Tribune. Shortly before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck Haiti. The images of destruction and aid from everywhere went around the world, sparking a large-scale international solidarity movement. Two months later, in New York, sixty countries meet, adopt the objective of the then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, "Rebuild better", and raise a sum of 10 billion dollars (around 7.2 billion euros) to bring Haiti "Towards a new future".
Ten years later, what has changed? The country remains the poorest in Latin America even if poverty has fallen – it only "affects" 59% of the population – and one of the most unequal, still as vulnerable to sudden disasters, such as Hurricane Matthew , in 2016, demonstrated it. Haiti is ranked at 168e rank out of 189 countries according to the Human Development Index (HDI, which measures the average quality of life of a country's population), when he was 149e out of 182 in 2007. Slums still occupy most of the capital, Port-au-Prince, a capital with new luxury hotels, built as part of the reconstruction…
Furthermore, in recent years, living conditions and the human rights situation have deteriorated at a rapid rate. The fault of the Haitians, the chronic political instability of the country, the corruption of the political class? In the mirror of its failures, the humanitarian always sees another.
malfunctions
The international intervention in Haiti was an extreme case, but not a case apart from humanitarian aid. All the "dysfunctions" identified in previous interventions elsewhere in the world were reproduced on a larger and more systematic scale. Save lives ? Haitians saved more in the first 48 hours, while international rescuers – and the cameras that inevitably follow them – were not yet operational. Lack of coordination between humanitarian actors? The media coverage and the race for visibility, the ignorance of the context, the multiplication of projects made it an almost natural trend.
"It was not the earthquake that caused the disaster in Haiti. It had already taken place. It had a name: neoliberalism ”
