Haiti is at War

The burned-out hulk of the car belonging to the former senator and his driver rested beside a bucolic mountain road that cuts through the hills above Port-au-Prince. The bodies of its former occupants, as charred and desecrated as the vehicle itself, lay inside.

For much of the past year, motorists attempting to leave Haiti’s capital for the southern peninsula — an area dotted with undulating hills, shimmering beaches and picturesque colonial towns — would traverse the lanes though Laboule 12 in an attempt to avoid the warring gangs that operated along the other route that led through the sprawling slum of Martissant, a take-your-life-in-your-hands proposition that saw motorists kidnapped or shot dead with terrifying regularity.

By the time Yvon Buissereth — a former senator who had been appointed head of the government’s social housing division by former President Jovenel Moïse (himself assassinated in spectacular fashion in July 2021) — opted to try his luck on the road last weekend, Haiti was in the throes of a state collapse the likes of which has rarely been experienced in the Western Hemisphere this century.

The gang that allegedly murdered Buissereth is led by a criminal known as Ti Makak (Little Monkey), one of dozens of armed groups currently operating in Port-au-Prince. The gang emerged to fè dezòd (make disorder) in the zone just as the forces of the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), the country’s beleaguered national police force, was launching an offensive against another gang, the 400 Mawozo (400 Hillbillies), who run a kidnapping ring based in the city’s eastern suburb of Croix-des-Bouquets, but whose territorial control extends all the way to the border with the Dominican Republic. This past spring, a failed attempt by the 400 Mawozo to seize the territory of a rival gang, the Chen Mechan (Mad Dogs), in this area, known as the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, killed at least 191 people, according to the human rights organization Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH). Thousands more were displaced.

What links these two apparently unrelated episodes of violence on opposite sides of the capital also tells the story of state collapse in Haiti. An implosion that has rapidly accelerated since the assasination of Jovenel Moïse, the first Haitian president killed in office since 1915.

Though Haiti has a long history of politically motivated militias — from the Zinglins and Piquets of Faustin Soulouque the mid-1800s, to the Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier family dictatorship (1957- 1986) — the modern-day roots of Haiti’s gang rule can be found in a catastrophic interweaving of events in the 1990s.

A strangling economic embargo designed to return to power Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, ousted in a coup in 1991 after only seven months in office, all but destroyed what was left of Haiti’s manufacturing sector. A subsequent IMF and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment, made with U.S. President Bill Clinton’s support, lowered Haiti’s tariffs on imported rice from 50% to 3%, turning Haiti into the world’s fifth-largest importer of U.S. rice and breaking the backbone of its peasant economy. Those who fled the countryside to the cities found few jobs waiting for them.

It was the children of these news arrivals — as many of the capital’s poorest neighborhoods are populated largely by country people new to the city — who became the first generation of the modern youth gangs in Haiti, a phenomenon encouraged with ruthless efficiency by Aristide and his party Fanmi Lavalas (formed in 1996) to ensure their grip on power. Aristide returned to the presidency in 2001 only to be overthrown again in a 2004 rebellion that began when a formerly loyal gang in the northern city of Gonaïves, the Lame Kanibal (Cannibal Army), turned against him in retaliation for allegedly killing their leader.

I knew many of these young, first-generation gunmen personally, and spent countless hours speaking with them in Cité Soleil, the sprawling seaside slum they called home. Although they were not typical of the inhabitants of the capital’s slums — most of whom, then as now, have no connection to guns or violence — they represented an unavoidable political force. Before their early deaths (all but one died before his 30th birthday), some spoke eloquently to me about a desperate desire to blast Haiti out of its inhuman squalor and inequality. At a certain time, one could see the good they might have done for the country. But Aristide got to them first.

In the last two decades, the armed groups in the slums — who generally call themselves baz (base, in Haiti’s Creole language) — have metastasized through generations of slain leaders and opportunistic politicians of various political stripes, seeking to monopolize the forces of arms and the votes they bring come election time. The Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK), the country's dominant force since 2011 — to which both Moïse and former President Michel Martelly belonged — embraced the baz model as enthusiastically as the Lavalas party (now, like founder Aristide himself, a historical footnote) ever did.

But over the years, something new began to happen, although it wasn’t immediately apparent. During a 2015 lull in the nearly 20-year tit-for-tat violence, two baz in the Martissant communities of Ti Bois and Grand Ravine waged war against each other. I interviewed the leader of the Ti Bois baz, Chéry Christ-Roi, a somber-faced man then in his early 30s, who had improbably succeeded in maintaining his grip on the neighborhood since the early 2000s — an extraordinary period of longevity for someone in his line of work. As we sat inside his hillside nightclub, in a spray of day-glo colors contrasting with the sweeping view of the Bay of Port-au-Prince, he said the gangs were sick of politicians using them as cannon fodder, and they might some day form a sort of alliance for good, or so I hoped.

Haiti’s tortured politics had different plans. In 2016, Jovenel Moïse, a businessman from Haiti’s north, was elected president after a markedly low turnout. The political opposition — consisting of opportunistic career politicians who gave themselves grand names like the secteur démocratique et populaire despite being neither democratic nor popular — flatly refused to accept the election results. The battle lines hardened.

Though Moïse oversaw the construction of miles of roads, and a nascent effort to restructure Haiti’s faltering energy grid — lashing out at “a corrupt oligarchy” and vowing to free from their grasp a “captured state" — an audit of the Venezuelan low-cost oil program, PetroCaribe, claimed that firms linked to Moïse cashed in on an embezzlement scheme. A civil society movement, under the slogan Kot kòb PetroCaribe a? (Where is the PetroCaribe money?), demanded accountability for the funds, along with an end to corruption and other government abuses. Striking a deal with the political opposition, whose signal demand was that Moïse resign (opposition lawmakers twice vandalized Haiti’s parliament in the company of their partisans to prevent Moïse’s choice for Prime Minister from going to a vote), the civil society, perhaps unwittingly, became part of a larger drama that was unfolding.

In November 2017, a police raid in Grand Ravine ended in the deaths of at least two police officers and 10 civilians in what some called a police massacre. A policeman involved in the massacre, Jimmy Chérizier— better known by his nickname, Barbecue — abandoned his post and returned to his power base in the capital’s Lower Delmas quarter, where he founded an illegal armed group, allegedly with ties to the Moïse government —a claim Moïse and Barbecue both denied. In 2018, Barbecue was accused of participating in a massacre in the Port-au-Prince slum of La Saline that killed 26, according to a United Nations report. Barbecue and two officials of the Moïse government were sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for their alleged roles in the killings.

While the Moïse government negotiated with the PNH over the police department’s quest to form a union, a gang called Fantôme 509 (Haiti’s country code) emerged, claiming to be dissident police. The group wore masks and shot their guns in the air, at vehicles and into government buildings. Fantôme 509 was widely viewed as a wing of the opposition. In June 2020, Barbecue, dressed in a suit and carrying a machine gun, held a press conference to announce the formation of the G9 an fanmi e alye, an alliance of armed groups around the city, including Krisla’s Ti Bois baz. Though Barbecue stated that he was not “pro-government or pro-opposition,” he released several videos of himself surrounded by an armed, masked cadre and expounding on the political issues of the day. His Twitter account, which had a large following, has since been suspended.

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But Barbecue was hardly the only boss in town, and not the only one to grasp the power of social media.

Across Route Nationale 2 from Grand Ravine and Ti Bois, in the Village de Dieu slum, Arnel Joseph, a politically connected gang leader, who reigned over the 5 Segonn (5 Seconds) gang until fleeing in an attempt to avoid arrest, was killed by police in February 2021. The following month, Haitian police tried to storm the slum in a raid that ended with six police officers dead: their final moments recorded by gloating gang members who shared the footage on social media.

Arnel Joseph's successor as head of the 5 Segonn is an entirely different character, and the footage of the slain policemen was just the beginning of his social media war. Going by the nom de guerre Izo, the new strongman presides over a kidnapping empire, the proceeds of which he uses to fund slick videos of himself and his gunmen as he spits rhymes while strutting through the slum and snorting mounds of cocaine. (He is, as it happens, a lyricist of no small talent.) Beyond his musical pursuits, Izo has deftly used social media to boast of his battlefield success and terrorize rivals. Last month, while bragging about weapons taken during a fight with rival gang G9 in the La Saline slum, 5 Segonn displayed the guns perched on the dead body of an enemy gang member. In another, Izo dismembers the cadaver of a rival he bought from the gang in Grand Ravine, and cooks the viscera in a pot.

The 400 Mawozo have also shown a fondness for social media. The gang’s leader, Joseph Wilson, alias Lanmò San Jou (Death Comes Unannounced), recently recorded himself and his gunmen (who appear to be in their early teens) requesting the “paperwork” of motorists traveling between Port-au-Prince and the Dominican Republic. Last month, 400 Mawozo gunmen murdered a police officer inside a church, spirited the body away and disseminated footage of themselves mulitalitng the corpse.

Wilson, believed to be a houngan, or vodou priest (vodou, despite its reputation in the West, is a religion like any other, combining both light and dark elements), has availed himself of the authority of such a role. I have seen videos of him and other 400 Mawozo members at fêtes involving coffins and other accouterments of death. The possible spiritual elements of the violence in Haiti today in some ways echo the gruesome public displays of Charles Taylor, during the 1989-1997 Liberian Civil War of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), who cannily co-opted some of the trappings of the Poro Society — a male secret society in West Africa — to add an aura of authority to his military might.

The violence has more immediate ways of revealing its interconnection. In the shantytown of Cannaan, whose population exploded when thousands of Haitians displaced by the 2010 earthquake resettled there, a gang recently filmed themselves firing in the air as they referred to themselves as “the Taliban.”

Although the government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry — who assumed power under controversial circumstances after the assasaniation of Jovenel Moïse — has frequently been accused of having ties to gangs, the gunmen are now making direct attacks on the symbols of the state. In June, 5 Segonn gunmen stormed Port-au-Prince’s Palais de Justice, seat of the highest judicial authority in the capital, and have occupied it since, chasing off judges, clerks, prosecutors, police and staff. The authorities have made no attempt to retake the building, as its armed occupants strut about its rooms destroying files. In July, 400 Mawozo gang members set fire to the Croix-des-Bouquets prosecutor's office. Government services — customs, the central bank and other entities once housed in downtown Port-au-Prince — are abandoning the center of the city to the gunmen and moving to more secure locales, such as the airport or to far-flung suburbs.

“They're trying to establish some kind of recognition as a force or a state within the state,” said a conflict resolution specialist, and friend, who works in some of the capital’s most marginalized neighborhoods. “Any talk of elections without taking care of these guys doesn't make sense.”

More than the politically allied “posses” of Jamaica, which the Haitian gangs once most closely resembled, the armed groups in the country look more and more like the all-demolishing whirlwinds of the Islamic State, for whom killing publicly and ritualistically is as much an affirmation of power and mission as the success of any geopolitical goals.

In a very direct way, the violence also connects Haiti to its giant neighbor to the north, the United States.

In July, a ship arriving from Florida at Haiti’s Port-de-Paix was discovered to be carrying 120,000 cartridges, three handguns, 30 magazines, 20 Ak-47s and $3,890. That same month, seven illegal pistols were confiscated from another ship from the U.S., stopped at the same port. The government responded by freeing two of the men who had been arrested for alleged involvement in the scheme and firing the government official who’d overseen seizure of the weapons. Meanwhile, several suspect containers at a wharf in Port-au-Prince were found to contain 9mm pistols, 14,646 cartridges, 140 magazines and 18 assault rifles.

As the country roils amid criminal anarchy, the government of President Ariel Henry has remained largely silent, apparently secure in the support of such foreign actors as the U.S., France and the U.N. Mission in Haiti. The fact that both RNDDH and a now-stalled investigation by the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire (DCPJ) into the murder of Jovenel Moïse showed that Henry had spoken twice to Joseph Félix Badio — believed to be a key link in the plot to murder the president — on the night of the assassination, appears not to phase them. The government’s detachment from the trauma of its citizens was also vividly illustrated when, during a regular bout of gang violence, the prime minister spent a glittering evening at the posh Hotel Montana to celebrate “Europe Day'' with various foreign diplomats. The elegant hotel also serves as the base for the Montana Accord, a group of civil society actors and veteran politicos who “elected” a president and prime minister last year, yet whose authority barely extends beyond the lobby.

Last month, an attempt by the G-9 to take over the Cité Soleil, under the control of baz leader Gabriel Jean-Pierre, aka Ti Gabriel, who heads a rival coalition of gangs called the G-Pèp, failed. It was foiled when 5 Segonn rushed to Gabriel’s aid ferrying gunmen in motorboats along the coast, one of at least three instances that the group has used boats in recent months. The attack failed, but not before more than 200 people — mostly civilians— were killed and many thousands displaced. The onslaught, most observers agree, was unleashed to acquire territory in order to control voting centers should Haiti’s long-delayed elections ever be held.

It was around this time that the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince tweeted a photo of Chargé d’Affaires Eric Stromayer (the U.S. has not had an ambassador in Haiti since October 2021) grinning broadly behind a stoney faced Ariel Henry, saying the two had “discussed recent security gains.” This must have come as news to Haitians desperately trying to flee the abattoir of gang violence.

Stromayer’s meeting with Henry occurred the same week the RNDDH accused Henry of “continuing to supply the gangs with weapons and ammunition to put an end to the lives of the police, to discourage them in their work and to block justice.” And just weeks after the Episcopal Conference of Haiti demanded: “Why does the State not act?" A few days after the meeting, clashes between the G9-affiliated gang Krache Dife (Fire Spitters) and its rivals turned downtown Port-au-Prince into a war zone, with gunmen wearing police uniforms participating in the fighting and a cadre of “barefoot child soldiers” — as one local media outlet called them — firing automatic weapons. Around the same time, when a delegation of evangelical Protestants showed up one afternoon to clean the streets of the Pont-Breya section of Grand Ravine, gunmen shot the pastor's wife dead. Gang coordination seems to increase by the week. Sensing a common enemy, when police began a sustained campaign against 400 Mawozo this month, the gang sent word to Ti Makak, who helpfully distracted them with his own eruption of violence miles away — ending the life of Yvon Buissereth.

More than 550 people were murdered in greater Port-au-Prince between January and June, according to the Commission épiscopale de l’église catholique romaine Justice et Paix. An additional 200 victims from Cité Soleil were added to that death toll last month. More than 100 police officers were slain between June 2021 and June 2022. And the bloodshed appears to be spreading. In late July, clashes between armed groups in rural Petite-Rivière-de-l’Artibonite, nearly 75 miles from Port-au-Prince, left at least 20 dead and several buildings burned. The OAS recently issued a mea culpa, saying that Haiti’s crisis was “a direct result of the actions taken by the country’s endogenous forces and by the international community,” and arguing that “the international community’s presence in Haiti has amounted to one of the worst and clearest failures implemented and executed within the framework of any international cooperation.” But it, like everyone else, seems to have little idea how to stem the tide of violence.

“Every day, the insecurity in Haiti grows and the population becomes more imprisoned,” Haitian sociologist Laënnec Hurbon recently told me. “The prime minister is deaf and blind and the international community does not show the slightest empathy in the face of the country's tumble toward the abyss.”

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