The Country We Keep Forgetting to Care About

Haiti is collapsing in real time. And we’re barely watching.

Most of us aren’t ignorant because we’re stupid. We’re ignorant because we’re comfortable. Because somewhere in the back of our minds we know something terrible is happening… and we change the channel anyway. Not out of malice. Just out of the quiet, daily negotiation we all make about how much reality we can absorb before breakfast.

Haiti has been on the losing end of that negotiation for a very long time.

I want to talk about what’s actually happening there, because I think most people have only the haziest picture of it. A kidnapping here. A headline there. Maybe a memory of the 2010 earthquake, that extraordinary outpouring of international compassion that was, as we’ll get to, something of a masterclass in doing the wrong things with the right feelings.

But here’s where we are right now, in 2026, on an island that sits roughly 700 miles from Miami: a country is functionally ceasing to exist. And the world is mostly getting on with its day.

Ninety Percent. Think About That Number.

Armed gangs now control approximately 90% of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city. That is not a typo. That is not alarmist exaggeration. That is what UN officials told the Security Council, warning that without dramatically increased international action, “the total collapse of state presence in the capital could become a very real scenario.”

The phrase “near-total state collapse” has been used in the same clinical, careful way that bureaucrats use language when they are trying not to panic anyone while also being completely terrified.

The gang coalition behind much of this is called Viv Ansanm, which translates, with an almost grotesque irony, to “Living Together.” It is an alliance of Haiti’s most powerful criminal groups, and it has not just held Port-au-Prince hostage… it has expanded into three of the country’s ten departments. It controls roads. It controls ports. It controls who eats and who doesn’t. Between January and May 2025 alone, Haiti recorded more than 4,000 homicides, a 24% rise from the year before.

Over 1.3 million people… more than one in ten Haitians… have been displaced within their own country. Half of them are children.

I’ll let that one sit for a moment.

The Business of Gang Rule

Here’s something that doesn’t make it into the sporadic news coverage: this isn’t just chaos. Chaos, at least, is indiscriminate. What’s happening in Haiti is organised. The gangs impose “passage fees” on the main national roads. They have made the international airport so dangerous that aircraft have been hit by gunfire during approach, forcing repeated closures. The port has been blockaded. US airlines were banned from southern Haiti. Major banks shut. The Marriott in Port-au-Prince… closed.

Doctors Without Borders, one of the most resolute humanitarian organisations on the planet, people who work in active war zones without flinching, have halted services in multiple areas of the capital because they cannot operate safely. UN flights were suspended after gunfire incidents.

Think about what it takes to make Doctors Without Borders walk away from a situation. That’s the temperature of what’s happening.

And into that environment, countries like the United States, the Dominican Republic, and others deported over 225,000 people back to Haiti between January and October 2025 alone. Into a city where you cannot reliably get food, water, or healthcare. Into a country where only one of the three major hospitals in the capital’s metropolitan area is still functioning.

When the Body Turns Against Itself

Cholera kills through the body’s own desperate response to infection, and if you wanted a metaphor for what’s happening to Haiti as a whole, you’d struggle to find a crueller one. It is a disease that kills through the body’s own desperate response to infection… dehydration so severe and so rapid that without treatment, it can kill a healthy adult within hours. The cure is almost laughably simple: clean water and oral rehydration salts. You just need clean water. That’s all.

Haiti had actually eliminated cholera. By early 2019, no new cases were being confirmed. They had done the hard work. It was gone.

Then the gangs blockaded the ports. Fuel ran short. Water infrastructure collapsed. And in October 2022, cholera came back. Because of course it did.

By the end of October 2025, health authorities had recorded nearly 3,000 suspected cholera cases since the start of that year alone, with children under nine making up over a third of them. The disease, having been beaten once, is now spreading through the displacement camps where over a million people are living in conditions that essentially function as incubators. The fatality rate has surpassed what the World Health Organisation classifies as an emergency threshold.

The cure, remember, is clean water. And 35% of the population has no access to it.

The Hunger That Doesn’t Photograph Well

Famine is a word we reach for carefully, because it has a specific technical meaning and carries with it a weight that shouldn’t be diluted. But Haiti has reached it. The World Food Programme estimates that about 5.7 million people in Haiti are facing acute food insecurity. Six hundred thousand are in famine conditions, which in the clinical language of international aid organisations means they have no food, or minimal food, regardless of any efforts made to find it.

Over half of Haiti’s entire population faced crisis-levels of food insecurity or worse in 2025.

Here’s something that rarely gets said plainly: this isn’t a natural disaster. There is no drought. There is no flood (beyond the usual hurricane season). The food exists. The international aid exists, or at least some of it does. The problem is that the gangs control the roads. And the gangs decide who gets through.

This is starvation as a governance tool. And the international community’s response has been, to be blunt about it, embarrassingly inadequate.

The Peacekeeping Mission That Was Never Fully Funded

In 2024, a UN-backed security mission led by Kenyan police arrived in Haiti with genuine fanfare. Something was finally being done. The cavalry, however, turned up at less than half strength. The mission was originally envisioned at 2,500 personnel. As of early 2025, just over 500 had actually been deployed. The UN Secretary-General’s proposal to provide drones, fuel, and transport support has, in the words of the UN’s own communications, “languished in the council.”

Meanwhile, the gangs… who are not languishing, who are not understaffed, who are not waiting for a budget approval… gained more ground.

The international community is trying to put out a fire with a damp cloth and a strongly worded letter.

Why Does This Keep Happening? (The Uncomfortable Part)

This is where I’m going to say something that some people will find uncomfortable, but I think it needs saying.

Haiti’s invisibility in mainstream media coverage is not accidental. It is the legacy of a very specific, very deliberate pattern of dismissal that dates back to 1804.

When Haiti won its independence from France, it became the world’s first free Black republic, born from a slave revolt. The slaveholding Western world… the United States included, which would not formally recognise Haiti for another 58 years… decided that the only way to make sense of this was to frame Haitian self-governance as inherently chaotic, inherently violent, inherently doomed. The stereotypes that were deliberately manufactured to protect the institution of slavery became the lens through which Haiti has been reported on, and thought about, ever since.

The 2010 earthquake brought a wave of coverage and compassion. It also brought descriptions of earthquake survivors as “looters” within days of a natural disaster that killed over 200,000 people. It brought international aid that was, by the assessment of organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières, structurally inadequate and often counterproductive. It brought billions of dollars in reconstruction pledges, a significant portion of which never materialised, and some of which actively undermined local Haitian agriculture and industry. The good intentions were real. The results were not.

Haiti’s crisis resists easy categorisation. It is not a conventional armed conflict. It is not a simple insurgency. It doesn’t fit the visual grammar of foreign crisis that TV news has trained us to recognise. There are no clear heroes, no photogenic liberation movements, no obvious Western geopolitical interest. What there is, is a Black nation in the Caribbean that has been poor and unstable since the moment it dared to free itself, and that the world has, for over two centuries, found it convenient to look away from.

The Weapons Have to Come From Somewhere

Here’s a detail that is almost never included in the breathless reports about Haitian gang violence: the guns are not made in Haiti. Illicit arms trafficking into Haiti is overwhelmingly sourced from the United States, flowing in through Florida and other states, exploiting regulatory gaps and the sheer volume of legal US firearm sales.

US Congress has had legislation introduced to address this. It has not passed. The UN and the EU have applied targeted sanctions. They remain “insufficient,” in the carefully diplomatic language of Human Rights Watch.

The country being destabilised by American weapons is then periodically blamed, in American political discourse, for the refugees and migrants it produces. You cannot simultaneously supply the fire and condemn the smoke.

What Actually Matters Here

I want to be direct about why I think this matters to those of us sitting comfortably in Europe or North America, scrolling past the occasional Haiti headline.

First, the purely practical argument: failed states do not stay contained. The drug and arms trafficking networks that have made Haiti’s gangs so powerful do not respect national borders. The humanitarian flows that will intensify if Haiti descends further will reach the shores of the Dominican Republic, the United States, the Bahamas. The cholera, in a world of global travel, is not a Haitian problem. It is a problem that happens to be currently concentrated in Haiti.

But I don’t actually want to lead with that argument, because it’s slightly too self-interested, and Haiti deserves better than to matter to us only when it becomes our problem.

The more important argument is this: we live in a world that spent the better part of the last decade in passionate, public debate about humanitarian crises in places where Western geopolitical interests were clearly at stake. Where the people suffering looked more like the people watching. Where the emotional case was easier to make to a television audience.

Eleven point nine million people live in Haiti. More than half of them are in humanitarian need. The country is being systematically dismantled by organised criminal governance, abandoned by an international community that is understaffed, underfunded, and frankly a bit distracted.

And most people, if asked, could not tell you anything about it beyond “there was a big earthquake once, wasn’t there?”

The Thing About Selective Attention

Media coverage of Haiti tends to spike around three types of events: natural disasters, political assassinations, and kidnappings of foreign nationals or aid workers. The rest of the time… the grinding, relentless, daily collapse of a society… doesn’t make the cut. It’s not dramatic enough. There’s no clean narrative arc. It doesn’t lend itself to a four-minute segment with a correspondent standing in front of something photogenic.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s just the logic of attention in a saturated media environment. But the effect is that millions of people have been educated, over years, to think of Haiti as a place where bad things happen, without ever being given the context to understand why, or to feel that there is anything to be done about it.

There is something to be done about it.

You can follow organisations like the IRC, Médecins Sans Frontières, and OCHA who are doing actual work on the ground and who need actual funding. You can read beyond the headline. You can, when Haiti comes up in political conversations about immigration and deportation, introduce the information that 225,000 people were deported into an active humanitarian catastrophe in 2025 alone.

You can, at minimum, hold the discomfort of knowing rather than the comfort of not knowing.

A Final Thought

Haiti was once described as the Pearl of the Antilles. It was, before its revolution and the punishment that followed, the single most profitable colony in the entire Western Hemisphere. More wealth passed through the port of Saint-Domingue, as it was then called, than through most of the ports of Europe.

What followed was two centuries of deliberate economic strangulation, military occupation, corrupt governance, international neglect, natural disasters, and now gang rule.

This is not a country that has failed. This is a country that has been failed… repeatedly, systematically, and by people and institutions that knew exactly what they were doing.

The least we can do is pay attention.

Sources: UN Security Council briefings, Human Rights Watch World Report 2026, IRC Haiti Crisis Report, OCHA Haiti Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026, PAHO Haiti Humanitarian Crisis Report, International Crisis Group Report 110, Americas Quarterly, The Haitian Times.

Until Next Time