Haiti: what caused the gang violence and will it end now the PM has quit?
Haiti’s prime minister has announced his intention to resign after politically connected gangs sowed chaos in the country’s capital over the past two weeks, 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 had said the criminal groups’ mission was to overthrow the country’s unpopular leader, Ariel Henry, and liberate its 11.7 million citizens from anti-democratic rule.
Henry, who is also acting president, was in Kenya when the gangs’ 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. Speaking from Puerto Rico in a video address on Monday, Henry said his government would resign and urged people to remain calm until a transitional “council” could be formed. But he gave no timeframe.
What are the origins of the crisis?
It is seven years since Haiti held an election, almost three 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 the 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, according to the UN, and sexual violence was 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 the population 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.
Recent events have caused deeper uncertainty and pessimism. The UN’s humanitarian office said last week that 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 JeanMarc Biquet, the head of 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 the uprising, gangs were believed to control more than 80% of Port-au-Prince.
The police force is severely underpowered, with about 10,000 active officers across the country. UN estimates suggest it needs about 26,000. About 1,600 officers stepped down last year.
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 its arrival. The two gang coalitions revived a non-aggression pact in their effort to topple Henry’s government and strengthen their position.
What happens now?
Henry submitted his resignation to the Caribbean Community regional bloc (Caricom), after it held an emergency meeting on Haiti’s future. The president of Guyana and current Caricom chair, Irfaan Ali, said a presidential council with seven voting members would appoint Henry’s interim successor. The council’s representatives would come from the private sector and civil society and would include one religious leader, Ali said.
A senior US official said Henry remained in Puerto Rico, and that he had expressed a desire to return to Haiti in the future. That prospect could be slim because rival political factions will be manoeuvring behind the scenes in the hope of filling the vacuum.
It is unclear, even after Henry’s resignation, whether the gangs will be willing to stand down.
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.
Why isn’t the 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.
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 Nairobithis monthto try to salvage the plan by signing a new agreement with Kenya’s president, William Ruto. However, after Henry’s resignation statement, the Kenyan foreign ministry announced on Tuesday that the deployment was on hold until a new government was in place.
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.
Given the explosion of violence, many experts are sceptical that a relatively small Kenya-led force, whose officers speak English not Haitian Creole or French, would help reduce the bloodshed.
about the agony of forced pregnancy, about miscarriages and being shamed by pharmacists for using birth control – can also feel like a punch in the gut, many of them are about the common reasons women and families seek abortions: financial insecurity, becoming pregnant despite taking every precaution, being trapped in abusive relationships.
Dr Amelia Huntsberger, one of the OB-GYNs who fled Idaho last year, and who is now an advisor to the ProVoice Project, says, “We can’t forget how powerful story is in making people understand complicated topics, and in changing hearts and minds. That’s Jen’s gift to Idaho, and beyond its borders.”
Storytelling about abortion is a tool used by both national and grassroots organizing groups, though its success is hard to quantify – it’s subversive by nature, Quintano says. But she does share a concrete example: in Sandpoint, people who were afraid even to say the word “abortion” have now told their stories, emboldening others to do the same.
Quintano won’t allow herself to burn out (even though she feels close lately, with all this unpaid labor). She’s playing the long game: while up to 13 other states will have abortion on the ballot this election cycle, there’s barely a murmur of a ballot initiative in Idaho. Quintano sees it as one of her end goals, but legal access to abortion is five or more years off for her state, she thinks. Step one is to make sure women don’t die, by convincing politicians to at least walk back the most egregious language of Idaho’s abortion ban.
***
After rushing from her office to lead a volunteer meeting and then to chat with an author working on a book about whisper networks, Quintano drives through the early dark of the Sandpoint winter to the home of one of her board members. Cynthia Dalsing is a retired nurse midwife, although she says that Idaho’s abortion laws have robbed her of a peaceful retirement. Quintano and Dalsing are hosting a viewing that evening of On the Brink, the recent Nightline episode on the impact of restrictive abortion laws across the country.
Quintano invited several people in the healthcare community to the viewing, both from private practices and Bonner General, which has gone largely silent on any aspect of women’s healthcare. Only two physicians show: psychiatrists, both young mothers themselves, who provide counseling to pregnant women and new mothers. They say they’ve stopped documenting in their notes when a patient expresses ambivalence or negative thoughts about pregnancy. Even though research shows forced pregnancy may lead to increased risk of suicide, these psychiatrists feel they can’t document any negative aspect of patients’ attitudes for fear that the state could pull such records and use them against patients.
Then another guest arrives: Jim Woodward, a Sandpoint Republican who served in the Idaho state senate from 2019-2022. He voted yes on all anti-abortion bills, but lost his seat in the 2022 election to Scott Herndon, a farright abortion abolitionist who believes abortion should be treated as homicide and punished with jail time or even the death penalty. In the 2023 session, Herndon tried to remove Idaho’s rape and incest exception and called rape “an opportunity to have the child … if the rape actually occurred”. (Herndon declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Woodward is running to retake the seat this year. He says he and many other anti-abortion legislators didn’t foresee the ramifications of the bills they voted for. Part of his platform, which promises to reclaim his community from extremism, is to somewhat ease legislative language that doesn’t take the mother’s future health into account and calls for felony convictions for physicians. He didn’t hesitate to accept Quintano’s invitation to the viewing party. “We should be able to talk about all of these things, and do it in a nice way,” he says. Two days later, he shares stories from the Nightline episode with attendees at a campaign meet and greet.
This is what Quintano means about challenging people’s assumptions: otherwise, every newly outrageous development – like South Carolina Republicans’ push for legislation to execute a woman for having an abortion, or the Alabama supreme court’s ruling that frozen embryos are children – will further normalize the criminalization of abortion.
Such moves aren’t relegated to extremist pockets of the nation, either. “Idaho has been a frontrunner on a lot of other states’ abortion laws,” says Kelly O’Neill, Idaho litigation attorney with the organization Legal Voice and advisor for the Pro-Voice Project. “Even in a state where there are abortion protections right now, it might not be that way for ever. We can’t get complacent, and when people hear abortion stories from their next-door neighbor or their sister-in-law, or their son’s preschool teacher, it is a powerful way to remind people that politics are affecting you every day.”
Quintano has spoken about abortion in venues flying Confederate flags and been barred altogether from other engagements. The Pro-Voice Projectjust hosted a “rally for repro” at Bonner General and is gearing up to mark the “oneyear anniversary of the loss of our OBGYNs”. People still tell Quintano they don’t want to come to her storytelling performances for fear of violence. A full year into leading very public organizing efforts, though, she’s yet to see any major backlash.
“I don’t want to paint the picture that there’s no danger in speaking out,” she says. As her work gains visibility, she thinks it might attract harmful attention. “But if I can do this really publicly, with little in the way of blowback, then that means your average citizen has a lot of room to be safely vocal about their beliefs. If we are silenced, the other side has won.”
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
How can I ask other people to put themselves out there, if I’m not willing to do that myself ?
Jen Jackson Quintano
the federal level is still in its infancy.
“Am I frustrated? No. Because that’s our government – it has always functioned that way,” she said. “That’s why I’m not a politician. That’s why this is my first and last campaign.”
Still, at least five US states have already enacted laws to curb the use of explicit deep fakes with about 20 introducing legislation, according to a database maintained by NCMEC.
In New Jersey, a bill introduced following the episode at Westfield High, cleared a senate committee last Friday with bipartisan support.
A Polish migrant, who came to the US for college in the 1990s, Mani is a wealthy entrepreneur who founded a local preschool academy and runs an interior design business. She also talks candidly about how financial privilege has helped her campaign, which has drawn bipartisan admiration in Congress.
A spokesperson for the New York congressman Joe Morelle, who introduced the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, said the mother and daughter had “taken their trauma and turned it into fierce advocacy to ensure more women do not have to suffer through the pain Francesca went through”.
The spokesperson added that recent reporting by the Guardian revealing some of the individuals associated with the ClothOff app “underlines why there must be both criminal and civil penalties to hold people accountable for this despicable behaviour”. “We must establish strong deterrents to prevent people from creating deepfakes and certainly from profiting off of them.”
But the episode in New Jersey was far from isolated in the United States. Last week a middle school in Beverly Hills expelled five students who victimised 16 eighth-grade students by creating AI-generated deep fake explicit images. A spokesperson for the school board would not comment on which specific app was used to create the images.
“This emerging technology is becoming more and more accessible to individuals of all ages,” said Dr Michael Bregy, superintendent for the Beverly Hills unified school district.
“We are appalled by any misuse of
AI and must protect the most vulnerable members of society, our children.”
In December of last year two male students at the Pinecrest Cove Academy were suspended after generating nude images of several classmates using an app unnamed by local police.
And in Issaquah, Washington a 14year-old male student was investigated by police for generating nude photos of several female classmates using images he had taken at school events, later sharing them via Snapchat, according to a police report reviewed by the Guardian, which does not name the app in use.
Mani said she has heard from parents in many places around the country, including areas that had not been reported in the media.
“Many people don’t feel comfortable going public with what happened,” she said. “Because, just like in my school, they are constantly hearing that nothing can be done.”
Asked what her message would be to those behind the app reportedly used to target her daughter and her classmates, Mani was direct: “Shame on them. They’re just making money.”
But immediately, she pivoted to the next step in her campaign, to target platforms like Apple, Google and Amazon and the financial institutions such as PayPal, Amex and Visa that she said ultimately allowed such technology to prosper.
“Otherwise it’s like chasing ghosts.”