Welcome to the latest edition of Woy Magazine’s biweekly newsletter, providing you with must-know news and commentary on Haiti and our Diaspora.
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Ou pa konn kote dlo soti antre nan kokoye
You don't see how water enters the coconut
(Haitian Proverb)
I shared these thoughts via Twitter earlier this week and decided to share them again here.
People keep asking for a quick primer on Haiti, and at this point that I’m at in my life, I’m not sure I believe in the flash card infographic model for political education. All I can urge people to do is to be consistent about their politics when seeking to understand Haiti. If we are consistent about our principles, we can’t fall for certain Haiti narratives.
If we are anti-capitalist, we can’t fall for Haitian leaders whose platforms tout that Haiti is open for business by selling Haitian peasants and their land up the river. If we are anti-imperialist, we can’t fall for any UN-led foreign intervention purporting to bring peace. When has the West and their guns ever brought peace to Black and Brown people? If we are against the prison industrial complex, we can’t fall for the El Salvador approach, which hinges on mass incarceration. If you’re against that in the USA, why would you be for that in Haiti? If we heed history, we can’t fall for a Guy Phillipe or any fake demagogue who we know has been clearly used in recent history to do the West’s bidding in Haiti. There is no Haiti primer because Haiti requires your commitment. Haiti requires solidarity, not flash-in-the-pan viral hot takes.
We don’t purport to have all the answers here, but with this newsletter, we invite you to sift through everything happening in Haiti with us and apply a principled analysis to what we are witnessing. Keep your eyes open with us, and let’s not lose hope and fall for facile narratives when everything seems too confusing or difficult.
- Nathalie ‘Talie’ Cerin, Lead Editor
CHAY LA | Main Story
Fouye zo nan kalalou
The events that have transpired over the last two weeks since Ariel Henry traveled to Kenya seeking an intervention have been alarming for anyone who cares about Haiti and terrifying for those in Pòtoprens. Staying well informed about what’s going on in Haiti is a commitment that requires seeking knowledge of the history and how colonial dynamics persist in the geopolitics of today. We couldn’t possibly pack all of that into one newsletter. Instead of rehashing what has already been covered by other outlets, we would like to offer a few key points that are central to understanding the events that have unfolded in recent weeks.
The emperor has no clothes
First, Jimmy Chérizier, aka Barbecue, and the other gangs are not revolutionaries. We need to remember the genesis of these gangs and the coalition called Viv Ansanm that previously warring sides have now formed. Barbecue is a former policeman who was involved in massacres that took place under the Moise government. This includes a massacre at a school in Gran Ravin in 2017 and the Lasalin massacre that happened in November 2018, one of the first violent outbursts that analysts argue was perpetuated to repress the massive protests calling for accountability for the Petrocaribe scandal. He eventually went on the run and openly assumed his role as a gangster. But while Cherizier uses revolutionary language, he has no well-articulated political ideology and has wreaked havoc and terror on everyday working-class Haitians.
Other leaders of these groups are men from disadvantaged communities who were armed by politicians and business sector folks to protect their interests. In recent years, we watched politicians and private sector folks lose control of these groups, who recognized how much power they had and how much money they could generate from kidnapping, extortion, and terror.
Now, these groups have turned against the state.
It is a mistake to look to these groups today as liberators and freedom fighters now that they’ve turned their attention to one of the most illegitimate and disliked leaders Haiti has seen in recent decades — Ariel Henry. They are not out to liberate Haiti. They are simply trying to force into power someone who will grant them amnesty.
Many seem to have found this in Guy Philippe, whom we’ve discussed in previous newsletters. Philippe is another strongman figure who has now allied himself with the gangs. It is no wonder that he is speaking of offering the gangs amnesty.
“Former Haitian police chief and senator-elect, Guy Philippe was released after 6 years in prison in the US on drug trafficking charges and deported back to Haiti. Wanted by the Haitian police for his alleged involvement in an attack on the police headquarters in Cayes — he was held by PNH for questioning for 3 days and then let go.
A key figure in the 2004 coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide, he campaigned with Jovenel Moise on his road to the Haitian Senate. He was arrested in 2017 just days before his swearing in ceremony. While he is well liked in his hometown —where blockades and fires erupted pretty soon after his arrest—he is also suspected of being involved in murder and human rights abuses on behalf of Haiti’s elite as well as its international allies. (Source: Woy Newsletter)”
The conflict caused by these gangs has rendered the capital unlivable and has paralyzed the country. As of January 2024, the United Nations reports nearly 5,000 people killed in these conflicts in 2023 alone.
Nobody is coming
With the Kenya intervention stalled and the increase in violence this week, many people across social media have responded positively to the president of El Salvador’s statements on responding to Haiti's gangs.
Like the Kenya intervention, we should stop and consider what this approach actually entails. Today, El Salvador is seeing some of the worst human rights abuses since its civil war (1980-19992), according to Amnesty International, because of President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gangs.
“In El Salvador, a vicious response to the MS-13 gang has been rolled out, arresting 60,000 people last year, using a temporary “state of of exception” which has been renewed 9 times. Such measures has led to the indiscriminate arrest of people who are not gang members.
Several human rights organizations have condemned these efforts which doesn’t bode well for any support that Haiti might receive from El Salvador. If mass incarceration is what El Salvador is offering as a solution to Haiti, then we’re in trouble.” (Source: Woy Newsletter)
If the intervention does happen, it will require our vigilance about vetting policies and guardrails against human rights abuses.
Beyond the actual problems that intervention brings, waiting on one psychologically blocks Haitian political and economic leaders from coming up with a real security plan to protect the population. Meanwhile, ordinary Haitians are fleeing to protect their children, and individual communities are organizing themselves around security. The Haitian National Police (PNH), with the help of the army, has managed to stave off the gangsters from Champ de Mars and the airport and are conducting operations in lower Delmas, where Barbecue has control. The PNH needs better equipment, strict screenings to push out those tied to armed groups, and intelligence support.
Crisis or Design?
According to Dr. Sabine Lamour, if Haiti is in crisis, it is by design. Haiti’s attempts at nation-building were thwarted from the start. Rather, the basic building blocks of the Haitian state consist of institutions set up during the American occupation (tax system, public health care, security) and a neocolonial tie between the Haitian political and business class and the United States. These institutions were never meant to serve the Haitian people.
Since then, there have been bouts of social upheavals contesting that system and temporary fixes (elections, transitional governments, interventions). One of the most significant social upheavals in the last five years that has felt like a paradigm shift is the anti-corruption movement demanding accountability for the squandering of thePetrocaribe funds. The proliferation of the gangs was part of a backlash to quell this movement.
We can’t limit ourselves to discussions of centuries-long struggles. But it helps us to understand the resistance to Haitian proposed solutions over the past few years and the need to stay clear-eyed about foreign interference as we move forward. In the meantime, addressing the survival and material needs of Haitians is paramount — supporting and amplifying Haitians in their resistance to live and fight against terror.
That means those who are abroad should organize where they are, creating institutions and spaces for the Haitian diaspora to learn and get involved and pushing their politicians to do better by Haiti (immigration policy, foreign policy).
Immigration/Imigrasyon
In the case against Biden's Humanitarian Parole program, brought forth by Republican-led states, including Texas, a U.S. District Judge has declared that these states could not prove the financial harm they claimed to suffer as a result of the program.
Purported millions worth of expenditures on the migrants for health care, public safety, and education were unsupported in a context where the Humanitarian Parole program has dramatically decreased the number of migrants entering the country, thereby reducing out-of-pocket costs, according to the presiding Judge Drew B. Tipton.
The case has been dismissed, and the program will continue for the time being. Elon Musk and the right-wing media are having a field day spreading this propaganda, evoking such racist concepts as the great replacement theory.
The U.S. considering using Guantanamo Bay as a holding area for refugees coming from Haiti again — going as far as erecting tents in preparation for any potential influx of immigrants back in 2010 after the earthquake — like they did back in 1991.
Guantanamo is infamous for holding terrorist suspects. The holding and processing center for refugees is separate from that.
“Guantánamo Bay’s use as a site of prolonged, hellish incarceration on land the United States controls (but on which the federal government argues U.S. law doesn’t necessarily apply) was in fact started by George H. W. Bush, the forty-third president’s father.
In 1991, when the elder Bush was the forty-first president, thousands of Haitians who had supported Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled their country after their democratically elected president was ousted in a coup. Intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard en route to Florida, the refuge-seeking Haitians were kept from getting to the U.S. mainland, which, under international treaties, would have forced the United States to accept them as political asylum seekers.
But the United States couldn’t send them back to almost-certain death in Haiti. So, the first Bush administration sent them to Guantánamo Bay, where they’d be under U.S. authority but wouldn’t necessarily have access to civil rights under U.S. law.
Once there — as the Haitians waited to see if their petitions for refugee status would be granted or not — they were screened for HIV. As the scholar Cathy Hannabach has written, “While all Haitian refugees incarcerated at” Guantánamo “had their blood forcibly drawn and tested, it was only HIV-positive women who were subjected to technologies of reproductive intervention. Without their consent and often even without their knowledge, HIV-positive women refugees were either sterilized or forcibly injected with Depo-Provera, a semipermanent form of birth control.” […]
The Haitian refugee crisis of 1991, not the attacks of 9/11, was the inciting event that converted Guantánamo Bay into a space for indefinite detention. (Source: Rolling Stone)”
This is now back on the table as concerns in the US grow about more Haitians fleeing the country as conditions have worsened in Haiti in the last few weeks.
Kanal la djanm
Images have been showing water flowing through the canal into the Maribarou plain these past few weeks. According to reports onsite, technicians are still working on the canal but have released some of the water to stop it from flowing into the Dominican side as they continue with the project.
Farmers with the means to use pumps have already started making use of the water as secondary canals are completed. The canal in Wanament continues to inspire other communities to take up similar efforts. Another canal is being built in Malfety (Fò Libète) with the similar aim of funneling water to local fields in hopes of restoring food sovereignty for locals and beyond.