Haiti’s Agents Of Fear

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — On a recent late July afternoon patrol of Grand Rue, an intimidating mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle carrying Kenyan police broke down. Two officers in beige combat gear carrying automatic weapons alighted in the blazing midsummer heat to fix it. These officers are a fraction of the nearly 400 troops who have arrived in Haiti from Nairobi since late June; and a fraction of the thousands of armed gang members they are expected to defeat.

The United Nations has estimated that more than 80% of the Haitian capital is in the hands of gangs who, for more than two years, have outgunned the national police force and boldly claimed they will do the same to the African troops now slowly moving on foot and faulty MRAPs through their hazy streets.

The Haitian word for mechanical breakdown is pann — a wonderfully functional word. It’s used to vividly and metaphorically describe the debilitation of any system such that even the failure of the state itself can be like a faulty car: broken and in dire need of assisted repair.

For the last century, Haiti has seen many iterations of foreign boots on the ground promising to fix its democracy for good. And Haitians have endured rapidly intensifying street violence since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, which left a power vacuum that gangs with long-held links to the power elite in Haiti quickly filled.

So critics of the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission — newly formed by the UN Security Council to avoid associations with its past “peacekeepers,” who were implicated in introducing and spreading cholera in Haiti — were quick to use pann to describe the mission after news of the MRAP’s breakdown circulated.

The MSS intervention, like all the others before them, had stalled and was headed for a similar breakdown, these cynics told me. The foreigners, they argued, simply did not understand Haiti. Their mission is an pann (or had broken down). 

Over the coming months, the MSS force is expected to swell to 2,500 officers.  And Haitians are watching to see what this new group of invaders will do, often literally. Within minutes, videos of the broken-down MRAP hit social media. From London, I watched it closely on my smartphone. Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines, which most people call Grand Rue, was a street I knew well for its vibrant commerce. Here it was barren and colorless, blanched by violence and gang battles.

What struck me most was not the spectacle of slightly embarrassed Kenyan soldiers struggling to tow the top-heavy armored vehicle, but the phalanx of Haitians filming every second of it. They ran alongside breathlessly giving commentary or filmed off redoubts across the road and motorcycles.

Haitians more firmly control the narrative of their country’s crisis, but this isn’t always a good thing. Social media has created celebrities out of criminal gang leaders. Armed, masked and brandishing an aggressive but still fragile machismo, these gangster-cum-influencers have become the faces of a new Haiti — one that the Kenyans are expected to help rebuild by first ending the lawlessness of gang violence.

No one has benefited more from this aberrant version of people power than Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who leads the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies. Out of the 200 or so active criminal organizations in the republic, it is one of the best known.

His fame largely comes from his ability to use social media to give meaning to his cause. As he tells his followers on social media, he is not a thuggish gang chief but a freedom fighter, and his G9 is not a vast enterprise responsible for hundreds of murders, kidnappings and routine sexual violence, but a political movement.

“I am just fighting for our upcoming generation in 10, 20, 30 years for them not to carry guns like us,” Chérizier told Vice in 2021.

It was Chérizier’s forces, emerging from their base in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas in March, that blocked the return of Moïse’s interim successor, Prime Minister Ariel Henry, and forced his resignation. This ignited a worsening of the current crisis and prompted the UN to fly foreign police officers with little understanding of the reality of Haiti’s problems halfway across the world — from East Africa to the northern Caribbean — to help fix them. 

Changes in public image occur peculiarly in Haitian life. Deprivation and conflict leave vacuums, and in a country of great privation, they are easily filled by people with marginal preparation for the roles they assume. It is a feature I have seen repeatedly among all classes in Haiti.

In 2004 I met a peasant farmer at a camp for displaced Haitians in eastern Jamaica. He had been gifted a necktie from a local church charity. Once donned, a formality in his manner suddenly took hold. The others called him avoka (lawyer) simply because of his new look. This small change made him their de facto representative, a role far removed from that given him by birth. That necktie seemed to give him a measure of democratic power. 

So it is with Chérizier. Born in Delmas and raised for the most part by a single mother, who was a fried chicken vendor, Chérizier became a police officer with links to the underworld before ascending, over the years, to the top of a violent criminal hierarchy.

His rise owed much to a purported alliance he forged with Jovenel Moïse, the former president, who was rumored to have leaned on the G9 to preserve his executive power. In the aftermath of Moïse’s assassination, gangs consolidated their rule and Chérizier emerged supreme.

He likes to tell the cameras he is as important as any politician; in his flights of fancy, he compares himself to Malcolm X and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s liberator, who in 1804 made an independent republic out of a revolutionary movement organized by brutalized enslaved Africans.

On a wall in Chérizier’s Delmas base is graffiti of the man in a black beret fashioned to look like Che Guevara — only now it is Chérizier who foreign journalists seek out. After the Kenyans arrived in Haiti, a clean-shaven Chérizier put on glasses, a white turtleneck and a maroon three-piece-suit, and announced his demand to work with the Transitional Presidential Council to get Haiti back on the road to democracy. 

For Chérizier, the Kenyans are invaders, racially like the Haitians but symbolically no different from the French colonizers, the U.S. Marines who governed the country until 1934, or the UN forces who descended after the 2010 earthquake.

True democracy and peace, he believes, can only come internally, from the Haitians on whose behalf he claims to speak. His position is a clever concealment, for Chérizier — the most prominent of a twisted network of gang leaders who proudly post images of dead bodies and burned-out police stations to social media — is where he is not because he is loved, but because he is feared. 

Inherited Fear

In the Caribbean, fear has its own history. It came in the 15th century with the Spanish, who used extreme violence to conquer the archipelago island by island. And it was central to the institution of chattel slavery and colonial rule — expanded by primarily England and France — that brutally controlled unfree African and Caribbean communities first through slavery and then colonialism over the centuries that followed.

From this legacy, violence soaked itself into the island’s societies. Later, Haiti’s independent rulers used fear to keep themselves in office. Fear traveled with those who fled to exile and with their descendants when they escaped the worst of post-independence authoritarian oppression.  

The 21st-century agents of fear are urban gangs. They have especially spread through the poorest sections of the Caribbean’s cities and are incredibly mobile, using smartphones, cars and motorcycles to expand their reach. On my visits to Haiti over the past decade I have been reminded of aspects of my childhood in Kingston, Jamaica, where during the 1970s, political gangs set the pace of life in the city’s poorest areas.

Young men and boys fought each other in the name of politicians, parties, turf and honor. As long as the leaders — called dons in Jamaica — kept the communities loyal to the political leader, the dons could enjoy untrammeled jurisdiction. But Haiti is also unique from its neighbors.

The gangs in Haiti are now all-powerful. Fear is consuming the country. Since 2021, some 700,000 people have fled their homes. Boats laden with displaced Haitians are taking the treacherous journey across the Caribbean Sea for the U.S., Latin America and neighboring Caribbean islands, with greater frequency. 

Each time a crisis in Haiti comes to global attention the focus is less on the reasons for it than on how to repair it. One approach always rises above others: foreign intervention of various kinds — from diplomatic missions to military occupation to peacekeeping operations.

Each of these so-called solutions has resulted in claims of success by the occupying forces, but they seldom last, for the challenges Haiti faces are complex and historically ingrained. In conversation with Haitian friends, it has become clear to me that they, like everyone else, are struggling to find a way to understand what the latest Kenyan-led intervention can do.

Part of the problem and reason for the skepticism is the conviction among Haitians that interventions from “developed” nations always seem to start from an assumption of superiority. In the summer of 1888, President Lysius Salomon dealt with an uprising of opponents in Port-au-Prince by instructing followers to torch half the city, turning more than 400 homes to ash.

Looking from his home at the rising flames, a British diplomat laid bare in a letter his racial prejudice against Haitians and their abilities to rule an independent state: “All I can say is Haiti is a disgrace to Europe. England and France ought to take the matter in hand and blot out a republic that is a disgrace to humanity.”

Ever since, Haiti has been prey to the prejudices, misunderstandings and abuses of outsiders, often in fatigues and rubber boots, who believe as the British diplomat did in 1888, that Haiti was a “disgrace.” The 1915 assassination of President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam prompted U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to send U.S. Marines to Haiti, then the Caribbean’s oldest republic. U.S. Marines occupied the country until 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt withdrew them under his “Good Neighbor Policy” — an agreement brokered by the U.S, with Latin American nations meant to replace military intervention, with cooperation and trade, and that aimed to leave regional politics up to state leaders no matter the nature of their rule.

After the U.S. Marines withdrew — with many promises to build a stable democracy but few lasting improvements — tensions between what Haitians wanted and what elite politicians reared on their own definition of democracy were willing to do, galvanized a genuine movement among everyday Haitians for change.

Élie Lescot, the pro-U.S. president who waxed on about “the mystery of democracy” while acquiring dictatorial powers, was the target of a student-led national protest for democracy in 1946. Eventually shuffled into the back of a government car and put on a plane, he was soon replaced by Dumarsais Estimé. Praised by his allies as the symbol of a new politics in Haiti, the thin and balding Estimé had one foot in the peasant countryside of his birth and the other in the world of old politics that saw executive rule as sacrosanct. Change had come. 

But that change grew malignant when Estimé did not want to leave. When senators rejected his attempts to alter the constitution, he commissioned street gangs to back him up. In May 1950 they stormed and trashed the Senate as it met, ripping up the seats, tearing through the paperwork and lifting tiles from the flooring. 

That afternoon Estimé stood on the steps of the National Palace and addressed the nation. The mob’s actions were demonstrations of the “eloquent,” “political maturity” of the true agents of democracy. The word “democracy” had made a comeback. But this time it was bent to form. Democracy could be guns and pillage. Estimé’s end came with that speech. The army, as the main power broker in Haiti, organized a coup and exiled Estimé, who lived briefly in France, Jamaica and then New York before his death in 1953.

The solution to the Haitian political crisis after Estimé’s fall was to be worked out internally. The Haitian Army then was strong. It was a force reconstructed by U.S. Marines in the 1920s that had become an institution of social prestige and political power.

The military top brass had the same desire for power as the parliamentarians. The leader was a general, Paul Magloire, who became president following Estimé, and he ruled with a firm hand, the only type of rule he believed could manage Haiti. His enemies chafed and ran underground. One of them was the medical doctor and intellectual, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

Whatever semblance of democracy there was in the 1950s could not survive what followed. Magloire overplayed his hand. Democracy could not mean an extension of his rule, so he was toppled and Duvalier pounced. Then he changed the game. In 1964 he proclaimed himself president for life, passing the title on to his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” seven years later.

To guarantee the longevity of Duvalier’s rule, he went beyond the military and the streets by establishing an army known as the Tonton Makout, loyal only to him and rival in size to the national army. For decades the image of Haiti under Duvalier that was reproduced in magazines and newspapers was of menacing Makout officers with sunglasses carrying rifles and revolvers.

The Makout were supported by the state and armed by the likes of the U.S., who were willing to enable Caribbean and Latin American autocrats in return for their commitment to block the spread of communism in the region. Makout violence was part of Duvalierism. Those who survived chose not to speak too much about that period. 

The Duvalier years stretched to 1986 when the son was undone by time and greed. Like all dictators, Baby Doc did not want to leave, so he was forced out. Then democracy became the word of the ‘80s. Troops of foreign journalists stationed themselves in Haiti to file reports on another new beginning that came with the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.

Aristide was Haiti’s great hope. A former Salesian priest and social justice advocate, he was the bridge between the ideals of Haiti’s 18th-century liberators and its political future. He was viewed in international circles as a reformer — the first elected leader in Haiti’s first general elections in 1990; the face of Haitian democracy. But he unnerved the elite, who were wary of what Haitian democracy would mean for their long-held prestige, as well as the army’s top brass, who wanted to remain Haiti’s main power broker.

Aristide’s days were numbered. Overthrown in a coup in September 1991, he was exiled and fled to the United States for much of the remainder of the decade, before returning in 1994. In 2000, he ran for president again, this time virtually unopposed. The margin of victory was absurd: 91% for the former priest. It would long be bitterly contested by his enemies, who believed that Aristide in his second political incarnation had transformed a genuine movement into terror.

His every public utterance still drizzled with words of peace, but this 21st-century Aristide was molded of concrete, fixated only on power. And when it was time to yield that power, he called on street forces to intimidate and disrupt. It was the beginning of a new era of gang violence in Haiti.

Signs of this had come during the 2000 election. At an opposition rally in Port-au-Prince in the run-up to the vote, young men with rucksacks stood along the perimeter of the crowd, waiting for it to swell, before spraying them with urine-filled soda bottles. I had been near the rally the day that happened. When I spoke about it with friends later, they laughed. It had seemed only mildly spiteful. Then came the kidnappings, nighttime marauding and unsolved murders of independent journalists. The laughing stopped.  

On the streets, people scurried about with barely contained worry over possible assaults or kidnappings. With this new fear came an unraveling of security. The special forces of the Haitian National Police — reformed by Aristide after he disbanded the army in 1994 — were accused of extrajudicial killings, and on the streets, armed gangs of youths, known as chimères, caused great havoc.

An internationally supported rebel movement of former army officers then took advantage of the disorder, and after Aristide’s overthrow in 2004, he went into exile, first to the Central African Republic, then to Jamaica where I met him. It was our second meeting that year.

At first, when he was still in power, he had erupted with his legendary energy, convinced that the investment in Haitian democracy would keep him safe. At the second, he was a man overthrown, cordial but quieter. I kept the conversation light. I asked him who was the Haitian president he most admired. He named two: his successor Réné Préval and Dumarsais Estimé, the man whose collapse seemed to oddly prefigure his own.

After Aristide was overthrown in 2004, Haitian politics was fractured. There had been a lot of killings. Insurgents and paramilitary forces with attachments to international criminal networks clashed with gangs.

The outside world, which observes Haiti with a mix of woe and disdain, came in. It was, they said, to save Haitian democracy; it was, they meant, to contain the flight of tens of thousands of Haitians. By that summer, the UN had a peacekeeping force in the country known as the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which under UN Resolution 1529 was intended to “support a peaceful and constitutional solution to the crisis in Haiti.”

Thousands of peacekeepers dressed in military fatigues flew in from Nepal, Brazil and other UN member states, settling in Haiti. They promised this time it would be different.

Luiz Carlos da Costa was the Brazilian UN deputy special representative for MINUSTAH in Haiti. It was his job to ensure that all sides honored the commitment to building a functional democratic structure. He had seen conflict before, in Liberia and Kosovo, and believed strongly in peace and democracy.

In Haiti, he initiated projects with poor youths in the slums around the capital to give them alternatives to the forces that drew them into gangs. Da Costa was soft-spoken with deep reserves of patience, and when I spoke with him in 2009, he soberly assessed Haiti’s problems.

There was no easy solution, he told me. The politics of power brought distrust and intransigence that had to be delicately negotiated. Arrangements made after weeks and months of careful planning could fall apart with one personal disagreement. Violence could follow.

He had read the country correctly. As he spoke, I thought of a jumble of electric wires, each coiling into the next. Finding the origins of each wire required considerable forbearance to work through the knots lest the whole system short-circuit. 

More Troubles

Then an unexpected new disaster hit. On Jan. 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake —the worst in the Caribbean since Jamaica was hit by a massive estimated 9.5 magnitude temblor just over a century before — shook Port-au-Prince and nearby areas, killing hundreds of thousands of people, including da Costa, who was in his office when it struck.

Rubble-lined streets emptied of hope was the image of Haiti projected by global media. The country and its people had to adjust to turmoil of an entirely different origin. All that preceded it — Estimé, Duvalier, Aristide, the silent embrace of the past — seemed no longer relevant. The slate, Haitian academics in Port-au-Prince told me, had been wiped clean. 

But the past never retreats unreckoned. A few weeks after the earthquake I was in Port-au-Prince. As I visited places I knew well that had been leveled to mounds of concrete dust, the unsettled past lay there. MINUSTAH jeeps moved between neighborhoods training their massive weaponry on stunned, poor people trying to rebuild. It seemed so offensive.

Then-president Réné Préval, a reformer in Aristide’s Lavalas Party who was twice elected to the presidency in 1996 and 2006, became a hollow man ridiculed by Haitians and outsiders alike for his inability to adequately respond to the catastrophe. Political leadership was in short supply.

One afternoon, seeking a moment of solace, I went to a restaurant in the affluent suburb of Pétion-Ville, a 36-minute drive southeast of Port-au-Prince. The only other diners there were Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly — a celebrity musician and singer of the Haitian dance music, Konpa — and his family. I wondered what he thought of his country now.

That answer came a year later when Martelly surprised everyone by running and then winning the presidency in May 2011. It was a strange time. Baby Doc was allowed to return without sanction to live out his remaining years. Aristide also returned. And Haiti was being run by a former pop singer with no political experience but considerable U.S. support. 

International focus on Haiti faded. Missionaries still filled flights from Florida to Port-au-Prince, but major television stations stopped sending crews and charities stopped holding concerts. The world had moved on. It was in this period — from Martelly’s election to 2017, when the MINUSTAH forces began their departure — that the old and new problems of protecting a fragile democracy in a political culture where abuse of power was the norm and was often tolerated by outside forces, merged.

What resulted was a startling intensification of gang violence and an increased sense of fear. That new fear was engineered by state elites and political leaders who supported criminality in the poorer sections of the capital in return for gang protection of their political influence in these neighborhoods. This past August, Martelly was sanctioned by the U.S. government for his involvement in narcotrafficking and gang sponsorship.

Backward & Forward

The Kenya-led intervention stands a better chance of making a lasting difference than prior interventions, if it first sees Haiti’s current violence as not just a Haitian inheritance, but as part of the longer-term crisis that post-colonies share. The arriving troops must understand and treat the country as they do their own, as a fragile state reared on pain and violence, struggling to find faith in democracy. Like those in East Africa, gangs in Haiti and the wider Caribbean feed on the poverty and anger of their youth. Consequently, the Kenyans — and indeed any international body seeking a path forward for Haiti — will need to work not only with security forces and the state but also with civil society stakeholders.

It won’t be easy. The gangs have now outgrown the politicians. They have built their own economies, fueled by drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion — and created their own mini-democracies in the ruins of the bidonvil (shantytowns). Their scale and strength were made absolutely clear after the assassination of Moïse in 2021, when they began to take over more territory across Port-au-Prince and beyond.

The fear Haitians now live with is almost impossible to imagine. News reports carry the substance of the violence and chart the loss — some 2,500 people killed or injured in gang violence in the first quarter of 2024 — in a country of just 11 million. But these are only numbers. The psychic injury carried by those who live with violence cannot truly be quantified. Haitian governments over the years have tried to cover the scars of the past.

After 1986, when the last of the Duvaliers left power, the state removed all mentions of him from public buildings and educational materials — a sort of official “erasure” of his legacy that also tends to cloud stories of their terror. The erasure of the Duvaliers has been so successful that in more recent times, amid the shock and pain of the hundreds of armed gangs, high schoolers in Port-au-Prince told me they wished to return to a dictator like Papa Doc, who could end the present horror. They imagine a different Port-au-Prince, one where they can move freely through the streets and gather at all-night konpa clubs and football matches, where they don’t have to walk close to the city walls and crouch to avoid stray bullets.

It is not the young alone who fantasize about how life was better under an autocrat. Foreign news reports of the violence since Feb. 29, when Cherizier’s men shot at the airport and brought more hell to the streets of Port-au-Prince, include comments from middle-aged Haitians trapped in their homes, suggesting that life was so much better under the Duvaliers. 

In the neighborhoods dominated by gangs, some people have bought into a narrative that presents these gangs as caretakers of their communities — the only protectors in a city of extreme insecurity; small monarchs of a crumbling kingdom. The measure of their valiance is in the swath of neighborhoods they proclaim theirs, the size of their masked battalion and the noisiness of their arsenal. 

I have known that same narrative from my youth in Jamaica: It is a camouflage for fear. In 2010, the year of the earthquake in Haiti, there was a massive army incursion in Kingston’s Tivoli Gardens to fulfill a U.S. extradition request for drug charges of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, the community’s local leader.

The community responded first with protests, saying the man they called “prezi,” short for president, was a good man. He made sure they ate, their children went to school, and that they could come home unharmed at night. He made peace. The incursion of foreigners, not the local gangs, was the real destabilizer. In conversations then and after with people from the area, they told me that all that posturing was out of fear: fear of what would happen if they did not follow rules laid down by Coke. Under his watch children could go to school, they said, but girls were sexually assaulted by gang members. The police also cowered under Coke’s power and could not break it.

When the incursion led to a bloody standoff between the army and Coke’s allies, it became an international news story. At the time, I thought of the people I spoke with from there and wondered if their fear — so palpable that they did not seem to feel the breeze or the warmth of the sun, for nothing was good anymore — had lifted, even if the pain of losing loved ones in the violence remained.

In Port-au-Prince there are many such “Tivoli Gardens,” and each one is much larger than any of the so-called garrisons in Kingston. In the neighborhood of Bel-Air, the one-time base for poorer migrants in the capital, a federation of gangs now dominates. They torch the homes of rivals, maul the bodies of their victims and leave them in the open spaces to stiffen in the heat. Sounds of gunfire intimidate residents as rivals and others are killed or wounded; meanwhile, men rape for power.

The patterns repeat daily in Port-au-Prince, up through the suburbs of Pétion-Ville and into the mountains beyond. The little girl in the sprawl of the crowded Delmas 95 area, like the little girl in the more affluent Pelerin 5, are both being raised amid this new, distorted fear; it is the Caribbean problem at its most complete.