The year 2022 would be remembered as one in which Haiti’s compounding crises deepened across virtually every dimension, pushing the country closer to the threshold of complete state collapse while the international community’s response remained inadequate and the Haitian political class continued to fail the people it was supposed to serve.
The year’s major markers were all negative: the Montana Accord’s alternative government went unrecognized; elections were formally postponed indefinitely; gangs expanded control to an estimated 60 percent of the capital; the Palace of Justice was seized by a criminal network; a second fuel terminal blockade created a humanitarian emergency; cholera returned killing hundreds; Paul Farmer — Haiti’s greatest international advocate — died in February; the electoral council was dissolved; and Canada’s sanctions on Haitian elites and the UN’s sanctions on Chérizier, while symbolically important, produced no change in the security situation on the ground.
The human toll of 2022 was staggering. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Sexual violence used as a systematic tool of gang control. A cholera outbreak killing hundreds. An economy contracting for the sixth consecutive year. Inflation running at rates that made basic necessities unaffordable for millions. A healthcare system limping along on the margins of collapse.
Yet even in this accounting of disaster, the Haitian people continued to demonstrate that they were more than the sum of the crises afflicting them. Artists created, teachers taught when they could, community organizations continued to serve their neighbors, and the diaspora maintained its remarkable commitment to supporting the homeland. The question heading into 2023 was whether any of the political actors with the ability to change Haiti’s trajectory would finally find the will to do so.