The poorest country in the region, with 11 million inhabitants, cannot find the way to improve its conditions due to various causes, including natural disasters and political crises. In general, it is considered a failed state.
This Monday marks six months since the last earthquake that hit this country located on the island of Hispaniola (which it shares with the Dominican Republic), which was of magnitude 7.2 and left 2,200 dead and almost 13,000 injured. In addition to leaving great destruction in rural areas.
According to a UN report, the country’s key infrastructure deteriorated further, and 137,000 houses, 95 hospitals and health centers, roads, 1,250 schools were also destroyed, further complicating the education system and leaving 300,000 students with further complications for return to classrooms.
The Government indicated, in a forum a few days ago, that 2,000 million dollars are needed to repair the damage caused by the earthquake. More than half of that value would go to the reconstruction or rehabilitation of homes, 400 million to education, 40 for health services and at least 55 for food security initiatives. In addition to what would be needed for other programs in the area of agriculture, commerce and industry.
“The recovery plan includes all the regions that were directly and indirectly affected by the earthquake,” said Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
“We must be aware that the lack of adequate and timely investments in the country’s reconstruction will inevitably push the most vulnerable populations, unable to maintain their means of subsistence, to desperately seek solutions to survive,” he said, meanwhile, the deputy secretary general of the UN, Amina Mohammed, in the same appointment.
Politicians don’t help
The 2021 earthquake came shortly after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse (on July 7, 2021), which represented another setback in a country marked by multiple crises of an economic, political, security, humanitarian and development nature.
According to Antonio Sola, a consultant who has worked in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake -which caused unprecedented damage in the country and caused more than 220,000 deaths- and it was until Moïse’s assassination that he was one of his advisers and considered him a “brother and friend”, in the last ten years its political and institutional crisis has deepened and “it is a failed State dominated by narco-politics”.
“Organized crime and delinquency related to drug trafficking and politics were the ones that ended up killing President Moïse and have not allowed the Haitian state to rise. Beyond the economic crisis and the social upheaval, which are very deep and very strong,” says Sola, who currently works with the Haitian diaspora in the United States.
In the first half of the last century, Haiti was a more developed country than the Dominican Republic and went into a tailspin since the dictatorship of the Duvalier family (from the 1950s to the 1980s).
In addition, the failure of the international community in its attempts to help the country after the earthquake once again plunged the country into a very deep crisis, especially when the peacekeepers, who had managed to establish some order, left – not without being accused of committing abuses-.
“(What happened in Haiti) has to lead us to rethink how multilateral organizations like the UN, the OAS, human rights work… the situation of the governments of the Dominican Republic and the United States and others in Central America and the Caribbean, they see with great concern the instability that Haiti has… what I think is that we have to rethink the way in which we help each other as countries because they all have problems and we must think that we cannot get ahead alone,” says Sola, who adds that action must be taken especially in the economic crack, since in Haiti 80-85% live in misery.
Haitians are currently waiting for presidential elections that have not come. Something that goes against the attempt to give it a little institutionality and leave aside the transition authorities.
Analyst Esteban Santos comments that one could speak of Haiti’s problems since the origin of its independence, but that currently twenty families control the country. In addition to the fact that there is a lot of speculation about the murder of Moïse and it is precisely because of the lack of space of power that they were given to them, to which is added a too great problem of human trafficking, drug trafficking by cartels that also dominate spaces of power.
“For me, first you have to talk about how to generate a country identity that doesn’t exist right now, and a minimal institutionality… there is no democratic culture, of respect for institutionality, and since you don’t have something aside that identifies you as Haitian more than poverty and other negative facts, I find it extremely difficult to be able to talk about a reconstruction as such,” says Santos, who adds that international aid and efficient cooperation are required, but it will be even more necessary to solve the “elephant target of the table”, which is having to negotiate with entrenched mafias that have divided the country like their plots. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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