Thousands of working people in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, took to the streets April 2 protesting against the Haitian government’s refusal to protect them from the violence of brutal armed gangs, which have taken control over 85% of the capital city. They chanted, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go and get them out!”
It was a largely peaceful demonstration, but later in the day gunfire forced protesters to flee as police fired tear gas and live rounds into the crowd as it neared government offices.
Two days earlier gangs had stormed the towns of Saut d’Eau and Mirebalais in central Haiti, releasing 500 of their brethren from prison. When the thugs arrived, local cops fled.
Some people took refuge in a Mirebalais home where the attackers killed them all, including two nuns. Archbishop Max Leroy Mesidor said 28 parishes in the Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince have been forced to close because of the violence.
There are an estimated 20 armed gangs operating in the capital and up to half a million illegal firearms in the country. Mirebalais is on a crossroads to the border town of Belladere, a gateway for the flow of arms, ammunition and contraband coming to Haiti from South Florida via the Dominican Republic.
In 2024 more than 5,600 people were killed, 2,212 injured and 1,494 kidnapped by the gangs. And by March this year as many as 185,000 people have been forced from their homes.
Thousands of displaced people are either on the street or sheltering in makeshift sites, including schools and public buildings. Protester Julien David said at the demonstration, “We, the residents of the Solino neighborhood, we want to return home, and we will go home.”
The Miami Herald reported the gangs have “burned homes, schools and businesses. They’ve kidnapped people and used them as human shields against a government task force that uses drones to drop bombs on gang strongholds.”
After the demonstration, Fritz Alphonse Jean, the current head of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, gave a sanctimonious address saying, “Haitian people, you’ve spoken, and we’ve heard you. We understand your misery. We know your pain and your suffering.”
He tried to minimize the problem the people face, saying the fight against the gangs “is nothing compared to the battle we fought to get out of slavery.” Haitian slaves rose up and defeated the French army, winning independence in 1804. The rulers in Washington and elsewhere wanted to wipe out this example and ever since Haitians have faced colonial occupation.
Mario Jean-Pierre, a street vendor who sells used clothes he carries on his back, told NBC News he wasn’t impressed by Jean’s address. “This speech is not any different from other speeches,” he said. “They keep making promises and don’t accomplish any of the promises they’ve made.”
The gang violence has forced Jean-Pierre to move with his two children into a makeshift shelter in the yard of Haiti’s Ministry of Public Works. “Flying bullets are coming at you in different directions,” he said. “I’ve seen a few people in this camp who were hit by bullets as they slept.”
There is no question that a large number of Haitian government officials, police and military personnel profit from collusion with the rival armed gangs and their financial backers.
Decades of imperialist plunder
The devastation in Haiti is the result of decades of imperialist plunder, made worse by today’s unfolding worldwide economic crisis. Since the U.S. rulers became the dominant imperialist power, they’ve collaborated with successive dictatorial regimes in Haiti that relied on paramilitary gangs to terrorize working people.
Democratic and Republican administrations alike backed the bloody dictatorships of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, known as “Baby Doc,” and their Tonton Macoutes paramilitary force, from 1957 until 1986.
It was only the broad struggle of tens of thousands of Haitian working people and their supporters mobilized in both Haiti and the U.S. that brought down one of the most brutal dictatorships of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Since then a series of military interventions have been carried out both under the banner of the U.N. and directly by U.S. troops. They have installed puppet governments, none of which had the support or wherewithal to bring peace and prosperity.
Already one of the poorest countries in the world, the social crisis in Haiti was exacerbated by deadly hurricanes in 2008, 2012 and 2016, a devastating earthquake in 2010, as well as a cholera epidemic spread by U.N. forces.
Haiti has not had a president since former President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in 2021 and has not had an election since 2016. Capitalist parties representing competing sections of the country’s ruling class and foreign imperialist powers have proven incapable of creating any semblance of stable bourgeois-democratic rule.
The Joseph Biden administration concocted the Transitional Presidential Council, which is supposed to organize an election next February. Washington also pressured the U.N. to send a Kenyan-led military force to Haiti, supposedly to quell the gang violence. But these forces have neither the strength nor will to do so.
The protest April 2 shows working people are trying to forge a way forward.