OPINION | The tragedy of Haiti

Editor’s note: Roberto Izurieta is director of Latin American Projects at George Washington University. He has worked in political campaigns in several Latin American countries and Spain, and was an advisor to Presidents Alejandro Toledo, of Peru; Vicente Fox, from Mexico, and Álvaro Colom, from Guatemala. Izurieta is also a contributor to CNN en Español.

(CNN Spanish) – The brutal attack on the President of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, at his own residence and together with his wife, in what appears to have been an assault organized by a group of well-armed mercenaries, has caused rejection around the world.

This assassination shows, once again, the weakness of a State that, despite the very substantial international aid provided over many years by multiple institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, various governments and organizations of the The United Nations continues to exist on that dangerous border between a viable state and a failed one. This situation is not recent, it began perhaps already during the Haitian revolution, after the arrest and death in prison of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the charismatic leader of the revolution, at the beginning of the 19th century.

The karma of many weak states is sudden wealth (oil, diamond, etc.) in which those groups whose interest is to exploit these wealth for their own benefit promote ungovernability, which allows them to continue exploiting state assets. Perhaps Venezuela is an example. But in Haiti these riches do not exist, although there are clearly interests that benefit enough from the instability of the state to, apparently, have run the risk of hiring a large group of well-organized and armed mercenaries who assassinated a president whom , in some way, they must consider a threat to your business. Why? I don’t have the answer, there may be numerous explanations, and they will be found.

In the meantime, it is important to insist that the numerous international aid organizations and governments of goodwill that have supported Haiti have the minimum obligation to ensure that all of the resources provided to that country for infrastructure maintenance and renovation works, education , health, development, etc., are used in their entirety and adequately for those purposes and that they cannot be diverted under any circumstances, no matter how difficult or complicated it is to guarantee it.

Otherwise we will become accomplices of misgovernment, corruption and mismanagement. Multiple efforts have already been made in this regard, but it is something that must be continued and intensified.

Haiti has everything: violence, organized crime, extreme poverty, lack of basic services, health, education, basic infrastructure and much more.

To solve these problems we must put them in an order that could make it possible to unravel and solve them. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever heard was a comment from a friend’s mother who said to me: “How do you do when you have three big problems?” To which she herself replies: “The same thing you would do to pass them through a door: one at a time.” And he is right.

In this case, one should begin by providing security to the community and investigating this murder with international help, bringing all those responsible to justice. But the physical security of citizens requires well-managed and respected security forces, and this requires the development of truly democratic institutions. A democracy is not only equivalent to free elections, but requires -above all- the construction and development of State institutions with separate and limited powers (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) that exercise counterweights between them. The famous balance of powers.

But this, already enormously difficult, is not enough. The security of the Haitian population is not only physical but also economic and social, the right to work, to have a roof under which to shelter, feed, educate children … And the pandemic has aggravated these social injustices that they were already huge. As I stated in an article on CNN in April of last year, poor countries do not have the resources or the capacity to borrow to face a pandemic, and therefore they are the ones that suffer the most, multiplying socioeconomic differences even more , even within each country.

It is clear that all this cannot be solved in seven days. Where to begin? After the earthquake a decade ago, the international community made important efforts to restore Haiti’s infrastructure, but, for example, there are still areas that are difficult to access, particularly in winter. Guaranteeing roads and access roads to all citizens throughout the year (something that in other countries we take for granted) is a first step towards job security, education and health, since it allows the products of the land to arrive to markets, that vehicles are not destroyed in impossible ways (which makes transport enormously expensive), that children and young people come to their schools and adults to work, that the sick can be taken to centers health and hospitals on time.

Furthermore, the construction of local roads is also a source of work for the poorest communities. The very long-term sustainability of these (and other) initiatives must be considered a priority, and the international community must explicitly accept this long-term dependency if we are to be successful.

The problem of Haiti should make us reflect on other States in the region. To a somewhat lesser extent, Venezuela is already facing similar problems. At times I even fear that Venezuela has already crossed the invisible line that separates one impossible situation from another in which the return to democracy would be the solution to all the problems accumulated by the dictatorship. The problem in Venezuela seems to be that the presence of a formal State no longer exists in many parts of the territory (urban and rural) and criminal gangs (organized at higher or lower levels) are the ones that reign.