A woman carries a basket in a market in Port-au-Prince, this Sunday, July 11.Matias Delacroix / AP
Of all the problems that plague Clena Dival, the assassination of its president is the least important.
Sitting on a miserable section of the street in the Delmas neighborhood next to her business, a basket full of products that seem to be hygienic: deodorants, toothpastes, soaps, aspirin, nail polish ... The 62-year-old grandmother has been with her head for several days. resting on her hands watching how the dust, the noisy motorcycles, the tap-tap (colored buses) loaded with travelers, the screams of the drivers and the heat of the Caribbean are the only customers who come there.
He has not sold anything, absolutely nothing, in the last three days.
The wise reports of international organizations that say that 70% of Haitians live on two dollars a day passed by when they arrived in front of Dival because even that amount is not enough.
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With another scenario Clena Dival might have had a better future given her tendency to poetry. When he talks about his good times in Gonaive, the city where he was born, he snorts and tells that "life is like that, sometimes not a drop falls and another is the flood". When they summarize the situation in Haiti, they say that "it is in a coffin, but every time they want to bury it, they realize that it breathes" and when it refers to the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and the political confrontation that this has generated, it sums up better than a political scientist his contempt: "They cut off the head of the serpent, but left the tail." In a few sentences, Dival describes the social and political moment in a country that expected chaos after the death of its president, but is so used to living without him that the difference is hardly noticeable.
Delmas, Carrefour, Tabarre, La Saline, Martissant, Fontamar ... Two problems are repeated over and over again in the street and neither has to do with the death of Moïse: the violence of the gangs (armed gangs) and the very high price of the basic products. "Oil, beans, rice ... Everything has never been so expensive," he says in Creole.
"The situation is very difficult and I can't even eat once a day," he explains in front of all his assets: the discolored basket of hygiene products. The area it occupies is frequently attacked by local gangs that are fighting for the territory more emboldened and oiled than ever thanks to the fact that they have more money and weapons than ever as a result of drug trafficking and the increasingly important role that Haiti plays as a landing zone. on the route that connects Colombia and Venezuela with the United States, a few miles away. While hunger was always present, daily violence and kidnappings are a relatively new phenomenon in Haiti.
“I wake up in fear, I walk in fear and I sleep in fear. Sometimes bandits appear and start shooting and we have to run. Then I go back to get my merchandise ”, he explains. "I do not need the State, for that I have God, what I need is to lower the price of the products," he sentenced before putting his head back into his hands, waiting for one of the two to arrive.
Under a scorching sun, this Monday morning Dival is in the same place he was on January 11, 2010 when at 4.53 in the afternoon, an earthquake - which lasted what it takes for a traffic light to change color - reduced to rubble the capital of the country. That quake killed 250,000 people and the world turned to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. In a few days the planet was turned upside down with the shipment of unprecedented humanitarian aid. It was so much money and international organizations that came to Haiti that the Caribbean country came to be known as the "republic of NGOs." However, more than a decade later, the same evils of yesteryear are flying overhead. “I'm sorry to say it as president of Haiti, but we lost the opportunity to make a different country.We had the problem of political instability and we did not know what to do with the projects that came from international funds. But we cannot redo history and we must start over. It was hard for us that for 11 years we received a lot and the results are very minimal ”, acknowledged President Moïse in an interview with this newspaper five months before he was assassinated.
A few meters from Dival, Visonin Christainval, 29, sits on several bales of clothes waiting for the tension to drop. He has seen police officers and journalists arrive at the possibility of protests on the public highway and prefers not to take out the women's clothing that he sells on the street in case he has to go out at a gallop. A decade ago he arrived in the capital from Cap Haitien, five hours away, in search of a better life - if this is possible in Port-au-Prince - and since then he has lived by selling women's clothing. “It is a shame that a president is assassinated like that in his bed. If he who was so confident happened this to him, imagine how we will be ”, he says. When he talks about the main problems of the country, he insists on crime and the price of food.“I don't know who killed the president and I don't really care who it was. I don't have time to watch news. I just know that everything is more expensive every day and I can't buy even half the food I used to, ”he explains. The chicken? "That's rich," he answers with a listless grin.
One of the reasons for the rise in products has to do with the strength that the gangs that control the capital have been gaining, led by gangsters with names like Barbecue, Tilapli, Izo or Iscor.
As it produces practically nothing, everything that the country consumes arrives by boat or by road from the Dominican Republic and that route has become a dangerous road that requires extra vehicles or armed escorts to help introduce cargo into the capital, which has made prices more expensive to reach, in some cases, those of a European capital.
“Let the Americans come to put order.
You can't take it anymore ”.
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