2021 will be remembered as the year Haiti’s crisis reached its most acute and visible phase — a year when three catastrophic events, each individually devastating, struck in rapid succession: the assassination of the president in July, the magnitude 7.2 earthquake in August, and a sustained gang offensive that by year’s end had placed the majority of Port-au-Prince under criminal control.
The assassination of Jovenel Moïse on July 7 removed Haiti’s last nationally elected official, triggered a constitutional crisis over succession, and launched an investigation that implicated figures across Haitian and international political and business networks. It left the country in the hands of an unelected prime minister whose own legitimacy was contested and whose connections to the assassination were alleged though not proven.
Five weeks later, the August 14 earthquake killed at least 2,248 people, injured more than 12,000, destroyed or damaged nearly 140,000 buildings, and affected 650,000 people in Haiti’s already impoverished southern peninsula. The disaster struck a country with no functioning elected government, a security crisis that complicated relief operations, and a healthcare system already at breaking point from COVID and the political crisis.
Throughout the year, gang networks expanded their control, with the October fuel blockade demonstrating that criminal organizations could bring the country to a halt at will and the state was powerless to stop them. As the year ended, the question was not whether 2022 would be difficult — it would be — but whether Haiti still possessed the institutional foundations for any recovery, or whether the accumulation of disasters had finally crossed the threshold from crisis into something closer to collapse.