the uses of Haiti

Ok, Haiti hadn't experienced major earthquakes in the last 200 years.

Ok, since 1692 in the whole region there have been only 3 recorded quakes which have caused more than 1000 victims, the deadliest being the 1843 Leeward Islands one, with 5000 deaths.

Ok, the event was very close to the major urban area in the country, and very shallow, and hit Port-au-Prince with extreme violence. And strong aftershocks further damaged the area.

But a disaster such as this is really not a question of bad luck. You might not know when the earthquake is going to happen, but you can be quite sure that having a couple of million people in poorly built houses on the top of a fault which has been accumulating energy during the last two centuries is going to lead to a massacre, sooner or later.

Haiti is usually considered the perfect case study to explain the concept of vulnerability to disasters. Together with the Dominican Republic, it occupies the island of Hispaniola, which is struck almost yearly by some hurricane. The two countries are subject to winds of the same strength, rains of the same intensity, waves of the same height. But the same event that on the Dominican side would kill 1, makes 6 victims on the Haitian one.

This is not about the Dominicans being luckier. Rather, it is about the Haitians being poorer. A huge, poor population that ends up living and working in cheap, fragile buildings in cheap, dangerous areas, such as steep slopes and riverbeds. That relies on its local environment for food and energy provision, contributing to the overexploitation of the island's forests (which causes the soil to become less stable and less able to retain rain, and makes water runoff more violent, increasing frequency and intensity of floods and landslides) and of its coastal ecosystems (which protect people and their livelihoods from coastal hazards). That has never experienced a period of democratic stability and development. That can't count on any kind of welfare state, urban planning and building codes, decent health care, disaster preparedness system, or recognition and satisfaction of basic human rights.

This earthquake surely dwarfs any other event on the records, but in the last 10 years the country has already been hit by 37 major natural disasters, including the 2008 hurricanes (Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike) which killed about 800 and left 800,000 homeless, and the 2004 hurricane Jeanne, with its 2750 victims. The country is so vulnerable that almost every time a strong natural event hits it people are killed, buildings are destroyed, properties are lost.

In explaining these disasters, the human components are much more relevant than the violence and unpredictability of the natural events. And are deeply rooted in the country's history. This is where the appeals for funding, the emergency interventions, and a world-wide mobilization of people and resources fall short.

Obama, who now promises full support to the country, should remember how systematically US have undermined Haitian democracy throughout the last century with the aim of exploiting the country's resources and market, first as direct occupiers, then leaving the country in Trujillo's hands, financing the 30-years long Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier's regime, and contributing to the coup that, in 1990, overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically-elected leader the nation had ever had. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who now pledge financial and technical aid, should remember how happy they've been with the neoliberal regime US created to "restore democracy" in 1994, which worsened the life conditions of an already desperate population, or how passively they have acknowledged the embargo US imposed on the country after the 2000 local elections, which the Americans considered "irregular".

Under these conditions, is it any surprising that the population have basically experienced no development in the last two centuries? Could a country where the rights of the workers have been systematically denied, where the poor, black population has always been considered a danger for the capital, where wealth and power have been systematically concentrated in the hands of a handful families, turn out to be any different?

It's not a question of collecting more money, of rescuing the thousands buried alive, of providing food and shelter to the survivors. And it's not only question of building safe houses, schools, hospitals, infrastructures. Poverty and vulnerability won't disappear that way. Without a profound modification of the nature of the economic and political relations at the national and international levels, there's no way to avoid the progressive construction of catastrophes such as this earthquake, there's no way to avoid the fact that there will always be a former tropical paradise ready to be turned into a terrible hell circle.