---
title: "The Crisis in Haiti, Explained: How Gangs Captured a Nation"
description: "It is a crisis that, for all intents and purposes, has disappeared from the global consciousness, even as the United Nations describes it as an unending horror story. For much of the past year, the world's attention has been fixed elsewhere: on Venezuela, where in January U.S. special forces captured President Nicolás Maduro during a daring raid on Caracas; on Iran, where negotiations between Washington and Tehran inch forward even as the spectre of open war grows larger by the day; and, briefly, on Sudan, where the city of El Fasher fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, leaving behind what UN experts later described as a ghost town.\n\nThese are understandable preoccupations. They are among the largest crises the world has seen in a decade, and each represents a profound failure of the international community's ability to manage and resolve conflict. But while attention has been concentrated on these wars, Haiti, the Caribbean nation of roughly 12 million people, has slipped further and further into a catastrophe with no end in sight. And unlike those other conflicts, which at a fundamental level pit a state against military forces, whether rebel groups, paramilitaries, or foreign armies, Haiti's government has been fighting gangs.\n\nSo far, the gangs are winning. In July 2025, the UN announced that gangs controlled more than 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and were pushing their reach into once-peaceful regions of the country. The result has been a humanitarian collapse of staggering scale, with millions facing hunger, more than a million driven from their homes, and a state whose authority is evaporating in real time. This is the story of how a nation lost control of itself, why its gangs grew so powerful, what the international community has tried to do, and whether any realistic path back from the brink still exists.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- By July 2025, gangs controlled more than 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, a city of over three million people, in what amounts to one of the most complete collapses of state authority anywhere in the modern world; even at the height of cartel violence, Mexican gangs never controlled 90 percent of Mexico City.\n- The roots of the crisis stretch back decades, from the Duvalier dictatorship's Tonton Macoute militia, which was disbanded but never disarmed in 1986, to a recurring pattern in which politicians financed gangs to intimidate rivals, only to lose control once the gangs grew more powerful than their patrons.\n- The 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and the 2024 rise of the Viv Ansanm coalition, led by former police officer Jimmy \"Barbecue\" Chérizier, marked the turning points that pushed Haiti from chronic instability into near-total state collapse.\n- The humanitarian toll is immense: at least 5,601 people killed in gang violence in 2024, more than 1.4 million displaced, a 1,000 percent rise in sexual violence against children, and six consecutive years of economic contraction.\n- The international response, anchored by a Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission, has been chronically underfunded, understaffed, and beset by language and capability gaps; just 400 of a planned 2,500 officers were on the ground months after deployment began.\n\n## A Coalition Turns on Itself\n\nOn Tuesday, December 9, at around 4 a.m., gunshots tore through Bel-Air, one of Port-au-Prince's most notorious gang strongholds. For years, Haitians woken by gunfire have learned to read it as one of two things: a police raid against a gang position, or gangs targeting the police. This time it was neither. It was gang members shooting at each other, raising the spectre of an all-out gang war that could plunge the city into even deeper chaos.\n\nDozens of gunmen died in the firefight. Bodies littered the streets, some burned where they fell. Footage and images circulating online showed the aftermath in graphic detail, including a picture of the severed head of a high-ranking gang figure identified as Dede. According to the Associated Press, dozens were killed, including 10 children. What made the episode remarkable was not the bloodshed itself but the combatants: these were not rival gangs but members of the same coalition, Viv Ansanm, turning their weapons on one another.\n\nViv Ansanm, which translates from Haitian Creole as \"Living Together,\" was formed when Haiti's two most powerful gang factions united under a single banner, bringing together dozens of gangs that had spent years fighting brutal turf wars. For a nation accustomed to gang violence for decades, the merger was unprecedented. Thousands of heavily armed fighters were suddenly operating in concert, a far larger threat to the government than the sum of their parts.\n\nAccording to the Miami Herald, the December clash was triggered by a dispute within the coalition over kidnappings, which had surged in recent months. One faction wanted to keep kidnapping, a major source of revenue, while another wanted it stopped. In a video released that day, Jimmy \"Barbecue\" Chérizier, a former police officer and the coalition's spokesman, stood flanked by six people he claimed were former hostages, including a 12-year-old girl. He said that one of Viv Ansanm's generals had ignored repeated warnings to halt kidnappings, prompting another faction to intervene and free the captives. \"We don't want the matter of kidnapping,\" Chérizier declared. \"Today, Viv Ansanm decided to be done with the kidnapping issue.\"\n\nSources told the Herald that the general in question was Kempes Sanon, a former police officer turned gang leader sanctioned by both the United States and the UN for supporting Viv Ansanm's terror campaign. Until very recently a close ally of Chérizier, Sanon was in hiding after being shot. Two ironies stood out: former allies, both once police officers, had turned on each other, and a coalition responsible for thousands of deaths, mass displacement, and systematic terror was claiming the moral high ground on kidnappings. The episode laid bare what many observers had long suspected, that Viv Ansanm, for all its success in uniting Haiti's warring factions, remained fragile, held together by common enemies rather than genuine ideological unity.\n\nThe violence was not confined to internal feuds. Earlier that month, heavily armed gang members attacked Haiti's central region over a weekend, killing men, women, and children as they torched homes and forced survivors to flee into the darkness. A government official in Pont-Sondé, in the Artibonite department, confirmed that nearly a dozen people had been killed. Many survivors fled to the coastal town of Saint-Marc, where one resident told the Associated Press they would no longer rely on the government and would instead take justice into their own hands.\n\nThe gangs do not, however, hold the entire country uncontested. The Haitian National Police have pushed back and scored notable wins, most recently on February 21, when an overnight operation in Kenscoff, a commune in the Port-au-Prince area, killed 16 suspected gang members. But in a country with hundreds of gangs and thousands of fighters, such victories are barely a drop in the bucket.\n\n## How Haiti Got Here: From Papa Doc to the Macoute's Long Shadow\n\nBy July 2025, gangs controlled more than 90 percent of the capital. The figure is worth dwelling on: nine out of every ten neighborhoods in a city of more than three million people were under the control of armed criminal groups rather than the government. Even at the height of cartel violence, Mexican gangs never controlled 90 percent of Mexico City. What happened in Port-au-Prince represents one of the most complete collapses of state authority anywhere in the modern world.\n\nThe conventional explanation points to 2021, when President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck, and armed violence became commonplace. But that account misses the deeper layers of history. To understand the present, one must return to 1957, when François \"Papa Doc\" Duvalier seized power to become one of Haiti's most feared dictators. The country was already in dire straits, ravaged by a succession of revolutions, dictatorships, crushing debt payments to France, 20 years of U.S. occupation, and the Great Depression. Beyond economic misery, Black Haitians chafed at being ruled by the mulatto minority, a group with one white and one black parent that, despite making up less than 5 percent of the population, has historically wielded outsized political influence. Duvalier's 1957 opponent, Louis Déjoie, was a wealthy mulatto businessman, and Duvalier rode anti-mulatto sentiment to victory.\n\nTwo years later, Duvalier created a paramilitary outfit called the Militia of National Security Volunteers, better known as the Tonton Macoute, named after a Haitian bogeyman, to serve as his enforcers. Haiti at the time was a deeply superstitious place, and, according to John Henley, the Guardian's Europe correspondent, Duvalier weaponized that belief, convincing many Haitians that the Macoute were not merely named after the bogeyman but were zombies he had raised from the dead. Over the 28 years that Papa Doc and his son Jean-Claude \"Baby Doc\" Duvalier ruled, Henley writes, the Macoute killed between 30,000 and 60,000 Haitians and raped, beat, and tortured countless more.\n\nWhile the Macoute committed massacres on a grand scale, the Duvaliers robbed the national treasury blind. According to historian Alex von Tunzelmann, they embezzled up to 80 percent of Haiti's international aid, while the debts they signed accounted for almost 50 percent of what the country owed. When Baby Doc fled in 1986, some experts estimated he left with as much as $900 million. Many hoped his ouster would usher in a golden era, but it did not. Stephen Keppel, a former Economist editor for Latin America, told the Guardian that for all their faults, the Duvaliers knew how to keep control; without them, Haiti fell prey to coups, ousters, and social unrest.\n\nThe most enduring damage lay in the Macoute themselves. After the dynasty fell in 1986, the militia was disbanded, but, crucially, never disarmed. According to a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, its members continued to operate informally and re-emerged as far-right vigilantes, used by politicians to intimidate opponents and voters and to disrupt rallies and elections. It would not be the last time a Haitian government, handed an opportunity to address the armed-group problem, failed to do so.\n\n## A Powder Keg: How Politicians Built the Gangs\n\nIn 1994, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to power after being deposed in a 1991 coup. One of his first acts was to outlaw the pro-Duvalier paramilitaries and even the Haitian armed forces. But because he never fully tackled disarmament, military pensions, or the retraining of former soldiers, those men once again morphed into armed gangs. From 1994 to 2004, gangs of former soldiers waged an anti-Aristide insurgency. In response, young people from working-class neighborhoods in the capital formed self-defense groups, which eventually merged with local police into a force loyal to Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas, the social-democratic party born of his movement.\n\nAristide used them extensively. In December 2001, when police officer Guy Philippe attacked the presidential palace in an attempted coup, Aristide called on the gangs to defend him. Journalist Michael Deibert, who was in Haiti at the time, told PBS: \"It wasn't the police defending their government's Palais National. It was thousands of armed civilians.\" Yet the gangs that once protected Aristide would eventually engineer his fall, establishing a recurring Haitian pattern in which politicians and elites financed gangs to spread chaos and intimidate rivals, only to lose control once the gangs realized they had grown more powerful than their patrons.\n\nThe 2003–2004 unraveling illustrates the dynamic. One pro-Aristide militia, the Lame Kanibal, or Cannibal Army, was led by Amiot Métayer. When Métayer was killed in September 2003, gang members widely believed, according to the local outlet AlterPresse, that Aristide had ordered his death. The gangs responded not with petitions but with a violent campaign that culminated in the president's ouster. After the 2010 earthquake, according to the Global Observatory, a platform of the International Peace Institute, younger, less ideological, and more predatory gangs seized territory once held by the self-defense groups, showing far less hesitancy to cross neighborhood lines, assassinate enemies, and prey on the vulnerable.\n\nThe earthquake mattered for more than chronology. It nearly tore the country in two. Alex von Tunzelmann spoke with aid workers who described Haiti as \"down there with Somalia, as just about the worst society on earth. Even in Afghanistan, there's a middle class. People aren't living in the sewers.\" By 2012, conditions had not improved; as donor funding dried up and youth unemployment stayed high, the gangs found an easy recruitment pipeline. The pattern held through the 2010s, including in 2016, when Jovenel Moïse of the Tèt Kale party was elected president.\n\nMoïse's tenure was, in a word, complex. To some he was a reformer who fought the oligarchs' grip and corruption; to others he was just as corrupt, having become an oligarch himself. His harshest critics included Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, which accused his government of funding, supporting, and arming gangs that committed what amounted to crimes against humanity. In a report analyzing three attacks between 2018 and 2020 that killed at least 240 civilians in neighborhoods vocal about government accountability, the clinic documented gangs arriving to shoot residents indiscriminately, rape women, and burn and loot homes. \"Moïse's government has been pushing the story that the attacks are merely gang infighting,\" said Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, \"but the evidence demonstrates high-level government involvement in the planning, execution and cover-up of the attacks.\" Moïse's government denied any links, and the then-acting prime minister claimed antidemocratic forces were using the gangs to destabilize the state, but the weight of evidence pointed the other way.\n\nAbout three months after the report's release, on July 7, 2021, Moïse was assassinated, and the crisis spiraled further. Months later, the New York Times reported that he had been killed because he was compiling a dossier of powerful politicians and businesspeople involved in Haiti's drug trade, intending to hand it to the American government. The reporting validated what Jimmy \"Barbecue\" Chérizier had claimed in the immediate aftermath: that police, opposition politicians, and the business community had colluded to kill the president in what he called a conspiracy against the Haitian people.\n\n## The Major Players: Barbecue, the G9, and Their Rivals\n\nNo figure looms larger over Haiti's gang landscape than Jimmy \"Barbecue\" Chérizier. A former police officer, he served in a riot squad whose members have been accused of killing protesters. According to a Guardian biography, he was expelled from the force in 2018 over alleged involvement in several crimes, including a horrific massacre in La Saline in which 71 people were killed, seven women raped, and 400 homes burned. Chérizier denied wrongdoing, but his expulsion from a police force that is, at times, more gang than police speaks volumes.\n\nHe made the leap from officer to gang leader, the Associated Press reports, by multitasking, building an armed group while still in uniform and, by 2017, controlling the Delmas 95 in the impoverished Lower Delmas neighborhood. In June 2020, he formed the G9 Family and Allies, uniting nine major Port-au-Prince gangs allegedly tied to the ruling Tèt Kale party. By 2022, a UN Security Council report found, the G9 had grown to more than a dozen gangs and ranked among the most powerful coalitions in the country.\n\nPart of the G9's strength came from Chérizier's charisma. Sky News correspondent Stuart Ramsay described him as engaging, a natural politician, and a force to be reckoned with, traits that let him win local hearts even as his gang committed atrocities. Vice dubbed him the \"Gangster King\" of Haiti's chaos, and Washington agreed, posting a $5 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. \"He gives women presents on Mother's Day. He gives money to families that don't have the means to send their kids to school,\" International Crisis Group analyst Diego Da Rin told the Guardian. \"But people are aware that he is also one of the main people responsible for the nightmare they are living.\"\n\nBeyond charisma, the gangs grew powerful through arms-trafficking networks supplying AK-47s, AR-15s, and Israeli Galil rifles. According to a UN panel of experts, their firepower exceeded that of the police, creating a deadly cycle: gangs expanded their reach, seized strategic locations, and imported still more weapons to expand further. Nor was the G9 alone. According to Haitian expert Djems Oliver, more than 200 armed groups operate in Haiti, with 95 in Port-au-Prince. Most are small, neighborhood-level outfits, but some rival the G9.\n\nThe chief rival is G-Pèp, led by Gabriel Jean Pierre, known as Ti Gabriel, and formed in response to G9 violence. According to Crisis Group, after the G9's creation Chérizier invited other gangs, especially in the densely populated Cité Soleil commune, to join. Those that refused, including Ti Gabriel's Nan Brooklyn, faced coordinated attacks in which members were decapitated, corpses torched in the streets, and homes burned, partly to intimidate residents into not collaborating with other gangs. The attack backfired. Rather than submit, the targeted gangs rallied around Ti Gabriel, who a month later announced G-Pèp, quickly drawing in gangs uneasy about the G9's growing power. \"A two-party gang war on numerous fronts has thus superseded the old local rivalries,\" Crisis Group wrote, \"as the G9 and Gpèp vie for overall ascendancy. Fighting has spread, with civilians stuck at home to stay out of the crossfire.\"\n\nThough most expected the better-armed, better-connected G9 to overwhelm G-Pèp, the latter held its own with help from 400 Mawozo, which by April 2022 was the most powerful gang in the country. 400 Mawozo gained international notoriety in 2021 for kidnapping 17 missionaries, but within Haiti it was already feared for thousands of kidnappings targeting ordinary citizens. The consensus is that it backed G-Pèp to keep the G9 from becoming too dominant. Another major player is the 5 Segond gang, led by rapper Johnson André, known as Izo. Based in the Village de Dieu slum, it controls key transport routes, including stretches of the western coast and a major highway linking Port-au-Prince to the south, giving it a central role in arms and gun trafficking and a history of hijacking shipments by land and sea. The BBC's Vanessa Buschschlüter wrote that Izo is one of the few leaders who wields more power than Chérizier, with a $1 million U.S. bounty to match.\n\nA final figure is less a gang than an individual: former police officer Guy Philippe, who has long coveted the presidency and once tried to seize it by coup. After that failure, according to InSight Crime, he turned to crime, laundering money, trafficking cocaine from Colombia into the United States through Haiti, and taking bribes to protect drug shipments. Elected senator in 2016, he was arrested days before being sworn in and gaining immunity, then extradited to the United States, convicted, and imprisoned for nine years; he served six before being repatriated. Haiti expert Michael Deibert called his return \"pouring gasoline on an already raging fire.\" Though Philippe commands no gang of his own, InSight Crime reported he was often seen with armed members of the Protected Areas Security Brigade, or BSAP, a rogue government unit nominally tasked with guarding national parks that analysts say has effectively become a gang. A spokesman for demobilized soldiers told a local outlet that many BSAP members were former soldiers who fought alongside Philippe in the 2004 coup, helping explain how a government agency became his personal protection unit.\n\nThere is also a countervailing force: the vigilantes who have risen to defend their communities. The most famous, the Bwa Kale, first mobilized in 2023, according to Romain Le Cour of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, as a movement of several hundred citizens determined to restore order and punish enemies, gang members or otherwise, through violence. Rather than a formal organization, Le Cour describes it as the re-emergence of old practices of community surveillance and patrolling, a fluid mob response activated in specific circumstances such as gang attacks. Any group of citizens can form a Bwa Kale within their neighborhood. When a threat appears, residents mobilize, often via WhatsApp, gather whatever weapons they can, increasingly guns alongside sticks and stones, and chase down and frequently summarily punish suspects. The vigilantes often work with police, who offer firepower and tactical support that machetes cannot match, and who in turn gain community support, intelligence, and a proxy presence.\n\n## A Crisis Plays Out: Fuel, Fury, and the Fall of the State\n\nThe collapse accelerated in March 2018, when Venezuela stopped shipping subsidized oil to Haiti, ending the Petrocaribe program that had supplied cheap fuel for over a decade. Under Petrocaribe, Haiti could defer payment on 40 percent of its oil bill for up to 25 years at just 1 percent interest, effectively a cheap loan meant for development. Losing it forced Haiti, dependent on imports for nearly all its energy, to buy oil on the open market at far higher prices. By July, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, which had promised a $96 million loan package, the government announced it would eliminate fuel subsidies. Prices soared, protests erupted nationwide, and Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant resigned, but the damage was done. The protests had already evolved from anger over prices into a broader indictment of Moïse's government and its failure to tackle the corruption that had let those who embezzled Petrocaribe funds escape prosecution.\n\nIn 2019, a 600-page Senate report released in May implicated both Moïse and his predecessor Michel Martelly in the mismanagement and theft of Petrocaribe funds. According to Time, at least $2 billion had gone missing, roughly a quarter of Haiti's entire 2017 economy, and the issue became a rallying cry because Haitian taxpayers would still owe Venezuela billions for the borrowed oil. Thousands marched demanding Moïse's resignation and were met with heavy-handed police responses. By December, when the protests waned, more than 80 people had been killed and over 200 injured, according to Freedom House. Several journalists, including Rospide Pétion and Néhémie Joseph, were killed after criticizing the government; Joseph's death came amid a spike in violence that claimed 20 lives and paralyzed the country for weeks.\n\nThe protests carried into 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic briefly suppressed street demonstrations, but the grievances remained. Moïse was ruling by decree, having dissolved parliament in January 2020 after October 2019 legislative elections were postponed; there were no checks on his power. Kidnappings, including by state-linked gangs, surged 200 percent between 2019 and 2020, and many feared a slide back toward Duvalier-style dictatorship. By early 2021, Haiti was on the brink. Protesters argued Moïse's five-year term had ended on February 7, 2021, since elections were held in 2015; Moïse countered that, because the 2015 vote was disputed and he took office in 2017, his term ran to February 2022. The dispute sparked mass demonstrations, met with tear gas and rubber bullets, and in February authorities claimed to have foiled a coup, arresting 23 people, including a Supreme Court judge.\n\nThen, on July 7, 2021, armed men burst into the president's private residence and assassinated him, and Haiti, as observers put it, jumped off a cliff. After a brief power struggle, Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon Moïse had named prime minister days before his death, took office with international backing. Many Haitians viewed his installation as unconstitutional, arguing the absence of a functioning parliament made it illegitimate. Nominally in charge, Henry presided over a power vacuum the gangs eagerly filled, expanding operations with little resistance as already-weakened state institutions grew more ineffective. The gangs seized neighborhoods, captured key roads linking the capital to the rest of the country, and blocked ports holding fuel, triggering devastating shortages and still more protests.\n\nBy 2022, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet warned that armed violence had reached unimaginable levels; between April and May 2022 alone, at least 92 civilians were killed in coordinated attacks. On September 11, Henry announced the end of fuel subsidies, spiking prices and igniting violent protests within days, as demonstrators pillaged UNICEF warehouses, attacked politicians' homes, and set fires across the city. But it was the gangs' reaction that proved decisive. On September 12, Chérizier and the G9 blockaded the Varreux fuel terminal, the country's largest depot, storing over 70 percent of national fuel, demanding Henry's resignation and lower prices for fuel and basic goods. Gas stations and schools closed, hospitals warned their generators were running dry, and as cholera cases appeared, UN officials pleaded for a humanitarian corridor. The blockade held for nearly two months until the Haitian National Police retook the terminal on November 3 after heavy gunfire. Days later, Chérizier posted a video telling drivers and employees they could approach without fear, though he denied negotiating with Henry's government.\n\nBy 2023, violence reached unprecedented levels. In January, a Haitian human rights group reported that 78 police officers had been killed since Henry took power; by year's end, 37 more had died, 1,800 had fled the country, and the homicide rate more than doubled to 40.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. The gang emergency was compounded by a deepening political one.\n\n## An Unpopular Choice and the Rise of Viv Ansanm\n\nHenry had come to power promising a return to constitutional order and democratic elections, but he oversaw repeated electoral delays as the security crisis worsened, arguing that credible voting was impossible amid rampant gang violence and limited state capacity. The public did not accept this, especially given the lingering questions over his rise. As conditions deteriorated, with nearly half the population facing acute hunger, according to the World Food Programme, and more than 165,000 people displaced, regional observers increasingly doubted Henry would last.\n\nTwo developments in late 2023 set the stage for what followed. First, in September, Chérizier announced the formation of Viv Ansanm, a united front of rival gangs including the G9 and G-Pèp. According to Romain Le Cour, the coalition formed because Chérizier and the G9 were losing momentum while independent rivals and G-Pèp-affiliated gangs were rising. Initial attempts to consolidate failed after key leaders championing the merger were killed, but the idea of a unified gang force endured. Second, in late November, Guy Philippe returned, deported after six years in a U.S. prison. The former coup leader wasted no time organizing demonstrations and declaring his political ambitions, and on February 7, 2024, the date Haitian leaders are traditionally sworn in, he posted a video calling for a rebellion to oust the prime minister. The rebellion failed, Le Cour says, because Philippe could not secure support from key allies in the public, private, and gang sectors, but it foreshadowed what was coming.\n\nLater that month, Henry attended a Caribbean Community summit in Guyana focused on the Haitian crisis. Although several representatives viewed him as part of the problem, a CARICOM press release on February 28 stated that Henry would remain in power until elections in August 2025. The next morning, Port-au-Prince erupted in flames, and that afternoon Chérizier formally announced the resurrection of Viv Ansanm. The gangs had united. What followed was unlike anything Haiti had seen. Coordinated attacks struck police stations, hospitals, and the international airport, and the gangs stormed the country's two largest jails, freeing more than 4,000 inmates. The scale and coordination indicated planning and inter-group cooperation impossible to arrange overnight, meaning that at some point after September 2023 Viv Ansanm had overcome the obstacles to its formation and solidified its partnership.\n\nHenry, who had been in Kenya pushing for a UN-backed, Kenyan-led security force, found himself locked out of his own country. His plane was barred from the Dominican Republic, and he landed in Puerto Rico as U.S. officials called mid-flight urging him to expedite a political transition. Chérizier warned that if Henry did not resign and the international community kept backing him, Haiti would head straight for civil war and genocide. By early March, according to UNICEF's Catherine Russell, Port-au-Prince was almost completely sealed off by air, sea, and land, with nearly 100,000 people fleeing the capital in under three weeks and those who remained trapped in overcrowded shelters with minimal food, water, or sanitation.\n\nOn March 11, Caribbean leaders convened an emergency meeting in Jamaica, attended by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, signaling Washington's willingness to move past Henry. That evening, Henry announced his resignation, saying his government would cede power to a transitional presidential council tasked with selecting a new interim prime minister and preparing for elections. It was meant to be a new beginning, but as Michel St-Louis, a 40-year-old Haitian, told the press in front of a burned-out police station: \"Haiti is now under the control of the gangs. The government isn't present.\" The gangs had won.\n\n## The International Response: A History of Mixed Results\n\nThe international community has long been involved in Haiti, with mixed results at best. In September 1993, the UN deployed its first peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Mission in Haiti, the first of a succession of missions with varying mandates and strength over the next seven years. Then, in 2004, after Aristide fled, the Security Council established the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, which began with 8,000 personnel and grew to 13,000 after the 2010 earthquake. MINUSTAH was tasked with supporting the transitional government, monitoring and restructuring the Haitian National Police, assisting with disarmament, and protecting civilians.\n\nBut scandal dogged the mission from the start. Nepalese peacekeepers introduced cholera to Haiti in 2010, ultimately killing more than 9,000 people. UN troops were implicated in sexual abuse: in 2012, two Pakistani peacekeepers were jailed and dismissed for raping a 14-year-old boy, and a leaked 2015 report found UN peacekeepers had engaged in transactional sex with at least 229 women who traded sex for money, food, and medicine. Though credited with helping stabilize Haiti's security and supporting its police, MINUSTAH saw its military contingent withdrawn in 2017 and its police contingent in 2019, forced out by the United States as part of a global effort to cut peacekeeping costs. Many in Haiti and abroad called the withdrawal premature given the still-precarious security situation. The mission was replaced by the much smaller UN Mission for Justice Support in Haiti, which ended in October 2019, and then by the UN Integrated Office in Haiti, which lacked the active components the country needed for security and stability.\n\nThat gap became glaring by 2022, when Henry was forced to ask the UN to deploy specialized forces to support an overwhelmed police. Haiti had first requested help earlier that year as violence surged but could find no country willing to lead a mission, with many governments wary of backing Henry's unelected administration and of intervening where previous missions had been marred by abuses. Then, in July 2023, Kenya stepped forward, saying it acted in solidarity with a brother nation. On October 2, 2023, the Security Council authorized a Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission for an initial 12 months.\n\nThe deployment immediately ran into trouble. In January 2024, a Kenyan opposition politician petitioned the Nairobi High Court, which ruled that deploying police to Haiti was unconstitutional and invalid. Kenyan President William Ruto countered by signing a reciprocal agreement with Henry in Nairobi on March 1, 2024, ironically the very moment Viv Ansanm put Port-au-Prince under siege. Even then, delays persisted. Sources in Kenya's Interior Ministry told the Global Initiative that an exploratory team found Haiti ill-prepared, with the barracks meant to host the contingent still incomplete.\n\nThe first 400 Kenyan officers finally arrived on June 25, 2024, but the mission immediately faced operational problems. According to the New Humanitarian, some officers said they received about $155 a month, roughly a fifth of what they had been promised. The force was also badly understaffed: though slated for 2,500 officers and soldiers, the 400 Kenyans deployed in late June were largely left alone. They lacked resources, struggled with language barriers since most spoke neither French nor Haitian Creole, and faced doubts about their suitability for urban counter-gang operations they had never conducted. In September 2025, the Security Council authorized transforming the mission into a Gang Suppression Force with a more forceful mandate including arrest authority, but it faces the same challenges, including slow deployment.\n\n## A Transitional Council Plagued by Crisis\n\nThe military effort was only one part of the international response. Just as important was support for Haiti's governments, including the Transitional Presidential Council that succeeded Henry, meant to exercise presidential powers until an elected president was inaugurated or until February 7, 2026, whichever came first. It was plagued with problems from the start. In October 2024, Haiti's Anti-Corruption Unit accused three members, Smith Augustin, Gerald Gilles, and Emmanuel Vertilaire, of abuse of function, bribery, and corruption, alleging they had demanded $750,000 in bribes from the chairman of the National Bank of Credit to secure his appointment. All three denied wrongdoing and refused to resign.\n\nThe council also became entangled in a public power struggle with Garry Conille, its pick for interim prime minister. According to the Security Council Report, disagreements arose over the division of responsibilities, the appointment of certain cabinet ministers, and the handling of corruption allegations against the three council members, with Conille resisting a cabinet reshuffle amid the bribery claims. The conflict came to a head in November 2024, when the council replaced Conille with businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. The move drew fire from legal experts; former Justice Minister Bernard Gousse called the dismissal illegal, citing both the council's overreach and the corruption allegations against it. The International Crisis Group reported that violence rose as news of Conille's ouster spread, with gangs ramping up attacks in October 2024, emboldened by the security forces' apparent weakness and the government's distracting infighting.\n\nThe council also faced accusations of links to the very gangs it was meant to combat. In January 2026, the U.S. State Department imposed visa restrictions on two council members and their families over involvement in gang operations. Washington imposed further restrictions on four council members and a minister after the council tried to oust Fils-Aimé in what was widely seen as an attempt to prolong its grip on power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed the importance of Fils-Aimé's continued tenure to combat the gangs and stabilize the island, and soon after, Washington deployed a guided-missile destroyer and two U.S. Coast Guard boats to patrol the bay of Port-au-Prince. Coming barely a month after the U.S. capture of President Maduro in Venezuela, the move read as a statement of how far Washington would go to keep Fils-Aimé in power. On February 7, the Transitional Presidential Council dissolved as scheduled, transferring its remaining powers to the prime minister. France 24 reported that Fils-Aimé was the only politician with executive power in the country, left with the unenviable task of organizing elections in a violence-gripped nation, with a fractured political class and a public that has lost faith in the system.\n\n## The Human Toll: Displacement, Children, and Economic Collapse\n\nThe casualty figures, grim as they are, barely scratch the surface of what every regional observer agrees is one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history. In 2024 alone, at least 5,601 people were killed in gang violence, an increase of more than 1,000 over 2023, according to figures verified by the UN Human Rights Office, with more than 2,000 injured and 1,400 kidnapped. In October 2024, the Gran Grif gang killed at least 115 people in Pont-Sondé in what ACLED described as the deadliest incident in Artibonite since it began collecting Haitian data in 2018, likely a retaliation for locals allying with the Jean Denis self-defense coalition. A few months later, at least 207 people were killed in a massacre orchestrated by the leader of the Wharf Jeremie gang in Cité Soleil; many victims were older people accused of killing his son through alleged voodoo practices, and gang members mutilated and burned most of the bodies or threw them into the sea.\n\nThe violence has produced what World Relief called the worst displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere. In October 2025, the UN estimated that more than 1.4 million people had been forced from their homes that year alone, the highest figure ever recorded in the country and a 36 percent increase since the end of 2024, making Haiti the country with the largest number of crime-related displacements globally. The UN estimates that 83 percent of displaced Haitians rely on already-overstretched host communities of acquaintances, friends, and family, while the rest struggle in spontaneous sites. Compounding the strain, more than 270,000 Haitians have been deported back to the country, further burdening its overwhelmed social services.\n\nChildren bear the heaviest burden, making up over half the displaced population, and the education system is near collapse. In January 2025 alone, armed groups destroyed 47 schools in Port-au-Prince, adding to 284 destroyed in 2024, and more than 1,600 schools across four departments have closed, disrupting learning for over 243,000 students. UNICEF estimated that one in seven Haitian children was out of school, with nearly a million more at risk of dropping out. UNICEF also reported that child recruitment into armed groups surged 70 percent, with children making up as much as half of all members; spokesperson James Elder said most were taken by force, while others were manipulated or driven to join by extreme violence.\n\nThere has also been a staggering 1,000 percent rise in sexual violence against children, coinciding with a spike in the gangs' use of sexual violence overall. Between January and October 2024, nearly 4,000 girls and women reported sexual violence. Humanitarian workers told Human Rights Watch that many survivors are reluctant to report or seek care for fear of retaliation, and that those who do often cannot reach help within the critical 72-hour window for post-exposure prophylaxis and emergency contraception, because public medical facilities are closed by violence or because they cannot afford private care.\n\nThe economic damage has been equally catastrophic, with Haiti enduring six consecutive years of economic contraction and GDP declining 4.2 percent in 2024. Agriculture saw the steepest fall at 5.6 percent, hitting the poor hardest, while industry shrank 4.7 percent amid worsening conditions and mass textile-sector layoffs. The IMF projected a further 2.2 percent contraction in 2025 and a 1.2 percent contraction in 2026, with investment and consumption dampened by insecurity and inflation. Foreign direct investment is near total collapse: the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reported FDI inflows fell to $23.6 million in 2023 from $39.4 million in 2022, while the neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares Hispaniola, received $4.75 billion in 2023, a 17.3 percent increase. The only thing keeping the economy from complete collapse is remittances, which reached $4.1 billion in 2024, roughly 20 percent of GDP, though even that lifeline is strained as deportations surge. The country's infrastructure, already poor, has deteriorated further; of a road network with only about 1,000 kilometers paved, much has been damaged by floods and landslides. An engineer in Haiti's public works ministry told the World Bank that the absence of basic infrastructure was so severe it limited access to basic services and denied farmers access to markets. Taken together, the picture is of a country where, even if the gangs laid down their arms today, rebuilding would take decades of sustained effort and investment.\n\n## What Will It Take to End the Crisis?\n\nObservers have proposed several solutions, from military intervention to negotiating with the gangs. One controversial idea is to include the gangs in any political settlement. Some see this as capitulation to criminals, but proponents argue the gangs are already deeply embedded in Haiti's political system, and any solution that excludes them is doomed. The International Crisis Group has noted that gangs increasingly portray themselves as defenders of the poor to improve their image and pursue political recognition, and that Viv Ansanm, despite lacking legal status, presents itself as a political movement capable of fielding candidates in future elections. The coalition has worked to rebrand, distributing money and gifts, installing electricity in underserved neighborhoods, and handing out school supplies, all while still using violence to maintain control.\n\nNegotiating with armed groups is not as outlandish as it sounds; governments throughout history have done so to end conflicts, especially when victory by force is unlikely. The question is whether such talks would bring genuine peace or simply entrench the gangs' power. Crisis Group analysts believe it would likely be the latter, with gangs hoping to use negotiations to install allies in government and secure amnesty, but the group also argues that talks aimed at protecting civilians and disarming the gangs would serve Haiti as a first step on the long path to stability.\n\nAny solution must also address the economic incentives driving young people into gangs. The New Humanitarian reported that children and teenagers can earn anywhere from a few dollars for errands to roughly $40 or more a week for other tasks, a princely sum where most Haitians live on less than $2 a day. As long as gangs offer better economic opportunities than the state, recruitment and the crisis will continue. Fixing the economy so those incentives vanish is essential but daunting, given six years of contraction, dwindling foreign investment, and crumbling infrastructure. The government must also address the cycles of vengeance that drive recruitment; one 17-year-old told UN officials he had joined a gang to avenge his father, killed by a rival gang. Without reconciliation processes that acknowledge harm on all sides, Haiti risks generation after generation seeking retribution.\n\nA well-funded, properly equipped police force will be crucial. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Haitian National Police has shrunk from more than 15,000 officers in 2021 to fewer than 13,000 in 2024, less than half what a country of 11 million needs, and many officers live in gang-dominated neighborhoods, leaving the force vulnerable to intimidation and collusion. Haiti will need to invest heavily in retaining, recruiting, and training officers while ensuring they are better armed and protected than the gangs they fight.\n\nThe justice system also needs significant investment. As of November 2025, 82 percent of detainees were in pre-trial detention under conditions the UN called inhuman and degrading. William O'Neill, the UN's Designated Expert on human rights in Haiti, described prisons as unbelievably crowded and hot, with too little food and scant medical care; 52 people died in detention in the last three months of 2025, many from diseases that should not have killed them. Conditions in juvenile facilities are especially alarming, with some children waiting more than five years to see a judge while held in cells that sometimes hold 40 to 60 minors. Kettly Julien, who runs a human rights organization working in correctional facilities, told the New Humanitarian that although juvenile facilities provide schooling and counseling, they are also breeding grounds for reinforcing gang systems. Without addressing these systemic failures, Haiti will keep radicalizing the very people it should be rehabilitating.\n\nThe best approach, analysts suggest, is a dual-track strategy: the Haitian police and their international partners using force to degrade the gangs' military capabilities, seize weapons, and arrest leaders, while the government creates exit pathways for rank-and-file members willing to disarm, because purely military solutions historically fail in urban gang environments. Haiti has tried such programs before. During MINUSTAH, it attempted traditional disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, which proved unsuccessful, prompting a shift to a more community-focused armed-violence reduction and prevention program; even these adapted programs faced significant challenges in urban settings. Most importantly, the government must aggressively pursue disarmament, because allowing the gangs to keep their weapons is a recipe for future chaos. Without both the stick of enforcement and the carrot of reintegration, Haiti risks prolonging the conflict.\n\nFinally, the international community must do more, particularly on funding. According to the International Rescue Committee, Haiti's crisis is among the most underfunded in the world; by the end of 2025, only 24 percent of the necessary funding had been secured, leaving 1.7 million people potentially without critical humanitarian services. Dr. Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, warned that with USAID abolished and subsequent cuts to development assistance by the UK, Canada, and the EU, many of the steps needed to reduce gang power will have scant resources. Projects to reintegrate gang members and rebuild communities will likely go unfunded, as will the basic development assistance that could boost the economy and generate jobs, and jobs are critical to offering a legal alternative to former or future gang members. Without such an alternative, many will simply return to crime, the worst possible outcome for a nation that, in the words of 45-year-old Orné Derilia, has already endured too much: \"Too much blood has been shed, we've had too many dead, we have gone through too much.\" Haiti has been through too much.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### How much of Haiti's capital do the gangs control, and how did it get this bad?\n\nBy July 2025, the UN reported that gangs controlled more than 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, a city of over three million people, and were expanding into previously peaceful areas. The roots reach back to the Duvalier dictatorship, whose Tonton Macoute militia was disbanded but never disarmed in 1986 and re-emerged as political enforcers. A recurring pattern followed in which politicians financed gangs to intimidate rivals, only to lose control once the gangs grew more powerful than their patrons. The crisis accelerated after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, leaving a power vacuum the gangs quickly filled.\n\n### What is Viv Ansanm, and who leads it?\n\nViv Ansanm, meaning \"Living Together\" in Haitian Creole, is a coalition formed when Haiti's two most powerful gang factions, the G9 and G-Pèp, united under a single banner, bringing together dozens of previously warring gangs. Its spokesman and de facto leader is Jimmy \"Barbecue\" Chérizier, a former police officer expelled from the force in 2018, who carries a $5 million U.S. bounty for his arrest. The coalition formally announced itself in early 2024 with coordinated attacks that freed more than 4,000 prisoners and sealed off the capital.\n\n### How bad is the humanitarian toll?\n\nAt least 5,601 people were killed in gang violence in 2024, with more than 2,000 injured and 1,400 kidnapped. More than 1.4 million people were displaced in 2025 alone, the highest figure ever recorded in the country. Children make up over half the displaced, child recruitment into gangs rose 70 percent, and sexual violence against children rose 1,000 percent. The economy has contracted for six straight years, with GDP falling 4.2 percent in 2024, while remittances of $4.1 billion—about 20 percent of GDP—are nearly all that prevents total collapse.\n\n### What has the international community done, and why has it fallen short?\n\nThe UN has deployed peacekeeping missions in Haiti since 1993, most notably MINUSTAH from 2004, which was credited with stabilizing security but was tarnished by introducing cholera that killed over 9,000 people and by sexual abuse scandals. After MINUSTAH's withdrawal, a Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission was authorized in 2023. Its first 400 officers arrived in June 2024, far short of the planned 2,500, and faced underfunding, language barriers, and capability gaps. By the end of 2025, only 24 percent of the necessary humanitarian funding had been secured.\n\n### What would it take to end the crisis?\n\nAnalysts argue for a dual-track approach combining military pressure to degrade the gangs with reintegration pathways for members willing to disarm, alongside economic reform to remove the incentives that drive recruitment, a larger and better-equipped police force, and justice-system overhaul to address mass pre-trial detention. The international community must also significantly increase funding; the abolition of USAID and cuts to development assistance by the UK, Canada, and the EU threaten the reintegration and development projects most needed to break the cycle of violence.\n\n## Sources\n\n1. https://archive.is/opVRg\n2. https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260207-haiti-transitional-council-transfers-power-prime-minister-fils-aimé-us-gang-violence\n3. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/7/haitis-transitional-council-hands-power-to-us-backed-pm\n4. https://www.ksat.com/news/world/2026/02/07/haitis-presidential-council-dissolves-after-rocky-tenure-as-unelected-us-backed-ruler-remains/\n5. https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/haitis-political-crisis-deepens-amid-a-slide-into-criminal-governance/\n6. https://www.caribbeannationalweekly.com/news/caribbean-news/haitis-transitional-council-steps-down-handing-power-to-prime-minister-fils-aime/\n7. https://www.crisisgroup.org/anb/latin-america-caribbean/haiti-united-states/us-gunboats-patrol-haitis-waters-amid-wrangling-over-new-government\n8. https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/latin-america-caribbean/caribbean/haiti/107-locked-transition-politics-and-violence-haiti\n9. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/11/g-s1-33654/haiti-prime-minister-garry-conille\n10. https://haitiantimes.com/2024/11/10/gary-conille-ousted-as-prime-minister-by-haitis-transitional-council-but-argues-legality-of-move-breaking-news/\n11. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/about-security-council-report\n12. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/10/haitis-transitional-council-moves-to-replace-pm-in-contentious-move\n13. https://haitiantimes.com/2024/10/15/haiti-presidency-the-presidential-council-verge-implosion/\n14. https://www.haitiresponse.org/haiti-reports/sep-23-2025\n15. https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/haiti/news/article/haiti-end-of-the-transitional-presidential-council-mandate-09-02-26\n16. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/1/kenya-haiti-sign-reciprocal-agreement-on-police-deployment-ruto\n17. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/world/americas/haiti-crisis-leadership-gangs.html\n18. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/01/roadmap-security-and-governance-reform-haiti\n19. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/02/haitis-vicious-circle-funding-needed-end-violence-violence-means-funding-doesnt-come\n20. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2022/2/14/can-Haiti-gangs-help-build-better-future-country\n\n<!-- youtube:8ZHXW1vOBI4 -->"
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It is a crisis that, for all intents and purposes, has disappeared from the global consciousness, even as the United Nations describes it as an unending horror story. For much of the past year, the world's attention has been fixed elsewhere: on Venezuela, where in January U.S. special forces captured President Nicolás Maduro during a daring raid on Caracas; on Iran, where negotiations between Washington and Tehran inch forward even as the spectre of open war grows larger by the day; and, briefly, on Sudan, where the city of El Fasher fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, leaving behind what UN experts later described as a ghost town.

These are understandable preoccupations. They are among the largest crises the world has seen in a decade, and each represents a profound failure of the international community's ability to manage and resolve conflict. But while attention has been concentrated on these wars, Haiti, the Caribbean nation of roughly 12 million people, has slipped further and further into a catastrophe with no end in sight. And unlike those other conflicts, which at a fundamental level pit a state against military forces, whether rebel groups, paramilitaries, or foreign armies, Haiti's government has been fighting gangs.

So far, the gangs are winning. In July 2025, the UN announced that gangs controlled more than 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and were pushing their reach into once-peaceful regions of the country. The result has been a humanitarian collapse of staggering scale, with millions facing hunger, more than a million driven from their homes, and a state whose authority is evaporating in real time. This is the story of how a nation lost control of itself, why its gangs grew so powerful, what the international community has tried to do, and whether any realistic path back from the brink still exists.

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## Key Takeaways

- By July 2025, gangs controlled more than 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, a city of over three million people, in what amounts to one of the most complete collapses of state authority anywhere in the modern world; even at the height of cartel violence, Mexican gangs never controlled 90 percent of Mexico City.
- The roots of the crisis stretch back decades, from the Duvalier dictatorship's Tonton Macoute militia, which was disbanded but never disarmed in 1986, to a recurring pattern in which politicians financed gangs to intimidate rivals, only to lose control once the gangs grew more powerful than their patrons.
- The 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and the 2024 rise of the Viv Ansanm coalition, led by former police officer Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier, marked the turning points that pushed Haiti from chronic instability into near-total state collapse.
- The humanitarian toll is immense: at least 5,601 people killed in gang violence in 2024, more than 1.4 million displaced, a 1,000 percent rise in sexual violence against children, and six consecutive years of economic contraction.
- The international response, anchored by a Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission, has been chronically underfunded, understaffed, and beset by language and capability gaps; just 400 of a planned 2,500 officers were on the ground months after deployment began.

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<!-- aeo:section start="a-coalition-turns-on-itself" -->
## A Coalition Turns on Itself

On Tuesday, December 9, at around 4 a.m., gunshots tore through Bel-Air, one of Port-au-Prince's most notorious gang strongholds. For years, Haitians woken by gunfire have learned to read it as one of two things: a police raid against a gang position, or gangs targeting the police. This time it was neither. It was gang members shooting at each other, raising the spectre of an all-out gang war that could plunge the city into even deeper chaos.

Dozens of gunmen died in the firefight. Bodies littered the streets, some burned where they fell. Footage and images circulating online showed the aftermath in graphic detail, including a picture of the severed head of a high-ranking gang figure identified as Dede. According to the Associated Press, dozens were killed, including 10 children. What made the episode remarkable was not the bloodshed itself but the combatants: these were not rival gangs but members of the same coalition, Viv Ansanm, turning their weapons on one another.

Viv Ansanm, which translates from Haitian Creole as "Living Together," was formed when Haiti's two most powerful gang factions united under a single banner, bringing together dozens of gangs that had spent years fighting brutal turf wars. For a nation accustomed to gang violence for decades, the merger was unprecedented. Thousands of heavily armed fighters were suddenly operating in concert, a far larger threat to the government than the sum of their parts.

According to the Miami Herald, the December clash was triggered by a dispute within the coalition over kidnappings, which had surged in recent months. One faction wanted to keep kidnapping, a major source of revenue, while another wanted it stopped. In a video released that day, Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier, a former police officer and the coalition's spokesman, stood flanked by six people he claimed were former hostages, including a 12-year-old girl. He said that one of Viv Ansanm's generals had ignored repeated warnings to halt kidnappings, prompting another faction to intervene and free the captives. "We don't want the matter of kidnapping," Chérizier declared. "Today, Viv Ansanm decided to be done with the kidnapping issue."

Sources told the Herald that the general in question was Kempes Sanon, a former police officer turned gang leader sanctioned by both the United States and the UN for supporting Viv Ansanm's terror campaign. Until very recently a close ally of Chérizier, Sanon was in hiding after being shot. Two ironies stood out: former allies, both once police officers, had turned on each other, and a coalition responsible for thousands of deaths, mass displacement, and systematic terror was claiming the moral high ground on kidnappings. The episode laid bare what many observers had long suspected, that Viv Ansanm, for all its success in uniting Haiti's warring factions, remained fragile, held together by common enemies rather than genuine ideological unity.

The violence was not confined to internal feuds. Earlier that month, heavily armed gang members attacked Haiti's central region over a weekend, killing men, women, and children as they torched homes and forced survivors to flee into the darkness. A government official in Pont-Sondé, in the Artibonite department, confirmed that nearly a dozen people had been killed. Many survivors fled to the coastal town of Saint-Marc, where one resident told the Associated Press they would no longer rely on the government and would instead take justice into their own hands.

The gangs do not, however, hold the entire country uncontested. The Haitian National Police have pushed back and scored notable wins, most recently on February 21, when an overnight operation in Kenscoff, a commune in the Port-au-Prince area, killed 16 suspected gang members. But in a country with hundreds of gangs and thousands of fighters, such victories are barely a drop in the bucket.

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<!-- aeo:section start="how-haiti-got-here-from-papa-doc-to-the-macoute-s-long-shadow" -->
## How Haiti Got Here: From Papa Doc to the Macoute's Long Shadow

By July 2025, gangs controlled more than 90 percent of the capital. The figure is worth dwelling on: nine out of every ten neighborhoods in a city of more than three million people were under the control of armed criminal groups rather than the government. Even at the height of cartel violence, Mexican gangs never controlled 90 percent of Mexico City. What happened in Port-au-Prince represents one of the most complete collapses of state authority anywhere in the modern world.

The conventional explanation points to 2021, when President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck, and armed violence became commonplace. But that account misses the deeper layers of history. To understand the present, one must return to 1957, when François "Papa Doc" Duvalier seized power to become one of Haiti's most feared dictators. The country was already in dire straits, ravaged by a succession of revolutions, dictatorships, crushing debt payments to France, 20 years of U.S. occupation, and the Great Depression. Beyond economic misery, Black Haitians chafed at being ruled by the mulatto minority, a group with one white and one black parent that, despite making up less than 5 percent of the population, has historically wielded outsized political influence. Duvalier's 1957 opponent, Louis Déjoie, was a wealthy mulatto businessman, and Duvalier rode anti-mulatto sentiment to victory.

Two years later, Duvalier created a paramilitary outfit called the Militia of National Security Volunteers, better known as the Tonton Macoute, named after a Haitian bogeyman, to serve as his enforcers. Haiti at the time was a deeply superstitious place, and, according to John Henley, the Guardian's Europe correspondent, Duvalier weaponized that belief, convincing many Haitians that the Macoute were not merely named after the bogeyman but were zombies he had raised from the dead. Over the 28 years that Papa Doc and his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier ruled, Henley writes, the Macoute killed between 30,000 and 60,000 Haitians and raped, beat, and tortured countless more.

While the Macoute committed massacres on a grand scale, the Duvaliers robbed the national treasury blind. According to historian Alex von Tunzelmann, they embezzled up to 80 percent of Haiti's international aid, while the debts they signed accounted for almost 50 percent of what the country owed. When Baby Doc fled in 1986, some experts estimated he left with as much as $900 million. Many hoped his ouster would usher in a golden era, but it did not. Stephen Keppel, a former Economist editor for Latin America, told the Guardian that for all their faults, the Duvaliers knew how to keep control; without them, Haiti fell prey to coups, ousters, and social unrest.

The most enduring damage lay in the Macoute themselves. After the dynasty fell in 1986, the militia was disbanded, but, crucially, never disarmed. According to a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, its members continued to operate informally and re-emerged as far-right vigilantes, used by politicians to intimidate opponents and voters and to disrupt rallies and elections. It would not be the last time a Haitian government, handed an opportunity to address the armed-group problem, failed to do so.

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<!-- aeo:section start="a-powder-keg-how-politicians-built-the-gangs" -->
## A Powder Keg: How Politicians Built the Gangs

In 1994, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to power after being deposed in a 1991 coup. One of his first acts was to outlaw the pro-Duvalier paramilitaries and even the Haitian armed forces. But because he never fully tackled disarmament, military pensions, or the retraining of former soldiers, those men once again morphed into armed gangs. From 1994 to 2004, gangs of former soldiers waged an anti-Aristide insurgency. In response, young people from working-class neighborhoods in the capital formed self-defense groups, which eventually merged with local police into a force loyal to Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas, the social-democratic party born of his movement.

Aristide used them extensively. In December 2001, when police officer Guy Philippe attacked the presidential palace in an attempted coup, Aristide called on the gangs to defend him. Journalist Michael Deibert, who was in Haiti at the time, told PBS: "It wasn't the police defending their government's Palais National. It was thousands of armed civilians." Yet the gangs that once protected Aristide would eventually engineer his fall, establishing a recurring Haitian pattern in which politicians and elites financed gangs to spread chaos and intimidate rivals, only to lose control once the gangs realized they had grown more powerful than their patrons.

The 2003–2004 unraveling illustrates the dynamic. One pro-Aristide militia, the Lame Kanibal, or Cannibal Army, was led by Amiot Métayer. When Métayer was killed in September 2003, gang members widely believed, according to the local outlet AlterPresse, that Aristide had ordered his death. The gangs responded not with petitions but with a violent campaign that culminated in the president's ouster. After the 2010 earthquake, according to the Global Observatory, a platform of the International Peace Institute, younger, less ideological, and more predatory gangs seized territory once held by the self-defense groups, showing far less hesitancy to cross neighborhood lines, assassinate enemies, and prey on the vulnerable.

The earthquake mattered for more than chronology. It nearly tore the country in two. Alex von Tunzelmann spoke with aid workers who described Haiti as "down there with Somalia, as just about the worst society on earth. Even in Afghanistan, there's a middle class. People aren't living in the sewers." By 2012, conditions had not improved; as donor funding dried up and youth unemployment stayed high, the gangs found an easy recruitment pipeline. The pattern held through the 2010s, including in 2016, when Jovenel Moïse of the Tèt Kale party was elected president.

Moïse's tenure was, in a word, complex. To some he was a reformer who fought the oligarchs' grip and corruption; to others he was just as corrupt, having become an oligarch himself. His harshest critics included Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, which accused his government of funding, supporting, and arming gangs that committed what amounted to crimes against humanity. In a report analyzing three attacks between 2018 and 2020 that killed at least 240 civilians in neighborhoods vocal about government accountability, the clinic documented gangs arriving to shoot residents indiscriminately, rape women, and burn and loot homes. "Moïse's government has been pushing the story that the attacks are merely gang infighting," said Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, "but the evidence demonstrates high-level government involvement in the planning, execution and cover-up of the attacks." Moïse's government denied any links, and the then-acting prime minister claimed antidemocratic forces were using the gangs to destabilize the state, but the weight of evidence pointed the other way.

About three months after the report's release, on July 7, 2021, Moïse was assassinated, and the crisis spiraled further. Months later, the New York Times reported that he had been killed because he was compiling a dossier of powerful politicians and businesspeople involved in Haiti's drug trade, intending to hand it to the American government. The reporting validated what Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier had claimed in the immediate aftermath: that police, opposition politicians, and the business community had colluded to kill the president in what he called a conspiracy against the Haitian people.

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<!-- aeo:section start="the-major-players-barbecue-the-g9-and-their-rivals" -->
## The Major Players: Barbecue, the G9, and Their Rivals

No figure looms larger over Haiti's gang landscape than Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier. A former police officer, he served in a riot squad whose members have been accused of killing protesters. According to a Guardian biography, he was expelled from the force in 2018 over alleged involvement in several crimes, including a horrific massacre in La Saline in which 71 people were killed, seven women raped, and 400 homes burned. Chérizier denied wrongdoing, but his expulsion from a police force that is, at times, more gang than police speaks volumes.

He made the leap from officer to gang leader, the Associated Press reports, by multitasking, building an armed group while still in uniform and, by 2017, controlling the Delmas 95 in the impoverished Lower Delmas neighborhood. In June 2020, he formed the G9 Family and Allies, uniting nine major Port-au-Prince gangs allegedly tied to the ruling Tèt Kale party. By 2022, a UN Security Council report found, the G9 had grown to more than a dozen gangs and ranked among the most powerful coalitions in the country.

Part of the G9's strength came from Chérizier's charisma. Sky News correspondent Stuart Ramsay described him as engaging, a natural politician, and a force to be reckoned with, traits that let him win local hearts even as his gang committed atrocities. Vice dubbed him the "Gangster King" of Haiti's chaos, and Washington agreed, posting a $5 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. "He gives women presents on Mother's Day. He gives money to families that don't have the means to send their kids to school," International Crisis Group analyst Diego Da Rin told the Guardian. "But people are aware that he is also one of the main people responsible for the nightmare they are living."

Beyond charisma, the gangs grew powerful through arms-trafficking networks supplying AK-47s, AR-15s, and Israeli Galil rifles. According to a UN panel of experts, their firepower exceeded that of the police, creating a deadly cycle: gangs expanded their reach, seized strategic locations, and imported still more weapons to expand further. Nor was the G9 alone. According to Haitian expert Djems Oliver, more than 200 armed groups operate in Haiti, with 95 in Port-au-Prince. Most are small, neighborhood-level outfits, but some rival the G9.

The chief rival is G-Pèp, led by Gabriel Jean Pierre, known as Ti Gabriel, and formed in response to G9 violence. According to Crisis Group, after the G9's creation Chérizier invited other gangs, especially in the densely populated Cité Soleil commune, to join. Those that refused, including Ti Gabriel's Nan Brooklyn, faced coordinated attacks in which members were decapitated, corpses torched in the streets, and homes burned, partly to intimidate residents into not collaborating with other gangs. The attack backfired. Rather than submit, the targeted gangs rallied around Ti Gabriel, who a month later announced G-Pèp, quickly drawing in gangs uneasy about the G9's growing power. "A two-party gang war on numerous fronts has thus superseded the old local rivalries," Crisis Group wrote, "as the G9 and Gpèp vie for overall ascendancy. Fighting has spread, with civilians stuck at home to stay out of the crossfire."

Though most expected the better-armed, better-connected G9 to overwhelm G-Pèp, the latter held its own with help from 400 Mawozo, which by April 2022 was the most powerful gang in the country. 400 Mawozo gained international notoriety in 2021 for kidnapping 17 missionaries, but within Haiti it was already feared for thousands of kidnappings targeting ordinary citizens. The consensus is that it backed G-Pèp to keep the G9 from becoming too dominant. Another major player is the 5 Segond gang, led by rapper Johnson André, known as Izo. Based in the Village de Dieu slum, it controls key transport routes, including stretches of the western coast and a major highway linking Port-au-Prince to the south, giving it a central role in arms and gun trafficking and a history of hijacking shipments by land and sea. The BBC's Vanessa Buschschlüter wrote that Izo is one of the few leaders who wields more power than Chérizier, with a $1 million U.S. bounty to match.

A final figure is less a gang than an individual: former police officer Guy Philippe, who has long coveted the presidency and once tried to seize it by coup. After that failure, according to InSight Crime, he turned to crime, laundering money, trafficking cocaine from Colombia into the United States through Haiti, and taking bribes to protect drug shipments. Elected senator in 2016, he was arrested days before being sworn in and gaining immunity, then extradited to the United States, convicted, and imprisoned for nine years; he served six before being repatriated. Haiti expert Michael Deibert called his return "pouring gasoline on an already raging fire." Though Philippe commands no gang of his own, InSight Crime reported he was often seen with armed members of the Protected Areas Security Brigade, or BSAP, a rogue government unit nominally tasked with guarding national parks that analysts say has effectively become a gang. A spokesman for demobilized soldiers told a local outlet that many BSAP members were former soldiers who fought alongside Philippe in the 2004 coup, helping explain how a government agency became his personal protection unit.

There is also a countervailing force: the vigilantes who have risen to defend their communities. The most famous, the Bwa Kale, first mobilized in 2023, according to Romain Le Cour of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, as a movement of several hundred citizens determined to restore order and punish enemies, gang members or otherwise, through violence. Rather than a formal organization, Le Cour describes it as the re-emergence of old practices of community surveillance and patrolling, a fluid mob response activated in specific circumstances such as gang attacks. Any group of citizens can form a Bwa Kale within their neighborhood. When a threat appears, residents mobilize, often via WhatsApp, gather whatever weapons they can, increasingly guns alongside sticks and stones, and chase down and frequently summarily punish suspects. The vigilantes often work with police, who offer firepower and tactical support that machetes cannot match, and who in turn gain community support, intelligence, and a proxy presence.

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<!-- aeo:section start="a-crisis-plays-out-fuel-fury-and-the-fall-of-the-state" -->
## A Crisis Plays Out: Fuel, Fury, and the Fall of the State

The collapse accelerated in March 2018, when Venezuela stopped shipping subsidized oil to Haiti, ending the Petrocaribe program that had supplied cheap fuel for over a decade. Under Petrocaribe, Haiti could defer payment on 40 percent of its oil bill for up to 25 years at just 1 percent interest, effectively a cheap loan meant for development. Losing it forced Haiti, dependent on imports for nearly all its energy, to buy oil on the open market at far higher prices. By July, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, which had promised a $96 million loan package, the government announced it would eliminate fuel subsidies. Prices soared, protests erupted nationwide, and Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant resigned, but the damage was done. The protests had already evolved from anger over prices into a broader indictment of Moïse's government and its failure to tackle the corruption that had let those who embezzled Petrocaribe funds escape prosecution.

In 2019, a 600-page Senate report released in May implicated both Moïse and his predecessor Michel Martelly in the mismanagement and theft of Petrocaribe funds. According to Time, at least $2 billion had gone missing, roughly a quarter of Haiti's entire 2017 economy, and the issue became a rallying cry because Haitian taxpayers would still owe Venezuela billions for the borrowed oil. Thousands marched demanding Moïse's resignation and were met with heavy-handed police responses. By December, when the protests waned, more than 80 people had been killed and over 200 injured, according to Freedom House. Several journalists, including Rospide Pétion and Néhémie Joseph, were killed after criticizing the government; Joseph's death came amid a spike in violence that claimed 20 lives and paralyzed the country for weeks.

The protests carried into 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic briefly suppressed street demonstrations, but the grievances remained. Moïse was ruling by decree, having dissolved parliament in January 2020 after October 2019 legislative elections were postponed; there were no checks on his power. Kidnappings, including by state-linked gangs, surged 200 percent between 2019 and 2020, and many feared a slide back toward Duvalier-style dictatorship. By early 2021, Haiti was on the brink. Protesters argued Moïse's five-year term had ended on February 7, 2021, since elections were held in 2015; Moïse countered that, because the 2015 vote was disputed and he took office in 2017, his term ran to February 2022. The dispute sparked mass demonstrations, met with tear gas and rubber bullets, and in February authorities claimed to have foiled a coup, arresting 23 people, including a Supreme Court judge.

Then, on July 7, 2021, armed men burst into the president's private residence and assassinated him, and Haiti, as observers put it, jumped off a cliff. After a brief power struggle, Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon Moïse had named prime minister days before his death, took office with international backing. Many Haitians viewed his installation as unconstitutional, arguing the absence of a functioning parliament made it illegitimate. Nominally in charge, Henry presided over a power vacuum the gangs eagerly filled, expanding operations with little resistance as already-weakened state institutions grew more ineffective. The gangs seized neighborhoods, captured key roads linking the capital to the rest of the country, and blocked ports holding fuel, triggering devastating shortages and still more protests.

By 2022, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet warned that armed violence had reached unimaginable levels; between April and May 2022 alone, at least 92 civilians were killed in coordinated attacks. On September 11, Henry announced the end of fuel subsidies, spiking prices and igniting violent protests within days, as demonstrators pillaged UNICEF warehouses, attacked politicians' homes, and set fires across the city. But it was the gangs' reaction that proved decisive. On September 12, Chérizier and the G9 blockaded the Varreux fuel terminal, the country's largest depot, storing over 70 percent of national fuel, demanding Henry's resignation and lower prices for fuel and basic goods. Gas stations and schools closed, hospitals warned their generators were running dry, and as cholera cases appeared, UN officials pleaded for a humanitarian corridor. The blockade held for nearly two months until the Haitian National Police retook the terminal on November 3 after heavy gunfire. Days later, Chérizier posted a video telling drivers and employees they could approach without fear, though he denied negotiating with Henry's government.

By 2023, violence reached unprecedented levels. In January, a Haitian human rights group reported that 78 police officers had been killed since Henry took power; by year's end, 37 more had died, 1,800 had fled the country, and the homicide rate more than doubled to 40.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. The gang emergency was compounded by a deepening political one.

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<!-- aeo:section start="an-unpopular-choice-and-the-rise-of-viv-ansanm" -->
## An Unpopular Choice and the Rise of Viv Ansanm

Henry had come to power promising a return to constitutional order and democratic elections, but he oversaw repeated electoral delays as the security crisis worsened, arguing that credible voting was impossible amid rampant gang violence and limited state capacity. The public did not accept this, especially given the lingering questions over his rise. As conditions deteriorated, with nearly half the population facing acute hunger, according to the World Food Programme, and more than 165,000 people displaced, regional observers increasingly doubted Henry would last.

Two developments in late 2023 set the stage for what followed. First, in September, Chérizier announced the formation of Viv Ansanm, a united front of rival gangs including the G9 and G-Pèp. According to Romain Le Cour, the coalition formed because Chérizier and the G9 were losing momentum while independent rivals and G-Pèp-affiliated gangs were rising. Initial attempts to consolidate failed after key leaders championing the merger were killed, but the idea of a unified gang force endured. Second, in late November, Guy Philippe returned, deported after six years in a U.S. prison. The former coup leader wasted no time organizing demonstrations and declaring his political ambitions, and on February 7, 2024, the date Haitian leaders are traditionally sworn in, he posted a video calling for a rebellion to oust the prime minister. The rebellion failed, Le Cour says, because Philippe could not secure support from key allies in the public, private, and gang sectors, but it foreshadowed what was coming.

Later that month, Henry attended a Caribbean Community summit in Guyana focused on the Haitian crisis. Although several representatives viewed him as part of the problem, a CARICOM press release on February 28 stated that Henry would remain in power until elections in August 2025. The next morning, Port-au-Prince erupted in flames, and that afternoon Chérizier formally announced the resurrection of Viv Ansanm. The gangs had united. What followed was unlike anything Haiti had seen. Coordinated attacks struck police stations, hospitals, and the international airport, and the gangs stormed the country's two largest jails, freeing more than 4,000 inmates. The scale and coordination indicated planning and inter-group cooperation impossible to arrange overnight, meaning that at some point after September 2023 Viv Ansanm had overcome the obstacles to its formation and solidified its partnership.

Henry, who had been in Kenya pushing for a UN-backed, Kenyan-led security force, found himself locked out of his own country. His plane was barred from the Dominican Republic, and he landed in Puerto Rico as U.S. officials called mid-flight urging him to expedite a political transition. Chérizier warned that if Henry did not resign and the international community kept backing him, Haiti would head straight for civil war and genocide. By early March, according to UNICEF's Catherine Russell, Port-au-Prince was almost completely sealed off by air, sea, and land, with nearly 100,000 people fleeing the capital in under three weeks and those who remained trapped in overcrowded shelters with minimal food, water, or sanitation.

On March 11, Caribbean leaders convened an emergency meeting in Jamaica, attended by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, signaling Washington's willingness to move past Henry. That evening, Henry announced his resignation, saying his government would cede power to a transitional presidential council tasked with selecting a new interim prime minister and preparing for elections. It was meant to be a new beginning, but as Michel St-Louis, a 40-year-old Haitian, told the press in front of a burned-out police station: "Haiti is now under the control of the gangs. The government isn't present." The gangs had won.

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<!-- aeo:section start="the-international-response-a-history-of-mixed-results" -->
## The International Response: A History of Mixed Results

The international community has long been involved in Haiti, with mixed results at best. In September 1993, the UN deployed its first peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Mission in Haiti, the first of a succession of missions with varying mandates and strength over the next seven years. Then, in 2004, after Aristide fled, the Security Council established the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, which began with 8,000 personnel and grew to 13,000 after the 2010 earthquake. MINUSTAH was tasked with supporting the transitional government, monitoring and restructuring the Haitian National Police, assisting with disarmament, and protecting civilians.

But scandal dogged the mission from the start. Nepalese peacekeepers introduced cholera to Haiti in 2010, ultimately killing more than 9,000 people. UN troops were implicated in sexual abuse: in 2012, two Pakistani peacekeepers were jailed and dismissed for raping a 14-year-old boy, and a leaked 2015 report found UN peacekeepers had engaged in transactional sex with at least 229 women who traded sex for money, food, and medicine. Though credited with helping stabilize Haiti's security and supporting its police, MINUSTAH saw its military contingent withdrawn in 2017 and its police contingent in 2019, forced out by the United States as part of a global effort to cut peacekeeping costs. Many in Haiti and abroad called the withdrawal premature given the still-precarious security situation. The mission was replaced by the much smaller UN Mission for Justice Support in Haiti, which ended in October 2019, and then by the UN Integrated Office in Haiti, which lacked the active components the country needed for security and stability.

That gap became glaring by 2022, when Henry was forced to ask the UN to deploy specialized forces to support an overwhelmed police. Haiti had first requested help earlier that year as violence surged but could find no country willing to lead a mission, with many governments wary of backing Henry's unelected administration and of intervening where previous missions had been marred by abuses. Then, in July 2023, Kenya stepped forward, saying it acted in solidarity with a brother nation. On October 2, 2023, the Security Council authorized a Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission for an initial 12 months.

The deployment immediately ran into trouble. In January 2024, a Kenyan opposition politician petitioned the Nairobi High Court, which ruled that deploying police to Haiti was unconstitutional and invalid. Kenyan President William Ruto countered by signing a reciprocal agreement with Henry in Nairobi on March 1, 2024, ironically the very moment Viv Ansanm put Port-au-Prince under siege. Even then, delays persisted. Sources in Kenya's Interior Ministry told the Global Initiative that an exploratory team found Haiti ill-prepared, with the barracks meant to host the contingent still incomplete.

The first 400 Kenyan officers finally arrived on June 25, 2024, but the mission immediately faced operational problems. According to the New Humanitarian, some officers said they received about $155 a month, roughly a fifth of what they had been promised. The force was also badly understaffed: though slated for 2,500 officers and soldiers, the 400 Kenyans deployed in late June were largely left alone. They lacked resources, struggled with language barriers since most spoke neither French nor Haitian Creole, and faced doubts about their suitability for urban counter-gang operations they had never conducted. In September 2025, the Security Council authorized transforming the mission into a Gang Suppression Force with a more forceful mandate including arrest authority, but it faces the same challenges, including slow deployment.

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<!-- aeo:section start="a-transitional-council-plagued-by-crisis" -->
## A Transitional Council Plagued by Crisis

The military effort was only one part of the international response. Just as important was support for Haiti's governments, including the Transitional Presidential Council that succeeded Henry, meant to exercise presidential powers until an elected president was inaugurated or until February 7, 2026, whichever came first. It was plagued with problems from the start. In October 2024, Haiti's Anti-Corruption Unit accused three members, Smith Augustin, Gerald Gilles, and Emmanuel Vertilaire, of abuse of function, bribery, and corruption, alleging they had demanded $750,000 in bribes from the chairman of the National Bank of Credit to secure his appointment. All three denied wrongdoing and refused to resign.

The council also became entangled in a public power struggle with Garry Conille, its pick for interim prime minister. According to the Security Council Report, disagreements arose over the division of responsibilities, the appointment of certain cabinet ministers, and the handling of corruption allegations against the three council members, with Conille resisting a cabinet reshuffle amid the bribery claims. The conflict came to a head in November 2024, when the council replaced Conille with businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. The move drew fire from legal experts; former Justice Minister Bernard Gousse called the dismissal illegal, citing both the council's overreach and the corruption allegations against it. The International Crisis Group reported that violence rose as news of Conille's ouster spread, with gangs ramping up attacks in October 2024, emboldened by the security forces' apparent weakness and the government's distracting infighting.

The council also faced accusations of links to the very gangs it was meant to combat. In January 2026, the U.S. State Department imposed visa restrictions on two council members and their families over involvement in gang operations. Washington imposed further restrictions on four council members and a minister after the council tried to oust Fils-Aimé in what was widely seen as an attempt to prolong its grip on power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed the importance of Fils-Aimé's continued tenure to combat the gangs and stabilize the island, and soon after, Washington deployed a guided-missile destroyer and two U.S. Coast Guard boats to patrol the bay of Port-au-Prince. Coming barely a month after the U.S. capture of President Maduro in Venezuela, the move read as a statement of how far Washington would go to keep Fils-Aimé in power. On February 7, the Transitional Presidential Council dissolved as scheduled, transferring its remaining powers to the prime minister. France 24 reported that Fils-Aimé was the only politician with executive power in the country, left with the unenviable task of organizing elections in a violence-gripped nation, with a fractured political class and a public that has lost faith in the system.

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<!-- aeo:section start="the-human-toll-displacement-children-and-economic-collapse" -->
## The Human Toll: Displacement, Children, and Economic Collapse

The casualty figures, grim as they are, barely scratch the surface of what every regional observer agrees is one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history. In 2024 alone, at least 5,601 people were killed in gang violence, an increase of more than 1,000 over 2023, according to figures verified by the UN Human Rights Office, with more than 2,000 injured and 1,400 kidnapped. In October 2024, the Gran Grif gang killed at least 115 people in Pont-Sondé in what ACLED described as the deadliest incident in Artibonite since it began collecting Haitian data in 2018, likely a retaliation for locals allying with the Jean Denis self-defense coalition. A few months later, at least 207 people were killed in a massacre orchestrated by the leader of the Wharf Jeremie gang in Cité Soleil; many victims were older people accused of killing his son through alleged voodoo practices, and gang members mutilated and burned most of the bodies or threw them into the sea.

The violence has produced what World Relief called the worst displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere. In October 2025, the UN estimated that more than 1.4 million people had been forced from their homes that year alone, the highest figure ever recorded in the country and a 36 percent increase since the end of 2024, making Haiti the country with the largest number of crime-related displacements globally. The UN estimates that 83 percent of displaced Haitians rely on already-overstretched host communities of acquaintances, friends, and family, while the rest struggle in spontaneous sites. Compounding the strain, more than 270,000 Haitians have been deported back to the country, further burdening its overwhelmed social services.

Children bear the heaviest burden, making up over half the displaced population, and the education system is near collapse. In January 2025 alone, armed groups destroyed 47 schools in Port-au-Prince, adding to 284 destroyed in 2024, and more than 1,600 schools across four departments have closed, disrupting learning for over 243,000 students. UNICEF estimated that one in seven Haitian children was out of school, with nearly a million more at risk of dropping out. UNICEF also reported that child recruitment into armed groups surged 70 percent, with children making up as much as half of all members; spokesperson James Elder said most were taken by force, while others were manipulated or driven to join by extreme violence.

There has also been a staggering 1,000 percent rise in sexual violence against children, coinciding with a spike in the gangs' use of sexual violence overall. Between January and October 2024, nearly 4,000 girls and women reported sexual violence. Humanitarian workers told Human Rights Watch that many survivors are reluctant to report or seek care for fear of retaliation, and that those who do often cannot reach help within the critical 72-hour window for post-exposure prophylaxis and emergency contraception, because public medical facilities are closed by violence or because they cannot afford private care.

The economic damage has been equally catastrophic, with Haiti enduring six consecutive years of economic contraction and GDP declining 4.2 percent in 2024. Agriculture saw the steepest fall at 5.6 percent, hitting the poor hardest, while industry shrank 4.7 percent amid worsening conditions and mass textile-sector layoffs. The IMF projected a further 2.2 percent contraction in 2025 and a 1.2 percent contraction in 2026, with investment and consumption dampened by insecurity and inflation. Foreign direct investment is near total collapse: the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reported FDI inflows fell to $23.6 million in 2023 from $39.4 million in 2022, while the neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares Hispaniola, received $4.75 billion in 2023, a 17.3 percent increase. The only thing keeping the economy from complete collapse is remittances, which reached $4.1 billion in 2024, roughly 20 percent of GDP, though even that lifeline is strained as deportations surge. The country's infrastructure, already poor, has deteriorated further; of a road network with only about 1,000 kilometers paved, much has been damaged by floods and landslides. An engineer in Haiti's public works ministry told the World Bank that the absence of basic infrastructure was so severe it limited access to basic services and denied farmers access to markets. Taken together, the picture is of a country where, even if the gangs laid down their arms today, rebuilding would take decades of sustained effort and investment.

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<!-- aeo:section start="what-will-it-take-to-end-the-crisis" -->
## What Will It Take to End the Crisis?

Observers have proposed several solutions, from military intervention to negotiating with the gangs. One controversial idea is to include the gangs in any political settlement. Some see this as capitulation to criminals, but proponents argue the gangs are already deeply embedded in Haiti's political system, and any solution that excludes them is doomed. The International Crisis Group has noted that gangs increasingly portray themselves as defenders of the poor to improve their image and pursue political recognition, and that Viv Ansanm, despite lacking legal status, presents itself as a political movement capable of fielding candidates in future elections. The coalition has worked to rebrand, distributing money and gifts, installing electricity in underserved neighborhoods, and handing out school supplies, all while still using violence to maintain control.

Negotiating with armed groups is not as outlandish as it sounds; governments throughout history have done so to end conflicts, especially when victory by force is unlikely. The question is whether such talks would bring genuine peace or simply entrench the gangs' power. Crisis Group analysts believe it would likely be the latter, with gangs hoping to use negotiations to install allies in government and secure amnesty, but the group also argues that talks aimed at protecting civilians and disarming the gangs would serve Haiti as a first step on the long path to stability.

Any solution must also address the economic incentives driving young people into gangs. The New Humanitarian reported that children and teenagers can earn anywhere from a few dollars for errands to roughly $40 or more a week for other tasks, a princely sum where most Haitians live on less than $2 a day. As long as gangs offer better economic opportunities than the state, recruitment and the crisis will continue. Fixing the economy so those incentives vanish is essential but daunting, given six years of contraction, dwindling foreign investment, and crumbling infrastructure. The government must also address the cycles of vengeance that drive recruitment; one 17-year-old told UN officials he had joined a gang to avenge his father, killed by a rival gang. Without reconciliation processes that acknowledge harm on all sides, Haiti risks generation after generation seeking retribution.

A well-funded, properly equipped police force will be crucial. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Haitian National Police has shrunk from more than 15,000 officers in 2021 to fewer than 13,000 in 2024, less than half what a country of 11 million needs, and many officers live in gang-dominated neighborhoods, leaving the force vulnerable to intimidation and collusion. Haiti will need to invest heavily in retaining, recruiting, and training officers while ensuring they are better armed and protected than the gangs they fight.

The justice system also needs significant investment. As of November 2025, 82 percent of detainees were in pre-trial detention under conditions the UN called inhuman and degrading. William O'Neill, the UN's Designated Expert on human rights in Haiti, described prisons as unbelievably crowded and hot, with too little food and scant medical care; 52 people died in detention in the last three months of 2025, many from diseases that should not have killed them. Conditions in juvenile facilities are especially alarming, with some children waiting more than five years to see a judge while held in cells that sometimes hold 40 to 60 minors. Kettly Julien, who runs a human rights organization working in correctional facilities, told the New Humanitarian that although juvenile facilities provide schooling and counseling, they are also breeding grounds for reinforcing gang systems. Without addressing these systemic failures, Haiti will keep radicalizing the very people it should be rehabilitating.

The best approach, analysts suggest, is a dual-track strategy: the Haitian police and their international partners using force to degrade the gangs' military capabilities, seize weapons, and arrest leaders, while the government creates exit pathways for rank-and-file members willing to disarm, because purely military solutions historically fail in urban gang environments. Haiti has tried such programs before. During MINUSTAH, it attempted traditional disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, which proved unsuccessful, prompting a shift to a more community-focused armed-violence reduction and prevention program; even these adapted programs faced significant challenges in urban settings. Most importantly, the government must aggressively pursue disarmament, because allowing the gangs to keep their weapons is a recipe for future chaos. Without both the stick of enforcement and the carrot of reintegration, Haiti risks prolonging the conflict.

Finally, the international community must do more, particularly on funding. According to the International Rescue Committee, Haiti's crisis is among the most underfunded in the world; by the end of 2025, only 24 percent of the necessary funding had been secured, leaving 1.7 million people potentially without critical humanitarian services. Dr. Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, warned that with USAID abolished and subsequent cuts to development assistance by the UK, Canada, and the EU, many of the steps needed to reduce gang power will have scant resources. Projects to reintegrate gang members and rebuild communities will likely go unfunded, as will the basic development assistance that could boost the economy and generate jobs, and jobs are critical to offering a legal alternative to former or future gang members. Without such an alternative, many will simply return to crime, the worst possible outcome for a nation that, in the words of 45-year-old Orné Derilia, has already endured too much: "Too much blood has been shed, we've had too many dead, we have gone through too much." Haiti has been through too much.

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<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### How much of Haiti's capital do the gangs control, and how did it get this bad?

By July 2025, the UN reported that gangs controlled more than 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, a city of over three million people, and were expanding into previously peaceful areas. The roots reach back to the Duvalier dictatorship, whose Tonton Macoute militia was disbanded but never disarmed in 1986 and re-emerged as political enforcers. A recurring pattern followed in which politicians financed gangs to intimidate rivals, only to lose control once the gangs grew more powerful than their patrons. The crisis accelerated after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, leaving a power vacuum the gangs quickly filled.

### What is Viv Ansanm, and who leads it?

Viv Ansanm, meaning "Living Together" in Haitian Creole, is a coalition formed when Haiti's two most powerful gang factions, the G9 and G-Pèp, united under a single banner, bringing together dozens of previously warring gangs. Its spokesman and de facto leader is Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier, a former police officer expelled from the force in 2018, who carries a $5 million U.S. bounty for his arrest. The coalition formally announced itself in early 2024 with coordinated attacks that freed more than 4,000 prisoners and sealed off the capital.

### How bad is the humanitarian toll?

At least 5,601 people were killed in gang violence in 2024, with more than 2,000 injured and 1,400 kidnapped. More than 1.4 million people were displaced in 2025 alone, the highest figure ever recorded in the country. Children make up over half the displaced, child recruitment into gangs rose 70 percent, and sexual violence against children rose 1,000 percent. The economy has contracted for six straight years, with GDP falling 4.2 percent in 2024, while remittances of $4.1 billion—about 20 percent of GDP—are nearly all that prevents total collapse.

### What has the international community done, and why has it fallen short?

The UN has deployed peacekeeping missions in Haiti since 1993, most notably MINUSTAH from 2004, which was credited with stabilizing security but was tarnished by introducing cholera that killed over 9,000 people and by sexual abuse scandals. After MINUSTAH's withdrawal, a Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission was authorized in 2023. Its first 400 officers arrived in June 2024, far short of the planned 2,500, and faced underfunding, language barriers, and capability gaps. By the end of 2025, only 24 percent of the necessary humanitarian funding had been secured.

### What would it take to end the crisis?

Analysts argue for a dual-track approach combining military pressure to degrade the gangs with reintegration pathways for members willing to disarm, alongside economic reform to remove the incentives that drive recruitment, a larger and better-equipped police force, and justice-system overhaul to address mass pre-trial detention. The international community must also significantly increase funding; the abolition of USAID and cuts to development assistance by the UK, Canada, and the EU threaten the reintegration and development projects most needed to break the cycle of violence.

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources

1. https://archive.is/opVRg
2. https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260207-haiti-transitional-council-transfers-power-prime-minister-fils-aimé-us-gang-violence
3. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/7/haitis-transitional-council-hands-power-to-us-backed-pm
4. https://www.ksat.com/news/world/2026/02/07/haitis-presidential-council-dissolves-after-rocky-tenure-as-unelected-us-backed-ruler-remains/
5. https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/haitis-political-crisis-deepens-amid-a-slide-into-criminal-governance/
6. https://www.caribbeannationalweekly.com/news/caribbean-news/haitis-transitional-council-steps-down-handing-power-to-prime-minister-fils-aime/
7. https://www.crisisgroup.org/anb/latin-america-caribbean/haiti-united-states/us-gunboats-patrol-haitis-waters-amid-wrangling-over-new-government
8. https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/latin-america-caribbean/caribbean/haiti/107-locked-transition-politics-and-violence-haiti
9. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/11/g-s1-33654/haiti-prime-minister-garry-conille
10. https://haitiantimes.com/2024/11/10/gary-conille-ousted-as-prime-minister-by-haitis-transitional-council-but-argues-legality-of-move-breaking-news/
11. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/about-security-council-report
12. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/10/haitis-transitional-council-moves-to-replace-pm-in-contentious-move
13. https://haitiantimes.com/2024/10/15/haiti-presidency-the-presidential-council-verge-implosion/
14. https://www.haitiresponse.org/haiti-reports/sep-23-2025
15. https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/haiti/news/article/haiti-end-of-the-transitional-presidential-council-mandate-09-02-26
16. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/1/kenya-haiti-sign-reciprocal-agreement-on-police-deployment-ruto
17. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/world/americas/haiti-crisis-leadership-gangs.html
18. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/01/roadmap-security-and-governance-reform-haiti
19. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/02/haitis-vicious-circle-funding-needed-end-violence-violence-means-funding-doesnt-come
20. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2022/2/14/can-Haiti-gangs-help-build-better-future-country

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