Over the last few days, we have witnessed the brutal collapse of our foundations in the Haitian capital: All the police stations in Port-au-Prince and its suburbs have been set on fire; markets, hospitals, courts, shops, port facilities and banks have been ransacked, looted and set alight. Prisoners spectacularly escaped from the two main prisons. It's a terror campaign carried out by heavily armed men in the name of a revolution whose paradoxical supposed goal is "living together."
As I write this article, the Caribbean Community and the anxious vigilance of the United States has launched a new round of negotiations between certain political officials to find an immediate stop to this fall into the abyss. One thing is clear from the outset. Since July 2021, the inability of these same political officials (the ruling power, the Haitian opposition and the international community) to resolve the crisis through a negotiated agreement has given the region's transnational mafia and their local business and political allies the time and space to transform these assailants into a self-proclaimed "national liberation army."
A few reminders of recent history are in order. It was the 2010 elections that opened this new cycle of instability, economic collapse, social disaster and violence. The US imposed the third-place candidate [Michel Martelly], as the winner of those elections. Canada and France were quick to endorse the move. During the two mandates of the political heavyweight, Haiti saw the squandering by nationals and non-nationals alike of the PetroCaribe fund granted by Hugo Chavez [former president of Venezuela] after the 2010 earthquake, the depreciation of its currency, the evisceration of its institutions, the deterioration of its economy and the strengthening of its geographical position as a key transit point for drug trafficking in the Latin American and Caribbean zone.
This descent into hell has led to a sharp rise in clandestine migration to neighboring countries and an acceleration of the exodus towards large cities, particularly Port-au-Prince. Urbanization has come about without any structures to welcome the young population which can't really identify with the codes of the city, has lost the solid references of the rural world and feeds on the consumer impulses of social media and the violent imaginary stimulants of video games. The deportees, former prisoners in the US who were sent back to Haiti in large numbers, brought with them a new violent culture learned through contact with gangs in US prisons. These young people left to their own devices ended up forging their own subculture from these ingredients.
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