Above photo: President of Haiti’s “Transitional Presidential Council” Laurent Saint-Cyr accompanied by his wife Marie France Saint-Cyr alongside Donald Trump and Melania Trump at the 80th UN General Assembly in New York.
On September 30th, the UN Security Council voted 12 in favour to none against, with 3 abstentions (China, Pakistan, Russian Federation), “to authorise Member States to transition the Multinational Security Support mission [in Haiti] to the Gang Suppression Force for an initial period of 12 months. Among other terms, the organ decided that the Force shall have an authorized personnel ceiling of 5,550, consisting of 5,500 uniformed personnel — comprised of both military and police — and 50 civilians.” The UN stated that the mission is scheduled to be for just one year, but all evidence points towards an extended occupation with the U.S. using The Global Fragility Act which Trump signed into law in 2020 to justify the action.
The Russian statement on their decision to abstain should be quoted at length for the accuracies it captures:
“Unfortunately, the tools of international assistance to Haiti pushed through the Council have failed to produce any sustainable results,” and we have every reason to believe that this new mission — under yet another grand title — will meet the same fate…No proper assessment of the efficacy, successes or failures of the Multinational Security Support mission was conducted…Instead, the Council is now being presented with a new idea — to create a mission independent of national and international oversight, with a virtually unrestricted mandate to use force against anyone and everyone labelled with the vague term ‘gang.” Do you not understand that ill-conceived and rushed steps may lead to outcomes that are completely contrary to our goals?”
The main, immediate contradiction for the masses in Haiti right now is not another UN foreign invasion or the presence of the Multinational Security Support Mission’s (MSS) Kenyan soldiers on their soil; it is the presence of armed gangs who impede the population from any sense of normalcy and freedom. This is a reality most of the non-Haitian left has failed to grasp. Any force, foreign or domestic, who could help hundreds of thousands of displaced families begin to return to their neighborhoods and homes so they can circulate and engage in commerce would be welcomed, at least in the immediate sense. The fact that this entire ordeal is all the direct result of centuries of foreign intervention and that the UN and gangs are both occupying forces armed by the same empire are distant secondary considerations lost on the displaced and hungry.
How will the UN’s Resolution 2793 on Haiti play out?
The UN forces, alongside private mercenaries and Marco Rubio’s OAS forces will clash with heavily armed paramilitaries, further incinerating and destroying the fragile, dilapidated infrastructure of the katyè popilè (the popular neighborhoods or ghettos). Dozens upon dozens of ghettos have already been made inhabitable by the gang’s horizontal violence. To make the capital city unlivable was the gang’s mission since their inception. The UN will now make it even more unlivable.
Haitians will never forget Special Representative of the Secretary General for Haiti, Helen La Lime’s, statement encouraging the confederation of the very gangs the UN now opposes and U.S. ambassador Pamela White saying “Guy Philippe and Barbecue should be part of the solution.” The UN’s U.S. guns will square off with the gang’s U.S. guns with the masses trapped in the middle. The UN will build no new homes, but rather contribute to destroying thousands more, adding to Pòtoprens’s refugee crisis where an estimated 1.3 million have already been displaced by the paramilitaries.
This article will analyze U.S. foreign policy thinking and machinations to understand the dynamics behind the fourth foreign invasion of Haiti in the last 100 years.
Build Up to an Invasion
On September 25th, Yale graduate, insurance salesman and current unelected “president” of Haiti, Laurent Saint-Cyr, spoke at the UN General Assembly. Pretending to speak for the Haitian people he shares little in common with, the businessman called Haiti “a modern Guernica, a human tragedy at the doorstep of America.” This is indeed an accurate description by yet another spineless politician complicit in the creation of the very “Guarnica” he decries.
Saint-Cyr, who was hand-selected by the U.S. and CARICOM (The Caribbean Community), predictably presented the gangs as a purely Haitian problem and phenomenon, as if they did not have transnational support and connections. Making sure to carefully pronounce every word in his teleprompters in French, a colonial language not spoken by the vast majority of Haitians, he thanked Trump and Panamá for having launched the idea of an international “Gang Suppression Force” (GSF) to invade Haiti. On August 28, Panamá followed the U.S’s lead at a UN Security Council meeting on Haiti and pledged to step up its role. It matters little who the third world underling is, what matters is the appearance of a “multilateral mission.” From 2004 to 2018, the U.S. used over 37,500 Brazilian troops and thousands of other troops from Chile, Argentina and around the world to carry out their dirty work in Haiti. Though it is a taboo subject, the military occupation misnamed “The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti” (MINUSTAH), carried out massacres in Site Solèy and other occupied slums, leading to an estimated 30,000 Haitian deaths.
Saint-Cyr then proceeded to claim that the overcoming of the paramilitary gang project (known as Viv Ansamn, VA) would allow for “free and credible elections,” which is another outright lie. If there were ever “free and credible elections” in Haiti, like there were in 1990 and 2000, the Haitian masses will again vote out their oppressors. This is the elite’s biggest fear and the reason they colluded with the U.S. government and intelligence agencies to overthrow the broadly popular President Jean Bertrand Aristide in both 1991 and 2004.
The truth about the gangs is that they have from their inception served the interests of elite politicians and oligarchs like Saint-Cyr — clearing Pòtoprens and Latibonit — Haiti’s two most populated areas, of their most revolutionary subjects, the masses.
Who sent them is the question I have been asking since August 2018 when Haiti exploded into the PetroCaribe rebellion? A complex system of clientism, a country addicted to corruption and foreign mafias activated death squads in charge of plunging Haiti into even deeper destitution and paralysis. Because Haiti is merely a “menacing Black chaos” in the eyes of the 99 percent long accustomed to the corporate media, there is no way to warn of the gravity of what is transpiring.
There is an irony that should not be lost on any critical observer. Foreign forces are invading Haiti to crush proxy gang forces that have fulfilled their mission, to wipe out any popular expression of mass resistance and mobilisation. My time and research in Haiti since 1998 shows that U.S. guns and mainly Colombian cocaine continue to meet in the porous Caribbean crossroads that is Haiti. This colonial conflagration has produced the worst human rights and humanitarian disaster this hemisphere has witnessed in the period following the historic 1804 Haitian Revolution which razed away, at least momentarily, the humiliation of colonization and slavery.
The Empire Lines up its Ducks
Foreign ministers from across the hemisphere also met during UN week to push their newest anti-Haitian project forward. Canadian Ambassador Bob Rae convened the meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti. He hypocritically condemned the latest episode of violence in Haiti — the PNH and mercenary murder of eight children in a drone strike on the Simon Pelé slum. Days before, the armed groups murdered four children in their homes. Like the other talking heads, Rae feigned concern for “the daily lives of people,” neglecting to mention that both the police and the gangs’ weapons and drones come from the United States. He also conveniently lied about the presence of Eric Prince and other private mercenaries contracted to fight alongside the PNH (the Haitian National Police) and Kenyan mercenaries against Viv Ansamn. Both sides fight one another with little concern for the lives trapped in between. Research shows that the PNH constitute a gang unto themselves preying upon the same masses the gangs do, though the police are often outgunned by the paramilitary project.
The discussions were held as the Security Council prepared to resume debate on a proposal by Antonio Guterres, pushing for a new “UN Support Office” in Haiti to facilitate the invitation and arrival of Trump’s Gang Suppression Force. It is the same discourse that the Clinton and Bush administrations used in 1994 and 2004 to invade and occupy Haiti. The current chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Henry Wooster, proclaimed:
The Western Hemisphere is enormous. We’re confident that within those countries, we will attain the 5,500 troops, we’ll call them that for ease of not distinguishing with police just for the moment.
Imperial ministers take great care to use exact words as they orchestrate their next criminal action.
Who will pay for the next anti-Haitian military occupation is still not clear to Wooster, Washington or the UN.
Once again, those implicated in causing the disease are the least qualified to propose a cure. What all of these foreign entities — the UN, the OAS, the U.S. government, CARICOM, the Core Group and proxy police and military forces employed by the U.S. — have in common is a complete disregard for input or leadership from the Haitian people. They collectively constitute Haiti’s present-day colonizers.
Pretending to be the Good Guys
The U.S. exercises its Full Spectrum Dominance in myriad ways. Just as it can reward its yes-men and chronies, it can punish them too. It is important to understand the high-level reasoning behind phoney U.S. sanctions and recent, high-profile symbolic arrests which indicate above all that the gang problem permeates all echelons of Haitian society.
On September 23rd, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Dimitri Vorbe. Vorbe and his family own Société Générale d’Énergie S.A, one of the biggest private power companies in the nation. The Vorbes were implicated in the theft of billions of dollars of funds from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe fund and are in the leadership of the once insurrectionary political party of Jean Bertrand Aristid and millions of malere (the extreme poor), Fanmi Lavalas. A few days later, the State Department revoked the visa of Max Chauvet, the owner of Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s oldest and most conservative newspaper and member of the board of directors of Unibank. Meanwhile, they have ignored the criminal roles of even bigger oligarchs like Gilbert Biggio and Andy Apaid.
Does this signal the U.S.’s changing of the oligarchical guard?
The U.S.’s Full Spectrum Dominance allows them to handpick the elites they will work through and sacrifice others who they no longer have any use for. Social media and the mainstream press run with the stories, showing the most powerful, light-skinned Haitian elites in handcuffs, designed to make the masses wonder: Are things really changing this time?
No! The token sanctions and arrests do not interrupt the system in any meaningful way. It is merely a public relations stunt. The bloodletting of Haiti continues uninterrupted. The invasion of The Gang Suppression Force will be as sanguinary as the other three U.S. invasions of Haiti in the past 100 years.
An underground MOLEGHAF organizer, Montas, who was forced by the gangs to escape from Port-au-Prince to the countryside, walked me through how his organization understood U.S. strategy:
This is a ti piki, a band-aid like solution. The U.S. will now act through other proxies, no worse or better than the oligarchs with multi-million dollar mansions in Florida they have now decided to put behind bars. They can reproduce the system with new faces. Why? Because 2018-2021 was a period of mass mobilisation. All of these sound bites about getting the gang financiers makes it seem like a mass victory, a victory for us. No No No! Many of our people will falsely believe the U.S. government listened to the demands of the masses. But no! They are just reinventing themselves.
Analyst Jean Elissaint Saint-Vil aka Jafrikayiti wrote:
This is similar to announcing Satan arrested a suspected evil-doer. Zionist Gilbert Bigio is allied with MAGA Republican Trump while the Arab wing of white warlords in Haiti such as Reginald Boulos and Dimitri Vorbes are linked to the Clinton Democrats Klan. I think what’s really going on here is warfare between US-backed white warlords in Haiti. Impoverished black Haitians are mere spectators in this mafia family feud.
Sanctions are a similar story. According to lawyer Brian Concannon from the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti “the sanctions imposed are less than a slap on the wrist.” Concannon gave the sanctions on former president Michel Martelly — a Hillary Clinton appointee as president of Haiti in 2011 and a major sponsor of the paramilitary project — as an example of the Appearance-versus-Reality strategy of the U.S.:
Martelly can’t a) get credit from US persons, b) do foreign exchange transactions, or c) have investments from U.S. persons. So basically, when he hits the Miami clubs he needs to use his debit card, not his credit card, and when he is transferring money to or from his friends in Haiti, it has to be all U.S. dollars. Other than that, he’s free.
Researcher Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) reached a similar conclusion about U.S. posturing:
The US has taken action against many members of the Haitian elite, mainly pulling visas and denying entry. But those same people still hold millions of dollars worth of real estate in South Florida. Some have been shifting ownership into shell companies and selling.
This allows bureaucrats like Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of State, to then issue lofty statements, making it seem like the U.S. government is the good guy:
The U.S. government will remain relentless in pursuing those supporting terrorist gangs through indictments, arrests, sanctions, arms seizures and other immigration restrictions.
The fake shake-up allows the U.S. to clean their hands of their relationships with these powerful actors and now work through a new slate. They seize the billions in mansions, bank accounts, massive investments in real estate in Miami, D.R. etc. — but where does it all go?
Not one goud (Haitian currency, worth less than one U.S. penny) makes it back to who it was stolen from.
Speaking from a squatter’s camp in Boudon where 30 families sleep in cramped rooms, a student leader, Clifford, commented:
The U.S.’s team of politicians and oligarchs is like a football team. They have injuries. Setbacks. But it is always the same team. Periodically they have cosmetic personnel changes. But in its essence this is merely the banal reproduction of Haitian class society.
The sharpest agitators, minds and pens — alongside the masses that gave birth to them — are also internally exiled in a country out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of the West.
Understanding the Unelected CPT: The Merry-Go-Round of Colonial Sadism
The Transitional Presidential Council (Konsèy Prezidansyèl Tranzisyon) or CPT is unelected and unaccountable to the estimated 1.3 million Haitians displaced by gang attacks. The “international community” and their CARICOM underlings selected the band of nine rotating presidents in an attempt to prop up a government that drew from different sectors and social classes they deemed acceptable. They bet on the CPT having the appearance of being legitimate in order to facilitate the next U.S. takeover.
The politicians and the gangsters work hand in glove. Neither entity tires of grandstanding on the internet and in the media, promising to overthrow the other in bold claims that have little to do with reality. The truth is that there is a codependent relationship between the gangsters in ties and the gangsters in flipflops. Who would Barbecue and the other warlords be without the ports, private airstrips, guns and drug trafficking facilitated by the oligarchs? If the masses were armed to defend themselves and had their say, they would organize a bwa kale (Self-Defense Brigades) and burn the war lords — the modern-day tonton macoutes — alive with all of their arrogance, soldiers and U.S. weaponry. This is what happened in 1986. The long-repressed Haitian masses rose up in a dechoukaj (uprising) and sought revenge on the tonton macoutes. This is the worst fear of the oligarchs, on both sides of the Caribbean Sea.
According to Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the Observatoire Haïtien des Crimes contre l’humanité (OHCCH), there is an abundance of proof that the rotating demagogues and lackeys are in cahoots with the gangs. Zantray News shows how all of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils Aimé’s diplomatic visits are just strong words. While declaring “The Prime Minister is determined to unblock all roads to allow the population to move freely,” VA continues to control all routes in and out of Port-au-Prince. All of the visits to DC by Fils Aimé and Saint-Cyr amount to nothing but handwringing. Jake Johnston recently published a study of Haiti’s private sector lobbying in Washington to keep the gravy train going. The kleptocracy will not bite the hands that feeds it. Disaster capitalism is a bonanza for a few Haitians and a silent descent into hell for the vast majority.
The Forgotten Palestine of the Caribbean and the Theft of Hope
The UN charade has again successfully muzzled any popular, critical voices from Haiti. This is all transpiring without any participation from truly patriotic and dedicated Haitian organizations.
Underneath the humid rain, a group of community organizers from KOMOKODA and other Haitian organizations gathered outside the UN to denounce, not just the gang or paramilitary project, but its foreign backers. Long-time East Flatbush organizer, Dahoud Andre, said:
These politicians do not speak for us the Haitian people. These are clowns and traitors. They have no legitimacy to speak for us. The Kenyan occupation is an occupation in black face, along with all the other mercenaries they are sending to Haiti.
There could not be more of a disconnect between unelected Haitian (mis)leadership — both in the form of political and lumpen thugs — and the populace. Displaced citizens attempt to inform an indifferent world about the everyday worsening conditions in displacement camps.
Haitian social leaders denounce what they see as the complete gangstèizasyon and degeneration of their society. Brutality begets brutality. Violence begets violence. Rape begets rape. The traumatized further traumatise the innocent. Investigative journalist Josedarline Pierre Louis explained the following about a displaced and occupied Port-au-Prince at a meeting hosted by the Black Alliance for Peace:
Young children have to sleep with old men or the leaders in the refugee camps to get some food. Everyone has to do their necessities in front of others. There is no clean place or privacy. How can we denounce this situation? Who will listen to us?
Yvonèt told her story:
I was raped by a bandi (criminal, from VA). I had the baby here in this school [used as a displacement camp]. We are cramped together. There are community leaders who try to do an activity for the kids on the weekend. But overall, it is very bad. Children hear adults arguing, fighting and having sex. The little girls are not safe. There is no childhood here.
The paramilitary project has helped destroy hope for multiple generations. The gangs have overseen the fracturing of traditional Haitian society. The church, the peristil (vodou temples) and lakou (yards for community gathering) have all been victims of the gang’s flames, their preferred weapon. One displaced father from Kafou Fèy, a massive complex of neighborhoods where an estimated half million people lived up until September 2023 when they were forced out by paramilitaries, remarked:
No place is more beautiful than my home. That was robbed from me, my mother and my family. They murdered my father, my uncle, my cousins. Our neighborhood is gone. We cannot see our country fall this way.
Urban geography has been redefined. Monuments to Caribbean architecture have been reduced to ashes. Children grow up knowing their only goal is to escape Haiti. Port-au-Prince is a cemetery of human hope.
Displaced philosopher, actress and organizer, Sland Alexander, summarized the past eight years of the paramilitary gang offensive:
We are scattered. There is no time to try to organize. We don’t know how to feed our children. Most of our people see no hope. We don’t have physical spaces to meet. We have been on the run and on the defensive for too long. The colonial walls continue to close in on us. This is a silent genocide.
Danny Shaw was a professor for 18 years at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. In blatant disregard for the first amendment, John Jay fired him for speaking out against the genocide in Palestine. The ethnographer has been traveling to Haiti and studying Kreyòl since 1998. He has published dozens of articles on Haitian popular movements and U.S. foreign policy towards Haiti. He returned to Haiti this summer and witnessed the ongoing shutting down, twin occupation and isolation of Haiti. He is the author of The Saints of Santo Domingo: Dominican Resistance in the Age of Neocolonialism, among other books. You can follow his work at @profdannyshaw and profdannyshaw.com.
