By Peter Costantini, Seattle

Bumper sticker on office door: "Everyone should learn to read, Everyone should learn to write." Photo credit: Peter Costantini

Nicaragua and...

By Peter Costantini - Seattle

Over two months after the first round of balloting November 28 in Haiti's turbulent presidential elections, the Conseil Électoral Provisoire (Provisional Electoral Council) published results February 3 showing former first lady Mirlande Manigat and pop star Michel "Sweet Mickey" Martelly advancing to a runoff election...

At a recent demonstration against waste dumping in the community of Troutier, a protester's sign says "The state and NGOs: we are people too"

(Posted by Ansel Herz)

Ericq Pierre (Rochasse091@yahoo.com) is a Haitian agronomist who published the following op-ed...

By Ansel Herz

Cross-posted from mediahacker

CAP-HAITIEN, HAITI - The first barricade looked harmless enough. Foot-long rocks piled next to each other in a line.

But as the bus driver slowed down, flying rocks landed in the street - thrown by youths crouching in the bushes...

By Ansel Herz

Within hours of my op-ed being published in the New York Daily News today, the $50 million Clinton Bush Haiti Fund posted an update on its Facebook page called "Cholera Concern," which includes this sentence: "While other organizations in Haiti are using their...

Cholera is spread through the ingestion of contaminated water.
Photo: United Nations

By Peter Costantini

Ansel Herz has filed three stories so far for Inter Press Service on the cholera epidemic in Haiti.

His reporting has given voice to the...

By Peter Costantini ~ Seattle

Farmers from different districts of Jacmel - Des agriculteurs venus de différentes communes de Jacmel - Photo: le Nouvelliste

My most recent piece on Haiti for Inter Press Service, "Hurricanes and the River Flowing" (

By Peter Costantini ~ Seattle

A few days ago, while browsing Le Nouvelliste, the venerable French-language paper published in Port-au-Prince, I was taken aback to find my name in a headline: « Peter Costantini propose le retrait des semences hybrides en Haïti » ("Peter...

By Ansel Herz (http://mediahacker.org) ~ Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Actor Sean Penn, who is helping manage a camp of displaced earthquake victims in Haiti, is making pointed criticisms of journalists for dropping the ball on coverage of Haiti. He's wrong. I've been on the...

By Peter Costantini ~ Seattle

Mouvman Peyizan Papay demonstrators at Hinche June 4, 2010. Photo credit: La Via Campesina

To: Hugh Grant, President and CEO, Monsanto

As you are no doubt aware, your offer to...

By Peter Costantini ~ Cyvadier, Haiti

Walking home from school in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo credit: Peter Costantini

Down a rutted, muddy lane off the main highway running through Cyvadier (pronounced see-vad-yay), a small group of kids are hanging...

Peter Costantini ~ Pétionville, Haiti

Next to where we were building a new platform for a hospital tent in the Pétionville Club camp for displaced people, I went to take a break in the shade. Under another tent, medical people were conducting what looked...

By Peter Costantini ~ Pétionville, Haiti

Rain was general all over Port-au-Prince. It was falling last night, and the night before, and the night before that, falling on the broken National Palace, on the collapsed roofs of houses in Turgeau and on the stony green hills above the city, softly...

At the Port-au-Prince airport, as at most airports in poor countries, men are hustling to carry luggage and hook up travelers with taxis. I'm looking for Schendy, the young architect from Architecture for Humanity who's coming to meet me. All the hustlers say of course they know him and compete...

I'm flying from Seattle down to Port-au-Prince on a red-eye via Chicago and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
About an hour from O'Hare over the prairie, the sky is clear. The gibbous moon is lighting up a bend of a river below and the small towns are crosshatches of amber lights.

by Peter Costantini ~ Seattle

When I was in Miami in 2004 to cover the elections, I had dinner in a Haitian restaurant in Miami Beach called Tap-Tap. I picked up a flier there that had a poem printed on it. It was by a Haitian poet, yet it captured...

By Peter Costantini - Seattle

To get a feeling for the magnitude of the suffering in Haiti, you have to try to fit some context around those hallucinatory strings of zeros. Keep in...

Peter Costantini

Haiti is the fertile mother of a prolific diaspora ranging across the Dominican Republic, United States, Canada, France and beyond. One of her sons, Haitian-born Canadian novelist and journalist Dany Laferrière was in Haiti for a festival when the earthquake struck. Laferrière won a major French literary award,...

By Peter Costantini, Seattle

Ten years after the contentious Seattle Ministerial of the World Trade Organization - AKA "The Battle of Seattle" - the relationship between trade, jobs, poverty and migration remains tangled and controversial.

Trade agreements make it easier for goods and services to cross borders. And beyond trade,...

By Tito Drago, Director of Inter Press Service Spain (IPS).

Tito Drago (right) with Spanish judge | (derecha) con el juez español Baltasar Garzón

Tito is a journalist and consultant specializing in international relations. He was born in Argentina and...