That is what started happening in Haiti on Tuesday: three different American airliners were hit by bullets in rapid succession, and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted all US flights to Haiti for at least the next month.

It’s not the first time that Port-au-Prince’s airport has been forced to close by criminal gangs. That’s how the same gangs forced interim prime minister Ariel Henry to quit early this year. Henry had been serving in that role since the assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, but Jimmy Chérizier wanted him out.

Chérizier, an ex-policeman who now leads the ‘G9' coalition of gangster groups, is known as ‘Barbecue’ because he likes to set his victims alight (a fearsome reputations is an asset in Haitian gangsterdom), but he is more than an ordinary thug. He and his backers are after political power, and their first step was to get rid of Henry.

The opportunity arose when Henry traveled to Guyana for a ‘summit’ meeting of Caribbean countries in February. Chérizier’s gunmen just seized control of the airport and refused to let him come home.

Around the same time a prisoner uprising in Port-au-Prince’s main jail freed 4,000 inmates. Many of them joined Chérizier’s street ‘army’, which now controls 80%-85% of the capital, and 3,600 civilians have been killed by the rival gangs this year. But alongside the random murder and robbery there is real political purpose.

The rival factions in Haiti managed to create a nine-person ‘Transitional Presidential Council’ (TPC) in April. Henry officially resigned without ever setting foot back in the country, the airport re-opened, and in June the TPC appointed a new interim prime minister, Garry Cornille.

The US ambassador, Dennis Hankins, said “Each day is a new day, and this is a new day for Haiti”. ‘Barbecue’ just told the caretaker government “Brace yourselves,” and the war in the streets carried on as usual.

Into all this, also in June, tiptoed an African peace-keeping force that mainly consisted of Kenyan police officers. Kenyan President William Ruto means well, but the Kenyan police are far too few (only 400) to make a difference. Another 600 are due to arrive any day now (if they can find the money for them), but that’s still only a drop in the bucket.

Predictably, the transitional council is now falling apart. At war with interim prime minister Conille almost from the day he was appointed, it has now dismissed him and appointed a new interim president, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. He is the son of a well-known activist, but he has no following of his own.

Conille insists that the TPC had no power to dismiss him, and ‘Barbecue’ has warned that he will escalate the gang violence against the interim government. As for the United States, which has been trying to build the TPC into something more coherent (despite three of its members now facing corruption charges), you can practically hear the despair between the lines.

“The United States views it as vital that (the interim government) clearly delineates the roles and responsibilities of the TPC vis-à-vis the prime minister and includes measures to hold one another accountable as appropriate while preventing further gridlock.” In other words, shape up or ship out.

But the United States has not been willing to invest much faith or money into rebuilding the shattered Haitian state even under President Joe Biden, and it certainly won’t do so under President Trump 2.0. The Haitians are almost entirely on their own, and their past does not inspire confidence.

The country has been independent almost as long as the United States, but it has never known domestic peace for very long. Out of its past twelve presidents, four were killed in office and six others were driven from power by violence in the streets.

It isn’t the fault of anybody now alive, but they are all trapped in a low-level civil war that has been going on, sometimes open but usually submerged, since the earliest days of Haitian independence. It’s between the mixed-race ‘mulatto’ people who had the education and the money and the black nine-tenths of the population who had neither.

When ‘Barbecue’ talks about leading a revolution (as he does), he is appealing for the support and loyalty of the nine-tenths. He may not mean it – he is primarily a gangster – but it is an appeal that still resonates with many people. After 200 years you mostly can’t see the difference in people’s faces, but you can certainly see it in people’s lives.

Author

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Gwynne Dyer