Unasur: US$300 millones para Haití
Paúl Mena Erazo
Ecuador
UNASUR anunció un fondo de US$100 millones para ayudar a Haití.
La Unión Suramericana de Naciones (Unasur) resolvió este martes en Quito establecer un fondo de US$100 millones para la ayuda de la región a Haití, y solicitar al Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) un crédito por US$200 millones para el país caribeño a largo plazo, a una tasa de interés mínima, y pagado por los países miembros del bloque regional.
Los presidentes de Ecuador, Rafael Correa; Perú, Alan García; Colombia, Álvaro Uribe; y Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, junto con el presidente de Haití, René Preval, y delegaciones de los restantes países suramericanos, acordaron que toda la ayuda de la Unasur será canalizada a través del gobierno haitiano.
Los participantes de la reunión coincidieron en la necesidad de fortalecer las instituciones en Haití, tras el terremoto del pasado 12 de enero que ha dejado más de 200 mil muertos.
clic Lea también: Número de víctimas "llega a 230.000"
"A Haití le falta alimento, le falta apoyo, pero también le falta Estado", dijo el presidente Lugo.
De allí que la Unasur establecerá comisiones que trabajen junto con el gobierno haitiano en infraestructura y vialidad, agricultura, y salud, que fueron las tres áreas de necesidad planteadas en la cita por el presidente Preval.
Respecto del fondo de US$100 millones para Haití, el presidente pro témpore de Unasur, Rafael Correa, señaló que en el marco de la Cumbre del Grupo de Río que se efectuará los días 22 y 23 de febrero próximos en Cancún, México, se efectuará una nueva reunión de Unasur para definir el monto que entregará a dicho fondo cada país suramericano.
La asistencia anunciada por la Unasur incluye el envío de carpas y la ayuda en la construcción de albergues para atender necesidades urgentes del pueblo haitiano. Igualmente, se exhorta a los países miembros a llevar adelante procesos de regularización migratoria a favor de haitianos, así como mecanismos de eliminación temporal de aranceles a productos provenientes de Haití.
El grupo suramericano además resolvió que embarcaciones de Perú, Venezuela, Brasil y Argentina recorrerán el Pacífico y el Atlántico para recoger la ayuda en vituallas que cada país suramericano tiene destinada para Haití.
Cooperación Sur-Sur
El paquete de ayuda a Haití acordado por la Unasur se enmarca en una estrategia de cooperación Sur-Sur, que plantea un respaldo a corto y largo plazo al gobierno haitiano en la reconstrucción del país, y que es aludida por varios mandatarios de la región para emitir una crítica abierta a la ayuda que llega desde Estados Unidos y Europa.
Queremos inaugurar una nueva forma de cooperación Sur-Sur. La cooperación Norte-Sur es asistencialista y masiva el momento de la desgracia, pero luego se olvidan
Rafael Correa, Presidente de Ecuador
"Queremos inaugurar una nueva forma de cooperación Sur-Sur. La cooperación Norte-Sur es asistencialista y masiva en el momento de la desgracia, pero luego se olvidan (…) El momento de la desgracia repletan de ayuda muchas veces inmanejable, muchas veces inapropiada, casi siempre a través de ONGs y organismos internacionales", manifestó el presidente Correa, y lamentó que gran parte de la ayuda se la efectúe dejando de lado al gobierno local.
Por su parte, el presidente de Haití, René Preval, agradeció la ayuda de los "países del sur que quieren ayudar a otro país del sur".
"Aprecio mucho esta ayuda que no es pequeña y que viene de países hermanos que también tienen dificultades", manifestó Preval.
Breve encuentro informal Uribe-Correa
La cita de la Unasur fue el escenario para la primera visita a Ecuador por parte del presidente colombiano Álvaro Uribe tras la ruptura de relaciones diplomáticas entre ambos países ocurrida en marzo de 2008, como consecuencia de un bombardeo colombiano a una base de las FARC en territorio ecuatoriano.
Concluida la reunión, los presidentes Uribe y Correa mantuvieron en el Palacio de Gobierno un breve encuentro informal, que más tarde fuera seguido por declaraciones de ambos mandatarios respaldando el proceso de normalización de las relaciones diplomáticas.
Más allá de que afuera del Palacio de Gobierno unas 50 personas realizaron una protesta pacífica contra Uribe, el presidente colombiano dijo haber sentido el afecto del pueblo ecuatoriano durante su corta visita.
De su parte, el presidente Correa manifestó que "sin jamás olvidar lo que pasó, aprendiendo del pasado pero viendo hacia el futuro, es claro que lo que más conviene a los dos pueblos es tratar de normalizar lo más rápidamente posible las relaciones".
Finding Parents in Haiti's Rubble Was Easy Part
Juan Fach for The New York Times
Jean-Paul Coffy, right, with his father, visits his mother at a hospital in the Dominican Republic.
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By SARAH KRAMER
Published: February 10, 2010
Jean-Paul Coffy arrived in darkness at the three-story house he grew up in, in the Nerette neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, a concrete-and-tin home where his parents still lived and he visited each year.
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Perspectives on Haiti's Earthquake
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Haiti Earthquake Multimedia
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Two Charities Start Fund to Help Haitians in New York (February 11, 2010)
Small Fund-Raisers for Victims Start to Add Up (February 11, 2010)
Times Topics: Haiti
Enlarge This Image
Juan Fach for The New York Times
Zilania Joacin, Jean-Paul Coffy's mother, in the corridor of a Dominican hospital. Her husband and son keep a vigil.
It was six days after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, and Mr. Coffy, a musician and teacher from Chicago, had not heard from his parents, siblings, uncles, cousins or friends. So Mr. Coffy's wife, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, had persuaded him to go.
"I came in with a candle in my hand," Mr. Coffy said. "And I am screaming their names, and they are answering!"
His mother thought he was a ghost. "Oh my God, oh my God, why is God punishing me? Making me think my son is here, and I know he can't get here," he recalled her crying out that night. "And I said, 'It's really me. I'm here, I'm here.' "
Mr. Coffy found his parents near a back room — the only part of the house still standing — having survived on bonbon salé, a Haitian cracker similar to Saltines.
In the three weeks since, they have traveled eight hours across Haiti's dusty roads and slept in the hallways of hospitals in the neighboring Dominican Republic, and Mr. Coffy has spent thousands of dollars on securing government documents, as well as on fixers, housing, food and patchwork transportation, as he tries to secure permission for his parents to return with him to Chicago.
Mr. Coffy shared his ordeal — not unlike that of countless other United States residents in Haiti trying to help family members — in a series of telephone interviews from the Dominican Republic.
His father, Reserve Coffy, 68, was unharmed in the earthquake, but his mother, Zilania Joacin, 67, a diabetic who recently had a hip operation, broke the same leg, which was "so swollen you couldn't touch it," Mr. Coffy said.
That first night together, the three of them slept in the open air, afraid to stay in the house's surviving room. In the morning, Mr. Coffy realized why no one had heard his parents' calls for help. Their block was filled with wreckage and the stench of the dead.
After hours of walking and picking his way through the debris, he found a working pharmacy still stocked with the blood pressure medicine his mother needed, another with insulin and a third with painkillers. He paid three times the normal cost.
A brother and a sister died in the earthquake, and another brother is still missing. Of his surviving siblings in Haiti, one has two children who broke legs in the quake, and the others are poor and scattered through the countryside. So Mr. Coffy decided to take his parents to Santo Domingo, where he thought it would be easier to get help.
But Caribe Tours, the bus company he took to Haiti from the Dominican Republic when he flew in from Chicago, would not let his parents board without passports, which were lost in the earthquake; so he paid 2,000 Haitian dollars — about $250 — to wrangle a shaded pickup truck known as a tap tap to take them to the border town of Las Caobas, his mother stretched out on a mattress, wailing at each bump in the road.
He managed to get papers granting his parents a one-month stay in the Dominican Republic, paying about $500 to a fixer. Another $58 bought the full back seat of an air-conditioned bus to Santo Domingo, the capital.
It was there that Mr. Coffy and his parents visited four hospitals. At one, a private clinic, X-rays showed that Ms. Joacin would need a hip replacement, but because her leg was infected she would have to wait three months.
Father and son held each other that night on a small bench beside her bed. "It was the first time that I actually slept," Mr. Coffy remembered. "It had been three days."
The one-night hospital stay cost $359, depleting Mr. Coffy's bankroll, so his wife has wired him $3,600 from Chicago. Mr. Coffy, the sixth of nine children, had been sending about $500 a month to his parents before the earthquake, he said.
Ms. Joacin was given a cast for her leg and a cot in a hallway at Darío Contreras, a large public hospital teeming with earthquake survivors. The Dominican Republic's health ministry estimated that the country's hospitals had cared for about 7,000 Haitians as of Tuesday. Worried that the hospital food — oatmeal, white rice, spaghetti — would worsen his mother's diabetes, Mr. Coffy sneaked meals in from the outside for her and hid them under a table. He also posted a little sign near her head: "Do not feed her in any way."
After more than two weeks in the hospital, spent mostly in the hallway, Mr. Coffy and his parents moved Monday night into a room with two beds at a church facility. On Tuesday, Mr. Coffy received new passports for his parents from the Haitian Embassy; he had an appointment scheduled for Thursday with the United States Consulate in Santo Domingo to apply for temporary visas to take them to Chicago. Another possibility would be humanitarian parole, a special temporary immigration category that is rarely granted.
His case will be particularly difficult, immigration experts say, because Mr. Coffy, while a legal resident with a green card, is not a United States citizen.
"You can imagine the number of injured Haitians who have loved ones in the states who want to get here," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the nonprofit Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.
Mr. Coffy lives in Kenwood, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, with his wife, Yakini Ajanaku-Coffy, and their 10-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter. The couple met in 1994 when she was Chicago's cultural attaché for Haiti and he was the keyboardist in a Haitian band, the Boukman Eksperyans; having returned to Chicago in 2002, after living for years in Haiti, the couple now run a music-themed preschool called La Grande Famille.
After deciding that Mr. Coffy would travel to Haiti to look for his family, the couple pulled together supplies like cereal bars and water purification tablets, and $1,500 in cash, including $1,000 from the mother of his son's best friend (others have donated more than $7,000 through a blog).The couple traded cellphones, since hers is a BlackBerry, so he could get e-mail messages. Hours later, they were at O'Hare International Airport with their son, Akin, who was crying.
"He said, 'Dad, you could die there,' " Mr. Coffy said.
Mr. Coffy had promised Akin that he would return by Feb. 3, but now says it might be another month.
When Akin asked his mother last week when his father would be back, she told him: "When the job is done, baby, when the job is done. He didn't go this far to turn back."
Juan Fach for The New York Times
Jean-Paul Coffy, right, with his father, visits his mother at a hospital in the Dominican Republic.
Sign In to E-Mail
Reprints
Share
By SARAH KRAMER
Published: February 10, 2010
Jean-Paul Coffy arrived in darkness at the three-story house he grew up in, in the Nerette neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, a concrete-and-tin home where his parents still lived and he visited each year.
Multimedia
Interactive Feature
Perspectives on Haiti's Earthquake
Interactive Feature
Haiti Earthquake Multimedia
Related
Two Charities Start Fund to Help Haitians in New York (February 11, 2010)
Small Fund-Raisers for Victims Start to Add Up (February 11, 2010)
Times Topics: Haiti
Enlarge This Image
Juan Fach for The New York Times
Zilania Joacin, Jean-Paul Coffy's mother, in the corridor of a Dominican hospital. Her husband and son keep a vigil.
It was six days after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, and Mr. Coffy, a musician and teacher from Chicago, had not heard from his parents, siblings, uncles, cousins or friends. So Mr. Coffy's wife, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, had persuaded him to go.
"I came in with a candle in my hand," Mr. Coffy said. "And I am screaming their names, and they are answering!"
His mother thought he was a ghost. "Oh my God, oh my God, why is God punishing me? Making me think my son is here, and I know he can't get here," he recalled her crying out that night. "And I said, 'It's really me. I'm here, I'm here.' "
Mr. Coffy found his parents near a back room — the only part of the house still standing — having survived on bonbon salé, a Haitian cracker similar to Saltines.
In the three weeks since, they have traveled eight hours across Haiti's dusty roads and slept in the hallways of hospitals in the neighboring Dominican Republic, and Mr. Coffy has spent thousands of dollars on securing government documents, as well as on fixers, housing, food and patchwork transportation, as he tries to secure permission for his parents to return with him to Chicago.
Mr. Coffy shared his ordeal — not unlike that of countless other United States residents in Haiti trying to help family members — in a series of telephone interviews from the Dominican Republic.
His father, Reserve Coffy, 68, was unharmed in the earthquake, but his mother, Zilania Joacin, 67, a diabetic who recently had a hip operation, broke the same leg, which was "so swollen you couldn't touch it," Mr. Coffy said.
That first night together, the three of them slept in the open air, afraid to stay in the house's surviving room. In the morning, Mr. Coffy realized why no one had heard his parents' calls for help. Their block was filled with wreckage and the stench of the dead.
After hours of walking and picking his way through the debris, he found a working pharmacy still stocked with the blood pressure medicine his mother needed, another with insulin and a third with painkillers. He paid three times the normal cost.
A brother and a sister died in the earthquake, and another brother is still missing. Of his surviving siblings in Haiti, one has two children who broke legs in the quake, and the others are poor and scattered through the countryside. So Mr. Coffy decided to take his parents to Santo Domingo, where he thought it would be easier to get help.
But Caribe Tours, the bus company he took to Haiti from the Dominican Republic when he flew in from Chicago, would not let his parents board without passports, which were lost in the earthquake; so he paid 2,000 Haitian dollars — about $250 — to wrangle a shaded pickup truck known as a tap tap to take them to the border town of Las Caobas, his mother stretched out on a mattress, wailing at each bump in the road.
He managed to get papers granting his parents a one-month stay in the Dominican Republic, paying about $500 to a fixer. Another $58 bought the full back seat of an air-conditioned bus to Santo Domingo, the capital.
It was there that Mr. Coffy and his parents visited four hospitals. At one, a private clinic, X-rays showed that Ms. Joacin would need a hip replacement, but because her leg was infected she would have to wait three months.
Father and son held each other that night on a small bench beside her bed. "It was the first time that I actually slept," Mr. Coffy remembered. "It had been three days."
The one-night hospital stay cost $359, depleting Mr. Coffy's bankroll, so his wife has wired him $3,600 from Chicago. Mr. Coffy, the sixth of nine children, had been sending about $500 a month to his parents before the earthquake, he said.
Ms. Joacin was given a cast for her leg and a cot in a hallway at Darío Contreras, a large public hospital teeming with earthquake survivors. The Dominican Republic's health ministry estimated that the country's hospitals had cared for about 7,000 Haitians as of Tuesday. Worried that the hospital food — oatmeal, white rice, spaghetti — would worsen his mother's diabetes, Mr. Coffy sneaked meals in from the outside for her and hid them under a table. He also posted a little sign near her head: "Do not feed her in any way."
After more than two weeks in the hospital, spent mostly in the hallway, Mr. Coffy and his parents moved Monday night into a room with two beds at a church facility. On Tuesday, Mr. Coffy received new passports for his parents from the Haitian Embassy; he had an appointment scheduled for Thursday with the United States Consulate in Santo Domingo to apply for temporary visas to take them to Chicago. Another possibility would be humanitarian parole, a special temporary immigration category that is rarely granted.
His case will be particularly difficult, immigration experts say, because Mr. Coffy, while a legal resident with a green card, is not a United States citizen.
"You can imagine the number of injured Haitians who have loved ones in the states who want to get here," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the nonprofit Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.
Mr. Coffy lives in Kenwood, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, with his wife, Yakini Ajanaku-Coffy, and their 10-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter. The couple met in 1994 when she was Chicago's cultural attaché for Haiti and he was the keyboardist in a Haitian band, the Boukman Eksperyans; having returned to Chicago in 2002, after living for years in Haiti, the couple now run a music-themed preschool called La Grande Famille.
After deciding that Mr. Coffy would travel to Haiti to look for his family, the couple pulled together supplies like cereal bars and water purification tablets, and $1,500 in cash, including $1,000 from the mother of his son's best friend (others have donated more than $7,000 through a blog).The couple traded cellphones, since hers is a BlackBerry, so he could get e-mail messages. Hours later, they were at O'Hare International Airport with their son, Akin, who was crying.
"He said, 'Dad, you could die there,' " Mr. Coffy said.
Mr. Coffy had promised Akin that he would return by Feb. 3, but now says it might be another month.
When Akin asked his mother last week when his father would be back, she told him: "When the job is done, baby, when the job is done. He didn't go this far to turn back."
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