The crisis in Haiti continues to grow as heavily armed criminal gangs escalate their attacks on the police, government, and logistics infrastructure. Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture Airport looms large here.
While an attempt to seize the airport was defeated on Monday, the gangs clearly hold the initiative and are likely to conduct other such assaults. They want to ensure that Prime Minister Ariel Henry is unable to return to Haiti. Henry has disappeared since meeting with the Kenyan leadership in Nairobi over the weekend. This has fueled growing speculation over whether he has essentially ceded power. That would be a big problem. After all, the prime minister was in Kenya seeking to resuscitate a security deal that would see Kenya deploy 1,000 police officers to help restore order in Haiti. That’s something the gangs obviously don’t want to see happen. They’re determined to stop reinforcements from arriving to support the country’s utterly inadequate police force.
The airport bears attention for another reason. Because if it falls, Kenyan reinforcements obviously won’t be able to land. While there is another international airport on Haiti’s northern coast, the status of that airport would quickly fall into question if Toussaint Louverture were to fall to the gangs. It’s also highly unlikely that Kenya would send its troops to an airport that would force them to fight their way into Port-au-Prince. In such a scenario, only the U.S. military would have the capacity to conduct a forced entry operation to seize Toussaint Louverture. Considering the U.S. popular skepticism toward foreign military interventions, it seems highly unlikely President Joe Biden would order such an action. Indeed, the White House has told the Miami Herald that there are no plans to deploy U.S. forces.
Evinced by the antics of key gang leader Jimmy Cherizier, the situation is dire. A former police officer nicknamed “Barbecue” and the leader of the G9 federation of gangs, Cherizier struck a deal last year to form a temporary peace pact with an adversary gang federation, the G-Pep alliance. Accused of massacres and various other human rights abuses, Cherizier comes across as a psychopath in many of the interviews he has given. In a 2019 interview with the Associated Press, for example, Cherizier said “he got the nickname Barbecue as a child because his mother was a street vendor who sold fried chicken, not because he is accused of setting people on fire.”
Cherizier’s gangs successfully raided a major prison over the weekend, freeing around 3,000 prisoners who will now presumably join or rejoin their ranks. His increasing consolidation of power allows him to focus his attention on battling the overwhelmed security forces. And with civilian access to medical and food supplies increasingly restricted and with Cherizier’s penchant for grotesque violence not in question, Haiti’s plight appears dire. What happens next?
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Much would seem to depend on whether Henry returns to restore a glimmer of stability and resistance to the gangs. But will Haiti’s embattled security forces be able to hold the airport until then? Will they keep risking their lives to do so even as Henry remains AWOL? And will the Kenyans even come?
These are dark times for a people who have suffered far more than their fair share of them.
