2024-11-19
30 分钟Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips reports from Haiti on the struggles of the government to reassert its authority over the capital, Port-au-Prince, and on the ordinary Haitians caught up in the violence. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
This is the Guardian.
Today on the ground in Haiti, one of the most lawless countries on the planet.
So it's really difficult to visit Haiti at the moment.
We have been trying to get to Port au Prince since March, when this massive gang insurrection began.
Tom Phillips is the Guardian's Latin America correspondent.
In those first few weeks, it was just too difficult.
The city was completely cut off from the rest of the world.
The airport was closed down, and we couldn't find a safe way to get in and to do reporting safely on the ground.
So we've been pushing for months to get there, and finally we managed to identify what we thought was a reasonably safe window of opportunity in October.
So I flew in from Miami feeling really apprehensive about what we might find on the ground in a city that is now almost entirely under gang control.
And right now in Puerto Brincid is a nice day, and temperature is about what you see here in Miami.
The last time I'd been to that airport was just a few days after the 2010 earthquake struck.
Port of Bronze in January that year leveled much of the city because so much of the city was so poorly built.
To this day, we don't know how many people died, but people talk about 200,000 plus.
Tom will never forget what he saw in 2010.
So emerging from the airport, you walked into just an absolute nightmarish situation.
There were just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people outside, bodies and rubble everywhere.
Now the situation is very different.
The rubble has gone, and there are instead of thousands of displaced people who've lost their homes in an earthquake.
There is hardly a soul to be seen.