International Aid to quake-stricken Chile

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Chile early on Feb. 27 was 500 times stronger than the 7.0 quake that killed an estimated 200,000 Haitians last month. And yet the number of casualties in Chile appears to be exponentially smaller, with the official death toll still in the hundreds. Far fewer people were rendered homeless than in Haiti, and much of the telephone service in Santiago and parts of central Chile had been restored within five hours.

Comparisons between the two countries will no doubt be much discussed when the U.N. hosts a conference in New York City on March 31 to hash out how best to help Haiti rebuild. Donor governments already know why there was so much less destruction in Chile: it's because the government there forces builders to adhere to rigorous codes, while Haiti's incorrigible corruption and carelessness left such regulation all but non-existent. On the global corruption index put out by Transparency International, a Berlin-based nonprofit that lists countries from the least to most corrupt, Chile ranks 25th and Haiti 168th. And while Chilean President Michelle Bachelet hit the streets on Saturday reassuring citizens about her government's earthquake response, Haitian President Rene Preval has been seemingly AWOL for weeks.

Both Chile and Haiti sit atop large, volatile fault lines. In recent decades, Chile has mandated earthquake-proofing for new structures, requiring that materials like rubber and features like counterweights be built into the architectural designs to allow buildings to bend and sway during temblors rather than break. Haiti, by contrast, lets its buildings rise with little if any input from engineers and plenty of bribes to so-called government inspectors. Structures have scant reinforcement and are often set on weak foundations. That's why 13 of 15 federal ministry buildings pancaked in the Jan. 12 earthquake — and why, in 2008, 91 students and teachers died when their school in a Port-au-Prince suburb collapsed. The school's owner was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after admitting he barely even used mortar to hold its concrete blocks together.

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