Letter from Port-au-Prince
Political factions angle for advantage as Haiti’s capital fights for its survival
I.
Just off Avenue John Brown in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, one descends into a labyrinthine twilight despite the bright sun and deep cerulean sky blazing just outside. Under fragile tarps and with hanging laundry fluttering over plastic barrels of gray water, some 8,000 souls now live virtually on top of one another, the air filled with the sounds of babies crying and adults shouting to be heard, a mixture of sweat, cooking food and latrines cloying to one’s nose.
The camp sprung up on the grounds of the Office de la Protection du Citoyen (OPC) - perhaps ironically a government entity tasked with the promotion and protection of human rights - this past November after gunmen belonging to the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) coalition of armed groups besieged the neighborhood of Solino, descending upon terrified residents while clad in garish costumes that included women’s dresses in an echo of the surreal sartorial flourishes donned by fighters during Liberia’s 1989-1997 civil war, and chanting Si w pa Viv Ansanm, n’ap boule w an sann (If you’re not Viv Ansanm, we’ll burn you to ashes). Those camped out at the OPC now constitute part of the nearly 1.3 million people the International Organization for Migration (IOM) now counts as internally displaced in Haiti, a 24 percent increase since December 2024 and the highest number of people displaced by violence ever recorded in the country. The OPC complex is one of 200 sites housing displaced people in and around Port-au-Prince and is administered by the IOM with assistance from the Italian NGO Cooperazione E Sviluppo (CESVI).
“Life is very difficult here,” says Nordil Tadet, part of the committee that camp has organized to help advocate on their behalf. As he speaks, women cook or wash clothes and young children run past or sit on sheets of cardboard on the ground. “People were chased from their homes and now they’re here…When the rain falls it comes right into our camp.”
Strung along the glittering and polluted waters of a broad bay and ringed by brooding mountains that climb into cool, pine-dotted forests, Port-au-Prince has experienced a security collapse in recent years that few cities in the world ever have. Armed groups that for more than two decades have used the capital’s poorer quarters as their redoubts, maintaining close links with actors in the country’s political and business elite who often sponsored their activities, have seen their power grow exponentially since the July 2021 assasination of President Jovenel Moïse. Coalescing first under the banner of the G9 an Fanmi e Alye (G9 Family and Allies, so called because the coalition originally consisted of nine affiliated armed groups) before Moïse’s death and then as Viv Ansanm in early 2024, the gunmen now control the lion’s share of not only the capital itself - making repeated forays into the mountain towns above it, as well - but also its northern and southern suburbs and have, since March, extended their reach all the way to the city of Mirebalais, some 30 miles away to the east. The most well-known of their leaders, Jimmy Chérizier alias Barbecue, is a former police officer who I interviewed last October and serves as the coalition’s unofficial spokesman. Last month, along with the Gran Grif gang, another armed group operating in Haiti’s agricultural Artibonite Valley, Viv Ansanm was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State. [A sizable amount of the guns in Haiti are purchased in the United States and then smuggled illegally to ports around the country.]
Before Haiti’s armed groups reared up, golem-like, to turn on their patrons, they had been used for many years by those who viewed it as their right to rule the impoverished country. Often referred to as the baz (base), the armed groups today are in a sense descendants of other irregular paramilitary forces in Haitian history, from the zinglin of the mid-1800s rule of Faustin Soulouque to l’armée souffrante of the renegade general Louis-Jean-Jacques Acaau to the Tontons Macoutes of dictator François Duvalier.
But the groups in their current form - often quite young gunmen acting in a hybrid role of neighborhood enforcer, tax collector, muscle for political interests and freelance criminal - have their roots in the late 1990s to early 2000s reign of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party. Many of the young men who formed the first generation of baz (a number of whom I knew personally during my years living in Port-au-Prince), were then known as the chimere and had grown up in the orbit of Aristide’s Lafanmi Selavi home for street children, before being gradually seduced into a life of violence in support of Aristide’s political movement following his 1994 return from exile. The model was later adopted by a number of different political currents in Haiti, including, with notable enthusiasm, by the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) founded by Michel Martelly, who served as Haiti’s president from 2011 until 2016. Elements of Haiti’s private sector also used the services of the baz to wage war on one another’s business interests.
When Haiti demobilized its army in 1995 (it has gradually been reactivated) and replaced it with an undermanned police force, the Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH), an entity which often found itself under pressure for Haiti’s political factions, the country’s security situation continued to remain fragile. With the authority of the state eroding even further during Jovenel Moïse’s truncated presidency - which saw Moïse (elected under the PHTK banner) square off against a recalcitrant opposition dominated by violent opportunists who promised to “destroy the country completely” if he took office - the power of the state decreased as the power of the armed groups increased. When Moïse’s post-mortem successor, Prime Minister Ariel Henry, signed an agreement with the government of Kenya for that nation to lead a multinational security mission to Haiti in March 2024, the armed groups rose up as Viv Ansanm and succeeded in driving Henry from power.
II.
With the capital’s airport closed to international travel since three planes landing or departing were struck by gunfire in October of last year, and with the overland approaches to the north, east and south all controlled by the gangs, one now enters Haiti’s capital - a city estimated to now have a population of over 3 million people - aboard an aging helicopter from the northern city of Cap-Haïtien, skirting over the Massif du Nord mountain range garlanded by gossamer clouds before sailing over the Artibonite Valley, green and undulating, below. The largely bald and denuded hills around Mòn Kabrit herald one’s arrival to the city of fires.
The benighted Ariel Henry has since been replaced by a hydra-headed, nine-person Conseil Présidentiel de Transition (Presidential Transition Council or CPT), composed almost entirely of veterans of the political currents that brought Haiti to the current abyss in the first place and midwifed into existence by the United States and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Another key player in the post-Jovenel Moïse political firmament - though frequently under the radar - in Haiti has been the British diplomat Jonathan Powell, who served as Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff during the latter’s premiership from 1997 to 2007 and whose “private diplomacy” firm, Inter-Mediate, was very active in Haiti in recent years, with local daily Le Nouvelliste reporting in March 2023 that Powell had already “been active for several months in the country.” Who exactly was employing Powell to set up his various tête-à-tête between local and international political actors remains murky, and last year he returned to London, where he is currently serving as National Security Adviser in the administration of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The CPT itself, meanwhile, shares with its predecessor Henry the dual distinctions of both being possibly illegal and deeply unpopular. In a country where the World Food Programme estimates some 5.7 million Haitians do not have enough to eat and nearly 277,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition, an April report by the Réseau national de défense des droits humains (RNDDH) human rights organization concluded that each member of the council was costing Haiti’s meagre pubic treasury more than USD $76,000 per month, including more than $2,000 a month in “fuel expenses,” nearly $4,000 per month “for their spouse” and over $7,000 a month to pay for food. The economist Fritz Jean, the current occupant of the CPT’s rotating presidency, has denounced such allegations as “smears.”
Despite having no legal authority to do so, the CPT also decided it was within their purview to rewrite Haiti’s constitution, coming up with suggestions that have been denounced by almost all levels of society, with Haiti’s Association professionnelle des magistrats (APM) saying the proposed changes would steamroll judicial independence and others warning that they will pave the way for “a president who is king, an elected dictator.”
Outside of the air-conditioned offices of the transition authorities, life in the capital continues in a swirl of activity amid the ever-present threat of another lunge into a new neighborhood by Viv Ansanm. The neighborhood of Bois Verna is now on the frontline of the areas of the city not occupied by the armed groups, and in early afternoon the crossroads beneath the Natcom telecom building is full of a crush of vendors, pedestrians and moto taxis waiting for a fare, as well as some fairly serious looking police checkpoints with masked and heavily armed officers interrogating drivers and passerby (in a stylistic addition, one officer is even draped in a keffiyeh). Last year, the gangs acquired a .50-caliber machine gun and perhaps have acquired another one or two since then.
“We are living in a catastrophic situation,” says Jocelyne Colas, the Executive Director of Haiti’s Commission Episcopale Nationale Justice et Paix. “So far [the government’s] responses have not been what we expected [and] we feel they are more discussing what concerns them, each for their own, while the population's situation is getting worse and worse every day.”
Earlier this month, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that at least 2,680 people were killed in Haiti between 1 January and 30 May 2025, including 54 children. The Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission in Haiti, initially believed to need at least 5,000 active personnel to be effective, hobbles along starved of promised personnel, with regional countries such as Barbados (whose imperious Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, was among those who helped foist the transition council on Haiti to begin with) backing out of their promised support for the mission.
Over 25 years, Haiti has been host to the Mission civile internationale en Haïti (MICIVIH) from 1993 to 2000, the Mission des Nations unies en Haïti (MINUAH), the U.S.-led “Operation Uphold Democracy” in 1994, and, from 2004 to 2017, the Mission des Nations unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH), which eventually became the Bureau Intégré des Nations Unies en Haïti (BINUH). Far from helping to stabilize the country, some observers in Haiti believe that the long international involvement has instead helped to solidify the unstable, creaking foundations of a political system that has brought the country to its current sorry state.
“For 30 years, peacekeeping missions replaced the national authorities responsible for ensuring the security of lives and property,” says Haitian sociologist Michèle Oriol. “They built up a messy system, with too many people involved in the police formations, without producing a national security doctrine and without ensuring national responsibility for security issues. Haitian political authorities were busy maintaining their power while the blan took care of security. When they left and insecurity had to be managed, the institutions were already rotten.”
III.
In the current battle against Viv Ansanm, a great deal of attention in the foreign press has been focused on the actions of a small group of mercenaries affiliated with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince currently operating weaponized drones in Haiti under the aegis of the office of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. This is a situation of of questionable legality and one whose outcome is uncertain given Fils-Aimé’s icy relationship with PNH Director General Rameau Normil, but, nevertheless, down on the terra firma of the Haitian streets, the war continues to be waged by Haiti’s police and an ever-expanding patchwork of brigades de vigilance, or self-defense militias, throughout the capital, the Artibonite Valley and the Plateau Central. In late May, the PNH conducted a raid on a bastion of the Kraze Baryè (Gate Breakers) gang of Vitel'Homme Innocent (on whom the U.S. Department of State had placed a $2 million bounty) in Pernier, near Pétionville, reportedly killing a number of gunmen and seizing firearms, ammunition and other war booty. Police, supported by local militia, also recently launched a punishing attack on gang members in the mountain district of Furcy above the capital. It would be wrong to think that the gangs are anywhere near vanquished, though, as one night a friend and I retired from listening to the rain soothingly fall on the palm fronds near their empty pool only to be serenaded by the sound of automatic weapons fire as Kraze Baryè attempted to launch an incursion on the community of Méyotte, near Pétionville, and were repulsed by police.
The militias themselves can sometimes be quite brutal, however. In the Artibonite Valley, north of the capital, a militia known as the Coalition révolutionnaire pour sauver l’Artibonite (Revolutionary Coalition to Save the Artibonite) committed a massacre of at least dozen parishioners at a church in the town of Préval who they believed were collaborating with the Gran Grif gang.
The vanguard of the effort to stem Viv Ansanm’s advance in Port-au-Prince has been the neighborhood of Canapé-Vert. In 1944, the Haitian writers Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin set their eponymous novel there in what was then a rural and fecund area between Port-au-Prince and where the hills of the capitol begin their climb up to Pétionville, producing a pastiche of peasant life with a strong thread of Vodou running through it. Over the years, as the city continued to grow, Canapé-Vert became part of the continually populated stretch between the two communes, part of the urban sprawl of Port-au-Prince that now sees little distinction between once-separate municipalities. Once leafy and green, the hills around Canapé-Vert’s public square have long since been overtaken by the fragile dwelling’s of Haiti’s struggling class. It was here, in April 2023, that police intercepted a minibus with a dozen individuals, arms and ammunition, who were subsequently lynched and their bodies burned by an enormous angry crowd of citizens, given birth to the anti-gnag citizen vigilante movement of Bwa Kale (Chopping Wood). Today, one finds a neighborhood criss-crossed with gates ready to be closed at a moment’s notice, piles of tires ready to be set ablaze and sandbagged fortifications. The leader of the local self-defense forces in Canapé Vert is Samuel Joasil, who served in the Unité de Sécurité Générale du Palais National - the unit directly responsible for the president’s security - under Jovenel Moïse.
“Canapé Vert is a model of existence, it’s a the model of an impregnable fortress,” Georges Duperval, a local entrepreneur close to the Canapé-Vert militia, told me one afternoon as we sat on the grounds of a now-moribund nightclub he owns in the neighborhood.
“The people in Canapé Vert have lived here for a long time,” Duperval said as local children splashed in a swimming pool on the nightclub’s grounds, seeking an escape from the afternoon heat. “Their parents and their families are here, so we got together, community leaders, church leaders, vodouisants and everyone…We have around 50,000 people living here and many of them are militia, informers, spies or supporters…Haiti is a sacred land. The Haitian people just want to live in peace with the most basic things. Why can’t we give that to then?”
IV.
When - and if - the current crisis ends, what iteration of Haiti can be reconstructed out of the ashes of the current violence remains to be seen.
The members of the CPT - whose mandate is slated to end in February 2026 with the inauguration of a new president (a deadline no one believes they will be able to meet) - are widely viewed as trying to position the various political currents they represent to control the electoral machinery in the event of the next election. Though many have spoken in terms of such a scenario favouring Aristide and the Fanmi Lavalas party (both current CPT president Fritz Jean and his predecessor as the body’s leader, Leslie Volatire, emerged from the Lavalas milieu and the latter remains a member of the party), on the ground it seemed more likely that political currents formerly aligned with the late president René Préval (who died in 2017) appear to have the upper hand. The current Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, ran unsuccessfully for Haiti’s senate under the mantle of the Vérité party that Préval founded in 2016 and the current Minister of Interior, Paul Antoine Bien-Aimé, previously served in ministerial posts during both of Préval’s non-consecutive presidencies under Jacques-Édouard Alexis, Préval’s Prime Minister. An ideologically promiscuous coalition, the Préval faction runs the gamut from erstwhile leftists to many in the orbit of Unibank, Haiti’s largest bank, whose founder and former board chairman, Carl Braun, was sanctioned by the Canadian government in 2023 for “enabling the illegal activities of armed gangs that terrorize the population and threaten peace and security in Haiti.”
Meanwhile, though it often gets lost in the swirl of garish political violence, Haiti’s cultural heart is also still beating. Despite the increasing lack of cultural spaces, Haiti’s writers continue to produce, its painters to paint and its musicians to put out music in a dizzying array of styles from rasin to twoubadou to konpa to reggae to hip-hop to rabòday. One afternoon during my visit, I joined some friends for lunch in a breezy apartment complex on the road up to the Hotel Ibo Lele. In recent months, the host, my friend Vanessa, had felt compelled to start painting, despite having no formal training, and her canvases depict a nation in torment, its figures whirling and gesticulating amid flames and rubble.
While in Haiti I also met up with Erol Josué, the Director of Haiti’s Bureau National d'Ethnologie and an accomplished dancer and interpreter of Haiti’s traditional Vodou songs. We reminisced about the sublime experience of attending the traditional Vodou lakous such as Souvenance, Badjo and Soukri outside the northern city of Gonaïves in the early 2000s and contrasted it with the situation today.
“The current situation is completely attacking our memory and national identity,” Erol observed. “The Bibliothèque Nationale downtown is completely inaccessible. The Bureau National d'Ethnologie, its ethnography museum and specialized library are closed to the public. The Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien is closed to the public. The Théâtre National d’Haïti is inaccessible. The École Nationale des Arts is closed. The Rex Theater is in ruins and has been squatted by displaced people from Carrefour Feuilles Even the Grand Cimetière of Port-au-Prince is difficult to access. Artists don't have a place to express their inspiration.”
As Haiti’s complexities grow ever more byzantine, the country also suffers from a dearth of nuanced discussion abroad, especially within the anglophone world. Many analysts, academics and even journalists who regularly write about Haiti haven't set foot in Port-au-Prince in years (and some never at all) and their discourse often suffers from their remoteness from events and people on the ground. Like many countries, Haiti has also been impacted by the spread of conspiratorial incitement on various online platforms. One recent popular recent conspiracy theory involved laying Haiti’s woes at the feet of its supposedly vast deposits of iridium - a dense, naturally-occuring metal - with some sites even going as far as to falsely claim that “Haiti has the world's second largest iridium deposits,” while, in fact, South Africa produces 80% of the global supply, followed by Russia. Haiti’s own Bureau des Mines et de l’Énergie concluded in 2022 that “assigning an economically exploitable mining target to the iridium identified in the geological layers [of Haiti] is purely utopian given the low iridium content recorded and the relatively small thicknesses involved.”
Haiti has also been firmly in the sights of the Kremlin’s francophone propaganda machine in recent years. This was attested to by a May visit to Cap-Haïtien by Kémi Séba - né Stellio Gilles Robert Capo Chichi in Strasbourg, France - an anti-semitic criminal and supporter of Russian leader Vladmir Putin who lined his pockets with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Kremlin-aligned organizations in recent years in exchange for spouting pseudo-Pan Africanist gibberish targeting Russia’s various enemies. To Haiti’s credit, though some were suckered in by his celebrity, many in the country were repulsed by Séba’s call for Haitians to join forces with the country’s gangs “against the West,” with one writer assailing what he called Seba’s repetition of the “well-known song of the main terrorist leaders who have been killing, kidnapping, robbing, and raping us for almost seven years” and another writing how “posing as a champion of a supposedly Pan-Africanist revolution, Kémi Séba is not offering a path to liberation, he's suggesting oblivion, compromise, & impunity [and] offending the suffering of a martyred people.”
And amid all the violence, fear and deprivation, Haitians somehow manage to continue living. In Cap-Haïtien, despite an enormous influx of people from other parts of the country, one can still stroll the decaying streets under atmospheric colonial balconies and watch kids play spontaneous football games and or see residents jog along the seaside Carrenage in early morning. All around the Caribbean and beyond, nations are dotted with Haitians who opted to leave their home chèche lavi (looking for life). They work on construction sites and on vast plantations in the Dominican Republic, despite confronting that country’s often caustic official racism. They staff hotels and restaurants in places like the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos.
One thing that struck me about my travels around Port-au-Prince, more often than not on a humble moto, this time was that, despite everything, the Haitians had no lost their warmth or their sense of welcome. Merchants driven out of other parts of the capital set up shop in Pétionville. Even as the hour grew late on weekend nights, one saw the residents - of modest means, classe moyenne and gwo boujwa - continue to push the envelope, staying out a little later, somehow after all these years refusing to surrender to hiding in their homes.
Gael Pressoir is a Haitian geneticist who serves as the director of the Centre Haïtien d'Innovations en Biotechnologies pour une Agriculture Soutenable (CHIBAS), a research centre that works to improve the economic security of rural families. After gangs invaded Mirebalais in March, he was forced to begin moving the centre and its resources out of the town to safer locales. When we spoke, he seemed, like me, at once both rueful about what Haiti’s people have had to endure and somewhat in awe at their ability to do so.
"What we're seeing isn’t resilience…It might be more accurate to call it over-adaptation," he told me. “This country has invented surprising ways to survive.”
Thank you for putting feet on the ground. All those places closed - “The Bibliothèque Nationale, The Bureau National d'Ethnologie, The Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien,The Théâtre National, The École Nationale, The Rex Theater" - makes my heart ache.
nice piece. particularly like the section with Erol Josué, although it is also very depressing and tragic. thanks for continuing to report on Haiti in difficult times.