The gang violence currently convulsing Haiti is no accident. It's the result of deliberate efforts by politicians to use the gangs for their own purposes - until the gangs decided they could do the same for themselves, without needing the politicians.
A 1990s embargo was imposed after the military overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The embargo and the international isolation devastated the country’s small middle class, said Michael Deibert, author of “Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti,” and “Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History.”
After a U.S.-backed U.N. force pushed out the coup's leaders in 1994, a World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment led to the importation of rice from the U.S. and devastated rural agricultural society, Deibert said.
Boys without work flooded into Port-au-Prince and joined gangs. Politicians started using them as a cheap armed wing. Aristide, a priest-turned-politician, gained notoriety for using gangsters.
In December 2001, police official Guy Philippe attacked the National Palace in an attempted coup and Aristide called on the gangsters to rise from the slums, Deibert said.
“It wasn’t the police defending their government’s Palais Nacional,” remembered Deibert, who was there. “It was thousands of armed civilians.”
“Now, you have these different politicians that have been collaborating with these gangs for years, and ... it blew up in their face,” he continued.
How did weak foreign intervention hurt Haiti?
Many of the gangs retreated in the face of MINUSTAH, a U.N. force established in 2004.
Rene Preval, the only democratically elected president to win and complete two terms in a country notorious for political upheaval, took a hard line on the gangs, giving them the choice to “disarm or be killed,” said Robert Fatton, professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia.
After his presidency, subsequent leaders were at best easy on the gangs and at worst tied to them, he said.
Fatton said every key actor in Haitian society had their gangs, noting that the current situation isn't unique, but that it has deteriorated at a faster pace.
“For the last the three years, the gangs started to gain autonomy. And now they are a power unto themselves,” he said, likening them to a “mini-Mafia state.”
“The autonomy of the gangs has reached a critical point. It is why they are capable now of imposing certain conditions on the government itself," Fatton said.
"Those who created the gangs created a monster. And now the monster may not be totally in charge, but it has the capacity to block any kind of solution,” he said.
There's more at the link.
Why is this reminiscent - and perhaps prescient - of the situation in Chicago, where youth gangs have been running amok for years? Here are a few headlines from the past decade:
28 Arrested In Mob Attacks On Mag Mile, Red Line
As Chicago magazine pointed out more than a decade ago: "In some parts of Chicago, violent street gangs and pols quietly trade money and favors for mutual gain. The thugs flourish, the elected officials thrive—and you lose."
A few months before last February’s citywide elections, Hal Baskin’s phone started ringing. And ringing. Most of the callers were candidates for Chicago City Council, seeking the kind of help Baskin was uniquely qualified to provide.
Baskin isn’t a slick campaign strategist. He’s a former gang leader and, for several decades, a community activist who now operates a neighborhood center that aims to keep kids off the streets ... In all, he says, he helped broker meetings between roughly 30 politicians (ten sitting aldermen and 20 candidates for City Council) and at least six gang representatives.
. . .
At some of the meetings, the politicians arrived with campaign materials and occasionally with aides. The sessions were organized much like corporate-style job fairs. The gang representatives conducted hourlong interviews, one after the other, talking to as many as five candidates in a single evening. Like supplicants, the politicians came into the room alone and sat before the gang representatives, who sat behind a long table. “One candidate said, ‘I feel like I’m in the hot seat,’” recalls Baskin. “And they were.”
The former chieftains, several of them ex-convicts, represented some of the most notorious gangs on the South and West Sides, including the Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples, Black Disciples, Cobras, Black P Stones, and Black Gangsters. Before the election, the gangs agreed to set aside decades-old rivalries and bloody vendettas to operate as a unified political force, which they called Black United Voters of Chicago. “They realized that if they came together, they could get the politicians to come to them,” explains Baskin.
. . .
But in the end, as with most things political in Chicago, it all came down to one question, says Davis, the community activist who helped Baskin with some of the meetings. He recalls that the gang representatives asked, “What can you give me?” The politicians, most eager to please, replied, “What do you want?”
Again, more at the link.
And what's the result of all this? The gangs flourish, street crime is rampant, and the police are effectively not allowed to do their job through being defunded, restricted and vilified by politicians and "community activists". Examples:
Admittedly, Chicago's gang problem has not deteriorated to the same extent as Haiti's: but it hasn't been solved, either. That's partly because in years past, it was largely confined to a few inner-city suburbs where gangs effectively operated in a "safe haven" - police didn't go there unless they had to. Now, the gang culture and violence that's permeated those areas is spilling over into the central business district and other areas, and the police have been so hamstrung by budget cuts and official sanctions that they simply can't control it.
Will Chicago become like Haiti? Hopefully not, because the authorities will crack down before that occurs: but given the evidence of the past decade or two, and political collusion with criminal gangs as described above, it's certainly not impossible.
Nor is Chicago alone. Look at youth mobs and gang violence in other large US cities, particularly where "imported" gangs from South America have set up new bases after flooding across our southern border, thanks to the Biden administration's policies. There are headlines about them on an almost daily basis in New York City and elsewhere. Note, too, that many of Haiti's gangsters have made the same journey, bringing with them the same attitudes and ruthlessness they displayed there.
Haiti is not yet a predictive model for the USA . . . but it might become one for some of our inner-city ghettoes and adjacent areas, unless our politicians wake up and do something about it. Trouble is, too many of those politicians are behaving like Haiti's, and viewing gangs as a resource to exploit. That way lies chaos and anarchy.
Peter
