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Haiti’s Agents Of Fear

Haitians are caught between the grip of violent gangs and the messy legacies of foreign intervention.

In the Caribbean, fear has its own history. It came in the 15th century with the Spanish, who used extreme violence to conquer the archipelago island by island. And it was central to the institution of chattel slavery and colonial rule — expanded by primarily England and France — that brutally controlled unfree African and Caribbean communities first through slavery and then colonialism over the centuries that followed.

From this legacy, violence soaked itself into the island’s societies. Later, Haiti’s independent rulers used fear to keep themselves in office. Fear traveled with those who fled to exile and with their descendants when they escaped the worst of post-independence authoritarian oppression.  

The 21st-century agents of fear are urban gangs. They have especially spread through the poorest sections of the Caribbean’s cities and are incredibly mobile, using smartphones, cars and motorcycles to expand their reach. On my visits to Haiti over the past decade I have been reminded of aspects of my childhood in Kingston, Jamaica, where during the 1970s, political gangs set the pace of life in the city’s poorest areas.

Young men and boys fought each other in the name of politicians, parties, turf and honor. As long as the leaders — called dons in Jamaica — kept the communities loyal to the political leader, the dons could enjoy untrammeled jurisdiction. But Haiti is also unique from its neighbors.

The gangs in Haiti are now all-powerful. Fear is consuming the country. Since 2021, some 700,000 people have fled their homes. Boats laden with displaced Haitians are taking the treacherous journey across the Caribbean Sea for the U.S., Latin America and neighboring Caribbean islands, with greater frequency. 

Each time a crisis in Haiti comes to global attention the focus is less on the reasons for it than on how to repair it. One approach always rises above others: foreign intervention of various kinds — from diplomatic missions to military occupation to peacekeeping operations.

Each of these so-called solutions has resulted in claims of success by the occupying forces, but they seldom last, for the challenges Haiti faces are complex and historically ingrained. In conversation with Haitian friends, it has become clear to me that they, like everyone else, are struggling to find a way to understand what the latest Kenyan-led intervention can do.

Part of the problem and reason for the skepticism is the conviction among Haitians that interventions from “developed” nations always seem to start from an assumption of superiority. In the summer of 1888, President Lysius Salomon dealt with an uprising of opponents in Port-au-Prince by instructing followers to torch half the city, turning more than 400 homes to ash.