Haiti was the first country in the world where enslaved people defeated their slavers, liberated themselves and established a republic in 1804. But crises shaped by brutal imperialist interests and a roguish local ruling class that together show the bestiality of capitalism in its most unalloyed form, have marked its chequered history. This has reduced the country to what some have described as a failed state.
Contending gangs, with ties to different sections of the weak and corrupt ruling class, and gangsters, several of whom have roots in the police, have become lords and masters of the public sphere. The United Nations says violence unleashed by these gangs claimed over 5,600 lives and left thousands more injured, not to talk of those kidnapped last year alone. Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, added that “these figures alone cannot capture the absolute horrors being perpetrated in Haiti”.
A Multinational Security Support (MSS) occupying force, composed largely of Kenyan police, has been deployed to curb the violence. This has been of little effect. An interim transitional presidential council was established in Jamaica for the country as the crisis consumed whatever vestiges of legitimacy the Haitian state might have tried to hold on to. The mandate of the council, with members from an array of the bosses’ political parties, coalitions of parties and what is left of an organised private sector, ends on 7 February 2025. It could not wield any reasonable form of state authority. People allege that three of its seven voting members engaged in corrupt practices, bribery, and abuse of office.
The mass of working-class people in Haiti have not simply been observers despite the challenging context of the crisis. Poor working people and youth, through self-defence militias, resisted the gangs, forming Bwa Kale, a resistance movement from below which the distraught ruling class demonised. Only Haiti’s working people, rising against imperialist and lackey capitalist forces’ oppression, will secure Haiti’s liberation, as they did two hundred and twenty-one years ago.
We must stand with them in solidarity, tear away the shroud of half-truths behind the situation they are facing which informs the dominant narratives, demand action that will enable popular power from below to arise and call for justice for a new Haiti, including reparation for years of its despoliation and exploitation.
Thus, in the following sections, we first put the current crisis into perspective. Then we look at the rich history of revolutionary struggle in Haiti, and then the capitalist rule’s descent into overtly gangsterish dynamics. Finally, we interrogate foreign occupation’s persistent failure in addressing the catastrophe imperialism has inflicted on Haiti, and underscore the need for a revolutionary alternative, which can be brought to birth only from below, by the Haitian working people.
A deepening crisis, popular resistance & the international community
The spiralling crisis that has engulfed Haiti at the current moment started in July 2018. Jovenel Moïse of the ruling Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK) who had emerged as president the year before after a series of massively rigged elections introduced sharp cuts in fuel subsidies, that resulted in a 51% rise in fuel pump price. This was based on the directive of the IMF as a conditionality for the $96 million that the country’s government was negotiating with the World Bank. Massive working-class resistance erupted in the streets. The government was forced to reinstate the fuel subsidies.
This did not pacify the working masses. They protest movement expanded its demands to include Moïse’s abdication of power, the constitution of a transitional government, trial of the broad array of corrupt politicians across party lines, and state welfare policies that would benefit the poor masses. Moïse met the people’s resistance with the most brutish of violence.
He used the police for this. But that was not all. He was not only a businessman and corrupt politician. Like Michel Martelly, his predecessor from the same party and following a long traditional with Haitian politicians over the decades, he had his own gangs of heavily armed and well-funded area boys, whom he unleashed. And he did this with support from the same international community that are now shedding crocodile tears. As The Nation magazine captured it, he could “do no wrong grandiose or cruel enough to call his regime into question—at least not according the international community”.
But the wind, which was sowed, birthed a whirlwind of economic disaster, social catastrophe and political turmoil, which has lasted to date. The economy has been in sharp recession since then, with inflation also rising to 49.3% in January 2023. Whilst it declined to 30% by the second half of 2024, most Haitians can still barely afford enough to live on.
Half of the country’s population of 11.7 million people is on the brink of starvation. 22% of the children are severely malnourished. Public healthcare is in shambles, worsened by a series of cholera epidemics that swept through poor neighbourhoods in 2022 and 2023. By 2024, two thirds of the hospitals in the country were inoperative. Even those outside the major theatres of gang violence lacked medical supplies and fuel.
Last year alone, over 700,000 people were displaced because of activities of these armed groups, according to Save the Children. And 2.4 million school-age children have not been able to go to school as more than a thousand public schools across the country have been closed for years.
The whirlwind consumed President Moïse himself in 2021. The falcon of the gangs no longer heard the cry of the falconer of the ruling class, and mere anarchy was loosed upon the land. Kidnapping for ransom, homicides, and protection racketeering by coalitions of gangs became the order of the day. The ruling class has been unable to rule since then. Ariel Henry took up the role of acting Prime Minister after Moïse’s assassination and intrigues to fill the power vacuum.
Interestingly, his illegitimate emergence was at the behest of a body called the “Core Group” made up of ambassadors of the United States, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Brazil and the European Union, in Haiti. Thus, from the very beginning to his exit in 2024, he could not rule, and was also beholden in his impotence to imperialist interests as the broken puppet in a macabre puppet show.
In October 2022, he issued the first of his series of letters to the United Nations appealing for the “immediate deployment of a specialised armed force” to come and help to restore peace. Working behind the curtains, the United States tried to get some countries to take up this responsibility. This is because, on the one hand, its historical crimes against Haiti are so grave and clear. And on the other hand, a proxy invasion suits the USA better than direct intervention, particularly after its humiliating expulsion from Afghanistan by the Taliban.
Canada was the first country to be approached. The Canadian government turned this American interest down and tried to get neighbouring countries like the Dominican Republic to do the dirty job of boots on the ground, promising both Canadian and United States financial support, to no avail.
These pressures from the United States and its allies like Canada reached a frenzy in May 2023. This was because the Haitian masses had started to organise themselves and fight back to defeat the gangsters and take back their lives and dignity, as the decentralised Bwa Kale self-defence movement.
It started spontaneously on the morning of 24 April 2023. Residents in the Canapé-Vert neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, stormed a police station where police held 14 gangsters. They dragged these thugs out, lynched them and burned their bodies. From this first brutal step against a brutish force, the spark was lit for nationwide resistance. And it spread like wildfire, extending to six out of the eight regions of the country within a few weeks.
In several neighbourhoods in these regions, or departments as they are called in Haiti, hundreds of people marched on the dens of gangsters terrorising the neighbourhood, and apprehended and summarily executed them. There was little use in handing them over to the police, in the view of the people. Not only are the police ineffective, they are also corrupt through and through. In fact, many of the gang leaders are ex-police officers!
The people did not leave their flanks open. They set up barricades on roads leading to their neighbourhoods. They collectively resolved on curfew periods, during which detachments of the Bwa Kale patrolled. And be it daytime or at night, wherever gangsters were sighted in the vicinity of communities, people would start hitting pots and pans to alert others.
Between May and July that year, homicides and other crimes declined at an impressive rate. There was an indisputable lull in gangsters’ activities. In fact, several gangs leaders saw no choice but to hail the Bwa Kale movement, and claim to support them, whilst they withdrew their gang members away from the communities to avoid getting lynched.
But what was the response of the ruling class and imperialist forces which had been complaining about the country being ungovernable?
Within days that the movement started, Ariel Henry asked the people “to remain calm” despite “whatever they may have suffered at the bandits’ hands.” Shortly after, websites funded by USAID started demonising the Bwa Kale movement, claiming that it posed “future criminal threat.”
This was despite the fact that a month before the Bwa Kale was born, the country’s minister of justice had pointed out that there were constitutional provisions for citizens to defend themselves against burglars breaking into their homes or people pillaging their property. This was a demonstration of the helplessness of the state to provide security for the people. But when the people moved, the ruling class feared the power of such a popular armed working people’s force.
Initially, even the police were happy that at last, the citizenry was helping them to do what they had lost the capacity to do; provide security in the neighbourhoods. But the erosion of the police’s repressive function, even hampered as it had already become, troubled them.
The police top brass thus tried to incorporate the Bwa Kale in urban areas, similar to the way the Nigerian Army incorporated the Civilian JTF in Borno and later some other states in Northeastern Nigeria. But in light of the castigation of Bwa Kale by the president and Western imperialism, the police also became critical of the militia force and tried to get them to disband. But they did not.
In July 2023, at the peak of the power of the Bwa Kale, Ariel Henry sent another letter to the United Nations reiterating his plea for an international force, which had gone unheeded since October 2022. Three months later, the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC) authorised the establishment of a Multinational Security Mission (MSS) for Haiti.
But, even before this decision of the UNSC was reached, the William Ruto government of Kenya offered to dispatch police officers to Haiti.
Haiti: a history of revolution, intervention and subjugation
Haiti has a chequered history. It was born through a revolution that raged from 1791 to 1804. Black people enslaved by France rose up in arms, defeated their slave masters, liberated themselves, and established a republic. This was the first insurrection of its type in history.
And right from that onset, imperialist forces have persistently invaded and waged war in one way or the other against liberated Haiti. It was the wealthiest of the colonies in the Caribbean and generated more wealth for France than any of its other colonies. So, the French did not want to let it go. Despite the fact that France had shown Europe the way to liberation from kings, nobles and priests with the 1789 revolution, where it declared “the rights of man”, it refused to respect the liberation of Black Haiti.
This was like the United States, where Blacks were still being enslaved well after 1776 when its founding fathers had claimed that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were unalienable rights of humankind.
In 1825, France forced Haiti into an “agreement” to pay 150 million francs as compensation for the loss of its “property”. This so-called “property” was the population of enslaved Black people who had liberated themselves to establish Haiti. The “negotiations” were done with French warships stationed on the coast of Haiti, with the threat of invading the country if it failed to accept the terms of “compensation.”
This was much more money than Haiti could ever pay, even on an instalment basis. The first year’s instalment amounted to six times the total annual revenue of Haiti.
Eventually, France settled for the payment of 112 million francs, which amounts to $32.5 billion in today’s money. This was still a huge amount for the country to pay. It did not finish paying it until 1947. So, for 122 years, the Haitian people’s revenue was largely being used to pay their former slave masters, for liberating themselves!
However, the French were not the only imperialist power that made life hard for the poor people of Haiti. Germany, and particularly the United States’ imperialism moved in to plunder its natural and human resources. Imperialist rivalry drove this expansion of accumulation, as is the capitalist nature of imperialism.
For several decades, the USA did not recognise Haiti, fearing that this would “undermine their own systems of slavery and white supremacy” according to the historian Brandon R. Byrd. And when it eventually did, it was with the intent of controlling and plundering the country on one hand and curtailing French and German imperialism in the Western hemisphere, on the other.
In the most brazen of ways, the United States invaded Haiti in 1915. It immediately seized control of Haitian banks, including directly carting away $500,000 from the Haitian National Bank, for what it described as safe-keeping in New York. It then remained in that county as an occupation force until 1934. Thus, for two decades, America usurped the sovereign powers of Haiti with no pretence, and ruled it like a colony.
According to the Washington Post, during the 19 years of direct occupation, “US forces executed political dissidents and implemented a system of forced labour that ravaged Haiti’s peasant population. Thousands of people died.”
Many of those killed were workers who went on strike for improved working and living standards. Peasants known as Cacos also organised insurgent resistance. They were brutally killed. The occupying Yankee force crushed their resistance with the massive force of arms. In total, the American forces massacred over 15,000 Haitians.
During this period, the US did not only pillage, it “shaped Haiti in important and often damaging ways.” One of the ways it made sure this was permanent was by re-drafting the constitution of Haiti. Progressive laws such as the ban on foreign ownership of land, for example, were repealed. When the puppet legislative house the Americans put in place surprisingly rejected these constitutional amendments, it was dissolved. And the Americans supervised the drafting of a new constitution directly.
Having laid the foundations for the subjugation of Haiti to its imperialist designs, the United States’ occupation was ended. But even when they left, the Americans directly controlled Haiti’s finances until 1947. It also continued to intervene without the slightest respect for Haitian sovereignty for many decades.
Cold War politics informed America’s imperialist relations with Haiti from the 1950s to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The Duvalier dynasty, which ruled for most of that period despite its horrendous record, was propped up because the Duvaliers were staunchly anti-Communist.
The collapse of the rule of the Duvalier family coincided with the decline and fall of the Soviet-led East bloc. A popular uprising swept the dynasty into the dustbin of history. However, the absence of a mass-based party of the working-class people that could provide leadership for the uprising created a vacuum in power which the military stepped in to fill by constituting an interim government. This paved the way for Haiti’s first genuinely elected government in February 1991. The president and head of this government was the populist priest, Jean-Betrand Aristide. Eight months later, a coup d’état ousted Aristide.
Emmanuel Constant, who was head of FRAPH (Front Révolutionnaire Armé pour le Progrès d’Haiti, in English: Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti), a paramilitary gang that attacked supporters of Aristide and participated in the coup has categorically informed the world that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) colluded with the military generals to overthrow Aristide in September of the same year. Over 5,000 people were murdered in those nine months.
The military junta, which took over after the coup, had close ties with the Cali Cartel. Despite the Drug Enforcement Administration stressing that the junta played a key role in drug trafficking, the United States government supported it. This is just one example of how the US’ war on drugs is targeted, and not genuine at heart.
Aristide and his supporters in the diaspora did not rest on their oars. They organised mass demonstrations that drew tens of thousands of people in the United States and put pressure on the Clinton administration. In 1994, the United States led the so-called Operation Uphold Democracy, a multinational military intervention to dislodge the junta, after its leaders reneged on an earlier agreement with their boss, the US imperialist state, to hand power back to Aristide.
During his second term in office, from 2001, Aristide also utilised thugs more often. But this was not what turned imperialist forces against him. In 2003, Aristide demanded reparations of $21 billion from France as restitution for the so-called compensation the French had foisted on Haiti at gunpoint, not to talk of the exploitation of enslaved people before the Haitian Revolution.
The following year, he was forced out of power and into exile once again. The New York Times reported that at least a dozen top officials of Haiti and France, including Thierry Burkard, who was the French ambassador to Haiti, confirmed that France and the United States were alarmed by the call for reparations. And they acted in concert with local opposition forces to oust Aristide from power.
The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) stepped in on the heels of French and US troops to legitimise the 2004 coup d’état as an occupation force. MINUSTAH, officially disbanded in 2017, spawned the so-called “Core Group,” or “friends of Haiti.”
We can thus see a long unbroken thread of imperialist interventions, including occupations to subjugate Haiti, since its historic defeat of the Spanish, the French and the despicable institution of slavery.
A criminal ruling class and its symphony of gangs
Imperialism laid the foundation of Haiti’s perpetual crisis. Working hand in hand with the United States, the ruling class laid blocks of repression and criminal extortion of the people on the foundation to build today’s “Hammer House of Horror” that the country has become. And they have done this with the use of gangs over the last 68 years, starting with Francois Duvalier, who was better known as Papa Doc.
Papa Doc came to power in 1957 with a seemingly radical black nationalist agenda. But less than two years later, he established a ruthless machine for repression that was answerable to only him: the Milice Civile (Civilian Militia), which in 1962 he renamed as Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (in English: Volunteers for National Security) in 1962. The Haitian people infamously called this secret death squad the Tonton Macoute.
This undercover paramilitary body assassinated his political opponents, instigated violence, raped and killed Haitians at will (sometimes leaving the corpses hanging on trees as warning signs) to instil fear in their hearts. Despite their official status, these first sets of gangs that have been woven into the politics of Haiti also carried out extortions, killing people that did not pay up.
Haven consolidated his power with this officialised gang, he declared himself as a life president in 1964, with the power to pick his successor. And when he died in 1971, his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier was sworn in as president, with a constitution that vested him with absolute power. Like his father, he was exceedingly corrupt, repressed any opposition at home, and was rabidly anti-Communist.
The United States preferred him because he did not have any black nationalist pretence like his father. He was thus ready to do all their bidding. Arguably, the most notable of this was in 1982 when he agreed to kill every creole pig in Haiti to curb the spread of an African swine fever epidemic which started in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
This was because the Americans were afraid it would spread to the US and affect their own pork industry. But that action left scores of thousands of Haitians bankrupt. The creole pig was to them what cattle are to the Fulani in West Africa.
This contributed to rising unemployment, worsening living conditions and increasing poverty in the early 1980s as the global capitalist economy entered its most severe recession, at the time, since the Second World War. The economic crisis led to widespread discontent, which even Tonton Macoute gangs he had inherited from his father could not contain. In October 1985, a popular revolt started in one of the country’s provinces. By January 1986, the whole country was engulfed in a series of mass protests. He fled the country for France in February with hundreds of millions of dollars he had stolen from the Haitian people.
An interim “national council of government” led by the military under Lt Gen Henri Namphy stepped in. It dissolved the parliament as well as the dreaded Tonton Macoute. But the Macoutes remained armed. Strikes and mass protests continued under the military. The military met these with ruthless repression. In 1987, soldiers killed 22 striking dock workers, while ex-Macoutes killed 140 protesting peasants at the instance of landlords. These marked the beginning of the use of gangs as unofficial means of repression of the poor masses, used by the different factions and layers of the propertied classes in and outside the government.
Every government since then, both civilian and military (in the wake of several coup d’états) spawned and used gangs, or paramilitary bodies. Opposition parties and business people also had gangs that they used. A gangsters’ paradise element became integral to the social and political life of Haiti by its ruling class. This partly reflects the weakness of Haitian capitalism and its state. In a macabre manner, these extra-state armed bodies took on the repressive role of the state in an inchoate manner.
Initially, a significant number of the gangs and their leaders’ origins could be traced to the Tonton Macoute. By the 2000s, the Macoutes had become history, becoming to today’s gangs what the homo erectus was to today’s homo sapiens.
It is also worthy of note that several gang members and leaders used to be police officers. A graphic example is Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, leader of the so-called “Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies” (FRG9), a coalition of more than a dozen gangs with bases in the Haitian Capital. He is probably the most powerful gang leader in the country. But before then, he was a police officer in the elite “Unit for the Maintenance of Order” of the Haitian National Police.
He was a close ally of President Jovenal Moïse and acted with impunity during Moïse’s reign as president. In this period, Chérizier is known to have organised several massacres in which upwards of 200 people were killed. Top officials of the Moïse government also provided weapons, vehicles, and even police equipment to the FRG9 for these massacres.
The so-called gang takeover of Haiti over the last two years is not merely a matter of informal criminality. Fundamentally, it’s a political problem, a thread woven into the concrete fabric of capitalism in Haiti; it reveals how the ruling class has preserved its collective dominance over the poor. And at the root of this is the long history of how imperialism has shaped capitalist development in the country, since smashing the victory of the Black Jacobins out of fear for the spectre it represented.
Conclusion: between foreign intervention and power to the people
Foreign boots on the ground have never helped the people of Haiti. Every invasion has led to more problems than they claimed to have come to solve.
The United Nations had several “peacekeeping” and “stabilisation” missions in Haiti first in the 1993 to 1996 period and then between 2004 and 2017. But there are little positive developments to show for these. Not only did they fail to stem the tide of violence and corruption, they introduced what has now become regular epidemics of cholera, which have left over 10,000 people dead and almost a million Haitians infected at different times.
These so-called peacekeepers also left a legacy of systematic sexual exploitation and abuse including the rape of Haitian women and girls as young as seven years.
These detestable acts were not only by armed peacekeepers. Senior officials of charity organisations like Oxfam were equally implicated in sexual exploitation of Haitian girls when they came, ostensibly to “help” Haitians in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. And the organisations further covered this up!
Like capitalist governments, charity organisations also used their seeming concern for the poverty and suffering of Haitians, to milk Haiti during occupations. The Red Cross for example raised half a billion dollars ostensibly to help rebuild working class neighbourhoods that were devastated by the earthquake.
However, while its operatives on the ground were riding around in expensive jeeps, collecting fat per diems and saying our successful their activities in the country had been, just six houses were built for the Haitian poor people out of these funds.
These are some of the reasons why Haitians detest the idea of foreign intervention, as Eyder Peralta “Haiti’s at a breaking point but few want foreign intervention” report a few weeks after Abel’s first call for yet another multinational intervention force in 2022. They have bitter lessons from their chequered history.
Their perspective that yet another foreign intervention would only contribute to the crisis in which the country is stuck has been confirmed. The number of people killed or displaced by gang violence has only increased since the arrival of the MSS, with Kenyan police who were only recently joined by some Guatemalan military police this January, at its fore.
The Kenyan government has not even been able to pay the wages of the rank-and-file police it sent to Haiti. According to Reuters, several of them “submitted letters of resignation from the mission” of an occupation force in the last months of 2024.
The only force that has been able to stem the tide of the gangsters’ rule over these bloody years has been the armed poor masses of Haiti themselves, organised as the Bwa Kale movement.
The forces of imperialism and the weak local ruling class have however done everything they can to demonise the movement since it emerged two years ago. As Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté reported at the time, they were “alarmed at the entrance of a new actor onto Haiti’s stage, the one they fear the most: the Haitian masses.”
As was the case over two hundred years ago, so it is today. The liberation of Haiti will be won only by the working-class people of Haiti. The road forward is rough and complex with bloody landmines. Imperialism and a roguish ruling class have laid these down with the gangs as a manifestation of a deeper structural problem. Nonetheless, the Haitian working masses will find their way through the maze. With Bwa Kale, they have shown embers of the resurgence of the spirit of the Haitian revolution captured by the words inscribed with blood: “We shall die for liberty!”
by Bàbá AYÉ
