As 2022 drew to a close, Haiti’s situation had in almost every measurable dimension worsened from where it had stood twelve months earlier. The political impasse between the Henry government and the Montana accord coalition remained unresolved. The security situation had deteriorated sharply, with gangs expanding their territorial control, the Palace of Justice seized, and two fuel terminal blockades demonstrating the state’s inability to protect critical infrastructure. A cholera outbreak had added a public health emergency. And elections that had been promised for 2022 had been formally abandoned with no new timeline offered.
The international community’s response to Haiti’s deepening crisis remained inadequate to its scale. Discussions about an international security assistance mission had intensified after Henry’s formal request in October, but no concrete action had materialized. The UN Security Council’s sanctions on Chérizier were a welcome step but insufficient to change the security dynamic on the ground. Canadian sanctions on Haitian elites with gang ties were similarly important symbolically but limited in practical impact.
Haitian civil society organizations, exhausted by years of crisis but refusing to give up, continued to advocate for a Haitian-led political solution, insisting that any genuine recovery had to be driven by Haitian actors rather than imposed by international consensus. They called for a genuine national dialogue that included all major political and social forces and that could produce a transitional arrangement with broad enough legitimacy to create conditions for credible elections.
The Haitian people, who had demonstrated extraordinary resilience through years of accumulated disasters, entered 2023 with their country in a deeper crisis than it had been in when 2022 began. Their capacity to endure was remarkable; the political class’s capacity to provide the leadership they deserved remained as elusive as ever.