Imperialism faces a dangerous threat in Haiti. The collapse and subsequent infighting between fractious local ruling cliques has derailed US and French imperialist plans to establish a compliant functioning government. The vast gap between rich and poor has provoked constant rebellions. Now a federation of armed groups under the banner Viv Ansamn (Live Together) is in control of 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and much of the countryside. DAVID HETFIELD reports.
An anarchic struggle for existence involving armed bands developed as the acutely polarised society disintegrated after anti-government protests in 2018. In 2021, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, and in the face of punishing inflation, cholera and acute hunger, groups of the unemployed and informal working class from the slums created organisations to defend their areas from the police and criminal groups. Demands for a political solution to their misery by the mass of the slum dwellers emerged from this, despite some gangs remaining linked to wealthy and ambitious Haitians with personal agendas. A 2023 UN report estimated there could be as many as half a million weapons in the country, over 80% arriving from the US.
There were attacks on government buildings and wealthy areas by armed groups with mixed aims. These are deliberately lumped together by the Western press, and all dismissed as common criminals, to justify the reimposition of control by imperialism. However, early on, pressed by the demands of the poorest – one prominent armed local defence group, led by ex-policeman Jimmy Chérizier, raised clear political demands. Viv Ansanm emerged from the two big alliances in Port-au-Prince, one of them Chérizier’s G9 Families and Allies. It has now demanded participation in discussions to resolve the crisis. In April 2024, acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry was forced out by pressure from Viv Ansamn. Cherizier offered a ceasefire in exchange for dialogue but has said that there will be no laying down of arms until Viv Ansamn participates in discussions to form a new government. It is no coincidence that Chérizier is the only gang leader to have been sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Imperialism recognises the threat Viv Ansamn poses to its interests in Haiti.
Five thousand people have been reported killed in the last year and 700,000 people have been forced from their homes by the conflict. Half the population now faces acute hunger. This is the result of centuries of colonial and imperialist oppression. Since 2018, the imperialist-backed ruling class, wracked by in-fighting and corruption, has been unable to assert effective political control; most recently Prime Minister Garry Conille was unceremoniously dumped and replaced by businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. The new prime minister was sworn in on 11 November 2024, against a background of renewed gun battles in the streets of the capital between police and armed groups. Homes in wealthier areas of Port-au-Prince were torched. The international airport was shut down after shots were fired at a commercial plane. Despite all the efforts of US imperialism to restore Haiti to its semi-colonial status, the Haitian working class has made the country ungovernable by the old regime.
Imperialist military and ‘democratic’ solutions fail
In October 2023, the imperialist powers scrambled to impose a UN-mandated military solution on Haiti, with a ‘Multinational Security Support’ (MSS) mission led by Kenyan forces. A year on, of the promised 2,500 police and army officers, there are only 426 poorly-funded and ill-equipped MSS personnel in Haiti. Their deployment has mainly been to secure the international airport and the Haitian Police Academy.
Alongside the attempt to control Haiti militarily have come promises of ‘aid’ and ‘democracy’. US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, made the first high level US government visit to Haiti in almost a decade in September, pledging $45m in humanitarian assistance and trying to provide reassurance that imperialism’s plans to return Haiti to ‘democracy’ were working. Nothing could be further from the truth. Imperialism has failed to restore even its pseudo democracy to Haiti. The US was forced to concede the removal of unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry in April, after armed militias seized Haiti’s international airport during a trip to Africa by Henry to appeal for military support. In April 2024, under the supervision of the US, Canada and France, the Caribbean regional bloc, CARICOM set up a Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) for Haiti, deciding on the rules for its membership, which included supporting the role of the MSS. The TPC was made up of seven voting members, plus two members from civil society without voting rights. One civil society group referred to it as a conspiracy of mafia forces set up to ‘take control of the presidential council and the government so that they can continue to control the state.’ With the TPC having little credibility, CARICOM changed the threshold from a simple majority of the seven voting members to a qualified majority of five votes, with the head of council rotating every five months. This resulted in Garry Conille, a former regional director of UNICEF, becoming prime minister.
This compromise quickly turned to infighting and corruption. Different TPC members wanted control of key ministries; three of them, Smith Augustin, Louis Gérald Gilles and Emmanuel Vertilaire, were accused of demanding the director of the state-owned commercial bank, National Bank of Credit, pay 100 million Haitian gourdes (around $758,000) to keep his job. Now Conille has been unceremoniously forced out. The unelected Fils-Aimé, who previously served as the president of Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce, has promised elections in a year – the last were in 2015 and Haiti has not had a functioning parliament for nearly two years. He has promised to restore ‘security’ but like his predecessors has nothing to offer Haiti’s impoverished, hungry and angry working class.
Ravaged by imperialism, debt and brutality
Since the victorious slave rebellion at the end of the 18th century, the imperialists have waged a constant battle to reassert control in Haiti and guarantee the continued exploitation of the people and its resources. Following the 1791-1804 revolt, the former French colonialists and slave owners demanded, under threat of invasion, 150 million French francs in compensation for loss of land and human ‘property’. The legacy of this debt was to strangle Haiti’s development over the next century. Then in 1914 US Marines seized Haiti’s gold deposits, handing them over to New York’s National City Bank (Citibank). The US invaded in 1915 and occupied Haiti until 1934, during which time they disbanded the Haitian army, introduced forced unpaid labour and repressed the renewed peasant-based rebel insurgency. National City Bank took over the ‘debt’ owed to France, which took until 1947 to pay off with interest.
The US supported dictatorship (1957 -1986) under ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and then his son ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, whose Tonton Macoutes militia terrorised the population, killing an estimated 30,000 people. They were overthrown in February 1986 by mass popular uprising. Haiti’s first free democratic election in 1990 saw progressive ex-priest Jean Bertrand Aristide win with 67% of the vote. Aristide calculated the amount Haiti was forced to pay to France was equivalent to $21bn at the time and demanded repayment. Aristide was removed by a US-backed coup in 1991. The US restored Aristide to power for the last 16 months of his term under the condition he implemented IMF dictates. Re-elected in 2000, Aristide was faced with using 90% of foreign reserves to pay back debts to the US. He was removed in a coup for the second time in 2004.
Following the coup, a UN-backed multinational military force was stationed in Haiti from 2004 to 2017. It presided over massacres of protesters, sexual abuse, indefinite detentions, electoral fraud, chronic insecurity, and inequality. After the disastrous 2010 earthquake, a contingent of UN ‘peacekeepers’ reintroduced cholera to Haiti for the first time in a century: it added a death toll of tens of thousands to the 200,000+ killed by the earthquake. Little of the $13bn raised in aid ever reached the mass of displaced people.
After the repressive UN occupation force left, mass protests erupted over the reduction in fuel subsidies demanded by the IMF and the PetroCaribe scandal. Venezuela’s PetroCaribe project sold oil to Latin American and Caribbean countries via cheap loans, allowing them to use the profits for social programmes and infrastructure. At least $2bn was embezzled, with then President Jovenel Moïse being central to the corruption. With zero credibility and legitimacy Moïse cancelled parliamentary elections and ruled by decree in 2020. The following year he was assassinated by mercenaries, and Ariel Henry was appointed with the full backing of US imperialism.
In no sense since the US invasion has Haiti produced a national bourgeoisie with the aim of developing the country’s infrastructure and productive forces to benefit ‘national interests’, but rather has kleptocratic and parasitic elites robbing the state whilst offering resources and cheap labour to the imperialists in return for protection. The economy has contracted for the last five years, inflation is 37% and youth unemployment is 37%. Meanwhile, the richest 10% control 61.7% of the wealth whilst the poorest 60% live on less than $2 a day. Resistance is inevitable.
Working class in revolt
During President Moïse’s time in power, armed gangs were used by different bourgeois politicians and even supported as paramilitary force to control the protests of the working class and the poor neighbourhoods. These militias proliferated with support from politicians and business elites who facilitated the import of massive amounts of illegal weapons from the US to protect their interests. At the same time, they provided Henry with a pretext to repeatedly beg the UN for foreign intervention to fight the ‘gangs’, because as the crisis in Haiti deepened, some of these armed forces were not clients of wealthy private interests, but rather voicing the demands of the working class and peasants for radical change and opposing the attempted revival of the corrupt state.
A clearly politicised Chérizier recently told Sky News that Viv Ansamn ‘respects CARICOM a lot’ but dismissed the current processes as unrepresentative of the needs of the ordinary people and a smokescreen to allow ‘corrupt oligarchs’ to continue running the country. The only way the situation can move on, he insisted, is if the peace process includes his coalition.
Whilst most of the leaders of the armed groups are former police or security, the recruits are from the poorest sections of society, angered at the desperate poverty and food insecurity in their communities. Neighbouring socialist Cuba shows that another future is possible once the working class shakes off the shackles of capitalism. Cuba and Haiti have similar populations of around 11 million people, but dramatically different outcomes: Cubans have a life expectancy of 80 years, for Haitians it is 64; infant mortality in Cuba is 4 per 1,000, in Haiti it is 36.8; Cuba has 8.42 doctors per 1,000 citizens, Haiti has 0.23. Cuba’s independence today is the result of revolution, Haiti’s misery the result of imperialist plunder. Both countries are susceptible to natural disasters, but in Cuba the whole state and the mass organisations work together to ensure a minimum loss of life and a speedy recovery from any damage. When the earthquake happened in Haiti in 2010, the first response was the US military securing the airport with priority given to military equipment to safeguard imperialist interests. Many Haitians were left in displacement camps for years.
For Haiti, the only path forward is the continuation of the current barbarism or the fight for socialism. Following the appointment of yet another Haitian prime minister on 10 November, Chérizier posted a statement on behalf of Viv Ansanm in which he reiterated that the authorities would not defend the interests of the Haitian people, and ‘the battle will begin again… the time has come, as you are accustomed to doing, to take the destiny of this country back into your own hands’.
Imperialism has no answers for the Haitian masses – imperialist hands off Haiti!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 303 December 2024 /January 2025
