Haiti's "gang" crisis explained

Your Saturday deep dive.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the Saturday deep dive. Today, Haiti.

Before I start, I want to recount a note I got from a reader after a recent Proximities entry on what is most often referred to as Haiti’s gang crisis. She questioned whether “gangs” was an accurate term for the armed groups that now control a staggering 90 percent of the capital Port-au-Prince.

It gave me pause. A key principle of journalism is (or should be) to call things what they are in as plain a manner as possible, as accurate a manner as possible.

What you should do is avoid using terms a government or other interested parties want you to use to obfuscate or make a judgement. Perhaps the most notorious example was the U.S. military calling the civilians it killed “collateral damage.”

So, thank you to that reader. I hope in today’s newsletter I can shed some light on whether that is actually an appropriate term and provide you with the context to make up your own mind. With that said, let’s jump into a Q&A.

Until next Saturday,

Barry.

What is going on in Haiti?

It’s chaos. There is a lot of background you can dig into, but for the sake of brevity, I think it’s appropriate to start this explainer in 2021, when Haiti’s then president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. The circumstances of his killing, which was carried out in an assault on his home by a team of Colombian mercenaries and two Haitian-Americans, are incredibly murky. There are reports of U.S.-based companies being involved and Moïse’s widow and a former prime minister have been charged. Two of his bodyguards are alleged to have conspired with the killers and the rest offered no resistance when his house was stormed.

Though the gangs have been around for decades, the uncertainty, fear and vacuum that Moïse’s assassination created allowed them to grab more territory and become an ever more potent threat to the state.

As mentioned above, they are now thought to control about 90 percent of the capital, are becoming increasingly wealthy, and regularly pronounce on politics.

Who are the “gangs” and what do they want?