A UN-sponsored international force has been deployed in Haiti with a mandate to clamp down on gang violence. But the strength of the gangs is inextricably linked to the character of the Haitian state and its ties to economic elites at home and abroad.
An armed gang member in Delmas 6 area, which is controlled by Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier on May 9, 2024, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (Giles Clarke / Getty Images)
In October 2023, the UN Security Council voted to “authorize the deployment of a multinational security support, headed by Kenya” in Haiti. In addition to one thousand Kenyan police officers, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Belize, Suriname, Antigua and Barbuda, Guatemala, Peru, Senegal, Rwanda, Italy, Spain, and Mongolia promised armed contingents. Former prime minister Ariel Henry — who served as the de facto, and therefore unelected, acting president — had previously urged the international community to act “in the name of women and girls raped every day, in the name of an entire people victim of the barbarity of gangs.”
According to the National Network of Human Rights Defense (RNDDH), between November 2018 and March 2024, gangs were responsible for the murder of over fifteen hundred people and the rape of more than one hundred sixty girls and women, as well as dozens of disappearances and the internal displacement of more than half a million people. At the beginning of this period, these armed groups acted in isolation and in competition with one another. However, in August 2020, nine of them federated under the leadership of former police officer Jimmy Chérizier, also known as Barbecue.
In January 2024, Chérizier consolidated the rest of the gangs in the capital to launch what they called a “revolution.” First, they took control of the area around the international airport to prevent Henry from returning to Haiti after his trip to Kenya. Over the following months, they bulldozed police stations and prisons and burned down public hospitals, universities, and libraries, killing a few hundred people in the process. To replace Henry’s government, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) facilitated the establishment of a seven-man Presidential Council, with the majority of its members representing the Parti Haitien Tèt Kale (PHTK), which has been in power since 2011.
International news about Haiti’s crisis presents it as a problem of gang violence beyond the control of the state. Yet social movements and human rights organizations had noted Henry’s silence about the hundreds massacred and kidnapped during his term. Moreover, reports produced by independent researchers from Haiti and other countries have demonstrated how various actors, both national and international, “manufactured” the chaos.
The following conversation, based on a panel discussion, pushes us to view current events in Haiti beyond the idea of a crisis resolvable through military occupation, elections, and “good governance.” The panelists discuss what the gangs reveal about the nature of the Haitian state and its relationship to economic elites in Haiti and the wider world.
Mamyrah Prosper
Gangs control territories abandoned by the state. These popular neighborhoods have little to no access to potable water, electricity, schools, hospitals, and jobs. Many of these territories are places on the state’s map while others are informal settlements or shantytowns, where more than one million people live. Most gangs are concentrated in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area near industrial parks, international ports, petroleum distribution centers, warehouses of imported luxury goods and foodstuffs, and along domestic and international trade routes.
Gangs are mostly composed of boys and young men (with a few women), who, faced with high rates of unemployment and without basic educational skills, decide to join for protection in order to acquire masculine respect from their community and to make money. In contrast, gang leaders are former police officers and private security agents.
Gangs control territories abandoned by the state. These popular neighborhoods have little to no access to potable water, electricity, schools, hospitals, and jobs.
The first gangs were extensions of self-defense brigades established after the overthrow of the twenty-nine-year dictatorship of the Duvalier family and reinforced during the coup d’état in 1991 against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to protect popular neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince from death squads. Upon the return of the deposed head of state in 1994, guns were distributed to his supporters, leading to the de-politicization of these formations and their turn to criminal activities, including kidnappings.
During Aristide’s second term (2001–4), these “neighborhood” gangs were strengthened to counter former military officers — demobilized in 1995 — aiming to overthrow his government. After the forced removal of Aristide in 2004, the MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti] troops muted his militiamen.
The gangs of today — founded or enhanced by PHTK rulers, other politicians, and key oligarchs — are the new death squads. They traffic in organs and human beings as well as drugs and arms. They kidnap on behalf of others and to raise funds to buy ammunition. They kill to conquer new territory or as retaliation against rival formations.
Gangs also provide security to private businesses, like those of merchant capitalist Reynold Deeb, against petty thieves. They defend their employers from and assault their competitors. They break up strikes. For hire by politicians, like former president Michel Joseph Martelly (2011–16), gangs threaten voters to control election results and to prevent participation in protests. They murder political opponents. They rape and massacre residents of neighborhoods known for their militancy.
Gang members mostly use handguns and semiautomatic rifles. However, over the last three years, their firepower has increased to include war weaponry like Russian AK-47s, US-made AR-15s, and Israeli Galil assault rifles. Some arms trafficked in Haiti are bought in shops in the United States where gun laws are lenient and shipped from Miami’s port where cargo is arranged in itemized containers requiring intensive searches.
Illegal guns enter the country through maritime ports under the private control of oligarchs like Gilbert Bigio’s Port Lafito, through unofficial landing strips, and across land borders with the Dominican Republic. At the same time, over the last thirteen years, the PHTK regime has systematically underfunded and under-armed its own armed forces.
Georges Eddy Lucien
The army — the traditional actor that the Haitian state or the local and international oligarchy (especially the United States) usually uses to resolve the crisis — is no longer there. Because to resolve the crisis, if you look at 1946, 1956, 1986, it’s always the same thing: we go to sleep, we wake up, we find that the army has taken power. But today, with the Haitian army dissolved in 1995 when Aristide returned to power, the other repressive apparatuses, whether the police or the gangs, play a huge role.
Certainly, during the Duvalier dictatorship, there was always a link between the army and the militias. But the army had more logistical means and more guns than the militias. Informality is important, because when the army needed to do things off the books, it would use the militias. This was the case for the coup d’état of 1991, when they used the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti [FRAPH], a known product of the CIA.
Since 2016, the police have been incapable of quelling the uprisings, incapable of making the people retreat. The gangs came to serve two functions. One of them is that they serve as censors in the concentrated popular neighborhoods — we know that about two-thirds of the Port-au-Prince agglomeration lives in precarious neighborhoods.
Since 2016, the police have been incapable of quelling the uprisings, incapable of making the people retreat.
We can take the example of Lasalin residents who participated in the October 17, 2018, protest, who were massacred three weeks later by the gangs, sending the message that people from popular neighborhoods do not have civic and political rights; they cannot be involved in protests. There are other instances, such as the Belair massacre during the first peyi lòk — translated by some as “general strike” — or the Kafou Marasa (Cité Soleil) massacre.
The gangs play the role of censor. First, they prevent progressive organizations from gathering in popular neighborhoods. For example, during the period of 1987–88, following the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship, numerous popular organizations operated inside of the neighborhoods, including student groups and unions. But today, it is difficult to organize a meeting in these areas.
Their second mission is to banalize concepts like “children of the poor” or “revolution” and to contribute to the criminalization of social movements. Under the government of Jovenel Moïse (2017–21), the participation of gangs in the protests trivialized the demands. Those are all strategies.
The social movement that we are discussing today arose in 2015–16 and has lasted for a six-year period during which there were various uprisings. Since the major protests in 1929 against the US occupation (1915–34), we have not experienced such a long period of sustained uprisings.
After the withdrawal of US troops, local and international oligarchs were able to maintain continuity and control. But in 1946, there were other mass protests. After ten years, in 1956–57, the local oligarchy was able to take control for the next thirty years through the Duvaliers, until around 1985–86.
Now, we can see that since 2015, the people have begun to rise up again. This period reminds us of the period between 1902 and 1915, during the thirteen-year resistance of Rosalvo Bobo against deepening relations between the local and US oligarchies.
Ernst Jean-Pierre
It’s important to recall our history as a people and the specific form of colonialism that took place in Haiti. The arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 created a new colonial reality. The colonists appropriated the riches of the land, devastated the environment and the indigenous people who lived there, and introduced the transatlantic slave trade of Africans. The Code Noir (Black Code) that regulated the slave system in Haiti considered enslaved Africans to be subhuman — this has repercussions until the present.
The Bwa Kayiman ceremony served to plan the first major slave insurrection of the Revolution, which achieved the general liberation of all slaves and claimed independence in 1804. But following independence, the sons of whites, mulattos, and Creoles made claims to the land, demanding to be compensated for lost and damaged property.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a major leader of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of independent Haiti, opposed these demands. His aspiration for independence extended beyond the abolition of slavery, to a system of equality based on the values of the Bosals, Africans born on the continent and not in slavery, who held communalist values around labor and freedom. Representing a break from the inherited colonial system, Dessalines proposed to redistribute the wealth of the land among all Haitians, issuing a series of measures directed toward these aims.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines proposed to redistribute the wealth of the land among all Haitians, issuing a series of measures directed toward these aims.
The decrees of Dessalines constituted radical efforts to address the colonial system of wealth, but they caused tensions within the new nation. In October 1806, Dessalines was assassinated, marking a pivotal moment that split the nation into two. The succeeding government sent the Bosals to the mountains and countryside, imposing a Rural Code similar to the colonial Black Code. This instilled a form of racism, even apartheid, maintaining a society in which a peasant class produced the agricultural products for society for a cultivator class of Creoles.
This fundamental divide unfolded into the crisis of 1843, dividing the country into four parts. By 1915, Haiti had fallen into the hands of the US occupation. Many North American institutions and companies, such as the Haitian American Sugar Company [HASCO], were engaged in the export of sisal, rubber, and sugar cane.
Haitians ended up with a state that does not correspond to the aspirations of the masses, a cheap prototype of the Western nation-state. Haitian law is a copy of French law, with no sense of environmental or communal rights. The educated, elite classes took the reins of government, granting themselves social and economic privileges and requiring the majority to wait.
This is the present condition. This is what led us to the crises of 1943, 1946, in all the periods after President Dumarsais Estimé, and after President Duvalier in 1986. The crises recur because the historical problem has never been solved: the fight between the Bosals, the peasant people, and the elites.
Mamyrah Prosper
The social movement that arose in 2015–16 then sought to collapse the state, to resolve this historical problem between the masses and the elites. Following the first round of the 2015 presidential elections, the political opposition — including mass-based and other civil society organizations — shut down the capital to denounce the PHTK’s manipulation of the results.
Before this pivotal moment, resistance to the PHTK’s development projects was localized: defense against land grabs in Caracol in the northeast in 2011, the island of Île-à-Vache in the South in 2013, and the island La Gônave in the Bay of Port-au-Prince in 2014, for example. But the social movement that arose in 2015–16 targeted the PHTK regime directly, leading to the annulment of the election results. Yet in the end, new elections in 2016 still ushered the PHTK pick Jovenel Moïse into power.
The social movement that arose in 2015–16 targeted the PHTK regime directly, leading to the annulment of the election results.
The social movement attempted to block the PHTK’s further pursuit of this historical “Scramble for Haiti.” The moment recalled the fraudulent elections that led the party to power in 2011, which brought into view the PHTK strategy to delay parliamentary elections and instead rule by decree in order to gift communally stewarded agricultural lands to multinational elites as free trade zones.
Many also pointed to the PHTK’s misuse of public monies — like the 2010 earthquake reconstruction funds and the PetroCaribe proceeds — to subsidize extractivist projects such as the construction of the largest industrial park in the Caribbean, Caracol Industrial Park, in 2011; the establishment of Moïse’s banana plantation, Agritrans, in 2014, before he was revealed as the PHTK presidential candidate; and the building of the country’s first multipurpose deepwater port to accommodate larger cargo ships, Port Lafito. All of these public-private partnerships are tax exempt.
Sabine Lamour
The Haitian oligarchs are not a uniform, monolithic group, where everyone has the same vision, or everyone has the same consciousness. There is the segment that has existed since the revolutionary period, the formerly “freed,” who up until now considered themselves the heirs of their white colonialist fathers. This group formed the national bourgeoisie, which was successful from 1804 until the US occupation in 1918.
In this bourgeoisie were also those from France, Britain, and Germany. Daughters of the national bourgeoisie already in place were married to foreign sons, the result of trade relations. The national bourgeoisie renewed itself by keeping a hegemony based on skin color over the larger population.
But through the US occupation of the Caribbean, new groups came into power. Emergent capitalists from the Levant extended themselves across the region. And in Haiti, “benefiting” from their lighter skin color, they eventually replaced the initial national bourgeoisie.
The bourgeois class in Haiti is plural. It is an exploded class that is not necessarily unified. However, if there is a thread that runs across these groups that we might consider elites or oligarchs, it is this: nothing national interests them. They invest in commerce; so, even if Haiti can produce rice, Reynold Deeb, the chief officer of Deka Group, prefers to buy and bag it in the US to sell in the country instead of supporting national production.
Can we actually call these oligarchs a national bourgeoisie? These so-called national bourgeois exist in their own secluded spaces from the majority of the population. Their children don’t go to the same schools. If they are sick, they seek care in Miami. They hold multiple citizenships. This is a type of stateless bourgeoisie that builds nothing with the masses.
The Haitian oligarchs are not a uniform, monolithic group, where everyone has the same vision, or everyone has the same consciousness.
Every time their interests are threatened, when the contradictions have reached a level that could cause change or social transformation to take place for resources to be veritably shared between the population, when capital is in trouble, this plural bourgeoisie allies with the international community or with the United Nations to offer foreigners whatever resources Haiti possesses in order to secure its position and to continue to extract wealth.
Interestingly, one of the newer elements in this present crisis is the active engagement of these transnational bourgeois with politics. Traditionally, they had practiced a “stand-in politics” where they funded politicians only accountable to them into power. But now, they have decided to enter national politics with their own faces.
Gregory Mevs — whose family owns the Varreux Petroleum Terminal and the SHODECOSA industrial park — served as the cochair of former president Martelly’s Presidential Advisory Council on Economic Growth and Investment. Reginald Boulos, founder of Sogebank and owner of a chain of supermarkets and car dealerships, established his own political movement under the former president Moïse.
These bourgeois show their faces not because they are concerned with the transformation of society, but because they want to directly control what I call the “predation sites” in society. For example, the control of customs is a site of predation, affording the capacity to import guns, rotted carcinogenic foods, and other expired products that kill. The bourgeois monopolize all industries. The Gilbert Bigio Group, for example, controls construction (iron and wood imports).
When the bourgeois realize that little by little, the majority is increasing in power, and that at any minute, there might be a social explosion in Haiti, they seek to control the spaces of power. But they do not decide to control the spaces for themselves; instead, they share control with the international elites.
Mamyrah Prosper
As Sabine Lamour remarks, the PHTK state has been openly accommodating to these transnational elites. It also facilitated the rise of a small group of aspirant capitalists. Within the first year of his term, Moïse’s government proposed a budget that increased the salaries of himself and his cabinet while raising taxes on the working poor and the middle class.
In July 2018, at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, Moïse announced the removal of gas subsidies.
He pulled Haiti out of the PetroCaribe agreement with Venezuela, which put the country back on the market to purchase petroleum products. In July 2018, at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, Moïse announced the removal of gas subsidies. Increased gas prices inevitably lead to higher prices for transport and food.
In response, dissenters erected barricades to block all national trade routes and disrupt all commercial activity across the country for two days: the first peyi lòk. Moïse repealed the announcement. A month later, the PetroChallenge movement launched with protests in all ten major cities in Haiti around the slogan “Kot Kòb PetroKaribe?” (“Where is the PetroCaribe money?”), demanding that the PHTK regime account for its use of over US $3 billion of the PetroCaribe funds earmarked for the improvement of infrastructure and social programs.
Georges Eddy Lucien
The July 2018 uprisings, one of the most significant uprisings of recent years, brought up the question of PetroCaribe because PetroCaribe itself questions the logic and undermines the functioning of the international financial system introduced to Haiti in 1825, when French banks gave the formerly colonized nation a loan. Typically, in these arrangements, the bank wins and the country that receives the money loses. However, PetroCaribe offered the possibility for both Venezuela and Haiti to be winners.
Within PetroCaribe, Venezuela agreed to allow the borrower to pay back the loan with goods they produce, straying from the neoliberal model that has broken the dynamics of production in Haiti. There was a possibility of challenging the international financial system. July 2018 was also one of the first times that the social movements spoke of “chavire chodyè,” breaking with the system.
Sabine Lamour
Peyi lòk is a mode of resistance. It is the result of contradictions inside society that are so striking that the people are forced to block the system. How can the government take away gas subsidies when the price of fuel per gallon exceeds the minimum wage! During the first peyi lòk in July 2018, mobilizations took place all across the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and spread throughout the entire country, paralyzing all commercial activity. And the government was forced to retreat over the fuel issue.
Within the peyi lòk, despite the paralysis, numerous activities take place within organizations both in civil society and the political opposition. Panels are held, position papers are released, flash mobs and protests are organized. Thus, we can say that peyi lòk tempers gang insecurity and offers a moment for organizations to become more politically active, meeting more often to discuss.
Of course, there is a contradiction in peyi lòk: people in need can become collateral damage — they cannot go about their daily work to reproduce themselves; they must be able to afford to stock up on food. The government also utilizes the peyi lòk period to repress militants, those who take to the streets every day to maintain barricades against the police and gangs.
Ernst Jean-Pierre
The peyi lòk is not something new, it is a peasant mode of struggle called “koupe wout” (cutting off roads). The Indigenous Army of Dessalines used this tactic to cut off French supply lines during the revolution in 1802. This method was deployed after independence by different revolutionary peasant leaders seeking to isolate and control their own region.
Freedom is a fundamental element within the activist movement with a set of political ideals that permeate Haitian society.
The Kako fighters adopted this “koupe wout” tactic to prevent the further incursion of the US Marines into the countryside. Blocking roads disrupted the reinstatement of forced labor by the US occupiers to build those very roads that facilitated the transport of export crops.
I interpret it as a mode of struggle being adapted to Port-au-Prince and other cities: it prevents communication between other departments, circulation and movement, and functionality of the capitalist system within cities themselves. It is a historical and cultural system of resistance. We integrated some English and French words: we say “barikad” (barricades); we say “lòk,” but it was called “gran chimen bare” (roadblock), where no one could circulate freely.
Sabine Lamour
There is a constant in the demands of the social movement — the right to self-determination. Whether it is in relation to the Haitian state, or to the international community which always wants to impose a series of measures onto us, we always demand that at a certain point, we, too, can propose our way of life. This thread has run through every social movement, whether the political element is women, peasants, young people, or teacher unions.
Freedom is a fundamental element within the activist movement with a set of political ideals that permeate Haitian society. Since the Revolution of 1804, we realized that within the question of freedom is a question of well-being — not well-being in the Western sense based on private property.
Ernst Jean-Pierre
There is an absence of political thought and even ideology in the Western sense in relation to what’s happening on the ground, in terms of popular expression. The urban popular neighborhoods are more mobilized than the peasants in the current struggle. Political leaders have been discredited in the popular mass movements.
The historical mission of the popular masses is a battle against an unjust global order, the common thread of Haitian popular struggles historically which can be linked to broader anti-imperialist left-wing discourse. But if you look closely at the emergence of popular struggles, it is an existential battle around the need to live.
There is a permanent nature of this struggle, reflected by the impossibility of dialogue between the elites and the masses. The traditional political elites lack a narrative to address popular demands, they cannot articulate the struggles for change. That’s why they are always in crisis.
The scenarios being played out right now are ones we have lived through since 1806, centering around self-determination, redistribution, and resource production.
In 2021, following Moïse’s assassination, various progressive civil society organizations and parties came together to draft the Montana Accords, which allowed for a transitional government to organize free elections and pursue the PetroCaribe trial. But these efforts reduced the organized struggle to the question of taking power.
The popular masses were waging a historic battle to change the Western capitalist system definitively. There are two battles in Haiti: a battle for real change, and a battle for power. The latter battle does not express the aspirations of the popular masses.
Sabine Lamour
The scenarios being played out right now are ones we have lived through since 1806, centering around self-determination, redistribution, and resource production. In every major crisis, the same question is raised: How will we build a community on the 27,500 square kilometers of land that we have together, to live together if some don’t view others as fully human? This is the basis of the struggle in Haiti: those in charge claim all the resources produced within society belong to them, and they never hesitate to seek outsiders to intervene in the issue.
But there’s a question of what needs to happen internally to build a true fellowship, a common political project to build a society. This battle has existed since the nation was formed. The proposed political projects thus far end up fostering some form of exclusion and absence of redistribution. Now, there is a political coherence within the chaos that Haitians must address.
This is an edited version of a longer discussion first published by Phenomenal World and LeftEast.