Ready to Burst
Ready to Burst
Haiti’s Capital Reels from Violence But Stubbornly Clings to Life
I.
In his home and studio in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Delmas, Frankétienne is having visions.
“When we take the history of humanity, it is a spiral, from primitive society to today,” says the 86 year-old Haitian writer, painter and musician, who was born only two years after the nearly 20 year-occupation of Haiti by the United States ended in 1934. “It is not the circle, because the circle is closed, the circle refers to death. The spiral is the movement of all life, it is diversity, it is multi-dimensionality, it is multi-polarity.”
In the mid 1960s, along with writers Jean-Claude Fignolé and René Philoctète, Frankétienne founded the spiraliste philosophical and aesthetic concept, birthing a kind of Caribbean surrealist aesthetic that would heavily influence writers such as Martinque’s Édouard Glissant. In 1975, he would publish Dézafi, one of the first novels to be written in Haitian Creole. Having produced a dizzying variety of literary and visual work of surpassingly high quality, he now putters around a home full of books that he shares with his wife, his paintings radiant from their hanging places on the walls, the capital of Haiti, the nation that defeated the French and ended slavery on its territory in 1804, convulsed by violence and threatening to collapse just outside his door.
“You have come to a destroyed country,” he tells a visitor. “Of course, this does not date from today, it does not date from yesterday, it goes back several centuries. It is a descent into hell caused by the anti-patriots, the anti-nationals, the Haitians who do not like this country, who do not like this land, but with the complicity of a good part of the international community, because we have not been forgiven for having first broken the chains of slavery and then for having created the first black republic.”
“I don't have a crystal ball, I'm not a prophet, but it will take time, it will take time,” he sighs. “If it happens! It will take time for us to get back on our feet.”
II.
A few miles away, another Haitian is having a different kind of vision.
Just beyond the Carrefour de l'aéroport, where the thoroughfare splits off to head towards the capital’s airport, the remainder of the Route de Delmas is frighteningly empty, with almost no pedestrians on the streets and its length bearing the signs of violence such as a destroyed police station surrounded by the hulks of burned out cars. The sound of sporadic gunfire echoes from within the warrens of lanes on either side. A lone moto driver warns a visitor that a blindé (armored vehicle) of the Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH) is nearby and may presage a clash in the zone. One enters the fiefdom of Jimmy Chérizier, a former policeman better known as Barbecue who now serves as the spokesman for the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) coalition of armed groups that control much of the capital, to find it patrolled by armed men displaying a notably more disciplined stance than the habitually drunk and high youths one finds in gang-controlled zones elsewhere in the city, and the streets surprisingly clean for what is the generally rubbish-strew anba lavil (downtown) area.
Viv Ansanm rose up at the end of February after Ariel Henry, the widely-reviled Prime Minister who took the reins of government after the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, signed an agreement to bring a Kenyan-led security force to Haiti. Two months later, after laying siege to Haiti’s main international airport and breaking all the prisoners out of the capital’s main penitentiary, Viv Ansanm succeeded in forcing Henry’s resignation. Since then, Haiti has been governed - if that is the right word for a place where authorities exercise little territorial control - by an unwieldy, hydra-headed combination of a nine-member transitional council formed out of whole cloth in April after a series of CARICOM meetings in Jamaica (and culled from the same political class that brought the country to this precipice) and, since June, a new Prime Minister, former United Nations official Garry Conille, who briefly held the same office under President Michel Martelly from 2011 to 2012. Viv Ansanm, who many Haitians view as little more than a motley crew of criminal gangs, meanwhile, has continued to take and hold territory in and around Port-au-Prince, suffering precious few setbacks despite some clearly committed (though woefully undermanned) members of Haiti’s security forces.
Bearing a grave, unsmiling expression, Chérizier greets a journalist on the second floor of a modest breeze block building as the report of firearms issued periodically nearby.
“Today, I can say that Haiti is in a misery without precedent,” he says. “Today, the country has reached a point where Haitians cannot even eat.”
Chérizier spent 14 years as a police officer, much of it with the Unité départementale pour le Maintien de l'ordre (UDMO), Haiti’s version of a riot squad. In November 2017, while still a serving police officer, Chérizier took part in an operation against a gang in the capital's Grand Ravine neighborhood, an action during which two police officers were killed and the police were accused of summarily executing an employee of the Collège Evangélique Maranatha who they believed - wrongly, by most accounts - had led them into an ambush. Eight other people were also killed that day. Chérizier was also later accused by human rights organizations of participating in a November 2018 massacre in the nearby zone of La Saline as part of a complex political and criminal struggle, charges he denies.
In the former case, he says the school’s employee “lied to us” and the gang “hid inside [the school] with all their weapons” and that the police “had to engage in combat with the men in order not to die.” As to the other civilians killed that day, he says “they found themselves in a bad place at the wrong time…It was a police operation that went wrong that they then gave a political colour.”
Regarding La Saline, he says the killings were the result of a clash between two local gang leaders, Serge Alectis alias Ti Junior and Hervé Bonnet Barthélémy alias Bout Janjan, and the violence that has focused around control of the Croix Des Bossales market, over which a succession of armed groups have battled for over two decades. [Barthélémy was arrested on in November 2018 after seeking treatment in hospital for gunshot wounds but was among those who escaped when gangs stormed the Pénitentiaire National earlier this year. Alectis was slain in La Saline in November 2022]
“There was no La Saline massacre,” Chérizier claims. “It was two armed groups that were facing each other…For political reasons it was claimed that Bout Janjan was close to the opposition [and] that Ti Junior was close to Jovnel Moïse. But I had nothing to do with it.”
Chérizier also denies frequently repeated claims that he was any sort of enforcer for the government of Jovenel Moïse, saying he had “no relationship” to the former president and noting the number of police operations he says were conducted against him under Moïse’s presidency. [In an October 2020 video, Chérizier says he was in fact a supporter of Jude Célestin, Jovenel Moïse’s political rival, and was assigned to provide security for Wuinchel Olivier, a candidate for Haiti’s lower house of parliament from Célestin’s then-party, the Ligue Alternative pour le Progrès et L'Émancipation Haïtienne (LAPEH).]
He goes on to say that, even though Moïse was put in office by “the oligarchs,” the president “became aware that what these guys were doing to the country was not good” and “began to cut their government contracts.”
“The decisions Jovenel Moïse was making were not in favour of the United States,” Chérizier says. “They were not in favour of France. They were not in favour of Canada…[The oligarchs] killed Jovenel because Jovenel wanted to change the living conditions of the people.”
Chérizier is full of harsh words for the international community.
“We are taken in the scheme of the United States, Canada and France who took a team [from CARICOM] and put nine thieves at the head of our country, who put a corrupt prime minister at the head of our country,” he says. “We are asking the multinational force to leave the country, because it is a group of invaders who just came under the orders of the United States, Canada, and France. They have not come to solve the country's problems.”
Asked if he has any message for Haiti’s long-suffering people, who are preyed upon by many groups in the coalition he currently speaks for, he concludes.
“I tell the Haitian people to take courage. Despite all the miseries we are going through, we remain a great people, we have a great history behind us,” he says. “I think the time has come for all Haitians to come together. Our motto is togetherness, L'union fait la force (Unity makes strength) is the strength that gives us our independence today. I think the time has come for us to unite to liberate Haiti.”
III.
As I spoke to Chérizier, gang members belonging to the Viv Ansanm coalition were besieging the nearby neighborhood of Solino, where a cadre of policemen and civilians from the local brigade de vigilance (self-defense militia) tried to hold them off. Video footage shot by the gang members themselves and distributed on social media shows dozens of armed young men, some clad in women’s dresses in an echo of the garish costumes donned by fighters during Liberia’s 1989-1997 civil war, approaching a barrier set up by Solino residents while chanting Si w pa Viv Ansanm, n’ap boule w an sann (If you’re not Viv Ansanm, we’ll burn you to ashes). Thus far, the fighting in Solino has displaced at least 5,000 people.
The use of armed gangs, often made up of the quite young, as a political modus operandi is perhaps the most lasting legacy of the 2001 to 2004 government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose Fanmi Lavalas party pioneered the practice during which the gangs were referred to as chimere, after a mythical fire-breathing demon. The practice has since metastasized throughout Haiti’s body politic so that many political currents in the country have their cadre of gunmen (referred to as baz, or base, in Creole), with Michel Martelly’s Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale and its affiliated entities being notably enthusiastic in the practice when they weren’t busy looting the country’s meagre resources. The gang leaders, despite frequently engaging in lethal feuds with one another, gradually grew ever-more powerful, as their erstwhile patrons among the country’s political and economic elite - for some in Haiti’s business sector also availed themselves of the services of armed groups - contributed to their rise.
Far from being the monolithic entity that Viv Ansanm might suggest, that modus operandi of the gangs is as diverse as their leadership, the common factor binding them being their roots as hirelings of the country’s political and economic class.
The 400 Mawozo gang, which controls much of the area from the northeastern suburb of Croix-des-Bouquets to the border with the Dominican Republic (and whose leader, Joseph Wilson, aka Lanmo San Jou or Death Comes Unannounced, has a $1 million bounty placed on his head by the United States Department of Justice) grew out of a criminal gang with links to no less than four different elected Haitian politicians involved in smuggling between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The 5 Segonn gang from the seaside neighborhood of Village de Dieu is the spawn of a criminal enterprise linked to a Haitian politician from Haiti’s fertile Artibonite Valley region who I have heard referred to as the “godfather” of the zone. The gang in the hilly quarter of Grand Ravine, part of the larger neighborhood of Martissant, was nurtured by a series of deputies that served in Haiti’s lower house of parliament.
For years, actors in Haiti’s private sector have also recruited gang members to try and snuff out - sometimes literally - competition from their rivals in the various economic sectors in which they operate. In 2022, the government of Canada sanctioned three of Haiti’s wealthiest businessmen - Gilbert Bigio, Reynold Deeb and Sherif Abdallah – charging them with “using their status as high-profile members of the economic elite in Haiti to protect and enable the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs, including through money laundering and other acts of corruption.”
The videos the gangs distribute through social media and messaging apps of their cruelty are clearly designed to terrorize an already-beleaguered population: A man’s head is cracked open with a hammer blow; a man with his arms tied behind his back has gasoline poured on his head and - fully alive and conscious - is set on fire; two suspected informers are brought into an open field and shot dead by Lanmou San Jou. In one notably terrible attack, over the night of 3-4 October this year, the Gran Grif (Big Claw) gang assaulted the town of Pont Sondé, along Haiti’s main north-south road, by land and sea, targeting La Coalition, a self-defense group, before turning on the population at which point “entire families were wiped out,” with “at least” 70 slain, according to the Réseau National de Défense de Droits Humains (RNDDH) human rights organization. [Though local officials initially put the death toll of the attack at over 100, there has been considerable dispute since, with the Association des entreprises funéraires du bas Artibonite (Association of Funeral Companies of Lower Artibonite) saying that the claim of over 100 deaths in Pont Sondé is “a voluntary exaggeration” not reflected in the number of burials, while others put toll at closer to 40.]
Late last month, the United States sanctioned former parliamentarian Prophane Victor and Gran Grif gang leader Luckson Elan for “forming, supporting, and arming gangs that have committed serious human rights abuses.”
However, there is more to the story of the gangs than just their violence. There is also a story of chronic deprivation and marginalization of the neighborhoods that they hail from which provides and endless stream of willing recruits for these groups, the serious trauma that so damaged many of the gang members themselves and the miasma of politics and business that helped to foster them.
Johnson “Izo” André, an aspiring rapper and one of the two leaders of the 5 Segonn gang that controls the neighborhood of Village de Dieu (the other being Emanuel Solomon, aka Manno, who the U.S. Department of Justice has placed a $1 million reward on for his alleged role in kidnapping U.S. citizens), was himself a former child soldier in one of the zone’s previous factions. His group has now expanded from kidnapping to deeper contacts with South American criminal organizations, as evidence by his proud display of recently-acquired Belgian-made FAL rifles, a weapon traditionally associated with the Venezuelan government's clandestine support of Colombia’s now largely-demobilized Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) guerilla group, dissident elements of which are still active in the drug trade.
The current gang leader in the neighborhood of Simon-Pelé, near the international airport, Stevenson Albert alias Jouma, is the son of René “Grenn Sonnen” Jean Anthony, a former solider, police officer and Aristide government enforcer who became a freelance bandit before being slain by security forces in a gunbattle in April 2005. Vitel'Homme Innocent, the leader of the Kraze Baryè gang (who has the distinction of having a $2 million reward for his capture put out by the F.B.I.), was once in charge of the gravel pit at a business owned by one of Haiti’s elite families, then a small-scale entrepreneur and then finally a criminal. In a June 2022 interview with the Haitian journalist Guerrier Henri, Innocent spoke of what he charged was the involvement of both Ariel Henry and the PNH’s then-Director General Léon Charles in the murder of Jovenel Moïse, a charge he has repeated in other interviews.
IV.
Though some in Haiti’s political and business elites have long lived by the words of Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” some among them realize it was the predatory instincts of some in their number that brought the country to this terrifying pass and that it is long past time things change.
“There is not one country in the world that is not functioning properly without a responsible elite, and our elite has been irresponsible for a long time,” says Ralph Edmond, Chairman and CEO of Laboratoires Farmatrix, a manufacturer of various pharmaceutical products headquartered in Lower Delmas whose warehouse was damaged in the recent violence.
“We need to do more corporate social responsibility so it really impacts the community,” Edmond believes. “Something that is transformative. We have done it before, but it has been a patchwork. You have to give the community a sense of ownership of your company, you have to be with the community.”
The situation in and around Haiti’s capital is so dire that one can almost forget that other realities, beyond political struggles and gang wars, continue to exist, as well.
At Banj, a co-working space founded by the entrepreneur Marc Alain Boucicault, one finds the site - which offers different tiers of membership and meeting rooms and office space - humming with activity. In one of the spaces, the Gwoup Konbit, a Haitian social movement working to facilitate connections between leaders and groups that espouse the principles of konbit - a traditional form of collective labor in Haiti - was holding forth. The group grew out of the work of the Konbit Solèy Leve, which formed in the capital’s impoverished Cité Soleil neighborhood in 2011.
“It is disheartening to witness the current state of Haiti, a country with so much potential yet struggling,” says Louino Robillard, a community development specialist and activist who is the group’s co-founder. “Because of the weakness and lack of vision of Haitian leadership, Haitians have become weak, desperate, and dependent, a reality that does not reflect who we truly are. We know we are stronger than this. We just need to remember who we are and where we come from.”
Miles away across the capital in the neighborhood of Juvenat, one finds an explosion of colour and light amid the enticing smell of Haitian food at the L’éveil Spirituel (Spiritual Awakening) event at the Karibe Hotel. A three-day affair, the event highlighted Haiti’s local production from art to literature to agricultural goods and featured a stunningly beautiful Musée du Vodou, which featured clothing designs modeled on the attributes of Haiti’s national religion by the local fashion designer Maelle Figaro David.
V.
Haiti’s new leaders, such as they are (many of whom, as noted before, are faces recycled from political eras past) appear to be trapped in their own spiral of learned behavior.
Earlier this month, Haiti’s Unité de lutte contre la corruption (ULCC) recommended prosecution against three members of Haiti’s transition council for participating in an alleged bribery scheme: Louis Gérald Gilles, who represents the Accord du 21 Décembre which the government of ousted Prime Minister Ariel Henry hammered out with several political entities in late 2022; Emmanuel Vertilaire, acting on behalf of the Pitit Dessalines party of former senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean Charles; and Smith Augustin, who represents the Engagés pour le Développement (EDE) party formed by former Prime Minister, Claude Joseph, and the Résistance Démocratique (RED), formed by a number of close allies of Jovenel Moïse. Despite calls from human rights and civil society bodies for the councilors to resign their positions on the commission, as yet they have not done so.
The current occupier of the council’s rotating “presidency” (of which only seven members - all male - can vote on decisions) is Leslie Voltaire, representative of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas and thus working under the aegis of a political entity and a man whose political history was daubed in the primary colours of blood and destruction, who groomed the first generation of youth gang leaders in the late 1990s and early 2000s and whose government itself committed some sickening massacres (such as the killing of at least 27 people in the central town of Saint-Marc in February 2004).
Voltaire has been sulking since he was not recognized as Haiti's president at the United Nations General Assembly last month when he tried to crash a meeting between Prime Minister Connille and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva [he appeared to have forgotten that Lula always looked a bit askance at Lavalas], and has been calling for the ouster of Haiti’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dominique Dupuy, whose public profile increased dramatically due to her advocacy of behalf of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic amid Dominican President Luis Abinader’s mass deportation scheme. Conille and his cabinet have aggressively and publicly opposed this move.
Last week, Haiti’s Ministry of Justice, Carlos Hercule, warned that “malicious individuals, working for specific sectors in national life, are planning to spread acts that undermine public order in Haiti, including plotting targeted attacks against Prime Minister Garry Conille and other members of the transitional government” and that “acting on behalf of certain specific sectors of national life,” the unnamed individuals “intend to sow more unrest and panic in the country.” For his part, the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Max Leroy Mésidor, warned the actors in this drama that “you, the authorities, don’t you see that you are taking the same path as those who preceded you?”
There likewise seems to be confusion and upheaval in the international community’s approach to the crisis, as well. Some in the United Nations bureaucracy are reportedly resentful that the body’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) was essentially bypassed by the creation of the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission, even though its creation was approved by the United Nations Security Council in October 2023. For his part, Leslie Voltaire has formally requested the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti. Many foreign governments involved in Haiti seem to be deep in the delusion that “elections” can be held under such circumstance, even as the capital and its environs continue to veer through cycles of insecurity. One foreign diplomat I spoke to, frustrated at this approach, said that the international community was “committed to driving this shit with their feet,” a reference to what he viewed as unachievable goals and unrealistic means of realizing them.
VI.
Heading down the Canapé Vert road on a moto, one first sees the broad sweep of the entire city, the port just outside of Cité Soleil, the waterfront districts of Village de Dieu and Mariani. The hillsides where the neighborhoods of Grand Ravine and Ti Bois formed over the years. Then one begins to run into the barricades, some improvised, such as a line of tires across the road, others more permanent, such as gates that have sprung up in recent years, some made out of steel and with padlocks which are shut and fixed tight come nightfall and at moments of unrest to stop the gangs from venturing further up the hill. These neighborhoods - Canapé Vert, Pacot (my old neighborhood when I was living in Haiti in the early 2000s), Turgeau - were where the vigilante movement known as Bwa Kale (Chop Wood) began in early-mid 2023, where the population rose up against the gangs, killing many of their members before reportedly being undercut by the Ariel Henry government. The surroundings grow notably more green and fecund, and the winding lanes off Avenue Jean-Paul II, where the luxurious Marriott looks over the simmering city, are still dotted with lovely old homes in the “gingerbread” style of architecture and sprays of bougainvillea issuing out from behind high walls.
Inside the hotel, I spoke with Danièle Magloire, a sociologist and human rights activist who helped found the feminist organization Kay Fanm.
“The government says it has a roadmap, but it’s more of a grocery list, and everyone has to manage on their own as best they can,” she tells me. “Hence the barriers we see in all the neighborhoods. It's a response to the situation.”
The status of women in Haiti is especially fraught. In June, Haitian feminist and human rights organizations called the exclusion of women from voting membership in the transition council represented “a gigantic step backwards compared to decades of hard-won progress towards equality.” Earlier this month, Béatrice Cajoux of the feminist organization MARIJÀN was killed by unidentified armed men as she distributed hygiene kits intended for displaced people from Carrefour-Feuilles, a gang controlled neighborhood that currently falls under the sway of the group from neighboring Grand Ravine. The Grand Ravine baz is currently led by a triumvirate of gang leaders: Renel Destina aka Ti Lapli, against whom a $1 million reward is currently being offered by the U.S. Department of Justice for his alleged role of kidnapping U.S. citizens, and a pair of brother brothers, “Killick” and “Bougoy.”
“It is women who generally take care of their children, but with this security situation created by armed gangs, they can no longer function or work as they did,” Danièle Magloire tells me. “Already in general, women have the most precarious jobs, the lowest paid jobs, and many, many businesses have shut down... In addition, there is violence when the gangs carry out their attacks, they rape because it goes hand in hand with their methods of attack, the burning down of houses, people being beaten, people being killed.”
She is not buying the gangs’ stated political agenda.
“I think it must be said that these are criminal groups, these are not groups that are fighting to take power,” she continues. “They are not interested in coming to manage a country with all these problems, manage the economy, manage the schools. That does not interest them. They want to occupy their territory and make money…[But] the vast majority of people here are people who simply want to live, and aspire to educate their children in schools worthy of the name.”
VII.
Meanwhile, back in his home in Delmas, as the noise of traffic and the swirl of everyday life echoes just outside his gate, Frankétienne grows philosophical about what he and his nation have endured.
“I was born on Easter Sunday,” he tells a visitor. “And I believe that having internalized the importance of this date, linked to the resurrection of Christ, I am the man of the renaissance, I am the man of the resurrection and, in fact, my life has been a succession of trials overcome.”
He goes on to detail a dizzying list of close calls: Arrests under the Duvalier dictatorship, a bout of advanced cancer, nearly dying in the 2010 earthquake, a near-fatal robbery, an agonizing bout with Covid only three years ago.
“I am the man of resurrection,” he repeats. “Of rebirth. I am a miracle.”
Perhaps, one hopes, one day soon, Haiti will have its resurrection, too.