Blog post

Damming the Flood of ill-informed reporting on Haiti

Tamar Shlaim12 January 2011

On the first anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, Verso is publishing a new and updated edition of Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment

On publication, Damming the Flood was called the "first accurate analysis of recent Haitian history" by Paul Farmer, who has since been appointed by Bill Clinton as the Deputy UN Special Envoy to Haiti. This new edition contains a substantive new afterword covering the international response to the earthquake and the run up to the elections. 

For more of Peter Hallward's authoritative analysis of recent Haitian history, including the current cholera outbreak and the UN's "shameful betrayal" of the Haitian people, see his articles for the Guardian and New Statesman

For more recent writing that fills in the gaps in the mainstream coverage see Mark Weisbrot's articles for the Guardian on what the Wikileaks embassy cables reveal about Haiti and the "travesty of democracy" that was the November 2010 elections. 

See also Slavoj Žižek's excellent review of Damming the Flood for the New Statesman

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