The Foreign Service Journal, April 2010

10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 1 0 Chile and Haiti: What’s In a Comparison? Just six weeks after the Jan. 12 Haiti disaster, a powerful earthquake hit Chile. Though stronger in magnitude (8.8 compared to Haiti’s 7.0), the earthquake in Chile wrecked far less havoc. In Haiti a reported 230,000 lives have been lost, an astounding number compared to Chile’s current 800 death toll. How is it that an earthquake whose energy at the epicenter was 500 times stronger than that of Haiti’s failed to produce even a fraction of the devas- tation seen there? To be sure, there are some geological factors to take into consideration, such as the proximity of the Haiti earthquake’s epicenter to its capital and other major cities, com- pared to the epicenter of the quake in Chile, which was centered some 20 miles offshore and roughly 200 miles southwest of Santiago. In an effort to answer that question, the BBC compared the Haiti disaster with the recent quakes in Italy and China “Put simply, there are the tech- nical elements of the earthquake and then the social elements on top of that,” Pete Garratt, head of Red Cross Disaster Relief told the BBC. As other analysts note, the radically different outcomes in the wake of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes have revealed underlying social and eco- nomic disparities between the two countries. Haiti is currently the poor- est nation in theWestern Hemisphere, home to corrupt politics and a govern- ment which had failed to install appro- priate countermeasures should an earthquake occur. (Admittedly, the country’s last severe earthquake oc- curred 200 years ago, explaining in part its lack of investment in safety meas- ures and earthquake-resistant infra- structure.) Chile, by contrast, has a stable, hon- est government. Moreover, the coun- try had prepared itself for possible natural disasters with rigid building codes, architecture designed to adapt to seismic waves, and world-renowned seismologists and earthquake engi- neers working to provide the safest and most accommodating structures within a country regularly visited by earth- quakes. Oxfam America’s Chris Hufstader underscores the extent to which com- parisons of the damage inflicted by earthquakes depend on the country’s level of development. He points to the recent study by the Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemi- ology of Disasters showing that earth- quakes have killed more people over the last decade than any other natural disaster. “An increasing proportion of those affected are in developing countries,” Hufstader says. “So if we can use the data and lessons learned from these comparisons, it is yet another fact we can use to mobilize people and re- sources to end poverty, because it will also save lives.” — Jennifer Thompson, Editorial Intern and Susan Brady Maitra, Senior Editor Project to Take on Abuse of Law as a Weapon of War In mid-March, The Lawfare Proj- ect was launched with a by-invitation- only conference in New York City co-sponsored by the New York County Lawyers Association Foreign & Inter- national Law Committee, the Euro- pean Center for Law and Justice and the Lawfare Project. The term “law- C YBERNOTES D efense and diplomacy are simply no longer discrete choices, one to be applied when the other one fails, but must, in fact, complement one another throughout the messy process of international relations. ... U.S. foreign policy is still too domi- nated by the military, too depend- ent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands. — Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on March 4, www.jcs.mil/ speech.aspx?ID=1336