Haiti has for some time now been living under the sign of catastrophe. When it is not natural disasters—hurricanes, floods, earthquakes—it is the consequences of poor governance that destroy lives and property.

The current serious crisis is merely the logical continuation of the disastrous governance of recent decades. It is a record for which the elected and unelected officials who have successively led the country since the departure of the Duvaliers in 1986 must take responsibility. This is not to say that the period before then, including the Duvalier era, deserves to be glorified, but the events of 1986 were supposed to represent a break with the poor governance that, since independence, had kept a large part of the population in abject poverty.