Port-au-Prince still bears the traces of the 7.0-degree earthquake on the Richter scale, the most devastating Haiti suffered since records have been kept, and which injured more than 350,000 people and left 5 million homeless, according to government figures.

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

According to the United Nations, the number of fatalities multiplied by 10 the sum of those registered in disasters in Haiti since 1963.

The Gross Domestic Product contracted by five percent, in a nation that was already experiencing an insistent political and economic crisis, in addition to a succession of corrupt governments, coups d’état, and military interventions.

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

This, according to experts, made the government more ineffective and encouraged the diversion of resources to NGOs that took the money, but did little or nothing to help the country’s recovery.

More than a decade later, Haiti has still 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.

Of some 12 million inhabitants, more than 4.7 million are currently facing famine, according to recent data from the World Food Program, and 1.8 million are in the emergency phase.

Violence escalated and claimed thousands of lives in 2022 alone, hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes and cholera resurfaced last October to add yet another wound to the devastated nation.

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