Haiti’s weak and illegitimate government, with an interim president who is suspected of being one of the plotters who arranged the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July, hardly contains the large and unruly gangs who are terrorizing Port-au-Prince, the capital. The gangs kidnap for ransom (including missionaries and any Haitian who looks prosperous) at will. The fundamental functions of a government -- security of person and defense of sovereignty – are now forfeit. Few inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation can live without fear of random assault, arbitrary attack, and senseless murder. What is left of the country’s police and army are largely powerless and frightened.
Rival gangs compete for territory and power, as they do in El Salvador, Mexico, and key cities in the United States. But ever since the already weak governments of Haiti began to lose any semblance of coherence in the aftermath of the disastrous 2010 earthquake, successive regimes ceded more and more power to local (not Caribbean-connected) gangs.
Gang violence - a dozen major massacres and more than 600 persons killed – overwhelmed Haiti, however, after the Moise administration and its police force connived with existing gangs to gain electoral support in and since 2017, when UN peacekeepers went home.
A year ago, authoritative estimates suggested that half of Haiti was run by gangs, especially 400 Mawozo and G9. Now their de facto operations are more widespread, giving orders everywhere, establishing what they call their own “police stations,” and imposing “justice” in so-called “courts.” Instead of paying taxes to the government, Haitians have to pay taxes to the gangs, apply and pay for various “permits,” and even are forced to give gangs money for water and electrical power that is hardly the gangs’ to distribute. This kind of extortion was not unknown in Sicily, where the Mafia long held sway, or in insurgent-held zones of Somalia or Mali. But usurping a national administration means that no one has protection except within a gang structure, and the gangs compete militarily.
The 400 Mawozo gang kidnapped seventeen American Christian missionaries and children last year; its leader threatened to “unload a big weapon to each of their heads.” Fortunately, the missionaries escaped after sixty-one days captivity. Some ransoming may have occurred. Earlier this month, in a surprising and wholly unexpected exercise of policing, Haiti (with U. S. assistance) captured 29-year old Joly Germine, the boss of 400 Mawozo, and quickly extradited him to the United States. He is being held for trial in Washington, D. C.
Last year, the leader of G9 paraded around Port-au-Prince in a three-piece suit and acted as if he were in charge at national celebrations. The Haitian government could do little to assert its authority. G9 originated as a collective of nine local gangs that came together about 2018, gaining hegemony over large slum areas of Port-au-Prince and then taking territory in other towns as well
The head of a local human rights NGO acknowledged to New York Times’ reporters that “The gangs have more authority than our leaders. If they say ‘Stay home, you stay home’….It’s terror.”
Behind the terror is profiteering and extortion rackets. But what is rarely said is that narcotics trafficking is the source of big money, and the driver of much of Haiti’s mayhem. The killing of President Moise by hired Colombian hit men certainly appears to reflect drug deals gone bad or promises to traffickers unmet. As long ago as 2004, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Jesuit priest, was believed to have cut deals to permit Columbian traffickers to use Haitian airstrips on their way to Florida. His ouster from the Haitian presidency at least partially reflected his drug-related profiteering.
Nowadays there is nothing much else in this desperately poor and densely populated country to appropriate. The long ago rich returns from sugar are gone. Coffee grows commercially no more. Supplies of bauxite have been exhausted. And the small factories in Port-au-Prince that once supplied Miami and New Orleans with textile manufactures and furniture are shut. Tourists no longer arrive. Even the UN-sponsored Brazilian peacekeeping force has left. In such a parlous situation, remittances from the Haitian diaspora in Miami, New York, Boston, and Montreal are essential.
Washington hardly knows what to do with or for Haiti, close as it is to Miami, and filled as it is with migrants desperate to reach safe haven in the United States. Many experts want the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), or the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to take charge and reorganize Haiti. But sovereignty is still important; even though they are terrorized by gangs, Haitians would not welcome authority imposed from without.
Nor, given the Pulitzer Prize-worthy exposé in this week’s New York Times of how Haiti’s poverty results from huge reparation payments to France throughout the nineteenth century and Wall Street’s commandeering of the Haitian treasury during the first half of the twentieth century, can Paris and Washington escape joint responsibility to help Haiti help itself and uplift its people. Given the chaos in contemporary Haiti, and the war in Ukraine, that will be and must be a major undertaking that cannot be avoided forever. Exactly how, and with whom locally, to partner is the conundrum that needs to be solved – urgently.
More on Haiti, especially on the American occupation from 1915 to 1934, on Monday.
Sad, sad long-term disaster; and, yes, Washington's and Paris' responsibility for the historic collapse of Haiti's economy is shameful.