This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 killed more than 200,000 people, and in the disaster's aftermath, American televangelist Pat Robertson publicly claimed the catastrophe was retribution for a supposed Vodou pact with the devil at Haiti's founding. The claim reached a wide American audience even as Haiti buried its dead.
Inside Haiti itself, the backlash turned physical. Vodouisants were attacked in the earthquake's immediate aftermath, and some were denied emergency medical assistance because of their religion, at the exact moment survivors most needed care regardless of what they believed.
The violence did not end with the earthquake itself. When a cholera epidemic struck later that same year, Vodou practitioners were blamed again, and lynch mobs killed dozens of Vodou priests over accusations that they had caused the outbreak through sorcery.
What 2010 changed for Vodou practitioners was a demonstration that legal recognition, granted only seven years earlier in 2003, had not by itself ended social persecution on the ground. A religion the Haitian state had formally recognized as legitimate still saw its practitioners attacked, denied care and killed by mobs when disaster gave old suspicion a new occasion.