15 years of solitude

Exactly 15 years ago, at 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck west of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The shockwaves triggered the collapse of some 300,000 buildings — nearly half the structures in the capital, including the centers of government — while ravaging other cities on Haiti’s southern peninsula. The death toll was estimated between about 100,000 and 316,000. Even at the lower bound, that makes it the deadliest earthquake on record in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the deadliest in human history. I survived the collapse of the building I was in (my house). Several of my friends elsewhere in the city did not.

For most of the world, and certainly here in the U.S., this milestone will pass unnoticed. The last earthquake anniversary I can remember getting any attention was the tenth, in 2020. I had a raft of radio interviews in the build-up, mostly as I recall from outlets in Canada and the UK. Then the day passed and life trudged forward, as it always does, through the start of the pandemic and the election that year, and — well, everything that's happened since. On this January 12 the news is consumed with the fires in L.A. and the impending re-inauguration of our felonious forever president. If there’s an international story making waves it’s his Rooseveltian¹ threats to retake the Panama Canal Zone or seek Lebensraum in Greenland and/or Canada. This is not a judgment, it’s just an observation: time moves on and our trauma calendars are packed these days. But that’s what remembrances like this are for.

So what has changed? Haiti is by almost any measure in a worse condition than it was on the morning of the earthquake, and by a lot of measures in a worse state than it was even immediately after. Despite what you might have heard at the time, on the evening of January 12, 2010, and for a few months after, Haitians of all stripes and classes came together with a unity of purpose: to help each other survive, to mourn, to rebuild. It didn’t take long for the class lines to reemerge. First, the tiny elite and foreigners exploited their advantages in getting out and accessing care. Before long they started chafing at the displaced persons camps, home to the millions made homeless by the disaster, that sprung up on their lands and commercial properties. Then came the cholera epidemic, started by United Nations peacekeepers, and covered up (unsuccessfully) by much of the international system. The formal reconstruction petered out soon after, with little — other than a $300 million “industrial park” home to a garment assembly factory in the country’s north — to show for it.

Politics returned at the end of 2010, when the U.S. meddled in a presidential election, backing the right-wing pro-business challenger Michel Martelly even as his followers were rioting in the streets. Martelly’s corrupt reign lasted for five years. He was succeeded by his handpicked successor Jovenel Moïse, who surprised everyone by outdoing his mentor in authoritarianism and refusing to hold elections or leave office, then becoming the first Haitian president to be assassinated in office in over one hundred years. There were opportunities afterward for a different path: a broad-based proposal for a transitional government that would hold fair and transparent elections was hammered out, presented to the Biden administration, and summarily ignored. Instead, Washington backed a doddering reactionary neurosurgeon named Ariel Henry, sat idly by as he spent three years managing a downward social spiral, then cut ties with him as he was literally in midair, flying back from Nairobi, where he’d been dispatched to lobby for a Kenyan-led “multinational security support mission.”

Paramilitary forces — some with a patina of ideology, others just petty gangsters — rushed into the power vacuum left by the U.S. and Henry. According to the U.N., over 5,600 Haitians were killed by gang violence in 2024. That includes two journalists shot to death last month when gunmen opened fire on a press conference meant to mark the reopening of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital. Johnson “Izo” André, the leader of the Viv Ansamn (“live together”) gang coalition, claimed responsibility for the attack, explaining that he had not authorized the hospital to reopen.

Haiti also remains as under threat as ever for disasters, both seismic and climatic. A 2021 earthquake centered much further west on the southern peninsula killed “merely” 2,200 people and would have surely killed far more if had been closer to the metropolitan zone. Desperate for safety, Haitians have migrated en masse across the hemisphere, to Brazil, Chile, the neighboring Dominican Republic, and of course the United States, where, despite being the author of many of Haiti’s troubles, the Haitian-born population has grown to over 731,000 as of 2022. Despite being more likely than other immigrant groups to have achieved U.S. citizenship or legal permanent residence — and having long since become a backbone of many of their communities’ service and professional sectors — Haitians were singled out for the most egregious xenophobic calumny uttered during the 2024 election, indicating they may be under particular threat from the incoming anti-immigration regime.

And what, if anything, has changed outside Haiti? The lessons of the failed disaster response were learned in some ways, though ignored in others. There is far more lip service paid now to “local-led” and mutual aid efforts in disaster response. It’s far more common than it was to hear casual observers remark (correctly) that it’s “better to send money than stuff” into affected zones.

But judging from the fires in Los Angeles, many of the most destructive myths remain wholly intact. Major media still play with the “fears of looting” trope, writing breathless, under-evidenced stories about (usually nonwhite) residents just waiting to prey on their fellow survivors, eager to exploit a shared tragedy on hopes of grabbing, say, a partly melted Nintendo Switch. Social media trolls are now leading the game, mislabeling videos of Black Angelenos helping recover their own things as if they were criminals caught in the act. (As disaster experts like Eric Auf Der Heide have written over the years, this is often the case.) Even if there is the odd property crime of opportunity, the sense of looming social chaos that this focus creates almost always results in wasting time and resources, funneling effort and money into unnecessary and destructive security responses instead of where it should be: saving and preserving lives.

When I set out to write my book on the 2010 earthquake, the biggest myth I wanted to bust was the widely held assumption, among Americans at least, that the U.S.-led top-down response had been a success. I hoped that in doing so I’d shine a light on the real problems in Haiti — vulnerability, a lack of sovereignty and international respect, rampant inequality on a global and historical scale — and help move the needle toward better outcomes. I and others succeeded in the first part — we helped erode trust in institutions and leaders that failed. But the second step, replacing it with a new more mutual sense of purpose and priority, never took. Instead, the shorthand went from “we saved Haiti” to “disaster response is always corrupt” and/or “the Clintons stole all the money from that awful place” — all of which have the same ultimate effect: to convince the listener that nothing more needs to or can be done, and that it’s fine to, once again, look away. But the reality is that, while yes, the problems are still there, the solutions are also still in reach. We just have to remember, once again, that lesson so many of us took on that awful night: Wherever we are, and whatever our station, we’re all in this together.

1  Teddy, that is.