As Haiti’s humanitarian crisis deepens, many Haiti advocates are now concluding that international intervention is necessary — including South Florida Congresswoman and Haitian-American Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who told WLRN that aid to Haiti is "unsustainable" without it.
Last week the U.N. issued more dire warnings about severe food shortages in Haiti — and the looming specter of more malnutrition if not starvation for many Haitian children. That crisis is driven largely by the violent, powerful gangs that control much of the country and regularly hijack basic goods there.
Cherfilus-McCormick, the first Haitian-American Democrat elected to Congress, said she now believes only armed international intervention can restore enough stability in Haiti to fix the emergency. The U.N. and the Biden Administration have also calling for some sort of new international peacekeeping mission there. (The U.S., however, has so far declined to assume a leadership role in such an effort.)
"Not, of course, an international occupation," Cherfilus-McCormick stressed, hearkening back to past and more heavy-handed international interventions that critics say ended up worsening Haiti's crises.
"But certainly an intervention to secure roads and infrastructure so we can get people's needs to them" — and perhaps, she said, to make Haiti sufficiently safe to hold sorely needed elections to restore Haiti's all but collapsed and dissolved government.
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Toward that end, Cherfilus-McCormick said the U.S. needs to pressure interim Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry — whose administration is virtually powerless now — to "cooperate" with Haitians' efforts to create a new, temporary government arrangement that would facilitate elections. Right now, the congresswoman argued, Haiti "does not have a prime minister whom people look at as legitimate," and who is now refusing to seriously negotiate with the country's civil society groups to find a way forward.
Earlier this month, talks in Jamaica between Henry and civil society organizations like the Montana Group, which has issued a transitional government proposal, ended with no substantive agreements. Many Haitians feel Henry should either step aside or step down.
As as result, Cherfilus-McCormick said, there's a risk that U.S. aid like the additional $53.7 million Vice President Kamala Harris recently announced for Haiti will be ineffective.
“We’re pouring money into this situation, but it’s not sustainable without an intervention," Cherfilus-McCormick said, "and it’s not sustainable without cooperation from the Prime Minister so we can have a transition government.”
Cherfilus-McCormick is also co-sponsoring the Haiti Criminal Collusion Transparency Act, a bill now moving through House committees. It would strengthen the Biden Administration’s sanctions efforts against the Haitian political and economic elites who aid — if not outright sponsor — the gangs that now control an estimated 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
“If we could start strangling or choking out [those elites'] finances," she said, "that would be a huge help in trying to get the gangs to surrender or to suppress the gangs.”
Last Friday, Canada imposed tough economic sanctions on another prominent Haitian businessman, André Apaid, for alleged gang collusion. Cherfilus-McCormick said one aim of the criminal collusion measure would be to raise the U.S.'s economic sanctions muscle in Haiti to the level of Canada's.
