Haiti’s violent gang uprising has forced an unpopular prime minister to resign — but that’s only deepened the country’s crisis because, in the eyes of many Haitians, it’s given the gangs the cachet of a political movement. WLRN Americas Editor Tim Padgett looks at how much harder it may be now to dislodge gang rule in Haiti.
Last week, Haiti’s interim prime minister, Ariel Henry, announced he’ll resign — that is, when a transitional governing council is put in place to lead Haiti out of violent gang chaos and into new elections.
Problem is, it may be too late at this point to set up any kind of new government in Haiti except… gang government.
That was sadly apparent days before Henry's resignation announcement, when Haiti’s gangs attacked the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, with barrages of assault rifle fire. They succeeded in shutting the airport down — largely to keep Henry, who remains stranded in Puerto Rico after an official visit to Kenya, from returning to the country.
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Haiti watchers say something just as unsettling, though, has become just as apparent since then, and it promises to make the country's crisis even deeper. They're seeing a growing level of resignation to — if not support for — the rule of those same gangs that have terrorized Haitians in recent years with murders, kidnappings and hijackings of food, fuel and medicine.
That stems from the fact that most Haitians have, in fact, shared a goal with most of the gangs: getting rid of Henry, who they say represents Haiti’s corrupt and anti-democratic ruling elite, and who they feel was imposed on them by the U.S., U.N. and other developed countries after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.
“As paradoxical as this sounds, the Haitian people are both living in fear and grateful,” said Haitian-American Pierre Imbert of Aventura, a founding director of the nonprofit Ayiti Community Trust.
"Many Haitians credit the gangs with Henry's resignation — so unfortunately the gangs are standing up as saviors. You just cannot ignore that reality."Pierre Imbert
Imbert travels to Haiti often and is frequently with people on the ground there — and he says a disturbing number of folks there have started to identify the criminal gangs as something more like political movements.
“Some I have directly spoken with talk about how Ariel Henry was forced to resign because of the gangs," Imbert said. "Unfortunately, the gangs are standing up as saviors, and right now you just cannot ignore that very reality.”
The International Organization for Migration says the gang uprising of the past two weeks has driven some 17,000 Haitians out of Port-au-Prince and into Haiti's rural provinces to. On Monday, amid a new gang rampage through the capital's more affluent neighborhoods, at least a dozen corpses were seen in the streets of the Pétionville suburb.
Even so, many Haitians WLRN has spoken with in recent days echoed the reality Imbert points to.
"We appreciate that the gangs stood by the people to get the job done" of forcing Henry out, Danessa Derice, a security guard for a business in Port-au-Prince, told WLRN.
Derice added she believes notorious Haitian gang leaders like former policeman Jimmy Cherizier, known as “Barbecue,” represent a sort of people’s rebel uprising.
“I personally don’t think they’ve hurt the people more than Haiti’s politicians have," she said.
That’s a remarkable statement given the U.N. says the gangs were responsible for almost 5,000 homicides last year — and all the more befuddling since so many of Haiti's gangs are sponsored as street enforcers by those same politicians Derice refers to.
"We appreciate that the gangs stood by the people to get the job done [of forcing Henry out]. I personally don’t think they’ve hurt the people more than Haiti’s politicians have."Danessa Derice, a security guard for a business in Port-au-Prince.
Either way, the fact that the gangs are now obstructing the effort to form the transitional governing council that Haitians, the U.S. and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are trying to form is more evidence that they're sitting in Haiti's driver's seat.
“What this shows is that things have moved from just the gangs attacking each other, the gangs kidnapping individuals on the streets — to the gangs directly attacking the government," says Fort Lauderdale attorney Michelle Austin Pamies, a founding member of the Haitian American Foundation for Democracy.
"Now the gangs do not fear the police.”
Florida guns - and the return of Guy Philippe
And there doesn't appear to be much of a Haitian police force left to fear anymore. Nor does it look like the U.N.-backed, U.S.-funded Multinational Security Support Mission — to be led by a thousand police officers from Kenya — will be deployed to Haiti any time soon.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and other developed countries like Canada and France have so far balked at sending any of their forces, military or police, into Haiti to stabilize the situation, especially since such foreign interventions there have often made things worse in the past.
Austin Pamies insists Haitians know they can’t move forward under gang governance — that “gang control of the country is contrary to the people’s interests.” That's true enough.
But the equally important question now is: can the country ever control the gangs again, especially if the U.S. and the international community keep failing to help Haiti control them?
Can they, for example, finally stop or at least slow the flow of high-power guns smuggled from countries like the U.S. — mostly from Florida, says the U.N. — into Haiti and the gangs' arsenals?
If not, what could emerge instead of that transitional council is a sort of coup d’etat government led by a gang-supported figure like former Senator and police commander Guy Philippe.
Twenty years ago this very month, Philippe was dressed in military fatigues holding court with foreign correspondents like myself in Port-au-Prince after leading the overthrow of then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Philippe’s attempt to seize power then failed — and he would later go to prison in the U.S. on drug charges. But last fall he was released. He returned to Haiti — and he’s now making a new bid, with the gangs’ help, to take over.
“I’m preaching a peaceful revolution," Philippe told WPLG Local 10 News in South Florida by Zoom from Haiti last week. "That’s what I’m trying to do in Haiti."
People like me are the real victims of this so-called gang revolution. It’s the poor like us who are losing everything.Yvanne Altidor
Philippe even declared he represents a less corrupt choice for Haitians than the transitional council the U.S. is now calling for. That’s a questionable claim at best, coming from an ex-drug trafficking convict. And questionable especially to Haitians like Yvanne Altidor, a single mother trying to find food for her two children in Port-au-Prince amid the gang brutality.
“People like me are the real victims of this so-called revolution,” Altidor told WLRN. “It’s the poor like us who are losing everything.”
And if Haiti’s violent power vacuum keeps getting filled by gangs, folks like Altidor are likely to keep losing even more — and are that much more likely, if the past is any indicator, to embark on yet another wave of desperate refugee migration by sea to Florida.
Jeremy Dupin reported from Port-au-Prince
