Popular Uprisings and Gang Violence: Understanding the Struggle in Contemporary Haiti

Editorial note: In late May, at the same time as violent police crackdowns on protests around the elections and the high cost of living in Kenya, hundreds of Kenyan police officers landed in Haiti to ostensibly quell gang violence and restore order. The authors of this dialogue paint a complex picture of the situation beyond the stereotypes that dominate the manner in which the crisis in Haiti is too often conveyed.  Following up on the 2019 article by Kolektif Anakawona about the protests around Martelly and Moise governments’ blatant misuse and theft of PetroCaribe funds, this dialogue, produced in cooperation with Phenomenal World, offers a sophisticated account of the ongoing assaults on the people of Haiti and the possibilities for popular uprisings today.

The dialogue is based on an October 2022 panel discussion at the 9th Annual Philosophy of Religion in Africana Traditions (PRAT) conference, and has since been edited to reflect recent political developments. Following this publication, it has been republished in Spanish and Portuguese.

In October 2023, the United Nations Security Council voted to “authorize the deployment of a multinational security support, headed by Kenya.” While Russia and China abstained, they too condemned “the increasing violence, criminal activities, and human rights abuses and violations which undermine the peace, stability, and security of Haiti and the region.” A few months prior, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) had expressed its “support for the restoration of law and order” in the country. The United States pledged $200 million to assist military troops. In addition to 1,000 Kenyan police officers, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Belize, Suriname, Antigua and Barbuda, Guatemala, Peru, Senegal, Rwanda, Italy, Spain, and Mongolia promised armed contingents.

Former Prime Minister Ariel Henry—who served as the de facto, and therefore unelected, acting president—had previously made his second request at the UN meetings in September, urging the international community to act “in the name of women and girls raped every day, in the name of an entire people victim of the barbarity of gangs.” A few months prior, the Minister of Justice and Public Security also serving as Minister of Culture and Communication of Haiti, Emmelie Prophète, had claimed that neighborhoods overrun by “urban guerillas” were “lost territories.”

According to the National Network of Human Rights Defense (Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, RNDDH), between November 2018 and March 2024, “gangs” led over twenty-five massacres and other armed attacks, involving the murder of over 1,500 people, the collective rape of over 160 girls and women, the disappearance of dozens of people, the maiming of hundreds of people, and the destruction of more than 450 homes, resulting in the internal displacement of more than 500,000 people. At the beginning of this period, these armed groups acted in isolation and in competition with one another.

However, in August 2020, nine of them federated under the leadership of former police officer Jimmy Chérizier, aka Barbecue, an effort that Haiti’s National Commission of Disarmament, Dismantlement and Reinsertion (Commission Nationale de Désarmement, Démantèlement et Réinsertion, CNDDR) commended. In January 2024, Chérizier consolidated the rest of the gangs in the capital to launch a “revolution.” First, they took control of the international airport surroundings to prevent Henry from returning to Haiti after his trip to Kenya. Over the last months, they bulldozed police stations and prisons, burned down public hospitals, universities, and libraries, killing several hundred people. They destroyed the Superior Court of Accounts and Administrative Disputes (Cour Supérieure des Comptes et du Contentieux Administratif, CSCCA) offices where government spending receipts are archived, including the dossiers concerning the PetroCaribe arrangement with Venezuela.

To replace Henry’s government, CARICOM facilitated the set up of a Presidential Council with seven presidents, all men,^[1] and the majority representing the Parti Haitien Tèt Kale (PHTK), in power since 2011.^[2] In May 2024, the Council’s first act was to confirm the international community’s commitment to pursue the mission, despite popular denunciation of the thirteen-year UN Stabilization Mission between 2004 and 2017 that enabled the arming of the gangs. Additionally, the Council sidelined people’s basic demands to “chavire chodyè a” (break with the system), formulated through the question “Kot Kòb PetroKaribe A?” (Where is the PetroCaribe money?).

The mainstream international news about Haiti’s crisis is transmitted as a problem of gang violence beyond the control of the state. But before Henry’s 2022 and 2023 requests, social movement and human rights organizations as well as social media activists had noted his crushing silence around the hundreds massacred and kidnapped during his term. Moreover, several independent reports outlined how various national, international, and transnational actors, including state and other diplomatic functionaires, “manufactured” the chaos.^[3]

The following conversation—featuring Sabine Lamour, Georges Eddy Lucien, and Ernst Jean-Pierre—pushes us to view current events in Haiti beyond a crisis resolvable through military occupation, elections, and “good governance.” Rather, the struggle in question is one of historical proportions, waged between the people of Haiti and the neocolonial state. The conversation asks not just: who are the gangs? But also, why the gangs, and why now?

A conversation on Haiti, featuring Mamyrah Prosper, Ernst Jean-Pierre, Sabine Lamour, and Georges Eddy Lucien

Mamyrah Prosper: Gangs—also called bases —control territories left abandoned by the state. These popular neighborhoods have little to no access to potable water, electricity, schools, hospitals, and jobs. Many of these territories are places on the state’s map while others are informal settlements or shantytowns of more than one million people. Most gangs are concentrated in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area near industrial parks, international ports, petroleum distribution centers, warehouses of imported luxury goods and foodstuffs, and along intra-national and international trade routes. Gangs are mostly composed of boys and young men (with a few women) who, faced with high rates of unemployment and without basic educational skills, decide to join for protection, in order to acquire masculine respect from their community, and to make money. In contrast, gang leaders are former police officers and private security agents.^[4]

The first gangs were extensions of self-defense brigades established after the overthrow of the twenty-nine-year dictatorship of the Duvalier family. Then, the brigades were reinforced to protect popular neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince from death squads during the 1991 coup d’état against democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Upon the return of the deposed head of state in 1994, guns were distributed to his supporters, leading to the de-politicization of these formations and their turn to criminal activities, including kidnappings. During Aristide’s second term (2001–2004), these “neighborhood” gangs were strengthened to counter former military officers—demobilized in 1995—aiming to overthrow his government. After the forced removal of Aristide in 2004, the UN stabilization mission troops muted his militiamen.^[5] 

Gangs are not a monolith. Yet, over the last six years, militant scholars have qualified the twenty-three primary gangs operating in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area as paramilitaries or extra-legal armed forces of the state. What explains this?

Georges Eddy Lucien: Since 2016, the police have been incapable of quelling the popular uprisings, incapable of making the people retreat. The gangs came to serve two functions. Firstly, they serve as censors in the concentrated working class neighborhoods—we know that 67 to 69 percent of the Port-au-Prince agglomeration lives in precarious neighborhoods. We can take the example of Lasalin residents who participated in the October 17, 2018 protest, who were massacred three weeks later by the gangs. This conveyed the message to the people from working class neighborhoods that they do not have civic and political rights; they cannot be involved in protests. There are other instances, such as the Belair massacre during the first peyi lòk—translated by some as “general strike”—or the Kafou Marasa (Cité Soleil) massacre.

So the gangs play the role of censoring residents, and they censor progressive organizations as well. During the period of 1987–88, following the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship, numerous popular organizations operated inside of the neighborhoods, including student groups and unions. But today, it is difficult to organize a meeting in neighborhoods from where the grassroots base would be drawn. The second mission of the gangs is to banalize concepts like “children of the poor” or “revolution” and to contribute to the criminalization of social movements. Under the government of Jovenel Moise (2017–2021), the gangs’ participation in the protests trivialized the demands. Those are all strategies.

The army—the traditional actor(s) that the Haitian state or the local and international oligarchy typically use, especially the United States, to resolve the crisis—is no longer there. If you look at 1946, 1956, 1986, it’s always the same thing: we sleep, we wake up, we find that the army has taken power. But the Haitian army dissolved in 1995 when deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to power. Today, the repressive apparatuses, whether the police or the gangs, play a huge role. Certainly, during the Duvalier dictatorship, there was always a link between the army and the militia. But the army had more logistical means and more guns than the militia. Informality is important, because when the army needed to do things off the books, it would use the militia. This was the case for the coup d’état of 1991, when they used the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a known product of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

MP: Gang members’ firepower has increased to include war weaponry like Russian AK-47s, US-made AR-15s, and Israeli Galil assault rifles. Some arms trafficked in Haiti are bought from shops in Florida, in the United States, where gun laws are lenient. They are then shipped from Miami’s port where cargo is arranged in itemized containers requiring intensive searches. Illegal guns enter the country through maritime ports in the private control of oligarchs like Gilbert Bigio’s Port Lafito, through unofficial landing strips, and across land borders with the Dominican Republic. At the same time, over the last thirteen years, the PHTK regimes systematically underfunded and under-armed its own armed forces.

The gangs of today—founded or enhanced by PHTK rulers, other politicians, and key oligarchs—are the new death squads. They traffic organs and humans, drugs, and arms. They kidnap on behalf of others, or to raise funds to buy ammunition. They kill to conquer new territory or as retaliation against rival formations. Gangs also provide security to private businesses, like those of merchant capitalist Reynold Deeb, against petty thieves, and assault competitors. They break up strikes. For hire by politicians, like former president Michel Joseph Martelly (2011–2016), gangs threaten voters to prevent fair elections and deter participation in protests. They murder political opponents.^[6]

GEL: Despite the presence of the gangs, the last peyi lòk (general strike) in July 2018 showed that these strategies were not able to make the people retreat. This created the necessity for military intervention on behalf of local and international oligarchies. It’s similar to 1802 when the Leclerc expedition was launched in Saint Domingue (Haiti): the colonial metropole realized that the repressive apparatuses at the local level were incapable of making the masses of slaves retreat. This incapacity of the French metropole to block the masses of slaves for a period of about ten years, from 1791 to 1801, made them reinforce the repressive apparatuses. It is the same case for the 1902–1915 crisis. Foreign military intervention reflects the incapacity of the local and international oligarchies to quell uprising.

The social movement that we are discussing today arose in 2015–2016 and has lasted for a six-year period during which there were various uprisings. Since the major protests in 1929 against the US occupation (1915–1934), we have not experienced such a long period of sustained uprisings. After the withdrawal of US troops, local and international oligarchs were able to maintain continuity and control. But in 1946, there were other mass protests. After ten years, in 1956–1957, the local oligarchy was able to take control for the next thirty years through the Duvaliers, until around 1985–1986. Now, we can see that since 2015, the people have begun to rise up again. This period reminds us of the period between 1902 and 1915, during the thirteen-year resistance of Rosalvo Bobo against deepening relations between the local and U.S. oligarchies.^[7]

Mamyrah Prosper: This current crisis, then, is a reflection of the persistent divides and interventions that have characterized politics in Haiti even before the Revolution of 1804. What are the historical dimensions informing the social movement that arose in 2015–2016?   

Ernst Jean-Pierre: It’s important to recall our history as a people and the specific form of colonialism that took place in Haiti. The arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 created a new colonial reality. They appropriated the riches of the land, devastated the environment (the flora and the fauna) and the Indigenous people who lived there, and introduced the transatlantic slave trade of Africans. The Code Noir (Black Code) that regulated the slave system in Haiti considered enslaved Africans as subhuman—this has repercussions until the present.

In 1791, the Bwa Kayiman ceremony served as the site of planning for the first major slave insurrection of the Revolution, which achieved the general liberation of all slaves and claimed independence in 1804. But following independence, the sons of whites, mulattos, and Creoles made claims to the land, demanding to be compensated for lost and damaged property. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a major leader of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of independent Haiti, opposed these demands. His aspiration for independence extended beyond the abolition of slavery, to a system of equality based on the values of the Bosals—Africans born on the continent and not in slavery—who held communalist values around labor and freedom. Representing a break from the inherited colonial system, Dessalines proposed to redistribute the wealth of the land among all Haitians, issuing a series of measures directed towards these aims.^[8]

Dessalines’ decrees represented radical efforts to address the colonial system of wealth, but they caused tension within the new nation. In October 1806, Dessalines was assassinated, marking a pivotal moment that split the nation in two. The succeeding government sent the Bosals to the mountains and countryside, imposing a Rural Code similar to the colonial Black Code.^[9] This re-inscribed a form of racism, even apartheid, in the society, by maintaining a peasant class to produce the agricultural products for a cultivator class of Creoles. This fundamental split unfolded into the crisis of 1843, dividing the country into four parts. By 1915, Haiti fell into the hands of the US occupation, during which many North American institutions and companies such as the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO) were engaged in the export of sisal, rubber, and sugar cane.

Haitians ended up with a state that does not correspond to the aspirations of the masses, a cheap prototype of the Western nation-state. Haitian law is a copy of French law, with no sense of environmental or communal rights. The educated, elite classes took the reigns of the government, granting themselves social and economic privileges and requiring the majority to wait. This is the present condition. This is what led us to the crises of 1943 and 1946, as well as the crises after President Dumarsais Estime and President Duvalier. The crises recur because the historical problem has never been solved: the fight between the Bosals, the peasant people, and the elites. The elites put in place two powerful weapons: education and the state. It is a combination of these things that are fighting against the popular masses.

In this uneven struggle, we witness the wear and tear performed by the masses to produce the collapse of the state, a cadaver state. There is a carnival song that says exactly this, that the state is a cadaver or a corpse. On that state, you cannot build anything. People demand a change in the system, the system of slavery we fought against. The world powers made us pay dearly for that struggle. The seeds of the alternative lie in the Bosal struggle—built on lakou (communal lands), in the bitasyon (plantations), based on consensus, democracy, solidarity, and konbit (mutual aid).

Mamyrah Prosper: The social movement that arose in 2015–2016 then sought to collapse the state, to resolve this historical problem between the masses and the elites. Following the first round of the 2015 presidential elections, the political opposition—including mass-based and other civil society organizations—shut down the capital to denounce the PHTK’s manipulation of the results. Before this pivotal moment, resistance to the PHTK’s development projects was localized: defense against land grabs in Caracol in 2011, the island of Ile-à-Vache in 2013, and the island La Gônave in the Port-au-Prince Bay in 2014, to name a few examples. But the social movement that arose in 2015–2016 targeted the PHTK regime directly, leading to the annulment of the election results. New elections in 2016, however, still ushered in PHTK-pick Jovenel Moise into power.

The social movement attempted to block the PHTK’s further pursuit of this historical “Scramble for Haiti.” The moment recalled the fraudulent elections that led the party to power in 2011, which brought into view the PHTK strategy to delay parliamentary elections and instead rule by decree in order to gift communally-stewarded agricultural lands to multinational elites as free trade zones. Many also pointed to the PHTK’s misuse of public monies—like the 2010 earthquake reconstruction funds and the PetroCaribe proceeds—to subsidize extractivist projects such as the construction of the largest industrial park in the Caribbean, Caracol Industrial Park, in 2011; the establishment of Moise’s banana plantation Agritrans in 2014, before he was revealed as the PHTK presidential candidate; and the building of the country’s first multi-purpose deep water port to accommodate larger cargo ships, Port Lafito. All of these public-private partnerships are tax exempt.

In present-day Haiti, who controls these free trade zones?

Sabine Lamour: The Haitian oligarchs are not a monolithic group either. They do not share, among themselves, the same vision or consciousness. There is the segment that has existed since the revolutionary period, the formerly “freed,” who up until now consider themselves the heirs of their white colonialist fathers. This group formed the national bourgeoisie, which was successful from 1804 until the US occupation in 1918. In this bourgeoisie were also those from France, England, and Germany. Daughters of the national bourgeoisie already in place were married to foreign sons, the result of trade relations. The national bourgeoisie renewed itself by keeping a skin-color based hegemony over the larger population. But through the US occupation of the Caribbean, new groups came into power. Emergent capitalists from the Levant also extended themselves across the region. And in Haiti, “benefiting” from their lighter skin color, they eventually replaced the initial national bourgeoisie.

The bourgeois class is plural. It is an exploded class that is not necessarily unified. However, if there is a thread that the groups we might consider elites or oligarchs hold in common: nothing ‘national’ interests them. They invest in commerce; so, even if Haiti can produce rice, Reynold Deeb, the chief officer of Deka Group, prefers to buy and bag it in the US to sell in the country instead of supporting national production. Can we actually call these oligarchs a national bourgeoisie?

They exist in secluded spaces, isolated from the majority of the population. Their children don’t go to the same schools. If they are sick, they seek care in Miami. They hold multiple citizenships. This is a type of stateless bourgeoisie that builds nothing with the masses. Every time their interests are threatened, when the contradictions might compel the change or social transformation needed for resources to be veritably shared across the population, when capital is in trouble, this plural bourgeoisie allies with the international community or with the United Nations to offer foreigners whatever resources Haiti possesses in order to secure its position and continue extracting wealth. 

Interestingly, one of the newer elements in this present crisis is the transnational bourgeoisie’s active engagement with politics. Traditionally, they had practiced a “politique de doublure / stand-in politics” where they funded politicians only accountable to them into power. But now, they have decided to enter national politics with their own faces. Gregory Mevs—whose family owns the Varreux Petroleum Terminal and the SHODECOSA industrial park—served as the co-chair of former President Martelly’s Presidential Advisory Council on Economic Growth and Investment. Reginald Boulos, founder of Sogebank and owner of a chain of supermarkets and car dealerships, established his own political movement under the late former President Moise. The bourgeoisie show their faces not because they are concerned with social transformation, but because they want to directly control what I call the “predation sites” in society. Customs is one site of predation, affording the capacity to import guns, rotted carcinogenic foods, and other expired products that kill. But the bourgeoisie monopolize all industries. The Gilbert Bigio Group, for example, controls construction (iron and wood imports).

When the bourgeoisie realize that, little by little, the majority is increasing in power, and that at any minute, there might be a social explosion in Haiti, they seek to control the spaces of power. But they do not decide to control the spaces for themselves, instead they share control with international interests.

Mamyrah Prosper: As Sabine Lamour remarks, the PHTK state has been openly accommodating to these transnational elites. It also facilitated the rise of a small group of aspirant capitalists. Within the first year of his term, Moise’s government proposed a budget that increased the salaries of himself and his cabinet while raising taxes on the working poor and the middle class. He pulled Haiti out of the PetroCaribe agreement with Venezuela, which put the country back on the market to purchase petroleum products. In July 2018, at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Moise announced the removal of gas subsidies. Raised gas prices inevitably lead to increased mass transportation and food prices. In response, dissenters erected barricades to block all national trade routes and disrupt all commercial activity across the country for two days: the first peyi lòk. Moise repealed the announcement. A month later, the PetroChallenge movement was launched. Protests erupted in all ten major cities in Haiti around the slogan “Kot Kòb PetroKaribe?” (Where is the PetroCaribe money?), demanding that the PHTK regime account for its use of over 3 billion US dollars of the PetroCaribe funds earmarked for the improvement of infrastructure and social programs.

The social movement that arose in 2015–2016 was concentrated in the capital, but it took on a national scale with the first peyi lòk. While different land defenses outside of Port-au-Prince mentioned earlier had deployed their own messaging, by 2018 all protest demands converged into the question, “Kot Kòb PetroKaribe A”? What is so important about PetroCaribe?

George Eddy Lucien: The July 2018 uprisings, one of the most significant uprisings of recent years, brought up the question of PetroCaribe because PetroCaribe itself questions the logic and and undermines the functioning of the international financial system introduced to Haiti in 1825, when French banks gave the formerly colonized nation a loan. Typically in these arrangements, the bank wins and the country that receives the money loses. However, PetroCaribe offered the possibility for both Venezuela and Haiti to be winners.

Within PetroCaribe, Venezuela agreed to allow the borrower to pay back the loan with goods they produce, straying from the neoliberal model that has broken the dynamics of production in Haiti. There was a possibility of challenging the international financial system. July 2018 was also one of the first times that the social movements spoke of “chavire chodyè,” breaking with the system.

Mamyrah Prosper: After months of nation-wide protests in 2018, an official investigatory report revealed that President Moise himself had profited off PetroCaribe funds, leading to calls for his resignation. Instead, Moise voted against the recognition of Nicolas Maduro in the Organization of American States in 2019. That year, there were gas shortages, which prompted another peyi lòk, this time lasting three months. What is “peyi lòk”?

Sabine Lamour: It is a mode of resisting. It is the result of contradictions so striking inside society that the people are forced to block the system. How can the government take away gas subsidies when the price of fuel per gallon exceeds the minimum wage! During the first peyi lòk in July 2018, mobilizations took place all across the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and spread throughout the entire country, paralyzing all commercial activity. And the government was forced to retreat over the fuel issue.

Within the peyi lòk, despite the paralysis, numerous activities take place within organizations both in civil society and the political opposition. Panels are held, position papers are released, flash mobs and protests are organized. Demands themselves are not on lock. Thus, we can say that peyi lòk tempers gang insecurity and offers a moment for organizations to become more politically active, meeting more often to discuss.

Of course, there is a contradiction in peyi lòk: people in need can become collateral damage—they cannot go about their daily work to reproduce themselves, they must be able to afford to stock up on food. The government also utilizes the peyi lòk period to repress militants, those who take to the streets every day to maintain barricades against the police and gangs.

Georges Eddy Lucien: The peyi lòk prevents accumulation: there is a lòk, or lockdown, on the accumulation of international investments. It stops production at places like Savane Diane, a free trade zone manufacturing products for Coca-Cola; Caracol Industrial Park, where we produce clothes; or areas like CODEVI in Ouanaminthe or SONAPI in Port-au-Prince where there are numerous factories. It’s almost like in 1791 when the masses of slaves prevented the metropole—in today’s case, the United States—from accumulating.

Ernst Jean-Pierre:  The peyi lòk is not something new, it is an appropriation of a peasant mode of struggle called “koupe wout” (cutting off roads). Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ Indigenous Army used this tactic to cut off French military commander Joseph de Rochambeau’s supply line during the revolution in 1802. This method was deployed after independence by different revolutionary peasant leaders seeking to isolate and control their own region. The Kako fighters adopted this koupe wout tactic to prevent the further incursion of the US Marines into the countryside. Such blockages disrupted US occupiers’ reinstatement of forced labor to build those very roads that facilitated the transport of export crops. 

I interpret it as a mode of struggle being adapted to Port-au-Prince and other cities: it prevents communication between other departments, circulation and movement, and functionality of the capitalist system within cities themselves. It’s a historical and cultural system of resistance. We integrated some English and French words;  we say “barikad” (barricades); we say “lòk,” but it was called “gran chimen bare” (roadblock), when nothing could circulate freely.

Mamyrah Prosper: In January 2020, Moise disbanded Parliament to rule by decree, and by early 2021, he announced a referendum to adopt an Organization of American States-produced constitution that would expand the decision-making scope of the executive. He refused to step down from the presidency and made no plans to organize elections at any level. Rather, he gifted agricultural lands to another oligarch, Clifford Apaid, and replaced three supreme court judges (circumventing parliamentary procedures). Mass protests carried on until June. And just a few days before his assassination, Moise appointed Ariel Henry as his new (seventh) prime minister.

International headlines have focused on chaos and crisis, concealing and even conflating these popular uprisings with gang violence. What are the demands of this social movement? What are the different ideological tendencies on the ground?

Sabine Lamour: There is a constant in the demands—the right to self-determination. Whether it is in relation to the Haitian state, or to the international community who always wants to impose a series of measures onto us, we always demand that at a certain point, we too can propose our way of life. This has always been a constant since Toussaint Louverture fought internally against agrarian corporalism while struggling against the return of the French. This thread has run through in every social movement,  whether the political element is women, peasants, young people, or teachers unions. The second demand is recognizing the intersectional dynamics of the struggle, the ability to recognize people as people, beyond sex, race, class, and religion. The third demand is the fight against impunity, the fight for access to justice.

This social movement has an exploded leadership where everyone has the ability to act. These constants suggest that there is a political fidelity, an anarchic tendency, which scares the transnational oligarchies. One of the elements allowing us to condense our different demands is the ability for a person to be free. Freedom is a fundamental element within the activist movement, and it carries a particular set of political ideals that permeate Haitian society. Since the Revolution of 1804, we realized that within the question of freedom is a question of well-being, but not well-being in the Western sense based on private property.

Ernst Jean-Pierre: The urban working class neighborhoods are more mobilized than the peasants in the current struggle, and political leaders have been discredited. The historical mission of the popular masses is a battle against an unjust global order—that’s the common thread of Haitian popular struggles, which can be linked to broader anti-imperialist leftist discourse. But if you look closely at the emergence of popular struggles, it is an existential battle around the need to live. This struggle is permanent in nature, and it’s reflected by the impossibility of dialogue between the elites and the masses. The traditional political elites lack a narrative to address popular demands, they cannot appease the struggle for change. That’s why they are always in crisis.

In 2021, following Moise’s assassination, various progressive civil society organizations and parties came together to draft the Montana Accords, which allowed for a transitory government to organize free elections and pursue the PetroCaribe trial. But these efforts reduced the organized struggle to the question of taking power. The popular masses were waging a historic battle to change the Western capitalist system definitively. There are two battles in Haiti: a battle for real change, and a battle for power. The latter does not have the aspirations of the popular masses.

Sabine Lamour: The scenarios being played out right now are ones we have lived through since 1806, centering around self-determination, redistribution, and resource production. If you consider 1806, 1843, 1865, or even 1915 and 1934, as well as the struggles of 1986 and 2004, you will see these ghosts constantly returning to Haiti.  

In every major crisis, the same question is raised. How will we build a community on the 27,500 square kilometers of land that we have together, to live together, if some don’t view others as fully human? This is the basis of the struggle in Haiti: those in charge claim all the resources produced within society belong to them, and they never hesitate to seek outsiders to intervene in the issue. But there’s a question of what needs to happen internally to build a true fellowship, a common political project to build a society.^[10] This battle has existed since the nation was formed. The proposed political projects thus far end up fostering some form of exclusion and absence of redistribution. Now there is a political coherence within the chaos that Haitians must address.

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^[1] The Council also includes two observers with no voting power, including one woman.

^[2] PHTK representatives outweighed the progressives, the Fanmi Lavalas and the Accord Montana, which sought a transition government following de facto President Jovenel Moise’s assassination in 2021.

^[3] Reports from RNDDH, Fondasyon Je Kale (Foundation Watchful Eye), Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic, and a United Nations Security Council Panel of Experts. For more information: https://hrp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Killing_With_Impunity-1.pdf and https://insightcrime.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Report-Panel-of-Experts-Haiti_gangs.pdf

^[4] See for more information Djems Olivier’s (2021), “The Political Anatomy of Haiti’s Armed Gangs,” in NACLA: https://nacla.org/news/2021/political-anatomy-haiti-armed-gangs

^[5] Consult for more information: https://ayibopost.com/dou-viennent-reellement-les-gangs-qui-terrorisent-haiti/

^[6] See Ilinor Louis’ (2024), “Comprendre la Dynamique des Gangs à Port-au-Prince,” for more information: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/ilionorlouis/blog/180324/comprendre-la-dynamique-des-gangs-port-au-prince#_ednref7?userid=63d4c37e-41d3-4f31-ae0c-de16ea6ffc29

^[7] See for more information: Roger Gaillard’s (1973) Les Cent Jours de Rosalvo Bobo ou une Mise à Mort Politique, Port-au-Prince: Haiti, Presses Nationales. 

^[8] These included the decree of January 2, 1804 terminating farm leases of colonial proprietors; the decree of February 7, 1804 annulling of all possessions bequeathed by the French to their offspring, whether they were animals, movable, or immovable property; the decree of July 24, 1805 fixing the salaries of government officials and personnel; and the decree of September 6, 1805 regulating the titles of property previously owned by the French or foreigners.

^[9] The Rural Code legalized two “countries,” one for rural populations—descendents of the Bosals who fought in the Revolution, and another for urban elites. The Code regulated land use and ownership, as well as labor practices.

^[10]  Haitian Anthropologist Michel-Rolf Trouillot brilliantly described the situation we are going through in his work “State Against Nation.” He also described this issue in “Les Racines Historiques de l’Etat Duvalierien.”

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