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On one of my first reporting trips to Haiti, in 1987, I set out north by road from the capital, Port-au-Prince, on the eve of an election, hoping to get a taste of voter sentiment in the countryside.
After 50 miles, my car was stopped at a roadblock on the outskirts of a seaside town called Saint-Marc. There, bands of thugs loosely allied with right-wing politicians were roughing up passengers, extorting money from them, and, in at least one case, setting a vehicle on fire.
I was allowed to proceed but warned that I couldn’t return to the capital until after the election the next morning. For whatever reason, the thugs had decided they would shut down the highway for 48 hours. When my reporting was done, I headed back by the same route, and the scene had badly deteriorated. A line of stopped vehicles stretched into the distance, and now, burnt-out wrecks lay strewn on either side of the roadbed.
When my car reached the front of the line and we were interrogated, I was alarmed to find that the same man who had warned me against trying to return was still holding sway. After a long and squirmy conversation, he finally let me through, though, but not before administering several punches to the head of my terrified driver.
This was just the smallest intimation of the trouble to come. When I went out to cover voting in the capital the next day, one of the first scenes I came upon was the site of a massacre at a polling station hosted by a school. Thus commenced my introduction to Haiti.
Over the next six years, during which I made countless visits to the country, often involving lengthy stays, I sometimes imagined I had seen everything. After one violent coup d’état, armed groups occupied the airport, stopping all commercial aviation. To fly in, I banded together with other Miami-based reporters to charter a Learjet plane, but on approach to Haiti’s capital, the pilot was warned off with the threat that our plane would be shot down if it attempted to land.
The next day, we rented another small jet, and this time there was no one running or policing the airport. We landed and walked through a terminal that had mysteriously been left completely deserted.
In 1992, I was invited to the army headquarters for an interview with the leader of the right wing junta, U.S.-trained Lt. Gen. Raoul Cédras. At the appointed time, I was ushered into a conference room on the second floor of the rickety building where seven senior Haitian military officers sat stone-faced around a large table. When Cédras entered the room, our meeting began with him sliding his revolver to the middle of the table and asking his men unsmilingly who would like to volunteer to shoot this journalist who has been such a pest. After a long moment of tense silence, he took his gun back and holstered it and the interview proceeded. Haitian journalists, I hasten to add, experienced much worse.
A year later, I stayed on in the country for weeks after the start of an international embargo of a military regime that had overthrown the elected leader, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and was now clinging defiantly to power. One afternoon in October 1993, I looked on as a gun-waving band of a few dozen militiamen orchestrated a raucous portside demonstration that prevented the docking of a 522-foot-long U.S. warship, the USS Harlan County, with more than 200 soldiers aboard.
The ship had arrived bearing a contingent of international peacekeepers that was intended to pave the way for Aristide’s rightful restoration. The secret to their success in turning the ship back was the chant “Somalia, Somalia.” Their invocation of the Battle of Mogadishu, more famously known to Americans as the Black Hawk Down Incident, a week earlier, in which 18 Americans were killed, had more power than any magician’s spell.
I have taken the time to revisit scenes like these for one reason that is obvious and another that may not be. The first is that Haiti is presently in the grips of a very serious crisis, with no functioning government and violent gangs running rampant. The second is that, despite its catastrophic nature, few of the elements in Haiti’s grave situation are actually entirely new.
During the trying period in which I covered the country, I witnessed moments when the National Assembly completely broke down and became essentially irrelevant, when two or more people claimed legitimacy to rule, and when power briefly seemed vacant. I saw times when the streets were ruled by gangs or by shadowy militia like the Tonton Macoutes and the so-called attachés. I saw fecklessness by the international community, of which the Harlan County incident is but one example, and I also saw fleeting moments when the world appeared to come through for Haiti when every alternative seemed exhausted.
This included the restoration of Aristide to power through a U.S.-led intervention under President Bill Clinton in 1994. My coverage of Haiti and its region ended just then, but from afar I also followed Aristide’s subsequent failure and one might even say betrayal of his country as a brittle, vindictive, and—as many of his critics believe—violence-prone and even corrupt leader. His trajectory was all the more remarkable and disheartening in light of his beginnings, as a Salesian priest and devotee of progressive liberation theology.
What makes Haiti’s situation so special today is the way that all of its past failures seem to be recurring at once, in symphonic tragedy or grand mashup. There is no president (The last one, Jovenel Moïse, was murdered in 2021.). The acting prime minister, Ariel Henry, has been effectively exiled. There is no parliament. There is no army. There is barely a police force. And there is virtually no economy, save for a lucrative traffic in narcotics from South America, for which the country has long served as a wide-open trans-shipment base.
Gangs rule the streets, but they provide no structure or order, no hope for the future, and certainly no peace. The population lives at their mercy, with ordinary people terrorized and shot randomly as they seek out food or try to go about their daily business. Large numbers of people are reduced to living on the streets under shabby tarpaulins without municipal water, sewage, or electricity.
This had all led to the return of a recurrent and hard-to-resolve debate. Should the outside world intervene, and if so, what form should this take? The deployment of a Kenyan police contingent has been delayed by the effective anarchy in Port-au-Prince—as well as the Kenyan High Court decision—and for a cluster of reasons, historic and current, the United States is taking a hands-off approach, avoiding any direct intervention of its own. The historical reasons for this are solid.
Little known to most Americans, the United States has a destructive, racist, and corrupt imperial history in Haiti, which includes an intervention by the Marines in 1915, following another period of extraordinary political violence in the country. Washington’s contemporary reluctance would seem to stem from domestic U.S. politics: After a century of foreign interventions, deploying U.S. troops overseas for nation-building or even peacekeeping purposes is nowadays considered a vote loser.
Where does this leave Haiti? Sources of optimism are difficult to find. A starting point for the outside world might be a reckoning with how brutally and thoroughly Haiti was exploited in its past. This begins with the creation by France of what has often been called the most profitable colony in the world. This is a story that traces back to the early 18th century and the launching of a prison industrial labor camp system, prettified under the name “plantations,” in order to produce sugar on an untold scale.
Cane was only one of the raw ingredients. The lives of Africans who were brought there and forced to work in the fields was the other. In the human equivalent of planned obsolescence, newly enslaved Africans were worked to death with an average life expectancy of roughly five years from the time of arrival. Replacing this labor due to mortality was considered then just an ordinary feature of business. I wrote extensively about what the world owes Haiti as a result of this gruesome exploitation in my book Born in Blackness.
Crimes like these were insidiously compounded by the embargo that Western nations placed on Haiti as punishment for the audacity of winning its own freedom from outside domination and slavery in 1804. For this insult to Western wealth and power, the country was subjected to exorbitant and crippling indemnity payments that lasted for decades.
Ultimately, though, it is in Haiti’s feat of self-liberation that the country’s hopes for rebirth must lie. Modern history offers few if any more triumphal stories than the defeat of one Western army after another (France, Spain, Britain, and then France again) by Africans brought to Hispaniola to be worked to death—all in the cause of freedom and sovereignty.
In 1804, when Haiti was born, no other Western nation had legally enacted the values of the Enlightenment so fully—by abolishing slavery and discrimination on the basis of race. Long before the American Civil War and major civil rights legislation of the mid-20th century, Haitians had written these ideals into their constitution.
In recent decades, Haitians have been betrayed by the greed, pettiness, and narrow vision of their elites. But history shows us an example of the capacity of its people to rise up against the worst sorts of iniquity, and the Haitian people will somehow need to summon this capacity again. And when they tell the international community what form of assistance would be most helpful, the world should rally to their needs.
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