International experts consider that the current situation in Haiti is due to the fact that the leaders of that Caribbean nation depended on street gangs, which is why the gangs have now gained strength and taken over the country after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.
In the case of the Prime Minister of Haiti, he was last seen in Puerto Rico, where he was negotiating his return to a country that is mired in violence and controlled by heavily armed gang members. With his fate up in the air and the situation in Haiti deteriorating by the day, the world wonders if the country will fall completely into anarchy or some semblance of order will be restored.
It is easy to attribute the latest outbreak of violence in the West’s first free black republic to entrenched poverty, the legacy of colonialism, widespread deforestation, and European and American interference.
But a number of experts told The Associated Press that the most important immediate cause is something more recent: Haitian leaders have become increasingly reliant on street gangs.
Haiti has not had a strong, well-funded standing army or national police force for decades. Interventions from the United Nations and the United States have come and gone. Without a tradition of clean political institutions, Haitian leaders have used armed civilians as tools to exercise power.
Gang leaders, in surreal scenes, hold press conferences. And many see them as future participants in negotiations about the country’s future.
An embargo was imposed on the country in 1990 after the army overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The embargo and international isolation devastated the country’s small middle class, said Michael Deibert, author of two books about the country.
After a U.S.-backed United Nations contingent ousted coup leaders in 1994, a World Bank-driven settlement led to the importation of American rice and destroyed rural agricultural society, Deibert said.
Jobless kids flocked to Port-au-Prince and joined the gangs. Politicians began to use them as a cheap armed wing. Aristide, a priest turned politician, became famous for using gang members.
In December 2001, police officer Guy Philippe attacked the National Palace in a coup attempt and Aristide called on gang members to leave the neighborhoods, Deibert explained.
“It was not the police that defended the National Palace of the government,” recalled Deibert, who was there. “There were thousands of armed civilians.” “There are these different politicians who have collaborated with these gangs for years, and (…) it blew up in their faces,” he continued.
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