Updated 1 pm March 6
When Haiti’s powerful gangs erupted in new violence last weekend, interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry was out of the country. Now that the country has been violently plunged into what many call the deepest level of collapse yet, the question is: will Henry ever be let back in?
Henry was in Kenya finalizing a U.N. deal to bring a thousand Kenyan police officers to Haiti to help restore order. But at the same time, Haiti's heavily armed gangs reminded the world they’ve all but taken over the country after they attacked police stations, murdered civilians, released thousands of inmates from prisons and shut down the nation’s airports, thrusting Haiti into a state of emergency.
Haitian journalist Jeremy Dupin told WLRN from the capital, Port-au-Prince, the offensive is part of the gangs’ strategy to oust the unpopular interim prime minister from office.
“It’s to make sure that Ariel Henry remains outside of the country until he has no choice but to resign," said Dupin. "So the Prime Minister is currently in a very difficult situation, and we are in a power vacuum.," one that's exacerbated by the fact that there is no functioning parliament nor even one elected official in the federal government today. (Henry himself was controversially installed in 2021 by non-electoral means.)
Earlier in the week, a U.S. State Department spokesman had insisted Henry would return to Haiti. That would now appear to require some sort of beefed-up security escort consisting of Haitian military or soldiers from another country like the U.S. The Biden Administration, however, this week ruled out any U.S. troop involvement in Haiti of that sort. Other developed countries, like Canada, have also balked at committing boots on the ground there to rein in the chaos.
There are also questions now about how the fresh and more coordinated gang violence will affect the long-delayed deployment of the Kenyan-led multinational police force to Haiti.
READ MORE: 3 things to know about the current crisis in Haiti
Tuesday night, Henry was stuck in Puerto Rico after the gangs on Monday rendered both Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture International Airport and Cap Haitien's airport on Haiti's north coast inoperable. U.S. airlines, including American, have since suspended flights from Florida into Haiti.
(Update: WLRN's news partner, The Miami Herald, reported Wednesday that the U.S. is now urging Henry to resign.)
Meanwhile, Haiti’s power vacuum may be filled by a man who was recently released from a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.
His name is Guy Philippe, a former Haitian police commander who 20 years ago led a coup that overthrew another Haitian government. Dupin says Philippe’s now proposing himself as the transitional head of state — and he has support: from the gangs, because he too wants to remove Henry; and from many Haitians, because he's pledged to restore public security.
“Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s been nearly three years in power and he didn’t do anything really, either to restore security or hold new elections," Dupin said. "So Guy Philippe has a lot of sympathy.”
At the same time, however, "there are a lot of mixed feelings among Haitians in the streets about going along with a solution that's coming like this from the gangs — the same gangs that have been kidnapping and killing them and torturing their lives for so many years now," added Dupin.
Along with Philippe, former leftist Senator Jean-Charles Moïse is also heading the movement to boot Henry and form a transitional government "council."
Meanwhile, a coalition of Haitian civil society leaders known as the Montana Group have been pressing the U.S. and the international community to work with them to form a post-Henry transitional government. They say it would lead the country more effectively to the desperately overdue national elections Henry has so glaringly failed to realize, which would finally choose a permanent head of state to replace the late President Jovenel Moïse, who was brutally assassinated in 2021.
Last week, Henry had announced that those elections would be organized by August of 2025.
U.S., Florida are 'partly to blame'
Many Haitians here in South Florida say the U.S. is partly to blame for the possibility of Guy Philippe's sudden ascent because it insisted for so long on supporting Henry, a member of Haiti's elite class whom Haitians widely viewed as being installed by a group of developed countries after Moïse's murder.
"The U.S. was backing the wrong horse with Ariel Henry, who had no legitimacy or popular support," Fort Lauderdale attorney Michelle Austin Pamies — a founding member of the nonprofit Haitian-American Foundation for Democracy — said Tuesday, in a Florida International University forum on Haiti.
"We want our U.S. government instead to listen to us and to work with credible leadership in Haiti.”
Like many inside Haiti, Austin Pamies predicted that Henry's resignation is imminent.
In a statement this week, Florida U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Haitian-American Democrat whose district includes Palm Beach and Broward Counties, said: "I am also alarmed about the lack of progress towards a transition consensus government. The Biden-Harris Administration, along with the international community, must focus on urgently restoring security for the Haitian people and alleviating the ongoing humanitarian crisis.”
The consensus at the FIU forum was that Haiti’s crisis has now reached "its gravest moment," said FIU political science professor Eduardo Gamarra — but that Florida too shares a large part of the blame because its lax gun laws have made it the major source of the high-power weapons smuggled into Haiti to the gangs.
READ MORE: A bizarre arms trafficking case in Haiti leaves scars in South Florida
