Haiti

Col5Vid – a Spanish pun that stands for Colombia Sin COVID, or Colombia Without COVID-19 – is one of Colombia’s most dynamic new charity groups. But Col5Vid's founder admits the idea wasn’t born at a board room table – but on a bedroom sofa.

A month ago Haiti’s number of COVID-19 infections barely registered on the global radar screen. But a leading medical group warns that has now changed alarmingly.

Earlier this month, the U.S. deported a group of Haitians back to Haiti – and some tested positive for the new coronavirus. Immigrant advocates are now demanding the U.S. not send another flight of Haitian deportees this week.

Until this month, it looked like Latin America and the Caribbean might be spared the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then the world saw the tragic images from Ecuador of a sudden and overwhelming number of deaths from the new coronavirus – of corpses lining the sidewalks in the port city of Guayaquil. Meanwhile, the number of cases in Brazil is doubling or tripling every week – and so are the number of deaths.

On this Tuesday, Feb. 25, episode of Sundial:

Haiti’s Carnival shooting 

A protest in Haiti over police pay and working conditions ended in an exchange of gunfire between Haiti’s National Police force and the country's armed forces.

One of the greatest journalists to cover the Caribbean has died. Bernard Diederich passed away Tuesday at age 93 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Diederich’s pioneering, award-winning coverage helped make the world more aware of the Caribbean basin’s importance.

Ten years ago, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, causing apocalyptic damage in the capital of Port-au-Prince and surrounding cities.

Port-au-Prince was a canyon of crushed concrete and horrified screams as Jean Samson Edouard ran panicked and barefoot through the capital’s Carrefour-Feuilles district.

It was shortly before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 — a decade ago this Sunday. A magnitude-7.0 earthquake had just destroyed much of Haiti — and killed anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people, according to most estimates (although the Haitian government had put the toll as high as 300,000).

It's hard to wrap your arms around everything that happened 2019 in Latin America and the Caribbean. It's even harder to find any good news — from the violent political unrest that rocked capitals from La Paz to Port-au-Prince, to a record number of fires that ravaged the Amazon rainforest.