Tonight's last post: Looting, and machetes

An article in the New York Times ledes thus: "Along the capital’s main commercial strip Saturday afternoon, dozens of armed men — some wielding machetes, others with sharpened pieces of wood — dodged from storefront to storefront, battering down doors and hauling away whatever they could carry: shoes, luggage, rolls of carpet."


Any anthropologists or sociologists out there to help me out? This invocation of "machetes" seems to be a not-so-subtle symbol of scary, lawless people in developing countries. And the looting frame, while popular, is often false. I imagine that Haiti may become one of those places where we see dissensus, rather than consensus, behavior given that civil authority, weak before the disaster, has broken down given the destruction suffered by government institutions and major NGOs themselves. But Diane Rehm invoked the "machete" image last Friday (January 15) on her radio show on NPR/WAMU, and this frame bothers me. 


It's worth noting that her show will feature the Haiti disaster on Tuesday, January 19, at 10:00 am Eastern; if your NPR affiliate doesn't cover it I believe WAMU provides streaming audio. I note with some dismay that, as is her wont, her panelists are an academic who studies Haiti (good) and the "Latin America Correspondent for the Miami Herald." It's truly disappointing that, given the often-poor coverage of this disaster, that even a high-quality news-talk show on NPR cannot be bothered to seek out a disaster expert.