Caribbean & Central America - March 2024

As we went to press Haiti’s security situation had reached a new low amid a series of attacks coordinated by prominent gang leader Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier, with the stated aim of bringing down the government. For more details on this rapidly developing story please consult our sister publications LatinNews Daily and Latin American Weekly Report. Major uncertainty surrounds the efforts to secure the deployment of the Kenya-led multinational security support (MSS) mission to Haiti, which the international community touts as a solution to the country’s ever worsening security crisis [SSR-24-01], following a January ruling by a Kenyan high court which found it to be unconstitutional. Here we consider some of the challenges that the MSS faces if it does go ahead

A report published in February by the Geneva-headquartered NGO Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC) highlights how urgent progress on security now is, and how the task faced by the MSS is much more complicated than the one that confronted the 2004-2017 United Nations (UN) Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). As the GITOC report points out, there has been “a substantial change in gangs’ power, structure and capacity for territorial governance since the MINUSTAH era”. The report adds that these entities “are nowadays far more economically autonomous and territorially powerful, making them less controllable”.

Gangs in Haiti are nothing new. Gang culture is a phenomenon that dates back to the formation of the Tonton Macoutes militia under former president François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier (1957-1971). But the nature of the gangs has changed. GITOC states that: “The framing of weak, disarticulated gangs is no longer accurate…the major ones – those which control substantial territory and are responsible for most current instability – are well-structured, well-armed, and operationally competent entities”.

There are thought to be around 200 gangs now operating in Haiti, mostly in the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, which includes the communes of Port-au-Prince, Delmas, Cité Soleil, Tabarre, Carrefour, and Pétion-Ville. The report adds: “Some gangs that had 50 or 100 active members during the MINUSTAH era now stretch to 1,500 to 2,500 members”. Collectively, the gangs exert “control or substantial influence” over 80% of the city.

However, gangs are now expanding their areas of influence to include rural and semi-rural areas, particularly in central Artibonite department where violence has developed along key roads, thus making travel between major Haitian towns increasingly risky.

The wider availability of weapons is another change between the situation that the MSS force will face and that which MINUSTAH had to deal with. The GITOC report warns that “over the past decade firearms have completely transformed the ecosystem of violence”. Ten years ago it was rare to find semi-automatic weapons, now “large gangs are readily able to acquire AK-47, AR-15 or IMI Galil assault rifles”. There is even evidence of gangs stockpiling these weapons. The training of gangs in weapons usage by ex-soldiers and policemen has also increased gangs’ capabilities.

As a result of their greater firepower and better training, gangs are increasingly willing to confront the police. “The armed gangs,” the GITOC report says, “can confront the police (and will be able to confront MSS forces) in a way that they did not during the MINUSTAH era.”

The report does say that “several sources close to gang leaders” have said that the gangs are not ready to go into battle against the MSS mission (if it is ever deployed), seeing it as too powerful. They would prefer to negotiate with it. However, warns GITOC, “while this evaluation is also fairly prevalent within international civil society, caution should abound, especially given the determination shown by gangs in their battles against the [Haitian national police]”.

Another challenge for the MSS is the way in which gangs now control territory, with hundreds of bosses acting “like local sovereigns”. Gangs have built trenches and high walls to protect their areas of influence against police operations and, potentially, MSS forces. The report warns: “The intensifying fragmentation of territory, proliferation of trenches and semi-permanent barriers, and the difficulty of moving freely in the metropolitan area represent clear operational constraints for the proposed international force to the point where it risks being unable to traverse the capital”.

Extreme violence has become the norm, and sexual violence against women and girls “works as a central practice of gang control”. Mass rapes, some conducted in public to intimidate further, have been used as an instrument of terror. All this, the report adds, underlines “the challenge that lies ahead for rebuilding social fabric, supporting victims and pacifying the city”. It warns that “all these aspects must feed into any appraisal of the prospective MSS mission’s capacity to operate meaningfully on the ground, in terms of its ability to provide effective security and protection to the population”.

The proposed MSS mission will be particularly carefully watched – not just because of the extreme difficulty of the mission, but also because it is ground-breaking in the sense that it is a non-UN mission the target of which is organised crime and the violence associated with it.

One of the mission’s key objectives is to strengthen the capacity of the national police (PNd’H), and the GITOC report warns that “there needs to be a strategic approach to buttressing… and addressing high-level corruption within the police”. Without this, the mission “risks lacking a meaningful domestic security partner”. There is also the issue that efforts to strengthen the PNd’H won’t be effective without strengthening the whole criminal justice chain, that is to say the judiciary and the prison service.

Corruption within the MSS itself is a potential worry as well. This has been a problem with many UN peacekeeping missions, and there are concerns that the deployment of Kenyan police in this instance will bring with it an entrenched culture of bribe taking – a major worry given that Haitian criminal gangs have a long history of corrupting law enforcement officers. The GITOC report calls for “the deployment of an empowered internal affairs policing unit as part of the MSS mission with the capacity to initiate investigations of officers from any contributing country”.

A further risk is that the Haitian criminal gangs respond to the deployment of the MSS mission by further enhancing their arsenals and by uniting to form a common front against the intervention. This risk is exacerbated by the likelihood that the mission will be deployed with insufficient personnel. The UN is talking about a deployment of 2,500 while some experts argue that such an environment requires a deployment of between 3,500 and 4,500. 

Food insecurity

The GITOC report also notes an alarming effect of the expansion of gangs into rural areas on food security. It says that the expansion has “driven substantial rural displacement, and impacted agricultural production in Artibonite, with land under cultivation falling from 5,800 hectares in 2018 to 2,400 in 2022.” This is likely to have been a further deterioration in 2023.

Kenya high court ruling

In January, Kenyan High Court Judge Chacha Mwita ruled that the multinational security support (MSS) mission to Haiti, which had been greenlighted in October 2023 by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), was unconstitutional. Among other things he cited the fact that under the national police act, Kenya’s police officers can only be deployed to host countries that have a reciprocal agreement, which is not the case with Haiti. However, on 1 March Kenya’s President William Ruto and Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry, announced a memorandum of understanding (MoU), seemingly clearing the path for its deployment.