Haiti: what caused the gang violence crisis and what might happen next?
Over the past week, Haiti’s powerful and politically connected gangs have sown chaos in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, storming prisons, seizing control of the port, torching dozens of shops and police stations and laying siege to the international airport.
A special forces police officer turned gang kingpin called Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier has said the mission of the criminal groups is to overthrow Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, and liberate the country’s 11.7 million citizens from what he calls his anti-democratic rule.
“The people of Haiti must be free – and we will achieve that with our guns,” Chérizier declared. Henry’s failure to step down would lead to civil war and genocide, the gang boss claimed.
Diego Da Rin, a Haiti specialist from the International Crisis Group, said: “This is an armed insurrection with formerly rival criminal groups joining forces to bring the state to its knees and to present themselves as insurgents.”
It is unclear how the current crisis will be solved – or which political and economic actors are behind the attempt to topple Haiti’s government.
Henry, who is also acting president, was in Kenya when the gang onslaught began on 29 February and has been unable to return to Port-au-Prince. His backers in the US government are reported to have urged him to stand aside.
Meanwhile, rival political factions are reportedly maneuvering behind the scenes in the hope of filling the vacuum left by Haiti’s absentee leader.
What are the origins of the crisis?
It is seven years since Haiti held an election, almost three years since the president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated, and more than a year since the last elected officials left office – and the return of democracy to Port-au-Prince still appears to be distant.
Haiti’s crisis can be traced directly to Moïse’s assassination, but the roots go much deeper: to the economic catastrophe caused by the 2010 earthquake, the 29-year dictatorial rule of “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and even to the grotesque impact of vast “reparations” Haiti was forced to pay to France for generations after independence in 1804, which severely hampered economic development.
“The consistent meddling of the international community over the past 220 years has made Haiti a failed state because the people have no say in their lives, they have no say in their future, because the internationals have made it a puppet state,” says Daniel Foote, the former US special envoy to Haiti.
What’s happened in the past year?
An already terrible situation has grown worse. Almost 4,000 people were killed and 3,000 kidnapped in gang-related violence in 2023, says the UN; sexual violence is rife, with 1,100 attacks on women by October. More than 300,000 people have been displaced – at least 15,000 of them in the last week – and half of Haitians do not have enough to eat. Basic services such as electricity, clean water and waste collection are unreliable. The final figures for 2023 are expected to show that the economy has contracted for five consecutive years.
The events of the past few days have caused deeper uncertainty and pessimism. On Thursday, the UN’s humanitarian office warned Haiti’s health service was “nearing collapse”, with hospitals swamped by bullet wound victims and lacking staff and supplies.
“What I’m hearing [from my Haitian colleagues] is that we are lost … You can see in their faces and in the way they behave that they are really fearing what may happen next,” said Jean-Marc Biquet, the head of the medical NGO Médecins sans Frontières in Haiti.
Romain Le Cour, a security expert who was in Haiti when the rebellion began, said:“The humanitarian situation right now is devastating.”
How much power do the gangs have?
The vacuum of democratically accountable political authority has created space for the gangs to expand their influence in the capital, and two rival coalitions – G9, led by Chérizier, and Gpèp, which lacks a single clear leader – have fought for control of the city. Before this week’s uprising, gangs were believed to control more than 80% of Port-au-Prince.
Meanwhile, the police force is severely underpowered, with about 10,000 active officers across the country. UN estimates suggest they need about 26,000. Last year, about 1,600 officers stepped down.
Experts say the UN security council’s vote in October to send a multinational security force to Haiti to help combat the gangs appeared to worsen the violence, with both sides seeking to secure more territory before the force’s arrival. Now the two coalitions have revived a non-aggression pact as they seek to topple Henry’s interim government and strengthen their position. “It’s a kind of criminal maximum pressure strategy aimed at provoking political effects that we aren’t yet fully able to assess,” said Le Cour.
Is Ariel Henry finished?
Almost certainly. “No one wants Henry. Not the United States, which has all but asked him to resign. Not the gangs … and not the Haitian people. Many would be happy never to give him another thought,” Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, wrote in the Atlantic this week.
Unable to return to Port-au-Prince, where army troops are battling to prevent gang fighters overrunning the airport, Henry is currently stuck in Puerto Rico after he was denied permission to land in Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Speculation is rife about which Caribbean country might offer asylum to the temporarily exiled politician.
Could an international security force make a difference?
The UN’s announcement of its support for an international force led by Kenya prompted some optimism that it could challenge the gangs. The plan is not a formal UN peacekeeping force, in part because of the disastrous impact of the previous 2004-2017 UN mission, which was tarnished by appalling sexual misconduct allegations and the fact that sewage from a UN camp was implicated in a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people.
The force’s mission will not be to eliminate the gangs but to restore control of key routes into the capital, protect state infrastructure and stabilise the security situation. Even so, any incoming force would need considerable training to take on the gangs in a labyrinthine urban environment where gang members typically wear normal clothes and are hard to distinguish from civilians.
“It is a very complicated challenge that the mission would have to face,” Da Rin said, pointing out as well that the force would also have to contend with an organic and diffuse civilian vigilante movement that has been linked to public lynchings of suspected gang members.
Why isn’t that force in place yet?
Five months after the force was given a UN mandate, there is still no presence on the ground – and it has been given an initial authorisation for only a year. “The clock has been ticking on that since 2 October,” Da Rin said. “It should have been enough time to train, equip, and get the funds and personnel in place.”
One significant obstacle has been within Kenya, where the government promised 1,000 police officers to lead a proposed force of up to 5,000 personnel – but then faced a court ruling that the plan was unconstitutional. Henry went to Nairobi last week to try to salvage the plan by signing a new agreement with Kenya’s president, William Ruto. A further 2,000 personnel have been offered by Benin and the governments of Chad, Bangladesh, Barbados and the Bahamas have also offered to contribute officers.
However, given this week’s explosion of violence, many experts are skeptical a relatively small Kenya-led force – whose officers speak English not Haitian Creole or French – would help reduce the bloodshed. On Thursday,
the BBC reported that several Kenyan police officers had opted out the deployment for fear of their safety.
Foote said he believed an intervention was now essential: “But the Kenyans, the Chadians, the Barbadians and the Bangladeshi police: that ain’t gonna work. That’s just a suicide mission, worst case, and a waste of money, best case.”
So what can be done to end the current violence and restore some level of peace?
Foote, who has long opposed calls for a foreign military deployment in Haiti, said the situation had become so dire that some kind of major intervention had to happen. However, he called for “a real, well-planned, smart intervention” that would have to be agreed with a transitional caretaker government. “It’s not the UN going in and saying: ‘This is what we are going to do.’”
Foote argued such a mission should be led by a major economy with experience in police capacity building, such as the US, Canada, Britain, France or another EU nation. It would need between five and 10,000 members to contend with tens of thousands of gang members. “You can’t restore security with 2,000 people.”
Writing on the Chatham House website, Latin America expert Christopher Sabatini wrote: “Some form of compromise interim government needs to be established. But it will have to be done quickly: gangs are moving to consolidate their control over the population and infrastructure including the airport, fuel depots and police stations. It is only a matter of time until they attempt to seize government facilities.”