Haiti 13 years after the earthquake

Haiti 13 years after the earthquake

Port-au-Prince is still bearing the scars of the 7.0-degree Richter scale earthquake, the most devastating Haiti has suffered on record, injuring more than 350,000 people and leaving 1.5 million homeless.

The earthquake struck at 4:53 p.m. local time and the Presidential Palace, Parliament, Cathedral, hundreds of thousands of homes and government buildings, shopping malls, schools, health care facilities and more fell like dominoes.

According to the United Nations, the death toll has multiplied the total recorded in disasters in Haiti since 1963 by 10.

Gross domestic product shrank by five percent in a nation already experiencing an intractable political and economic crisis, on top of a series of corrupt governments, coups and military interventions.

With a history of poor administration, international aid was managed not by the authorities but by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

According to experts, this has made the government more inefficient and encouraged the diversion of resources to NGOs, which have taken the money but done little or nothing to the country’s recovery.

More than a decade later, Haiti still has not risen and the earthquake was followed by a cholera epidemic, natural disasters, a political and economic crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2021 earthquake.

According to current data from the World Food Program, more than 4.7 million of the approximately 12 million inhabitants are currently affected by famine and 1.8 million are in the emergency phase.

Violence escalated, claiming thousands of lives in 2022 alone, hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes and cholera reappeared last October, adding another wound to the devastated nation.

jf/ane