On March 12, Ariel Henry announced that he would step down as Haitian prime minister. The controversial leader’s announcement followed a meeting in Jamaica that included Caribbean leaders and U.S. Secretary of State Anthoney Blinken organized to address the political violence in Haiti.
“The government that I am leading will resign immediately after the installation of a council [for the transition],” Henry said in a late-night video address.
Haiti is set to form a transitional presidential council made up of politicians tasked with selecting an interim prime minister. But Henry’s resignation is unlikely to resolve the current political crisis in the country, as, after a slight pause, the crisis further intensified in the week following his announcement.
Henry took power following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 and promised to oversee new elections. However, due to the rise in violence, he has refused to hold democratic elections, arguing that conditions were not right.
In the years that followed, nearly every seat in the country’s senate has lapsed, leaving an institutional crisis.
Haitians and advocates in the United States have been calling on U.S. President Joe Biden's Administration to cease propping up Henry and his allies since he assumed power. In September 2023, Haitian-American leaders sent a letter to Biden, calling on the U.S. to dump Henry.
“Any military intervention supporting Haiti’s corrupt, repressive, unelected regime will likely exacerbate its current political crisis to a catastrophic one,” they wrote. “It will further entrench the regime, deepening Haiti’s political crisis while generating significant civilian casualties and migration pressure.”
Gangs, who have been responsible for the increase in violence, themselves had threatened a “civil war” if Henry did not resign.
Amid the ongoing crisis, both the United States and the United Nations have sought to form an international police force to be deployed to Haiti to combat the gangs. The mission was set to be led by Kenya but has run into constitutional challenges there. The United States has sought to find a solution to facilitate the deployment, but there continues to be uncertainty as to when the force will be deployed after Kenya has paused the deployment.
Meanwhile, the crisis continues to worsen.
Gangs have gained control of major parts of Haiti in the last decade, initially supported by politicians who utilized them to gain power and influence over their rivals. But now these gangs have taken the weapons and money to create a campaign of terror that has led to historic levels of violence throughout the country.
Among the figures who have risen to the forefront of the current crisis is Guy Philippe, a former police officer who led a U.S. and Canadian backed backed coup d’etat against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Philippe has sought to utilize the crisis to gain more political influence as the country moves towards forming a transition government. He and his supporters have resisted efforts to form a transitional council.
“They were the same guys who were working with Ariel Henry for three years,” Philippe told NPR. “The same name, the same organizations, with no popular support. I don't know why the international community wants to take that path."
Philippe, who was convicted in 2017 of money laundering and sentenced to six years in prison in the United States, has allegedly negotiated an alliance with the major gangs and political allies in a quest to obtain the presidency. He was deported back to Haiti in November 2023 after serving his sentence in the United States for money laundering.
As efforts to form a transitional government slowly advance, Haiti has continued to see violence across the capital of Port-au-Prince which is spreading into the wealthier areas of the city.
The Associated Press reports that at least twelve individuals were killed in a market in the upscale Pétionville city on March 18. Gangs have also looted homes further up the hill in the wealthy communities of Laboule and Thomassin.
During the crisis, the Guatemalan consulate in Port-au-Prince was raided by an unknown group, according to Guatemala’s Ministry of Foreign Relations. UNICEF also had a container containing “essential items for maternal, neonatal, and child survival, including resuscitators and related equipment” looted by unknown individuals at the main port of Port-au-Prince.
In many regards, the international community is responsible for the current prolonged crisis in Haiti.
The deterioration of Haiti comes after centuries of invasions, extortion, and manipulation of Haiti by foreign powers, particularly the United States. This has left the country mired in instability and poverty, contributing to the massive migration of Haitians since the 1980’s.
Haiti became the first country where enslaved people liberated themselves through a revolution—beginning in 1791, and culminating with the January 1, 1804, declaration of independence from France. Haiti became the second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere, inspiring powerful Black liberation sentiments across the region.
Andy Dunaway/U.S. Air Force (Public domain)
U.S. Marines patrol the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 9, 2004.
For more than 200 years, the United States has punished Haiti for its revolution. At the time the U.S. economy was driven by chattel slavery, and the Haitian example posed a threat to this system. According to Annika Neklason writing in The Atlantic, ahead of the U.S. Civil War, there were conspiracies spread among Southerners about the possibility of uprisings of enslaved people inspired by the Haitian revolution. Citing Manisha Sinha, an American history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, Neklason writes that Haitian revolutionaries were portrayed as “barbaric people who descended into completely chaotic violence for violence’s sake” rather than as freedom fighters seeking national liberation. These conspiracies are being echoed today with the current political crisis in Haiti.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the United States would formally recognize Haiti, but this did not mark the end of foreign interventions.
In 1915 the U.S. Marines occupied Haiti after a series of presidential assassinations. The political unrest and insecurity generated fears at the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) that Haiti could not pay its debts, spurring the invasion of the island nation.
The occupation was met by an insurgency led by Charlemagne Péralte, who carried out a guerrilla war against the Marines in the mountains. Péralte would be captured in 1919 and nailed to a door by U.S. Marines—in a pose resembling a crucifixion—as a grotesque warning to the population. The U.S. occupation of Haiti finally ended in 1932 after a further uprising against the occupation forced troops to leave.
In the decades following the end of the occupation, the United States would support the brutal dictatorship of François Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1971. The dictator, who was commonly known as Papa Doc, ruled the country with a heavy hand, utilizing fear tactics to keep the population in line. Democracy would not return to Haiti until after a popular uprising against Papa Doc’s son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, commonly known as Baby Doc, in 1986.
After a rough start, Haiti finally democratically elected a president in 1989. In a surprise, voters elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest and advocate of liberation theology, to the presidency. But he would be overthrown in a coup d’état in 1991. Aristide was able to return to Haiti in 1994 to finish his term. But when he returned, the United States deployed Marines to Haiti once again, where they remained for years.
Aristide was reelected to the presidency in 2001. But once again he was overthrown in a coup d’état in 2004—led this time by Philippe. This second coup occurred after Aristide demanded that France pay back the money that the country had extorted from Haiti in the 1800s.
Following the 2004 coup, the United Nations deployed a military peacekeeping force to the country (known as the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti). This peacekeeping force was accused of grave human rights violations, including causing an outbreak of cholera after human waste was dumped into the rivers in October 2010 by United Nations troops in northern Haiti.
The United Nations’s militarized peacekeeping force ended in 2017, but the international community has continued to maintain control and influence over the island nation, stripping the state and imposing a regime that is more governed by aid agencies and non-governmental organizations.
Haiti has never been allowed to maintain their own government. The paternalism and racism towards Haiti has continued to the current crisis.
On March 9, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele made the absurd statement on X (formerly known as Twitter) that he could fix Haiti, retweeting a post that spread racist narratives accusing Haitian gangs of cannibalism. His tweet was supported by X owner Elon Musk, who himself has spread racist images putting forth the same conspiracy. But this is just the latest example of such conspiracies and racism that date back to the historic victory of the enslaved people who rose up in 1791 against their enslavers in order to form the first Black republic.