On the Heights of Despair

Haiti's rulers planned to party. The country's gangs had other ideas.

Haitian security force in the mountains above the capital, Port-au-Prince, 16 February 2025.

As members of Haiti’s security forces were fighting and dying to stave off the latest lunge by Haiti’s gangs in the hills of Kenscoff above Port-au-Prince, the country’s rulers - made up of a transition council that represents a near-pure distillation of all that is wrong with the nation’s classe politique and a Prime Minister viewed as sufficiently pliable to do their bidding - were planning to party. 

After the Haitian state spent nearly $4 million to host Colombian president Gustavo Petro for a few hours in the picturesque southern city of Jacmel only last month, Patrick Delatour, currently serving as Minister of Culture and Communications under Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, announced that a carnaval national would be held in the far northern city of Fort-Liberté at a cost of more than $2 million. Tut-tutting (which is to say, transparently lying) about the fact that travel by road outside of the capital - the vast majority of which is controlled by the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) coalition of illegal armed groups - is a desperate and dangerous affair, Delatour said the capital’s resident could avail themselves of the festivities by traveling the 130 mile distance to Fort-Liberté as there was “no difficulty in going to the north” from Port-au-Prince.

Though yesterday, after a widespread public outcry, the government hastily announced it was in fact cancelling the Fort-Liberté carnival, the entire controversy dovetailed with a growing consensus that Haiti’s rulers do not seem to understand - even still, even now, at this late date - the nature of the volcano that they’re sitting atop of and, though it has not widely been analyzed abroad thus far, an ever-clearer picture of how Viv Ansanm is priming for their final push to take over the narrow swathes of the capital that remain outside of their control.