Haiti's Dire Situation in 4 Graphs
Last week I was sitting down to lunch with a new friend from Haiti, and it was a bizarre experience.
He had arrived in the US the day before. And right as we sat down to eat, he found out that one of his employees in Haiti had been kidnapped that morning. Our lunch conversation was periodically interrupted by his taking calls with the victim’s mother to get updates on the ransom situation. The bizarre part was that he would hang up the phone and continue talking to me as if nothing was going on, sharing things like how much weight he had recently lost.
The juxtaposition was surreal. How could he possibly be so casual?
The key, I believe, is that this is what life in Haiti is like right now.
Like most people, I had seen the headlines talking about Haiti. But I like data, and I hadn’t seen anything concrete yet. That is, until this week.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) released a new report on Haiti. While the focus was on firearms and drug trafficking, the appendix had a series of interesting data. It was when I put that data into charts that I realized that things in Haiti were not only bad, the trouble was accelerating.
The Worst Indicators
The thing I have been hearing the most about is kidnappings. I can’t remember where I read it (probably the Miami Herald), but there was a story about school kids collecting money to pay a ransom for their friends. That stuck with me.
Well, the report had data on monthly kidnappings since 2019.
Those are kidnappings per month. Are the data complete? Probably not. I’d bet they’re underreported.
Maybe you’re like me and you’re like, “Yeah, it’s going up, but how bad is it?” Let’s compare it to the US. Clearly kidnappings must happen all the time here because cops in Connecticut will arrest you for child endangerment if you let your kids walk around the neighborhood unsupervised.
Unfortunately, there isn’t very good data on kidnappings in the US because (apparently) we don’t record adult kidnappings in crime data. But we have some idea about kids. Most kids are kidnapped by relatives, but we’re not worried about that in Haiti. We want to know something about people snatched off the street by strangers. One source says that about 350 kids are kidnapped by strangers each year. The worst year was 2016 with 384. I imagine child kidnappings are more frequent than adult kidnappings, so let’s just double the number to 700 to include adults. Heck, since there are more adults in the US than kids, we could even double it again to 1,400.
How does Haiti compare? In 2022, there were 1,359 kidnappings.
That’s equal to our super generous estimate of kidnappings in the US, yet Haiti has about 3% of America’s population.
That’s really bad.
Kidnappings are only the beginning. The UNDOC report also had homicides.
Again, number is going up and jumps a lot in 2022. How bad is it?
There were 2,183 homicides in 2022, which gives a country-wide homicide rate of 18.3 per 100,000. But 83% of those were in the Ouest, which only has a population of about 4.0 million. That means the murder rate in that area is 43.4 per 100,000. According to Wikipedia’s list of cities by homicide rate, that is enough to put the relatively small area at #30 in the world. But if we want to assume that all of those murders are happening in Port-au-Prince itself, that puts the homicide rate at 173.5, making it one of the most dangerous cities in the world. That’s probably too strong of an assumption, but the two rates give a nice upper and lower bound to how bad things are in the capital.
Exit and Voice
Of course, Haitians are not taking this sitting down. Indeed, their response creates more data on how bad things are. Here are how many protests happen each month.
Except for a dip at the beginning of COVID, Haitians have been engaged in protests fairly consistently. But towards of 2022, protests had skyrocketed. This, of course, was a reaction to the end of fuel subsidies, which led to such disorder that the government petitioned the international community for help.
But the one that has me most concerned is how many people are fleeing the country on water.
From October 2021 to September 2022, the Coast Guard encountered 7,175 Haitian migrants. Between October 2022 and March 3, 2023 (5 months) the Coast Guard was already at 3,567, on pace to break the previous year’s numbers.
Why does this worry me?
This shows the situation is so bad that people are risking their lives to escape.
Finally, here’s what I’ve said the likely consequences of this are:
The single greatest thing that will prompt the US to act in Haiti is if Haitians start showing up in the US by the thousands. As long as Haitians stay in Haiti, DC doesn't see this as a US problem. But when refugees come, it becomes a tricky political problem. Especially to Democrats going into the 2024 election cycle, where the two leading Republican contenders are courting strong anti-immigrant sentiments. A refugee crisis would be so much fuel on the Republican fire that it could solve Haiti's diesel shortages.
What can be done about all of this?
I am not very creative here. But I invite you to check out these suggestions from Michael Deibert.
