Everything is Changed In Haiti, What’s Changed?

 

“The situation totally changed now, because the gangs are now working together,” a Haitian consultant said. Their unity forced the prime minister to resign. 

People with their faces covered, holding long guns while sitting on a step and the sidewalk.

Gang members this week in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It is unclear how strong the gangs’ alliance is or whether it will last. Credit...Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters

By Maria Abi-Habib, Natalie Kitroeff and Frances Robles

 

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Even as gangs terrorized Haiti, kidnapped civilians en masse, and killed at will, the country’s embattled prime minister held on to power for years.

Then, in a matter of days, everything changed.

Amid political upheaval not seen since the country’s president was assassinated in 2021, Haiti’s prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to step down. Now, neighboring countries are scrambling to create a transitional council to run the country and plot a course for elections, which once seemed a distant possibility.

What made this moment different, experts say: The gangs united, forcing the country’s leader to relinquish power.

“Prime Minister Ariel resigned not because of politics, not because of the massive street demonstrations against him over the years, but because of the violence gangs have carried out,” said Judes Jonathas, a Haitian consultant who has worked for years in aid delivery. “The situation totally changed now, because the gangs are now working together.” 

It is unclear how strong the alliance is or whether it will last. What is apparent is that the gangs are trying to capitalize on their control of Port-au-Prince, the capital, to become a legitimate political force in the negotiations being brokered by foreign governments including the United States, France, and Caribbean nations.

Police officers wearing camouflage, holding long guns, and walking near an armored vehicle. In the background, someone holds a wheelbarrow stacked high with cardboard boxes.

Haiti’s police force has been unable to control powerful gangs. Credit...Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters

In early March, Mr. Henry traveled to Nairobi to finalize a deal for a Kenyan-led security force to deploy to Haiti. Criminal groups seized on the absence of Mr. Henry, who is highly unpopular. Within days, the gangs shut down the airport, looted seaports, attacked about a dozen police stations, and released about 4,600 prisoners from jail.

Understand the Turmoil in Haiti

A simmering crisis. For more than two years, Haiti has been mired in violence and political upheaval. Despite an international effort to help restore normalcy to the country, the security conditions appear to have further deteriorated in recent days, with gang members assaulting two prisons and vowing to oust Haiti’s prime minister. Here is what to know.

Escalating violence. Gangs have long controlled Haiti’s poorest neighborhoods, but their influence and the level of violence they have unleashed has intensified since the country's last president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his home in 2021 and replaced by Ariel Henry, an interim prime minister who is widely viewed as illegitimate. Since then, murders and kidnappings have soared.

A new threat. Gangs have not been solely responsible for the turmoil. An armed environmental group allied with Guy Philippe, who was part of a 2004 coup that ousted a former Haitian president and who recently returned to Haiti after serving six years in a U.S. federal prison, has clashed with government forces and demanded Henry’s ouster.

International intervention. Haiti’s government pleaded for months for international help. Last summer, Kenya offered to lead a multinational force to Haiti to help train and assist the Haitian police. After a court temporarily blocked the mission, which is largely financed by the United States, a formal agreement to proceed was signed in March.

What is happening right now? Since traveling to Kenya to sign the deal, Henry has been unable to return to Haiti because of doubts over safely landing at the airport in Port-au-Prince. On March 11, the prime minister said that he would step down once a transitional council had been established, and Kenyan officials said that they were pausing their plans for the deployment of the police mission until a new government in Haiti was formed.

They demanded that Mr. Henry resign, threatening to worsen the violence if he refused. Since he agreed to step down, the gangs seem to be largely focused on securing immunity from criminal prosecution and staying out of jail, analysts said.

“Their biggest objective is amnesty,” Mr. Jonathas said.

The criminals’ most prominent political ally is Guy Philippe, a former police commander and coup leader who served six years in U.S. federal prison for laundering drug money before being deported back to Haiti late last year. He has led the push for Mr. Henry to resign.

  

Now Mr. Philippe is openly calling for the gangs to receive amnesty.

“We have to tell them, ‘You will put down the weapons or you will face big consequences,’” Mr. Philippe told The New York Times in an interview in January, referring to the gangs. “If you put down the weapons,” he said, “you will have a second chance. You will have some kind of amnesty.”

Mr. Philippe does not have a seat on the transitional council appointed to lead Haiti. But he is using his connections to the Pitit Desalin political party to bring those demands to the negotiating table in Jamaica, where Caribbean and international officials are meeting to forge a solution to the crisis in Haiti, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Gang leaders’ decision to unite was most likely motivated by a desire to consolidate power after Mr. Henry signed the agreement with Kenya to bring 1,000 police officers to Port-au-Prince, said William O’Neill, the United Nations expert on human rights in Haiti.

Many gang members in Haiti are teenagers, he said, who are looking to be paid but who probably have little interest in going to war with a well-armed police force.

 

The gangs respect “fear and force,” Mr. O’Neill said. “They fear a force stronger than they are.”

While many doubt that the Kenyan force will bring lasting stability, its arrival would represent the biggest challenge to the gang’s territorial control in years.

 

“The gangs have been hearing about this Kenyan-led force,” for years, said Louis-Henri Mars, the executive director of Lakou Lapè, an organization that works with Haitian gangs. “Then they saw that it was finally coming, so they launched a pre-emptive strike.”

The violence unleashed by the gangs shut down much of the capital and prevented Mr. Henry from being able to return to his country.

This was the tipping point: The United States and Caribbean leaders viewed Haiti’s situation as “untenable.” U.S. officials concluded Mr. Henry was no longer a viable partner and sharpened their calls for him to move quickly toward a transition of power, officials involved in the political negotiations said.

Since then, gang leaders have been speaking to journalists, holding news conferences, promising peace, and demanding a seat at the table. 

Jimmy Chérizier speaks before a tight crowd of people who are holding up cellphones to record him.

Jimmy Chérizier, the gang leader also known as Barbecue, is in Port-au-Prince this month. His gang is accused of looting, rape, and random killings. Credit...Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters

Jimmy Chérizier, a powerful gang leader also known as Barbecue, has become one of the best-known faces of the new gang alliance, known as Living Together.

The G-9, the gang of Mr. Chérizier, a former police officer known for his ruthlessness, controls downtown Port-au-Prince and has been accused of attacking neighborhoods allied with opposition political parties, looting houses, raping women, and killing people at random.

Yet in his news conferences, Mr. Chérizier has apologized for the violence and blamed Haiti’s economic and political systems for the country’s destitution and inequality. Mr. Philippe has echoed that thinking.

Guy Philippe standing on a step and listening to villagers, who are looking up at him.

Guy Philippe with villagers in his hometown, Pestel, in 2016. He is the most prominent political ally of Haiti’s gangs. Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

“Those young girls, those young boys, they have no other opportunity — to die starving or to take weapons,” Mr. Philippe told The Times. “They chose to take weapons.”

   

Andre Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince.

Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent based in Mexico City, covering Latin America. She previously reported from Afghanistan, across the Middle East, and in India, where she covered South Asia. More about Maria Abi-Habib

Natalie Kitroeff is The Times’s bureau chief for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. More about Natalie Kitroeff

Frances Robles is an investigative reporter covering the United States and Latin America. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years. More about Frances Robles

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