HAITI

Haiti stamps for sale at Io Collezionista. Haiti was one of the first countries in the Americas to declare independence from the western colonisers, in 1804. The state lies in the western part of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic; the latter was invaded by the Haitians in 1822 and would become a sovereign state only in 1844, thanks to the popular uprising led by Juan Pablo Duarte. The name Haiti comes from the word the indigenous Taino people used for the whole island, meaning the land of high mountains. More recently a catastrophic earthquake in 2010, thought to be the second most powerful recorded event in history, and a violent hurricane in 2016 have dragged Haiti into a permanent humanitarian emergency.