Haiti Has Collapsed: What Happens Next?

It finally happened. After years of growing warnings from analysts, reporters, and diplomats, the nightmare scenario came to pass. Haiti has collapsed — not in the sense commonly used to describe a nation overrun by armed gangs, but a genuine, full-on state collapse.

The kind of failure that Somalia underwent in the 1990s. The government has crumbled, leaving no central authority. The police forces have all but evaporated.

The streets are now completely under the control of armed groups that burn and rape and loot and murder at will. As Foreign Policy put it: “The Haitian state has functionally disintegrated.” The collapse of Haiti is not something that exists only on the news — a sad story to make readers feel bad before they scroll onto something else.

It is a real nightmare unfolding a mere 1,000 km from Florida. One that is a tragedy for Haitians, but also an event with the potential to destabilize the Western hemisphere.

The March 2024 Gang Uprising That Broke Haiti

The immediate causes of the collapse are clear. Toward the beginning of March, the unelected and unpopular prime minister Ariel Henry left Haiti to fly to Kenya for a meeting with President William Ruto. The reason was to seal an agreement whereby Nairobi would send a UN-backed force of 1,000 policemen to Port-au-Prince to help dismantle Haiti’s gangs.

Unfortunately for Ariel Henry, the gangs struck first. With Henry out of the country, Haiti’s warring criminals did something they had never done before: they joined forces. Under the leadership of former policeman Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, the gangs rose up in a coordinated, sustained bout of violence.

Over the next few days, prisons were ransacked and thousands of prisoners were freed. Vital infrastructure — including airports and ports — was attacked. The outburst was similar to that which gripped Ecuador back in January, when a gangster uprising saw the government briefly lose control of the streets.

But Quito had the resources to declare a state of internal armed conflict and deploy the military nationwide. While things remain shaky, the Ecuadorian government is at least back in control. Haiti, on the other hand, was incapable of fighting back.

To see why, look no further than the employment figures for Haiti’s security services. After the army was disbanded in the 1990s, it was only reformed in 2017 — and then more as a praetorian guard than an actual military. The New Yorker reports that there are only 500 active members.

The Haitian National Police, meanwhile, has between 5,000 and 8,000 officers to police a nation of over 11 million. New York City alone has 36,000 officers. With such a deficit in numbers, Haiti’s police were quickly overwhelmed.

The Weekend of March 9-10 and Ariel Henry’s Forced Resignation

The weekend of 9th–10th March saw the nation drowned in chaos. The details are eye-popping — the kind of reports one might expect from an actual civil war like the one in Sudan. Indeed, Foreign Policy has argued that the term “gang violence” should be abandoned in relation to Haiti, replaced by language acknowledging that the nation is suffering an active insurgency.

It is hard to disagree. Aside from opening and burning prisons, the gangs attacked government buildings, including the Interior Ministry. Police stations were torched, as was the home of Police Chief Frantz Elbe.

The Financial Times reported “roadblocks and gun battles.” The New York Times wrote that “dead bodies are rotting on the streets.” As gangs took over people’s homes, refugees flooded into public spaces, desperate to find safety.

Faced with such violence, Ariel Henry’s plane was unable to land. Diverted to Puerto Rico, he was told by American and Caribbean leaders to resign. On Monday, March 11, he did exactly that — making way for a Transitional Council intended to guide Haiti back to stability.

For many, the blame for Haiti’s collapse can therefore be laid at Henry’s feet. Certainly, the mild-mannered neurosurgeon played a big part in it. Never elected, Henry was appointed to his post in mid-2021 by President Jovenel Moïse, just two days before Moïse was himself assassinated.

Despite his lack of mandate, Henry assumed control of the government, promising to hold already-delayed elections. Instead, he kept on delaying them — clinging to power even as the country’s last elected officials saw their terms expire, even as his popularity sank and gangs seized control of 80 percent of Port-au-Prince. As the Times put it: “The catastrophic situation Haiti finds itself in today was not inevitable.

It is a direct result of the dithering and delay by Henry and his government, who until recently had the firm backing of the United States and other regional powers.” But to say the current situation was wholly the fault of Henry or his backers is to ignore the longer history — the deeper reasons why Haiti’s gangs were able to execute a takeover that the equally brutal gangs of Ecuador were unable to pull off.

Historical Roots: How Haiti’s Elites Created the Gangs

The deepest reason of all is the twisted connections tying Haiti’s gangs firmly to the nation’s elites. Back in the 1990s, Haiti was emerging from a long period of dictatorship and instability. Baby Doc’s regime had fallen in 1986, and a 1991 military coup had removed the nation’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from power.

This led to a 1994 intervention that restored Aristide. But with trust in the military now so broken, the president disbanded it. Speaking to the Financial Times, Professor Robert Fatton explained what happened next: “When he disbanded the army, you had all kinds of political factions, including Aristide himself, who started to create armed groups that would defend the interests of those particular groups.

And I’m talking about a wide variety of people in the business community, people in conflicting political parties.” These armed groups would become the seeds of today’s gangs. Not simple street hoodlums, but non-state actors with elite connections who would use the threat of violence to push elite interests.

That might include gangs forcing everyone living in their territory to vote for a specific candidate. It might involve settling business disputes with bullets. A parasitic relationship developed between Haiti’s one percent and the gangs terrifying its streets.

The leader of the new gang alliance illustrates this perfectly. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier founded his gang G9 in 2020, a time when there was a growing protest movement against President Jovenel Moïse. Allegedly, Moïse used G9 against the protestors, keeping the streets quiet through fear.

The reporting group Insight Crime claims that G9 got half its funding from the president in that era. Such a situation was not unusual in Haiti. Recent attempts by the USA and Canada to sanction those connected to the gangs have discovered evidence linking everyone from business leaders to senators to these armed groups.

The point is not that Moïse was a criminal, but that effectively Haiti’s entire elite is. The only thing that has changed is that the power balance has shifted in favor of the gangsters. As Insight Crime states: “Prime Minister Henry’s resignation underscores how, for the first time, street gangs that once answered to political and economic elites have now emerged as Haiti’s dominant power brokers.”

The Transitional Council and the Gangs’ Political Ambitions

The fight surrounding Haiti’s planned Transitional Council reveals the extent of the gangs’ political ambitions. Mandated by regional grouping CARICOM, the Transitional Council is supposed to be a gathering of seven members — plus two non-voting observers — from across Haiti’s political spectrum. AP News reports that seats have been reserved for groups like civil society leaders Montana Accord; former President Aristide’s old party Fanmi Lavalas; the parties of other former presidents; Ariel Henry’s December 21st Agreement group; and the private sector.

Representatives of civil society and the religious sector hold observer seats. At the time of writing, the gangs are trying to use their leverage to get seats on the Council. Chérizier released an audio message on WhatsApp that seemed to threaten the families of anyone who joined a Council that excluded the gangs, saying: “I’ll know if your kids are in Haiti, if your wives are in Haiti … if your husbands are in Haiti.”

As the New York Times summed it up: “What is apparent is that the gangs are trying to capitalize on their control of Port-au-Prince, the capital, to become a legitimate political force in the negotiations being brokered by foreign governments.” This is why Foreign Policy insists the situation in Haiti should be understood not through the lens of gang violence, but through the lens of insurgency. These actors are not just out for money and business opportunities — they want to take political control of Haiti, to push through a “revolution” they feel will benefit them.

In his audio message, Chérizier talked about how Henry’s resignation was only the “first step in the battle.” In past interviews, Chérizier has tried to frame his actions as an anti-elite uprising, drawing a distinction between the lighter-skinned Haitian “elites” and darker-skinned residents like himself whom he characterized as Black. His stated goal was to ensure Haiti’s Black people took charge of their own destinies.

To be clear, Chérizier is a man who has overseen a gang infamous for randomly killing civilians and using rape as a tool of revenge. But the point is to show how Haiti’s meltdown has more in common with a full-blown civil war than a temporary breakdown in law and order — that Chérizier and other players are actively aiming to take over the Haitian state. Among these other players, perhaps the most prominent is Guy Philippe, a former coup leader recently released from a US prison after serving a six-year sentence for money laundering and drug trafficking.

Philippe is not exactly a gang leader so much as a figure trying to start a grassroots revolution, aided by opposition leader Moïse Jean Charles, whose Petit Desalin party was offered a seat on the Transitional Council only to refuse. Charles and Philippe appear to be plotting to use this crisis to bring themselves to power. As part of his positioning, Guy Philippe has started calling for an amnesty for the gangsters, trying to reframe them as marginalized people with no other choice.

He told the Times: “Those young girls, those young boys, they have no other opportunity — to die starving or to take weapons. They chose to take weapons.”

The Humanitarian Catastrophe on the Ground

While the current crisis may have a political dimension, there are also signs that the gangs’ new alliance was opportunistic. United Nations human rights expert William O’Neill has argued that the Kenyan police deployment Ariel Henry went abroad to agree put the fear of God into the gangs, whose members are mostly teenagers. Fearing defeat if the mission went ahead, they instead combined forces to ensure the deployment would never happen.

If that is the case, they succeeded. After Henry resigned and Haiti plunged into anarchy, Nairobi indicated its police would not be deployed after all. And likely with good reason — with the way things stand, it is hard to see how anything aside from full military intervention could restore order.

As of March 15, things in Haiti are in a truly dire state. Nearly the whole of Port-au-Prince is under the control of the gangs. Insight Crime reports that key transport routes and 90 percent of water sources have also fallen to the armed groups.

Up to 5.5 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. With key ports for importing food affected by the chaos, it is thought one million could be on the brink of famine. Meanwhile, over 350,000 are internally displaced — driven out of their homes by the fighting.

The scale of this humanitarian catastrophe is staggering for a country only two hours’ flight from Miami. The collapse of infrastructure, the seizure of water sources, and the disruption of food imports have created conditions in which mass starvation is a genuine possibility. The internally displaced, crowding into public spaces with no security guarantees, face continued threats from the armed groups that drove them from their homes in the first place.

Military Intervention, Haitian-Led Solutions, and the Refugee Crisis

All of which raises the pressing question of what happens now that Haiti appears set to become a North American Somalia. One possibility is that the international community accepts the need for another military intervention, a mere seven years after the previous UN force left Haiti. The Hill reports that a recent Zoom call between representatives of CARICOM, the US, Canada, France, Brazil, and Mexico ended with the insistence that members of Haiti’s new Transitional Council must be supportive of an “international security mission” to be eligible for a seat.

But a military intervention is easier said than done, not least because no one knows who will lead it. The United States has long refused to lead another Haiti mission, lest it be portrayed as a colonialist adventure. Canada, Brazil, and Mexico have all previously ruled themselves out.

Nor is the UN’s divided Security Council likely to agree on the contours of a bigger mission than the Kenyan police deployment. It does not help that some aspects of Haitian society are fighting hard against outside interference, fearing it will keep the cycle of instability and intervention ticking over indefinitely. On the other hand, Haitian-born professor Robert Fatton told the Financial Times that intervention might be necessary: “The situation is catastrophic for so many people in the capital city that one can probably assume that if there is a foreign intervention that would be effective enough to stop the violence and tame the gangs, that there would be support.”

However, he added that it would have to succeed in its goals very quickly, lest drawn-out fighting turn the population against it. An oft-touted alternative to foreign military deployment is some kind of Haitian-led initiative, although no one is sure if such a thing is even possible at this stage. Columnist Lydia Polgreen suggested it could work, but: “It will require a leap of faith, and a whole lot of help, financial and otherwise.”

Financial help — even if large — is preferable to a military intervention that could turn into a quagmire. But it depends on Haiti’s elites working together in ways that have eluded them for years to solve the country’s political gridlock. Unfortunately, it is not even clear how that gridlock could be solved.

The key demand since before Ariel Henry was even appointed to office has been new elections, but it is hard to see how it is physically possible to hold them amid such violence. Even if the gangs could be convinced to allow free and fair elections, Foreign Policy points out that it likely would not result in long-term change. The majority of Haiti’s elites are connected to the gangs.

And with a fragmented system of over 250 registered political parties, any election might just create new gridlock and new resentments without fixing anything. For governments in the Western hemisphere, walking away is unlikely to be an option. If Haiti’s collapse is not arrested, the result will be a massive refugee crisis.

Things are already becoming increasingly chaotic near the border with the Dominican Republic. In the United States, there is growing fear in the White House that Haiti’s meltdown will spark an exodus by sea — small boats, each carrying hundreds of Haitians, trying to make the dangerous journey to Florida’s shores to escape the unrest. According to CNN, Washington is drawing up emergency plans to turn part of Guantanamo Bay into a processing center for Haitian refugees.

But that will still require dangerous at-sea interceptions by the US Coast Guard. Haiti is in a state of freefall. A country two hours’ flight from Miami is in danger of becoming a Caribbean Somalia, with all the instability that could imply.

Each potential option — from military intervention to simply walking away — comes with myriad pitfalls and ways it could wind up making everything worse. The only certainty is that something needs to be done, because Haiti is sliding into the abyss, and the longer leaders wait to act, the worse it will get — and the more acute the suffering of Haiti’s ordinary people will become.

Sources

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2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/world/americas/haiti-gangs-ariel-henry.html
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