Three Years Later

The Haitian Presidential Palace in January 2010, the day of the earthquake (from The New York Times).

The image of the collapsed Presidential Palace was seen as the most adequate symbol of the situation in Haiti after the earthquake of 2010: what was left were only ruins. In the days following the disaster, the press constantly updated the figures of the deaths, the homeless, the wounded, and of any other classification for the victims. Unfortunately, if anyone thought that the situation in Haiti could not get worse, he or she was proven wrong.

The disaster offered a creepy opportunity to start anew, practically from a tabula rasa (as a symbol of this re-start, in September 2012 the Presidential Palace was finally demolished, expecting to build a new permanent house for the executive branch of government in the coming years). On the one hand, Haitians did not give themselves to despair. Moving stone by stone, they have cleaned up the roads and streets of the country, rebuilt houses, and reestablished services. In addition, the government has implemented new regulations and programs that aim at helping the poorest sectors of the population to rent a house (the construction code was substantially modified), to ameliorate the nourishment of children, and to fight tropical diseases such as cholera. In the midst of the crisis, the country went through a presidential election that, although highly contested during the campaigns, was carried out peacefully and within the existing institutional channels. The assistance of foreign governments and multilateral organizations is at all times acknowledged.

On the other hand, as suggested in the communiqué of the United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH), efforts have to be increased. There are still at least 300,000 people living in refugee camps, the passing of hurricanes still poses a major threat (as was the case last November during Sandy), and the government is still working to develop full authority and capacities (the Mission’s 2012 report can be found here: http://minustah.org/pdfs/fact_sheet/factsheet2012-haiti-moving-forward.pdf). Otherwise said, the mammoth institutional challenges of Haiti are still clearly present, building an efficient and democratic state that in its previous versions had been rampaged by dictators and that had been unable to process the society’s conflicts. If this was an easy task, it would have been done by now.