Haiti Is Facing an Insurgency, Not a Gang Problem

For the past four and a half years, Haiti’s internal security has steadily deteriorated. In 2019, the United Nations concluded 15 years of peacekeeping operations in the country, which had been initiated to address growing instability in the wake of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s 2004 ouster. Under the U.N. mission, an estimated 10,000 international nongovernmental organizations channeled foreign aid into Haiti to help support its social services. But the U.N.’s departure forced many aid groups to withdraw, spiraling the country into social unrest once again.

The 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse was the most visible harbinger—and catalyst—of impending state collapse. That foreign mercenaries managed to kill the president, as both Haitian officials and U.S. prosecutors allege, was itself a signal of Haiti’s eroded internal security. De facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry then assumed control of the government without a roadmap to new elections. Henry’s lack of legitimacy made him unpopular and further compromised the country’s stability.

Now, the Haitian state has functionally disintegrated. Henry traveled to Nairobi in late February to secure Kenya’s leadership of a new U.N.-authorized Multinational Security Support mission for Haiti. But his absence from Port-au-Prince undermined the prospects of the planned intervention by emboldening gangs that already controlled most of the capital to make further advances.

Jimmy Chérizier, who leads the G9 Family and Allies gang and is known by his nom de guerre, “Barbecue,” apparently orchestrated a mass prison break in Port-au-Prince, freeing upward of  4,000 prisoners. This faction has claimed responsibility for attacks on government institutions, including Toussaint Louverture International Airport, the apparent aim of which was to prevent Henry’s return. Chérizier declared his intent to oust Henry, threatening “civil war” and “genocide” unless the leader resigned. The Haitian National Police, whose ranks have dwindled from around 9,000 to an estimated 5,000 over the past two years, is losing ground daily.

After an emergency Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) meeting in Jamaica on Monday, Henry announced his resignation and vowed to step down after the installation of a CARICOM-mandated transitional council. Henry was not present at the meeting and remains in Puerto Rico, where he diverted his plane after being unable to land in Haiti or the Dominican Republic.

These rapidly escalating developments should prompt the international community to speak about Haiti’s crisis in clearer terms. The country is experiencing not just an uptick in gang violence—as the U.N. mandate for the new security mission characterizes it—but a full-blown insurgency. Pretending otherwise will doom any intervention before it has begun. In framing Haiti’s situation as a mere gang problem, global actors risk committing to an ill-prepared and ill-fated intervention that will fail to secure the country and needlessly endanger those deployed—ultimately exacerbating the humanitarian crisis.

The Kenyan-led U.N. mission to Haiti was predicated on the view that the country required assistance in suppressing gang violence to restore public order. As a result, the current U.N.-backed plan, largely financed by the United States, entails Kenya leading the force with a contingent of 1,000 Kenyan police officers. Several CARICOM states, as well as Bangladesh, Chad, and Benin, have pledged to send personnel to supplement the Kenyan police, but their numbers and composition have yet to be finalized.

As the core—and only deployment-ready—force, the Kenyan contingent is wholly insufficient to provide any meaningful reinforcement to the Haitian National Police. It is also inappropriate to center the U.N. mission on policing when Haiti’s situation clearly requires a military response.

Police officers enforce laws under governments that hold the monopoly on violence in their respective territories. When nonstate armed groups—whether one calls them gangs or insurgents—challenge that monopoly on violence by establishing control over territory claimed by the state, they nullify the law’s reach into that space. In these cases, a military intervention is necessary to reclaim lost territory and neutralize hostile forces.

The distinction between organized criminal groups and insurgency groups can be murky. Both employ violence to contest state control over territory. A growing body of strategic literature speaks to organized crime and insurgencies as variations of the singular phenomenon of organized violence. Narco-traffickers in Latin America, most recently in Ecuador, have so evidently confounded the distinction that analysts increasingly label them as “criminal insurgents.”

This nuance is often eschewed by academics, policymakers, and other stakeholders who remain hesitant to liken organized crime to insurgencies for both rhetorical and pragmatic reasons. Rhetorically, they concede the overlap in the modus operandi of gangs and insurgent groups but reserve the insurgency label for armed groups with stated political goals, as opposed to criminal groups, which are considered violent income-generating enterprises.

Regardless, Haiti’s most prominent and powerful gangs have issued political demands while also conducting operations against government officials, institutions, and infrastructure. These are the actions of insurgents carrying out urban warfare. Perhaps if a major gang donned fatigues and included the word “revolutionary” in its name, we would more readily acknowledge this reality.

States also hesitate to describe gangs as insurgent groups because doing so carries practical implications. Since gangs are conceived as criminal enterprises, countermeasures fall under the umbrella of justice and law enforcement; combating gangs, the argument goes, is the purview of the police and the courts. Declaring the existence of an insurgent group, by contrast, invokes the laws of war, a military response, and the concomitant resources and strategy.

It is undeniable that Haiti is a failed state. That means there is no Haitian-led solution to the country’s turmoil forthcoming. The Haitian government, and by extension its laws, has lost authority; armed groups have overrun Port-au-Prince and are expanding across the country. The only practical goal of an international intervention would be to reverse this situation and reassert control of the country through direct confrontation with armed groups—setting aside the fraught question of determining trustworthy local stakeholders to reconstitute a government. This is the work of soldiers, not police. Retaking territory and neutralizing enemy combatants are military actions.

For the moment, Kenya has paused its plan to deploy its police forces to Haiti until a transitional government has been established. This gives the international community an opportunity to rethink and reconfigure the requirements for the U.N.-backed security mission.

Unless CARICOM, the U.S. government, and all who have a say or stake in Haiti accept that we are facing an insurgency, not a gang problem, the prospects of resolving Haiti’s crisis remain dim. Haiti can only be brought under control by a military deployment operating under rules of engagement that recognize armed groups as combatants. Otherwise, anarchy will prevail, with attendant consequences for the people of Haiti and the security of the Caribbean Basin.