Foreign Assistance

“Latin America Is Unsettled by Washington’s Rhetoric” (Opinion, March 3) clearly has a limited view of our client states, concluding that Colombia is “the hemisphere’s most troubled country.” As J.P. Slavin points out in the same Opinion section (“As Aristide’s Support Ebbs, Tensions Grow”), a Haitian intellectual states, “We are again part of a mad dream.” For, despite decades of oversight, tutorship, occupation and winking at outrages by the Duvalier family, Haiti (so poor it can’t even fund an export drug trade) remains our most disastrous foreign assistance program. And there is no end in sight.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that more and more doubts are now beginning to surface about how, down the road, good will result from our efforts in Afghanistan?

F. Daniel Gray

Los Angeles