By Jean Fritzner Etienne[1]
(translated by Malick W. Ghachem)[2]
The ongoing political and constitutional crisis in Haiti has highlighted the depth of popular opposition to the authoritarian abuses of the de facto president, Jovenel Moïse. But the current stalemate involves more than the intersection of political corruption and massive popular protest. It represents a near total collapse of state and society in Haiti dating back more than three decades, to the fall of the dictator Jean Claude Duvalier in 1986. Political turbulence, the erosion of state authority, disregard of the most elementary principles of the rules of law, uncontrolled inflation and chronic unemployment — the list goes on. This multivalent, long-term crisis has many domestic sources. But the international community has also played a key role in undermining the Haitian political and social order.
The end of the Duvalier reign of terror in 1986 marked the beginning of a more hopeful era whose promise was embodied in a new fundamental charter. Adopted in March 1987, Haiti’s new constitution put in place the foundations of a democratic state and declared fundamental rights to life, food, health, housing, education, security, and employment, and impartial justice. In the context of the late Cold War fight against communism, such socially progressive constitutionalism was uniquely vulnerable to reactionary domestic forces tied to the leading western nations. This hostile political climate made enforcement of the 1987 Constitution all but impossible. Instead of empowering the poor majority, Haiti’s post-Duvalier leaders worked in tandem with their foreign partners to perpetuate the system of exclusion and social inequalities that favored the creation of a reserve army of cheap, unskilled laborers.
From 1987 to 1994, the western powers operated more or less in the background, supporting authoritarian military regimes that preyed on the political, economic, and social rights of ordinary Haitians. The first democratic elections organized under the 1987 Constitution, held on November 29, 1987, ended in a bloodbath perpetrated by the military leaders. Jean Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in 1991, seven months after becoming Haiti’s first democratically elected president under the new regime. Aristide’s reinstatement in October 1994 was engineered by the United States, and while U.S. forces were quickly replaced by those of the United Nations, America continued to lead the dance of foreign powers.
From the 1991 coup d’état onwards, the western powers acted increasingly in the open, their intrusion in the country’s internal affairs becoming ever pronounced. Assuming the role of mediators, they manipulated the naïve protagonists of Haitian politics in the interests of imperial domination and neoliberal economic policies, while the political climate and the material conditions of life in Haiti deteriorated. Reelected in 2000, Aristide was once again chased from power in 2004, this time by an armed rebellion resulting from an alliance of former military leaders and gangs (the latter armed by Aristide himself to all appearances). Parallel to this uprising, Aristide faced a strong movement of popular resistance to his antidemocratic and authoritarian abuses. In 2004, foreign troops returned under the aegis of the U.N., which created a new mission for Haiti named the U.N. Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH). This was the second foreign occupation the country had seen in less than ten years. The military arm of MINUSTAH withdrew in 2019. The U.N. then created an agency called the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), which took as its mission the protection and promotion of respect for human rights in the country.
From 2004 to 2019, the country was effectively under a thinly veiled state of international trusteeship. All spheres of national political life were controlled by foreign powers, the United States in particular. The U.N. served in reality only as a sound box for the interests of the major foreign powers in Haiti, organized in the form of a unique and peculiar coalition known as the Core Group that includes Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain — in addition to the U.S., the U.N., the E.U., and the Organization of American States (OAS). The Core Group inserted itself into the heart of the electoral process, often under cover of technical assistance, dismissing ballot results that conflicted with its interests and announcing its own preferred outcomes. By never failing to support reactionary forces that oppressed the vast majority of Haitians, the Core Group countries made a mockery of their claim to be the friends of the Haitian people.
For their part, docile Haitian politicians who toed the foreign policy lines of the major powers, particularly the United States, received carte blanche to govern in the name of corruption and repression. The current impasse is the continuation of this dynamic. Jovenel Moïse has adopted a foreign policy whose sole objective is to defend the interests of the United States, with whose support he hopes to remain in power notwithstanding overwhelming popular opposition to his rule. Moïse voted for Venezuela’s expulsion from the OAS, engineered a military alliance consisting of the United States and several Latin American nations, and came out against Chinese policies towards Hong Kong — all in the name of appeasing Donald Trump. Moïse has tarnished Haiti’s image as a standard bearer for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Never has the country’s foreign policy been in such self-interested, mediocre, and erratic hands.
As for the U.N.’s seventeen-year long presence in Haiti, the only visible results are a disastrous cholera pandemic, the near total disintegration of state structures, and the acceleration of the country’s economic and social collapse. At no time since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship has Haiti been as unstable as during the era of the U.N. presence.
In this context, it is perhaps no surprise that the Haitian government has managed to excel at little other than the promotion of domestic insecurity. Armed gangs, linked to politicians who believe them indispensable as a means to attain and hold power, have proliferated. They have extended their tentacles even into the most remote rural zones. Kidnappings for ransom have become a commonplace practice. And the police work hand in hand with the very gangsters they claim to be seeking, according to human rights organizations and the U.N.
The poorest Haitians are often the victims of these gangs. In November 2018 and the summer of 2020, gangs linked to the current government perpetrated massacres of the La Saline and Cité Soleil neighborhoods. 71 civilians were murdered in the attacks on La Saline. The Cité Soleil attacks left 111 dead and 48 persons missing. Both of these atrocities have been linked to powerful politicians seeking to use gang warfare to intimidate and control Haiti’s largest slum cities in anticipation of upcoming elections. Fednel Monchery, the director general of the Interior Ministry implicated in the La Saline massacre, was arrested at the beginning of 2021 only to be released two hours later despite being on the police wanted list. 523 assassinations were carried out in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area from January to June 2019 alone. Human rights organizations have documented almost one thousand violent deaths from January to September 2020 (including political assassinations, large-scale massacres of civilians, and executions of antigovernment protesters). The U.S. State Department’s own reporting on some of these events shows that it is well informed of the human rights situation in Haiti — including the de facto regime’s failure to prosecute government and law enforcement officials accused of committing abuses — but deliberately chooses to support a government plainly implicated in the violation of those rights.
At least two armed groups have even found shelter within the Haitian National Police itself. One of these, known as “All Black” and led by Jimmy Cherizier, carries out criminal missions that the authorities do not want to entrust to the (regular) police, according to the president of the national police officers union. The other, called Fantom 509, operates as a kind of special protection racket for police officers whom it believes has been illegally imprisoned. The Haitian National Police has entered a state of accelerated breakdown, despite the claims of foreign powers to have worked towards its professionalization for the pat twenty years.
Against this perilous security backdrop, Haiti now also faces existential challenges to its electoral and judicial systems. The de facto president, whose term expired February 7, 2021, has never organized elections to renew the Parliament and the councils of the local and regional authorities. This means that the sole legitimately elected representatives of the Republic of Haiti today are the ten senators representing the last third of the Senate. Moïse seems to have taken great pleasure in announcing, on the second Monday of January 2020, the lapse of the Chamber of Deputies and the dysfunction of the Senate owing to the lack of the constitutionally required quorum. Despite the U.N. presence, elections have never been conducted in Haiti in accordance with the constitutional timelines. Convinced that the electoral machinery is programmed in favor of his party, the de facto president is like the devil in a baptismal font, debating with himself as he organizes elections in which the opposition refuses to participate. Only the de facto government and the international community support the move to organize new elections in the current conditions. Given the impossible security climate and the illegality of the de facto president’s actions, including his appointment of a puppet Electoral Council, it is difficult to see how Haiti exits from the current stalemate without the constructive mediation of the United States and/or the leading international organizations.
Moïse’s tenure has also coincided with a systematic and deliberate campaign to undermine the country’s legal system. The de facto president has sought to make the Haitian judiciary, a coequal branch of goverment, totally dependent on him. He has appointed and dismissed judges of the Court of Cassation at will and even arrested one of them, notwithstanding that the Constitution makes them answerable only to the high court itself. He has ordered judges to imprison, detain, and release whomever he wants. He has persecuted his political opponents, some of whom have had to go into exile. He has undertaken to amend the Constitution through popular referendum in violation of article 284.3. In short, Moïse is attempting to return Haiti to the kind of dictatorship that it endured under the Duvaliers. Far from bringing more stability to the situation, these ultra vires measures have only triggered endless and ongoing strikes by the judiciary and the legal bureaucracy. They have created a pernicious Catch-22 dynamic in which, as Judge Jean Wilmer Morin has warned, Haitian citizens currently have no legal means of getting out of prison once they have entered it.
Meanwhile, even as the Haitian people have continued to demand his resignation for more than two years, Moïse has defiantly created a culture of impunity for his own acts of corruption and malfeasance. He has relied on the support of armed gangs to stay at the helm of a devastated country in which political crimes have become commonplace. There have been no repercussions for the corruption scandals in which top-ranking officials and politicians linked to the government have been implicated. The Petrocaribe affair, in which Moïse and his cronies stand accused of having pilfered monies that Haiti received in connection with a Venezuelan oil-purchasing program, is perhaps the biggest financial scandal the country has ever known. Along with the fuel price increase imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the summer of 2018, it is one of the principal short-term causes of the current crisis, since a fair trial is only possible with a change of leadership.
The role of the international community in Haiti’s vertiginous descent into the depths of social collapse is beyond dispute. It has never clearly denounced Moïse’s authoritarian abuses. It has so often reduced democracy to the routine, infantile organization of regular elections, whether credible or not, as if spreading the gospel of elections will somehow resolve the complex legacies of foreign intervention in Haiti over the past thirty years and more. It has rarely stood squarely at the side of the Haitian people in its efforts to build a democratic state — even in the face of the massive demonstrations against Moïse’s rule that we have seen in recent weeks. The contempt that the international community and Haitian government have shown for the legitimate demands of ordinary Haitian citizens is the fundamental source of the current crisis, as it has been of previous crises. It is long past time for the international community — a pompous label behind which certain foreign powers, particularly the United States, France, and Canada, so often hide — to chart a genuinely new path in its relationship with Haiti.
The current resistance movement is part of a longstanding struggle by the Haitian people in defense of its fundamental rights that dates back to the revolutionary era. After 29 years of the Duvalier dictatorship, that movement crystallized in the 1987 Constitution, an imperfect document that nonetheless prioritized the human rights of ordinary Haitians, including their right to live under a state embodying the rule of law. For more than thirty years, the implementation of that charter has been blocked by a combination of reactionary domestic forces and self-interested foreign powers. Only a systematic policy to provide sustainable answers to the fundamental claims of the country’s poor majority can bring an end to the social collapse that we are currently witnessing in Haiti.
[1] Historian and researcher in France.
[2] Associate Professor of History, MIT.
