The protracted political crisis and murderous gang violence in Haiti continues to spiral, with devastating consequences for working people. At least 5,600 people were killed by gangs in 2024, and the number of those forced to flee their homes tripled to more than 1 million.
In the meantime, capitalist parties representing competing sections of the country’s ruling class and foreign powers that intervene in Haiti are at an impasse in bringing about any semblance of stable bourgeois-democratic rule.
Capitalist rulers in Haiti and the governments in the U.S., Canada and Europe that have historically dominated the country, have no solution to these deadly breakdowns. They are the product of decades of imperialist plunder, exacerbated by today’s unfolding worldwide economic crisis, alongside the rule of successive dictatorial regimes that relied on paramilitary gangs to terrorize working people.
Under a plan concocted by the Joseph Biden administration in April 2024, a Transitional Presidential Council was cobbled together and charged with organizing long-delayed presidential elections by the end of 2025. After horse trading between the rival political parties, Fritz Alphonse Jean became the third transitional president March 7.
Washington got the United Nations to approve sending a Kenyan-led foreign military force — the Multinational Security Support Mission — to Haiti tasked with quelling the violence. So far, it has made few inroads into gang-held territory, which has in fact expanded, as the gangs form their own alliances.
Gangs control almost the entire city of Port-au-Prince, the capital. They frequently hijack freight trucks and have blocked oil terminals, creating fuel shortages. Their control over key roads drives up food prices and transportation costs, and has caused the virtual collapse of water and electricity supply, and health services. The country has become a hub for transnational trafficking of firearms and drugs, underpinned by government corruption.
Doctors Without Borders suspended its operations in Haiti for 22 days last year, following repeated death and rape threats by police and government-backed vigilantes to its staff and patients.
The Cuban government continues to maintain a medical brigade providing services in the southern part of the country. Cuba has kept a mission in Haiti uninterruptedly since 1998, when it sent volunteer doctors and other medical personnel to care for victims of Hurricane George, and then again after a massive earthquake in 2010. Over the years these internationalist volunteers have provided care for millions of working people.
Dominican capitalists profit
The Dominican government on the other side of Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is stepping up deportations of Haitians. It deported more than 276,000 people, mostly Haitians, in 2024. As many as 1 million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican government pledges to deport 10,000 Haitian immigrants per week. Its goal, however, is not to remove all undocumented immigrants from the country but to instill fear among them and make them more vulnerable to exploitation. Bosses in agriculture, construction and other industries depend on the lower wages and conditions they impose on Haitian workers to maintain their profit levels, and they have no intention of changing that.
In 2024, Dominican capitalists exported nearly $900 million of goods to Haiti, $23 million more than in 2023.
Dominican textile businesses profit from importing duty-free cotton products from the United States and then selling products, including fabrics, to bosses in textile free-trade zones in Haiti.
The gang violence is having a dampening effect on workers’ struggles, with tens of thousands laid off from textile and apparel factories. In 2022, Haitian garment workers scored a victory, as a coalition of unions negotiated an agreement with the government to provide transportation and food stipends.