Koupe tèt, boule kay
More neighborhoods fall to Haiti’s gangs as security mission struggles to gain traction
Like embers from a burning building, one by one the touch of the illegal armed groups dominating Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, has fallen on new neighborhoods.
During the early days of the new year, clashes took place between gangs and security forces in the quartiers populaires of Solino, Lower Delmas, Nazon and elsewhere as the armed groups, since early last year united under the umbrella of the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) coalition, steadily work their way up the hill from their seaside redoubts towards neighborhoods such as Canapé Vert, one of the bastions of the Bwa Kale (Chop Wood) vigilante movement that has seen civilian militias work to secure their zones behind gates and barriers in tandem with official security forces. In his own particular way of ringing in 2025, sporting a jaunty new coiffure, former police officer Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier, the spokesman for Viv Ansanm, announced on New Year’s Day that the the collective would be transforming itself into a political party for elections that are slated - perhaps over-optimistically - to be held later this year.
Haiti’s theoretical government is composed of a nine-member Conseil Présidentiel de Transition (Presidential Transition Council or CPT) of which only seven members - all male - can vote and Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and his cabinet. It essentially extends control over only a very few neighborhoods in the capital. With the council itself made up almost entirely of veterans of Haiti’s previous political wars, its current “president” is Leslie Voltaire of the Fanmi Lavalas party of former Haitian President Jean-Bertand Aristide, a political current that, two decades ago, helped create the template for the armed groups now terrorizing the country.
Cobbled together with CARICOM and U.S. assistance following the Viv Ansanm uprising against then-Prime Minister Ariel Henry (who resigned in April 2024 and who local human rights groups had accused of his own links to the gangs), the council has, since its inception, been beset by scandal and infighting. Three of its coalition members - the Accord du 21 Décembre, which the defunct Henry government hammered out with several political entities in late 2022, the Collectif du 30 janvier consisting of political groupings ranging from the Organisation du peuple en lutte (OPL) to the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) (several of whose members have been sanctioned by the governments of the United States and Canada) and the Résistance Démocratique (RED), formed by a number of close allies of slain president Jovenel Moïse - are calling for the council to be reduced to three members. One member each of a new transition council, the groups argue, should be drawn from Haiti’s Supreme Court, civil society and political sector. To make matters even more complex, the Accord du 21 Décembre and RED have distanced themselves from their representatives on the current council, both of whom (along with a third council member) have been named in a corruption scandal regarding their activities there.
There has been an agonizing push-and-pull between the gangs, the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) force and Haitian security forces. While a recent incursion by the Grand Ravine gang into the hills above Port-au-Prince ended in defeat for the gunmen at the hands of Haitian police and the security mission is working to wrest the Artibonite Valley town of Petite-Rivière de l’Artibonite from gangs, an armed group in Port-au-Prince’s Wharf Jérémie section under the command of local gang leader Monel Félix, better known as Mikano (accused of a mass killing there last month), succeeded in bringing the main port in Haiti’s capital to a virtual standstill. Innocent civilians, such as the young entrepreneur Roberson Rendel, continue to be slain by assassin’s bullets, in this case in front of the Eglise Perpétuel Secours in Delmas 75. Despite losing a number of their members, the Gran Grif gang, based in the Artibonite Valley’s Savien, still succeeded in setting fire to an armored vehicle belonging to the MSS and released gloating videos of the act.
As dozens of Guatemalan soldiers and a handful of Salvadorans landed in Port-au-Prince to help buttress the MSS, its spokesman, Jack Ombaka, told Radio Métropole that the population had to be “patient” and called for the installation of forward operating bases in gang-affected neighborhoods.
With the United Nations reporting that more than 5,600 people died in gang violence in Haiti in 2024, one wonders have much more patience Haiti’s population should be expected to have. What, then, is a possible way forward?
It is perhaps instructive to look at other examples where warring organizations were brought to heel.
After a 50-year civil war that claimed many thousands of lives, the government of Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos only successfully brought the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC) rebel group to the negotiating table following a horrific war of attrition between the FARC, the government of Santos’ predecessor, Álvaro Uribe, and right-wing anti-FARC paramilitaries under the umbrella of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defenders of Colombia or AUC). For years, all sides in the conflict - the FARC, the government and government-aligned paramilitaries - committed horrific human rights abuses, but the Uribe government, with Santos serving as Minister of Defence through much of its tenure, succeded in significantly degrading the FARC’s ability to launch a wide scale war. Uribe and Santos, both, however had the luxury of democratic legitimacy (having both been elected to the presidency) and of their anti-insurgency efforts being bankrolled by the massive U.S. foreign and military aid programme known-as Plan Colombia. The authorities, such as they are, in Haiti currently have neither. [The AUC disbanded in 2006 and the FARC demobilized in 2017, though splinter groups from both entities continue to commit violence and engage in drug trafficking.]
In Liberia, which fought two horrific civil wars between 1989 and 1997 and then again between 1999 to 2003, peace was only achieved following the resignation of warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor, who was subsequently convicted by a UN-backed court of war crimes for his support for rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone. An agreement signed in Accra, Ghana in August 2003 finally ended the conflict, but enabled the political rehabilitation of combatants such as Prince Johnson, whose Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) rebel group had committed horrific human rights abuses and who had been filmed overseeing the dismemberment and execution of then-president Samuel Doe in 1990. Johnson, who died this past November, went on to sit in Liberia’s senate for 18 years despite Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommending that he specifically be banned from office.
El Salvador’s 12 year civil war, which lasted between 1979 and 1992 and saw death squads, many of them with close ties to the U.S.-supported military, kill civilians with impunity, ended with both a truth commission and a controversial amnesty law which was finally suspended in 2019.
A military victory over Haiti’s gangs may seem a long way off, but it is worth, even at this early date, debating what any day after may conceivably look like.
To be clear, Viv Ansanm have committed some sickening crimes against a largely defenseless population, but the salient fact here is not only in the diversity of how the outcomes ending previous conflicts were arrived at - defacto military victories in Colombia and Liberia, effective stalemate in El Salvador - but how a political and not just a military solution followed thereafter to arrive at something resembling peace, as flawed as that peace may have been.
These examples should be studied in Haiti. Though they are a million miles away from one now, a military victory by combined Haitian and international forces over Viv Ansanm may be possible, but any “victory” that does not take into account the realties of trauma, deprivation and state absence in the highly marginalized communities from which the group draws its forces from will be short-lived indeed, as will any plan that does not address the culpability of the political and economic actors who helped give birth to the gangs in the first place.
As someone who was spent more time in these marginalized Port-au-Prince neighborhoods than most foreigners, I can say that without a comprehensive plan to ameliorate the misery that helps perpetuate these groups, we will be back in this same situation in only a few years time. I hope that those with far more power to influence Haiti’s future than I have are keeping this forefront in their minds.