Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, has been gripped by an ever deepening crisis and violence since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. After the president’s death, acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry failed to control rising gang violence in the capital of Port-au-Prince and faced a crisis of legitimacy. Despite demands from Haiti’s citizens for a national election, Henry betrayed his December 2022 pledge to hold a free, fair and transparent general election in 2023, leading to a democratic transition of power by Feb. 7 of this year.
With growing protests demanding Henry’s resignation and gangs’ takeover of 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, armed groups staged coordinated attacks on government buildings and the airport in early March, with the goal of ousting Henry from office. From Puerto Rico, Henry released a statement on March 11 that he was willing to resign upon the formation of a transitional government backed by the U.S.
That same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and foreign diplomats from France, Canada and the CARICOM nations meeting in Jamaica, announced support for the formation of a transitional Haitian presidential council composed of seven voting members and two observers. A UN-backed plan to deploy 1,000 police officers from Kenya to help restore order in Haiti is on hold, pending the formation of a transition council. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jake Johnston, senior research associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who discusses the chaotic situation in Haiti and efforts by the U.S. and other nations to intervene in the crisis they helped create.
JAKE JOHNSTON: The current crisis really kicked off on Feb. 29. The disparate armed groups in the capital, estimates around 200 of them, announced sort of an alliance. And that day began coordinated attacks against state infrastructure and institutions. So police stations, the national penitentiary, the airport.
And that was a significant difference from what we’ve seen in the past, where these groups have been fighting largely each other over territory and access to different neighborhoods and routes. And so this is certainly a different dynamic than we have seen on the ground before. And certainly there is this climate of fear and unknown.
I think it is important to note a few things. One is, as you mentioned, this has been building for some time. And in fact, the territorial fights that put large, densely-populated civilian areas directly in the crossfire were extraordinarily violent.
And those happened a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago and got very little attention. So what we’re really seeing now, again, is a different target and the state itself being targeted. We’re seeing big shootouts between armed groups and the police as opposed to between two armed groups.
SCOTT HARRIS: Alongside this violence, there was a recent meeting of representatives of the U.S., Canada, France and the CARICOM nations in Jamaica with the goal of forming a presidential council after Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned from office earlier this month. The status of his resignation is not quite clear, as you wrote about recently. But tell our listeners a bit about what these world powers have come together in Jamaica to do.
JAKE JOHNSTON: To provide a little context, while this began on Feb. 29 and it’s continued since. Henry was out of the country and he had attended actually a CARICOM meeting that weekend and on that day, was in Kenya to sign an agreement with the Kenyan government to bring 1,000 police to Haiti.
The armaments in the capital were quite explicit that their ostensible goal in this activity was to force Henry from power. And certainly their attacks on the airport, which closed the airport to all travel and all airports in Haiti, have meant that the prime minister, as well as everybody else outside of Haiti or anybody in Haiti, has been unable to leave or get in.
And so with that happening, the U.S. and other foreign powers, which had stayed very strongly behind Henry over the previous 30 months, even as Haitians from all stripes were arguing and making the case for the need for a presidential council or some new transitional governance structure to provide some balance, there’s not a single elected official in Haiti right now.
So all of the power had been consolidated under the Prime Minister Henry. And so, now we see this movement from the international community. Now that the situation has sort of exploded on the ground in a certain way, they moved against Henry and are pushing this new presidential council being negotiated, certainly with the involvement of Haitians. But the way it was set up sort of makes it seem at the very least that Haitians are basically submitting proposals to a board of foreign powers who are then choosing which one to follow.
In a country with a history of foreign interference and where foreign backing for the illegitimate Henry administration really pushed Haiti into this crisis, another government emerging solely based on the legitimacy coming from outside of Haiti is a serious concern and has made the exit to this crisis that much more difficult.
People are negotiating now with a gun to their head and that has given tremendous leverage to these international actors, for example, to impose conditions on participating in the council, including accepting the deployment of Kenyan police to Haiti. That is a condition to participate in this presidential council.
Even if this new council out of CARICOM happens, it’s not clear at all that those people with guns in the capital right now are going to accept that whatsoever.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Jake Johnston (17:21). More articles and opinion pieces are found in the Related Links section of this page.
For more information, visit the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) at cepr.net and Jake Johnston CEPR at cepr.net/staff-member/jake-johnston.
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