Haiti’s Endless Transition

Rotating “Interim” Governments Have Now Lasted as Long as a Presidential Term While Violence and Political Positioning Continue

Haiti Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé addresses reporters in Port-au-Prince after returning from the CARICOM Council of Heads of State and Government in Saint Lucia earlier this month. Source: Présidence d’Haïti Facebook page.

To anyone connected to certain WhatsApp and Telegram groups focused on Haiti, the images are hard to forget. Throughout July, a nonstop stream of photos and videos of people killed and tortured by various factions of Haiti’s armed groups, both in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and in the agricultural heartland of the Atibonite Valley to its north, have filtered out into the world.

It was on the night of 7 July, five years ago, that Haiti’s last president, Jovenel Moïse, was murdered as part of a sprawling international conspiracy that - despite the trials and convictions of some in the United States for their role in it - the world still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of. Since then, Haiti has been ruled by a series of ostensibly temporary interim regimes. Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who took control of the reins of state despite having never officially assumed the office he would occupy, oversaw the country’s slide into further violent anarchy from July 2021 until April 2024, by which point a coalition of armed gangs calling themselves Viv Ansanm (Live Together) succeeded in driving him from power. Henry was succeeded by the hydra-headed nine-member Conseil présidentiel de transition (CPT), almost entirely made up of products of Haiti’s balkanized and dysfunctional political class, with the body mired in scandal from its inception as its members jockeyed for advantage. In February 2026, the CPT was succeeded by another Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who had served in that role under the CPT’s auspices since November 2024 and adroitly triumphed in outflanking them to continue on as the CPT itself was shown the door.

Five years. The length of a full presidential mandate in Haiti. Since the overthrow of the Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986, only one elected president - René Préval, who passed away nearly a decade ago - managed to hand over power to a democratically-elected successor. Haiti’s other presidents - some democratically-elected and some not - saw their terms end via coup d’état (Leslie Manigat), street protests and armed rebellion (Jean-Betrand Aristide), the handing over of power to a transitional, non-elected successor (Michel Martelly) and homicide (Jovenel Moïse). With no elections held in Haiti since 2016, these five years of drift have left the country in a dire state, indeed.

The International Organization for Migration counts well over 1 million people as internally displaced due to both the violence of Viv Ansanm and its sporadic clashes with what pass for the forces of order, which include elements of the national police force, the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), the nation’s resurrected army, the Forces Armées d’Haïti (FADH), and, until last autumn, an ineffectual, United Nations-sanctioned Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) force. Last September, the United Nations authorized a Gang Suppression Force (GSF) to replace the MSS with a mandated personnel ceiling of 5,550 consisting of both military and police personnel. Like the MSS, however, the GSF has been glacially slow to get up and running.

The Central African nation of Chad has promised 1,500 to the mission, the first of whom began to deploy in April, and earlier this month, some 300 Sri Lankan soldiers arrived in Port-au-Prince to take their place among the ranks. But my sources in Haiti tell me that the current number of total personnel for the force is hovering somewhere around 2,000, far below its mandated strength. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres visited Port-au-Prince last month, where he told reporters that “the greatest shame is not the violence of the gangs [but] the indifference of a world that has looked the other way for too long.”

Haiti’s own security forces - in tandem with assaults of weaponized drones operated by contractors working with Vectus Global, a security firm co-founded by former Blackwater head Erik Prince and operating under conditions of of questionable legality - have begun pushing into areas of the capital that had been regarded as no-go zones for years. Last month, the PNH launched an operation into the seaside slum of Village de Dieu, the stronghold of the Viv Ansanm-affiliate 5 Segonn gang of Johnson “Izo” André, an aspiring rapper whose forces killed six police officers there in March 2021. In downtown Port-au-Prince, the PNH are finding “gutted buildings, looted structures [and] vegetation reclaiming the deserted streets.” But the Haitian security forces simply do not have the manpower to retain control of the neighborhoods once they have “retaken” them.

It is not work for the faint of heart, either, as, according to the Réseau national de défense des droits humains (RNDDH) human rights organization, 35 police officers were murdered between June 2025 and June 2026. Rushing to fill the security void, this month, in a course slated to last four to six months, a new contingent of 665 recruits began training at a military base in Cap-Haïtien to constitute the FADH’s first “shock troops,” in the words of Minister of Defense Mario Andrésol.

All involved have a tall order in front of them. U.N. statistics released last month concluded that at least 2,300 people have been killed across Haiti so far this year. North of Port-au-Prince, the Kokorat san Ras and Grand Grif gangs (the latter, like Viv Ansanm, designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State) operate seemingly at will. Keeping the populations of towns like Marchand-Dessalines under their boot, they extort residents as they attempt to work in their fields or any means of transport that dares ply the roads. At the end of May, Gran Grif disseminated videos of their grisly public execution of three members of the PNH’s Unité Temporaire Anti-Gang (UTAG) who had fallen into their hands. [Earlier this month, many years into their bloody reigns, the United Nations finally got around to adding Gran Grif and two other gangs - Krazé Baryé and 400 Mawozo - to their list of actors responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict.]

Around the capital, things are no better. Over the night of 4 July, gang members attacked a telecommunications facility in the zone of Obléon, up the mountain from the community of Kenscoff, in the cool hills above Port-au-Prince. The gangs were successfully repulsed by a joint PNH-FADH contingent that time, but on the night of 6 July, as the Haitian outlet AlterPresse reported, the gangs returned to the surrounding hinterlands and “armed individuals killed residents, burned houses, and destroyed crops, causing a large portion of the population to flee,” leaving dead bodies in the streets and “disappearing” people in their wake. Local officials said they alerted members of the PNH and FADH about an impending attack - Kenscoff mayor Jean Massillon had sent a letter to the head of the local police station on 30 June alerting the forces to intelligence indicating an imminent assault - but the response in terms of forces deployed was scant and insufficient. According to the UN, at least 61 people were killed in 5 days of conflict and nearly 6,000 displaced.

One might fairly ask what Haiti’s own authorities were occupied with as all of this was going on.

As Kenscoff bled, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé left Haiti to attend the 51st Conference of Heads of State and Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in Saint Lucia, with Fils-Aimé’s office releasing a statement that his presence at the conference “reflects the government’s commitment to strengthening regional cooperation, consolidating Haiti’s relations with CARICOM member states, and promoting constructive dialogue on the major challenges facing the region.” [It should be remembered that, along with the United States, CARICOM was the entity most responsible for foisting the much-loathed CPT upon the country in the first place.]

It a statement upon the conference’s conclusion, CARICOM said that it wanted to “reaffirm their unwavering solidarity with the people of Haiti and their continued commitment to supporting Haiti’s efforts to restore security, strengthen democratic institutions, and return to constitutional governance,” and also said that it would send a “high-level delegation” to Haiti at the end of July to evaluate the situation there. With Haiti’s own healthcare system in a state of collapse, Fils-Aimé announced that CARICOM was requesting that Haiti to send nurses to its member states to address a shortage of healthcare personnel there.

The rules governing any upcoming election have been the subject of an ongoing though apparently slightly abating power struggle between the CEP, the Fils-Aime administration and Haiti’s various political actors, with an absurd 316 political parties having been approved by the CEP to participate in the elections, assuming they are ever held. In a press release, the CEP announced that it was extending the deadline for parties to register until the end of July, but itself has suggested that some of the parties merge to simplify matters in the electoral project. This is a real hill to climb in a country where, as a Haitian friend told me in the late 1990s, every politician looks in the mirror in the morning and sees a potential future president.

Noting what they called “the existence of separate versions of the texts governing the electoral process” (an alarming prospect in any political context let along the volatile one that exists in Haiti), several political parties - the Konvansyon Inite Demokratik (KID) of former Port-au-Prince mayor and former Prime Minister Evans Paul; the Rassemblement des démocrates nationaux progressistes (RDNP) founded by the late president Leslie Manigat; the Engagés pour le Développement (EDE) party formed by former Prime Minister Claude Joseph; and several others - have gone as far as calling on the CEP to suspend the registration of parties, citing security conditions which “risk making the announced timetable unrealistic and compromising the very credibility of the elections.”

Though they have notably stopped talking about it much publicly, Haiti’s interim authorities are also continuing with their quest to illegally modify Haiti’s constitution, something the CPT also tried - and failed - to do during its benighted tenure. Article 72 of the electoral decree specifies that the CEP organizes the elections for “the positions to be filled” as well as “the popular ratification of the proposed changes to the Constitution in accordance with” the Pacte national pour la stabilité et l’organisation des élections, an agreement signed this past February between Haiti’s political actors and some members of its civil society and economic sector. Article 12 of the agreement dictates that “the signatory parties agree to propose…a limited number of amendments to the [constitution] based on a consensus reached within society, in order to improve governance and ensure the harmonious functioning of the State apparatus.”

A number of Haiti’s self-proclaimed “friends” have been less than helpful. The decision of a deeply reactionary U.S. Supreme Court last month to give the Trump administration virtually unlimited power to end the programme known as Temporary Protected Status or TPS - which over 300,000 Haitians were covered under - was the context in which a plane carrying 111 deported Haitians from the United States arrived in Cap-Haïtien on 11 July, with authorities of Haiti’s Office national de la migration (ONM) saying that U.S. officials told them they hoped to be able to deport 250 Haitians per week from the United States.

Another plane carrying another exile also landed in Haiti, though this time in Port-au-Prince, as former president Michel Martelly - sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for alleged involvement in drug trafficking - returned after several years abroad. Martelly’s presence in Haiti simultaneously with that of former presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Prosper Avril and Jocelerme Privert must mark something of a record for former presidents being physically present on the national territory at the same time. After returning to his home in Peguy Ville with a traditional rara band in tow, Martelly’s first order of business was to sit before the latest judge tasked with investigating Jovenel Moïse’s murder.

So many years lost. So many lives lost. Perhaps, if it is ever fully constituted, the Gang Suppression Force will be able to turn the tide against the armed groups and what have increasingly looked like hit-and-run insurgency tactics against anyone who challenges their spheres of control. Viv Ansanm and affiliated groups have now had five solid years of practice fighting a series of different military adversaries and have gotten surprisingly good at it beyond the chaotic assemblage they often appear to be.

But what worries me most is the continuing focus of Haiti’s political actors on the prolongation of their own power and influence at the virtual eclipse of a security collapse that has moved in ebbs and flows but never fundtamentally changed: Viv Ansanm and it allies continue to control the vast majority of the capital and all the approaches to it from the north, south and east, with the maritime area of the Bay of Port-au-Prince to the west remaining somewhat contested. What would move the needle, perhaps, is when the country’s political actors no longer wish to conduct affairs by the maxim of Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Ayiti pap peri.