reins of development in the hands of the Haitian communities.

A team of World Bank experts is on the ground in Haiti, to assess how our current projects can be best redeployed to support recovery and to prepare for an emergency operation in response to the earthquake. Bank specialists will join a multilateral team -- including staff from the UN, the European Union and the Inter American Development Bank -- that will be working in Haiti for the next few weeks to conduct damage and reconstruction assessments in every major sector, including health, education, water, sanitation, electricity, and roads.

Going forward, we would like to put special emphasis on the capacity generated by community-driven development projects, where people at the local level decide their priorities.

We have supported a number of such initiatives going on in Haiti at the moment that have proven to be particularly successful on the basis of community involvement. This will be critical in the reconstruction.

Just to give an example, by May 2009 our community-driven initiative had completed 549 projects, primarily for agricultural support and other infrastructure -- including grain mills, water pumps, and local roads -- as well as income-generating activities.

It provided technical support to 4,032 community-based organizations in rural areas, benefiting around 763,000 people in poor rural areas (or 57 percent of the population of the rural communities covered by the program).

We also want to build back better, making housing and infrastructure more resilient to natural hazards, such as earthquakes and hurricanes.

We want to work with the Haitian authorities to strengthen code enforcement and the institutions that supervise this, while continue building the government's capacity to ensure that this happens.

In a joint effort with the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) we have recently produced a Reconstruction handbook that I'd like to share here with anyone interested.

In sum, we will be focusing on ongoing projects that work quickly, effectively, and with the people.

The recent tragic events in Haiti have proven the resilience and determination of the Haitian people -- who have not given up on their country or their future or even their hope to still find survivors in the wreckage of their battered capital.

We want to join their determination to build a better future based on their own priorities and the help of the international community.

A Tribute to Haiti I - Icon, Model and Mirror of the Past, Present and Future of the New World.

To help rebuild Haiti it is needed to understand Haiti, and her heroes from yesterday, now, and ever.

That is a history that I will try to explain from now on, as I, myself, also come pursuing to learn about it. Getting touched more and more by its epic grandeur that seems to have no end.

Understanding the complex Ayiti, we may really understand the why and how to help effectively to rebuild a renewed but coherent Ayiti, as it was at once: INDEPENDENT, proud, generous and strong. That is a matter of honor for the world and specially for the whole Americas.

Moreover, this "Millennium" earthquake should also be the great motivator for us to show ourselves that we can, starting with Ayiti (put again as vanguard and model) ... we can, together and focused, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and build a New New World in its entirety.

The immeasurable disaster happens at the exact moment of the greatest global crossroads we have in the life of all of us who are alive. 

I have, at each new document or testimony I look at, each untold fact that I find, an even more increased and unshakable certainty that the path, for the better shared Earth we all demand, has now to go through a renewed Ayiti. 

Under our free will is the choice among the possible paths - progress or retrogression. 

"A tragedy is a very huge opportunity - of learning and union - to be wasted."

By now, I stop here. Soon, I will begin to replace my tears for sweat.

By now, rests alone the total feeling of void, occasionally interrupted by the questions that I think will never shut up:

• Why D. Zilda Arns and all who were there (as the UN staff and many others) only to help, to support?
• Why our and other peacekeepers?
• Why all the tens of thousands of our brothers and sisters of the First Free Nation in Americas - without neither overseas owner nor internal slavery -, sons and daughters of The First Black Republic in the World, heirs and heiresses of the heroes that spread the Liberty will abroad the whole Continent? Why such suffering?
• Why - as it may seem absurd to think this time about the cold / blanket fitness (but that is the way I honestly feel) ... Why this heroic country, today already tired of so much prejudice-fighting, wars, natural disasters, domestic and imposed political, economic, and social crisis?
• Why? Why Ayiti?

There is not how to express this feelings into words.

Otherwise, I will do as did Euclides da Cunha - the great Brazilian writer (in his inauguration statement at The Brazilian Academy of Writers, discussing about the Brazilian 100 years anti-slavery struggle, humbled and saying himself wordless) using the verses of our greatest abolitionist poet Castro Alves, whom among other inspirations had the Revolution of Saint Domingue (now Ayiti) as a muse:

God! O God! Where are you that you do not answer! 

On what world, what star have you hidden yourself 
Veiled in heaven? 

For two thousand years I have cried out to you, 

In vain, it has echoed through an empty heaven . . . 

Where are you, Lord God?. (...)

Christ! In vain you died on a mountain 

Your blood will not cleanse my brow of The original stain. 

Yet today, by unlucky fate, 

My children-beasts of burden for the universe 

I---pasturage for all. 

Today my blood feeds America Condor, 

you have made yourself into a vulture, 

Bird of slavery. She draws nearer, . . . traitorous sister! 

Which of Joseph's vile brothers, 

For the other Will sell his brother! 

Enough, Lord! 

Send forth your potent Arm, 

across the stars of space 

Forgiveness for my crimes! 

For two thousand years I have had one cry ... 

Listen to my protest from your everlasting throne, 

My God! Lord, My God!!! (...)  

*Atrocious fatality that the mind crushes! 

Extinguish now the dirt brig, 

The track that Columbus opened in the waves, 

Like an iris in the deep abyss! 

But this is too much infamy!.. 

of the ethereal land Rise, 

heroes of the New World!  

Andrada, rip that flag of the air! 

Columbus, close the door of your seas!

"Voices from Africa" (excerpt) *w/ "The Slave Ship" (excerpt)

Antônio de Castro Alves (died at 24)

São Paulo, June 11, 1868 

(YEAR 77 of the Emancipation in Ayiti)

Dedicated to D. Zilda Arns.