Haiti Is Not a Failed Country; It Has Been Broken. Now Erik Prince Wants to Fix It.

Haiti is not a failed nation; it has been broken time and again. Now, the same people who broke it want to fix it by bringing in the notorious private security contractor Erik Prince. But under what legitimacy would he and his army of mercenaries operate in the country?

In my understanding, the best way to describe Haiti’s situation is to frame it as a descent into anarchy and civil war. This is anarchy because the absence of a hegemonic power has spawned hundreds of small armed groups. It is a civil war because, using an encompassing definition from a critical review of the term, Haiti fits within it: “We define a civil war as a politically organized, large-scale, sustained, physically violent conflict that occurs within a country principally among large/numerically important groups of its inhabitants or citizens over the monopoly of physical force.”

The main warring parties in this conflict are, on the one hand, the oligarchic elite, who claim state legitimacy through political proxies and control most of the country’s economic resources, including its police force. On the other hand, the paramilitary units that most media define as “gangs,”  are large groups of armed, non-governmental forces. Some emerged from previously state-sanctioned militias; others were created by the oligarchic elite to do their dirty bidding but have now gone out of control.

We can divide these paramilitary units into two categories. The first has a political discourse, like Vivansam and Besop. Their aim, at the moment, is a change in the system. In February 2024, they prevented the return of Prime Minister Ariel Henry from Kenya, where he had gone to sign an agreement to bring notoriously ruthless military forces from that country, paid by the U.S., to fight them. In that same year, they also protected farmers from Dominican Republic forces as they were building a canal to irrigate their lands. These are political acts; therefore, a more adequate term to refer to these paramilitary forces, and distinguish them from other gangs, could be “insurrection forces.”

The second category consists of the actual criminal gangs—violent armed groups that have taken control of parts of the capital or other areas and that do not have a political motivation. They fill the power vacuum created by the absence of authority and sustain themselves financially through crime. In many cases, these gangs have been armed and used by competing factions of the oligarchs. I will refer to them simply as “gangs.”

The oligarchic elite claim state legitimacy, while the insurrection forces dispute that claim by fighting their violent forces: the police, UN international missions, and some gangs. At the same time, the insurrection forces are gaining territory, especially in the capital, Port-au-Prince, including its main airport, and claim to be fighting “the system” in reference to oligarchic rule. They use this claim, along with the protection of civilians in the territories they control, as a source of legitimacy.

Apart from these three groups—the oligarchic elite, insurrection forces, and gangs—and accounting for the fact that they are not homogeneous, there are other armed groups in the country. There are the popular defense forces, which are not armed to the same standards as the oligarchic or insurrection forces, and which are mainly concerned with protecting some neighborhoods from conflict. There are also armed criminal groups involved in drug trafficking, as Haiti is a transit port for cocaine from Latin America to the U.S. and Europe. These differ from gangs in that they have foreign components.

The distinctions between these groupings are not always clear-cut, as oligarchic forces and insurrection forces often participate in criminal activities, and popular defense forces sometimes mix with insurrectionists. The historical nature of the conflict—spanning at least 20 years since the last coup against President Aristide in 2004—and its evolution make it difficult to clearly separate one from the other.

As in most civil wars, there are two principal issues in dispute: first, who holds the wealth; second, who holds state legitimacy and can monopolize violence. For the most part, the oligarchic elite holds the first, and it is the inequality created by their hoarding—and the inefficacy of previous governments to change that situation—that has led to the dispute over the second.

According to Schmittian and Kelsenian definitions, the monopoly of violence is an essential feature of a modern state. Violence, in this context, is the coercive force a state uses to impose its laws. The legitimacy to use it comes from the idea that a state, through its laws, is the embodiment of the sovereign will of its citizens. In Haiti, a portion of the citizens, many of whom were armed earlier by President Aristide to counter the army that he disbanded, no longer saw the state as embodying their will and therefore felt justified in contesting its monopoly of violence.

The apparatus of the state lost its claim to be the expression of the sovereign will, as abstract as that concept might be, after the second coup against the first democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. After the coup, orchestrated by the U.S., a transitional government, formed mostly of those close to the oligarchic elite, was installed under the auspices of the UN, which at the behest of the U.S. sent a “peace keeping” force. Since that moment, the state has continued losing its legitimacy and power, culminating in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

Jovenel Moïse was elected president in 2016 amid protests against his party, the PHTK, accused of election fraud and serving oligarchic interests. The demonstrations, in a country still reeling from the 2010 earthquake, escalated amid allegations that the government used armed gangs to suppress them. From 2016/2018, the homicide rate has soared from 9.6 to 41.15 per 100,000 inhabitants, among the highest in the world.

The assassination of Moïse remains unresolved, the true masterminds still unknown amid a legacy of foreign interference and entrenched corruption. Revelations from a foiled coup attempt months earlier suggest a web of deception involving supposed impersonators posing as U.S. officials. This draws parallels to earlier unsolved political killings that reflect Haiti’s ongoing cycle of violence and secrecy, but above all, of oligarchic rule in connivance with foreign interests. The result was the complete loss of state legitimacy through continuity

If we take the Schmittian definition of sovereignty as the ability to declare and impose a state of exception, then the coup against Aristide and the killing of Moïse show that Haiti’s sovereignty did not reside within the state, but elsewhere—in private boardrooms and the corridors of Washington. This is what the insurrection forces claim: that the oligarchic rulers are not sovereign and, therefore, do not represent the sovereign will; they are rulers only by virtue of serving foreign interests in exchange for wealth.

Another element that defines the role and legitimacy of the state is the law, but oligarchic elites and their politicians have used the constitution and the law to protect themselves. Law and the capacity to uphold it are, for Hans Kelsen, among the primary characteristics of a state. In the case of Haiti, there is no law for the oligarchic elites, and political rulers apply it arbitrarily while the insurrection forces, let alone the gangs, do not uphold any consistent legal framework.

I have mentioned three of the most often-quoted characteristics of a state—sovereignty, monopoly of violence, and law—to show how, in Haiti, there is no such thing as a state, as no one can claim to have hegemony over them. The warring parties are equally legitimate or illegitimate depending on the observer’s lens.

An example of this different lens can be discerned from the discourse of outside observers and commentators. For the U.S. and its allies in the U.N., legitimacy rests with the oligarchic forces. For commentators, such as professor Danny Shaw, no armed force has legitimacy at the moment, neither the oligarchic forces nor the insurrection ones or gangs, which he considers to be the same thing. For journalist Dan Cohen, from Uncaptured Media, the insurrection forces are a legitimate revolutionary movement aiming to change the system.

What must be noted is that the absence of a dominant political institution that could claim this legitimacy—whether a state or otherwise—and the ensuing civil conflict are due to constant intervention in Haiti by foreign powers, especially, but not uniquely, the U.S. during the last century, not to the impossibility of Haitians tuling themselves.

Perhaps among the most telling of these interventions is the debt imposed by France as “reparations” for the slave masters. Haiti’s enslaved population led what some have dubbed “the only successful slave revolution in history” and gained independence in 1804. But in 1825, France returned and forced the Haitian government to pay “reparations” under the threat of re-enslaving the country. This debt, which President Aristide calculated as costing Haiti over $20 billion, was finally paid in 1947 but has continued to cripple the country to today.

A similarly significant foreign intervention was the U.S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, initiated at the behest of the National City Bank of New York, the precursor to today’s financial services giant Citigroup.

According to James Weldon Johnson, who visited the country in 1920, the National City Bank had more power over Haiti than the State Department and the Marines. It worked to create the conditions that would maximize its benefits, having taken over Haiti’s Banque Nationale de la République d’Haïti (BNRH), controlling its policies by appointing a financial adviser and receiver general to manage revenue, monopolize credit and specie imports, and impose a $30 million loan. Among other things, the loan was used to pay the debt that France had imposed on the country.

In 1934, the U.S. officially ended the occupation but its presence continued to be felt. It made the creation of an organic governing structure almost impossible through constant intervention, and it supported the Duvalier dictatorship, father and son, between 1957 and 1986. This dictatorship was particularly brutal and kleptocratic. In 1988, a case against “Baby” Duvalier found him guilty of stealing $504 million, which is what could be traced. The dictatorship concluded with “Baby” Duvalier being flown out of the country by the U.S.

Though the dictatorship ended, U.S. intervention did not. For example, among many others,  the U.S. orchestrated the final coup in 2004 against President Aristide, who, in his third time in power (2001 to 2004), began asking questions about sovereignty and foreign intervention and sought to create political alliances in the Caribbean and Latin America independent of the U.S. As a symbol of this turn, he wanted to take France to court to demand reparations. This reorientation might have led to his deposition. After the coup, the U.S. recognized the ruling of the oligarchic elites —Aristide was a pastor and had not been born into it—through their taking over the state which, from that moment onwards, lost all legitimacy.

The ensuing situation, which we have described above, is what several independent studies have called a “manufactured chaos”. With its history of intervention it would seem that the chaos was manufactured by the U.S. in connivance with the country’s oligarchic elites, most of which profit from it but live in places like Miami. The question that seems difficult to answer is why the U.S. is so involved in a country relatively small and even unimportant. Haiti has no significant natural resources (unlike its neighboring Dominican Republic gold industry). But the answer might be becoming clearer now.

On August 7th, and after intense lobbying in the U.S. the private sector, i.e. the oligarchic elites, assumed directly control of the Haitian state. But that only means that the U.S. recognizes them as interlocutors with the country, since as we have seen, the state itself has disintegrated and has no legitimacy. Soon after, on August 14th, news emerged that Erik Prince, infamous founder of the mercenary company Blackwater and Trump ally, had signed a 10 year deal through his new company Vectus Global with this camarilla. The deal involved restoring “security” to Haiti and collecting border taxes while keeping a percentage.

Haiti was the first on a list of countries affected by the Global Fragility Act signed into law in 2019, during Trump’s first administration with bipartisan support and put into action by Biden. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled his continued support for this act and it’s sold by the Council of Foreign Relations as an “approach to foreign assistance and help ensure that taxpayer dollars are more effectively used to promote U.S. and global security and prosperity”.

What is more cost effective than having a mercenary army, paid by the host country, to advance the interests of the U.S. without accountability for its crimes? Trump pardoned four Blackwater mercenaries accused of a massacre of 14 civilians in Iraq, who were already serving their sentences.

My conclusion, given the U.S. occupation and interventionism in Haiti over the last 100 years, including the current “manufactured chaos”, is that the U.S. has used, and is currently using, the country as a testing ground for new forms of control with relatively low risk. The latest being having a foreign mercenary army taking the most basic elements of a state, security and taxes, out of their hands while maintaining a puppet government with no legitimacy. If this holds true, the ramifications for other “fragile states” are alarming.

Haitians deserve better than that. Perhaps a model forward is to return to the ideal of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a major leader of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of independent Haiti. His aspiration for independence extended beyond the abolition of slavery, to a system of equality based on the values of the Bosals—Africans born on the continent and not in slavery—who held communalist values around labor and freedom.