Haiti’s Deepening Night
What you need to know about a country trying to claw itself back from chaos.
On July 16, a 200-strong Kenyan police contingent arrived in Haiti, doubling the numbers of their compatriot officers already in the Caribbean country. Two days later, armored vehicles carrying Kenyan and Haitian police moved across downtown Port-au-Prince, an area considered particularly dangerous in a capital city overrun for months by armed gangs. Gunshots were heard but reporters on the ground were unable to tell who fired, or if anyone was wounded or killed. Meanwhile, Haiti’s transitional prime minister went on television to tell his 11 million people something they already knew to be painfully true: “Life every day in Port-au-Prince has turned into a battle for survival.”
Dismal though it sounds, this is what good news looks like today in Haiti, once the “pearl of the Antilles” and now the poorest country in the Americas. There’s a foreign police force to bolster the outgunned, outmanned, utterly demoralized Haitian National Police (HNP), with more international forces promised. There’s an unelected acting head of government—trained gynecologist and former UN official Garry Conille—to end the ignominious situation of having no national leader and no administration worth the name. And there’s the first tentative attempts by the security services to enter no-go areas of the capital and show they are on the job and mean business.
In his classic 1966 novel The Comedians, Graham Greene concluded about Haiti’s abject need and chronic dysfunction: “Impossible to deepen that night.” That was then. Even for a nation with a history of uprisings, dictatorships, coups and gang violence, the past three years have fearsomely deepened Haiti’s night.
In the current spell of extreme lawlessness, the criminal gangs that control 80% of Port-au-Prince have burnt police stations and UN food depots, released thousands of prisoners from jail, blocked crucial fuel terminals, briefly shut down the country’s main international airport, forced the resignation of the de facto head of state and even demanded a role in the next power-sharing government.
In March, at the height of the mayhem wrought by the gangs, their head, former police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, presented himself as a Caribbean Robin Hood pumped for all-out war against Haiti’s fragile administrative state on behalf of the common people. Issuing a chilling ultimatum, he said, “Either Haiti becomes a paradise or a hell for all of us.” The depredations of Chérizier’s fluid coalition of criminal groups, accused of murder, kidnapping and sexual violence, have caused tens of thousands to be displaced from their homes, while almost half the population suffers acute hunger.
There is a clear timeline of how it got to this.
On 7 July 2021, Haiti’s democratically elected president Jovenel Moïse was shot dead in his well-guarded home in an upmarket neighborhood high in the hills of Port-au-Prince. Moïse, a banana farmer known by the Haitian kreyòl nickname Neg Bannann, was not a particularly beloved or unifying politician. In fact, he was constantly battling calls to resign and often hinted at the “dark forces” out to get him. Even so, his assassination threw the country into disarray, leaving Haiti with no head of state, no functioning legislature, an unelected acting prime minister, and a constitutional vacuum after the death from coronavirus of the head of its supreme court.
Three days after the assassination, the Haitian government under acting prime minister Ariel Henry called for the United States to dispatch troops to protect the country’s key infrastructure. They never came. In October 2022, Henry’s government asked the international community for a “specialized armed force” to address the crisis caused by the gangs’ blockade of Haiti’s main fuel port. It was a call Henry would repeat several times during his 32 months in office, as he continued to promise new elections. When he finally set an August 2025 deadline for the polls, civilian protests broke out, adding to the rising instability caused by already surging gang violence.
Then Henry visited Kenya in late February to broker a deal for a police deployment to deal with the gangs… who promptly blockaded the airport to prevent his return to Haiti, forcing him to step down. This past May, Garry Conille was named prime minister by a nine-member transitional council tasked with overseeing Haiti’s political transition.
Any timeline, of course, is just the bare bones of a story, an orderly sequencing of events without much to explain cause and effect.
Why did the night darken so suddenly in Haiti? And why did this happen after the death of President Moïse? At first glance, history seems to offer some parallels. In 1915 Haiti violently rid itself of a head of state and plunged into weeks of chaos. Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam had been president for just four months when he was beaten to death and his body paraded through the streets of Port-au-Prince. The resulting instability precipitated U.S. military intervention to protect American assets, and ended in an unpopular occupation that lasted nearly 20 years.
But 2021 was vastly different from 1915—and not just in terms of Haiti’s importance to the United States. Haitians and observers of Haiti alike acknowledge that hopes for positive change were stronger in the country’s first century as an independent nation than in its second.
In fact, Chérizier himself recently provided an instructive explanation for why criminal gangs suddenly reneged on their years-long deal to serve as Haitian politicians’ dirty tricks squad, and instead declared war on their paymasters. In an interview with NPR’s Eyder Peralta, the gang leader declared: “It is the corrupt political system based on lies that made me the person I am today.” He went on to say that, having served 14 years in the Haitian National Police, he had an epiphany and realized it was better to be top dog than a cat’s paw.
“It is traditional politicians that want you [the police] to do the dirty job of destabilizing the government that is in place,” he said. “Today, the armed groups have awakened. I’ve made them understand that listening to the oligarchs and politicians will not lead them anywhere. So it is better if we turned our guns on the oligarchs and the politicians. It is better to use these weapons to give the country another independence.” The quip about “oligarchs” is a reference to the straitjacket of extreme poverty that has long trapped over 50% of the population, while a wealthy elite of a few thousand families strike mutually profitable deals with politicians who care little about governing for the public good.
Of course, numerous other factors have compounded Haiti’s misery throughout its 220 years as a sovereign nation. After slaves wrested independence from France in 1804, the slave-owning United States isolated Haiti for nearly 50 years. Meanwhile, France extracted a high price, with the outrageous demand that its former colony compensate it for the lost value of slaves and Haiti’s profitable crops. That debt—estimated at $21 billion in today’s terms—equaled as much as 80% of Haiti’s revenues for more than 120 years.
Add to that the periodic natural disasters—earthquakes and tropical storms—and Haiti’s unpreparedness for them. In January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake left more than 200,000 people dead and Port-au-Prince in ruins. In 2021, the country was hit by another, even stronger quake, destroying key infrastructure in Haiti’s mostly rural south.
Still, right now, Haiti’s fight against the gangs has taken center stage in its narrative of recurring woe. Prime Minister Conille has described it as “12,000 thugs that are holding 12 million people hostage,” but it isn’t a simple math problem. As a longtime Port-au-Prince resident told me after the second detachment of Kenyan police arrived, any measure of progress has to be realistic. “No new areas being taken [by the gangs] … gives some sense of normalcy if you keep your expectations low and remain in the ‘free’ areas.”
There is the overwhelming sense of a country at war. As the chair of the Caribbean Community group of nations noted: “More people have died in Haiti in the early part of this year than in Ukraine.”
As of now, Kenyan boots are relatively new on the ground, and Prime Minister Conille is only just beginning to administer much-needed nostrums—as well he might, being a medical doctor.
But there is no sign yet that Haiti’s long night is ending.
Rashmee Roshan Lall reported from Haiti for The Economist, The Guardian and Christian Science Monitor. Her Substack is This Week, Those Books.
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My small parish in upstate NY was “twinned” with a rural Haitian parish far from PoP after the massive earthquake. Many years later we are still helping them. With our help they have rebuilt their well, one room school, their thatched ‘health clinic.’ People are hardworking & ambitious for their children but even there the Gangs control the main roads. Why does Santo Domingo thrive and Haiti fester?
Haiti's debt to France was in the low millions, not $21 billion. Of course, Haiti had difficulty paying. Subsistence farming (as in Haiti) does not produce hard currency exports. The US occupation after 1915 was actually highly beneficial (to Haiti). After the Americans left, the country went downhill. To put this is perspective, the other part of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic) is thriving.