Moontown

The meeting was inaugurated Wednesday by the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Asha-Rose Migiro, and ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena at the Commission’s subregional headquarters in Mexico.

The Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, will be the keynote speaker during the second day of sessions.

The Regional Coordination Mechanism was established by resolution of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1998. It is coordinated by the United Nations regional commissions and chaired by the U.N. Deputy Secretary-General, and aims to promote the consistency of United Nations activities in each region.

In addition to ECLAC, representatives of the following bodies are participating in the meeting: the International Labour Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Population Fund, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, the United Nations Office for Project Services, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Food Programme, the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Also participating are the OAS, the Inter American Development Bank and top Mexican government officials.

The first of three work sessions will focus on the preparations for the summit on MDGs in September, and will specifically address the issue of employment.

The second session will review the negotiations process for an agreement on climate change and the perspectives on the 16th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 16).

The third work session will examine the political situation in the region and the United Nations system’s strategic contribution to regional cooperation.

There will also be a briefing on the situation in Haiti and the activities the different United Nations agencies are carrying out in that country.

Environment Minister Alejandro Hitcher said in an interview published by newspaper Ultimas Noticias on Wednesday that heavy water users will be charged a premium several times the basic cost of water from March 1.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. AFP PHOTO

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this month declared a state of emergency in the electric sector, after the drought reduced reservoirs serving the country’s Guri hydroelectric dam to dangerously low levels.

Guri typically supplies more than half of the OPEC member nation’s power. Water rationing is already in place 48 hours a week in the capital Caracas.

Consumers risk cuts in their water supply if they fail to pay penalties promptly, Hitcher said.

The Chavez administration has taken several measures to curb the country’s electricity usage, including rolling blackouts and rationing in some regions.

Last year, Chavez called on Venezuelans to limit themselves to three-minute showers to save water.

Major Venezuelan legislative elections are scheduled for September, when Chavez-backed candidates could face a mounting challenge from opposition parties.

A recent poll showed many blame the government for current utilities problems, and doubt its ability to resolve the crisis.

According to a decree in the Official Gazette dated Jan. 25, households in Caracas will pay a regular rate of up to 1 Bolivar (38 cents) per cubic meter for the first 40 cubic meters (10,568 fluid gallons).

If they consume between 40 and 100 cubic meters, the fees would rise to 3.5 bolivars ($1.35) per cubic meter, and top out at 5 bolivars ($1.92) when water use exceeds 100 cubic meters.

For industrial water users, the rate could reach up to 7 bolivars ($2.69) per cubic meter when they exceed 150 percent of preset usage levels.

In January, Venezuela created a multitiered currency regime, devaluing the bolivar’s official rate to 4.3 per dollar for most goods, but allowing some priority items to be be bought at 2.6 bolivars per dollar.

Industries would be charged up to four times the normal rate if they use between 100 and 150 percent of their regular allowances, the Gazette said.

It was not immediately clear from the Ultimas Noticias report how the preset allowances would be assigned. Hidroven officials earlier declined Reuters’ request for an interview and weren’t available for comment.

The Gazette said the fees would vary by region and be applied by local units of Hidroven. (Caribnet)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Bloomberg) — Haitian President Rene Preval said his government’s most urgent task is finding shelter for 1 million people displaced by the country’s Jan. 12 earthquake.

“The first priority was to save people who were trapped, people who were hurt,” Preval said Wednesday in an interview on the lawn behind the ruins of the presidential palace in Port-au- Prince. “Now we need to help about 1 million people who are on the streets find shelter.”

Preval said the government is working with international aid organizations and the United Nations on plans for long-term housing. Providing tents to displaced people is a “short-term” solution with the hurricane season approaching, he said, adding that procuring as many as 200,000 tents is proving difficult.

The cost of rebuilding the hemisphere’s poorest country may reach $13.9 billion, making the magnitude 7.0 temblor the worst natural disaster suffered by any country relative to the size of its economy, the Inter-American Development Bank said Tuesday. The country is also facing a “major food crisis” the Rome- based Food and Agriculture Organization said last week.

The Haitian quake killed about 230,000 people in the country of 9.6 million and destroyed a third of the buildings in the capital, according to government data. If the death toll is accurate, the quake will have surpassed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed an estimated 226,000 people in 12 countries.

The disaster was “the most destructive event a country has ever experienced when measured in terms of the number of people killed as a share of the country’s population,” the IDB said.

Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first visit by a sitting French president to his nation’s former colony, vowed to spend 230 million euros ($318 million) this year and next to help Haiti. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on a Feb. 15 visit that his country will build a temporary administrative center for the Haitian government to work from.

The US, which has the largest military presence in Haiti, has provided $334 million in aid through the US Agency for International Development. About 13,000 US military personnel and 18 ships are operating in Haiti and its surrounding waters, according to the Southern Command.

Tuesday’s IDB report, citing a separate study by one of its authors, also stressed that such disasters tend to have a lasting impact on economies, holding growth about 30 percent below what it would have been even 10 years later.

The UN has received about $619 million in donations for Haiti’s recovery as of Feb. 15, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said on its Web site. (Caribnet)

The US nationals were placed in a van with diplomatic plates and driven out of the compound where they had been held since their arrest on January 29.

American missionaries walk to board a van after being released at a police station in Port-au-Prince. AFP PHOTO

A US Air Force official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the group was due to leave Port-au-Prince aboard a US military transport plane in the evening to travel to Miami.

The emotionally charged case has dragged on for 19 days, drawing the attention of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and overshadowing the critical relief effort after a devastating earthquake on January 12 left more than 217,000 people dead and over a million homeless.

Haitian Secretary of State for Public Security Claudy Gassant delivered the release order to the Americans while they still stood behind bars, officials said.

Judge Bernard Saint-vil, who is handling the case, allowed them to leave the country without bail, according to their lawyer Aviol Fleurant.

But Saint-vil wants to question two other missionaries — group leader Laura Silsby and her confidante Charisa Coulter — “because they were in Haiti before the earthquake,” Fleurant added.

He earlier told AFP that Coulter had become sick in jail and was being treated for an unspecified illness.

With permission granted to leave the country, the eight are likely confident that their ordeal behind bars is over.

But another lawyer for the Americans, Louis Gary Lissade, a former Haitian justice minister, said the charges against the eight had not yet been dropped, although he expressed confidence that would happen soon.

Gassant stressed that the release does not prove his clients’ guilt or innocence, and that the eight should be prepared to return to Haiti should authorities here seek to carry out a prosecution.

“The release such as the one today is not a definitive decision. They should remain available for presentation before the judge,” he said.

Fleurant said Silsby has an orphanage in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the Spanish-speaking country that shares the isle of Hispaniola with Haiti.

The US nationals, Baptist missionaries belonging to the New Life Children’s Refuge, were caught trying to take a busload of 33 supposed orphans across the border to the Dominican Republic without authorization.

After it emerged that some of the children had parents, the Americans’ lawyers have sought to portray the Baptists as acting selflessly to help during Haiti’s catastrophe. They say the group had no criminal intent.

Some parents told the judge they willingly gave the children up because they could no longer care for them following the devastating quake that destroyed much of the Haitian capital.

Fleurant earlier expressed concern that judge Saint-vil may want to question his clients to determine their relationship with their former legal adviser, Jorge Puello.

Police in El Salvador are investigating Puello for his alleged involved in a sex trafficking ring, although he has denied the allegations.

“I don’t think this has any incidence on the Americans’ case,” said Fleurant. “I can only tell you that (Puello) met the Americans after their arrest in Haiti.”

Puello says he had no contact with the Americans prior to their arrest, but declined to provide details of how his legal relationship with the group began. (Caribnet)

“Our concern is to ask the biggest partners to leave aid there as long as possible, at least six months,” said Henriette Chamouillet, the WHO’s representative in Haiti.

“It’s absolutely necessary because we have to replace the hospitals which won’t work,” she told journalists in Geneva.

The majority of medical facilities in the capital Port-au-Prince and the surrounding southern area were destroyed or damaged in the magnitude 7.0 quake on January 12, which killed some 217,000 people and injured 300,000.

Chamouillet said it would take several months for the least damaged hospitals to reopen.

Foreign medical teams were also needed to boost health care in other parts of the country, after some 500,000 people sought shelter outside the capital, she added.

Clinton, who is the UN special envoy to Haiti, underwent a successful heart procedure in a New York hospital on Thursday to open a blocked artery that caused him chest discomfort.

Former US president Bill Clinton. AFP PHOTO

The 63-year-old, who was president from 1993 to 2001, had recently traveled to Haiti, where a January 12 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless in the impoverished Caribbean nation.

“Once the Haiti earthquake happened I didn’t sleep much for a month and that probably accelerated what was already going on with this failing vein,” Clinton told reporters at an event to promote the Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s fight against childhood obesity.

“What happened to me wasn’t all that rare, but what I have to conclude is I’m not going to do any more weeks where I do three overnight flights because I am going to have to help Haiti for several years. I can’t get it all done in a week,” he said.

Clinton, who had heart bypass surgery in 2004 to free up four blocked arteries, said it would be a “terrible mistake” to stop working and that he plans to manage his stress more through rest, exercise and healthy eating.

“I have been given this gift of life by my surgery five years ago, the medicine I take, the lifestyle changes I make. I don’t want to throw it away by being a vegetable, I want to do things with it,” Clinton said. (Caribnet)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) – Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday became the first French president to visit Haiti, vowing to honor historic obligations to France’s former slave colony and promising almost half a billion dollars in quake aid.

“I have come to tell the Haitian people and their leaders that France, which was the first on the ground after the catastrophe, will remain firmly at their side to help them pick themselves up again and open a new happy page in their history,” Sarkozy told a press conference on the grounds of Haiti’s damaged national palace.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) is welcomed by Haitian President Rene Preval upon his arrival in Port-au-Prince, as part of his brief visit of the battered Caribbean nation. AFP PHOTO

Sarkozy announced an aid package of some 326 million euros (446 million dollars) over the next two years, a sum that includes the cancellation of Haiti’s 56-million-euro debt.

“France will live up to the responsibilities of its shared history and friendship with Haiti,” said Sarkozy, who was greeted by Haitian President Rene Preval at the start of his landmark trip.

Preval said he welcomed the French leader’s visit, but would have preferred that it come “under other circumstances.”

Sarkozy surveyed the devastated Haitian capital and other affected areas from the air, somberly peering out from the open side door of a helicopter, and visited a field hospital set up by French aid workers where he met with earthquake victims.

Hundreds meanwhile protested outside the presidential palace, calling on the French leader to use his influence to help bring about the return to Haiti of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The demonstrators, who appeared to be young people from the poorer sections of Port-au-Prince, held placards bearing messages like “Sarkozy, we want President Aristide to come home” and “Aristide should be allowed to take part in rebuilding of his country.”

A 56-year-old former priest and champion of the poor, Aristide was Haiti’s first democratically elected leader, but was forced to flee a popular revolt in 2004 following two stints as president. He remains in exile in South Africa.

Wednesday’s visit was the first by a French president to this former French colony in the Caribbean, which fought for and won its independence in 1804, becoming the first independent black republic.

Alluding to France’s colonization of Haiti, which at the time was a thriving center of sugar production, Sarkozy acknowledged “a common history that is rich, but also painful.”

Ties between Haiti and France were violently ruptured as a massive slave revolt swept the island from 1791, claiming hundreds of lives and ultimately leading to the end of French rule 13 bloody years later.

“The wounds of colonization — and worse yet the conditions of our separation — have left behind unpleasant memories that linger for Haitians,” Sarkozy said.

France ultimately agreed to relinquish its lucrative colony on the condition that the fledgling government pay 150 million francs to reimburse plantation owners who lost holdings there. Haiti finished paying off the crippling debt in 1885.

Asked by reporters about the painful chapter of slavery and colonial domination, Preval before the start of the visit, said: “History is history. We have overcome — politically and psychologically — this difficult period of our history.”

Sarkozy’s visit comes more than a month after the massive January 12 quake claimed more than 217,000 lives and left some 1.2 million people homeless on the Caribbean island of a little over nine million people.

Keeping kids happy vital as Haitians hunt a normal life

He urged Haitian hosts to take their redevelopment and rebuilding into their own hands, saying the effort should be “a true national project” that focuses more on the provinces and far less on the area around Port-au-Prince.

According to the Inter-American Development Bank, the quake caused damages estimated at up to 14 billion dollars in what was already the poorest country in the Americas before the catastrophe, making it potentially the worst natural disaster in modern history.

The vast number of homeless from the quake are living in squalid camps in and around the capital. (Caribnet)

Craig Kelly, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, traveled to Havana to lead the US side in the talks which will take place Friday, the State Department said.

Ambassador Craig Kelly, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. AFP PHOTO

“The discussions will focus on how best to promote safe, legal and orderly migration between Cuba and the United States,” it said in a statement.

The Obama administration last year resumed talks on migration with Cuba which had been conducted every two years until they were suspended in 2003 by former president George W. Bush.

Kelly marks the senior-most official to head to Cuba for the talks, although envoys of his rank regularly went to Havana for the dialogue before the suspension.

Another senior US official, Bisa Williams, visited Havana in September last year to discuss another prospect for improving relations — resuming direct mail between the neighboring countries which has been suspended since 1963.

Obama took office last year with a mission of reaching out to adversaries including Cuba. The United States broke off relations with the communist island in 1961.

The Obama administration has lifted travel and money transfer restrictions on Cuban-Americans with relatives in Cuba, but it has urged Havana to free political prisoners and improve political freedoms.

Cuba’s government has a longstanding interest in migration dialogue with the United States as the Caribbean nation is embarrassed by persistent illegal US-bound emigration of its nationals across the shark-infested Florida Straits. (Caribnet)