4 ideas
In October 2010, months after the earthquake, cholera appeared in Haiti, where it had not been recorded in living memory. It was traced to a UN peacekeeping base near Mirebalais, where Nepalese troops' sewage leaked into a tributary of the Artibonite River. The outbreak killed thousands, and the UN spent years denying responsibility, so a foreign stabilization force became the source of a new national epidemic.
Only a sliver of the billions pledged after the earthquake went to the Haitian government. Most of it flowed to donor countries' own militaries, agencies, contractors, and foreign NGOs, which answered to donors rather than Haitians. Donors distrusted a weak state and routed around it, which left the state weaker still and made its weakness the justification for bypassing it again.
Responders arrived expecting looting and riots among desperate survivors, so they put troops, convoys, and crowd control ahead of speed in delivering food and water. The expected mass violence largely never came, and most survivors organized and helped one another. Treating victims as a security risk delayed relief and shaped the response around an imagined danger rather than the real needs.
A flagship reconstruction project, backed by the Clinton-led recovery effort and the US government, was an export garment park at Caracol in northern Haiti, well outside the earthquake zone. It was anchored by a Korean textile manufacturer, displaced farmers from fertile land, and produced far fewer jobs than promised. Recovery money was steered toward a pre-existing low-wage export development agenda rather than rebuilding what the quake had destroyed.