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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — During the 1990s, the U.S. government spent $100 million trying to improve Haiti's police and justice systems, and had little to show for it.
After a decade of such aid, the nation's law enforcement and courts remained corrupt and ineffectual, a 2000 Government Accountability Office report said.
From 2005 to 2007, the United States tried again, paying a contractor nearly $4 million to improve Haiti's judicial system. There was "no measurable improvement," a government audit found.
Those programs were a small part of the river of foreign aid that has flowed into Haiti in recent decades, even as it has descended further into the depths of poverty and dysfunction.
After receiving $8.3 billion in foreign aid since 1969, Haiti is 25 percent poorer than it was in 1945, according to statistics compiled by Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute. Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people, three-quarters of Haiti's 9 million people lived on less than $2 a day, the United Nations says.
World leaders now are talking about a massive effort to rebuild Haiti's shattered infrastructure. Haiti's tourism minister says it could cost $3 billion. The recovery challenge is without modern precedent, says Laurent Dubois, a Haiti expert at Duke University.
There have been equally devastating quakes, Dubois says, but "you have to go really far back to find an earthquake of this magnitude that hit a capital city," in a country already so lacking in decent housing, roads or public utilities, like water and electricity systems.
