We’re from the government, and we’re here to help
“Security is the key now in order for us to be able to put our feet on the ground,” said Vincenzo Pugliese, a U.N. spokesman. He said a lack of security had limited peacekeepers’ access “to the operational theater” — the city beyond the U.N. compound’s walls.
Meanwhile, outside the “operational theater” there are operating theaters busy at work… as opposed to standing by off-shore. From CNN Report, 17-January-2010:
I wonder if the insistence on “security” before assistance has anything to do with this:
Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.
In other words, when Latin America needs assistance, there is a solution… one I think I may have seen somewhere else. Oh, right… in the movies.
Latin America (left); IMF (right); U.S. peacekeepers (background)
mexfiles.net 
Obscenities come to mind when I think of the IMF and The World Bank.
There is a very interesting subtext to that CNN report – there has been very little mention of Cuba’s aid efforts in Haiti. I do not know if in that report, that the reporter is uneasy to mention Cuba, that he edged in mention of Cuba into a story that should not have mentioned Cuba. But there is ‘something’ because as he mentions Cuban doctors, he is quick to say “other Latin Americans and Spanish” and at the end only mentions the “Spanish” and others. Those who get news from outside of the US (and North America) will know that the make-shift hospital beside the demolished hospital was setup by the Cubans who were already working in the area).