Violent crime has plagued Haiti for decades but the country’s gangs accelerated their rise in 2021, when President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his home, a killing that remains unsolved. With the backing of foreign countries, including Canada, Prime Minister Ariel Henry took power, but his rule was weakened by a reluctance to hold elections and reports linking him to the Moïse assassination.
Gangs gained strength in the chaos left by Haitian politics. With just 9,000 on-duty police officers in a nation of almost twelve million, Haiti was already lightly policed, and even that threadbare force was marred by corruption. The country’s most powerful gangster, Jimmy Chérizier – alias Barbecue – is himself a former cop. The military is a rump of a few hundred people and not seen as part of the solution, said the Haitian-Canadian sociologist Frédéric Boisrond, who is based in Montreal and has taught at McGill University. There are more gang members than police officers and soldiers combined, he pointed out.
Barbecue and other gang leaders have sometimes presented themselves as revolutionaries seeking to overthrow a rotten system, but the gangs have long been closely entwined with the country’s elite. Politicians and businesspeople have historically financed gang activity to protect their interests or punish rivals. For that reason, Mr. Boisrond and others have argued the term “militias” is more apt to describe the armed groups running rampant across the country.
“They say they are liberating the population, but the population is actually the victim of what they are doing,” Ms. Ducéna explained.
The involvement of Haitian leaders in fuelling the gangs is no conspiracy theory; it’s a charge supported by the American and Canadian governments. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Mr. Chérizier alongside two former Moïse officials for their role in the notorious La Saline massacre, when more than seventy people were killed in retaliation for anti-government protests in 2018. Canada, meanwhile, slapped sanctions on several Haitian leaders in 2022 – including former President Michel Martelly and Gilbert Bigio, reputedly the country’s only billionaire – for supporting gangs through money laundering and other “acts of corruption.”
Now, the gangs have turned on, and usurped, Haiti’s ruling class. A years-long campaign of lucrative kidnappings gave them a reliable source of revenue and greater autonomy from their elite sponsors, said Pascale Solages of the Haitian feminist organization Nègès Mawon.
They have used that independence to place a chokehold on Haiti’s economy and government, largely controlling who and what enters the country. Barbecue’s men blockaded Haiti’s main fuel port in September, 2022, leading to international calls for a humanitarian corridor to prevent famine. Ariel Henry spent his time in power calling for foreign military intervention to quell the gangs, only to see his plane turned back before landing at Port-au-Prince’s embattled airport in March.
Given their historic complicity in financing the armed violence facing Haiti, the country’s political class now lacks credibility in denouncing it, argued Jean Saint-Vil, a Haitian-Canadian political analyst based in Gatineau, Que. “It’s like Frankenstein has created his monster, the monster is committing crimes, and Frankenstein amuses himself with giving speeches saying how the monster is ugly,” he said.
A transitional council, formed with the blessing of the regional authority known as CARICOM, has been given the task of staging elections by 2026, but its members are largely political insiders – “the old sharks of the past,” Mr. Boisrond called them – including a former president of the Senate and head of the central bank. Many in Haiti are already skeptical of the newly-formed body.
“The suspicion of the population has already set in,” Ms. Ducéna said.
For now, most Haitians are governed by gangs. A recent alliance between some of Haiti’s largest armed groups, known as Viv Ansanm (Creole for “living together”), has only increased the danger for civilians. Gunmen that once battled each other have now turned their wrath on the rest of the population and the remnants of the Haitian state, Ms. Ducéna said.
Rape has become commonplace as gangs move into new neighbourhoods. They use sexual violence as a way to terrorize and humiliate the population – often raping women in front of their children or spouses – and as a twisted way of measuring the “spoils of war,” said Ms. Solages, of the feminist organization.
Women and children have also been victims of the desperate state of health care across the country, where supplies are running out and personnel are afraid to come into work. The General Hospital in Port-au-Prince has experienced a shortage of oxygen for premature babies who need assistance breathing. There have been reports of pregnant women dying from lack of care, Ms. Solages said.
Health facilities are no refuge against the country’s pervasive violence. On March 13, in the coastal community of Léogane, armed men entered a hospital operating room and executed an 80-year-old patient, according to the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights. In the Delmas neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, members of Viv Ansanm occupied a former medical clinic and have been using it to rain bullets and Molotov cocktails on police convoys below.
No segment of society is safe in Haiti. Gang members have kidnapped priests and nuns, doctors and judges. They have looted and burned hospitals, courthouses, schools and over a dozen police stations. The country’s judicial system has ground to a halt, leaving gangs to act with impunity. A vigilante justice movement sprung up in response and saw citizens kill nearly 200 gang members in a spasm of retaliatory violence last year.
The police are the last shred of governmental authority in the lives of most Haitians, but they are often outgunned by the gangs, and in any case their presence can be a dubious blessing. In late April, a man gathering water from a pump in Port-au-Prince was fatally shot in the stomach by police, according to family and witnesses, for reasons that are unclear. His body was left in the street, covered by a shroud.
Nearly 400,000 Haitians have been internally displaced in the past year, with many of those left homeless now crowding into abandoned buildings such as the ruins of the National Theatre, destroyed in the 2010 earthquake. Leaving the battlegrounds of the capital is dangerous, as gangs use checkpoints to control most routes out of Port-au-Prince. With the country’s main airport and seaport closed, and violence spreading to the countryside, there is little prospect of escape for most Haitians. “Haiti is closed in on itself,” Ms. Ducéna said. “It is like we are in a prison.”
Some kind of foreign military intervention now appears inevitable. A UN-approved coalition of largely African and Caribbean countries led by 1,000 police officers from Kenya – with an $80.5-million contribution from Canada – has committed to providing boots on the ground. The timing of their deployment remains unclear, although the Bahamian foreign minister told journalists that Kenyan forces would begin arriving in Haiti by the end of May.
Foreign armies have a dark history in the country, from the nearly 20-year U.S. occupation of 1915 to 1934, to the UN peacekeeping mission ending in 2017 that was blamed for a deadly cholera outbreak and accused of sexual abuse. Many Haitians would prefer to see international support for local institutions in their fight against lawlessness. Canada is already helping to finance the Haitian police, but they could also train customs officials, to slow the traffic of arms, Mr. Boisrond said. The U.S. government could arrest alleged Miami-based gang financiers Michel Martelly and Gilbert Bigio, said the writer Jean Saint-Vil.
The violence likely won’t end any time soon, but if there is any silver lining to the anarchy facing Haiti, it is the chance to rebuild the country’s institutions from scratch, Ms. Ducéna said. “It’s a thought that brings hope with it. … We have a chance to turn a new page in our history.”
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