Will Infighting Stymie Recovery?

George Packer fears that Haitian politics will poison the relief efforts. He visited Haiti to report in the early 1990s:

[T]here was something in Haiti’s political life that was warped: everything became personal and Manichean. Discussion and compromise were alien. One of my Haitian friends, a leader of the teachers union, spoke endlessly about the need for a culture of tolerance. He had been in exile in Boston on my first trip, and the one person he insisted I see in Port-au-Prince was a colleague of his in the union movement. It struck me as an ill omen to discover, on the second trip, that the two of them had fallen into a bitteralmost a mortaldispute, over a matter that seemed small and easily resolved yet had ended their professional and personal relationship. A clear analysis of your own political culture does not make you immune to it.