Who’s to blame for the crisis in Haiti?
Haiti’s most powerful gangs launched an insurrection in the capital, Port-au-Prince, last month. More than 50,000 have been displaced from the capital as homes, schools, libraries and more have been destroyed by fire and bullets.
Gangs already controlled 80-90 percent of Port-au-Prince and various arterial roads across the country. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimated in 2023 that “23 major gangs operate in Port-au-Prince ... and alongside these, another 70 smaller”. While usually at war with one another, many have united in a political front called Viv Ansanm.
Viv Ansanm raided and burnt police stations and prisons on 29 February, releasing thousands of prisoners. Gang members launched an ongoing siege of the Presidential National Palace. A week later, an attempted takeover of the Toussaint Louverture International Airport forced the resignation of de facto Prime Minister and acting President Ariel Henry.
Henry, a widely despised figure, travelled to Kenya in late February hoping to secure armed personnel for deployment in Haiti. Armed international support has been a long-term goal for Henry, whose power rested on police repression and diplomatic support from the West. The airport siege left Henry stranded in Puerto Rico. With no ability to govern and security forces overwhelmed, the USA and Caribbean regional organisation (CARICOM) dropped Henry in favour of a new Presidential Council (CP).
The CP is a national unity government including members from parties aligned with a recent anti-government movement, business representatives and politicians from the pro-Henry camp. As personalities from all sides have withdrawn multiple candidates and appealed various sections of its mandate—alongside delays by Henry himself in handing over official power—the CP has inspired little confidence that it will end the crisis.
Viv Ansanm is the main obstacle to the CP. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, the group’s leader, hasn’t ruled out taking part in the political transition with the CP, saying to Sky News that he “respects CARICOM a lot”.
Despite seeking a seat at the table with business leaders and the USA, Chérizier casts himself and Viv Ansanm as Guevarist revolutionaries fighting imperialism. But he has not pulled the mass of Haitians behind him—the gangs rule the working-class slums with an iron fist. Their power comes from controlling many borders, ports and roads across Haiti, as well as being allegedly contracted out by right-wing governments.
This is not a new situation for Haitian workers and the poor. Their poverty has long been enforced by imperialist domination and authoritarian regimes that rely on secret police or paramilitary forces.
The dynamic can be traced all the way back to the revolution of the 1790s and Haitian independence in 1804. In one of history’s most heroic mass revolts, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans overthrew the French plantation system. The French responded by sending “the largest expedition that had ever sailed from France ... 20,000 veteran troops, under ... Bonaparte’s ablest officers”, as Trinidadian activist and historian C.L.R. James described in The Black Jacobins.
The Haitian slaves defeated France, but the prospect of eternal French invasions eventually forced Haiti to agree to pay 150 million francs in compensation for property lost in the revolution (that property being the slaves). The debt “remained shackled” to cash crops, while “education, healthcare and infrastructure went practically unfunded”, wrote Anthony Phillips in an article for the Canada-Haiti Information Project. The resulting political instability left “a series of despotic presidents ... and assassination, foreign sponsored coup d’état or civil insurrection”.
This instability provided cover for the US to launch a military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. This began as an operation to ensure Haitian payment of France’s debt and, the US argued, to create stability. Yet Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood describes how the US military “abolished an ‘undemocratic’ clause in the constitution that banned foreigners from owning property in Haiti, took over the National Bank ... expropriated land to create new plantations ... and forced labor that accompanied it”.
All of this required murdering thousands of Haitians who rebelled against forced labour and the end of independence, and the establishment of forces that would keep the new, pro-US political system in place. That was primarily the Haitian military, which assumed “power for themselves ... following the election of a mildly progressive government in 1946”, as Hallward describes.
Yet in 1957 the US found its most trustworthy strongman in François Duvalier, who took power when radical workers and students threatened the military regime. Duvalier, and his successor and son Jean-Claude, ended the instability through economic and military warfare.
The Duvalier dynasty was an anti-communist bulwark in Latin America and seen as an essential counterweight to Cuba. It was backed by the US, which sent warships to Haitian ports to ensure the smooth transfer of power from François to Jean-Claude in 1971.
The Duvaliers sold public industries to multinational sweatshops and abolished import controls to allow cheap US goods to flood the markets. Workers’ wages fell by 50 percent by the end of the 1980s. To maintain this system of extreme exploitation, the Duvalier dynasty established its most infamous institution of political repression, the Tonton Macoute.
Originally created as a personal paramilitary for Duvalier, the Macoute were drawn from the impoverished towns of Haiti with the promise of money and power. At times unofficially, but often openly, the Macoute acted as the nation’s secret police, brutalising and disappearing dissidents and murdering tens of thousands of students, workers, peasants and leftists.
Revolution eventually toppled the dictatorship in 1986. The strikes and popular organisations that smashed the Duvaliers terrified ruling-class interests in Haiti, and years of unsuccessful counter-revolution by the Haitian military forced the imperialist core to act.
In 2004, the United Nations sent a “stabilisation” mission to Haiti after, in its own words, “President Bertrand Aristide departed Haiti for exile in the aftermath of an armed conflict”. Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, who came to power through the mass movement against the Duvalier dynasty, “departed for exile” after a military coup that the UN defended by targeting those resisting it.
“After a demonstration of ten thousand people demanding the return of [Aristide] ... UN forces attacked the community and killed close to 30 people”, found a report by the North American Congress on Latin America and the Haiti Information Project in 2006. UN troops, led by Brazil and politically backed by Canada and the US, left behind death and disease (including a cholera outbreak caused by dumping sewage in drinking water), and not an ounce of democracy.
Since then, successive Haitian governments have implemented IMF austerity programs, stolen money allocated to public infrastructure and sold land to multinational companies. A telling example is the 2018 Digneron free-trade zone, which boasts of lacking corporate taxes and housing a golfing range. That same year, the government implemented IMF-advised cuts to fuel and food subsidies. The poverty resulting from these policies is “leading both girls and boys to join armed gangs, with 30-50 percent of gang members estimated to be underage recruits”, according to a Plan International report released last month.
These right-wing governments have brutally repressed the Haitian working class to secure their own rule. Assassinated ex-President Jovenel Moïse had police using live ammunition and tear gas against anti-government demonstrations and is alleged to have consistently used gangs as a personal paramilitary force, much like François Duvalier. A Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic study on the Moïse government’s ties to organised crime alleges that multiple government officials either “furnished weapons and vehicles” to the gangs or paid them “to put an end to anti-government protests”.
The provision of public services and welfare has been handed to foreign aid missions and NGOs that provide little to those who need it. Following the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the largest recipient of US aid was the $300 million Caracol industrial park designed for sweatshops. The Red Cross, according to a 2015 NPR article, “says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 [Haitian] people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six”.
The current crisis is linked to years of foreign powers underdeveloping Haiti and backing corrupt, authoritarian regimes that have fostered the growth of powerful gangs. All that has changed is that the gangs have outgrown their benefactors and asserted their role as power brokers. None of these forces want to improve the lives of regular Haitians or engage the mass popular movement that has been fighting for a more dignified life for the last six years.
Just as the crisis recalls Haiti’s colonial and imperial history, the solution will have to recall Haiti’s formidable revolutionary traditions.
