As our rights are under attack by an arrogant clique of billionaires at home, the global beacon of freedom, Haiti, confronts one of the toughest moments in its centuries-long liberation struggle.
For over four years now, burgeoning paramilitary gangs have waged a war on the 2.5 million people of Port-au-Prince. Last year, the disparate paramilitaries confederated into the Viv Ansanm gang under the leadership of former police officer turned warlord, Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier. In front of our eyes, the robust capital city of the world-famous carnival, of bustling commerce and proud traditions has been reduced to a city of refugees, shelters and isolated, hold-out communities resisting with everything they have. There are still neighborhoods like Kanape Vè and Akaye where the residents are organized into Brigad Vijilans (Neighborhood Self-Defense Brigades) to fight against the rule of death squads composed of child soldiers and other lumpen cannon fodder. David readies his slingshot against a Goliath, armed to the teeth with an avalanche of U.S. weapons which rendezvous with South American cocaine in this most permeable, punctured and penetrated country of the Caribbean.
The War of Predation
The first question outsiders ask is “Why?” Why are the Viv Ansanm paramilitaries waging war on the civilian population, displacing now more than an estimated 1,000,000 Haitians, or half the capital city?
It is important to highlight that August 22, 2018 represented the birth of the PetroCaribe movement to recover billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil embezzled by the corrupt colonial state. The sight of millions of Haitians conscious, united and mobilised forced the U.S.-sponsored aristocracy to pacify the millions of rebels. They partially built and set in motion a modern-day Frakenstein, their very own tonton makouts. The masses say the gangs are worse because “the criminal police and military wore uniforms and could be identified.”
The “gangs,” as the mainstream media refers to them, are the shock troops of the Haitian bourgeoisie and foreign capital. Researchers Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper, Ernst Jean-Pierre, Georges Eddy Lucien and Sabine Lamour outline the state and gang “predation sites.” Like early police forces in the U.S. and the Duvalier’s private security force, the Tonton Makouts, Viv Ansanm are mercenaries for hire.
“Customs is one site of predation, affording the capacity to import guns, rotted carcinogenic foods, and other expired products that kill. But the bourgeoisie monopolize all industries. The Gilbert Bigio Group, for example, controls construction (iron and wood imports).”
According to these experts and the Haitian masses, the gangs have a definitive agenda. They only hunt down, corral up and occupy poor communities. The highest summits of the elites in Petionville like Pelegren, Morne Calvaire and areas of Laboul have remained untouched by “the terrorists,” or tewowis as the communities say.
Furthermore, the scholars assert, the gangs “destroyed the Superior Court of Accounts and Administrative Disputes offices where government spending receipts are archived, including the dossiers concerning the PetroCaribe arrangement with Venezuela.” The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports on the medical catastrophe set in motion by four years of attacks from armed groups: “the situation is especially dire as only one of Port-au-Prince’s three major hospitals, and only 39 of 92 health facilities in the capital metro area, are now open.”
The gangs are now claiming to be openly involved in legal politics as well, appointing public officials in the areas under their domination. As the Haitian people have told me thousands of times since 2021, this is an “organised and well-planned death project.” Isn’t it curious that the gangs’ agenda is the ruling class’s agenda?
The Masters of Haiti
This video by content creator Tideone showcases the extreme wealth in the hills of Petionville that remain untouched by the gangs. The tiny bourgeoisie rules from here, with their breathtaking views, mansions and well-manicured lawns. Drone footage exposes the underground swimming pools, acres of land and elaborate architecture. The paramilitaries stop a few miles short from these private estates because they cannot bite the hand that feeds them. A feudal distance keeps diplomats and oligarchs enclosed and safe with their fancy designer shops, hotels and private doctors. There are elaborate private militarized security guarding the compounds. If the masses were to rise up in arms and penetrate the Haiti of the 0.01 percent, it would be a turkey shoot for the private police forces and paramilitaries to liquidate any threat.
But the terrorists represent no threat to them. Afterall, they are the offspring of the well-guarded elites. Parents and children have their spats but remain loyal to one another.
Viv Ansanm Takes Kenscoff
Further north of the oligarchs’ palaces is Kenscoff, a town known in Haiti for its cool breeze, winter hats and lookout points far above downtown Port-au-Prince. Haitians have long visited the serene, picturesque mountain top location to get away from the humidity and ride horses around the enchanted forests.
Kenscoff was the site of the last remaining road that existed outside of the gangs’ control to exit Port-au-Prince to the south and west. On January 28th, Viv Ansanm units attacked the Belot and Godot neighborhoods of Kenscoff. Like the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank, the raiding army shot anybody and anything that moved. Others resisted or fled into the mountains or local public plaza. The Haitian Times reported that this one attack displaced 3,000 people, including 721 children.
All images are from the Haiti Information Project.
A Fractured State
Different elements of the corrupt Haitian National Police (PNH) line up to defend their own interests. Some police officers collaborate with the gangs taking bribes to look the other way, to coordinate arms and drug shipments and to alert Viv Ansanm of pending attacks from the Haitian National Police (PNH). Police chief Frantz Elbe was fired amidst a hail of such accusations. Community leaders remember how guns seized from the gangs magically made their way back into the very same hands they were seized from.
Other elements of the PNH fight the gangs because it is their job and they remember the relatively more stable Haiti of recent years. Other police officers lived in these very neighborhoods and continue to fight alongside the civilian population on the barricades to defend their own families and communities. Some neighborhoods spoke of a necessary, temporary “marriage” with the police to live another day. Before the armed groups, reminiscent of the roving militias that murdered hundreds of thousands and displaced millions in 1990’s Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The PNH has historically been the agent of repression of the social movements. In 2021, they attacked the massive anti-neoliberal uprising and worked alongside the gangs, sniping and executing different popular leaders. In Haiti, all of these state and paramilitary crimes go unsolved. Impunity reigns. The message from all sides is that Resistance is futile. Izo, Lamò San Jou and the other cast of “gangbanging” warlords can move all these drugs and guns without the complicity of the state and the bourgeoisie.
Since 2021 and the advent of “the gangs,” there are now over 1,000,000 displaced Haitians, half of them children. The anti-Haitian, corporate media has conditioned us to think that Haiti is synonymous with war, displacement and tragedy. This relentless war on the population is not normal or common. No. I have known these neighborhoods personally since 1998. These neighborhoods are now gone. One of the main demands of thousands of families in the Palestine of the Caribbean is now: The Right to Return!
The Whitewashing of the Crimes
Viv Ansanm ironically means “to live together.” Smooth-talking, flamboyant gang boss Jimmy Cherezier, the public face of the confederation of the gangs since 2021, now claims Viv Ansamn is a serious political party. While his troops fire Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles piercing armored vehicles and downing helicopters, Cherizier’s preferred weapon is social media.
As Port-au-Prince continued to burn, on March 6th, Cherezier congratulated his main lieutenants Krisla and Izo for “organizing a beautiful carnival.” These gang chieftains control the Fontamara, Vilaj de Dye, Kafou and Mariyani neighborhoods which give them access to the strategic National Route 2 to travel to Haiti’s South. The battered national highways are a main vein of the international gun and drug trade. Viv Ansanm hosted the carnival, which is historically held throughout Haiti in February, in an attempt to distract from their crimes and project a false sense of stability and happiness in the gang-run city. Local leaders, sociologists and voudou priests have long been trying to educate us through grassroots media projects like ImajINAN (so named after a voudou lwa or god) about the sociology of the armed groups.
The same week that Barbecue again verified why he has earned his nefarious nickname, Colombian President Gustavo Petro pointed out in a cabinet meeting that “much of the cocaine coming from Colombia’s Catatumbo and Guajira region makes its way to the United States through Haiti.” The anti-imperialist president pleaded with the international community to stop the bloodshed.
Here we can see infamous cocaine runner Izo and his gang 5 Segonn (5 Seconds) brag about “being devils,” as they rap about their crimes and the sanguinary war on the population. More and more displaced families are coming under attack a second or third time and are retraumatized, yet Barbecue always claims to be the victim of the attacks. He says here that every accusation against his paramilitary units, turned “political party,” reflects the guilt of others. His role together with his foreign backers is to clean up the image of the anti-social death squads behind the massacres. As absurd as it seems, foreign journalists have played their role in lionizing the butcher of Port-au-Prince. Daily, Haitians ask “How come every time a foreign journalist comes to hang out and take pictures with Barbecue, hundreds of us are murdered?”
The small force of occupying Kenyan, Salvadoran and other international troops protect strategic locations but do not confront the gangs. One is left to ask: Why are they occupying Haiti to begin with? The occupation which, Marco Rubio just breathed fresh life into, may dismantle one gang, “the gangsters in flip flops,” but it will only again solidify the rule of the oligarchs, “the gangsters with ties.” Haitians know a fourth U.S. military occupation in the past century is not the answer, but rather a part of the root cause of how Haiti has been so thoroughly traumatized and decimated.
Standing with Haiti
The author reported from Solino and Nazon last year in a desperate attempt to alert the Western left that these stable working-class bastions of struggle were on the brink of falling. In late October of 2024, gang bosses Kempès and his boss Barbecue took control of these ghettos, burning, looting and murdering their way through family and community life. The thousands of families trapped in these downtown Port-au-Prince slums have now been reduced to begging and pauperism. Lucson Charles, a 22-year-old community leader and foreign language teacher, spoke to the author from Kan Antenor Firmin shelter near Turgo. He described the hunger, squalor and tension at the overcrowded high school turned refugee shelter. He went on to say: “Many families set out in the perilous hellscape in an attempt to beg for food during the day and have to sleep under the rain at night.” The Haiti Information Project reports weekly from the makeshift shelters on the deplorable conditions there.
Lucson, his family and hundreds of thousands of Haitians are now trapped in the murderous grip of Viv Ansanm with no escape possible. The walls of neocolonial humiliation are closing in on this majestic city exploding with an even more majestic, historic people. I am a student of the veteran anti-imperialist leaders from this forgotten capital city in the Western Hemisphere, a city that is the West Bank of the Americas. There is a consensus that this is the most difficult moment in Haiti’s history since the 1804 revolution against French colonialism, Napoleon and tens of thousands of invading troops. What role can progressives and anti-imperialists play to stop the march of death cutting through the heart of Haiti’s capital city and breathe fresh life into one of the epic national liberation struggles of our epoch?
Danny Shaw was a professor for 18 years at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who was fired 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. You can follow his work at profdannyshaw.com.
