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Before Haiti became a burning country, there were thousands of fires everywhere.
Many experts point to the beginning of everything in the colonization itself and the enslavement of the Africans brought to repopulate the island after the extermination of the indigenous communities.
Others date back to 1804, after the independence of this small Caribbean country.
Becoming the first free black people in the world cost them unpayable debts with France and blockades from other European countries.
The interference of the United States and the increase of criminal groups on the island are the last matches that have rekindled everything.
Passersby observe the scene where an alleged gang member was murdered, within a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, on March 20, 2024. Ralph Tedy Erol (REUTERS)
“Haiti is a country to which they have always turned their backs,” says Haitian Wooldy Edson Louidor, director of the master's degree in Critical Studies of Contemporary Migrations at the Javeriana University in Colombia.
“Even now, even the international community is preventing the transition.
We need a Haitian solution with the political class we have, corrupt or not;
ours.
We need your voice, that of the unions and that of those of us who are outside.
The role of the international community has to be to accompany and protect refugees, nothing more,” he adds.
The boredom of migrants with solutions always being sought outside is a constant in his stories.
However, the reality is far from what it suggests.
The latest figures known, from 2020, show that one sixth of the island lives abroad and that only 116,000 Haitians have received refugee status.
In a turbulent country, the diaspora has become a trench in the face of chaos.
The books of the Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière;
The critical thinking of Pierre Louis Jean or Jean-Claude Icart or the activism of Jennie-Laure Sully have explained abroad the ills of a nation in perennial crisis.
In addition, they offer an economic lifeline through remittances, as Yvenet Dorsainvil does from Chile or Richard Cantave's father from the United States.
“It's hard to survive without support,” says the last one.
His contributions and those of other migrants contributed $4.2 billion to the Haitian economy in 2023;
about 16.3% of GDP.
This is why Edson repeats over and over again: “The great resistance is transnational.
The great thinkers, the intellectuals... we are all out.
Haiti has all its human resources abroad.
And, without them, he will not be able to get up."
Wooldy Edson Louidor, professor of philosophy and migration at the Javeriana University of Bogotá, Colombia.
Camila Acosta Alzate
30 years of dictatorship, coups d'état, an assassination, two earthquakes that killed more than 220,000 people, cholera outbreaks... The small island of less than 12 million inhabitants has witnessed all the evils one can imagine .
Today, its population - the most impoverished in the region - is immersed in an absolute crisis and is seeking the tools for the transition towards a democratic model that guarantees the basic rights of the population in the midst of chaos.
Therefore, talking about migrating in Haiti is everyday.
According to calculations by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) until 2020, more than 1.7 million Haitians lived abroad.
But the social and political upheaval on the island completely outdated these data in less than four years.
“It is certain that there are thousands and thousands more, but it is very difficult to have exact figures, because the vast majority of migration is irregular,” says Giulia Sbarbati, from IOM Haiti.
And she gives as an example Honduras, where more than 82,000 Haitians arrived last year, an increase of 100% compared to 2022. “As the situation is, the trend is for it to continue growing,” she warns.
Despite the elusive figures, these remain overwhelmingly higher than the refugee statuses granted: until mid-2023,
only 116,463 Haitians were able to enjoy all their rights in a host country.
Another 195,425 requested asylum.
These modest numbers led UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to issue a document with recommendations to neighboring countries to guarantee refuge or other protection measures.
“We are not saying that everyone applies, but those who come from the most troubled territories in the country do.
The situation is complex and deportations only put the lives of thousands of people at risk,” explains Luiz Fernando Godinho, UNHCR spokesperson for the Americas.
Despite requests, hot returns are practically daily.
Since 2021, at least 303,000 Haitians have been repatriated by air and sea, the most common occurring in the Dominican Republic, the neighboring country with increasingly rigid restrictions.
“It seems that it is understood to welcome Ukrainians, but not our own neighbors,” laments Jean Exil, former Haitian ambassador to Colombia.
“We are talking about a country in which 300 people die a day and in which dogs devour the corpses.
“Maybe Americans are more sympathetic to those who look like them.”
United States: “I miss feeling at home”
Richard Cantave (Port-au-Prince, 38 years old) left in June 2003 to study in New York.
His city, in which he played until night in the street and in which he walked for hours with his father, is today the epicenter of chaos.
“The crisis made it easy for me to decide to stay,” he explains by phone.
Practically his entire family lives outside of Haiti, except for his brother, a judge who has not been paid his salary for seven months and who “is trapped in the city.”
Cantave, founder of the Haitian Nomad tourism company, says that he lives connected minute by minute to what happens there.
Both for his business, which he organizes trips around the world (currently including northern Haiti), and to be in some way close to what is happening in the land of his ancestors.
Like him, in 2023 there were about 731,000 countrymen living in the United States.
“I'm fine, but I miss feeling at home,” he says.
Migration through the Darien Jungle.
Mauricio Dueñas Castañeda (EFE)
That country and Canada were always two of the great goals of Haitians who left the island.
After the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, tens of thousands emigrated to Brazil and Chile, countries where they were welcomed as cheap labor.
But years later, they redirected their objective: to reach the United States no matter what.
And that
anyway
meant that they became the largest nationality in the very dangerous Darién jungle, which connects South America with Central America.
In 2023 alone, 46,422 Haitians entered;
107% more than in 2022, according to Sbarbati, from IOM Haiti.
In the last two years, the immigration policies of the Joe Biden Government encouraged many Haitians to try to reach that country.
Thanks to humanitarian parole, they are eligible for residence and work permits for two years.
For Gabrielle Apollon, a Haitian-Canadian resident in the United States and coordinator of the Hemispheric Network for the Rights of Haitian Migrants, it is unfair that they continue to be spoken of as “economic migrants”: “They are fleeing an unsustainable life in Haiti, not It's that they want to look for better jobs, it's that there is no guarantee of security where they are.
"The way to accompany the international community's crisis should be by welcoming refugees and not through political interference."
Brazil: “Racism is the great obstacle to finding work”
Since 2011, Brazil has been a transit country and medium-term destination for Haitians fleeing the devastating earthquake of the previous year, the subsequent social instability and cyclical crises.
Of the 160,000 who have since entered the country, some 86,000 remain;
Of them, about 55,000, are immersed in vulnerable situations.
It is estimated that tens of thousands continued to other countries—sometimes with their Brazilian children—with the dream of prospering, while a portion became naturalized.
Miguel Pachioni, from UNHCR, explains that “racism and discrimination are the great obstacle that Haitians have in finding work” in this continental country.
And he adds that Brazilian immigration policy is one of the most generous in the region with Haitians.
“And with every human being,” says Bob Montinard, 48, a cultural activist who in Haiti worked on peace-building, disarmament and cultural promotion projects in favelas, who has been living in Rio with his family for 14 years.
Montinard maintains that the umpteenth crisis in his homeland “is not the fault of Haitians alone, nor will the solution come only from Haitians.”
He suspects that there are major foreign interests out there to arm his compatriots, “so that they kill each other and destroy everything.”
He emphasizes: “It is sad and shameful that a country so rich and with such a strong history has become what it is now.”
This activist, who works in the NGO he founded with his French wife, says that since February it has been impossible to send remittances, even for those who have money, because the agencies are closed due to the chaos unleashed by criminal gangs.
Any Haitian recognized in Brazil as a refugee, with a humanitarian visa or temporary residence, receives documentation and a work permit.
Last year, the Government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva authorized family reunification with relatives up to the second degree, which includes grandparents and grandchildren.
Once the bureaucratic part is cleared up, the complicated part is usually gathering the money to travel from the Caribbean island to Brazil: São Paulo is more than 6,000 kilometers away.
Chile: “What happens affects us psychologically”
Chile hosted more than 179,000 Haitians in 2018. But in the last five years it began to witness this silent exodus of these migrants to North America.
“They don't want to return (to Chile) because every person who leaves has a negativity that they had to experience.
They are trying to breathe another air,” says William Pierre, spokesperson for the Haitian community in Chile.
A group of Haitian men meet to receive Spanish and cultural integration classes, in a shelter for migrants in Santiago, Chile, on May 6, 2017.Sofía Yanjarí
The current crisis is now added to the difficulties of migrants: “It even affects us psychologically.
They are family members, brothers, who are being kidnapped and there is no security that can be provided by the State... They are our roots.
“Nobody wants to be outside their country, no matter how much money they have.”
He arrived in Santiago in 2015, after passing through several countries, such as Colombia and the United States.
He had worked on the high seas with the company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) and as an interpreter for the United Nations.
“The ungovernability in Haiti and the corruption mean that professionals, the heart of the country, continue to go out to seek relief.”
Despite everything and the fact that his house in Haiti was shot up in 2022, Pierre assures that he has no intention of taking his family out of his country for now: “My children must receive a Haitian education.
It is part of growth… Returning is always my obligation, regardless of the chaos and insecurity of my land.”
Mexico: “If I can walk calmly again, I want to go back”
Giordano Bruno Square, in the heart of Mexico City, has become the exact image of what Haitian migrants suffer in the country.
The floor is covered with dozens of tents where there are about 200 people who cook, wash dishes and spend their daily lives sitting on paint buckets converted into seats.
Jessica Jean Baptiste, in Plaza Giordano Bruno, in the Juárez neighborhood of Mexico City, on March 20, 2024. Nayeli Cruz
Jessica Jean Baptiste, 25, recounts the more than 5,000 kilometers she traveled to reach Mexico from Chile, the first place she went after leaving her country in 2017. “It is a very ugly trip.
There is no way to bathe, no place to eat,” she laments.
She takes care of her one-year-old daughter while her husband works.
That money is used to live each day.
Since leaving Chile, they have not been able to send remittances to their families because they have spent their savings trying to reach the United States.
She is no exception;
Mexico has become a possible gateway to the North American country and increasingly a host country.
In 2010, the year of the fateful earthquake that devastated the country, there were only 733 Haitians registered in Mexico.
Like Jean Baptiste and Lolo Mathurin, another young migrant from the settlement, today it is estimated that there are more than 110,000 Haitians living in Mexican territory, according to the Citizen Committee in Defense of Naturalized and Afro-Mexicans.
The president of the association, Wilner Metelus, denounced last January the situation in which many of them live in camps without basic services in Mexico City and in several cities on the northern and southern borders.
The Migration Policy Institute states that the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) received 34,677 asylum requests from people from Haiti between January and August of last year, of which only 9% have been recognized.
A much lower rate than those of other nationalities such as Hondurans (89%) and Venezuelans (83%).
The arrival of Haitians to Mexico gives a clear image of the great exodus of people who, many times, dream of returning to their island one day.
“If everything starts to go well in my country and I can walk calmly, I want to return,” says Mathurin.